Schmidt Predicts Digital Sky Is Falling

Danse writes "Former Microsoft security chief Howard Schmidt now works for the government as the vice chairman of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. According to this article on Security Focus, he has been touring the country, proclaiming the dangers of "zero-day viruses" and "affinity worms" that will create the kind of havoc that nothing else short of a nuclear exchange could cause. "Traffic lights, pacemakers, appliances -- all subject to outages and interruptions because in the future they're controlled via Internet, declares Schmidt. The power grid could fail catastrophically by 2005!" How do you argue with this kind of rhetoric, especially when it's being spread directly by government officials to corporate leaders?"

Comments

Me thinks...

[fiftyLou]

from the dict-cullion dept.

I'm guessing Michael actually read this article.

The Future

[undecidable]

Unless you really love shopping like my girlfriend, wouldn't you rather spend your time and energy doing something else?

When I think about things like this, I think about how nice it would be to have a servant that knew exactly what I like, shopped around for the best price, stocked my frig, and even prepaired my food for me.

I cannot afford a servant, but you have to wonder how well technology will some day be able to provide these kind of services at a reasonible price.

You could imagine a service which analyzes you and your needs, analyzes the contents of your frig, and analyzes the current or forcasted prices of the items it predicts you will need. Such a service could potentially make purchasing decisions better than you can, and all automatically without you ever thinking about it. And you could imagine that these items are then delivered right to your frig all at a low price: much lower than the cost of a servant, and perhaps even lower than if you had shopped for them yourself.

You could imagine that the service is highly customizable and learns more about you the more you use it. For example, maybe you don't care about different kinds of pasta so much, so it gets a cheaper kind. But it learns that you really care about beer, so it only gets certain kinds. You could even imagine that it uses the information that it knows about you and networks with other services and discovers products that you have a high probability of really liking.

You could imagine this service using your schedule data to help make decisions. "Hello, I see you are watching the football game this weekend. Will the guys be coming over as well? I have permissions to read their personal food preferences. Would you like me to prepair for a party?"

I recognize that many people may react to this scenario with dislike, and that such a service would never do as good a job as they could do themselves.

But don't forget that assembly coders had this same exact attitude about Fortran compilers. Today, I really doubt that many developers could write assembly as well as a good compiler. And even if they could, for most projects, it's a major waste of time and energy.

Just a thought.

Re:But..

[undecidable]

Traffic lights and pacemakers don't need anything except clocks and sensors. You wouldn't want to make a larger-scale system, because that would be too hard to program-- it would be very difficult to avoid messing up the system even without attackers.

Actually, I can easily imagine the desire to design a larger-scale system for a city's traffic lights. I agree that such an algorithm is not simple to design, but that doesn't mean that it's beyond our collective capabilities.

And my guess is that it would be in most cases several orders of magnitude less expensive for a city to optimize their traffic lights to yeild the optimal flow than simply build more streets or widen existing ones.

As a simple example: consider one smart light that can sense when a greater flow of traffic is crossing east/west than north/south. To compensate, it extends the east/west green time. But now, the traffic lights in the surrounding intersections are not going to be green at the "right" time. For traffic flow purposes, it is advantageous to keep cars from stopping. Thus, the surrounding lights should know about a light's timing to help keep the flow of traffic moving as much as possible.

An interesting question might be, how well can you do if only the surrounding lights know about eachother's timing? This is starting to sound like the standard network flow algorithms.