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The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill's most powerful lawmakers weren't graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.
Your computers, they told the panel of senators [YouTube] in May 1998, are not safe — not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don't care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it.
"If you're looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be," said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down "by any of the seven individuals seated before you" with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes.
The senators — a bipartisan group including John Glenn, Joseph I. Lieberman and Fred D. Thompson — nodded gravely, making clear that they understood the gravity of the situation. "We're going to have to do something about it," Thompson said.
What happened instead was a tragedy of missed opportunity, and 17 years later the world is still paying the price in rampant insecurity.
Original Submission
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @07:46PM
Is anything safe? Are your homes safe? Are your lives safe? Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, and fires can demolish your home and your life. With a few well-choreographed keystrokes, the former Soviet Union could have taken down the world with nuclear missiles.
Sometimes the more effective strategy is to accept that everything is fleeting and temporary; to focus on redundancy and how fast and cheaply you can rebuild.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:07AM
Rebuilding on a faulty foundation just leads to further disasters. With how many hours get wasted on stupid web services, etc. I don't see how your comment is relevant. Your logic could be applied to car safety, why did they waste precious resources on better seatbelts, airbags, and anti-lock brakes when you can just sell the same car with a different paint job and a few new fenders? Thankfully market pressure from a few well intentioned manufacturers did away with that idea...
Maybe in the near future, once everyone's facebook / twitter / reddit accounts get posted online we shall see a demand for improvement. That stuff is already reality, just not publicly available enough to make a ruckus. The arguments "I have nothing to hide" or "I assume everything online is public" are horrible cop-outs that do not protect innocent people who don't realize the long term consequences and who rightly expect privacy.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:09AM
So multiple wives, and then start banging out kids? You never know how many you will lose along the way...