I designed and built my first embedded microprocessor project (for remote metering) using an 8088 and a 8284 clock generator chip, with some EPROM and static RAM back in the early 1980s.... I've been working on computers ever since.

How did this get down-voted? Settlement is a thing

The big issue is that one group of refugees from an attempted Genocide is creating another group of refugees from their attempted Genocide.

All else is lies.

"Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration, don't fail me now!" and/or

"Our Lady of Blessed Power Application, don't fail me now!"

I just gave up, and read the following things
    email /.
    metafilter
    boingboing
    facebook
    youtube
    doc searls web log

and that's it. The internet was nice while it lasted.

If this were a couple of kids in the US... they would both be on their way to Gitmo, the anti-rejection drugs the kid probably needs to stay alive wouldn't be addressed... then the remaining kid would probably go on a hunger strike in Solitary.

Oh... and someone at the Bank would be put in charge of a new "cyber security" division, with a big bonus and a corner office.

I wish we could be more like Canada some times.

That doesn't address the issue of unintended side effects from existing bugs. I agree that a separate LAN can help mitigate things, but it doesn't eliminate the odd things that can happen in a world where code is trusted by default.

Imagine if your garage light switch would 1 out of every 1000,000 times, cause your roof to fall off your house.... this is the world of software that can do anything.

The problem IS that things are trusted by default... but not in the way the author thought. If you trust every program you run by default, you are doomed. An operating system should NEVER trust anything by default... Linux, Windows, OSX all violate this principle. So do embedded devices base on some variant of them.

Never trust by default, and you stop having to worry about side-effects, and start deciding what the limits are ahead of time.

This sounds exactly like a Fountain Code to me, which isn't exactly news.

I find it interesting that an insightful mention of some spooks gets down voted at the same time some spammer shows up and spoils the story.

When you listen to them talking politics, and then bomb the wedding down the street instead... that's US Intelligence.

Wouldn't surprise me at all

I sit here in the Cassandra suite, watching the tech community finally waking up to the reality of the world. You are starting to panic because you know none of the operating system choices you have are viable for truly secure systems. Soon you will learn about Multi-Level Secure systems, Capabilities, and other features of the secure computing..

About 10 years from now, you'll get the hints the universe has dropped on you, and start implementing these systems.

About 10 years after that, some real old timers (or young punks who've read history) will point out that this stuff was actually figured out in the late 1960s, and early 1970s.