Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
The Military

Could Tech Have Stopped ISIS From Using Our Own Heavy Weapons Against Us? 448

JonZittrain writes: This summer, ISIS insurgents captured Mosul — with with it, three divisions' worth of advanced American military hardware. After ISIS used it to capture the Mosul Dam, the U.S. started bombing its own pirated equipment. Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?

We already require extra authentication at a distance to arm nuclear weapons, and last season's 24 notwithstanding, we routinely operate military drones at a distance. Reportedly in the Falkland Islands war, Margaret Thatcher was able to extract codes to disable Argentina's Exocet missiles from the French. The simplest implementation might be like the proposal for land mines that expire after a certain time. Perhaps tanks — currently usable without even an ignition key — could require a renewal code digitally signed by the owning country to be entered manually or received by satellite every six months or so.

I'm a skeptic of kill switches, especially in consumer devices, but still found myself writing up the case for a way to disable military hardware in the field. There are lots of reasons it might not work — or work too well — but is there a way to improve on what we face now?

Comment It's FUD? (Score 1) 132

Disclosing the existence of a vulnerability destroys a lot of its value, too. People who can stop using Tails until the issue is sorted out will do so, shutting off whatever intelligence could be gathered from them. If these guys had a real-world exploitable vulnerability and a willingness to sell it to the NSA, they would have sold it and said nothing.

Comment Re:pure rubbish (Score 1) 394

"normal draw is less than 140 watts, put it in standby and get 15 watts"

That's less than 500, but still an order of magnitude more than a set top box should need! IIRC power supply ratings on Apple TV and Roku box are both under 10 watts, real usage is probably 3-5. Add a WD green or similar hard drive (6-8W) and a couple of tuners and encoding ASICS and it still shouldn't break 20 watts at full load.

Comment Re:What a joke.. (Score 2) 186

One device to compromise. If malware infects the LAN-of-things gateway, it can tell your pillows to play deadmau5, tell the lights to flash, and tell the security system to upload shower-cam photos to facebook.

(But then, computer viruses that just annoy the user with sounds and flashing text are deader than dial-up. Connected home malware would probably wait silently for bad weather, then lock you out and demand 0.25 bitcoin to let you back inside, or steal your amazon credentials when the refrigerator orders more milk, or turn on everyone's air conditioner at the same instant to DDoS the power grid.)

Comment Re:we don't know what happened AT ALL (Score 5, Informative) 582

"Yes, we can trace the changelogs in the software & note who was checking the changes and missed them, but that all can be circumvented."

Actually it can't. That's kind of the point of git.

"The fact is we don't know if Heartbleed was an honest mistake or not...we don't know who knew and when..."

We do know who and what and when, because the person who wrote it and the person who signed off on it have commented publicly about the bug.

Maybe you're thinking of Apple's "goto fail" SSL exploit where we really don't know who or what or when and probably never will because it's not likely Apple is going to release their RCS logs.

Comment Re:And if they make me have a Facebook account... (Score 2) 199

Facebook says they don't, law suits against Facebook Ireland say they do (and that it's a violation of EU data privacy laws).

Personally, I think it would be too easy for a company that has the data on hand, and no concept of "boundaries" or "no, that's creepy" to resist. They already have millions of users complete address books from the find a friend feature, faces of people they know IRL tagged in photos, locations from check-ins, etc. it's just a matter of writing the right queries to tie them all together into a barebones profile. They either built shadow profiles for non-FB-users until the legal complaints started, or they still do but they keep them in US data centers where "your data is our trade secret" trumps "I never agreed to that!".

Comment Die, cable, die. (Score 2) 578

Is this a money play by Comcast/NBC to get some subscribers back?

Obviously.

Should the FCC step in and require NBC to at least provide a stream of their OTA content?

No, but the IOC should, if they want the games to be a thing Americans still watch in 15-20 years. The FCC already failed when they allowed the anti-competitive Comcast/NBC merger in the first place.

Comment Re:Why sell a money press? (Score 1) 250

The difference is marginal utility. You can only use one shovel at a time, owning a hundred shovels doesn't let you mine gold any faster than the guy with only one. Someone with a hundred Bitcoin mining rigs can mine 100x as many Bitcoins as somebody with one.

If there's no drop-off in marginal utility as you own more of the machines, and if we assume anyone who has the skills and capital to manufacture ASIC Bitcoin miners obviously has the skills and capital to use them (safe assumption, IMO - the required skills are the ability to lift a computer and plug it in, and the capital is just rack space and electricity), why sell them?

Slashdot Top Deals

The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst

Working...