Sunday, August 2, 2015

Fear Porn

Via Doug S

Image result for Fear Porn

On Wednesday I suggested that indeed there are things that “bother me” in the big picture. The biggest scare for someone like me is that we have morphed into a society where our entire lives rely on this thing called the Internet and the “grid”. ( the grid being the electrical distribution system)

I really cannot express how much this bothers me. I remember when I got my first digital camera and I was loading pictures onto my stone age computer. It was great! I could look at them, send them for free to family and friends. It was amazing. Then one day my hard drive crashed. All those memories were gone. People put on their high horse and said “Bob, didn’t you have a tape back up?!”  I didn’t even know what it was at the time, all I knew was that my photo’s were gone.

So now it’s all about backing up data in “the cloud”. Well that’s just fine and dandy folks. Now what happens when that cloud goes down? Again most people snicker as if having data centers that can’t go dark is impossible. Well I’m here to tell you they most certainly can.  Now, let’s pull it a little closer to home. If EITHER the Internet as a whole was to go down, or our Power Grid (which would be both actually) all life as we know it stops on that day.  No ATM’s, no credit card transactions, no banking, no food stores, no mass transit, no gas stations, no nothing.

That’s bad.

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6 comments:

  1. SunwolfNCAugust 2, 2015 at 11:33 PM

    It'll be a real bad time when internet goes away.
    Look at IOT. The 'Internet of Things'. It's super neat tech and building some of the internet connected devices will be a great project/learning experience for myself and my kid, but, the concepts behind IOT just shows how ingrained connectivity is and how fast the desirability to be connected is growing.
    I won't care of my voice activate coffee pot can't tweet its brew stats, or if I can't check the homemade trail-cam's website to see what pictures it posted to the cloud the night before, but losing the Internet as a whole would be pretty disruptive. Not world ending, though. Losing the power grid? Well that's another story. Losing power on a national level would send us back to the 1850s. Just read One Second After.

    Also - as far as attacks on Internet infrastructure - check this site out:
    http://map.norsecorp.com/
    Alleged real time depictions of various types of attacks taking place.
    Bet you never knew St. Louis was such a tasty target huh?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brock TownsendAugust 3, 2015 at 5:40 PM

      Bet you never knew St. Louis was such a tasty target huh?

      National military records center, but wonder why that would make it such a big hit?

      Delete
  2. AnonymousAugust 3, 2015 at 9:50 PM

    This brief article states St. Louis is not under attack:
    http://kplr11.com/2015/07/08/is-st-louis-under-a-cyber-attack-threat-map-points-to-china/

    ReplyDelete
  3. SunwolfNCAugust 4, 2015 at 11:58 AM

    OK so that makes sense:
    (NorseCorp's) "administrative headquarters is based St. Louis. Because of that, a disproportionately high number of the electronic “honeypots” they use to find suspicious activity are in the area"

    I had been told the same as you Brock; that ST Louis was a central hub for military networks and information.

    ReplyDelete

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