SCADA systems used to be airwalled, and since they started getting connections to the Internet, attacks have begun. Before the connections, SCADA systems mostly were accessed remotely via modem, still susceptible but somewhat more difficult (after systems started getting actual passwords and stuff, but that was a while ago.
Since they are planning on supporting IPV6, I assume that Internet connections will be inevitable, if for no other reason but cost savings.
Airwalled systems are not as easily attacked by unconnected assailants. Think it through.
ps - My original comment was inspired by the apparent interest in making sure the Smart Grid would be interoperable with the Internet, but little or no discussion of the inherent security risks. Maybe designing in the security first, and then adding in Internet connectivity, would be a good strategy? Naw, we should do it all at once.
And have they got a supplier for you that meets your criteria?
This is not a corporate purchase, it's a government purchase. Different rules. You can buy PCs from approved vendors, and they will be happy to give you a list. You will be buying the OS from a GSA vendor, Microsoft, probably, and the terms and conditions are not yours to decide. There are very, very different terms for GSA purchaes, and this can be done but not as easily as just buying from the conventional vendors like HP/Compaq and Dell, for instance. There are others.
I've tried to do business with agencies for quantities from 30 to 1000, and never had much luck. Even when I had an opportunity to broker a deal for >1000 systems, the vendor kicked the door in and took the deal over. Learning fast, I didn't bother.
You probably should just give in, but I admire your intentions.
I'm a Republican, and I feel much the same way. I'm not a Libertarian because they go much too far for my beliefs, and they seem to be more wacko than even the hard-left Democrats I know.
For now, Republican is my best shot. But they are just as corporatist as Dems, and I may have to jump ship. I've already voted for a primary candidate not of the party's choice this year, and I may have to vote for a Democrat or two to be able to sleep at night this November...
Spraying the protesters at a rally is a lot more effective than filming them if:
- You want to arrest them quickly. Just scan for the fluid at perimeter checkpoints and detain anyone glowing. Sort them later.
- You want to deny access to these protesters to another event. Scan for fluid at the other event and detain anyone glowing. Sort them later.
- You want to force them out of public for a while, maybe just a few hours. Make a show of spraying them, explain it, and the protesters will either hide or take time to scrub down. Time passes. Your targets are busy not leading the Rebellion.
- You want to know who they contact after. Spray, follow, scan as you wish, and see who touched them.
- You want to identify their associates mid-term. Spray, scan at events etc, detain, question. Build your database of associates.
- You want to avoid the unwelcome questions of video surveillance.
- You lack the technology or can't implement it. Sparying a crowd is not terribly sophisticated, and UV lamps or flashlights are cheap.
- The military uses are similarly interesting. If you're taking fire from a neighborhood, spray the whole damned place, and with the military-grade stuff. Weeks later, you're going to get hits from clothing, tire tracks, doorknobs, leaning against the police station, all over. Develop a field kit to ID the few simple codes, and you can find the shooters and their accomplices over time.
Cool stuff. Can I get some to coat my pencils at work? And my stapler?
If we jacked up wages significantly (say 80%), what whould happen?
- Would mothers quit work and stay home to actually *raise* their children?
- Would we keep on with two-income families and splurge on more crap, bigger houses, and better daycare so our brats would learn more sophisticated anti-social behavior?
- Would we just accept insane cell phone bills for uncapped data and unlimited texting, so our kids would be able to text and tweet instead of holding actual conversations?
- Would we descend into the enonomic abyss even faster, as the rest of the world careens past us?
The reality is that even the most desperately poor American is better off than 90% of the rest of the world, maybe 95%.
Stealing coppper isn't even the most desperate act. In Egypt, they bury long fiber runs in the desert as much as 30 ft. to discourage the locals from digging up the conduit for scrap. Here in Phoenix the crooks steal air conditioning units right off the side of a house of day care building for scrap. I left 10 ft. of angle iron outside by my driveway for half a Saturday afternoon. Gone. Foreclosed and partly built neighborhoods in many states were and are victims of scavengers ripping wiring and plumbing out of the walls, cutting rebar out of foundations, you name it.
But poor in America is more a matter of pride. Welfare is still available. And it pays better than living in the streets of Mogadishu.
"It's not that they hate the environment per se, it's that they don't care about it, and start out from the presumption that anything good for the environment conflicts with the rest of their ideology, and that is sufficient to lead them down the path to opposing it."
Somehow, this rings of an inconsistent argument on your part. For instance:
"it was the pro-hunting conservatives who wanted to 'conserve' nature."
Well, we STILL DO! The presumption that pro-hunting conservatives either no longer exist or no longer care whitewashes the argument that conservatives are largely unconcerned with environmental problems.
The Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 was, I beleive, signed into law by President Eisenhower. We could have a fruitful discussion on what sort of conservative Ike was, but to call him a Liberal is inaccurate.
The Clean Air Act of 1963 was signed into law by JFK. It was then greatly expanded by the Clean Air Act of 1970, signed into lawy by Nixon, not your typical bleeeding-heart liberal. And amended by an act sponsored by Senator Edmund S. Muskie, my second favorite Maine (my home state) Senator, and a Democrat. And the Clean Air Act of 1990 was, I tink, signed into lawy by President George H. W. Bush, not a liberal in most ways either. The Clean Air Act has not always had widespread support from the Republican members of Congress, but it had enough to pass.
The Clean Water Act has a similar history.
By their nature, conservatives often question legislation and oppose expansion of governmental influence and action in our society, but this is neither ubiquitous nor predictable. More often than not, conservatives fall victim to the political pressures, and personal ambitions, that affect all politicians, and so sometimes fall into what can only be described as 'misguided' acts. It takes constant vigilance to call them to account, and even then only real or threatened defeat at the polls gets their attention. And then for a short period of time.
"Not only are Dems idiots and assholes (some of them), but they are and have for fifty years been completely impotent and unable to get anything done. God, it's embarrassing."
Sometimes, I wonder. The Democrats control both Houses, sufficiently to pass nearty any legislation they wish to. I guess it's predictable, but they fear only the voters.
That's the short and easy list. Don't be disingenuous. I reference the prevailing popular^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmainstream media. To claim otherwise is ignorant. And/or insulting.
"Sorry about that. The conservative political movement hates solar."
No, same fallacy. You forget, the conservative political movement just wants to make obscene amounts of money and oppress the working man, so if solar pays off, they jump in it. If not, well, conservatives just hate not making money. Secondarily, they hate anyone else making obscene amounts of money. After that, they just hate everyone that disagrees with them. Liberals score on two of the three, so far as I can tell, and I'm not sure they aren't able to hit the first one out of the park pretty regular, either.
And for the record, I do feel your pain. Being lumped in with assholes and idiots does suck. Welcome to politics. It's all a scratch 'n dent sale.
"But that's typical, when conservative politicians speak about reducing the deficit, that is usually code for cutting programs that they just don't like and has nothing to do with the actual deficit."
So when 'conservative politicians' cut social spending and increase defense spending, regardless of the circumstances, that's just cutting what they don't like.
And when non-conservative politicians cut defense and increase all other spending, regardless of the circumstances, that's like, different?
How?
I thought so. When you can find the difference, let me know. Until then, it's just deficits all the way down, isn't it?
"How do I download a patch when my internet is off, I asked." "Bring your computer to the service center when we open on Monday."
I did a stint at a college help desk. We would have patched your system fully, re-scanned it for anything else, and offered to defrag it if you had the time. And of course offered to install the college-provided office suite if you had time, or just drop the URL on your desktop for you to at your pleasure.
And we would have done it for FREE. Well, your parents did pay an obscene tuition, but with that comes the assumption that they don't want you wasting time with mundane tasks such as cleaning up your machine, and of course the interruption of being infested by your roomie's machine either. Boy, the first couple of weeks starting the Fall term were days and nights of cleaning up incoming machines that had spent the summer on facebook and pr0n.
Quit yer whinin. They probably put in the 80-hour weeks I did getting the incoming crew settled down, and can use a weekend off. Were they gonna charge you? I bet not.
Kids.
Oh, BTW, this was at a very prestigious Northeastern lberal arts and science college. Obscene barely describes the tuition, but the kids coming in were impressive; polite, patient, quick to understand what was going on. It renewed my faith in America, compared to your average state college rabble. Unfortunately, they will be indoctrinated in the most unfortunate theories and balderdash, but many of them overcome that and go on to be productive and valuable members of society. The rest become politicians.
Make Bittorrent indispensible, and it cannot so easily be blocked or dismissed as 'illegal'.
If only a few Linux distros make torrents the only method, it won't work. If some heavyweights choose to, or even if some software patching becomes torrent-only, it might work. Add in some undeniable users (Akamai, Microsoft?) and you have critical mass.
But any outfit that does that risks isolation when the *IAAs and *PAAs and the rest try to punish them.
The system doesn't just permit machine trading, it encourages it. While this incident is about futures, and I can't imagine investing in futures, there is very little difference between these platforms and machine trading in common stocks. Mutual funds are part of that system,and since the Stock Market is, IMHO, becoming even less realistic than it has been, I'm wanting some other opportunity for investment. I have no idea what that is yet.
Actually, I do pay attention to permissions and such. I don't install obviously suspicious stuff, though figuring out what is suspicious is complicated and imprecise.
I haven't figured out how to deny permissions, but I haven't looked into that at all, so something to do in my spare time.
Slashdot Mirror
SCADA systems used to be airwalled, and since they started getting connections to the Internet, attacks have begun. Before the connections, SCADA systems mostly were accessed remotely via modem, still susceptible but somewhat more difficult (after systems started getting actual passwords and stuff, but that was a while ago.
Since they are planning on supporting IPV6, I assume that Internet connections will be inevitable, if for no other reason but cost savings.
Airwalled systems are not as easily attacked by unconnected assailants. Think it through.
ps - My original comment was inspired by the apparent interest in making sure the Smart Grid would be interoperable with the Internet, but little or no discussion of the inherent security risks. Maybe designing in the security first, and then adding in Internet connectivity, would be a good strategy? Naw, we should do it all at once.
Make sure the 'Smart Grid' is interoperable with the Internet and all data networks.
Simplifies things for the attackers, doesn't it?
How about they design some security into it first, eh? Just sayin...
And have they got a supplier for you that meets your criteria?
This is not a corporate purchase, it's a government purchase. Different rules. You can buy PCs from approved vendors, and they will be happy to give you a list. You will be buying the OS from a GSA vendor, Microsoft, probably, and the terms and conditions are not yours to decide. There are very, very different terms for GSA purchaes, and this can be done but not as easily as just buying from the conventional vendors like HP/Compaq and Dell, for instance. There are others.
I've tried to do business with agencies for quantities from 30 to 1000, and never had much luck. Even when I had an opportunity to broker a deal for >1000 systems, the vendor kicked the door in and took the deal over. Learning fast, I didn't bother.
You probably should just give in, but I admire your intentions.
I'm a Republican, and I feel much the same way. I'm not a Libertarian because they go much too far for my beliefs, and they seem to be more wacko than even the hard-left Democrats I know.
For now, Republican is my best shot. But they are just as corporatist as Dems, and I may have to jump ship. I've already voted for a primary candidate not of the party's choice this year, and I may have to vote for a Democrat or two to be able to sleep at night this November...
Actually, many have applied. All so far found wanting.
And this is not a job you want. Trust me, you need certain special abilities. And certain character traits.
Fortunately, there is only one opening, and it's been filled. We can go back to our own jobs, those who have them.
Jesus had a job. His dad hired him.
Spraying the protesters at a rally is a lot more effective than filming them if:
- You want to arrest them quickly. Just scan for the fluid at perimeter checkpoints and detain anyone glowing. Sort them later.
- You want to deny access to these protesters to another event. Scan for fluid at the other event and detain anyone glowing. Sort them later.
- You want to force them out of public for a while, maybe just a few hours. Make a show of spraying them, explain it, and the protesters will either hide or take time to scrub down. Time passes. Your targets are busy not leading the Rebellion.
- You want to know who they contact after. Spray, follow, scan as you wish, and see who touched them.
- You want to identify their associates mid-term. Spray, scan at events etc, detain, question. Build your database of associates.
- You want to avoid the unwelcome questions of video surveillance.
- You lack the technology or can't implement it. Sparying a crowd is not terribly sophisticated, and UV lamps or flashlights are cheap.
- The military uses are similarly interesting. If you're taking fire from a neighborhood, spray the whole damned place, and with the military-grade stuff. Weeks later, you're going to get hits from clothing, tire tracks, doorknobs, leaning against the police station, all over. Develop a field kit to ID the few simple codes, and you can find the shooters and their accomplices over time.
Cool stuff. Can I get some to coat my pencils at work? And my stapler?
This has
How about we take this debate a little further?
If we jacked up wages significantly (say 80%), what whould happen?
- Would mothers quit work and stay home to actually *raise* their children?
- Would we keep on with two-income families and splurge on more crap, bigger houses, and better daycare so our brats would learn more sophisticated anti-social behavior?
- Would we just accept insane cell phone bills for uncapped data and unlimited texting, so our kids would be able to text and tweet instead of holding actual conversations?
- Would we descend into the enonomic abyss even faster, as the rest of the world careens past us?
The reality is that even the most desperately poor American is better off than 90% of the rest of the world, maybe 95%.
Stealing coppper isn't even the most desperate act. In Egypt, they bury long fiber runs in the desert as much as 30 ft. to discourage the locals from digging up the conduit for scrap. Here in Phoenix the crooks steal air conditioning units right off the side of a house of day care building for scrap. I left 10 ft. of angle iron outside by my driveway for half a Saturday afternoon. Gone. Foreclosed and partly built neighborhoods in many states were and are victims of scavengers ripping wiring and plumbing out of the walls, cutting rebar out of foundations, you name it.
But poor in America is more a matter of pride. Welfare is still available. And it pays better than living in the streets of Mogadishu.
He was the manger.
This pretty much sums up IT in general. And the life of an NFL head coach.
"increasing the number of Spanish words your child receives so that they can better learn Spanish."
Um, like, how does that work? Add in some Spanish words? Make sh*t up?
If they are getting Spanish already, 'increasing the number' sounds stupid. If they are not, 'increasing the number' sounds stupid.
Sorry, but the idea that they can 'increase the number', that was stupid.
Trust me on this.
On my Android phone, using the Google 'News and Weather' widget, I get this with any NYT reference to an article in the widget.
Then when I go to the NYT link, I get a blank screen which is the offer to log in.
It doesn't work on my phone, possibly because it's Flash, possibly cause it just renders badly, I can't really tell yet.
So the phone widget is getting headline links to sites that con't work on the phone the widget is written for...
Ah, yes, Google. Such a failure sometimes. Beta is no excuse.
Mind you, I am running Eclair on a G1, Cyanogenmod 5.0.8, so they and my carrier have deniability. They will cling to that.
Then there are the WSJ links, which no longer show me a login prompt on my phone at all. Nice. So far the WSJ doesn't make me climb the wall.
In the interest of not throwing any 'more' mud:
"It's not that they hate the environment per se, it's that they don't care about it, and start out from the presumption that anything good for the environment conflicts with the rest of their ideology, and that is sufficient to lead them down the path to opposing it."
Somehow, this rings of an inconsistent argument on your part. For instance:
"it was the pro-hunting conservatives who wanted to 'conserve' nature."
Well, we STILL DO! The presumption that pro-hunting conservatives either no longer exist or no longer care whitewashes the argument that conservatives are largely unconcerned with environmental problems.
The Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 was, I beleive, signed into law by President Eisenhower. We could have a fruitful discussion on what sort of conservative Ike was, but to call him a Liberal is inaccurate.
The Clean Air Act of 1963 was signed into law by JFK. It was then greatly expanded by the Clean Air Act of 1970, signed into lawy by Nixon, not your typical bleeeding-heart liberal. And amended by an act sponsored by Senator Edmund S. Muskie, my second favorite Maine (my home state) Senator, and a Democrat. And the Clean Air Act of 1990 was, I tink, signed into lawy by President George H. W. Bush, not a liberal in most ways either. The Clean Air Act has not always had widespread support from the Republican members of Congress, but it had enough to pass.
The Clean Water Act has a similar history.
By their nature, conservatives often question legislation and oppose expansion of governmental influence and action in our society, but this is neither ubiquitous nor predictable. More often than not, conservatives fall victim to the political pressures, and personal ambitions, that affect all politicians, and so sometimes fall into what can only be described as 'misguided' acts. It takes constant vigilance to call them to account, and even then only real or threatened defeat at the polls gets their attention. And then for a short period of time.
"Not only are Dems idiots and assholes (some of them), but they are and have for fifty years been completely impotent and unable to get anything done. God, it's embarrassing."
Sometimes, I wonder. The Democrats control both Houses, sufficiently to pass nearty any legislation they wish to. I guess it's predictable, but they fear only the voters.
"[citations needed]"
http://cnn.com/
http://msnbc.com/
http://abc.com/
http://cbs.com/
http://nbc.com/
http://npr.org/
That's the short and easy list. Don't be disingenuous. I reference the prevailing popular^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmainstream media. To claim otherwise is ignorant. And/or insulting.
"Sorry about that. The conservative political movement hates solar."
No, same fallacy. You forget, the conservative political movement just wants to make obscene amounts of money and oppress the working man, so if solar pays off, they jump in it. If not, well, conservatives just hate not making money. Secondarily, they hate anyone else making obscene amounts of money. After that, they just hate everyone that disagrees with them. Liberals score on two of the three, so far as I can tell, and I'm not sure they aren't able to hit the first one out of the park pretty regular, either.
And for the record, I do feel your pain. Being lumped in with assholes and idiots does suck. Welcome to politics. It's all a scratch 'n dent sale.
"Damnit, I will nuke the sh!t out of these South Koreans*"
Well, that certainly presumes some major changes in the geopolitical scene...
Not in his first term, I suspect.
"Conservatives hate solar"
Prove it. In particular, prove that *I* hate solar.
Dare ya.
"But that's typical, when conservative politicians speak about reducing the deficit, that is usually code for cutting programs that they just don't like and has nothing to do with the actual deficit."
So when 'conservative politicians' cut social spending and increase defense spending, regardless of the circumstances, that's just cutting what they don't like.
And when non-conservative politicians cut defense and increase all other spending, regardless of the circumstances, that's like, different?
How?
I thought so. When you can find the difference, let me know. Until then, it's just deficits all the way down, isn't it?
"I can easily see Verizon's version of the iPhone as being the first smartphone with bloatware on it"
You haven't been paying attention. Samsung in particular is adding plenty of bloatware to the Galaxy phones.
See? Android rules! :)
Actually, you usually have to stop the car to change tires.
Unless you're from Massachusetts...
"How do I download a patch when my internet is off, I asked." "Bring your computer to the service center when we open on Monday."
I did a stint at a college help desk. We would have patched your system fully, re-scanned it for anything else, and offered to defrag it if you had the time. And of course offered to install the college-provided office suite if you had time, or just drop the URL on your desktop for you to at your pleasure.
And we would have done it for FREE. Well, your parents did pay an obscene tuition, but with that comes the assumption that they don't want you wasting time with mundane tasks such as cleaning up your machine, and of course the interruption of being infested by your roomie's machine either. Boy, the first couple of weeks starting the Fall term were days and nights of cleaning up incoming machines that had spent the summer on facebook and pr0n.
Quit yer whinin. They probably put in the 80-hour weeks I did getting the incoming crew settled down, and can use a weekend off. Were they gonna charge you? I bet not.
Kids.
Oh, BTW, this was at a very prestigious Northeastern lberal arts and science college. Obscene barely describes the tuition, but the kids coming in were impressive; polite, patient, quick to understand what was going on. It renewed my faith in America, compared to your average state college rabble. Unfortunately, they will be indoctrinated in the most unfortunate theories and balderdash, but many of them overcome that and go on to be productive and valuable members of society. The rest become politicians.
Make Bittorrent indispensible, and it cannot so easily be blocked or dismissed as 'illegal'.
If only a few Linux distros make torrents the only method, it won't work. If some heavyweights choose to, or even if some software patching becomes torrent-only, it might work. Add in some undeniable users (Akamai, Microsoft?) and you have critical mass.
But any outfit that does that risks isolation when the *IAAs and *PAAs and the rest try to punish them.
Maybe it works... May be not.
The system doesn't just permit machine trading, it encourages it. While this incident is about futures, and I can't imagine investing in futures, there is very little difference between these platforms and machine trading in common stocks. Mutual funds are part of that system,and since the Stock Market is, IMHO, becoming even less realistic than it has been, I'm wanting some other opportunity for investment. I have no idea what that is yet.
Actually, I do pay attention to permissions and such. I don't install obviously suspicious stuff, though figuring out what is suspicious is complicated and imprecise.
I haven't figured out how to deny permissions, but I haven't looked into that at all, so something to do in my spare time.