Sunday, 06/24/07

The NYT's Week in Review section this week features a borderline-mendacious story on "cyberwar". It mentions SCADA systems, the inadequately secured contraptions providing exhaustive remote operation of useful sites like power plans and dams, but contributes nothing to the question of why such comprehensive remote operation is necessary for infrastructure, how secure they are today, or how they might be made more so. It just drops the SCADA name, as if for street cred.

It's the ending, though, as author John Schwartz reverses course and starts to pat the reader on the head, that earns the story a place in my heart:

In fact, the United States has prepared for cyberattacks incidentally, through our day-to-day exposure to crashes, glitches, viruses and meltdowns. There are very few places where a computer is so central that everything crashes to a halt if the machine goes on the blink.

Pretend for a moment that this is true. It's also hands-down the sweetest, kindest interpretation I've ever seen of Windows' systemic security weaknesses. We're not wasting billions in lost productivity -- we're stimulating our computational white blood cells.

Next, as an integral element in national health care, citizens will be obliged to spend a half-day each week in day-care centers, hugging kindergartners and eating Microsoft-supplied hors d'oeuvres with bare hands. It's somewhere in between the best medicine and your patriotic duty. 10:13PM «

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