Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3196
A cyberattack could wreak destruction comparable to a nuclear weapon
People around the world may be worried about nuclear tensions rising, but I think they're missing the fact that a major cyberattack could be just as damaging—and hackers are already laying the groundwork.
With the U.S. and Russia pulling out of a key nuclear weapons pact—and beginning to develop new nuclear weapons—plus Iran tensions and North Korea again test-launching missiles, the global threat to civilization is high. Some fear a new nuclear arms race.
That threat is serious—but another could be as serious, and is less visible to the public. So far, most of the well-known hacking incidents, even those with foreign government backing, have done little more than steal data. Unfortunately, there are signs that hackers have placed malicious software inside U.S. power and water systems, where it's lying in wait, ready to be triggered. The U.S. military has also reportedly penetrated the computers that control Russian electrical systems.
As someone who studies cybersecurity and information warfare, I'm concerned that a cyberattack with widespread impact, an intrusion in one area that spreads to others or a combination of lots of smaller attacks, could cause significant damage, including mass injury and death rivaling the death toll of a nuclear weapon.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @11:31AM (18 children)
The pen is mightier than the sword, etc. etc.
We've built such a fragile, yet essential, infrastructure that, yes, if you manage to snarl the roads, cut the electricity and communications, millions of people will be screwed - particularly in the bigger/denser cities.
All in all, I'd much rather weather a cyber-attack that kills a few thousand people and shows us how we've been penny-wise, pound-foolish in our infrastructure buildout, as opposed to a bright flash, a ring of radiation diseased survivors and radioactive soil for decades.
Through the cold war, nobody really figured out an acceptable way to weather a nuclear strike, not even a small one. How do we get through a cyber-attack? At least half of us alive today have lived in a world with total internet breakdown, zero digital communication ability... maybe it was inhumane by today's standards, but we managed to grow the population quite a bit in those primitive conditions.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:21PM (4 children)
While words can be much more hurtful than bullets, a safe space offers much greater protection from all harms than an underground bunker.
<no-sarcasm>
Maybe when we rebuild computers and the network after the attack, we'll know next time not to let the great unwashed masses on. Make the next Usenet too difficult to use for marketing and sales people, for example. Make email too difficult for spammers. Make emacs a prerequisite. Delay introduction of the GUI until a higher level of tech and infrastructure exist. Even then, GUI software should use the net primarily for machine to machine communication, but not human-to-human communication. Or maybe only human to human within confined infrastructure, but not unsolicited emails to just anyone. There maybe should be an introductory short message requiring a permission token to be given before any further communications can be sent from an unknown party.
That deals with some of the human problems, such as "social" networking.
There is still the problem of building an insecure infrastructure. Require laws early on that put the liability where it belongs so that either insurance is obtained, and / or there is more than a token investment in making IoT devices secure. And that includes trivial things like traffic signals, nuclear power plants, and garden watering devices.
</no-sarcasm>
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:36PM
Yes.
Develop our systems using secure methods involving secure tools and security-minded programming languages.
Make sure out tools are developed similarly.
Yes, that may mean we need to rewrite almost everything.
Like the TUNES project was proposing (but never did do).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:52PM
Let the little bunnies have their internet, just don't do anything important with it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by DECbot on Wednesday August 21 2019, @07:06PM (1 child)
Ah yes, here's your shared laptop with the latest 128 core Xeon CPU with the 192 node AI neural net and the of course the 64 node GPU cluster. Sure, the GPU count is small, but we haven't installed a display as of yet so the need wasn't pressing. When we order a display for your laptop, well see about the GPUs. I see you've completed the terminal translation training course, congratulations. What dialect of Bash do you prefer? Ah, now before I allow you to perform your first login, you must demonstrate that you've arranged your punch cards in numerical order and labeled them in proper hexadecimal. Consider me dropping all your punch cards on the floor as a rite of passage. Oh? Oh yes, we did deliberately design the punch card reader to accept a card inserted upside down. The frustration keeps marketing from attempting too many pointless terminal requests. That and always scheduling finance to have terminal time immediately after them. You know how management hates any delays to processing invoices and how much pressure and stress finance creates when they are delayed. When we really want to make marketing flustered, we've got a little one-liner we can run remotely that will randomly invert the bit order of any one card.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:02PM
My preferred Bash dialect expects all input to be in EBCDIC.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:55PM (12 children)
In the short term: In a large-scale, potentially long-lasting emergency, there will three classes of people. We saw this, in a small way with Katrina.
- You have the people who are relatively prepared, able to live on their own resources for a time. In the case of Katrina, this was an unusually small group, because the ones living in New Orleans had to leave, taking little with them. In the case of a cyber attack, that would be less of a factor. Just looking at my family - we're not preppers by any stretch of the imagination - yet we could live a couple of weeks off the contents of our pantry. Longer, if it's summer and the garden is going.
- You have the parasites, who will loot and rob when given the opportunity. They are a limited problem and they will cease being a problem when they try to rob the wrong people. Good people with guns are a valuable insurance policy that should not be underestimated.
- Then, unfortunately, you have the vast majority who are unprepared for Walmart to have empty shelves tomorrow. They were also the majority in the case of Katrina - people who will be utterly dependent on external help or charity. In a national-scale disaster, they will be the first victims of the parasite class. If the disaster lasts more than a few days, they will start to die of various causes.
In the long-term, people will rebuild. That is a huge advantage of people accustomed to capitalism, because capitalism is a self-organizing system. The best thing the government will be able to do is to get out of the way. The market will detect shortages, people with scavenge, and eventually produce products to fill those shortages. Let the market work, and the system will quickly (a few months) settle into a new equilibrium.
Totalitarian countries would have a much tougher time, because thinking for yourself is dangerous, yet central direction would be impossible. China, for example, might well sink back into a pre-industrial state.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday August 21 2019, @11:11PM (10 children)
This is not what happened during Russia's perestroika. Two things saved Russia.
First, most of the city dwellers had suburban land where they grew vegetables and such. While it was not much, it was enough to prevent hunger.
Second, even when authorities lost it and stopped paying salaries, people of critical infrastructure would continue to go to work without pay so heating, water, and electricity mostly did not stop.
In the US, people don't have first and will not work without pay. The infrastructure will crash in a week and will be beyond repair in a month. By the end of the second month most dwellers of a tri-state area will be dead.
That's a relatively minor disruption scenario, mind you.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:35AM (9 children)
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. There isn't that much difference between Ruskies and USians. There's already a lot of volunteer work related to emergency preparedness in the US (indicating that supposedly nonexistent work ethic). And for any long term disruption of money-based economics, you have the same sort of pay (in kind rather than in money) to keep things going as they had in Russia.
Which was a deliberate and surprisingly successful disruption of the totalitarian state. It was enabled in large part due to the Chernobyl accident which the USSR was woefully unprepared for.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:11AM
As a case in point, a lot of people in the US continued going in to work during the government shutdowns (admittedly I think the government expected then to do so, it the promise of being paid later).
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 22 2019, @11:45PM (7 children)
I hope you are right; I really do. Where I work, which is a large financial IT joint, there is no work ethics. It is gone. We are walked by security down the corridor on lay off in front of everybody with out little possessions in our arms. We hope one day they will do the same - our business masters, I mean.
So, I hope you are right, but I am sure that there will be no money. I hope that truck drivers (it takes 2000 miles on average to deliver food) will work without money. I hope that gas stations will fill the trucks with fuel without money. I hope that oil companies will deliver fuel to gas stations without money. I honestly do.
But trust me on this - finance IT will not work and there will be no money. Please prepare.
My personal plan? I am leaving the country the same night. That's where my preparations are. Sorry, I do not believe.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 23 2019, @02:23AM (6 children)
I guess we better not depend on them for food transport, eh?
Why would there be no money? Paper money for a notable example is completely unaffected by high tech shenanigans. This mantra, "no money" is repeatedly said throughout your post. But here's the thing. If no money is bad, then put money back in. Solves the problem and we can move on.
And once we've done that, then your entire post of concerns goes away. We have many historical examples of countries that have reinvented their currency from scratch, overnight. It's not that hard and a zillion people didn't die to make it happen.
You got no money. No way you're going to leave the country, if nobody is paying you to do so, right?
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 24 2019, @12:26AM (5 children)
Well, perhaps it is because I am looking from the point that I know which is finance IT. While one may think paper money would work, it is a fallacy, I believe. First day or two you might be able to buy gas for paper, but on the 3rd day gas station would not be able to. They need electronic messages going through my infrastructure to pay. They have no other way. And then it is all the way up to Federal Reserve. I believe after a week there will be nothing anywhere available for sale paper or gold or whatever.
I do have emergency paper and gold but mostly because most people would not know it is useless and accept it at first.
Not true. Generally, mental preparation is the first and the most important step. One has to mentally prepare to leave right away. How? Just to give an example (not that I plan to) I can walk from the Island of Manhattan to Canada. I know exactly how to and I am mentally and physically prepared.
By the second month millions will try it, but most of them will die. One got to be before the first wave.
Let me give you another example. During Stalin's darkest times they'd arrest people of power in the middle of the night. I've read the accounts of a few survivors. Typical apartment of a rich Russian would have a service entrance for the help. Folks who survived kept an emergency bags and when KGB was banging on the front door at 4 am they'd walk the service entrance out and hitch hike a truck to a large construction site in Siberia. Over there nobody bothered them. Yes, they exchanged their privilege for a low life as regular citizens, but they survived. KGB did not bother looking for them.
Mental preparedness to act is the first step. During bad times, one who acts survives while one who reacts dies.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:23AM (4 children)
A dude would drop that paper off daily at some bank and get new paper. The 3rd day wouldn't happen.
Not with paper they don't.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:51AM (3 children)
This is not how banks work now, sorry. As per going old ways, managers at banks would not risk long prison times by doing what you propose. I guess some might. Perhaps government will suspend the rules. What they did in 2008 was pure financial crime after all. But I don't think so. We probably would not be able to even get cash.
Nevertheless, my disaster recovery plan at the office if the issue is wider than about 30nm radius is not to continue the business in any form. It is to preserve records so moneys could be returned to the rightful owners... eventually.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:36AM (2 children)
I agree. But it's how they would work after the electronics has been taken down. The point is that we would merely need to implement solutions we already know work.
Are we speaking of cyberattack or suicide by government? If a government is willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people merely to enforce meaningless finance laws on equipment and organizations that no longer function, then we have much bigger problems than no money.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:07AM (1 child)
You seem to forget that the US is the country of the Law and laws nowadays are enforced. There is no way I will release a single dollar without proper rules executed such as electronic end of day report to the Federal Reserve because some psychopathic prosecutor might send me to prison for the rest of my days. In fact I will simply not show up to make sure I am not even near such unspeakable violations. One does not know what will or will not be enforced after the fact and the safest way is to enforce all of them even if people are dying around. That's how children are charged with "attack with a deadly missile" for throwing a peanut off a bridge.
Yes, we do have much bigger problem than the money or no money. It did not affected most so far, just a minority, but when a disaster strikes all bets will be off.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:48AM
The US also forgets that a lot. This objection is absurd.
It won't be an unspeakable violation (that we are casually chatting about BTW, indicating it's quite speakable), because it won't be a violation in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:10PM
The question also being those who will attempt to take those. You address that below, but put enough hungry people in a small enough area and your odds of survival go way down. Unless you've found good ways to camoflage and conceal what you have (and staying inside all the time is a pretty sure sign you have resources).
Presuming that you are allowed to retain your guns. One shouldn't forget the public gun confiscations and desire of the New Orleans police chief that only the police should have firearms post-Katrina. Think it's much of a leap in these go-red-flags-times for teams checking on survivors to demand firearms turn-ins? Although reparations were made later, all it takes is a declaration of martial law.
Not really. If they have nothing then why would the parasites bother with them, or are you suggesting they'd go full cannibal off the bat? They are more likely to become the parasites. Desperate people may do desperate things.
Unregulated capitalism is good? Yeah, it may be self-organizing but unregulated capitalism leads to profiteering. Markets don't work so well if you can't get to them. And the ultimate expression of unregulated capitalism is allowance of slavery.
[citation needed] And that's all that needs to be said.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:01PM (6 children)
2025 was the year that summer never came. Most of the people who would die that year did not die when the bombs fell in February. The deaths came after radioactive dust and ash--the remains of the major cities, secondary explosions from munitions storage, etc was launched into the upper atmosphere and blotted out the sun. Some volcanic eruptions are capable of creating such a disaster, but this time it was man's arrogance alone.
Even in 2042, mothers have adopted an old custom: we do not name our children until the end of their first year. It's only then that we know the child might survive.
Nevertheless, humanity as a whole is surviving. N-day is not the end of the species, and it's difficult to say whether this era of history has it worse, all in all. The rich force the poor, especially in countries that have been terrorized by American imperialism, to live in conditions that are worse than our living conditions in 2042, even for all of the disease and pestilence of a world with an irradiated surface. At least each of us has the support of our communities, and we are not degraded cogs in somebody's profit machine.
The walk to the gas station will be for your own good.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:13PM
That's what the propaganda will say. What they will fail to mention is that the poor owned cell phones, automobiles, ate virtually unlimited sweet, salty, fatty foods of their choosing prepared by others, lived in air conditioned homes with running water and electricity. Yeah, the rich are sticking it to the poor, making them build mansions and yachts for them, but the poor of 2020 actually lived better than the richest of the rich in 2042.
The walk to the gas station will be for naught, all the snacks were looted within a week after N-day, and the gas? Mad Max made off with most of that, and you're better off if you don't have any.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:14AM (4 children)
This sort of story has been done to death. It's more "manliness porn" along the lines of Starship Troopers for people with a burn it all down mentality, letting them imagine themselves as hard-bitten, rugged ubermenschen with the innate brains and brawn to survive an apocalypse.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by r_a_trip on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:57AM
Azuma Hazuki, I think you are completely correct here. In the history of humanity there always have been devastating circumstances of one kind or another. What we see is that people come together and organize and rebuild. Even after total destruction, people organize to rebuild, restore order and to work cooperatively.
This "Mad Max Apocalypse" is a fantasy where people (dare I say men?) imagine themselves to be heroic and tough and able to survive on their own by wit and strength. Shooting their way to a new world order. Let me ask one question though. If you are not "Rick Grimes" now, what makes you think you will be "Rick Grimes" after the shit hits the fan?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:25PM (2 children)
More like Farnham's Freehold, warts and all.
Starship Troopers (the novel) was all about the cult of militaria and it was because of the team that formed the group survives although members of it die. It is unsurprisingly modeled on actual military experience, and more than once Heinlein went on record stating that it was a work asking the question, "Why do men fight?" (and I use the masculine because he did and that was then,) but also he suggested that the book didn't actually contain the answer to that question and only hypotheses. Anyway, it was much more the notion that they were soldiers and trained to survive whatever they were ordered to (as a unit).
While I much prefer "Alas, Babylon" for what might have occurred post-apocalypse (definitely dated to the late 1950s) and that communities will survive and/or will rebuild, having the skills and a plan for how one will independently survive until that occurs is still rather important. Which is why preparedness efforts of the government have for some time focused on the concept that is now You are the Help until Help Arrives [fema.gov]. That link is focused on the immediate term, but the big question is over what time frame is one prepared to do that.
I think what I'm aiming for is that there is a balance between "manliness porn" and failure to live because one wasn't prepared to survive.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 22 2019, @11:00PM (1 child)
There is, but all of our self-styled hard-bitten rugged individualists are firmly into the manliness-porn side of the map and have been for ages. Some of these selfish, solipsistic pricks *want* it all to go to hell in a handbasket because they think, they actually think, it'll be their time to shine and that they'll somehow be vindicated.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday August 23 2019, @01:49PM
Maybe not all, but your point is taken. It's a powerful and tempting fantasy - the things that aggrieve one and "keep one down" will suddenly go away and one then comes out on top as master of one's environment and self and will live happily under nothing but self-rule. Closely aligned to, "it's their turn now and I never deserved what I got."
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:22PM (30 children)
Wow, how dumb can you be? A car crash could be just as damaging to someone's life as a nuclear weapon ... but, in one scenario, life resumes for people not in a crash. In another, you are on top of a radioactive wasteland.
Who gives a fuck if power is out for a week or a month? It's a learning lesson not to download midget porn on your power plant management system, maybe? And as damaging as a nuclear weapon? Fuck, are people this out of touch with reality this day?? Get the fuck outside. Smell the air, or smog. But get the fuck out and stop bullshitting how "cyber" is no different from end of the fucking world for humanity.
If you need to watch a movie, how about The Day After? It's on youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyy9n8r16hs [youtube.com]
and if you are too fucking lazy to watch entire movie,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA [youtube.com]
yeah, same as "cyber attack".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:33PM (12 children)
Yeah, I'm thinking the author has never lived with weeks (even months) of power and data outage following a Hurricane strike or similar. We were without power for over 6 weeks after Hurricane Andrew, but it wasn't killing people. Even just a couple of years ago, I had a multiple week power outage following a storm - no running water upstairs (no running water at all for the neighbors...) We lived.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:09PM (11 children)
I'm familiar with Hurricane destruction too, but I have a different conclusion.
The difference between hurricanes and what the article proposes is that only a small percentage of the U.S. is affected by a hurricane. The rest of the U.S. can send bottled water and canned food. Many people already prepped with portable generators. Gasoline can be shipped in. However, if a significant part of the country has no electricity, that means gasoline can't be pumped. Transportation of food and water come to an abrupt standstill. It could be very deadly making Andrea and Katrina look like child's play.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:44PM (10 children)
Our gasoline supply is crazy vulnerable - it doesn't take much of a disruption at all for the stations to run dry, and the more widespread the disruption the more crippling it is.
After Katrina and Rita there were some serious compromises made in the Houston area air quality standards, in order to ensure a steady gasoline supply after the offshore refining capacity was knocked out by the storms. Clue: it's not just microplastics and Deepwater Horizon polluting the Gulf of Mexico, that same pollution that was so noxious onshore in 2006-7-8 is regularly discharged out on the offshore platforms, where most of it "dissipates" into the gulf waters before people notice, well, except people who try to eat the fish - there's a definite "crude" flavor to fish caught around the rigs, and the fishes' nature is to gather near structures like that, so lots of fish do get caught near them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 23 2019, @02:53AM (9 children)
That's not serious. After these crippling incidents, all you can point to is a temporary pulling back of air quality standards? My view is that when rather frivolous regulation takes precedent over genuine emergencies, then we've gone over the waterfall.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 23 2019, @10:23AM (8 children)
Even with those rather frivolous regulations in place, the Texas Gulf coast has some of the highest rates of cancer in the country (thus, the site choice for M.D. Anderson). We, as a family, left our low cost luxury house and high paying job with top of the line benefits to get away from the increased pollution. If you haven't lived in a high pollution city like SouthEast Houston, or Bhopal, you really don't appreciate the human value of "frivolous regulations" which are supposed to be protecting the health and even lives of millions of residents against the financial interests of foreign companies who will save every penny they can regardless of how much those cost saving measures poison the local residents' air and water.
Only in Houston did I have coworkers struck down by "inexplicable" cancer at age 45, unable to smell - at all - like: unaware that a skunk had sprayed in their truck cab, and "shelter in place: there's a pesticide warehouse across town on fire right now and you are under the plume." If all those frivolous regulations were actually followed, your price of gasoline might increase $0.04 per gallon, wouldn't that be a genuine emergency?
What has this to do with the aftermath of Hurricane destruction? Well: the offshore refineries are exempt from most regulation due to their distance from population centers, and the onshore refineries that took over for them "aren't equipped" to meet the current regulations while processing the required volumes of petroleum when the offshore capacity goes online. If this was a two or three month thing, I might call that a genuine emergency situation - hell, I stayed evacuated from Rita for almost a month, because there was no gas in the stations to get back to town. The increased pollution continued after the storms for years - that's not an emergency, that's greed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 23 2019, @11:44AM (7 children)
Doesn't mean anything without numbers. Then we can determine whether the "highest rate" is meaningful or not - or even if it's actually highest in the first place.
Funny how you get to these hard numbers only when you're just making up shit. Let us recall that this particular discussion started because you described the aftermath of two destructive hurricanes. I don't buy that the regulations in question, if imposed without regard for the emergency conditions so mentioned, would merely result in a modest $0.04 increase. I think instead it would have resulted in massive fuel shortages and huge harm to US society.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 23 2019, @04:39PM (6 children)
Look it up for yourself, I'm not your paid research assistant and even if I were inclined to spend time on Google to curate my own little collection of references that back my experience/opinions, that would have very little value... the sources would be of my own selection, biased by my searches. What you get on a message board is off-the-cuff recollection of life experiences, sans reference - if that is of no value to you then please politely shove off, because that's all you're getting.
The regulations in question had clear, from my perspective unquestionable, positive impact on the quality of life in SouthEast Houston - illustrated most clearly by the sudden change in air quality following the hurricanes, and its very slow return to baseline.
If said regulations were enforced with anything resembling authority, the necessary pollution controls could have been implemented, at small differential cost to "business as usual." $0.04 is, indeed, a BS number, as it was clearly intended to be taken, still - the actual number may in fact be quite a bit smaller, but when $0.04 per gallon is multiplied up and viewed from the source, a $5.7 billion per year expense, OMFG, no way we can let that impact anybody's quarterly bonuses.
Nobody here is advocating massive fuel shortages, but the "emergency measures" were allowed to run as an excuse to flaunt the regulations as long and widely as possible. It wasn't just the fuel refineries who went into "blow and go" mode, since all their crap was in the air the rest of the plants in town also turned down/off their scrubber functions - that shit's expensive to run:
Answer: they wouldn't.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:33AM (5 children)
I guess we'll just have to agree that it's not important then.
That's just a natural outcome of absolute enforcement regulations under dire situations, damn the consequences.
I like how in one place you portray the regulations as being low cost, then in another place admit that businesses become far more active, "blow and go" when they aren't under the thumb of this low cost regulation - which incidentally is solid evidence it is not low cost.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:11AM (4 children)
I like how you discount the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of people affected by the plant which is "saving" $50K per month by not running their scrubbers. What's a case of cancer worth? A thousand cases? Even if this exposure is only running up cancer rates by a few percent, 2.3 million Houston residents -> 500,000 deaths by cancer. Every 1% increase in cancer rate equates to over 60 additional deaths by cancer per year - and Harris county runs ~2% above the national average cancer rates, while Texas as a whole is almost 10% below.
How much is an early death by cancer every 3 days worth?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:32AM (3 children)
In the midst of a disaster which threatens the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of people far more than the pollution would. You should discount the hell out of that too. Here's why.
It's not. Keep in mind that life time exposure to such elevated pollution is moderately detectable increases in cancer rate by those most affected, it's not going to change much to have a couple month burst of pollution.
Compared to hundreds of thousands of deaths over the course of a couple months.
A hell of a lot less than one early death every thirty seconds or less.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:53PM (2 children)
Health is more than death by cancer, there's birth defects - a couple of months is pretty critical there, and there's developmental disorders... have a look at New Jersey autism rates, what's that worth?
And, still you're stuck in your tiny little national emergency mindset. My primary point is: greed of the corporate controllers trumps long term expenses spread among the community, and the community's government and enforcement is so controlled by the corporate interests that, when a short term "emergency" crops up, it's bonus time for everyone who shuts off their pollution controls for the following 3+ years, when, with any reasonable expenditure and effort toward implementing practical pollution controls, they could have been back to standard within 3 months. Would it have cost $6 billion dollars? Maybe, spread across all concerned, it might have hit that level to implement the controls - $0.04 per gallon increase for 12-13 months, I think America could handle that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:40AM
Way the fuck less than hundreds of thousands of deaths over a couple of months.
You should be too. After all, that's what the story and this thread is about.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:25PM
There's no reason for the scare quotes either. The hurricanes in question were genuine emergencies.
Your whole argument is absurd. I get that a common way to subvert regulation and democracy is to fabricate emergencies or merely delay the return to a non-emergency state. That's why, for example, the US is in 40 or so persistent "emergencies" - which really are superficial declarations by the US president in order that certain states of law and regulation continue forward year after year.
But the story was about something hypothetically as bad as nuking a city - hundreds of thousands of deaths are naturally a consequence of that. At that point, it no longer makes even a little sense to push regulation which supposedly saves a few lives over actions necessary to save hundreds of thousands - even if the polluting businesses stretch out the compromise for a few more years than necessary.
I saw another example of this argument when legont claimed [soylentnews.org] that banks wouldn't operate pre-electronic technologies like huge amounts of paper money because of government regulation requiring things like electronic reporting of transactions - even if the banks no longer could comply with that regulation in any way (say because computers and such no longer work). As if the US would rather kill vast numbers of people than adjust their regulations to a national-scale disaster.
Your continued fact-free blather that such controls would only impose minor costs are irrelevant when your assertions become no longer true.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:43PM (6 children)
My family survived the Montreal ice storm two decades ago. So did many others. It destroyed a large part of the electrical distribution infrastructure. We ended up in a shelter at a local hospital. It was two or three weeks before the electricity came on and we could go home again.
Fortunately, electricity was restored to the city's water-purification systems before it failed from fuel shortage for their emergency generators. There was no safe land route onto or off of Montreal island. No one was looking forward to drinking contaminated water.
But it's worth noting that the only reason power was on again so soon was that the Montreal region had the help of electricians from all over the continent to put the power lines up again. That isn't likely to be possible with continent-wide electrical utility destruction, whether by weather- or cyber-attack.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:08PM (2 children)
I would have looked forward to drinking uncontaminated beer then.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:39PM (1 child)
There's on;y a limited supply of uncontaminated beer when there's no uncontaminated water. The alcohol content of beer helps keep it clean, though, but not perfectly.
Water doet the palen rotten
Die het drinken, dat zijn sotten.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @06:01PM
"de palen" :)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:28AM (1 child)
Electricians from all over the continent wouldn't help in case of a continent-wide failure? Is it in their contracts?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:15AM
Exactly. It was a matter of other utilities lending out their personnel for an emergency. Not likely to happen if the other utilities have similar emergencies at home. No doubt they -- the utilities or the industrial-scale electricians -- were well-paid.
At home, we also lost two hot-water radiators. We already had a regular plumbing company. As soon as we had electricity again we called the plumbers to come and turn the heat on properly and carefully, which they did, after disconnection the failed radiators. We used electrical heating to heat the house until the regular heating came on. I trekked to a hardware store and bought 9 kilowatts worth of space heaters (all they still had in stock) and struggled to find combinations of outlets that didn't blow fuses.
It was improvisation.
There were no replacement radiators available on the market. Several months later, the plumber called and told me they had found some discarded but functional radiators from somewhere in the southern U.S and they came and installed them.
I don't know what we would have done that winter (it gets cold in Montreal. Back then it usually got down to -40 degrees in January of February). Those temperatures are less common now, twenty years later.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:19AM
I imagine that similar problems could arise with a cyberattack that destroys transformers by overloading them.
The way that stuxnet destroyed centrifuges in Iran.
Properly co-ordinated over an entire nation, it could cause real misery. Those large transformers aren't lying around in large numbers in electronic surplus stores.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:05PM (1 child)
The article is trying to get you to equate cyber attack with actual shooting attack, in order that the government can use that as an excuse to attack a random country they blame a cyber attack on.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:23AM
Quite possibly. All they need to do is announce what enemy they
wantbelieve the malware attack to have come from and they have their target of convenience.(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:28PM (4 children)
<no-sarcasm>
If power is out for two weeks, civilization will go back to the stone ages. Mass die offs.
No power. No cars. No fuel for cars. No power to pump fuel at stations. No more fuel deliveries. Grocery stores and Hardware stores all picked clean.
No vehicles for police or power company crews.
The thin veneer of civility in our supposed 'civilization' will come off. Things will get very ugly. Mass riots, looting. Stealing and hoarding what little pre-packaged food remains. No fire trucks. No more water pumped into your local water tower to keep the taps flowing and toilets flushing.
Who cares if the power goes off for a couple weeks?
</no-sarcasm>
Therefore it is imperative that all of our critical infrastructure, including but especially our electrical grid and generating plants be connected to the internet ASAP! And upgrade to Windows 98 SE for security reasons.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:08AM (3 children)
Puerto Rico had no power for a long time after Hurricane Maria, but I never heard about riots and civil unrest. They are certainly not back to the Stone Ages, and excess mortality was maybe 0.1 %, hardly mass die-offs. People are not the animals you think they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @09:37AM
And Hurricane Sandy in 2013, for example. My parents' house in Ohio didn't have power for a week or two. They're not even on the East Coast, which took a direct hit from the storm.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:27AM
Exactly. There were people in the rest of the world not afflicted by the same storm, and they organized mass food delivery. It's one of the advantages of a global civilization. But it the afflicted area is large enough, such support will not be sufficiently well resourced.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:56PM
The people of Puerto Rico have probably not assimilated to be afraid of anyone who is slightly different.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:30PM (2 children)
Uh huh. You will feed yourself how, when the grocery stores can't get supplies because both computers and phones are down?
You will get heat how? When this occurs in January and it is -30 outside your living place?
Where are you going to procure your water from when the stores have none and your pipes don't work? Hope you can be friendly with the gang controlling the fishing pond at your local park.
Infrastructure is supported by the same systems you readily dismiss.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday August 23 2019, @12:12AM (1 child)
Even if one is prepared, the swarm of not prepared will overwhelm. Manhattan folks will expropriate everything; I am looking at you, my Penn state friends with machine guns.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:40AM
Unless, those Manhattan folks are dead, of course. There's more bullets in Pennsylvania than there are Manhattan folks.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:27PM (3 children)
Ok, so let's review why some of this shit is even possible:
You put your database/service in the "cloud" which is probably some rusty bucket in a Chinese basement.
The only people who know how your application even works are drooling sacks of crap located in some outsourced India office.
You refuse to employ knowledgeable people locally or keep data under your control because your management brochure, written by the Chinese and Indians above, says it is uncool.
You insist that the application be written in "HTML" or some retarded bullshit of the day.
You put everything on the same internet connected network with passwords of "12345" because anything else is too hard.
Instead of moving your data over wires, you insist on broadcasting it over the air where anyone can get to it.
You actually think it is an accomplishment when your application design looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption.
I could go on and on. Idiots deserve what they get.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:49PM
Dear SomeGuy,
I would like to hire you for a middle management position at my company, as your rollout plan scores very well on both labor cost and time to market. Please get in touch.
Sincerely,
A Wealth Addict
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:29AM
Exactly. Good enough for now isn't good enough. Especially when security is an issue. Functionality, not so much.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday August 23 2019, @12:15AM
I am "a knowledgeable local", but my knowledge is - it can't be saved - sorry. I run; fast.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:11PM (9 children)
Unusually for me, I need help Googling a related topic.
There's a popular urban legend that the USA policy for NBC warfare is we have enough nuke that we don't need bio or chem and as such our response to any bio or chem attack would be fission/fusion in nature rather than returning fire using our (supposedly non-existent, LOL) B or C weapons. I can't find the actual exec order or even speech explaining it; maybe its from an obsolete semi-informal doctrine like the AirLand battle framework from the 80s (yes I know it isn't specifically in AirLand, I know quite a bit about AirLand having been in the .mil at that time, I mean the doctrine I'm proposing exists is out there in some legacy document I haven't memorized the name of and can't find.
Anyway the point of this google request is the point of hyperbole about cyber (sex?) being a weapon of mass destruction is obviously it isn't, but lets try some deterrent such that the next small helpless brown people country we invade for Israel will probably retaliate by changing the front page of CNN to 2G1C, which frankly would be an improvement, aside from aesthetics the point is they want us to respond to "cyber" by returning fire with ICBMs as "all weapons of mass destruction are the same". But I can't find the formal doctrine backing the original claim, although if I could, this proposed amendment to modify "NBC attacks" to "CyNBC attacks" or similar makes sense.
Typical urban legend; "everybody knows" but I can't find the treaty or exec order or nato statement or whatnot.
P.S. Am I the only person out there who can't take "cyber" talk seriously without giggling about cybersex and shitty 90s internet movies? Come on guys.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:36PM (2 children)
Ah, the advantages of having a long memory for news:
This came up because of a policy directive change during the second half of the Clinton administration. They were updating the policies on first use of nuclear weapons to reflect the end of the cold war. I remember hearing the report of this on the CBS Evening News. It was supposedly later clarified by one of the National Security Council people in an interview, though the directive itself was classified.
Here's a link to the Washington Post story that said it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/12/07/clinton-directive-changes-strategy-on-nuclear-arms/96b6788f-d7a1-47ec-a654-7ab368d15edf/ [washingtonpost.com]
This report talks about Robert G. Bell's clarification: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997-11/news/clinton-issues-new-guidelines-us-nuclear-weapons-doctrine [armscontrol.org]
The problem in both stories is that the actual doctrine is classified, so you can fill in whatever version you want and say that the other is just obfuscation.
Urban legend? Probably, but not certainly.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:45PM (1 child)
Hmm that strongly implies the doctrine where N B and C are considered equivalent although the USA would only respond to a NBC attack using N, but doesn't explicitly quote it or cite a doc.
Yes was definitely a good and productive lead, although not quite the data point I'm looking for.
Maybe it was never declassified "in the clear" and this is all coming from indirect statements added together kinda open source intelligence style.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:30AM
There is, however, one important difference between B attacks and N or C attacks. It's hard to contain B attacks to the target area.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:55PM (1 child)
First rule: there are no rules.
Whatever doctrine or policy or pattern of established behavior anybody has established, all that happens when it is broken is that you lessen your predictability / the "value of your word."
When it comes to slinging nukes, the value of anybody's word is about 0. Are we going to sling nukes in response to a chemical / biological attack? Sling 'em at who, how fast, based on whose standard of evidence, etc.?
Case by case - if slinging a nuke will make the world a better place for the nukeslinger after it's done, it's gonna happen. Hasn't been the case since Nagasaki, and the more actors who have nukes, the less likely the world is going to be a better place for them after a nuke has been unleashed on "enemy territory".
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:48AM
Too much predictability is a dangerous liability in the MAD strategy. The foe knows how far they can go before it triggers a response. Too little can be similarly lethal, since the foe doesn't know if they can survive (or can hope you won't follow through on certain fundamental threats required by the MAD strategy). But there is a happy medium where one has enough predictability to encourage others to play by basic, if very ruthless rules, but not enough that foes are willing to push.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday August 21 2019, @02:16PM
As to the definition of cyberattacks as WMD, by current US standards they absolutely could be categorised as such, especially if used to cause an explosive incident or structural failure involving a significant piece of industrial plant or national infrastructure. It does depend on who is writing the definition though. For instance, the DoD requires a lot more death and destruction than the DoJ does, where the definition of "WMD" seems to include pretty much anything that can kill or maim more than a handful of people at once, e.g. the pressure cooker bombs used in the Chicago marathon attacks.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:46AM (1 child)
It's not that complicated. There's no point to responding in kind, even if you had the weapons in question, due to their unreliability. A chemical weapon could go anywhere due to weather and it's not going to have much effect on anyone prepared for it - it's really for killing unprepared targets. And biological weapons could be killing your own people generations down the road - it has unintended consequences like no other weapon we've ever devised. OTOH, a nuke will kill what you aim at with the relatively modest blowback of fallout and soot. If someone is killing your people with these sorts of nasty weapons, and they have an identifiable place which you can destroy, then nukes will do the job far more effectively and with less fallout in the multiple senses of the word.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:35AM
Besides, targeting is much, much better nowadays than it was a few decade ago. You can precisely take out those responsible for a mass attack once you have identified and located them. No need to kill millions of probably innocent people.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday August 23 2019, @12:21AM
Well, let me restate here a Russian doctrine (wich nobody believes). In a nutshell, if Russia is cut off from SWIFT, Russian nukes are off flying.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:23PM (3 children)
The Slashdot Effect might look like a cyberattack, but it's really more like that feeling you get when there are too many cocks in Taco's anus and you can't slip your dick in.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:48PM (2 children)
You don't just try another of his two open ports, like 443 instead of port 80?
In the old days before "https everywhere" and /. effect was a real thing, you could often get past a medium size /. effect by hitting http: instead of https: so aside from the hilarious double entendre this actually used to work.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:27PM
There was the one time when slashdot's co-located router melted down [slashdot.org].
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 3, Funny) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:37AM
To maintain the level of profanity, let me just point out that the other port has teeth.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:52PM (14 children)
You can always imagine a situation where the results of something spiral into a catastrophe. This is the Golden BB idea of someone with an old rifle getting off a lucky shot that hits the pilot of a low flying fighter just which crashes into the infantry unit attacking your position killing all of them. You can then say that a single bullet can be as powerful as infantry backed up by air power. Well... Yeah... Sorta... In an incredibly contrived situation.
Given the choice of a cyber attack that takes some time to unfold and a nuclear weapon going off a few feet from me, I'll still generally take the cyber attack, thank you. I might be able to do something about that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:59PM (8 children)
All told, I've probably lived in about 3 months of zero-power, zero-phone, zero-internet post hurricane "attack" areas, and it's not much of a problem in reality.
The biggest adjustment was the concept that dialing 911 didn't do jack squat. All in all, people don't really need first responder help all that often, so it doesn't really change much, and when you know it's not there... adjust accordingly.
Slightly scarier is when the roads are impassible - you're trapped and you can't leave "the zone" even if you wanted to. Keeping the chainsaws tuned up is a good prep for that, or just be patient, the power crews do eventually get to everybody.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:45PM (3 children)
In such a situation it helps a lot that there's a rest of the world available to provide assistance.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:56PM (2 children)
Right, and the only credible cyber-doomsday-scenario is one in which a BIG part of the country goes down all at once, much bigger than a CAT 5 power loss zone. Even then, I think people would be surprised how well things still work without the net nannies watching over...
Now, when Elon de-trains all the semi-drivers after replacing them with self-driving trucks, which quickly evolve to include automatic loading / unloading at their endpoints... that could get sticky when they go down.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:40AM (1 child)
GPS navigation could still work, assuming the satellites aren't attacked, and assuming the trucks already have their regular routes downloaded.
Until they can't recharge any more. But that's a fuel shortage, which would happen with regular trucks, too.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 22 2019, @11:13AM
It is frightening how quickly gas stations are stripped of fuel during a hurricane... Rita in Houston was quite the lesson.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hartree on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:40PM (3 children)
(@JoeMerchant)
Katrina?
I have a brother that had an extended power/phone/water/whatnot outage from that in Pascagoula MS (though his house was intact), but sounds like you were in a worse hit area.
That's why I prefer the Midwest and tornados. The destruction is major, but localized and there are lots of resources to help you if you are hit. In a major hurricane or widespread major earthquake, everyone near you is just as much in need of help that doesn't exist anymore.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:50PM (2 children)
Was in SouthEast Houston for Katrina - no biggie there. Rita was a cluster of an evac. Also did Andrew in Miami, and a couple of storms more recently with shorter outages, but still long enough to hook up the generator to the house water pump...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:41AM (1 child)
Let me hope you enjoy the excitement of seeing a good storm up close.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 22 2019, @11:20AM
I think Andrew qualified as a good storm, I was in North Miami for that - the stronger bands hit north of us in Fort Lauderdale, and the eye hit my Uncle's house in Homestead, but we still had a semi-truck sized pile of itty bitty oak tree branchlets that blew out of the neighbors' trees all over the yard, and nothing to do but rake them up with no electricity (no AC, no fans) in the super clear sunny hot days that almost always follow an early season storm like Andrew. Power didn't come back on there for over 6 weeks, longer in Homestead. A few days after the storm we did manage to hook up a phone to some of the downed landlines and get to dial out for a few calls, but that didn't last too long before 60Hz power bled all over the phone lines, conspiracy nuts would think that BellSouth did that on purpose to stop people from "stealing" long distance from the downed lines. They're the oh-so-caring company who sent bills to people in trashed houses who hadn't had phone service for months, but their first piece of mail was a PAST DUE bill for phone service in the month following the storm.
After that, and seeing Rita/Katrina hit nearby, I'm pretty O.K. with the fact that we missed the year of 4 storms in Miami, and Ike in Houston.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:03PM (4 children)
I think if you confronted the author with the same choice, they'd agree with you. The two attacks are not comparable. There's a very wide range of scenarios for either type of attack, but having a chance to get out of harm's way is a big, big difference.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:30PM (2 children)
"Comparable" presumably means "can be compared", i.e., we can tell whether one is less than, equal, or greater then the other.
If they are really close to one another, we may be unable to distinguish these three cases, so presumably they're not comparable.
It they are really different, it is clear which one is greater, and thus comparable.
So if a major, continent-wide cyber-attack is as nothing compared to a nuclear attack, I'd say they are comparable.
:-)
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:06PM (1 child)
"Comparable" can also mean of roughly equivalent magnitude which I think is the meaning intended in the submission.
As you suggest, I mean in the sense of "can be compared", because one can envision so many different scenarios. For example, in the case of nuclear are we talking about a Bomb in a Suitcase or a full scale state sponsored attack?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:44AM
Just pointing out the perversity of language drift. And how mathematicians often use the same words in entirely different meanings from the rest of us. In this case, terminology used for partial orders.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hartree on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:34PM
This is one of those where the details of the scenarios matter an awful lot. You can envision a tactical nuke attack on a nearly uninhabited island versus a computer worm that causes a last ditch attempt to divert a planet killer asteroid to fail. Or you can unleash 3 or more way Mutually Assured Destruction via all out exchanges with associated nuclear winter versus a worm that shuts down a single city water supply.
As a general case though, I'd prefer a rogue hacker with a computer than say, a rogue militant group with a nuke.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:56PM (8 children)
At first glance, I thought this article was about the dangers of AI life, not mere cyberattacks on insecure mindless control equipment.
A Gray Goo kind of attack strikes me as uncomfortably possible in the near future. If the Gray Goo can be given enough AI to employ a shibboleth, and it can be tamed so it will only attack those who fail the test and it won't change tests or targets, there are groups who would unleash it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @02:01PM (5 children)
Sooner than grey goo, there will be tailored viruses...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:33PM (4 children)
As long as those viruses are tailored to protect from the hoardes approaching the Southern border.
A veritable onslaught, even an invasion of criminals, rapists and millennials.
(and yes, just to be clear, I am referring to Canada's southern border, which needs a great wall!)
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:50PM (3 children)
The instructions I heard (I'm a Canadian) about legal entry to Canada was that if you happen to cross the border where there isn't an official customs and immigration facility, then you should report to one as soon as possible.
I don't know what all this fuss is about with arresting people when they cross elsewhere. It does seem to be happening, but why? The problem is presumably with those who do not so report within a reasonable time. But arresting them as they cross doesn't give them the opportunity to do so.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:19PM (1 child)
My employer, multiple levels removed, is a Canadian company. When I've been there (only Toronto so far), it's like being in the Northern US -- just cleaner. Smaller but better tasting food portions. The paper currency is more attractively designed and colorful. The office I was visiting didn't have free soda like my office, and I didn't have the correct coins. Someone quickly and kindly sprang up to offer me the correct coins.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:58AM
I do like living in Canada.
The coloured money is plastic instead of paper. Pretty. And I don't mean credit cards (which are also plastic). It's a transparent kind of plastic that's almost impossible to duplicate convincingly. The secret to making it seems to be kept in New Zealand. It looks flimsy but is amazingly strong. It lasts, even when wet. You can launder your dollar bills (by mistake or not) and they survive.
I had a Number Theory professor at university in the 60's. He was black, and had married a white woman in Berkeley. Now Berkeley was a pretty tolerant place compared to some other locations in the USA, but the couple still felt hostility from the local community.
When he moved to Winnipeg (in Canada, in case you don't know) he was astonished that no one whatsoever cared about his or his wife's race. He kept telling us about that until he realized that he was just boring people.
Yes. I like living here.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:35PM
How does anybody think it works for boats which travel between the island nations? Check in with the Harbormaster, cause he's sure as hell not interested enough to come talk to you. Local customs apply, put up the Q flag and hope somebody from the harbormaster's office comes out to see you, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday August 21 2019, @08:40PM (1 child)
Reminds me a sci-fi story where one planet's religious fanatics created a weapon or disease that would kill any who was not genetically pure. Unfortunately, no one was pure enough so the weapon killed all of them. Maybe a Star Trek Voyager episode? I don't recall.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @11:03AM
A Babylon 5 episode, called Infection. It may be the third episode of the first season. It's considered one of the worst episodes of the series (another such candidate was Grey 13 is Missing). But even bad episodes of Babylon 5 are pretty good.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @02:05PM (6 children)
"As someone who studies cybersecurity and information warfare"
Clearly not very well. Over the last few weeks there has been a coordinated shift in MM reporting to a all in FUD reporting. The way they know there is going to be a recession is because they've decided to manufacture one by scaring the shit out of people.
Good to see that SN has joined the mainstream. I think this will be my last post here.
Go FUD yourself.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Alfred on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:09PM (3 children)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:36PM (2 children)
First they came for the Anonymous Cow Herds. But I said nothing because I did not post that way.
Then . . . I noticed how much better the quality of the messages were.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Alfred on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:47PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @10:43PM
I'm waiting for them to take out the Popeye's that was just built down the street from their future location. The Popeye's is next to a Taco Bell, so maybe they'll accidentally hit both....
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 21 2019, @06:09PM
An Inverted Yield Curve [investopedia.com] has preceded every recession.
Guess what curve just inverted!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @11:06AM
If your posts are all like this one, conflating cybersecurity with economics, you won't be missed.