Here's a really simple statement that should get you thinking.
The US cyberweapon, Stuxnet, will slow down soon. Analysts have determined it was originally designed to stop "replicating" on the 24th of June 2012.
Wow. Think about that for a moment.
If you are already familiar with botnet and cybercrime, you probably yawned a bit. I am, and despite that, I get chills.
Here's why:
This is a weapons grade worm, built to destroy infrastructure by making machines blow up.
It was released into the wild, onto the naked Internet.
It is programmed to survive by hiding, disguising itself, and slinking in the shadows of file systems on personal computers everywhere.
Finally, it was programmed to self-replicate. Make exact copies of itself, again and again and again, non-stop until the 24th.
It is now in the hands of hackers and researchers around the world. They are reverse engineering it to find out how to build something better.
It's simple folks:
It's a bad idea to make weapons that can self-replicate.
We are there with cyberweapons and drones that self-perpetuate (fuel themselves) will be here sooner than you think (drone self-replication is still a decade off).
We don't face a threat today, that's worthy of breaking this taboo.
PS: It's pretty hilarious how badly the news media is covering this topic. It's likely because they are asking the wrong people that wrong questions (as we saw in the coverage of Iraq).
PPS: If you haven't already signed up for my newsletter on Resilient Communities, do so sooner than later. Why? It's full of the kind of things you should be thinking about if you want to arrive at the end of this decade better off than you began, particularly when idiots are releasing self-replicating weapons into the wild.