Thanks to my colleague Kevin Moulton for pointing out an excellent Yahoo! special report: In cyberspy vs. cyberspy, China has the edge.

According to U. S. investigators, China has stolen terabytes of sensitive data — from usernames and passwords for State Department computers to designs for multi-billion dollar weapons systems. And Chinese hackers show no signs of letting up. “The attacks coming out of China are not only continuing, they are accelerating,” says Alan Paller, director of research at information-security training group SANS Institute in Washington, DC.

Private enterprise is also getting hit big time.

The official figures don’t account for intrusions into commercial computer networks, which are part of an expanding cyber-espionage campaign attributed to China, according to current and former U. S. national security officials and computer-security experts. 

In the last two years, dozens of U. S. companies in the technology, oil and gas and financial sectors have disclosed that their computer systems have been infiltrated. 

In January 2010, Internet search giant Google announced it was the target of a sophisticated cyber-attack using malicious code dubbed “Aurora,” which compromised the Gmail accounts of human rights activists and succeeded in accessing Google source code repositories.

The political ramifications of this cyber warfare are huge. The US and China are the world’s two largest economies, both cooperating and competing on the world’s stage.  With China owning more than $1.1 trillion in U. S. government debt, destabilization of U. S. markets due Chinese cyberattacks would, in effect, be an attack on China’s economy itself.

The old Mad Magazine Spy vs. Spy comics were hilarious, with each spy destroying the other through nefarious means, and then getting up quickly to compete another day.   On the other hand, the China vs. USA cyberspy game is serious business – we play this one for keeps. 

I am anxious for the time when I can buy groceries or pay for a meal with my iPhone.  According to Juniper Research, that time may be be closer than you would think.

As reported by GigaOM, Juniper Research predicts that 1 in 5 Smartphones Will Have NFC by 2014.  NFC, or “Near Field Communication,” is a technology that allows a payment to be made by holding a device, such as a mobile phone, in close proximity to a NFC-capable point of sale terminal.

I think it would be great to use a mobile wallet on my iPhone, working in concert with an NFC chip embedded within my iPhone, to make a payment.

The GigaOM article states:

Juniper said the increasing momentum behind NFC, with a stream of vendor and carriers announcements in recent months, is helping boost the prospects of NFC. North America will lead the way, according to Juniper, with half of all NFC smartphones by 2014. France, in particular, is off to a quick start, with 1 million NFC devices expected this year.

Of course, there is more than just putting moble wallet apps and NFC chips on smartphones.

But the NFC ramp-up will still faces challenges. With so many players involved, from merchants, operators, manufacturers and web giants like Google, service complexity will be an issue. The industry also needs to work out business models around NFC while ensuring strong security for consumers unfamiliar with the concept of a mobile wallet, said Howard Wilcox, the author of the report.

Which smart phone vendor will be first to the races with a mainstream NFC-equipped device? Will the next iPhone be NFC-equipped?  I hope so, but I had also hoped for that in the iPhone 4.  Time will tell.  I’m just hoping for sooner, rather than later.

And, by the way, Identity Management and Information Security are crucial to an overall solution. Knowing who the user is and that user wants to do, and making sure their information is absolutely safe, are critical components of the mobile payments infrastructure that must be built. In that vein, its great to be in the industry that is making this all happen.