Ted Rall for February 11, 2013

“The President of the United States even has the authority to green-light preemptive strikes against a credible, impending cyber-attack, according to the NYT article. This is so serious that either the Pentagon or Homeland Security Department would respond, depending on the type of attack.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2013/02/05/president-obamas-new-preemptive-strike-powers-target-cyber-attackers/.

So once more, as with nuclear weapons, the president has to be trusted to only launch a cyber-attack in the event of a credible impending attack on our countries infrastructure. I suppose this was inevitable, considering the vulnerability of the power, water and military “grids” that could be compromised. Who would have thought that the Internet we all love so much could end up being such a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands…

If you read the code along the inside of the emblem, (erm once you’ve cracked the 32 digits’ md5 cryptographic hash):

‘USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.’

I’m surprised at the ignorance of both what to hit, and how World of Warcraft works. Unless they also mean unsold versions of the game you would hit servers, and not individual copies. It would for that matter only hit the american servers and not european or asian.

Send in the clowns would be more appropriate.

Tue Elung-Jensen;#You may be over-thinking this one. The toon was meant to titillate the “unwashed masses”, not stir up the gaming geek crowd.

“The goal of this particular effort is to generate huge profits…”

That may have something to do with it, but there is a definite real threat to the infrastructure of the country. I was in school with a lot of computer types in the late 80’s that evolved into computer security people. One friend of mine used to drum up business for his company by breaking into databases of banks and financial institutions and leaving messages for security services. Fortunately for him they usually hired him to set up better firewalls and protection for their networks rather than having him arrested. Beyond the Washington paranoia involved, it’s a real threat that, as usual, we are behind the curve in addressing.

Must be the latest patch from Blizzard!

I want to slip in a joke here.Subject: Ethel Changed Motels

Last week, Ethel checked into a motel on her 70th birthday and she was a bit lonely. She thought, “I’ll call one of those men you see advertised in phone books for escorts and sensual massages.”She looked through the phone book, found a full page ad for a guy calling himself Tender Tony – a very handsome man with assorted physical skills flexing in the photo.He had all the right muscles in all the right places, thick wavy hair, long powerful legs, dazzling smile, six pack abs and she felt quite certain she could bounce a coin off his well oiled butt. She figured, what the heck, nobody will ever know.I’ll give him a call.“Good evening, ma’am, how may I help you?Oh my, he sounded sooo sexy! Afraid she would lose her nerve if she hesitated, she rushed right in,“Hi, I hear you give a great massage. I’d like you to come to my motel room and give me one. No, wait, I should be straight with you. I’m in town all alone and what I really want is sex. I want it hot, and I want it now. Bring implements, toys, rubber, leather, whips, everything you’ve got in your bag of tricks. We’ll go hot and heavy all night; tie me up, cover me in chocolate syrup and whipped cream, anything and everything, I’m ready! Now how does that sound?”He said, “That sounds absolutely fantastic, but you need to press 9 for an outside line.”

“Preemptive war”

They are making it up as they go along. There are no rules for cyber war as such today, shy of the ones O is writing into the patriot act and the like. By their definition the attacks that have been made attempted or completed into our security system is a “preemptive act.”

There was a massive, global effort to fix the Y2K bug, before the start of the millennium. Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent (world wide). Apparently, these preventative measures were successful.

Sometimes, but more frequently it was easier to change the code to keep 2 digits in the data & just treat 00-20 (or so) as 2000’s & 21-99 as 1900’s. The thinking was that most of the non-4 digit systems would be gone in 10 or 20 years.I didn’t hear anything about a ‘2010 bug’, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we hear about a few problems in 2020. I hope to retire before the y10k bug hits…

“Y2K was mostly stopped because of hundreds of man hours”I don’t recall stopping y2k single-handedly, so I think you may be under estimating that figure!:^D

“You don’t remember Bush and Poindexter’s plan to monitor ALL internet and cell phone traffic in the basement of the White House?”I do, but I knew the technology wasn’t up to the task of monitoring every transmission for keywords. I’m not at all sure of that now. Thanks Apple, thanks Google, thanks Ray Kurzweil.The moral of the story: don’t share your plans for World Domination with Siri!Seriously, we need to stay on top of our elected officials about this stuff. I suspect few here like the idea of government monitoring every conversation, regardless of their political leanings.

Is it me or does anyone else see a resemblance to Dr. Zaius of “Planet of the Apes” in that speaker? Does Ted have a “thing” about that movie or what?

4-digit year vs. 2-digit year, not quite a simple fix if the code source was lost (never expected to survive the next upgrade, and still running since the sixties and seventies, when memory was expensive.) Many many old ‘comatose Cobollers’ brought out of retirement, or on lucrative contract (we’d hope) to find and do those fixes. Bro-in-law was one of the many._____

Keep in mind, the history books, and the war crimes trials, are in control of the winning side, so drivers like the denial of scrap steel to the Japanese industries are glossed over.

Pearl Harbor (and Kaneohe Bay, where my parents had just moved into the new base housing, and was bombed and strafed about ten minutes before Pearl, on the way in) was just the “9/11” excuse to kick it off, since all the forces coming together were all ready to tip over.