On 3/14/13, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/security-when-the-bad-guys-have-technol...
So what I gather from that: "Calling terrorism an existential threat is ridiculous in a country where more people die each month in car crashes than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks." And there you have it :) Security obviously works thus far, in the sense, that so far, government has been preserved -- there is not total chaos, in at least most of the world, and people do not doubt if their life or property will still exist the next day. There have been incidents, even serious ones, and times when security failed -- it just means that security is not perfect, but hardly anything humans do is perfect; devices we make fail, accidents happen. I never saw an article yet about why engineering can't work, or why driver safety can't work (driver licensure/speed limits/seatbelts/traffic signs). Accidents are inevitable, and maybe the miscreants are able to take advantage of new faster engine technology before the police can, but it's not the point :) Abusing new technology faster doesn't trump the extreme smallness of the numbers of truly bad actors, who have irrational thinking, would like to end civilization, and the intersection between those and those who have a viable method that would work + the right resources/skill available, and a reasonable chance of success.... astronomically small If in a few decades, there is a 0.1% chance per decade of a script kiddie ending civilization, I think we've got few reasonable alternatives but to accept that risk and hope for the best :)
Three words: "desktop gene sequencing", "ebola", "script kiddies".
Good thing genetic manipulation is highly non-trivial, and obtaining ebola samples would require significant legwork while script kiddies lack motivation, and there are much lazier, less risky/dangerous, more profitable ways for them to steal. At least for the forseeable future until financial account theft becomes a solved problem. Then they might move to ransomware that threatens to shut down power grids, if they dpn't get paid, I suppose... but For the forseeable future; there's no mechanism for using a computer to modify a virus to insert spam or email-cc-details commands directly into people's brains, or to infect people's brains with malware to create a human botnet. At that point, perhaps in a couple hundred years, one begins to become concerned that one of the human botnet operators, could end civilization by accident.
-- jra -- -JH