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I have decided to submit a story from the hypothetical future, published by New York Magazine 9 months ago, one that I picked while browsing whatever I missed since my last visit on Schneier on security.
If you put your video-game aside, read this article, and pay attention to the left-side notes, you'll discover thingies in the near future history which you may missed when they actually happened — the election campaign was on at that time. Most of the "fictionals" depicted there actually happened; some that I was aware of, some others I wasn't (e.g. water utility hacked).
On December 4, 2017, at a little before nine in the morning, an executive at Goldman Sachs was swiping through the day's market report in the backseat of a hired SUV heading south on the West Side Highway when his car suddenly swerved to the left, throwing him against the window and pinning a sedan and its driver against the concrete median. [...] When the Goldman exec came to, his driver swore that the crash hadn't been his fault: The car had done it.
[...] A third-year resident in the emergency room at Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights walked through the hospital as a television was airing images from the accident on the George Washington Bridge; that meant several crash victims would soon be heading her way. When she got to her computer, she tried logging into the network to check on the patients who were already there, but she was greeted with an error message that read WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR BITCOIN THIS TIME.
[...] One Police Plaza had just reported that it, too, was locked out of the programs it used to dispatch officers and emergency personnel, which made responding to the traffic accidents around the city that much harder.
[...] After a few phone calls to friends in the private sector, the cybersecurity chief got more nervous. At the beginning of 2017, one friend told him, she had been called to investigate a mysterious occurrence at a water-treatment plant: The valves that controlled the amount of chlorine released into the water had been opening and closing with unexplained irregularity.
[...] In the summer of 2016, the hackers received an anonymous offer of $100 million to perform a cyberattack that would debilitate a major American city. The group's members weren't much interested in death and destruction per se, so they declined their funder's request for a "Cyber 9/11." But to self-identified anarchists with a reflexively nihilistic will to power, the proposition had some appeal. Causing disruption was something that had been on their minds recently, as their conversations veered toward the problems with global capitalism, the rise of technocentrism, bitcoin, and the hubris required to nominate a man like Donald Trump.
Happy reading.
[Ed. Note: Just as a clarification: this is not fact, but a projection of something that could easily come to pass. All the pieces of this hypothetical attack are possible. Scary stuff.]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @03:12PM (1 child)
If you insist on a government pretending to solve problems like this, then let it be that the government defines a very simple, easily understood base standard for liability and safety guarantees, but then have competing, "private" certification organizations work to impose that standard (or a higher standard) on the various industries in question.
When someone goofs, there should be a very clear cascade of responses to which every party involved has already agreed ahead of time.
This will lead to a well defined and ever-improving environment for innovation that is robust but safe.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @03:25PM
Going off topic because this was on my mind briefly this morning, and I knew you'd show up at some point today.
For vaccines, there is a fund that handles remediation in the unlikely event that a routine vaccination causes health problems or death. I believe this fund has paid out in an autism case at least once before. At any rate, this seems to be a system that's at least set up such that everybody has agreed ahead of time that there are risks and what the consequences are if the dice come up snake eyes.
Consider also infant circumcision. Nobody has agreed to anything ahead of time. If something goes wrong, there's a possibility of a civil suit on the part of the parents to attempt to get compensated for property damage (the infant) but that's the limit.
So in either case, if a life-altering problem happens to the infant, what is the infant's capacity to agree to any kind of contract? How will you determine whether the infant, as a grown-up, is entitled to any kind of compensation for his loss?
We can also extend this to other cases of child sexual abuse besides circumcision. How does this work? Is there any improvement over the current system?