Isn't 'outage includes other gaming-related servers' ambiguous at best(an attacker hitting XBL and PSN wouldn't need to be a rocket surgeon to add a few other high profile gaming related services to the list, unlike an attacker hitting a single service using some tailored vulnerability) and actively evidence in favor of 'not really DDoS, just all the legitimate paying customers having a lot of new consoles and games and extra free time right now' at worst?
If the problem is under-provisioning, the expected symptoms would be broad-based DDoS-like outages among all popular gaming related infrastructure. If the problem is DDoS attacks, the expected symptoms would be comparatively dramatic havoc on targeted systems, no disruption elsewhere, with the number of targeted systems limited by the attacker's resources(and by how close to failure those target systems were running under holiday load).
That's crazy talk. We'll probably never master the time-machine technology required to go back a couple of decades and obtain samples of such systems for study!
There's probably a substantial amount of decent scrap metal to be had; but a ship of that age(and presumably designed with a particular eye to avoiding things like 'catching fire just because our job is to be covered in jet fuel and munitions near a war zone') is probably one hell of a party in terms of asbestos, lead, PCBs, and who knows what else.
There might be some additional cost because, unlike a lower-profile commercial contract, it will be at least somewhat harder to just beach it on some especially unscenic chunk of Chittagong or Alang and then shrug in innocent ignorance as impoverished locals with hand tools attempt to break the ship before it breaks them. There is a reason why much of the industry is located in places with effectively nonexistent environmental controls and expendable workforces; but it would certainly be embarrassing, and might be illegal for one reason or another, for a particularly iconic ex-military vessel to make an appearance in such a place(based on what happened when the French tried it with the Clemenceau a few years back I would certainly be nervous about trying it).
We are obviously going back and forth on a joke here(though there have been a few cases over the years of some poor sucker in a coastal city accidentally roaming onto a cruise ship's $10/min cellular-to-satellite tower and getting a bit of sticker shock, though not often enough to suggest anything other than occasional incompetence); but at least on CDMA(in the broad sense of 'what Verizon and Sprint do', not necessarily the one particular generation that was actually called that) the carrier can initiate a PRL push, silently, at their discretion. Sometimes it's just an update, since towers and signal landscape changes over time, sometimes it's them assisting the feds in moving you over to a stingray...
There may have to be rules; but I am less than convinced as to why those 'rules' include getting to use deauth attacks against other people's Part 15 devices with your own just because their presence annoys you.
They can have whatever rules they want about who connects to their network and what they do on it; but 'there must be rules' is a pretty thin justification for tearing down the usual rules of precedence for part 15 devices and the ISM band. It's also a recipe for setting off a nice little arms race, which is about the last thing you want happening on a slice of spectrum that only remains useful if the devices on it manage to cooperate a bit.
They aren't exactly advertized in the glossy consumer stuff section; but there are cellular providers that cater to embedded sensors, distributed system control, and that sort of thing, who will sell data-only, SMS-only, or data/SMS SIMs designed to be used by assorted sensors and traffic lights and things that need to swap bits but can't justify dedicated hardlines. Getting reasonable prices at quantity 1 might be tricky, though.
The trouble with voice mail is that it painstakingly offers almost all the vices of the other options and few of the virtues. All of the inaccessibility of voice (yeah, you could cut and paste part of a VM into your reply, with some effort; but that would be highly unusual...) without any of the conversational or interactive qualities. All of the one-side's-rambling-monologue of email; but without any of the easy access, search, categorization, exchange of information where formatting or spelling count (Who doesn't love resorting to NATO phonetic alphabet just to get a serial number across a phone line?).
Then include the fact that most systems for retrieving them are so awful that somebody using an email client 25 years ago would assume that you were fucking with them, and it's just icing on the cake.
Sounds like somebody was cargo-culting it on that design decision: systems that are intent on using cryptographic lockdown to resist tampering usually don't store the blessed key in rewriteable memory, for reasons made obvious here. Depending on the hardware, it gets some sort of more aggressively write-once/locked/burned in at the factory and read only/whatever storage, with the data to be cryptographically verified going in the rewritable part. I suppose it still functions as a sort of checksum; but not really a security measure.
It has to be unsafe by design. How else can Thunderbolt be even more insanely great than Firewire's "Hey, sure, here's DMA access to the bottom 4GB of my memory space! Don't do anything naughty or nothing, ok?" security model?
I'm frankly surprised to hear that Apple still manufactures a device that will boot after you tinker with its boot ROM. The notion that a device that is, for most purposes, right on the PCIe bus can scribble all over the place isn't exactly a shock; but it doesn't seem much like Apple to build hardware that would still boot if the cryptographic signatures didn't check out.
Plus, thunderbolt daisy-chains, so (if you are handy with rework tools or Intel ever gets the stick out of their ass about selling the chips) the malicious device could either be a (subverted) normal looking peripheral or a surprisingly small lump lurking within a thunderbolt cable or somewhere within the chain.
The proof of concept is probably a big hairy bundle of prototype that would get you arrested if you brought it to an airport; but a slightly more polished variant could be squirreled away in quite a few places. The volume and power required to implement an entire single-purpose attacker device is already fairly small, getting into "eh, probably just one of those EMI ferrite things" territory, and not going to get any larger; plus the options available in either embedding the attacker device in the case of a legitimate device or modifying a legitimate device's firmware.
The truly paranoid user might not be vulnerable; but few users are paranoid enough to qualify.
Nor in this one(though, barring exemplary tactlessness on your part, customs isn't going to catch you importing all kinds of crazy stuff), that's why the hotels are whining to get a regulation changed. At present, ISM band devices are specifically supposed to avoid interfering with one another. They want the right to explicitly attempt to interfere with others. That will work really well on a shared area of spectrum...
Fair enough, I certainly deal with the ghastly little things more on the inside than as a user. I assumed that 'RSA dongle' implied that the grandparent poster was using the same, didn't actually check to see what the companies mentioned issued to customers. They are usuriously priced; but that didn't seem implausible for a brokerage account that might easily have actual money in it.
That said, aren't all non-connected tokens(like the Symantec one you link to) going to have the same fundamental limitation that you need to know enough to clone the token in order to authenticate the token? In the case of the Symantec offering, it appears that the model is "Company B needs to pass every auth request to Company A for processing". It's Symantec: Neutral Trusted Party, rather than Bank A vs. Bank B; but same basic system.
The nice thing about smartcards (and USB dongles or contactless systems that implement equivalent functions) is that, while they do need a communication channel, they can perform a proof of identity(via public/private keypair) without ever needing to expose their private key, and without the remote host needing to know anything except the public key. The extra channel is a huge pain in the ass, compared to the time-based ones(which really are a cute trick, even if RSA are awful to deal with), especially if users expect to log in on something where you can't just install a card reader; but something with access to keypair auth is fundamentally better suited to multi-institution verification.
I really wish that we'd just bitten the bullet 10 years ago and actually rolled out a CAC-style keypair/smartcard system, with accompanying hardware and software ecosystem) in a big way. Trying to add it on after the fact is pretty hopeless; but if baked in it's a pretty cheap interface, and more capable than the disconnected tokens by a fair margin. Ah well.
"The hotel group found support from Cisco Systems. “Unlicensed spectrum generally should be open and available to all who wish to make use of it, but access to unlicensed spectrum resources can and should be balanced against the need to protect networks, data and devices from security threats and potentially other limited network management concerns,” Mary Brown, Cisco’s director of government affairs, wrote.
While personal hotspots should be allowed in public places, the “balance shifts in enterprise locations, where many entities use their Wi-Fi networks to convey company confidential information [and] trade secrets,” she added."
So, because some people might not be competent enough to set up a network where you can't spoof an AP just by using a similar name (because 802.11x is totally exotic and stuff) we should just trash the ISM band in order to protect trade secrets and the children. I wonder if Cisco happens to sell a nifty WLAN management console that would let me identify those 'rogue' APs and knock them out, by any chance?
from their customers' own unrelated outside services? What's next, forcing hotel patrons to rent your cell phones for exorbitant sums? Fuck Marriott.
Goodness no! Go to the trouble of maintaining a stock of handsets for you to get your grubby fingers on, and a staff to hand them out and get them back? We'll just knock the handset you have onto our private tower, where you'll pay roaming fees that would make you think you were staying on a Kupier Belt object with a state telcom monopoly. Your telco will get their cut of the charges, so they'll pass the bill along, don't worry.
Even if you do approve of what jammers are designed to do(in this case, deliberately fuck up one user's use of the ISM band for somebody else's profit), there's also the danger that (as with everything else) jammers have a nasty habit of being built down to price; and, when the objective is 'knock out wireless communication', some seriously ghastly products end up fitting the bill.
Yes, there are the rather more sophisticated ones, usually with interfaces that refer to 'rogue APs', that actively exploit weaknesses in the protocol for fairly precise knockouts; but there are also just screaming heaps of RF noise.
Quite a few of the 'security' arrangements in financial areas make it abundantly clear that they suck because you don't really matter (this goes triple or worse for anything involving credit reports).
That said, RSA-fobs(or house-branded devices based on the same system) aren't actually something that would be trivial to share between organizations.
The RSA fob works because it is initialized with a given seed value at a given time. Every minute it performs a hash operation that provides enough output for the on screen numeric sequence along with the input for the next hash operation(if memory serves, it is reasonably well established that it is either impossible or computationally impractical to derive the internal state from knowledge of the screen output alone, even if you have many samples).
In order to enroll a fob in your authentication system, your auth server needs to know the seed and the initialization time. It can then run N rounds of the algorithm(based on the amount of time between initialization time and current time) and determine what should be displayed on the screen(sometimes allowing for a few minutes of slip, depending on how accurate the RTCs are believed to be), If you want Company B to use Company A's token, either Company B needs to pass every auth request to Company A for processing, and accept the result, or Company A actually has to send Company B the seed an initialization time for your fob(an operation that opens up certain obvious security concerns).
The RSA fobs are pretty cute(if it weren't for the fact that RSA stores all the seed values and times, and managed to get them stolen at least once), in that they require absolutely no communication between the fob and the auth server, ever; but they do suffer from the weakness that the data needed to validate a fob are also the data sufficient to clone a fob, which makes sharing a single fob between multiple entities pretty awkward.
Unfortunately, US law is absurdly unfavorable to we 'the people' knowing what is actually done in our name (it's difficult enough that there's so damn much of it; but it's also deliberately obfuscated and/or hidden in assorted vital areas).
However, this guy just oozes crackpot. Nobody with a rather histrionic CV? Check. Legalbabble slurry of novel legal theories designed to dodge basic problems like "standing" and "even if Snowden is totally screwed, it's not obvious why that would make it illegal to make a movie about him". Check.
Didn't you get the memo, citizen? "the American People" (Like "The Troops") aren't something you actually listen to in order to represent the will of. Rather, they are an additional decoration to be wrapped around the will of some asshole who allegedly understands them better than they understand themselves, typically in a manner (coincidentially, of course) highly convenient to their own interests.
It's basically the American version of 'dictatorship of the proletariat'(where you had a dictatorship that was 'of the proletariat' only in the sense that it allegedly served the interests of that group; not in that it bothered to actually consult them).
I'd be quite interested to hear otherwise(I love a good tale of skullduggery to go with my economic history); but my readings (admittedly limited) in the area never turned up any cool cartels, monopoly agreements, sabotage, etc, just plain old competition on price, capital costs, and gradual refinements of technology:
The scheme sounds pretty goofy; but if you have plenty of potable fresh water lakes around and labor costs are manageable, you can produce a lot of ice for little more than the cost of cutting and transport. By contrast, the early ammonia chiller systems were not cheap equipment, industrial sized, toxic gas leaks(remember 'ammonia' as purchased for household use is ~5% real ammonia in water; exposure to real ammonia will turn the fluid in your eyes and lungs into something resembling that, or stronger...), required considerable energy to run, etc.
A combination of refined technology(better seals, harder wearing parts, more efficient designs, cheaper electrical or coal power, etc.) and pollution of lakes near northern population centers increased the cost of natural ice and decreased the cost of manufactured ice, gradually tilting the balance.
Once superior refrigerants were developed(less, or nontoxic, mostly) and high-reliability sealed compressors became available, miniaturization of refrigeration down to residential, train-car, truck, etc. scales became possible, and demand for big chunks of manufactured ice gradually declined.
Again, if you know better, I'd love a juicy story; but it has always been told to me as a fairly straightforward(if counter-intuitive, given today's technology) replacement of one tech by another.
It might simply have been an economic matter: nothing magic about electricity as the input for driving a compressor (and, indeed, the form of refrigeration that does require electricity is peltiers, which are confined to a niche by how much they suck unless you simply can't have any moving parts); but "parts of Wales with erratic electricity" aren't necessarily a sufficiently commanding market to drive the development, and mass production, of a dual electrical/combustion engine or electrical/belt-connection system. Dry ice, by contrast, is relatively cheap to produce if there's enough of a market within shipping distance, dead simple to store, and quite trivial to use to keep an electrical refrigerator cabinet cool when the electrically driven heat pump isn't operating.
A great many things are possible; but without serious DIY-fu, substantial money, or mass production, fewer things are readily available. In that context, supplementary dry ice(possibly distributed using the very same hardware, dealers, and routes that had previously carried water ice for iceboxes), would have been a cheap, trivially interoperable, augmentation to mass-market electric-only refrigerators.
Particularly handy since(as long as you are in an environment well ventilated enough not to suffocate) it's an effectively zero-residue option. In practice you'll get a little condensation; but far less messy than water ice. Plus, it 'stores' well, since, if need be, you can generate it by allowing CO2 compressed in a cylinder to expand rapidly. My understanding is that shipping it ready-made and insulated, and accepting a little loss, is more cost effective in areas with good infrastructure; but making it right out of the gas cylinder isn't hard, and those things last for ages so long as you don't do anything stupid to damage them.
Man, you geeks are always making this difficult. Just solve it the easy way: Don't give all the users all the features they want, that would confuse them(as you said). Just give all the users all the features that I want. Much less confusing, and I'm happy!
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Isn't 'outage includes other gaming-related servers' ambiguous at best(an attacker hitting XBL and PSN wouldn't need to be a rocket surgeon to add a few other high profile gaming related services to the list, unlike an attacker hitting a single service using some tailored vulnerability) and actively evidence in favor of 'not really DDoS, just all the legitimate paying customers having a lot of new consoles and games and extra free time right now' at worst?
If the problem is under-provisioning, the expected symptoms would be broad-based DDoS-like outages among all popular gaming related infrastructure. If the problem is DDoS attacks, the expected symptoms would be comparatively dramatic havoc on targeted systems, no disruption elsewhere, with the number of targeted systems limited by the attacker's resources(and by how close to failure those target systems were running under holiday load).
That's crazy talk. We'll probably never master the time-machine technology required to go back a couple of decades and obtain samples of such systems for study!
There's probably a substantial amount of decent scrap metal to be had; but a ship of that age(and presumably designed with a particular eye to avoiding things like 'catching fire just because our job is to be covered in jet fuel and munitions near a war zone') is probably one hell of a party in terms of asbestos, lead, PCBs, and who knows what else.
There might be some additional cost because, unlike a lower-profile commercial contract, it will be at least somewhat harder to just beach it on some especially unscenic chunk of Chittagong or Alang and then shrug in innocent ignorance as impoverished locals with hand tools attempt to break the ship before it breaks them. There is a reason why much of the industry is located in places with effectively nonexistent environmental controls and expendable workforces; but it would certainly be embarrassing, and might be illegal for one reason or another, for a particularly iconic ex-military vessel to make an appearance in such a place(based on what happened when the French tried it with the Clemenceau a few years back I would certainly be nervous about trying it).
What do you think inspired Locke to bother writing a manifesto in favor of something else? Had it already been what he wanted, why go to the trouble?
We are obviously going back and forth on a joke here(though there have been a few cases over the years of some poor sucker in a coastal city accidentally roaming onto a cruise ship's $10/min cellular-to-satellite tower and getting a bit of sticker shock, though not often enough to suggest anything other than occasional incompetence); but at least on CDMA(in the broad sense of 'what Verizon and Sprint do', not necessarily the one particular generation that was actually called that) the carrier can initiate a PRL push, silently, at their discretion. Sometimes it's just an update, since towers and signal landscape changes over time, sometimes it's them assisting the feds in moving you over to a stingray...
There may have to be rules; but I am less than convinced as to why those 'rules' include getting to use deauth attacks against other people's Part 15 devices with your own just because their presence annoys you.
They can have whatever rules they want about who connects to their network and what they do on it; but 'there must be rules' is a pretty thin justification for tearing down the usual rules of precedence for part 15 devices and the ISM band. It's also a recipe for setting off a nice little arms race, which is about the last thing you want happening on a slice of spectrum that only remains useful if the devices on it manage to cooperate a bit.
They aren't exactly advertized in the glossy consumer stuff section; but there are cellular providers that cater to embedded sensors, distributed system control, and that sort of thing, who will sell data-only, SMS-only, or data/SMS SIMs designed to be used by assorted sensors and traffic lights and things that need to swap bits but can't justify dedicated hardlines. Getting reasonable prices at quantity 1 might be tricky, though.
The trouble with voice mail is that it painstakingly offers almost all the vices of the other options and few of the virtues. All of the inaccessibility of voice (yeah, you could cut and paste part of a VM into your reply, with some effort; but that would be highly unusual...) without any of the conversational or interactive qualities. All of the one-side's-rambling-monologue of email; but without any of the easy access, search, categorization, exchange of information where formatting or spelling count (Who doesn't love resorting to NATO phonetic alphabet just to get a serial number across a phone line?).
Then include the fact that most systems for retrieving them are so awful that somebody using an email client 25 years ago would assume that you were fucking with them, and it's just icing on the cake.
Hey, at least it won't be a dirty deed done dirt cheap, since it requires a malicious thunderbolt device to carry out...
Sounds like somebody was cargo-culting it on that design decision: systems that are intent on using cryptographic lockdown to resist tampering usually don't store the blessed key in rewriteable memory, for reasons made obvious here. Depending on the hardware, it gets some sort of more aggressively write-once/locked/burned in at the factory and read only/whatever storage, with the data to be cryptographically verified going in the rewritable part. I suppose it still functions as a sort of checksum; but not really a security measure.
It has to be unsafe by design. How else can Thunderbolt be even more insanely great than Firewire's "Hey, sure, here's DMA access to the bottom 4GB of my memory space! Don't do anything naughty or nothing, ok?" security model?
I'm frankly surprised to hear that Apple still manufactures a device that will boot after you tinker with its boot ROM. The notion that a device that is, for most purposes, right on the PCIe bus can scribble all over the place isn't exactly a shock; but it doesn't seem much like Apple to build hardware that would still boot if the cryptographic signatures didn't check out.
Plus, thunderbolt daisy-chains, so (if you are handy with rework tools or Intel ever gets the stick out of their ass about selling the chips) the malicious device could either be a (subverted) normal looking peripheral or a surprisingly small lump lurking within a thunderbolt cable or somewhere within the chain.
The proof of concept is probably a big hairy bundle of prototype that would get you arrested if you brought it to an airport; but a slightly more polished variant could be squirreled away in quite a few places. The volume and power required to implement an entire single-purpose attacker device is already fairly small, getting into "eh, probably just one of those EMI ferrite things" territory, and not going to get any larger; plus the options available in either embedding the attacker device in the case of a legitimate device or modifying a legitimate device's firmware.
The truly paranoid user might not be vulnerable; but few users are paranoid enough to qualify.
Nor in this one(though, barring exemplary tactlessness on your part, customs isn't going to catch you importing all kinds of crazy stuff), that's why the hotels are whining to get a regulation changed. At present, ISM band devices are specifically supposed to avoid interfering with one another. They want the right to explicitly attempt to interfere with others. That will work really well on a shared area of spectrum...
Fair enough, I certainly deal with the ghastly little things more on the inside than as a user. I assumed that 'RSA dongle' implied that the grandparent poster was using the same, didn't actually check to see what the companies mentioned issued to customers. They are usuriously priced; but that didn't seem implausible for a brokerage account that might easily have actual money in it.
That said, aren't all non-connected tokens(like the Symantec one you link to) going to have the same fundamental limitation that you need to know enough to clone the token in order to authenticate the token? In the case of the Symantec offering, it appears that the model is "Company B needs to pass every auth request to Company A for processing". It's Symantec: Neutral Trusted Party, rather than Bank A vs. Bank B; but same basic system.
The nice thing about smartcards (and USB dongles or contactless systems that implement equivalent functions) is that, while they do need a communication channel, they can perform a proof of identity(via public/private keypair) without ever needing to expose their private key, and without the remote host needing to know anything except the public key. The extra channel is a huge pain in the ass, compared to the time-based ones(which really are a cute trick, even if RSA are awful to deal with), especially if users expect to log in on something where you can't just install a card reader; but something with access to keypair auth is fundamentally better suited to multi-institution verification.
I really wish that we'd just bitten the bullet 10 years ago and actually rolled out a CAC-style keypair/smartcard system, with accompanying hardware and software ecosystem) in a big way. Trying to add it on after the fact is pretty hopeless; but if baked in it's a pretty cheap interface, and more capable than the disconnected tokens by a fair margin. Ah well.
Aside from the hotels, fuck Cisco on this one:
"The hotel group found support from Cisco Systems. “Unlicensed spectrum generally should be open and available to all who wish to make use of it, but access to unlicensed spectrum resources can and should be balanced against the need to protect networks, data and devices from security threats and potentially other limited network management concerns,” Mary Brown, Cisco’s director of government affairs, wrote.
While personal hotspots should be allowed in public places, the “balance shifts in enterprise locations, where many entities use their Wi-Fi networks to convey company confidential information [and] trade secrets,” she added."
So, because some people might not be competent enough to set up a network where you can't spoof an AP just by using a similar name (because 802.11x is totally exotic and stuff) we should just trash the ISM band in order to protect trade secrets and the children. I wonder if Cisco happens to sell a nifty WLAN management console that would let me identify those 'rogue' APs and knock them out, by any chance?
from their customers' own unrelated outside services? What's next, forcing hotel patrons to rent your cell phones for exorbitant sums? Fuck Marriott.
Goodness no! Go to the trouble of maintaining a stock of handsets for you to get your grubby fingers on, and a staff to hand them out and get them back? We'll just knock the handset you have onto our private tower, where you'll pay roaming fees that would make you think you were staying on a Kupier Belt object with a state telcom monopoly. Your telco will get their cut of the charges, so they'll pass the bill along, don't worry.
Even if you do approve of what jammers are designed to do(in this case, deliberately fuck up one user's use of the ISM band for somebody else's profit), there's also the danger that (as with everything else) jammers have a nasty habit of being built down to price; and, when the objective is 'knock out wireless communication', some seriously ghastly products end up fitting the bill.
Yes, there are the rather more sophisticated ones, usually with interfaces that refer to 'rogue APs', that actively exploit weaknesses in the protocol for fairly precise knockouts; but there are also just screaming heaps of RF noise.
Quite a few of the 'security' arrangements in financial areas make it abundantly clear that they suck because you don't really matter (this goes triple or worse for anything involving credit reports).
That said, RSA-fobs(or house-branded devices based on the same system) aren't actually something that would be trivial to share between organizations.
The RSA fob works because it is initialized with a given seed value at a given time. Every minute it performs a hash operation that provides enough output for the on screen numeric sequence along with the input for the next hash operation(if memory serves, it is reasonably well established that it is either impossible or computationally impractical to derive the internal state from knowledge of the screen output alone, even if you have many samples).
In order to enroll a fob in your authentication system, your auth server needs to know the seed and the initialization time. It can then run N rounds of the algorithm(based on the amount of time between initialization time and current time) and determine what should be displayed on the screen(sometimes allowing for a few minutes of slip, depending on how accurate the RTCs are believed to be), If you want Company B to use Company A's token, either Company B needs to pass every auth request to Company A for processing, and accept the result, or Company A actually has to send Company B the seed an initialization time for your fob(an operation that opens up certain obvious security concerns).
The RSA fobs are pretty cute(if it weren't for the fact that RSA stores all the seed values and times, and managed to get them stolen at least once), in that they require absolutely no communication between the fob and the auth server, ever; but they do suffer from the weakness that the data needed to validate a fob are also the data sufficient to clone a fob, which makes sharing a single fob between multiple entities pretty awkward.
I'm going to go with "No, and Yes".
Unfortunately, US law is absurdly unfavorable to we 'the people' knowing what is actually done in our name (it's difficult enough that there's so damn much of it; but it's also deliberately obfuscated and/or hidden in assorted vital areas).
However, this guy just oozes crackpot. Nobody with a rather histrionic CV? Check. Legalbabble slurry of novel legal theories designed to dodge basic problems like "standing" and "even if Snowden is totally screwed, it's not obvious why that would make it illegal to make a movie about him". Check.
Didn't you get the memo, citizen? "the American People" (Like "The Troops") aren't something you actually listen to in order to represent the will of. Rather, they are an additional decoration to be wrapped around the will of some asshole who allegedly understands them better than they understand themselves, typically in a manner (coincidentially, of course) highly convenient to their own interests.
It's basically the American version of 'dictatorship of the proletariat'(where you had a dictatorship that was 'of the proletariat' only in the sense that it allegedly served the interests of that group; not in that it bothered to actually consult them).
I'd be quite interested to hear otherwise(I love a good tale of skullduggery to go with my economic history); but my readings (admittedly limited) in the area never turned up any cool cartels, monopoly agreements, sabotage, etc, just plain old competition on price, capital costs, and gradual refinements of technology:
The scheme sounds pretty goofy; but if you have plenty of potable fresh water lakes around and labor costs are manageable, you can produce a lot of ice for little more than the cost of cutting and transport. By contrast, the early ammonia chiller systems were not cheap equipment, industrial sized, toxic gas leaks(remember 'ammonia' as purchased for household use is ~5% real ammonia in water; exposure to real ammonia will turn the fluid in your eyes and lungs into something resembling that, or stronger...), required considerable energy to run, etc.
A combination of refined technology(better seals, harder wearing parts, more efficient designs, cheaper electrical or coal power, etc.) and pollution of lakes near northern population centers increased the cost of natural ice and decreased the cost of manufactured ice, gradually tilting the balance.
Once superior refrigerants were developed(less, or nontoxic, mostly) and high-reliability sealed compressors became available, miniaturization of refrigeration down to residential, train-car, truck, etc. scales became possible, and demand for big chunks of manufactured ice gradually declined.
Again, if you know better, I'd love a juicy story; but it has always been told to me as a fairly straightforward(if counter-intuitive, given today's technology) replacement of one tech by another.
It might simply have been an economic matter: nothing magic about electricity as the input for driving a compressor (and, indeed, the form of refrigeration that does require electricity is peltiers, which are confined to a niche by how much they suck unless you simply can't have any moving parts); but "parts of Wales with erratic electricity" aren't necessarily a sufficiently commanding market to drive the development, and mass production, of a dual electrical/combustion engine or electrical/belt-connection system. Dry ice, by contrast, is relatively cheap to produce if there's enough of a market within shipping distance, dead simple to store, and quite trivial to use to keep an electrical refrigerator cabinet cool when the electrically driven heat pump isn't operating.
A great many things are possible; but without serious DIY-fu, substantial money, or mass production, fewer things are readily available. In that context, supplementary dry ice(possibly distributed using the very same hardware, dealers, and routes that had previously carried water ice for iceboxes), would have been a cheap, trivially interoperable, augmentation to mass-market electric-only refrigerators.
Particularly handy since(as long as you are in an environment well ventilated enough not to suffocate) it's an effectively zero-residue option. In practice you'll get a little condensation; but far less messy than water ice. Plus, it 'stores' well, since, if need be, you can generate it by allowing CO2 compressed in a cylinder to expand rapidly. My understanding is that shipping it ready-made and insulated, and accepting a little loss, is more cost effective in areas with good infrastructure; but making it right out of the gas cylinder isn't hard, and those things last for ages so long as you don't do anything stupid to damage them.
Man, you geeks are always making this difficult. Just solve it the easy way: Don't give all the users all the features they want, that would confuse them(as you said). Just give all the users all the features that I want. Much less confusing, and I'm happy!