4 ms·

> Pot, kettle, etc. Most defense and intelligence agencies have been, for the past two decades, calling the internet the most important conflict space of the 2

by cirgue 5y ago

> Pot, kettle, etc. Most defense and intelligence agencies have been, for the past two decades, calling the internet the most important conflict space of the 21st century. Why no one took them seriously is beyond me. What this didn’t touch on was the availability of likes/interactions for money. This seems to be the much more pernicious attack vector, because you don’t need to write fake content and risk exposure to any serious extent. There are already plenty of people saying antivax (or insert your favorite conspiracy theory) things, and it’s much easier to just hand them a megaphone instead of creating your own content. Any possible message you would want to spread as a state actor is almost certainly out there, and it’s better to find natural occurrences of it and simply amplify those voices.

dboreham 5y ago
> already plenty Apparently it only took 12.
f38zf5vdt 5y ago
I mean, Kojima did in Metal Gear Solid 2. > The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas, culture, history. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols, from tablets to books... > But not all the information was inherited by the later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really. That's what history is. But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading. Always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. Raiden, you seem to think our plan is one of censorship. > The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than those of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Be nice to other people." "But beat out the competition!" > "You're special. Believe in yourself and you will succeed! But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... > All this rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and VALVe systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever 'truth' suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulged in 'truth'. > And this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. > We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. I think no one took it seriously because it's always hard to take a threat seriously until it has caused some damage. Nuclear power seemed safe and environmentally friendly until a lot of nuclear disasters happened. With a world where we seem to be facing new existential threats every day, it makes sense that people hit the attention saturation point some time ago, walled themselves into their internal social networks, and landed us here today.
no-dr-onboard 5y ago
It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies). As a partial aside, the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us. This, in turn, limits how much we can actually care: As an (likely fictitious) example: > "Russia is hacking our critical infrastructure" doesn't have quite the same ring as >, "On 12/28/2018 Russia initiated an act of cyber warfare and remotely destroyed electrical switching equipment responsible fo rthe power outage and downtime in Middleton Ohio from 0100 GMT to 2119 GMT on the following day. The residents of this area have been notified via mail and SMS . . . ."
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies)." These agencies have huge conflicts of interest in that their funding depends on how afraid the government is of the threats they're tasked with defending. So the more afraid they can make politicians, the more funding they'll get. What makes their claims even less credible is that they're basically professional liars. They're trained in deception and have a long, sordid history of deceiving the public: often quite consciously and deliberately. "the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us" Even if they did tell us we could never know if they were telling the truth, as the public has absolutely no access to their internal records. They tell us what they want us to believe.
  - no-dr-onboard 5y ago
    > "we could never know if they were telling the truth" Depends on your epistemology, but I'd like to believe that most people could. At some point you have to draw a line between an unsatisfiable skepticism and believing third party, independent observer. In my example an electric company suffered an outage due to an attack. Certainly linemen, switch operators, NERC-CIP-familiar personnel and other people would be able to testify to the press (or to others) that something strange did happen. Having worked on outages related to that kind of stuff, I myself could testify that when people in my field see strange things on public-sector systems it somehow makes it's way around the community ;). The point here is that it would/will lend credence to the claims that those scary men in black suits make. But of course, believe what you want. That's always going to be your prerogative.

by cirgue 5y ago

dboreham 5y ago

> already plenty Apparently it only took 12.

f38zf5vdt 5y ago

I mean, Kojima did in Metal Gear Solid 2. > The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. Human memories, ideas, culture, history. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols, from tablets to books... > But not all the information was inherited by the later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really. That's what history is. But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading. Always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. Raiden, you seem to think our plan is one of censorship. > The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than those of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Be nice to other people." "But beat out the competition!" > "You're special. Believe in yourself and you will succeed! But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... > All this rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and VALVe systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever 'truth' suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulged in 'truth'. > And this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. > We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. I think no one took it seriously because it's always hard to take a threat seriously until it has caused some damage. Nuclear power seemed safe and environmentally friendly until a lot of nuclear disasters happened. With a world where we seem to be facing new existential threats every day, it makes sense that people hit the attention saturation point some time ago, walled themselves into their internal social networks, and landed us here today.

no-dr-onboard 5y ago

It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies). As a partial aside, the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us. This, in turn, limits how much we can actually care: As an (likely fictitious) example: > "Russia is hacking our critical infrastructure" doesn't have quite the same ring as >, "On 12/28/2018 Russia initiated an act of cyber warfare and remotely destroyed electrical switching equipment responsible fo rthe power outage and downtime in Middleton Ohio from 0100 GMT to 2119 GMT on the following day. The residents of this area have been notified via mail and SMS . . . ."

pmoriarty 5y ago
"It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies)." These agencies have huge conflicts of interest in that their funding depends on how afraid the government is of the threats they're tasked with defending. So the more afraid they can make politicians, the more funding they'll get. What makes their claims even less credible is that they're basically professional liars. They're trained in deception and have a long, sordid history of deceiving the public: often quite consciously and deliberately. "the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us" Even if they did tell us we could never know if they were telling the truth, as the public has absolutely no access to their internal records. They tell us what they want us to believe.
- no-dr-onboard 5y ago
  > "we could never know if they were telling the truth" Depends on your epistemology, but I'd like to believe that most people could. At some point you have to draw a line between an unsatisfiable skepticism and believing third party, independent observer. In my example an electric company suffered an outage due to an attack. Certainly linemen, switch operators, NERC-CIP-familiar personnel and other people would be able to testify to the press (or to others) that something strange did happen. Having worked on outages related to that kind of stuff, I myself could testify that when people in my field see strange things on public-sector systems it somehow makes it's way around the community ;). The point here is that it would/will lend credence to the claims that those scary men in black suits make. But of course, believe what you want. That's always going to be your prerogative.