« The Solicitor General Lays an Egg | Main | Good jazz, free, by email every week »

May 29, 2010

Comments

But, having said that, what's the difference between a geniune attack and some script kiddies fooling around? Is it just scale?

I mean, if you want to say "there's a national security issue involved with putting everything on the internet", then yes, that's certainly true, but that's not _solely_ a matter of national security. Google could shut down tomorrow and it would not affect the nation to a significant degree (indeed, if these stories about people running across highways because Google Maps said so, we'd probably be safer!) And Google has day-to-day business-operation reasons to keep its networks secure.

You cite the example of BP's oil spill, but it's not as though BP is having all that stuff be cleaned up for free! It's not as though they aren't going to lose billions of dollars over this!

To some extent this whole thing sounds like those weapons-wonk scenarios about EMP attacks making all our power lines explode. Scary stuff, but it turns out doing it requires enough nuclear weapons that it would be easier to just blast us all into oblivion.

The comments to this entry are closed.