The Art Of War And ECommerce Essay

The Art Of War And E-Commerce Essay, Research Paper The Art of War and E-Commerce How Secure are our Secured Transmissions? Sun-Tzu Wu is the reputed author of the Chinese classic Ping-fa (The Art of War), written approximately 475-221 B. C. Penned at a time when China was divided into six or seven states that often resorted to war with each other in their struggles for supremacy, it is a systematic guide to strategy and tactics for rulers and commanders. In doing business on the Internet during this time of rampant computer viruses and hacker attacks it may be wise for us to follow some of his tactical principles in order to insure the safety of ourselves and our future clients. Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are

ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle. In a chilling article entitled Big Brother is Watching Bob Sullivan of MSNBC recounts a tale during a recent visit to London: Only moments after stepping into the Webshack Internet caf in London s Soho neighborhood, Mark asked me what I thought of George W. Bush and Al Gore. I wouldn t want Bush running things, he said. Because he can t run his Web site. Then he showed me a variety of ways to hack Bush s Web sites. That was just the beginning of a far-reaching chat during which the group nearly convinced me Big Brother is in fact here in London. “I don t know if he can run the free world, Mark said. He

can t keep the Texas banking system computers secure. So-called 2600 clubs are a kind of hacker boy scout organization there are local 2600 chapters all around the globe. It is in this environment, and this mindset, that London s hackers do their work. They do not analyze computer systems and learn how to break them out of spite, or some childish need to destroy: Mark and friends see themselves as merely accumulating knowledge that could be used in self-defense if necessary. They are the citizen s militia, the Freedom Fighters of the Information Age, trying to stay one step ahead of technology that could one day be turned against them. Jon-K Adams in his treatise entitled Hacker Ideology (aka Hacking Freedom) states that hackers have been called both techno-revolutionaries and

heroes of the computer revolution. Hacking “has become a cultural icon about decentralized power.” But for all that, hackers are reluctant rebels. They prefer to fight with code than with words. And they would rather appear on the net than at a news conference. Status in the hacker world cannot be granted by the general public: it takes a hacker to know and appreciate a hacker. That’s part of the hacker’s revolutionary reluctance; the other part is the news media’s slant toward sensationalism, such as, “A CYBERSPACE DRAGNET SNARED FUGITIVE HACKER.” The public tends to think of hacking as synonymous with computer crime, with breaking into computers and stealing and destroying valuable data. As a result of this tabloid mentality, the hacker attempts to fade into the

digital world, where he-and it is almost always he-has a place if not a home. In his self-conception, the hacker is not a criminal, but rather a “person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.” Which means that he is not necessarily a computer geek. The hacker defines himself in terms that extend beyond the computer, as an “expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker” (Jargon File). So in the broadest sense of his self-conception, the hacker hacks knowledge; he wants to know how things work, and the computer-the prototypical programmable system-simply offers more complexity and possibility, and thus more fascination, than most other things. From this perspective, hacking appears to be a