This is the first chapter of a book I've read just before the summer. I highly, highly encourage anyone who found this article to go read that book (Amazon for the lazy). I really liked it because it explores the intersection between urban planning and technology and Townsend doesn't shy away from criticism.
edit: rob05c, are you aware that what used to be personal tags now doesn't register as two tags? I.e. my post should pop up in #technology as well as #technology.veen #bugski
edit2: accidental shoutout to rd95. My bad.
Yeah, there's enough inaccuracies in the first chapter that I'm a little skeptical.
mmmm.... Manhattan Project?
Apollo?
Yeah sure, smart thermostats are cool and all but the focus is a little... comp sci centric. And the problem pervades the entire discussion:
...that's not a smart toilet. A "smart" toilet would take into account water demand. That's a toto electric flusher. It's a solenoid with a motion sensor in front of it. A system it ain't.
That's a crashed signage server. Know why they crash? Because the signage industry died in 2008, when a study came out indicating that people look at their phones too much to notice signage. the DSN industry never made it out of Windows XP, because the features they need didn't exist in Vista. Know why you see BSODs at airports? Because the signage networks are eight years old because nobody makes enough money to keep them updated. They are also not systems... the systems would report back to the mothership to say "hey - I'm dead" and technicians would roll to fix them. That is, until the money dried up and the networks died. This isn't the sign of a "brittle" system, this is the sign of a system persisting eight years after its raison d'etre has expired.
Except these were glitches that were resolved in 90 minutes. We're talking about a grand total of 2 hours of unscheduled downtime. In 2006. Nearly ten years ago. Iphones didn't exist back then.
Rather than $300 billion over the course of decades, before the problem needed to be addressed. My uncle was a Y2K fixer - the reason it only cost $300 billion is lots of networks updated and upgraded their gear so they wouldn't have to deal with it. The reason we aren't eating dog food and pledging allegiance to The Great Humungous is that the Y2K bug was greatly exaggerated.
Author's diagram:
L3 network map:
...or maybe it's not a myth?
Speaking as someone who spent probably 400 hours doing acoustical analyses on backup generators on cell towers in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere post 9/11 as part of King County's 911 response plan, I can say that the above description is abject horse shit. There's a reason emergency response services bolstered the hardness of cellular networks in response to September 11 - they're virtually impossible to kill through nefarious acts or accident, and super easy to kill via civil mandate. Wanna kick all the citizens off of T-Mobile and give it over to EMS? Flip a switch. Lost 35 towers? Good thing you have 900 of them. Those of us who live near the beach have at least two friends with "micro cells" which extend the cellular network over their own residential internet uplink. Cellular networks are rock hard.
Yeah, I know the guy that did that. He works for a major studio. They have one show that is largely watched online, and they switched from AWS to a cheaper provider that assured them it could handle surge. It couldn't. The failover took down AWS. And what did we lose? Netflix. Life safety this ain't.
1) Not without a nuke.
2) I mean, seriously. Short of space burst nuclear weapons the GPS grid isn't going down.
3) And by the way, the first gen iPhones didn't have GPS. they used cell tower triangulation. This is still the principal localization system used by your phone. GPS is a backup.
4) And by the way, considering how reliant the military is on GPS, chances are good that their network is hardened.
...except the only devices affected by the infection were a specific control system from a specific manufacturer. This is akin to crafting a virus that will only give Donald Trump any symptoms and then arguing it isn't a targeted strike.
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The article strikes me as uninformed fear-mongering.