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The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust. Nearly every major system in use today is chock-ful

The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust. Nearly every major system in use today is chock-full of single points of failure that could have catastrophic consequences but we keep chugging along, rarely stopping to think about the "risk debt" we have accumulated - right up until a catastrophe. I don't know if that should make me feel more secure or terrified. Take power plants for example: they are all interconnected in large regional grids and deal with such large quantities of power that bringing a power plant online is a dangerous process that has to be coordinated with the rest of the system. You have to spin up the power plant and make sure that you are in phase with the grid before connecting your power output - all while accounting for geographic distribution losses, predicted load changes, and so on. Theoretically, any discrepancies (like power flow being too high due to phase difference) would activate breakers and other safeties should an adversarial actor decide to bring a power plant online online willy-nilly. Unfortunately, the last few decades have shown that those safeties are barely able to handle common scenarios, let alone an attack. There is a serious risk that a single power plant could cause systemic damage to many devices in a region's grid but for the entire history of the US, we have just assumed that anyone with tens of millions of dollars to invest in a power plant is just too profit-driven to pull off anything like that. If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting. GPS is just one of many such cases, although a surprising one. I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces.

toss1 8y ago
Reevaluate assumptions, indeed! We've just had this alert from DHS on RUS hacking into our grid: https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611708/russian-hackers-could-switch-americas-lights-off/ https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611708/russian... The preliminary R&D and tests seem to have been run in Ukraine https://www.eenews.net/special_reports/the_hack https://www.eenews.net/special_reports/the_hack Clearly, it's being tracked, but ...
akira2501 8y ago
> The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust. That's one way to look at it. The other way is that it depends on incentive. > that bringing a power plant online is a dangerous process Not really. Power plants are connected and disconnected from the grid several times each day. > You have to spin up the power plant and make sure that you are in phase with the grid before connecting your power output This is done by computer in all cases, and it's incredibly fast and easy to do so. Especially considering we're only dealing with 60Hz here. This only applies to certain types of power plants, solar plants have entirely different interconnection considerations. > There is a serious risk that a single power plant could cause systemic damage to many devices in a region's grid but for the entire history of the US There is serious risk that a single tree branch could cause a system wide blackout for a major portion of the US. [1] > we have just assumed that anyone with tens of millions of dollars to invest in a power plant is just too profit-driven to pull off anything like that. Breakers and automatic protection devices respond with incredible speed and are typically controlled by an external agency operating at a State or Regional level. > If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting. Relative to what? Fraud and theft will always be factors in a functioning society. Is the total value extracted by newer frauds increasing faster than our global GDP? > I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces. What are the alternatives? The world putting it's trust in a commercial system? We'd just be trading one set of known issues with another. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
- civilitty 8y ago
  > That's one way to look at it. The other way is that it depends on incentive. The entirety of modern economic and psychological theory can be reduced to "it depends on incentives." That's utterly unhelpful. > Not really. Power plants are connected and disconnected from the grid several times each day. I said "bringing a power plant online." You said "connected and disconnected from the grid." They're not even remotely the same thing: the latter is a tiny step in implementing the former. > This is done by computer in all cases, and it's incredibly fast and easy to do so. Especially considering we're only dealing with 60Hz here. This only applies to certain types of power plants, solar plants have entirely different interconnection considerations. Uhm... what? Power flow adjustments have been "done by computers" since at least the 1970s and the frequency is only relevant in so much as it sets physical limits on how fast geographically distributed hardware can respond to changes in the system. It doesn't really matter what the frequency is, as long as everyone agrees, the system will be fine. > There is serious risk that a single tree branch could cause a system wide blackout for a major portion of the US. [1] Are you arguing with me or agreeing? > Breakers and automatic protection devices respond with incredible speed and are typically controlled by an external agency operating at a State or Regional level. No, they don't and aren't: https://www.nvc.vt.edu/lmili/docs/Mili-Risk%20of%20Cascading%20Failures-IJCIS.pdf https://www.nvc.vt.edu/lmili/docs/Mili-Risk%20of%20Cascading... - privatization has opened us up to a lot of unforeseen weaknesses. > Relative to what? Fraud and theft will always be factors in a functioning society. Is the total value extracted by newer frauds increasing faster than our global GDP? Relative to where we were less than a decade ago, when Facebook was nothing more than some Ivy League hook up site. > What are the alternatives? The world putting it's trust in a commercial system? We'd just be trading one set of known issues with another. The alternative is fucking vigilance. Vigilance of tradeoffs. Vigilance of bad faith actors. Vigilance of the legislative branch. Vigilance of our public servants.
deleted 8y ago
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njarboe 8y ago
A default trust society can be much more successful than default deceive/don't trust society. The cost of default don't trust is high. I would say that the wide adoption of the Christian value of honesty with everyone is probably one of the main reasons for the rise of western Civilization. If we decide to go back to a default don't trust society, we will loose something very valuable. We should try very hard to avoid that.
- civilitty 8y ago
  I absolutely agree in the first bit. I'm a strong believer in "trust but verify" where you develop relationships based on trust by default with a healthy layer of auditing to inspire confidence long term. My concern is that the ROI of trust by default in the past has opened up our contemporary systems to an unprecedented attack vector. The surprising part is that this phenomena has extended to geopolitics: having control over the GPS constellation is the kind of thing that would have single handedly decided both world wars, yet is now taken for granted by intelligence operatives of hostile nations using our GPS system. It's hard to believe it's worked for so long. As for the Christian value of honesty stuff, I strongly disagree. Communities of chimpanzees and prairie dogs!! commonly exhibit social behaviors that would be indistinguishable from humans despite the fact that they have no formalized moral framework. Chimpanzees or prairie dogs who yell wolf too many times will be ignored. Those that are dishonest or manipulative are shunned. Those that are too aggressive are put down by the tribe. Christianity has nothing to do with it. Honesty is a necessary trait for survival of any complex species dependent on communication for survival
  - dingaling 8y ago
    > trust but verify That's not trust.
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duxup 8y ago
Civilization pretty much requires it. You could waste endless cycles not trusting. Even startups that I thought were absurd ideas ... I maybe wouldn't have done it because of a lack of trust... but they worked out.
zbentley 8y ago
Civilization has proven very resilient in the face of one of its hidden SPOFs being destroyed/attacked. The same is true for two and three of those SPOFs being damaged at the same time. I'm not convinced there wouldn't be a system degradation cliff after that point of 3+ SPOFs being attacked, e.g. a GPS issue, a massive BGP hack, Tier 3 Comm. or equivalent outage, and a DNS issue--all around the same time. That "cliff" could cause a biblical amount of damage. I'm sure those could all be mitigated, but the idea of them failing all at once, even coincidentally, is terrifying.
fireattack 8y ago
Could you give any example of such catastrophes? While I understand there are lots of such points of failure, relatively speaking, I personally feel the consequence of them failing is often exaggerated, and more importantly, human civilization are really good at make quick fix when it matters.
- Izkata 8y ago
  The Northeast Blackout of 2003 [0] was set off by a trees taking out a power line. It caused a local failure that increased the load in surrounding lines, tripping breakers, which increased the load in further surrounding lines, etc, cascading into a blackout over a huge chunk of North America. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
legulere 8y ago
Almost all human interactions involve trust. Political systems just exist because enough people trust in them. Same for money, juridical systems, laws, contracts, etc.
- ythn 8y ago
  That's why people who attack trust (mainly social engineers, but other types as well) annoy me so much. Not if they are doing it because someone asked them to, but when they abuse trust and then act like it's a bug of the system and are all high and mighty that they got away with it. Pompous social engineer blog post: "Dunkin Donuts is laughably insecure. I was able to steal lots of donuts by lying and abusing the trust of employees. Hahaha, Dunkin Donuts security sucks, what a joke. They don't even question that my story was completely fake and that I was just a good actor, what a trash company"
azernik 8y ago
Many of these SPOFs are tolerable because attackers are easy to track down, and those points of failure are not so bad as to destroy the ability of the system to track down and punish attackers. Where things get scary are when this deterrent effect disappears: 1. The attacker might be too powerful to deter, or might be able to make a coordinated attack that would prevent their punishment. A general great-power war would bring down many of these systems in the first few hours. 2. The attacker might be able to avoid detection or identification. This is the bucket most of those security fall under - if an attacker can take advantage of these systems anonymously, there's no deterrent effect. Cambridge Analytica is a bit of a hybrid case; it was used by powerful probably-state actors for deniable attacks.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust. The way I see it, this is a feature, not a bug. The energy costs of trying to build a civilization like ours on trustless systems would be prohibitive (and no one would be happy about the amount of bureaucracy it would involve). Trust is not only vital to the continuous existence of our civilization, it's also a very powerful tool for advancing it. That's why the growing lack of trust of the general population worries me. The rule of law works only as long as most people trust in its implementation. Money works only as long as most people trust in its implementation. That's why, for instance, I'm very critical of mainsteam journalism and media platforms - all they seem to be doing these days is to sow discord, burning people's trust in institutions to get their eyeballs. That's why I've been so critical of Uber since the very day they entered the taxi market, as by breaking laws and getting away with it they were eroding trust in the rule of law (half of the blame goes to municipal governments that failed to immediately ban them). In my view, trust is so important that working to destroy it is antisocial behaviour, and one that should be punished swiftly and severely. Much more than it is these days. -- > If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting. IMO the examples you give aren't very powerful. Nothing significant happened because of Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches, nor the Cambridge Analytica fiasco led to anything of relevance - when compared with the previous scenario of power grid failures. I'd use the 2008 financial crisis as a better example. > GPS is just one of many such cases, although a surprising one. I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces. What about the Internet? ;).
- ptero 8y ago
  I think you are spot on in the first paragraph that trust is critical for existence and advance of civilization. That trust somehow builds consistently in small groups -- humans seem good at quickly deciding, based on a few personal experiences, whether to deal with / trust another person. The major challenge is that this approach does not scale -- one does not trust strangers in a large city. Using a few trusted agents (newspapers, TV, etc.) for things you cannot personally see and assess kind-of worked 50+ years ago, but that model has now failed. IMO building a framework of trust in a larger, denser, more interconnected world, is one of the major existential issues for a modern civilization. Allowing folks to organize in smaller groups (and set their own rules) and not forcing mixing based on federal laws might be a start. It might work better that universal doctrines ("trust the state"), universal technology ("trust the app") or behavior changes ("trust a stranger"). My 2c.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
Even easier, you can take out critical parts of substations and other electrical infrastructure with a high-powered rifle. The world lives on the knife-edge of chaos. It's trivial to cause mass panic by driving a car into a group of people, or by a multitude of other means. The only reason society manages to even exist is that we generally trust each other. It's the fundamental underpinning of society. Most people are generally law abiding citizens. The reason that people don't murder each other isn't because it's illegal, it's because they don't want to. Society relies on the fact that we are generally nice people.
- lagadu 8y ago
  Well we are a social species: by and large we're programmed for that.
- imtringued 8y ago
  >it's because they don't want to. I would argue it's because there is no financial incentive to destroy the grid. Humans are willing to make entire species (overfishing, poaching, etc...) extinct for a quick buck.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I'm genuinely surprised at this and and some of the other comments. I'm not sure why people find this a) unexpected or b) frightening. Contrary to popular belief the whole world isn't out to get "us" and we're not on the verge of imminent global societal collapse at the hands of evil foreign powers and terrorists. No more than at any other point in history, anyway. Perhaps we all need to stop watching so much TV.
bena 8y ago
I think there's a good reason for the trust as well: mutually assured destruction. Sure, you can knock out a power grid with seemingly trivial means. But once you do, you're just as shit out of luck as the other guys. It's pretty much the "too big to fail" scenario. Too much of the infrastructure we've become dependent on is just not worth taking down in an attack. Sure, GPS may have a single point of failure... but GPS is kind of useful for you as well so you don't really want to knock it out. You can't afford to replace it. It's like these systems are just sitting around saying "Fuck with me and I will burn this whole place to the fucking ground. The fucking ground"

toss1 8y ago

Reevaluate assumptions, indeed! We've just had this alert from DHS on RUS hacking into our grid: https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611708/russian-hackers-could-switch-americas-lights-off/ https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611708/russian... The preliminary R&D and tests seem to have been run in Ukraine https://www.eenews.net/special_reports/the_hack https://www.eenews.net/special_reports/the_hack Clearly, it's being tracked, but ...

akira2501 8y ago

> The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust. That's one way to look at it. The other way is that it depends on incentive. > that bringing a power plant online is a dangerous process Not really. Power plants are connected and disconnected from the grid several times each day. > You have to spin up the power plant and make sure that you are in phase with the grid before connecting your power output This is done by computer in all cases, and it's incredibly fast and easy to do so. Especially considering we're only dealing with 60Hz here. This only applies to certain types of power plants, solar plants have entirely different interconnection considerations. > There is a serious risk that a single power plant could cause systemic damage to many devices in a region's grid but for the entire history of the US There is serious risk that a single tree branch could cause a system wide blackout for a major portion of the US. [1] > we have just assumed that anyone with tens of millions of dollars to invest in a power plant is just too profit-driven to pull off anything like that. Breakers and automatic protection devices respond with incredible speed and are typically controlled by an external agency operating at a State or Regional level. > If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting. Relative to what? Fraud and theft will always be factors in a functioning society. Is the total value extracted by newer frauds increasing faster than our global GDP? > I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces. What are the alternatives? The world putting it's trust in a commercial system? We'd just be trading one set of known issues with another. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

civilitty 8y ago
> That's one way to look at it. The other way is that it depends on incentive. The entirety of modern economic and psychological theory can be reduced to "it depends on incentives." That's utterly unhelpful. > Not really. Power plants are connected and disconnected from the grid several times each day. I said "bringing a power plant online." You said "connected and disconnected from the grid." They're not even remotely the same thing: the latter is a tiny step in implementing the former. > This is done by computer in all cases, and it's incredibly fast and easy to do so. Especially considering we're only dealing with 60Hz here. This only applies to certain types of power plants, solar plants have entirely different interconnection considerations. Uhm... what? Power flow adjustments have been "done by computers" since at least the 1970s and the frequency is only relevant in so much as it sets physical limits on how fast geographically distributed hardware can respond to changes in the system. It doesn't really matter what the frequency is, as long as everyone agrees, the system will be fine. > There is serious risk that a single tree branch could cause a system wide blackout for a major portion of the US. [1] Are you arguing with me or agreeing? > Breakers and automatic protection devices respond with incredible speed and are typically controlled by an external agency operating at a State or Regional level. No, they don't and aren't: https://www.nvc.vt.edu/lmili/docs/Mili-Risk%20of%20Cascading%20Failures-IJCIS.pdf https://www.nvc.vt.edu/lmili/docs/Mili-Risk%20of%20Cascading... - privatization has opened us up to a lot of unforeseen weaknesses. > Relative to what? Fraud and theft will always be factors in a functioning society. Is the total value extracted by newer frauds increasing faster than our global GDP? Relative to where we were less than a decade ago, when Facebook was nothing more than some Ivy League hook up site. > What are the alternatives? The world putting it's trust in a commercial system? We'd just be trading one set of known issues with another. The alternative is fucking vigilance. Vigilance of tradeoffs. Vigilance of bad faith actors. Vigilance of the legislative branch. Vigilance of our public servants.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

njarboe 8y ago

A default trust society can be much more successful than default deceive/don't trust society. The cost of default don't trust is high. I would say that the wide adoption of the Christian value of honesty with everyone is probably one of the main reasons for the rise of western Civilization. If we decide to go back to a default don't trust society, we will loose something very valuable. We should try very hard to avoid that.

civilitty 8y ago
I absolutely agree in the first bit. I'm a strong believer in "trust but verify" where you develop relationships based on trust by default with a healthy layer of auditing to inspire confidence long term. My concern is that the ROI of trust by default in the past has opened up our contemporary systems to an unprecedented attack vector. The surprising part is that this phenomena has extended to geopolitics: having control over the GPS constellation is the kind of thing that would have single handedly decided both world wars, yet is now taken for granted by intelligence operatives of hostile nations using our GPS system. It's hard to believe it's worked for so long. As for the Christian value of honesty stuff, I strongly disagree. Communities of chimpanzees and prairie dogs!! commonly exhibit social behaviors that would be indistinguishable from humans despite the fact that they have no formalized moral framework. Chimpanzees or prairie dogs who yell wolf too many times will be ignored. Those that are dishonest or manipulative are shunned. Those that are too aggressive are put down by the tribe. Christianity has nothing to do with it. Honesty is a necessary trait for survival of any complex species dependent on communication for survival
- dingaling 8y ago
  > trust but verify That's not trust.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

duxup 8y ago

Civilization pretty much requires it. You could waste endless cycles not trusting. Even startups that I thought were absurd ideas ... I maybe wouldn't have done it because of a lack of trust... but they worked out.

zbentley 8y ago

Civilization has proven very resilient in the face of one of its hidden SPOFs being destroyed/attacked. The same is true for two and three of those SPOFs being damaged at the same time. I'm not convinced there wouldn't be a system degradation cliff after that point of 3+ SPOFs being attacked, e.g. a GPS issue, a massive BGP hack, Tier 3 Comm. or equivalent outage, and a DNS issue--all around the same time. That "cliff" could cause a biblical amount of damage. I'm sure those could all be mitigated, but the idea of them failing all at once, even coincidentally, is terrifying.

fireattack 8y ago

Could you give any example of such catastrophes? While I understand there are lots of such points of failure, relatively speaking, I personally feel the consequence of them failing is often exaggerated, and more importantly, human civilization are really good at make quick fix when it matters.

Izkata 8y ago
The Northeast Blackout of 2003 [0] was set off by a trees taking out a power line. It caused a local failure that increased the load in surrounding lines, tripping breakers, which increased the load in further surrounding lines, etc, cascading into a blackout over a huge chunk of North America. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

legulere 8y ago

Almost all human interactions involve trust. Political systems just exist because enough people trust in them. Same for money, juridical systems, laws, contracts, etc.

ythn 8y ago
That's why people who attack trust (mainly social engineers, but other types as well) annoy me so much. Not if they are doing it because someone asked them to, but when they abuse trust and then act like it's a bug of the system and are all high and mighty that they got away with it. Pompous social engineer blog post: "Dunkin Donuts is laughably insecure. I was able to steal lots of donuts by lying and abusing the trust of employees. Hahaha, Dunkin Donuts security sucks, what a joke. They don't even question that my story was completely fake and that I was just a good actor, what a trash company"

azernik 8y ago

Many of these SPOFs are tolerable because attackers are easy to track down, and those points of failure are not so bad as to destroy the ability of the system to track down and punish attackers. Where things get scary are when this deterrent effect disappears: 1. The attacker might be too powerful to deter, or might be able to make a coordinated attack that would prevent their punishment. A general great-power war would bring down many of these systems in the first few hours. 2. The attacker might be able to avoid detection or identification. This is the bucket most of those security fall under - if an attacker can take advantage of these systems anonymously, there's no deterrent effect. Cambridge Analytica is a bit of a hybrid case; it was used by powerful probably-state actors for deniable attacks.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> The longer I am alive the more I learn about how much of human civilization depends on good faith and trust. The way I see it, this is a feature, not a bug. The energy costs of trying to build a civilization like ours on trustless systems would be prohibitive (and no one would be happy about the amount of bureaucracy it would involve). Trust is not only vital to the continuous existence of our civilization, it's also a very powerful tool for advancing it. That's why the growing lack of trust of the general population worries me. The rule of law works only as long as most people trust in its implementation. Money works only as long as most people trust in its implementation. That's why, for instance, I'm very critical of mainsteam journalism and media platforms - all they seem to be doing these days is to sow discord, burning people's trust in institutions to get their eyeballs. That's why I've been so critical of Uber since the very day they entered the taxi market, as by breaking laws and getting away with it they were eroding trust in the rule of law (half of the blame goes to municipal governments that failed to immediately ban them). In my view, trust is so important that working to destroy it is antisocial behaviour, and one that should be punished swiftly and severely. Much more than it is these days. -- > If the last few years (decades it seems) have taught me anything, it's that we have to reevaluate many of the assumptions we have been holding about reality and our peers. From the Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, we have just been way too lucky and way too trusting. IMO the examples you give aren't very powerful. Nothing significant happened because of Target/Home Depot/Equifax breaches, nor the Cambridge Analytica fiasco led to anything of relevance - when compared with the previous scenario of power grid failures. I'd use the 2008 financial crisis as a better example. > GPS is just one of many such cases, although a surprising one. I never thought the world would put so much trust in a system created by and for the US armed forces. What about the Internet? ;).

ptero 8y ago
I think you are spot on in the first paragraph that trust is critical for existence and advance of civilization. That trust somehow builds consistently in small groups -- humans seem good at quickly deciding, based on a few personal experiences, whether to deal with / trust another person. The major challenge is that this approach does not scale -- one does not trust strangers in a large city. Using a few trusted agents (newspapers, TV, etc.) for things you cannot personally see and assess kind-of worked 50+ years ago, but that model has now failed. IMO building a framework of trust in a larger, denser, more interconnected world, is one of the major existential issues for a modern civilization. Allowing folks to organize in smaller groups (and set their own rules) and not forcing mixing based on federal laws might be a start. It might work better that universal doctrines ("trust the state"), universal technology ("trust the app") or behavior changes ("trust a stranger"). My 2c.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

Even easier, you can take out critical parts of substations and other electrical infrastructure with a high-powered rifle. The world lives on the knife-edge of chaos. It's trivial to cause mass panic by driving a car into a group of people, or by a multitude of other means. The only reason society manages to even exist is that we generally trust each other. It's the fundamental underpinning of society. Most people are generally law abiding citizens. The reason that people don't murder each other isn't because it's illegal, it's because they don't want to. Society relies on the fact that we are generally nice people.

lagadu 8y ago
Well we are a social species: by and large we're programmed for that.
imtringued 8y ago
>it's because they don't want to. I would argue it's because there is no financial incentive to destroy the grid. Humans are willing to make entire species (overfishing, poaching, etc...) extinct for a quick buck.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

I'm genuinely surprised at this and and some of the other comments. I'm not sure why people find this a) unexpected or b) frightening. Contrary to popular belief the whole world isn't out to get "us" and we're not on the verge of imminent global societal collapse at the hands of evil foreign powers and terrorists. No more than at any other point in history, anyway. Perhaps we all need to stop watching so much TV.

bena 8y ago

I think there's a good reason for the trust as well: mutually assured destruction. Sure, you can knock out a power grid with seemingly trivial means. But once you do, you're just as shit out of luck as the other guys. It's pretty much the "too big to fail" scenario. Too much of the infrastructure we've become dependent on is just not worth taking down in an attack. Sure, GPS may have a single point of failure... but GPS is kind of useful for you as well so you don't really want to knock it out. You can't afford to replace it. It's like these systems are just sitting around saying "Fuck with me and I will burn this whole place to the fucking ground. The fucking ground"