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

Engineers to lose their sanity in 2004

[SirSlud]

Engineers around the globe will lose their sanity in exactly 2004 and will start engineering/programming their systems according to the guidelines of great cyberpunk novelists.

(Actually, given that marketing is really just the construction of fantasy-realities, I suppose marketing driven tech companies that engage in Real-Time-Sales-Driven-Development (tm) arn't too far off from that scenario. So, perhaps I shouldn't laugh.)

I say

[Treeluvinhippy]

Howard Schmidt = Chicken Little