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posted by Woods on Tuesday April 29 2014, @02:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-better-than-laserdisc dept.

Ars Technica reports that the US government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which are used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by DrMag on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:58PM

    by DrMag (1860) on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:58PM (#37744)

    It's a buzzword, and just as bad as "cloud". It happens to have a little age now, so many people today have accepted it as normal, just as 5-10 years from now the term "cloud" will be normalized if it sees continued use.

    Despite its accepted use today, the word "cyber" actually does stem from the word cybernetics [reference.com]---which has a little to do with computers, and nothing to do with network systems like the internet.

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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 29 2014, @06:30PM

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday April 29 2014, @06:30PM (#37782)

    It comes from the use of the term cyberspace. Cyberspace does make sense to me in how it's used.

    From that point it naturally follows that people would start prefacing things in the real world with cyber.

    Yes, it directly contradicts an already established use.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by DrMag on Tuesday April 29 2014, @08:53PM

      by DrMag (1860) on Tuesday April 29 2014, @08:53PM (#37841)

      No, originally cybernetic. It was first used by Norbert Wiener [wikipedia.org] in 1948. Most (all) sources I've seen cite this word as the origin for the prefix cyber-.

      For a more entertaining look at the origin of the word (and ultimately how silly it makes people sound) look here [io9.com].

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday April 30 2014, @12:03AM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 30 2014, @12:03AM (#37927) Journal

        Weiner wrote a book with the title "cybernetics". And he was thinking about military applications at the time. (I think he was originally talking about target seeking artillery shells.) He created the term cybernetics with "cyber-" taken from the Greek word for steersman. I'm not sure whether it was classical Greek or modern, but I suspect classical Athenian Greek.

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        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.