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Skynet vs. Ahmadinejad

post #1 of 17
9/24/10 at 8:01am
Thread Starter 
The future: it probably sucks. Even so, here's an incredibly fascinating article detailing just what we're up against, most likely sooner than later:

[Spoilers]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100921/ts_csm/327178

[/Spoilers]

I hope the U.S. aren't the ones responsible for this. However advantageous it may be to hit Iran sans physical military firepower, the cost just isn't worth the creation of... THAT. Also, it may have nothing to do with Iran and our cybernetic Doomsday is imminent. Just FYI.
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post #2 of 17
9/24/10 at 9:49am
YES!!!!!

Duh-duh-DUM-DUM-DUM!
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post #3 of 17
9/24/10 at 10:24am
This is pretty scary, considering we'll likely be the target of someone using this kind of pernicious malware. Imagine our air traffic control network being controlled from outside the system. It would make 9/11 look like a fender bender.
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post #4 of 17
9/24/10 at 11:08am
It's a damn good job the Galactica hasn't got a network installed!
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post #5 of 17
9/24/10 at 7:35pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr Vivisector View Post
Imagine our air traffic control network being controlled from outside the system.
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post #6 of 17
9/24/10 at 8:04pm
I find this news both awesome and terrifying. Also, it was probably us or Israel, or both...
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post #7 of 17
9/24/10 at 9:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd View Post
YES.

But Sadler is revealed to be:

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post #8 of 17
9/25/10 at 4:55am
Militarizing the internet was pretty much unavoidable, but nonetheless completely ill-advised. The US doesn't have the mind-set to properly run a counter insurgent campaign in the real world. What makes them think that they're ready for what will happen if this ever gets out of hand?

This is a seriously bad djinni that's being let out of its bottle.
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post #9 of 17
9/25/10 at 11:04pm
It'll probably turn out to be the handiwork of some Ritalin-juiced twelve-year old writing code on a battered Pentium II in Uzbekistan during his school lunch breaks.
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post #10 of 17
9/25/10 at 11:15pm
I read this book, it's called Neuromancer and that future sucks
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post #11 of 17
9/25/10 at 11:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr Vivisector View Post
Imagine our air traffic control network being controlled from outside the system. It would make 9/11 look like a fender bender.
I doubt it. It would be an enormous pain in the ass, but after enough pilots radioed ATC and said, "What the hell are your trying to do to me?" we'd probably all just switch over to VFR operations, find a place to land, and wait for it to blow over.

Having said that, this is the coolest thing I've seen all day. A non-kinetic kinetic kill? How awesome is that?
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post #12 of 17
9/26/10 at 3:44am
Thread Starter 
There's a lot of ambiguity on this thread, and I can understand that. It's evil, but it's cool evil. You might say it's the thinking man's Revelation fantasy -- one of the big appeals to people who buy into that is that you get to see cool Biblical imagery with your own eyes (since it's always within their own lifetime). Beasts with multiple heads, the armies of God and Satan clashing, the front lines of a great drama. I admit, IF the world is going to be destroyed by cybernetic intelligence, I wanna be alive to see it (preferably towards the end of my life). It probably won't be as interesting as Terminator, but who wouldn't wanna know exactly how that goes down?

Of course, the difference between our fantasy and the religious fantasy is, ours could actually happen.
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post #13 of 17
9/26/10 at 8:53am
I personally wouldn't call it "evil", I don't think this kind of technology is inherently evil. Scary yes. Potentially catastrophic, yes. But, imagine for a moment that this was perpetrated by the US against Iran's nuclear plant... we may have just prevented Israel from bombing them, and who knows, may have forestalled WWIII. And not a single person got hurt. I think that's all kinds of brilliant, in the short-term anyway. At what cost? Time will tell.
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post #14 of 17
9/26/10 at 11:51pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JuddL View Post
I personally wouldn't call it "evil", I don't think this kind of technology is inherently evil. Scary yes. Potentially catastrophic, yes. But, imagine for a moment that this was perpetrated by the US against Iran's nuclear plant... we may have just prevented Israel from bombing them, and who knows, may have forestalled WWIII. And not a single person got hurt. I think that's all kinds of brilliant, in the short-term anyway. At what cost? Time will tell.
Loosing this thing upon the Iranian nuclear threat is sort of ironic. It's kind of like using cats to get rid of the mice, then wolves to get rid of the cats, then bears to get the wolves... the destructive potential of this weapon is very much on par with nuclear capability. Nukes may have won WWII, but I think the general consensus is that it wasn't worth it to unleash such power into the world. We've come very close to and may still face annihilation from nuclear arms. Stuxnet is something even more dangerous, in my view. If someone were to tap its full potential, you'd have the destructive power of a nuke without any of the culpability. That's what was supposed to keep a lid on the arms race, right? "Mutually assured destruction". There's none of that in the cyber world. We may be able to trace an attack back to someone, but proving it was the will of a government? The whole thing is so murky. I think the downside is much too steep to look at it just in terms of Iran.
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post #15 of 17
9/27/10 at 12:58am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Warren Peace View Post
Loosing this thing upon the Iranian nuclear threat is sort of ironic. It's kind of like using cats to get rid of the mice, then wolves to get rid of the cats, then bears to get the wolves... the destructive potential of this weapon is very much on par with nuclear capability. Nukes may have won WWII, but I think the general consensus is that it wasn't worth it to unleash such power into the world. We've come very close to and may still face annihilation from nuclear arms. Stuxnet is something even more dangerous, in my view. If someone were to tap its full potential, you'd have the destructive power of a nuke without any of the culpability. That's what was supposed to keep a lid on the arms race, right? "Mutually assured destruction". There's none of that in the cyber world. We may be able to trace an attack back to someone, but proving it was the will of a government? The whole thing is so murky. I think the downside is much too steep to look at it just in terms of Iran.
Well, I acknowledged as much when I said time will bear out the true cost of creating such a weapon. But a few things 1) this kind of technology is inevitable, and if it were going to be used I could see worse reasons than postponing a military confrontation between Iran and Israel, 2) we're ultimately going to have to learn to defend ourselves against these kinds of threats and 3) there's no indication that such a weapon is easy to develop or duplicate.
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post #16 of 17
9/27/10 at 1:27am
I doubt the U.S. did this. Smart money's on Israel.
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post #17 of 17
9/27/10 at 4:25am
It may have been Israel, but the US using this as a way to preempt a military option by Israel is a likely scenario too.

Either way, as I said before, with all the problems we've been having with asymmetrical warfare in the real world I'm baffled as to why we chose to move into a whole new battlefield. One that's entirely build on the idea that the bits a single user in Jakarta transmits are as important as the ones originating from NORAD. This is as asymmetrical as you can get. A battlefield where the US not only doesn't enjoy the advantages it usually has, it is actually behind.
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