Slashdot Mirror
Is Cyberwarfare Fiction?
An anonymous reader writes "In response to calls by Russia and the UN for a 'cyberwarfare arms limitation treaty,' this article explains that 'cyberwar' and 'cyberweapons' are fiction. The conflicts between nation states in cyberspace are nothing like warfare, and the tools hackers use are nothing like weapons. Putting 'cyber' in front of something is just a way for people to grasp technical concepts. The analogies quickly break down, and are useless when taken too far (such as a 'cyber disarmament treaty').'"
We gotta do it before the cyberterrorists cybernuke our cybernets! Think of the children!
I guess the news here is that this isn't just one or two US Senators saying this now.
In response to calls by Russia and the UN for a "cyberwarfare arms limitation treat"
And then we can all dress up as h4x0r3z, maybe call the event Geek-o-Ween.
I can disable the national power grids of half the countries in the world using nothing more than an iPhone
And you need a guy there to knock out the backup generator.
Please, knocking out the power grid or making all the red lights turn green or whatever they're afraid of is nothing like having a bullet penetrate someone or a bomb going off - it's almost impossible, if not impossible to kill someone by hacking into a computer.
Shut something life threatening down or screw it up by hacking into it? There's backup or work around.
"Cyber warfare" is a small threat and not worth all the time and money spent on it. We should be spending the effort on ground surveillance and other means to reducing life threatening issues.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
One of the common claims regarding "cyber warfare" are attacks against the power grid. What I'd like to know is this: why is the power grid accessible to any outside system?
Living With a Nerd
When millions of people in key positions have artificial hearts, limbs, microchips in their body, nanotechnology with RFID in their clothes, then cyberwarfare becomes something physical.
If hackers can stop the artificial heart of somebody important, this is no different than assassinating the person.
Anyone who does not take cyberwarfare seriously is not envisioning a world where nanotechnology is everywhere in everything. Where the enemy can create a bomb that you shallow in a pill, or that is sprinkled on your food. Where the enemy can use nano bots too small to see to kill people, or hack into or reprogram, etc.
It's definitely not fiction, it's reality. The technology to do this already exists and for all we know governments could be launching their attacks as we speak. Whoever controls the nanotech weapons will control the future.
Postmodern Slashdot?
A "cyberwarfare arms limitation treat"? Yum! Does that come in cherry flavor?
And in a world where everything is connected, and everything is nanotechnology, and everything can be hacked, the dangerous are entirely different.
Does this mean that I also don't need a drivers license to drive around on the Information Highway?!
It seems the author commits his own offense, assuming that warfare is limited to organised military efforts. How many Americans killed British soldiers during the Revolutionary War, of their own volition?
No you haven't; at least not in the sense that matters. Even if there is a country stupid enough to connect it's "off switch" to the internet, all they have to do is pull the ethernet cable and switch it on again. Even if you can break a small proportion of power stations, the rest will come on again. You are a "cybervandal" not a "cyberwarrior".
The real serious cyberwarfare people would do both. A disable the off switch (force it on) and b) drop a graphite bomb at a key place to do weeks worth of damage. That's proper "cyber" warfare.
Cyber"warriors" know the exploit for the radar station and disable the air defences as they fly in with real bombs.
Cyber"guerilla"s mess with account numbers in the fund transfer excels of most of the big companies in the place they target.
There's a whole load of resources which are needed for this stuff. Real test suites where you actually have the control systems of your enemies nuclear power plants; actual buildings where you can try messing up the air conditioning system, people who can actually write serious, fully EAL7 compliant defence systems. People who can write EAL7 compliant versions of exploits (have you seen the state of security software????). etc. etc. etc.
If you think your country's military doesn't have a valid role to play in a "cyberwar" then you haven't understood the difference between a "cyberterrorist" putting an "easter egg" into a flight control system and a "cyberwarrior" diverting all your civilians into the area where his nukes can strike them most effectively.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
It is warfare in the same sense that computers think or ships swim. In other words, it really isn't, but it's a convenient metaphor to use because the truth is too complicated for the average person.
Anyone who puts the word 'cyber' in front of something should probably be shot.
Moving along to more immediate activities, we are actively seeing 'Information Warfare' being executed on the Internet. The latest widely heard event was the Israeli-flotiilla debacle, and subsequent dis-information campaign from every possibly side. Ask someone who has stated they have been following it, and see what factual information they can give you, and have them list multiple non-governmental independent investigatory sources for validation. It isn't possible.
This is not the first time Russian government reveals its unique idiotic approach to technology. As a former Russian citizen I am following the drama of Russian government politics in technology, which, synthetically speaking, is a laughing stock of Russian technoblogging community.
Basically, the technology policy of the Russian government does not differ much from:
1. New exciting promising technology discovered!!
2. ???
3. Profit (get recognition, re-establish mother Russia as a world superpower, look wise, etc)
Replace ??? with "flood zillions of roubles into this technology without any sense of balanced budget" (which was the case of "nanotechnologies") or in this case "propose a treaty to curb technology".
One would think that smartass KGB spy would do better than idiot Khruschev, but no... the result is the same: embarrassment and ostracism of Russia on the international level.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
In the same sense that nuclear war is real, cyberwar is real. We've seen both only in limited fashion. We know the technology exists and works. We've just never seen two well-armed adversaries thoroughly go at it.
There's a lot of fiction about full-scale nuclear war. That doesn't mean nuclear war itself is fiction.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
... and no printers have ever been delivered to unfriendly nations that contained complete cyber warfare ready code. That code wasn't used in the beginning of a drop-bomb, send-tanks-in war to bring down central parts of the network of the unfriendly government either. It is all fiction.
I suspect there are many Asian made routers with some "extra code" in them too and I wouldn't put it beyond some "friendly" governments to be working with manufacturers to insert special code inside equipment destined for unfriendly or known-to-sell-to-unfriendly-nations either.
Of course, all of this is fiction and not public knowledge.
The convenient thing about "cyberwar" as a slogan is how it allows you to extend the notions of "wartime" into virtually every nook and cranny of life and infrastructure.
The term "cyberwar" quietly implies that virtually any net-connected system is a potential or actual combatant. From here, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to applying military/wartime standards for such niceties as atttacking systems, or requisitioning access. Even better, since "cyberwar" is, for suitably nebulous definitions, something that occurs pretty much constantly, among a wide variety of state and nonestate actors, with various levels of covertness, the mandate covers basically everybody, everywhere, and is of unlimited duration(See also: "Global war on terror").
Who needs bullshit like "warrants" or "due process" when any computer system can simply be declared to be an "enemy combatant" or "materially supporting an enemy combatant"? If you think the notion of charging an object in order to avoid procedural restrictions is absurd, be aware that it is already standard practice in the context of "asset forfeiture". (which makes for some rather ridiculous case names...)
Even if you can break a small proportion of power stations, the rest will come on again.
Many large power plants need quite a bit of energy to jump start from an 'off' condition (normally they never go 'off' just in lower power mode). Turning off all power plants at once would be a much bigger mess then you think. I don't think you ever could do it because of fail-safes, but if you could you would start a big mess.
Point 1, "Hacking is opportunistic."
For civilians, yes, it certainly is. When you have operational forces at your command, however, it can get notably less-so. You could, for example, develop a virus and compel Microsoft to include it as a Windows Update. Or get a CIA operative to smuggle it in, conduct a raid on a connected node and have the soldiers upload it, duplicate the hard drive of a dignitary and implant it there, etc, etc, etc.
This point is basically saying that because small arms don't have killing capacity against tanks, we don't ever have to worry about governments attacking us. It is bizarre and limits governments to powers that only civilians would use.
Point 2, "Cyber-warriors aren't military"
Yeah, and neither was Osama Bin Laden. Yet we recruited him and gave him weapons to use against the Soviets in Afghanistan. If you think we just hinted at what we wanted him to do, you're absolutely insane. He was even on the payroll, as I understand it.
Governments have these people called 'operatives' that infiltrate organizations like the ones described by the author. These poor souls get burned if they get caught, but they knew that going in. Don't wax poetic about the cost of keeping clean hands without acknowledging that intelligence operations exist. Even in the civilian world we have 'social attacks', so who is going to believe that the government does not? What about 'youth groups' fundamentally changes this in any way?
Point 3, "Indeed, in America, such youths are more concerned about attacking our own government and corporations ("fighting the Man") than they are about fighting foreign adversaries."
So in America, there are only one type of youths, the anti-government type, and elsewhere they're all the opposite.
This is so weak I'm simply not going to waste time rebutting it.
Lines of power on the internet are not under the control of governments. A system that is not safe can be just as successfully or better attacked by a single individual or a whole army.
Numbers only mater in DDOS attacks. And the nature of these attacks, most effective to date, is in essence a shouting match, only conducted on the internet. And no botnet does it better than an idea that resonates among the people. There is no other defense than being prepared to serve faster and to filter the noise. Sometimes, the idea is national, like it was during the outfall of the Bronze Solder move. More often it is not. and its not certainly under any governments direct control.
Sticking a stupid name on something and overblowing what it means isn't the same thing as it not existing to begin with. Computers are vulnerable. People who don't like us can exploit those vulnerabilities. But this is really just another arena of non-shooting conflict, all under cloak and dagger.
The CIA has a long history of trying this sort of thing, sometimes successfully, many times not. There's directly funding revolutionaries, slipping agents into countries, running guns, sponsoring assassination attempts, economic sabotage, infrastructure sabotage, spying with human intelligence, electronic intelligence, satellite intelligence, etc. The CIA has a history of over-promising and under-delivering but this doesn't mean they won't still try.
The Russians have traditionally been much better at running spy rings. The beauty of hacking is you don't even have to put your own assets in-country and risk their capture.
On one hand, I don't think we'll ever get to the point where it can be Die Hard 4 info-Armageddon with hackers blowing up power plants at will. I think that public screwups will force a higher level of security and more rigorous design so that we are less vulnerable to external attacks. On the other hand, the BP fuckup shows that reason and logic are poor tools for explaining the behavior of large organizations. BP should have taken drilling seriously. They should have realized that they had no good plans for capping an uncontrolled well so if they were going to drill, the only option would be making sure they would never, ever, ever have an uncontrolled well. All the internal warnings they had in the months leading up to the disaster should have been their opportunities to stop the disaster before it happened. And we can see how it turned out.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"you shallow in a pill, or that is sprinkled on your food"
Newsflash - thats been around since people first figured out how to poison others.
Take your pick from poisons, bacteria or viruses. You've been reading too much sci-fi
because biology got there a few hundred million years before William Gibson.
Nothing to see here, move along please.
"Many large power plants need quite a bit of energy to jump start from an 'off' condition"
Coal fired plants maybe. Pretty much everything else just requires someone to press an on button. Gas turbines are easy to start, nuclear never really goes off even with the rods in and hydro is as simple as opening the sluice gates.
Nuclear war: Large area are vapourised, even larger areas poisoned for centuries. Result - everyone and everything larger than a bacteria dies.
"Cyber" war: Someone deletes some files on some computers and causes others to crash. Result - ethernet cables are unplugged and machines are restored from backups.
Get a sense of perspective.
..cyber veterans day!
I think both you and daid303 are a bit right. In the case of a nuke plant, there's often a safety trigger which fires damping rods into the station and takes weeks to recover from. If you just take the station off the grid (as our hacker guru was proposing) then they can probably come back on again pretty quickly. If you are a serious "cyberwarrior", then you take a proper model of the control system and you work out a way to get the emergency systems to trigger.
This is where I call bullshit on Mr Graham. Unless you have an copy of the power station control system, you can't test and be sure your attack on it will properly trigger the emergency systems. That's why proper "cyberwar" takes more resources than just a little bit of "cybervandalism". You are actually aiming to reliably destroy or disable large amounts of infrastructure in a very short amount of time. This is not something you do with just a single guy and a mobile phone.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Cyberwarfare is very, very real. If anyone disagrees with me, google "Skynet".
How about dropping a Pinch over southern California let's say right above Google and Intel's head quarters? Remember Pakistan is the world leader in that technology; no colleateral damage and nothing but sheer chaos on the ground. These are real BCP senarios; outlined by various standards such as the ISO.
This is a very serious matter! You might not be old enough to remember this, but it caused quite a stir back in 1979, and almost started a war, when some kid logged into the WOPR at Norad and started simulating a Soviet attack. Luckily they were able to stop the systems from a real attack by throwing the computer system into a tic-tac-toe loop. Then of course there was the Da Vinci virus that almost sunk that oil tanker. Something needs to be done about this!
I know that there can be an economic/legal impact, but CyberWar (I think) is used by businesses/C*Os to deflect legal responsibility and by governments to oppress public/citizens rights.
Yes there can be CyberWar, but CyberWar as a word/term can and (I think) is too frequently misused to fear-exploit and express faux-responsibility of the culpable and innocent.
I guess, I could be wrong, but... you cannot convince me (on this topic); So, BOOOWho?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Printing up counterfeit currency during WW2 by the Germans to destabilize Britain's currency certainly was part of the war and pieces of paper certainly aren't weapons in the killing and blowing up of things. They certainly are weapons in the sense of destroying the economy. So from that point of view any cyber attacks which aid in destabilizing the economy could be part of a war and would be weapons.
As far as there being some sort of treaty to prevent this, that's probably the most stupid thing I have ever heard of. It sounds like people are making things up to either create jobs or keep them. Just another waste of money and time by the useless UN.
Any action that weakens an economy or makes a resource more difficult top obtain can be an act of war. The perfect example is the deliberate destruction of oak trees that were normally used for barrels essential to Spain's military fleet. Without good oak barrels gun powder and food could not be kept at sea resulting in the destruction of the Spanish fleet.
Just as we can never be totally certain that the oil rig in the Gulf was not destroyed by a religious zealot or lunatic deliberately causing a spark at just the vulnerable moment we can also never be certain that simple email scams that harvest money from Americans are not encouraged, subsidized or even created by enemy nations or just some unfortunate people who seek to make a living by theft. We also can not tell if protest is simply by groups seeking to advance their cause or perhaps actually seeking to demoralize our public and make it more difficult to raise an army or get funding to support that army.
Putting 'cyber' in front of something is just a way for people to grasp technical concepts
... in bed.
The analogies quickly break down, and are useless when taken too far
[signature]
The article was interesting in discussing the use of nationalist youth groups, and suggesting that hackers may act in the same way.
I'm left wondering: if several national governments, including the US, and the UN, are devoting significant resources to the problem of "cyberwarfare," wouldn't one of these entities have detailed what they mean, exactly? I saw the point of the analogy of the bigger catapult to the bigger tunnel-sniffing dog, but what, then, are the cyberwarfare people actually proposing to do? Even if defending against cyberwarfare is fundamentally a stupid idea, it can't be completely devoid of content.
Exactly, nuclear never really goes off ... BECAUSE?
Exactly, because it takes forever to bring it to the ON state. So, if you managed to shut it off...
Pinch???? Google doesn't seem to help me here. A HANE above such sites would definitely be a counterpart for cyber-warfare guaranteeing much longer recovery times. For a true "cyber" part, wait for the US to launch satellites with nuclear weapons (for stopping "terrorist states"); then, during your cyber attack, take control of the satellite and use the bombs from that to cause your HANE.
That's really interesting and quite resource intensive; to get a practical attack on a nuclear equipped satellite nowadays, I bet you would have to infiltrate the development program; you'd certainly need powerful transmitters and you'd need to have serious levels of engineers. You could in principle attack via the US ground station, but that's run by people who actually know something about security so it's not on the open internet. Your iphone will likely not help here.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
lol, bulls1t. you really don't have a clue.
read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
and yes, that's why nuclear is dangerous.
Ok let me send you a virus that will make your computer set on fire and tell me that isn't a "cyber attack". LOL
offtopic is about the most retarded mod that could have had (for anyone that read the title anyway)
which is totally what she said
I think that although cyberweapons do not exist, government can implement a best next thing: killswitch for individual networks at the backbone level. Seriously, consider that US owns majority of the Internet. Say they find some sort of DDOS attack that originated in Russia against Estonia. They would be able to immediately cut off some Russian networks out of the main backbones on various levels (cut off access to root DNS if they are naugty, and if they are especially bad -- cut off all their IP blocks).
Nuclear plants won't run without an external power source. It's a safety feature. If the plant can't get power from the grid, the reactor shuts down automatically.
it's all abit technical.
one has to expand the term "cyberware" some more.
and it could rely on radical new physics.
not just sending "run-of-the-mill" but malicious data
over a conforming network.
you have to imagine the RAM and CPU and what
it relies on. not just electricity.
you have to see the N-P, P-N etc. and all the quantum
mechanical principals involved. you have to see
that we are still discovering new physics (like
those pesky oscillating neutrinos).
see also spooky action at distance and entanglement.
now, i'm sure some smart dude will get an idea
where i'm going with this.
just believe that EVERYTHING is connected.
So, to summarize, the idea of nation states waging cyberwar (may be SunTzu, Ideal) with cyberweapons (DDOS, buffer overflow, worm, spoof/snoop, EMP...) is not fiction.
It's an analogy we might use to describe some things that are virtual/conceptual that can cripple military/government ability to respond to emergency/threat incidents that are not in cyberspace, which triggers an excessive misdirected reaction. It's not what really goes on in cyberspace, but if a small-degree of fire-sale is possible that would allow mafia/other covert manipulation of a stock or market sector that could fund other criminal/war activities would that be using cyberwar/cyberweapon?
The conflicts between nation states in cyberspace is warfare by other then lethal weapons(MD). The tools "Crackers" use are like weapons that can disable or disrupt tactical or strategic response, but no local/international law will ever prevent the creation or use of cyberweapons except possibly cyberspace disconnection/embargo (diplomatic) or cyberspace-MAD (military).
Can cyberwar/weapons be used in asymmetric warfare? Yes!
Can cyberwar/weapons include physical contact/weapons (EMP/firesale) for augmenting tactics and strategy? Yes!
The cyberwar fiction is what drives the corporate/national policy, and that worries me a lot. The insipidness is a bigger danger to US, EU, RU... cyberspace than foreign/domestic Crackers.
SunTzu analogy: The subjugation of your enemy without a death or any physical destruction of the infrastructure or industrial-base is ideal/possible.
SunTzu still pwns war.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
No matter how ridiculous it sounds, we should do our best to keep up the whole "cyber-war", "cyber-weapons", "cyber-attack" theme.
That way, we can invoke the Second Amendment when the government tries to restrict strong encryption, copyright circumvention software or whatever other "cyber-weapons" they find threatening. Sorry Feds, you were the ones that started this whole theme about electronics and software being "weapons", and as such, you have no power to restrict the citizens from owning them.
"Cybersex" is nothing like real sex either.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Nuclear plants won't run without an external power source. It's a safety feature. If the plant can't get power from the grid, the reactor shuts down automatically.
Sir –
You're right that nuclear power plants need external power to operate as a safety feature - to keep the water pump providing coolant flowing so the reactor doesn't melt. However, the need to be connected to the grid differs from my experience working at nuclear power plants. At the plant I worked at (a CANDU reactor) if the reactor itself wasn't operational there was a grid-backup, a diesel backup, and a battery backup. The battery was the most impressive. The plant could be started and was designed to operate with any of these sources of power at any given time. Of course, other plants may have different, less redundant, designs — as you suggest.
The anonymous originator is obviously an idiot of major proportion.
remember remember the 5th of November
na lets all put a black cape on and wear white masks on November 5th
and just walk around saying HI anonymous
As it was explained to me when I asked that very question (to someone working in a nuclear power plant), you don't need direct internet access to the workings of the plant to cause a major disruption. To meet safety regulations, the plants have to file daily reports to the NRC via the internet. If the internet is disrupted and the reports can't get through, they are required by law to take the plant off-line, even if it's working perfectly. I suppose in an emergency they could go back to faxes or whatever they were doing before the internet, but that would take time to set up, and nuclear plants can't just be turned off and on like a light switch.
You might lead the casual reader to think that merely throwing a switch has no real world consequences, which is anything but the truth. When you are dealing with systems of such magnitude of energies even the smallest delay in rectifying an issue has a very lasting effect. e.g http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2009/08/17/hydro-electic-power-plant-explosion/ There are any number of ways to force mechanical failures simply by using 'control' software. Any mechanical system can be forced to fail if you know how it is built, and what problems plague the internal design of that system. The US is vulnerable to many such attacks against the control systems (e.g. SCADA ) and these threats should be taken VERY seriously until such time that we know the internal control networks are unreachable from any outside influence. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11465
where's my "peace dividend"?!!!
Haliburton must've gotten it...
No fatalities as a result, but slipshod documentation & maintenance is probably a bigger problem : http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/05/1632204/Computer-Failure-Causes-Gridlock-In-MD-County?art_pos=1
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I've read that these systems are accessible from the internet so that support staff can remotely diagnose problems.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You missed, anyway. There's an anon 1 minute before you.
"When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon -- China doesn't even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar. Attacks -- not just from China but from Russia and elsewhere -- on America's electronic networks cost millions of dollars and could in the extreme cause the collapse of financial life, the halt of most manufacturing systems, and the evaporation of all the data and knowledge stored on the Internet."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/cyber-warriors/7917/
Why risk the insecurities of the internet ? Use the power grid as an intranet using POWER LINE COMMUNICATION http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication . Then all you have to secure is your main connecting power lines.
(my emphasis) - you need to work out the right trick to cause a failure; you need to work out how to get that trick to happen through the control system; you need to integrate your software with the particular configuration of the control system in the particular power station you are attacking. Most of all, you need to repeat this whole process across many different installations all over a country.
This becomes an extremely non trivial "multi-vendor" (at least the attacker + the control software author, if not also the network software) integration case and needs time and energy.
Compared to the resources of the average army this is totally trivial. People who calmly send tens of thousands to their deaths are not worried by having to hire a few tens of programmers. On the other hand, to a little disorganised hacker band this is the kind of thing they can only achive through fairly serious advances in AI. One man and his iphone is just not going to cut it.
Which is not to say that killing a few hundred or even thousand people (e.g. by breaching a well chosen dam or causing a fire in the bottom of a tall building), a goal well within the reach of one bored skillful and lucky man and his iphone is something that we should just totally ignore. It's just that it's not really close to warfare.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The entire concept vastly more plausible and sensible than the 'All-Robot Warfare' idea that was going around several years ago.
Came across this while considering a graduate degree. It's enough to make Tom Clancy facepalm.
Cyberwar is very real. It's in it infancy right now and it relates more to the intelligence aspects of the military than to the 'men on the ground' idea of military might.
How is hacking a military database and planting misinformation and destroying data any different than covert ops? The military will someday have some sort of data division specializing in attacking countries using computers custom-tailored for warfare.
We can do this later and risk being vulnerable or we can do it now and maintain our supremacy. The choice is ours.
Article states: "I can disable the national power grids of half the countries in the world using nothing more than an iPhone. There is no such thing as 'cyberweapons'" These statements must be viewed as incongruent on some level. The fact that an iPhone might be used to commit an act of war may not may the iPhone a cyberweapon; however, disabling a national power grid is an act of war, no matter how you did it. You need to view this sort of thing in light of Robert K. Knake and Richard A. Clarke's book _CYBER WAR_ ISBN 978-0-06-196223-3. Russia's proposed treaty is about keeping the US asymmetrically vulnerable to computer-based attacks.
Anything the UN and Russia are behind as far as a "warfare" act moving through the UN will spell trouble for the US. Beware.
If we waited until it was time then how would nuclear weapons be contained?
Um aren't there any gov'y related peeps on this board?
Fiction? not hardly, Cyber-warfare quite some time ago became the 4th official platform just like other kinds (Sea, Air, Land) many years ago and the Air Force has an entire division with standard command structure in place.
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
I defer to your greater knowlege of the subject.
Close. It wasn't code that was injected, it was proprietary binaries. In other words, closed source kills. Yes, the same general category that gives us billions of lost hours from crappy drivers for good hardware. The same general category that is responsible for providing an incubator for the world's botnets.
That makes what Novell, Black Duck and other branches of Microsoft are doing so profoundly bad when they try to re-label their proprietary binaries 'open source' without releasing the full source. Just releasing some of the source doesn't count, it's as bad as all-binary proprietary. By release, that means read, edit and re-compile. Anything less is just plain dangerous.
You'd think that countries would learn. Or at least the US would learn. As things are, TSA is shaking people down for baby milk instead of doing something useful like nuking each and every NTFS partition on every harddrive that passes through customs. During a transitory period of a year or two, they could take it easy on the scum by just erasing every file ending in .com, .exe, or .dll and handing them a Fedora live CD. Tracking down and locking up the present and former executives of Microsoft and its partners would be another step forward. Off to Gitmo with the lot.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.