Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 01, 2023

Amazing the world hasn’t “accidentally” blown up in the last 25 years.

I try to refill my prescriptions at the VA and I have to prove myself everytime ( gave up after awhile and did the horrid phone calls) But seems the enemy plants all kinds of stuff. I should ask China to refill my scripts for me

I rely on the fact that nobody would give a hoot about my information.

Hear me on this, Mike: You and she are playing in different leagues. Hers is higher.

I would advert you to Fancy Bear goes Phishing, a history of hacking told through the 5 greatest hacks in history. From the Amazon blurb:

Hacking, espionage, war and cybercrime as you’ve never read about them before.

Fancy Bear was hungry. Looking for embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, the elite hacking unit within Russian military intelligence broke into the Democratic National Committee network, grabbed what it could, and may have contributed to the election of Donald Trump.

Robert Morris was curious. Experimenting one night, the graduate student from Cornell University released “the Great Worm” and became the first person to crash the internet.

Dark Avenger was in love. To impress his crush, the Bulgarian hacker invented the first mutating computer virus-engine and nearly destroyed the anti-virus industry.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0241461960/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Ain’t computers grand! ‘n’ AI will only be better. Yuk yuk.

Hacking 101?

Back in the day, there was a report that some hackers had actually taken command of the first space shuttle for a very brief period of time.

Matthew Broderick.Biggest contributor to juvenile delinquency ever.

Given the state of the world, maybe one big “bang” might not be such a bad thing. As the saying goes – if you don’t succeed, try, try, again.

Took a computer security class in the late ‘90s. The instructor said he couldn’t tell us to practice hacking on servers and computers, that would be illegal. But he did say, if we did, to crack computers in Russia and mainland China, the feds wouldn’t go after us if we hit those targets and might be interested in anything we found.

I’m sure the DOD would have disagreed, but most military were probably too old by half about internet security.

I mean, it’s all good so long as they don’t want to play Global Thermonuclear War.

I’ll bet the secret launch code is something like 0000 or 9999. I mean really, in the event of a nuclear alert do you really want some young Airman to have to remember the combination to his padlock.

Alex is a member of a country club!?!? When did that happen?

Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.

Einstein: What of it?

Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

The bad news is that AI-based hacking kits are now available on the dark net. They can do everthing from generating highly believable “phishing” email to hacking servers under text prompt control.

This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the leapfrogging has been going on so long that it’s acquired the tag “swordmakers vs. shieldmakers”.

It’s spy vs spy. Yet corporations and government don’t like to “waste” money on cyber security.

Why does Israel have a nuclear bomb?

this is edgyingly close to the truth, even that long ago.

Why does anyone? Because they can.