Indians will call Beijing the “Bindra Olympics” even if the rest of the world remembers it as Phelp’s Games. However, for me, the iconic image from the Bird’s Nest was George W Bush chatting to Putin. Some wag added a speech bubble where Dubya asks, “Vlad, remind me again, have you invaded our Georgia or your Georgia?”
What was that five-day war in the Caucasus about? The Russians say they intervened to prevent genocide in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where 95 per cent of residents are Russian citizens. The Georgians say the Bear punished Georgia for trying to join Nato. They also point out Hitler invaded the erstwhile Czechoslovakia to “protect” the ethnic Germans of Sudetenland.
Cynics say Russia is opportunistically gaining revenge upon the nation that gave birth to Stalin. Conspiracy theorists claim it’s all about oil. The paranoid believe that the war, which seems over, could escalate into nuclear conflict if Nato intervenes. The more superstitious have done numerological comparisons with WWI.
The Georgian Olympic contingent (which includes a beach volleyball team imported very recently from Brazil) continues to participate in Beijing. The Brazilian-Georgians beat the Russians in a match that grabbed a huge number of headlines.
The truth about the war has been further obscured by hackers taking down all sites with the Georgian domain-suffix “.ge”. Much .ge content has migrated to Google’s blogspot.com servers, which are better-protected. But like all blogger content, the Georgian government’s official position has transmuted into mere opinion along with the private hosting.
This is perhaps the first armed conflict that incorporated a serious component of cyber-war. Barring nuclear escalation, it will be remembered for that, rather than for the bloodshed. Every security establishment had better take note because this is likely to become a standard tactic in future conflicts.
The hackers have currently moved on to check out new juicy targets. A fortnight ago, IT security consultant Dan Kamensky discovered a hole in the heart of the Internet, in the way DNS (domain name servers) works. This can be exploited to redirect URLs to any site of the hacker’s choice. That means bye-bye to e-commerce. A site that checks out as e-Bay or a bank could be a perfect forgery that easily passes digital authentication. Even the digital certificate issuing sites can be faked.
Kamensky kept details secret and started working with the DNS community, which includes all the big names of IT. Details have leaked as the circle of knowledge expanded. As of now, Kamensky estimates not more than 40 per cent of the Net has been patched. So don’t do any net-banking until the flaw is fixed.
Concurrently, another security consultant Adam Gowdiak discovered big holes in Nokia’s Series 40 Platform and Sun’s Java, which could enable hacks against a wide range of handsets from the Finnish company that holds dominant global marketshare despite the iPhone. Gowdiak offered to sell the attack code for ¤20,000 to Sun or Nokia. This is a departure from normal procedure that borders on blackmail. But Gowdiak believes it’s the simplest way to recover his costs.
Nobody cared about any of this in India. Far more citizens were exercised by the Amarnath issue than by potential (if far-fetched) risks of nuclear conflict, or near-breakdowns in Net and mobile security. Even Bindra’s successful quest for gold didn’t stop the agitations.
The truth about Amarnath is at least as complex as the truth about South Ossetia. Historians will struggle to make sense of either. If we’re lucky, both conflicts will however be mere footnotes in a month eventually remembered for Bindra, Phelps and fixing the Net.
