The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business MP3 CD – Unabridged, May 17, 2013

A couple of family members became interested in this book after the authors appeared on the Glenn Beck program. So the book was purchased, and I became the first in the family to read it. I liked the book because it was well-written and thought provoking. The style is not popular, nor is it academic, but rather somewhere inbetween. Moreover, the reading level approaches that of the academic. Perhaps it is inevitable, given the subject matter. But if you are considering the book, do not let this keep you from buying it. Yes, it may take you a little longer than normal to read it, but you will be glad you did.I was apprehensive prior to reading the book. I thought it would be so full of Google geekspeak that it would be beyond my comprehension. To be honest, the book does have a bit of jargon in it; yet that is not the point of the book and should not deter most readers. Nearly all the industry vocabularly may be understood from the context. For those few terms that differ from the norm one may, well, google them. :-)The book is divided into broad chapters by what might be termed policy concerns. Then the chapters are divided into narrower sub-concerns. This lends the reading to take place in medium-sized sections, with time to briefly put down the book and think between.If you want to know what the leaders of Google (and for that matter, Facebook, Yahoo, and others) believe about the direction of our world and the ways technology will impact those directions, this is the book for you. Perhaps, like nearly all futurist books, not all of their predictions will happen exactly as prognosticated; yet the possibilities will inspire the reader.

Let's consider a few recent examples to better illustrate the universe of cyber warfare. Perhaps the most famous is the Stuxnet worm, which was discovered in 2010 and was considered teh most sophisticated piece of malware ever revealed, until a virus know as Flame, discovered in 2012, claimed that title. Designed to affect a particular type of industrial control system that ran on Windows oeprating system, Stuxnet was discovered to have infiltrated the monitoring systems of Iran's Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, causing centrifuges to abruptly speed up or slow down to the point of self-destruction while simultaneously disabling the alarm systems. Because the Iranian systems were not linked to the Internet, the worm must have been uploaded directly, perhaps unwittingly introduced by a Natanz employee on a USB flash drive. The vulernabilities in the Windows systems were subsequently patched up, but not until after causing some damage to the Iranian nuclear effort, as the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, admitted.Initial efforts to locate the creators of the worm were inconclusive, though most believed that is target and the level of sophistication pointed to a state-backed effort. Among other reasons, security analysts unpacking the worm (their efforts made possible because Stuxnet had escaped "into the wild" -- that is, beyond the Natanz plant) noticed specific references to dates and bliblical stories in code that woudl be highly symbolic to Israelis. (Others argued that the indicators were far too obvious, and thus false flags.) The resources involved also suggested government production: Experts thought the worm was written by as many as 30 people over several months. And it used an unprecedented number of "zero-day" exploits, malicious computer attacks while exposing vulnerabilities in computer programs that were unknown to the program's creator (in this case, the Windows OS) before the day of the attack, thus leaving zero days to prepare for it. The descovery of one zero-day exploit is considered a rare event-- and exploited information can be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market -- so security analysts were stunned to discover that an early variant of Stuxnet took advantage of FIVE.Sure enough, it was revealed in June 2012 that not one but two governments were behind the deployment of the Stuxnet worm. Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed to the New York Times journalist David E. Sanger that Stuxnet was a joint U.S. and Israeli project design to stall and disrupt the suspected Iranian nuclear-weapons program.In the book The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Livesby Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen | Apr 23, 2013For example, when the CENTCOM (US Central Command)Twitter account was compromised for 40 minutes by the Islamic State in January 2015, the motive was not monetary; it was political. The objective was to create discomfort and a sense of insecurity by openly demonstrating a security gap and sending out political messages through it.In the book Cybersecurity for Beginners by Raef Meeuwisse Second Edition published in March 2017According to Norton Anti-virus website, the previous mentioned Flame doesn't make the list of the 8 most amazing viruses ever. Norton's website listed1) CryptoLocker. Released in September 2013, CryptoLocker spread through email attachments and encrypted the user’s files so that they couldn’t access them.The hackers then sent a decryption key in return for a sum of money, usually somewhere from a few hundred pounds up to a couple of grand.2) ILOVEYOU. 2000. The malware was a worm that was downloaded by clicking on an attachment called ‘LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs’.ILOVEYOU overwrote system files and personal files and spread itself over and over and over again. ILOVEYOU hit headlines around the world and still people clicked on the text—maybe to test if it really was as bad as it was supposed to be. Poking the bear with a stick, to use a metaphor.ILOVEYOU was so effective it actually held the Guinness World Record as the most ‘virulent’ virus of all time. A viral virus, by all accounts. Two young Filipino programmers, Reonel Ramones and Onel de Guzman, were named as the perps but because there were no laws against writing malware, their case was dropped and they went free.3) MyDoom 2004. MyDoom is considered to be the most damaging virus ever released—and with a name like MyDoom would you expect anything less?MyDoom, like ILOVEYOU, is a record-holder and was the fastest-spreading email-based worm ever. MyDoom was an odd one, as it hit tech companies like SCO, Microsoft, and Google with a Distributed Denial of Service attack.25% of infected hosts of the .A version of the virus allegedly hit the SCO website with a boatload of traffic in an attempt to crash its servers.In 2004, roughly somewhere between 16-25% of all emails had been infected by MyDoom.4)Storm Worm. 2006. Storm Worm was a particularly vicious virus that made the rounds in 2006 with a subject line of ‘230 dead as storm batters Europe’. Intrigued, people would open the email and click on a link to the news story and that’s when the problems started.Storm Worm was a Trojan horse that infected computers, sometimes turning them into zombies or bots to continue the spread of the virus and to send a huge amount of spam mail.5) Sasser & Netsky. 2004. Sasser spread through infected computers by scanning random IP addresses and instructing them to download the virus. Netsky was the more familiar email-based worm. Netsky was actually the more viral virus, and caused a huge amount of problems in 2004.6) Anna Kournikova. 2001. Not sure why this one is on the list. The description says it didn't cause much damage, was created as a joke the author turned himself over to the police. Jan De Wit, a 20-year-old Dutch man, wrote the virus as ‘a joke’. The subject was “Here you have, ;0)” with an attached file called AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs. Anna was pretty harmless and didn’t do much actual damage, though.7) Slammer. 2003. Slammer is the kind of virus that makes it into films, as only a few minutes after infecting its first victim, it was doubling itself every few seconds. 15 minutes in and Slammer had infected half of the servers that essentially ran the internet.The Bank of America’s ATM service crashed, 911 services went down, and flights had to be cancelled because of online errors. Slammer, quite aptly, caused a huge panic as it had effectively managed to crash the internet in 15 quick minutes.As described in a wired magazine article: An inside view of the worm that crashed the Internet in 15 minutes. "Gah!" Owen Maresh almost choked when the Priority 1 alert popped up on his panel of screens just after midnight on Saturday, January 25. Sitting inside Akamai's Network Operations Control Center, the command room for 15,000 high-speed servers stationed around the globe, he had a God's-eye view of the Internet, monitoring its health in real time. His job was to watch for trouble spots and keep Akamai's servers - and the sites of its clients like Ticketmaster and MSNBC - open for business. This was big trouble.The tiny worm hit its first victim at 12:30 am Eastern standard time. The machine - a server running Microsoft SQL - instantly started spewing millions of Slammer clones, targeting computers at random. By 12:33 am, the number of slave servers in Slammer's replicant army was doubling every 8.5 seconds.8) Stuxnet, described above by Cohen in the New Digital Age.

If you have any of the scores of books written about the impact of the internet on society and politics, you can discard them now. This is the book you should pay attention to, read and study, and watch to see if the predictions come true. Not because the authors are any better suited to discuss this issue than the others. Far from it. Other authors are equally able and qualified to make their comments and observations. No, it is because the authors of this book are officers of Goggle. This fact alone should confer an air of authority of their comments and observations. In their corporate capacities Schmidt and Cohen literally own, manage, and direct the means of production. The "production" in this case is the content which is allowed to be broadcast over the internet. They are uniquely in the best position to make the predictions stated in their book happen. Viewed from this aspect, it is difficult to distinguish whether they are making neutral predictions of what the new digital age will look like, or they are telling their readers, via the contents of this book, what they plan to do. Overall, however, this book is a "keeper."So why the three stars? Because these observations are tainted by the authors' own biases, some overt and benign but others hidden and pernicious.The observations Schmidt and Cohen offer in this book oscillating between sober narratives of contemporaneous State restrictions on internet freedom, rosy assessments of the future digital world, and chilling, disingenuous portrait of a digital dystopia.Some of their "predictions" are with us now, for example, driverless cars are on the road now. Some of their observations about the contemporary world are downright brilliant. The observation which stands out is the dichotomy of the real, physical world and the digital, virtual world. This takes many forms. For example, on an individual level we can put out our virtual self on Facebook or MySpace, which often does or does not coincide with the individual personality. On a global level this dichotomy operates the same way. Schmidt and Cohen take the example of US - China relations. The image for public consumption is two countries which more or less cooperate and have similar economic interests. In the virtual world these two countries, as virtually every other country in this world, are engaged in a virulent, vicious state of cyber warfare.The rosy assessments abound. The first chapter deals with the authors' predictions of the future. A few are outlandish, sounding like a trailer for the Jetsons, such as the authors' prediction that within twenty years everyone in this world will be wired with mobile communications, from the Tribesman in Africa to the Lapplander in Finland. Is this a prediction or wishful thinking?It is hard to tell, but if it does happen, Schmidt and Cohen are in the best position to make it happen, or, to be more accurate, have the business, economic motivation to make it happen.At the same time, the authors are also senior fellows to conservative think tanks such as the New America Foundation, the Center of Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Council of Foreign Relations. While for the most part the authors' observations and predictions appear neutral and attempt at being objective, whatever they say in this book is peppered with the same conservative bias possessed by these groups. This is best seen in their discussions about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Schmidt and Cohen are positively antagonistic to what they call "free-information activists" or net neutrality. The authors question the authority and the judgment of Wikileaks, and indeed of all Whistle blowing sites, in disclosing documents which are kept secret by the government and not intended for general release. Specifically they question their determination on what should and should not be redacted and to what effect the release of documentation will have to political relations between nations. This is hardly a new or innovative argument; it is as old as the Alien and Sedition Act and the debate which ensued after the release of the Pentagon Papers. Those in control of the means of production such as Schmidt and Cohen will always have an interest in monopolizing the content of the internet and controlling the debate and flow of information.Their conservative bias is also displayed in their discussions about privacy. They quite rightly state in several portions of their book that there will be a constant struggle between the forces protecting net privacy and governmental forces which will attempt to infringe and control that privacy. But while paying lip service in support of privacy rights, they observe that in times of war or crisis the repressive forces of governmental control will "always prevail."Disingenuous statements such as these are rare in this book, but disturbing nonetheless. Are these the people we are putting our futures in? The book is essential reading if only because it gives a rare look into the minds and thoughts of the corporate powers-that-be, what they think of the world, and what they think of us mere mortals.

Written through the eyes of two people who have become obscenely wealthy exploiting the power of the internet. It talks about how the internet has spread power to the people - and obviously it has brought information, products and entertainment to our doorstep. However, it fails to mention the wealth inequality, stalling of social mobility and winner take all monopolies like Google, Amazon, Uber etc who exploit workers - the internet has enabled this and the tech elites now have unbelievable power and are eroding democracy - think Facebook's data being used to win elections. Furthermore, as an example of self interest, the book pushes hard on the national security threats the internet brings and lo and behold the billionaire author and his sidekick has just invested heavily in internet defence and been pushing for a position in Bidens transition government - talk about an abuse of power and conflict of interest. This is the true issue of the digital age; the ability of a very few people to get obscenely wealthy beyond anything we have seen in recent history and start to exert control on the media and government. Bezos owns the Washington Post. But of course, all of this is sidestepped in this book which typically plays down the future role of government in favour of power to the people whilst playing down big tech power. Rather than diminish it, we should be building up the Governments role to regulate the dark side of this technology and put in place a level playing field for tax and internet platform monopolies. Btw, Eric Schmidt is the same who appeared in front of the UK parliament and said Google creates jobs and pays taxes through the employees deductions. This is the mentality of the man. He fails to recognise there is only so much advertising money to go around and therefore Google destroys jobs in the older ad industries. The final insult is to suggest the power of entrepreneurship the internet creates. But like Walmart moving into a town and shutting the local stores, tech goliaths who control the internet now hoover up successful startups and threats like a Dydon on steroids. That is the dystopian presdnt and future this book fails to get to grips with.

Written by two people who seem to consider only the impact of computers on the world, this is interesting but it needs a does of reality. How will the world provide the resources to build mobile phones for everyone, to service them, provide electricity everywhere - and deal with issues like food, water, and climate change. Somewhat blinkered to say the least

very good coverage

Informative, well written, endorsements by influential people even though I don't like to be influenced by reviews.I liked this book, schmidt and Cohen have written a book covering a wide range of topics. Read it and educate yourself.

This book is so so so brilliant - Only God knows why I hadn't read it earlier. Have even ordered copies for friends! An excellent book.