Nobody’s safe as Stilgherrian turns his laser focus onto Australia’s IT industry in a weekly podcast.

“Nobody’s safe”? Does that count as a license to kill?

That, and there are very few geeks capable of explaining any of this quickly to a non-technical audience.

The government’s boffins do understand this stuff very well. But again, it’s a matter of the decision-makers — in this case the politicians, and especially government Ministers — having insufficient knowledge to make effective decisions based on the boffins’ advice, or even to give it the priority it deserves.

I’ve written about that previously in Are clueless politicians holding IT back?

Yes, the military’s idea of cyberwar is rather different from the action-movie plots. It’s more about warfare using or targeted at the information infrastructure.

But in the modern networked armed forces, infantry can call in an air strike using a satellite phone, and a cruising command aircraft relays that request to a waiting fighter-bomber which then launches a missile which might be guided by someone else again. The other side will want to disrupt that process, or at least detect when it’s happening and take countermeasures.

I think that when the military talk of cyber warfare they are talking about battlefield communications rather than war waged over the internet. It is about robots and satellites gathering situational data in real time and distributing it to units that can carry out the necessary task of killing and blowing things up…