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E-terrorism, Bark or Bite?

Posted by timothy on from the that-darn-innernet dept.

packeteer writes: "Huge multi-part article on CNET news about electronic terrorism. The article has some interesting scenarios about posible types of attacks. It also has some good info about whats being done to prevent attacks as well as some info about media-hype that's put on 'hackers'. Good read."

2 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Terrorism Worries..... by packeteer · · Score: 2, Informative

    The reason this article is titled "Bark or Bite?" is because it has to do with overblown fears. If you read into it about that dam "hack" was that it was NOT some 12 year old at the controls and was in fact a 27 year old who had no real control over the gates.

    This article is very good in that it shows that E-Terrorism is not a big problem. The big problem is that we are worrying about it all the time and are having our rights taken away. This is why its called "Terrorism". It doesn't do THAT much damage, do you know anyone who was killed on 9-11? im sorry if you do but most of us dont. For most of us the real damage comes from the fears and the irrational actions taken because of them. Its a horrible thing what happened but its also horrible how we are reacting.

    --
    unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
  2. Traffic signal conflict monitors by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative
    Traffic signals in the US have a "conflict monitor", a hardwired device that is connected to all the green light power circuits. It's a physically separate box inside the signal controller. If it detects an invalid combination, it drops a relay that switches all the lights to blinking red/yellow. The matrix that indicates which lights conflict is hard-wired on a plug-in board with a matrix of diodes (typically 120 of them) representing each possible conflict. Programming the board is done by physically clipping out diodes.

    Remote reset after a conflict detection is possible for some units, but takes 6-10 seconds, during which period all lights are in blinking red/yellow.

    There's an NEMA spec for this, and this functionality is required.

    Unfortunately, there's a trend towards putting more functionality in the conflict monitor so it can diagnose and report other problems, then giving it some communications capability. This is a concern. But conflict monitors are, intentionally, much dumber than the main controller, which is a full-fledged computer typically running OS-9.