Slashdot Mirror
Taken Over By Aliens? Google Has It Covered
swandives writes "Imagine what would happen if all the Google engineers turned rogue and held the world's Gmail accounts to ransom. Or if aliens attacked earth and wiped California off the map. Seems the folks over at Google's enterprise division have already considered these scenarios. CIO is running an article, as part of a larger interview with Google Enterprise director of security, Eran Feigenbaum. He's a fascinating guy — in his spare time he practices magic and mentalism, and you may also have heard of him as Eran Raven, a contestant from the NBC television show Phenomenon."
"Imagine what would happen if all the Google engineers turned rogue and held the world's Gmail accounts to ransom"
Ummm...we can just track them down and dangle them out of a window until they agree to release the accounts? We're talking about software engineers here, not special forces commandos.
An alien attack is a really unlikely scenario. Aliens aren't going to deal with the incredibly non-trivial problem of interstellar travel and then decide to go wack the primitive humans. And if they do decide to do that, they are likely to be so far advanced from us that it won't make much of a difference, since humans will be wiped so quickly that Google will be irrelevant. However, the alien scenario does two things that are good: First, a lot of the worst-case scenarios are things which one won't think of in advance. By using scenarios like the alien scenario they help cover a lot of reactions to unanticipated very bad scenarios that no one has even come up with. Second, this sort of thing helps make security wargaming fun. The fact is that a lot of standard wargaming and largescale simulations can be frightfully dull. Using something like aliens helps get people actually involved and potentially have fun with the situation, which will mean they will pay more attention and put more effort in.
what about the san Andreas fault going off and makeing CA split off from the rest of the usa?
Aliens are like zombies, they are just a placeholder for a particular type of disaster without getting hung up on the exact rules of a pre-existing disaster.
Zombies are a biological/Social Disorder disaster Aliens would represent massive and sudden technological disaster (for example, massive communication failure with California)
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
I stopped reading after this line in the first paragraph :
"...attacked the reputation of psychics and healers such as Israeli-born spoon bender Uri Geller..."
Anyone over the age of 12 who is impressed by Geller's parlor tricks is a braindead idiot. Of course they aren't beyond hope they could redeem themselves if only, oh the irony of it, they would "open their minds" to the existence of a rational explanation.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.