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Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can eas
by vasco 2y ago
Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.
- buckle8017 2y agoFortunately the people wanting to do that are often to stupid to realize what's vulnerable.
- dylan604 2y agowell, a more charitable take on it would be they just don't have the means to achieve what they might want to do. would you be able to charter a boat with the ability of cutting the cables while also ensuring that whatever crew you hired will be complicit with your task? make it more simple you say by finding where the cables come on land and attack them there is more complicated because now you're on foreign soil. so does that make someone stupid because they're not an evil billionaire and just someone that likes to watch the world burn?
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> well, a more charitable take ... One of the main reason the very few manages to ruin cities for everyone else is because of the charitable take. In addition to that, just like GP, my experience is that the people being nuisance are really just stupid. I haven't seen many chess IMs nor many engineers destroying things the majority relies on just for fun. There's zero reason to be charitable with dumb people acting evil and there's zero reason to attribute intelligence where there's typically close to none.
- card_zero 2y agoThey are thin on the ground, so far I could only find Norman T. Whitaker, who did a lot of insurance fraud and various kinds of swindle and was prison friends with Al Capone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_T._Whitaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_T._Whitaker
- croissants 2y agoThis is the thing that actually worries me the most about AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a working gun or figuring out how to kill somebody with a drone, and apparently these practical obstacles are enough to deter a nutso but insufficiently committed/intelligent/methodical would-be assassin, but if you have a chatbot that will happily talk you through the whole process, maybe that equilibrium changes.
- vkou 2y agoThe chatbot can't even give me a code sample which doesn't hallucinate APIs - something that is easily machine-verifiable. Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.
- croissants 2y agoI'm not sure what chatbots you're using, but the big free ones at this point can and, in my experience, typically do give valid code samples for a surprising range of tasks. I'm skeptical about LLMs as the ultimate future of AI, but they aren't useless.
- ge96 2y agoYou don't need AI for that, just look it up on Reddit
- npunt 2y agoSame, and the story is really of all technology. A suitable amount of friction is the invisible force that holds together much of society. We have to be very careful about what activities and actions we make easy to do, because if destruction is simple, we will be governed by the laziest and most stupid among us who will harness it without thought or care. The same goes in the opposite direction; if everything is hard to do, our dynamism is oppressed.
- xyzzy123 2y agoYou need a certain degree of practicality to do proper damage to infrastructure, the trades have it in spades but political types not so much. You have to have some mental model of which parts of the system are hard to replace. Sometimes this is not immediately obvious, e.g. signalling equipment vs track damage or transformers vs line damage. TBH most people's threat models haven't really caught up with the reality of battery powered tools and carbide / bimetal blades. A small number of organised protesters could quickly disable a lot of infrastructure with a few k of milwaukee, some wrecking bars & utility keys. It's been interesting to watch the "blade runners" in London solo this, still haven't seen a coordinated group do it on a large scale.
- ajross 2y ago> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. In point of fact no chunks of the network were ruined at all. Dynamic routing was a design point way back when DARPA funded IPv4, and for exactly this reason.
- samatman 2y agoThe topic was the telegraph network, which did not have that property.
- ajross 2y agoUh... no? The topic is "undersea internet cables", it's right there at the top of the page. It's true this subthread became a digression about telegraphs, and I thought it was important to bring things back to the actual subject being discussed, as it doesn't share the property that made telegraph sabotage a notable idea.
- samatman 2y agoEveryone in the thread up to the point where you commented was talking about telegraph cables. I believe you when you indicate that you thought you had changed the subject back to something else, but you gave no indication that this had happened whatsoever. The comment you're replying to: > Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Is, in fact, about the telegraph network. Thus your objection to it is bootless, because it isn't true about the telegraph network, which is the topic of that comment. The fact that it's true of other things doesn't really matter, because most wrong statements might be correct if made about some other topic.
- ajross 2y agoGood grief. I can only repeat: the discussion about telegraph sabotage was a senseless digression, unrelated to the subject at hand. And I think pointing that out for the people who might not understand the distinction is important. I'm sorry if you think that's "bootless", but in the real world hijacking discussions for unrelated minutiae is considered bad form. Go post an article about telegraph sabotage. The real internet is very robust.
- mmooss 2y ago> Because it takes 1 person ... It turns out that empirically, in every area, such '1 person' risks are very low, even though theoretically it sometimes seems likely to us. For some reason we often theorize, we imagine the world, as if homo sapiens are sociopaths. There's also a political/social movement (or set of movements) that require that to be true, and insist on it. In reality, it is very much against our nature to do such things. We are social creatures that live in groups and work together, and have been for millions of years. That's how we survive and thrive. It would take '1 person' to drive their car over a busy sidewalk or to push you into traffic, but I don't worry about it when I'm waiting to cross a busy street. It would take one to poison your dinner or push you off a cliff when hiking or set a bear trap in a park ... . You can come up with endless scenarios. (And yes, with 7+ billion people in the world, even with very low odds you can find examples.) Come to think of it, I can't think of other animals that do such things either, including non-social animals. Almost everything we do, we do in groups trusting each other. It's deeply ingrained human nature.
- kylecazar 2y agoThe book kiosk in my town had a leave-one take-one program that was suspended because a local stole all 40+ books to sell on Amazon. Also, no more nativity scene at the church because they steal the baby Jesus.
- mmooss 2y agoThings happen, but there are still nativity scenes and book kiosks all over the place that work fine.
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- lxgr 2y ago> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. If that were true, we’d see a lot more sabotage.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> If that were true, we’d see a lot more sabotage It is true. There is a lot of critical infrastructure out in the open that a dude with a pick-up truck of fertiliser could trash. (I'm not even getting to our electrical or natural gas distribution systems.)
- lxgr 2y agoI don't doubt that for critical infrastructure in general, but telecommunication infrastructure in particular seems redundant enough to be resilient against physical layer attacks of that kind. The last mile usually isn't, but recent events have shown that even cutting several cables doesn't have any noticeable impact on international traffic patterns: https://blog.cloudflare.com/resilient-internet-connectivity-baltic-cable-cuts/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/resilient-internet-connectivity-... I'm actually much more concerned about e.g. a logical attack against Cloudflare, which could actually bring down tons of services globally.
- XorNot 2y agoI mean shooting electricity transformers turns out to be pretty viable, it's just got the basic problem of (1) you probably need that electricity yourself and (2) while it might be hard to prevent, catching the guys who did it is a lot easier and no one wants to do 12+ months in prison.
- dole 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack it’s been 10 years, and you think it’d be easier to catch someone in manhattan in this day and age but things fall through the cracks. I hope satellite surveillance advances to protect infrastructure assets but there’s really only so much unknown you can protect yourself from.