The New Realities: Cyber Army and Cyber Warfare

Recent news out of China and the US has driven home the growing threat of cyberwarfare.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin and the US Department of Homeland Security on Saturday confirmed that the company had come under a cyber attack, Priyo said.

On Sunday, CFO Sondra Barbour revealed the company was a frequent target of attacks from around the world, stating that this had become “the new reality.”

But the company, the Pentagon's main supplier, stated it had responded immediately to the latest attack, and that no customer, program or employee data was lost.

The confirmation comes after reports on Friday that Lockheed Martin systems were experiencing a major disruption due to a network security issue.

Also last week, China acknowledged the existence of a cyber security squad, described as an Online Blue Army, to defend state systems from online attacks.

The organization, which has a budget running into the tens of millions of yuan, is believed to have existed for at least two years. It employs 30 staff with advanced security training.

China Post points out that while the unit has been portrayed as primarily defensive, the news could increase tensions with foreign governments such as the US, Australia and Germany, which have already alleged that Chinese hackers are carrying out systematic attacks on foreign governments.

China already raised eyebrows in the US this month by unveiling a video game designed as a recruiting tool for the PLA, which appears to pit the player against US troops.

While no state was involved, Sony was also taken to task by a security expert last week for not taking seriously threats that the company would be targeted in a cyber war of revenge from hacker collective Anonymous.

Western Australia to get 16Tbps cable to Singapore

It’s been a long time coming but a second cable connecting Australia’s west coast to South East Asia is
finally getting built. Following the aborted plans by Matrix and Ochre to build a similar cable from Perth to Indonesia and Singapore, Leighton Contractors Telecommunications and its subsidiary Australia-Singapore Cable (International) Ltd, has finally announced concrete plans to construct a Western Australia to Singapore
cable.

Leighton announced this week that it has contracted Alcatel-Lucent to build the 4,800km cable that
will now become the second link between South East Asia and Australia. The new cable will bring online up to 16Tbps of capacity to a route currently served by the legacy Sea-Me-We 3 cable with 960Gbps of design capacity. According to Leighton, ASC will initially be built with two fibre pairs supporting 80 wavelengths operating at 40Gbps for an initial design capacity of 6.4Tbps.

With a 100Gbps upgrade option, the system will eventually be able to support more than 16Tbps, the
company said. The design, survey and planning phase of the project is already underway, with commercial services expected to go live in 2013. During the initial phase of the contract, Alcatel has dispatched its own survey ships to check the planned route.

In the construction phase, slated to start in the first quarter of next year, the vendor will manufacture
the cable itself in France, along with the dry-land electronics; it will then deploy its cable- laying vessels to
install the link itself. Once the cable lands, ASC will take over with a separate contract to connect it to
data centres in Perth and Singapore; the firm has already secured the land for the Perth facility, and an-
other Leightons Telecoms company – Metronode – is pushing ahead with its construction.

ASC chairman and Leighton Telecommunications executive GM Peter McGrath told CommsDay that
the firm was in productive discussions with potential customers. “At this stage, we have a strong level of interest in terms of pre-commitments from key customers, both domestic and international,” he said. “We’ll look at funding in terms of the levels of pre-commitment that we can get, and that involves customers saying that they’ll pay for an Indefeasible Right of Use... so they pay upfront and they get to use the capacity for, say, sixteen years. That’s an important source of funding, and to the extent that we do need additional funding, we will obviously look at our current providers.”

“The capacity that’s been built in recent years has mainly been linking into the US... there really hasn’t
been any significant capacity built out of the West coast since Sea-Me-We 3 was put in, and that’s proba-
bly fifteen years ago,” he added. “We identified demand for a cable off the West coast of Australia proba-
bly two years ago... we initially looked at doing a partnering arrangement, [but] in the end our customers
were telling us that they’d like to go to Singapore on one cable.”

McGrath also noted that the new cable, combined with terrestrial Australian infrastructure operated
by ASC’s Leighton Telecoms stable mate Nextgen Networks, would provide “the lowest latency, highest
capacity... connection from Singapore to Sydney.”

“The big international telcos do need redundant paths through Asia; most of their paths today go
through Singapore, Hong Kong, across to Japan. And what they’ve been looking for is a southern route
to provide redundancy in the case of earthquakes and the like,” he said.

While the Australian telecoms community has focused on building international cables out of Syd-
ney – including Pipe Networks’ PPC-1 system to Guam, Telstra’s own Endeavour cable to the US, and
more recently, Pacific Fibre’s trans-Pacific system connecting Australia, New Zealand to the US – the
route for the new ASC system gives it a unique path to the rest of Asia. More importantly perhaps, the
construction of the new system correlates with the influx of bandwidth within Asia, enabling it to tap
into onward connectivity from intra-Asia systems such as the Google-backed, Singapore Japan Cable, as
well as the Asia Submarine-cable Express, being jointly built by a NTT Communications-led consortium
as well as Telekom Malaysia.

It also positions the new cable in close proximity to new India to Europe systems such as EIG and
IMEWE.

While there is a still a dearth of capacity between Singapore and India to support this utilisation
model, the situation may change in the near future. Already industry insiders have told CommsDay of
at least one proposal by a regional operator to build a new cable system spanning the Bay of Bengal to
Malaysia and Singapore.

HIGH-CAPACITY TECH: Meanwhile, Alcatel won the turnkey contract for ASC after a competitive
tender; McGrath said that the vendor clinched the deal on pricing, scale, and their commitment to lat-
est-generation technology – including the exclusive use of D+ fibre.

“ It’s a type of glass which has what’s called positive dispersion... which means that coherent transmis-
sion technology works particularly well,” explained Leighton Telecommunications CTO Phil Martell.
“Traditional cables use a cocktail of positive and negative dispersion fibres that balance out the disper-
sion over the route; in a coherent system you don’t need to do that, and therefore you can use a D+ fi-
bre which can achieve lower losses across the whole route.”

That helps to make possible the upgrade to 100Gbps wavelengths, and although this is not sched-
uled to take place until some time after the cable’s planned commercial launch in 2013, ASC is posi-
tioning the upgrade as a key advantage of the new link. “It’s our understanding that this is the only ca-
ble to be announced globally with that capacity,” said McGrath. “When you’re looking at the potential
growth from, say, the NBN... when you look at what the large corporate and multinationals are demand-
ing... we’re seeing strong growth in demand over time, and at some point we’ll move to the 100Gbps
transmission.”

“So it’s future-proof; whereas virtually all of the cables being built today, with the D+ and D- [fibres],
will not allow that.”

The two companies are staying tight-lipped on the value of the deal, which has been estimated in the
millions of dollars, but expect to reveal more details once the construction phase gets underway.
(source:Petroc Wilton and Tony Chan)

WiFi Gaining Traction in India

Wi-Fi is becoming steadily more popular in India, thanks to the falling cost of devices and the immaturity of alternative technologies in the market.

Prices of data-capable smartphones have dropped steeply in the region to about 3000 rupees ($67) today, while a large number of Indian mobile handset brands such as Olive, Karbonn, Micromax, Lava and others are unleashing more smartphone choices for less.

On the upper end of the device spectrum, Samsung Galaxy Tab now retails its new version 2 for only 24,000 rupees, down from 29,000 rupees just four months ago, and is flying off the shelves.

From the networks side, you will notice that the stars are aligning for a perfect take off of Wi-Fi. As of May 2011, it will be a full year that the 3G / BWA spectrum auctions and its infamous investigation aftermath were initiated and not a single BWA network has seen the light of day, let alone launch of service.

While 3G licensees have attempted to light up select towns with 3G, there is no single new service the user can connect with and claim a high quality experience which was otherwise not available. In this vacuum Wi-Fi appears to be a great alternative.

Wi-Fi service providers are therefore scrambling to expand coverage. Thus Ozone, Zylog, Tikona and MetaMax have stepped on the gas and are enhancing build-out adding more POPs, expanding coverage and increasing footprint.

Ozone is exploring to tie up with Vodafone and Idea while a technology collaboration agreement with Alcatel-Lucent is already in place.

Down south, Zylog’s Wi5 is making waves with a 100% pre-paid model which has a combined subscriber base of over 30,000. Tonse believes that Zylog probably has cracked the Wi-Fi base station pricing model better than anyone else and is able to setup a POP at the lowest cost per subscriber, using a combination of own software plus third party hardware.

Zylog has even penetrated tier 2 towns and if offering fail-safe Wi-Fi in over 150 locations. Plans are afoot to grow to 179 locations and 100,00 subscribers by year end. Zylog Wi-Fi generated a top line of about $5.15 million.

Indian cellular operators have suddenly more respect for the relatively smaller Wi-Fi counterparts. While initially these free-to-air spectrum operators were considered yet another enterprise customer who would buy bulk bandwidth, the relationship is now more symbiotic.

Wi-Fi ISPs are now more likely to carry access traffic from larger captive Wi-Fi base than pricey data plans from cellular operators. Besides, retail outlets are willing to make room for Wi-Fi gear as the added attraction of offering Wi-Fi soon becomes a ‘must have’.

But perhaps an even bigger opportunity lies shrouded under clouds: wholesale Wi-Fi offload. Instead of creating multiple small regional Wi-Fi PoPs and creating several bilateral relationships with individual mobile operators, a large scale, carrier-class wholesale Wi-Fi model should emerge in India.

With only a fraction of 3G sites just lit up, none of the TD-LTE / BWA offerings live and mobile data traffic beginning to grow in volume, it is but a matter of months before a large scale data explosion becomes a reality.

If a large nationwide Wi-Fi network is built out and a ‘LightSquared-like’ wholesale model is launched, it should have plenty of takers.

After a BWA spectrum auction that generated billions in revenues to the government a business model around unlicensed spectrum that is non-retail suddenly seems lot more appealing for this bandwidth hungry nation.

Sridhar Pai runs wireless research & consulting businessTonse Telecom from Bengaluru, India

Mommy Blogger Heather Armstrong earned $1 million a year

O.K., then, I say, almost begging at this point, almost to the point of tears, is there anyone I can talk to who might see what I’ve been through and understand? And here’s where I say: “Do you know what Twitter is? Because I have over a million followers on Twitter. If I say something about my terrible experience on Twitter, do you think someone will help me?” And she says in the most condescending tone and hiss ever uttered: “Yes, I know what Twitter is. And no, that will not matter.” AUG. 28, 2009, Dooce.com

The washing machine at Heather Armstrong’s Salt Lake City home — as millions of her followers already know — is a Maytag. To be specific, it’s a Performance series 4.4-cubic-foot-I.E.C.-capacity front-load steam washer that retailed for $1,599 and that she and her husband, Jon, bought on sale for $1,300, plus the 10-year warranty. They made the purchase near the end of her second pregnancy, a pre-emptive strike against the mountain of soiled onesies that accumulate when a newborn joins the family.

As her followers also know, that machine stopped working a week after it was installed. Instead of washing clothes, it produced electronic error messages. By that time, the summer of 2009, the baby was home, the laundry was piling up and 10 days of waiting for a part turned into 10 more days of waiting for another part, and June became July which became August, which is when Armstrong threatened to bring the wrath of the Internet down on Maytag.

She is one of the few bloggers who wield that kind of clout. Typically, there are 100,000 visitors daily to her site, Dooce.com, where she writes about her kids, her husband, her pets, her treatment for depression and her life as a liberal ex-Mormon living in Utah. As she points out, a sizable number also follow her on Twitter (in the year and a half since she threatened Maytag, she has added a half-million more). She is the only blogger on the latest Forbes list of the Most Influential Women in Media, coming in at No. 26, which is 25 slots behind Oprah, but just one slot behind Tina Brown. Her site brings in an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month or more — and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. She won’t confirm her income (“We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials”). But the sales rep for Federated Media, the agency that sells ads for Dooce, calls Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” then notes a few beats later in our conversation that “our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

By talking about poop and spit up. And stomach viruses and washing-machine repairs. And home design, and high-strung dogs, and reality television, and sewer-line disasters, and chiropractor visits. And countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life that, for some reason, hundreds of thousands of strangers tune in, regularly, to read.

I lost my job today. My direct boss and the human-resources representative pulled me into one of three relatively tiny conference rooms and informed me that the company no longer had any use for me. Essentially, they explained, they didn’t like what I had expressed on my Web site. I got fired because of dooce.com. FEB. 26, 2002

Today the sleek headquarters of Blurbodoocery Inc. — the corporate identity of Heather and Jon Armstrong’s company — is on the 1,000-square-foot third floor of their sprawling six-bedroom home on a cul-de-sac in Salt Lake City, where they have lived since June.

In one corner is the glass-walled office of their newest employee, John LaCaze, who came aboard a few months before that move, and whose job description — everything from answering e-mail to ordering lunch to making sure that time is not wasted because, after all, it is money — has earned him the nickname “Tyrant” on Heather’s blog. Next to LaCaze’s office is the studio, equipped for audio and video. In the center are Jon and Heather’s work spaces, each dominated by two enormous computer monitors and an array of cartoons and kitsch.

Next to the door of the office is etched “Heather B. Armstrong, President,” but by her desk is a nameplate that reads “Heather Hamilton.” That was who she was in February 2001 when she wrote her very first Dooce post. She was 25, with a degree in English fromBrigham Young University and a job at a start-up in L.A. “In those days when you said you had a blog, people thought you had a venereal disease,” she says now.

Dooce was a nickname that grew out of an inside joke — a takeoff of “dude.” Unlike many bloggers (particularly women) whose initial goal was to update family living far away, her postings were never meant for her relatives. She wrote of the liberation she felt leaving her parents’ Mormonism behind, of sex and caffeine, of dating and work. In the summer of 2001, Armstrong’s site was receiving 58 hits a day. On a whim she e-mailed Jason Kottke, one of the earliest online aggregators (whose own site was still a hobby and had not yet become kottke.org) and asked him for technical advice. He linked to Dooce, and her readership leapt to 2,000 daily hits.

Kottke also warned Armstrong that her family would eventually find out. Despite her certainty that they were as likely to search the Net as they were to vote for a Democrat, her brother did wander onto her site on Sept. 13, 2001. The first post he saw was one she describes as “a martini-fueled diatribe against the Mormon Church” that she wrote in anger about the attacks on the World Trade Center, committed in the name of religion. Tears, screaming and weeks of silence followed, and for a time Armstrong thought her family would never speak to her again.

Soon she would be in trouble for something else. Venting about work, she nicknamed her co-workers (as she would later nickname Tyrant) — things like That One Co-worker Who Manages to Say Something Stupid Every Time He Opens His Mouth — and, in what she considered the safety of her blog, she dished amusingly (and disparagingly) about them. “I hate that the Tech Producer doesn’t know how to use e-mail,” she wrote one day. “He’s the goddamn TECH Producer, for crying out loud. I hate that one of the 10 vice presidents in this 30-person company wasn’t born with an ‘indoor’ voice but with a shrill, monotone, speaking-over-a-passing-F16 outdoor voice. And he loves to hear himself speak, even if just to himself.” (source: The New York Times)

Gartner Survey: Open Source Software have been adopted by more than 50% Organizations

STAMFORD, Conn., February 8, 2011— A recent survey by Gartner, Inc. found that more than half of organizations surveyed have adopted open-source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions. However, the survey revealed that only one-third of responding organizations had a formal OSS policy in place. Gartner conducted a primary research survey of 547 IT leaders in organizations in 11 countries from July 2010 through August 2010. The goal was to determine current and future OSS adoption and usage habits. "Gaining a competitive advantage has emerged as a significant reason for adopting an OSS solution, suggesting that users are beginning to look at OSS differently — if they can customize the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. "As external service providers emerge to support commercial offerings, OSS is and will continue to be used in both non-mission-critical and mission-critical environments," Ms. Wurster said. "With greater in-depth understanding and access to the necessary skill sets, end-user organizations will continue to find new deployment of OSS. Although a search for reducing costs by adopting OSS continues to be a major driver, with this survey we see more respondents looking at OSS as having much-greater value than simply getting something for free." Gartner's survey indicated that just over one in every five responding organizations (22 percent) was adopting OSS consistently in all departments of the company. However, a much-higher number of respondents (46 percent) used OSS in specific departments and projects. In addition, 21 percent of respondents revealed that they were in the process of evaluating the advantages of OSS usage. The top corporatewide Gartner-defined key initiatives supported by the use of OSS were: data management and integration; and application development, integration, architecture, governance and/or overhaul. Other key initiatives supported by OSS werebusiness process improvement or re-engineering; security, risk and/or compliance; data center modernization and consolidation; and virtualization. "Based on these results, we see that OSS components and building blocks are utilized together with internally developed software to augment and enhance existing systems through integration and automation, as well as to improve business efficiencies and security," said Bob Igou, research director at Gartner. With each Gartner OSS survey taken in the past five years, the amount of OSS that makes up responding organizations' portfolio has increased, from less than 10 percent five years ago to more than an expected 30 percent within the next 18 months. In that same period, the rate of proprietary software has decreased at about the same rate as OSS usage has increased. However, internally developed software has also increased, suggesting that OSS is used most often in conjunction with internally built software rather than as a complete replacement for proprietary software. Additional information is available in the Gartner report 'Survey Analysis: Overview of Preferences and Practices in the Adoption and Usage of Open-Source Software.' The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1528219.

After 50-years in exile, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi returned to Egypt

On the same day, other signs of a changing Egypt emerged. The military warned restive workers that it would stop what it declared were illegal strikes crippling Egypt’s economy, declaring “it will confront them and take the legal measures needed to protect the nation’s security.”

It also allowed two Iranian Navy ships to pass through the Suez Canal — a first since the 1979 Iranian revolution and a move that some Israeli officials called a provocation. Egyptian officials reportedly said the ships did not contain weapons.

Sheik Qaradawi, a popular television cleric whose program reaches an audience of tens of millions worldwide, addressed a rapt audience of more than a million Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square to celebrate the uprising and honor those who died.

“Don’t fight history,” he urged his listeners in Egypt and across the Arab world, where his remarks were televised. “You can’t delay the day when it starts. The Arab world has changed.”

He spoke as the authorities in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were waging violent crackdowns on uprisings inspired in part by the Egyptian revolution. The sermon was the first public address here by Sheik Qaradawi, 84, since he fled Egypt for Qatar in 1961. An intellectual inspiration to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Qaradawi was jailed in Egypt three times for his ties to the group and spent most of his life abroad. His prominence exemplifies the peril and potential for the West as Egypt opens up. While he condemned the 9/11 attacks, he has supported suicide bombers against Israel and attacks on American forces in Iraq.

On Friday, he struck themes of democracy and pluralism, long hallmarks of his writing and preaching. He began his sermon by saying that he was discarding the customary opening “Oh Muslims,” in favor of “Oh Muslims and Copts,” referring to Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. He praised Muslims and Christians for standing together in Egypt’s revolution and even lauded the Coptic Christian “martyrs” who once fought the Romans and Byzantines. “I invite you to bow down in prayer together,” he said.

He urged the military officers governing Egypt to deliver on their promises of turning over power to “a civil government” founded on principles of pluralism, democracy and freedom. And he called on the army to immediately release all political prisoners and rid the cabinet of its dominance by officials of the old Mubarak government.

“We demand from the Egyptian Army to free us from the government that was appointed by Mubarak,” Sheik Qaradawi declared. “We want a new government without any of these faces whom people can no longer stand.” And he urged the young people who led the uprising to continue their revolution. “Protect it,” he said. “Don’t you dare let anyone steal it from you.”

As the uprising here intensified in recent weeks, Sheik Qaradawi had used his platform to urge Egyptians to rise up against Mr. Mubarak. His son, Abdul-Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is an Egyptian poet who supported the revolution, and, though Sheik Qaradawi is considered a religious traditionalist, three of his daughters hold doctoral degrees, including one in nuclear physics.

Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy.

But he has made exceptions for violence against Israel or the American forces in Iraq. “You call it violence; I call it resistance,” said Prof. Emad Shahin of the University of Notre Dame, an Egyptian scholar who has studied Sheik Qaradawi’s work and was in Tahrir Square for his speech Friday.

“He is enormously influential,” Mr. Shahin added. “His presence in the square today cemented the resolve of the demonstrators to insist on their demands from the government.”

Egyptians streamed back into Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the revolution, for a rally that was part prayer service, part celebration and part political protest. State television put attendance at two million.

A raucous spirit of flag-waving celebration prevailed. Women in full face veils painted their daughters’ faces in the colors of the Egyptian flag. Young men danced to thrumming drum beats on balconies, lampposts and trucks. There were many signs bearing the dual images of a crescent and cross, the symbol of Muslim-Christian unity.

(source; The New Tork Times)

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.(See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.(See the best inventions of 2010.)

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.(Comment on this story.)

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

(source: time.com)
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html#ixzz1EMNPE86F