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Government Ponders Future Of Y2K Command Bunker
When the command center was announced last August, as explained in this Reuters article, the government's idea was that post-Y2K, the center would serve to coordinate "future cooperation between key infrastructure industries and the federal government to protect communication networks."
The government certainly has a vested interest in keeping communication networks functional; the question is, how vested? Especially with the recent talk of ever greater (and more explicit) governmental oversight of Internet traffic and activities, I'm not sure I want any more observation posts than already exist.
On the other hand, it seems likely that government involvement in Cyberspace will increase dramatically, and soon. Is there some way that this command post could play a vaguely positive role in that involvement? Or does it smack of a open door to ever-more-pervasive observation and tracking of personal behavior?
Please send all the computer stuff to:
Erich P.
Georgia Tech Station
Atlanta, GA
30332
They could even write it off on their taxes, maybe.... oh, wait, they're the government.
Seriously, though, most of the time when government stuff stops being used it goes into a warehouse, in case another department needs it... that's what it's like here in Georgia, anyway. There's this depot with unused 286's, NeXTStations, Sparc IPCs, 20meg 5.25" RLL drives, and so on... I think they keep stuff for like 10 years. It's sort of absurd, nobody is going to use some of that stuff. Oh well. That's government for you.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I wasn't precisely sure myself, so I checked
Google
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
Arrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh.....
Or maybe they should set aside the equipment until then. They could put it all in the same warehouse in which they're storing the Ark of the Covenant.
Here's an interesting quote:
:-) We all know how much Janet Reno and Louis Freeh want to snoop on all Americans. Zounds! Look at all this monitoring computer equipment! We can't just waste it!
Indeed, Washington is in the midst of a close self-examination over how it can protect the country's critical computer networks -- such as power, communications and banking systems -- from electronic assaults, technical failures or natural disasters.
The Y2K monitoring network, which won high praise among participants, appears an obvious element of that plan.
Hmmm... could it be that this was the original intent all along?
I am only half joking. I have zero trust in this administration's respect for citizen rights.
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Infuriate left and right
Rent the place out for $$ to people playing Quake and other games.. They can do stuff like display finals on the big plasma screens. I bet it would command big $$ for that place, and I bet they could get enough customers (i.e. events) to justify it.
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I've heard that there's two in service right now (un-mothballed a couple years ago).
This is common stuff to do for the government when you don't see a need for a while for equipment. The WWII era battleships of the Iowa class have spent a lot of time since WWII in dry dock, however they have been brought out and refitted a couple times -- notably to shell the city of Beruit and for the Gulf War. It would have been inpractical to keep these ships in service during peace time, when instead they can just be retrofitted with modern equipment and brought into service when the need arises.
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*looks at article on jaguar game going for >1,000 on ebay... glances over to "Government Ponders Future Of Y2K Command Bunker" hmm....
nah... too easy...
The WWII era battleships of the Iowa class have spent a lot of time since WWII in dry dock, however they have been brought out and refitted a couple times -- notably to shell the city of Beruit and for the Gulf War. It would have been inpractical to keep these ships in service during peace time, when instead they can just be retrofitted with modern equipment and brought into service when the need arises.
You can do this with weapons. Afterall a big metal projectile is still a big metal projectile. The effectiveness doesn't really decrease, unless there's some revolutionary advance in weapondry (say modern steel versus cast-iron => cannon versus modern artillery). Also ALOT of money goes in to simply making a ship a ship, rather than a weapon system. Remove the gun turrets add a floor to them and flood them, and you got a cruise ship (albiet a very industrial luuking cruise ship)
You can't exactly do that with a computer. Trying to use a 6 year old computer is pretty painful. (Yes, it was upgraded 486SX-25 -> AMD 5x86-100. 4ram -> 20ram. Hell, I even cut out a hole in the top of the case to exteriorly mount two 3gig HDDs (my personal favorite hack).) I say simply fold them back in to the rest of the government. I'm sure someone needs new stuff.
Of course I would like to own one of those plasma displays. (Yeah it looks like photogenic equipment was one of the requirements for this.)
that's what evolution is for.
any links on your research?
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+&x
Was this stuff really necessary? Also, couldn't a plasma screen be easily used in another place? The time zone maps, those were probably made especially for Y2K, which is just wasteful.
When can we expect a "block any post containing the word 'beowulf'" option? It's needed far more desperately than the Y2K command bunker was.
The right and timely thing to do would be to turn it into a civil courtroom where a Dept. of Commerce Administrative Judge would be able to hear/view/browse evidence, hear arguments and render judgment regarding things like domain name disputes, peering agreements gone wrong, and all the other administrivia that a functional marketplace and public forum need to have sorted out by a court, so that everyone knows where they stand.
In other words a cyber court for cyberspace.
The Governments' role in enabling a functional exchange economy has always been primarily one of adjudicating disputes rather than laying down the law. And I certainly think that an Online court dedicated to disputes that occur over Internet related issues makes a lot of sense.
Certainly, only a court that is online can hope to react with the speed demanded by the environment.
Evolutionary/genetic algorithms can come up with pretty good solutions to the travelling salesman problem - I wrote one myself a few years back that has a reasonable shot at 80-100 cities.
The problem is that while these techniques produce a good solution relatively fast, they aren't guaranteed to find the optimal solution.
Finding the perfect solution ultimately means checking all the combinations, which could take a rather long time.....
Damn!! That's so paranoid but cool. Maybe the prime factorials can easily be determined with a magical formula from 128-bit encryption so 1 tick is spent on that process and the other 59 ticks applying the results to scanning all our network data via Echelon. SETI@home isn't to determine if there's alien life. Who the fuck cares about that?! It's using the people's computers to monitor those self-same people. Massive redundancy. Outside life doesn't matter to us until it effects us. It doesn't affect us now (unless our government is really a puppet government of our alien overlords--how's that for paranoia twisted).
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
The fact is that most of the infrastructure for real-world utilities is owned by the government or otherwise substantially controlled by it. This comes about either through the incredible investment needed (e.g. interstate highway) or some need to have a monopoly control (e.g. broadband spectrum). This infrastructure is absolutely critical to the functioning of American business. Imagine if a large section of the country lost electrical power: the consequences would be horrific. Like it or not, the Net has become almost as important as electricity to corporations. The government, for once, does not have control over a vital resource, which I think is a good thing. However, the government is not used to not having control, and in any case its corporate constituents are very concerned that no one has control. Thus the government is going to take steps to try and reassure themselves and the corporations that someone is taking care of it. I say let them have their little bunker, and let the Net and the admins use their own protective measures.
Walt
The most serious problem, however, is that politicians and policymakers here in Washington do not grasp even the most basic technical ideas propelling the information revolution.
In other words, the conspiracy theorists who long believed that the government would use Y2K (and the Y2K "bunker") as an excuse to dismantle American institutions had it backwards: we are not in danger of elite or intelligence government agents making decisions, we are in danger because the government is financially and technologically muscular, but philosophically and intellectually malnourished.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
First post to suggest linking these computers into a Beowulf cluster?
Anyway, here are the top ten things you can do on a Y2K-command-center-cum-Beowulf-cluster:
10. Solve the 50-city travelling salesman problem
9. Solve the halting problem
8. Run a Gameboy emulator within an C64 emulator within a Mac emulator within DOS installed within a VMWare partition on Windows NT installed within a VMWare partition on Linux
7. Calculate all the digits of pi
6. Find the first occurance of the current Linux source in those digits
5. Compile Mozilla in less than 8 hours
4. Trounce team Slashdot on distributed.net
3. Forget "globally coordinated" - DoS Yahoo to its knees all by yourself
2. Open up a Quake cafe
1. Execute a while(1) { } loop in six seconds
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