Except that according to the folks at the Sydney Morning Herald, we’re all headed for a new kind of horror – cybergeddon, the digital mushroom cloud.
Is it just me, or do these nice people all seem to have a complete freakin’ fetish for the prefix Cyber?
In trying to make a point, these people all come off as rather pathetic characters out to scare people… or unaware that they sound like movie characters gone awry. Take for instance Mr. Brett Peppler, a former intelligence officer who undertakes research for the Australian Homeland Security Research Centre who said:
There’s no jurisdiction in cyberspace. There’s no accountability … no rules. And it’s grown explosively, not in a planned way.
Sounds a little too much like Shaggy, ahhhh… Cereal Killer in Hackers (shut up, I know you’ve all seen it) exclaiming:
FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That’s a typo. Orwell is here now. He’s livin’ large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
And at the end of the day – it’s just a movie – if there’s gonna be a firesale, wouldn’t it have happened already? Aren’t the hackers addicted to critical infrastructure (telcom, power, ummm… twinkies and jolt shipments)? Aren’t the really bad nation-state types (well the ones to worry about anyways – yes China, probably not Yemen) really addicted to critical infrastructure (Walmart, containerized shipping, MacMansions with ARM mortgages)??
I guess as I go back and evaluate the time that I’ve spent working on Critical Infrastructure security (what a freakin’ mess), did I spend that time well, or not? Will the next war be fought in the spaces between computers or on a field with hot metal? I grew up when the cold war looked a little tepid, I’m accustomed to real bad guys — to Krushchev wanting to bury us — a nuke targeted at every city. What kind of pansy-ass bad guy construct is the industrial military complex trying to create for our consumption?
Where’s the facts and the journalism?
[tags]rants, cyberdouchery, tuesday[/tags]