Recently I've noticed a lot of talk about "cyber warfare" and things like it.

One guy on TV was even saying that terrorists could bring down a nuclear power station over the internet... perhaps even cause a disaster! I sincerely hope not. Any control system for a power station should never be connected to the internet, simply because it has no need to be.

Is this just fearmongering?

 

I would think fearmongering. I did work experience at a nuclear power station back in the days when floppy discs were still used. I had the misfortune of formatting a few thousand because they were worried about the possibility of buying pre-formatted discs which could in theory have a virus.
I wouldn't have thought the computers that run the important things would have any connection to the outside world.

 

Unfortunately, alot is networked.

Yes, the next great war won't involve arms, at least not the munitions types.

 

Are you far-eekin kidding me?

I guess if there is a problem, and everyone evacuates, there can still be full control of the station.

If so, it should be set to only allow access from one IP and a boatload of protection.

But they probably have the control server on the same box as the WWW server, and they use a BestBuy bought router-firewall/ "There! That should do it! Ok, you password is your last name!"

--SECURED--


Speaking of floppy disks, I remember going from punch-cards to 8inch floppies.

HUGE things.

 

Speaking of floppy disks, I remember going from punch-cards to 8inch floppies.

HUGE things.

horror memories,
I was with Sundstrand (now Sauer Danfoss) in the early seventies setting up manufacturing transfer lines with punched tape...
you will never know how men suffered for production rates!

 

horror memories,
I was with Sundstrand (now Sauer Danfoss) in the early seventies setting up manufacturing transfer lines with punched tape...
you will never know how men suffered for production rates!

Aint that the truth.

I never 'worked' with them, I learned with them.

By the time my tech school days were over, we were word processing on Apple IIe

That was over 6 years. From cards to 8" to 5.25".

The mainframe/terminal based fortran computer was a beast. You could SMELL it running.


[ed]
I had to add this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_punched_card_era
[/ed]

 

If you look at what happened to the nuke plant in Iran, it is possible. That was "very high art" in crafting it to only target the one facility and going undetected until it crashed the plant.

The CIA did a test for security and found that over half the thumb drives dropped in parking lots of "targets" ended up plugged into secure systems. With the way windows tries to "help" you see what is on the drive, that is all it takes for an infection in many cases.

 

Autorun is a cruel mistress!

Thats criminal. I cant believe what people will do.

Oh, look! Someone dropped a thumbdrive!

Wonder whats on it? I guess I will check after I pass the 4 levels of security and get to my workstation in the Nuclear Freekin Power plant!

 

The actual situation is worse than you can possibly imagine. That we have not suffered a major incident is pure coincidence.

 

The actual situation is worse than you can possibly imagine. That we have not suffered a major incident is pure coincidence.

I wonder if there have been any close-calls or cover-ups.

With the swiss-cheese of protection and security, something had to of happened.

 

Remember the movie: WarGames?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

 

ahhhh back in the days when you actually put your phone into the modem.

 

I remember it only as a super-fantastic-inspiring-good movie. I have never seen such a modem "live". Only on movies...

 

I saw one live one time. A buddy had one. I didn't get one till 2400baud. Then when that same buddy came home with a 14.4 WOW!!!! We thought that thing was blazing! You could download a jpg in like 10 minutes when we could only download one in 1 hour. The good ole days. Email would take like a week to get from FL to CA.

 

I remember it only as a super-fantastic-inspiring-good movie. I have never seen such a modem "live". Only on movies...

I have one that connected to my Atari 1200XL back in the day. Today, I don't have a phone that would fit it.

The other cool "futuristic obsolete tech" is an Indus GT floppy drive for the Atari, it can adjust spindle speed, has a readout for what track you are on, and other cool features for hackers. Copy protection back in the 80's involved bad sectors, so to make a backup, you slowed down the spindle speed and wrote to that sector, then put it back to normal speed and it worked fine.

I'm still amazed at how fast computing has advanced compared to other things. When I was 15, I wouldn't think something like a Droid phone would exist for 50 years or more.

Sorry, got sidetracked into my ancient computer collection memories there for a minute.

 

My neighbor, the guy that had the VIC20 had a 110 baud cradle modem.

You could watch the BBSs' "type out" one character at a time on the screen.

THAT was exciting. OOOHHHHH, the anticipation!

 

45.5 wpm baudot through 75 wpm baudot .... you can type faster than that.

110 baud .... not too bad.

300 baud .... my first modem
1200 baud
2400 baud
14.4 kb
33.6 kb

5.25 SSSD diskettes
5.25 DSDD diskettes
8.0 SSSD diskettes

3.5 720 kB diskettes
3.5 1.44 MB diskettes

Whopping hard drives....
5 MB
10 MB
20 MB
and up ....

Computer CPU's becoming obsolete within six months ....

Computer speeds from 4 MHz to hundreds of GHz

Such innovations I've used on personal computers.

 

My first harddrive was 32MB.
The first harddrive I used was a LTColonel 10MB on a C128

I spent hours with a friend copying all of the cassette tapes to the HD.

 

I still have my C128 and the 4Gig unit I bought, a CMD model.

 

4 gig? Whoothewhat? For a 128?