September 02, 2005

• If terrorists were able to replay the Texas City Disaster, they'd be able to take out an entire port. All they'd need to do is hijack a boat full of fertilizer.
• The drought in New Mexico.
• The Yellowstone Supervolcano could kill us all.
• Well, the likelihood of a major earthquake in a highly populated area of California.
• Or the flu.
• Cumbre Vieja could slide into the ocean, generating a megatsunami that would wipe out the East Coast.
• The New Madrid Fault could tear lose and devastate the US heartland.
• Flooding caused by global warming, of course.
• And science and technology gone bad.
• And ‘Can we really be confident that rogue states will be unwilling to risk giving WMDs to terrorists?’
• Oh. We need some kitten overdose, here. /tucks into bed located in earthquake, water shortage-prone area
• Don't even get me started on the threat that gay marriage will undermine society.
• Or the threat of theocratic rule.
• Or, especially, the monster under the bed.
• We might freeze if the acidic oceans kill the plankton.
• Maybe we'll kill the Gulf of Mexico.
• How about death from posting too much on an internet site? (just kidding, HW. Don't kill me--although that would be ironic.)
• A repeat of the Great New Madrid earthquake, the largest earthquake in US history and one of the largest ever recorded in the world (estimated to be an 8.0). New Madrid is in Missouri. They're due for another, but not nearly as prepared as places like California where we get periodic smaller quakes to remind us of the danger.
• Whoops, sorry un-. Didn't see yours.
• Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California could go to war over the Colorado River. (Related to the New Mexico link above). I suppose we may not have real war ... but lack of fresh water is becoming a huge problem.
• And ‘Can we really be confident that rogue states will be unwilling to risk giving WMDs to terrorists?’ I'll second that one. Yet another on the list of things Bush has cut funding for, thinking it will never come back to bite him, is disposing of loose nukes in Russia and the former Soviet republics. I dont have the energy to find the links, but trust me, they're out there for the taking. The states dont have to "give" them b/c they are sitting, unguarded or practically so, in crumbling former Soviet facilities, waiting to be taken by any half-competent thief.
• I'm laughing, f8x, but it's an eerie, hollow laugh....
• Really, I'm just having a little fun to distract myself from feeling sick at it all. I'll shut up now.
• Sea monsters, bitches. Sea monsters. A sea monster will fuck you up!
• The Big One in the pacific northwest. We're overdue for a mag 9.0 quake offshore. And it would be pretty bad for my city. Old town in downtown Portland has actually started to die recently, as a city measure requires the old buildings to be retrofitted before new tenants can move in them. So as tenants (commercial and res) move out, buildings are getting emptier and emptier. Only a small portion of our downtown, but the area with all of the beautiful old brick buildings in it.
• See? This is Jeff the Sea Monster. Behold his peevishness!
• Now I'm going to have nightmares.
• Drop bears and yowies will do you all in...soon.
• Sea monsters, bitches. Sea monsters Lack of sea monsters. Fisheries world-wide are very near or past the point of collapse. I wonder how much of the human population's protein derives from the ocean? Get used to eating lots of squid. Mmmm, calamari! Too bad it's full of cholesterol. Better stock up on that Lipitor.
• "Now I'm going to have nightmares." Nobody tell Jeff. He gets self-conscious.
• Let's see. I live on a fault line. But New Zealand's other significant cities are on a volvaniv plain and a flood plain (Auckland and Christchurch, respectively). This is not unusual, though. Most major cities are built in dodgy locations. I could move to Sydney and have bushfires. Air travel as we know it will most likely dissapear in my lifetime with the loss of oil and hence avgas; you may be able to build electric cars. But I'll agree that ecologically related disasters are probably the big ones that will bite us in the arse hardest: ongoing desertification in Africa, global warming, the destruction of fisheries, general species extinction and the like. Unfortunately, too many people are too busy actively trying to undermine any efforts to do anything about any of this - sponsoring junk science, villifying those who bring it up as "eco-fundamentalists", "tinfoil hats" and the like to do anything about it. The Times of London is already running editorials abusing anyone who dares note, eg the role of the loss of the wetlands in New Orleans, in the disaster there as "intellectual looters" and eco-terrorists.
• melting siberian tundra. oh...and a really big comet or asteroid hits the earth, wiping out most of the life on it, on a regular schedule every 56 million years (most likely due to the sun's up and down motion through the milky way)....guess how long it's been since the last one...
• oh...and rogerd brought up an interesting point...wetlands...they cover less than 1% of the earth, but provide like 90% of the worlds oxygen... guess who's getting bulldozed?
• Hmm. I meant to finish " you may be able to build electric cars" with " but good luck on electric 747s". I suspect we'll be left with, at best, modern blimps if there's any air travel left in 25 or so years. My grandchildren will only be holidaying in Europe if my children are wealthy enough they can take 6 months off work, like their grandparents or great grandparents would have to have been.
• I think it unlikely that nuclear weapons will be stolen from the former Soviet Union. Descriptions of the laxity of the Russians have been greatly exagerated by western journalists who don't understand the Russian military. As far as WDM proliferation goes, the much bigger threat is from large, organised, money driven networks along the lines of the Kahn network. My personal favourite oh-god-oh-god-we're-all-going-to-die is the possiblity that The Terrorists are going to take down the world's IT infrastructure in a single devastating blow. Lets not get into too many details in case Bin Laden is a secret mofi lurker, except to say that this kind of attack is possible, acheivable by a small group of people, and would make a nuclear attack on a single city look like a picknic.
• I find it difficult to believe that everyone here just conveniently doesn't mention an alien invasion or a giant asteroid. Is it really possible that you are all in on it, too?
• Bird flu. Or something along those lines.
• Mind you, it might finally take out Big Bird. He's had it comin' for a long time, trust me. *shakes fist*
• What a fun thread before breakfast. I feel much better now, thanks.
• Stop shaking me, goddamit, I just ate!
• Surely we can add an oldie but a goodie: Planet X will pass by Earth and cause the poles to shift.
• The Big Vancouver Earthquake, coming soon. This might be part of the same Pacific Northwest shake-up alluded to above.
• The Terrorists are going to take down the world's IT infrastructure in a single devastating blow. Lets not get into too many details in case Bin Laden is a secret mofi lurker, except to say that this kind of attack is possible, acheivable by a small group of people, and would make a nuclear attack on a single city look like a picknic. I don't buy it. This sounds like a repeat of the infamous Y2K bugaboo.
• Sheet. Ya'll want a disaster? I'll give you disaster. Term limit repeal. How's THAT for disaster?
• A 6.0 earthquake could hit NYC. We're a bit overdue for our centennial ~5.0.
• That wouldn't be a disaster. That would be their god's retribution for NYC's heathen, sodomization-enabling, Babelish ways. (But not the Big Apple's worship of manna, which somehow has become acceptable in their god's eyes.)
• Man. We're ALL fucked.
• Hey! There's the guy who fucked my million dollar house! Officer!
• Goddamn! What could possibly be worse than THIS?
• Look on the bright side! We don't have to worry about Y2K anymore!
• Y10K will be the motherfucker to end all mother fuckers.
• Here in Carrumbia, SC, the Lake Murray Dam and the Monticello Lake nuclear facility are both dangerously close to fault lines. If New Madrid shimmies again or if we have a bad earthquake here, well...
• The world's going to end in 2012 in any case, so just relax and have fun until then.
• I don't buy it. This sounds like a repeat of the infamous Y2K bugaboo. Yeah, that's what a lot of people say when they hear about this. My response would be that the Y2K thing was the about fear that computers might break of their own accord. This is about people actually setting out to destroy them on purpose. It's quite a different kettle of fish.
• Don't even get me started about when the Great Kettle of Devil Fish gets dumped on us by a wrathful god.
• And all that devilish fish is salmon, MJ... : )
• Y2K thing was the about fear that computers might break of their own accord. This is about people actually setting out to destroy them on purpose. It's quite a different kettle of fish. I dunno, I still have trouble believing this is even possible. You said the entire IT infrastructure would be taken out in a single blow. But IT infrastructure isn't monolithic or homogeneous. I.e. it doesn't all run on Windows ;-) Sure there've been viruses and worms but nothing that terrorists could do would take the entire infrastructure down all at once because it would require hundreds of thousands of simultaneous attacks on different systems. Some of which are very difficult to hack (e.g. the telephone network).
• The Great Cyber War of 2002, from Frontline.
• Robot Jews believe that Robot Jesus was built, and that He was a very well-programmed robot, but not their messiah.
• The Great Cyber War of 2002 is a bad potboiler that Hollywood would be proud of. One of the first things that happen in this "war" is that the power grid and the telephone network go down at the same time. So these terrorists would have to have amazing in-depth knowledge of some incredibly complicated software/hardware in two independently-operated networks. Then they would have to be able to break into said systems, even though in most cases they are *not* connected to the Internet. Plus they would have to find some hole that would allow them to bring down said system. A hole which may or may not exist. *And*, this is the kicker, the hacker has to prevent maintenance personnel from bringing the system back up, even when there is no physical damage. A determined insider could bring down a system temporarily but this "cyberwar" attack across multiple heterogeneous networks? It aint' gonna happen. Some of the examples cited in the article are hilarious. I.e. hackers hijacking the air traffic control system and smashing planes into each other. It's theoretically possible (in the same way maybe that someone could take over your car via remote control while you're in it). But why go to all the bother? An anti-aircraft missile would be much easier.
• Ok, StoryBored. You can be in charge of our cyber-infrastructure. I feel safer already.
• ... and before the endtimes, can I just say there's something tremendously sexay about the term "Foggy Bottom?"
• Seriously, though. I see this as as real possibility. StoreyBored, please refute on point why someone couldn't come up with a worm (or something else) that could cripple all communication.
• And none of this "independently-operated" or "redundant" or "robust" bullshit. Think like a terrorist -- they can do it.
• Cynnbad, let's talk about the telephone network. When you make your phone call, its routed through a half a dozen switching centers. These centers are controlled by software and manned 24/7 by technical personnel. Why is an uberworm difficult to create? The fundamental reason is this: in order to spread, a worm has to be able to automatically inject its software into its hosts. A worm spreads by duplicating itself and sending out copies of itself to other hosts. In Windows there are all kinds of ways that executable code can be injected into a PC remotely (e.g. Word macros, ActiveX etc), that's what makes Windows such a security disaster. But the telephone switching system is not like that. The telephone network does not allow a switching system to remotely and automatically inject another switching system with executable code. The only thing that gets sent between the switching centers is the information needed to set up and take down telephone calls. In this sense, the possibility of a worm that brings down the entire network is on the same order as being able to catch a cold over the Internet. Analogy: your car has lots of software running in it. Some of it controls how fast your turn indicator flashes. If you for some reason have bad turn indicator software, there is no way for you to "infect" another car's turning indicator software because there is no pathway for it to do so. "You can't get there from here". Microsoft's big disservice to the world: the widespread notion that all software is inherently virus and worm vulnerable when emphatically this is not the case. It's far easier to "take down" the telephone network by blowing up the switching centers than by working the worm angle. A determined and knowledgeable hacker *could* perhaps take down a single switching center but the technicians would likely restore it within a short period with minimal disruption. As Katrina aptly demonstrated the telephone network is designed to withstand outages of multiple switching centers without affecting the network at large.
• Oh also here's some sound statistics to back up my argument: Number of PCs infected by a hacker's virus: A gazillion in 20 years. Number of times the national telephone network has been brought down by a hacker's virus: Zero in 100 years. :-)
• Let's all ignore this soon-to-be upcoming problem More hurricanes, anyone?
• OK; you present a good argument about phones. But I still wonder about discrete infrastructural systems (nuclear, flood control, etc.) that might be vulnerable. I'm hardly an expert, and I'm not cringing in fear, but I think from a terroist's perspective, a series of cascading hits on these systems might be an efficient way to disrupt things. After all, look how quickly markets react to even natural disasters.
• As you can probably guess, my background is in telecoms ;-) and not in those other areas you mention (nuclear and flood control). But if we're thinking terrorism, there is another reason why cyber attacks would not be favoured: They don't make good tv. Taking down a nuclear reactor would be a lot more spectacular and newsworthy if it's done the old-fashioned blood and guts way rather than through cyber-sabotage and probably easier to boot. But "easy" is a relative term. Cracking open a nuclear reactor's going to be pretty challenging. If I was a terrorist I would instead start thinking non-linearly: which heavily trafficked locales are most vulnerable to attack? Even now after years of "Homeland Security", there are huge and incredibly obvious targets which remain unmitigated. Targets which could be attacked with minimal planning and cost <$100K and resulting in hundreds of casualties. In the meantime, the FAA insists on searching airline passengers' shoes for bombs. Good grief.
• If I was a terrorist, I'd buy a big white sheet and cut out eye holes and sneak up behind people and shout "BOO!" Then when they turned round, eyes wide with TERROR, I'd say "THAT'S for fucking with the Ummah, infidel!" Then I'd run away REALLY FAST and you pig-eaters would never catch me.
• If I was a terrorist, yo ho ho I'd blow up buildings in slo mo With a hicky dicky dee and a hokey dokey doe There go the body parts of my foes! If I was a big terrorist, yo ho ho I'd bide my time and save ammo I don't care about body parts I'm in it strictly for the art. If I was a super terrorist, yo ho ho I'd skip the art, and go for mo History's what we're talking 'bout chum Join the Struggle, get off yer bum. If I was a citizen, yo ho, ho. I'd lock my doors and stay inside.
• StoryBored: Expect the EfBeeEye at your door for that one!
• You know, my fears aren't exectly quelled by the above. Yours is a non-response; if only we lived in Wonderland, where quid is in charge!
• ... So let's make jokes. Ok; I get it. For your amusement, my previous typo was "let's make jocks." whoo dee hoo.
• Sorry 'bout that Cynnbad, the poem was more in response to ol' Quiddy there. Didn't mean to derail... Back on topic: maybe it all comes down to faith. I feel pretty sure we'll see terrorist explosions before terrorist cyberattacks for the reasons I listed above. That's probably not a consolation from any point of view other than having one less thing to be anxious about.
• The EfBeeEye? *puts on fake mustache* Yes, how can I help you officer?
• OK. Carry on with your bad selves.
• ...... And I'm referrin' to Irag, girz! Mucho deeadio, muchaco hueves. whateahavah.. A message from beyond...
• So what does "Irag" have to do with this? Or do you think because we make jokes here, we're all in denial, with fingers in our ears? Two points: There are many, many ways that terrorists can inflict fear and millions of dollars of damage, with very minimal infiltration. Shopping malls, casinos and theme parks all have high population densities and relatively low security. You could kill thousands. Going after places like flood control systems and nuclear plants is both foolhardy and non-cost-effective. They will have to pour alot of effort, manpower and money into cracking open triple-redundant security systems (both physical and software) just to get to one building or structure, and even if the plan works, it may or may not wreak devastation across the surrounding area. Second point is that this is a forum for discussion. We can't move the earth here, or change the government. We express our concerns, engage in friendly banter and make jokes because that is what conversation amongst friends is about. If you're constantly critical about our tone, or the fact that we're either too pessimistic for you or too jovial, you're just going to make yourself miserable.
• If I can't do the denial thing once in a while about this, I'd probably get a gun and .... *chants ooooommmm and thinks gentle thoughts OK, as I was saying, I'm not that good at focusing 24/7 on the seriousness of it all. I'm sure there are refugees that are denying like crazy and just trying to focus on getting through a day, an hour, a minute at a time, because for them to look at the whole scene would be cause to willingly lay down and die.