Aigeanta.Net

Love is a holistic experience that cannot be contained merely in the mind or the body. Without physical chemistry, there is no sexuality. Without common interests or attitudes, there is no friendship. However, even if both mind and body are perfectly matched, there is still no guarantee that the subjects will “fall in love,” and perhaps those who would never think of associating with each other based on appearance or behavior are missing out on the love of their lives. Thus, the traditional view of love is a complicated phenomenon that is impossible to reduce to simple factors.

The story of Stuxnet reads like a cross between a work of cyberpunk fiction and an international spy novel. In 2009 the world community was intensely debating the immediacy of Iran’s nuclear weapon program readiness. Meanwhile, a clandestine software project, sponsored by a cyber superpower with vast resources, was engaged in coding the first known malware rootkit to monitor and subvert the programmable logic controllers of an industrial system, allegedly the Iranian Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

Sebastopol is a bucolic little hamlet seated in the western portion of Sonoma County, California. Formerly known for its Gravenstein apples, most orchards have long been planted with vineyards, or converted into the corporate grounds of the tech publishing firm O’Reilly Media. But several years ago a heated battle served to overturn the relative serenity of this community. The conflict erupted over the town’s implementation of a contract for a public Wi-Fi network in its main plaza.

Since its mainstream popularity blossomed in the late 1990’s, the Internet has become tightly woven into the fabric of modern society. Linking together many formerly disconnected institutions and technics, the invention of this high-speed communication medium has also pushed freedom of speech issues to the forefront of the debate about protecting the highly pervasive technology and the critical infrastructure it serves from disruptive events.