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British Military Deploys Skynet

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the have-you-seen-sarah-connor dept.

rowleyrw writes "The BBC are reporting, 'The British military is set to take one of its most significant steps into the digital age with the launch of the first Skynet 5 satellite. The spacecraft will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and "friendly" forces across the globe.' It's not yet the Skynet of Terminator, but how long before it becomes self aware?"

3 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Skynet is not new by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Note that this is the launch of Skynet 5. Skynet 1A was launched in 1969. See the Wikipedia article for more details.

  2. Re:With a name like Skynet... by malsdavis · · Score: 5, Informative

    ""Jolly good, ol' chap! Let us name it after a fictional military system that runs off the rails and destroys humanity!"

    Uh, the British Skynet system pre-dates the original terminator movie by about 15 years.

  3. Re:Bandwidth by HarmlessScenery · · Score: 5, Informative

    I also worked on Skynet 4 and 5. I'd have to disagree with the comment that the amount of information that is classified is 'ridiculous'. When you're talking about a system that all UK operations will be reliant on, you can't be too careful. In most cases, individual snippets of information might seem 'relatively harmless' in isolation, but combined with other 'relatively harmless' snippets of information can quickly reveal exploitable attack vectors on the system.

    As for the available bandwidth within the system - it's actually quite a complicated problem. That was one of the areas I studied. Knowing the power and frequency bands available is not enough to be able to determine a maximum data throughput on each channel.

    Different types of communications traffic use up frequency and power resources with different efficiencies. So the maximum data throughput varies - a lot - according to actual real world use. You also lose resources due to intermodulation products - which again vary widely with usage patterns.

    So when JacksonG says 'nowhere near as much as you might think' - it's probably less than that too ;)