You don't need to bribe people, just leave a compromised USB key in the parking lot. Or if you're more industrious, host an industry-specific "lunch and learn" for the target audience. Make sure everyone goes home with a trojan door-prize - iPad, smart phone, camera - something that can deliver your payload and will likely be hooked up to a computer for registration or activation.

Cost of 20 steaks + 20 iPads is pretty affordable, even for a malefactor of limited means.

Hmm, well that needs to extend one level past the "enemies" to include all of the countries/geographies/etc. that do connect with the "enemies." You don't launch your exploits from your cyberwar directly from your connection. First you compromise a bunch of systems in other countries and use those as the launch point. Possibly nesting this several layers deep. Yep - just like in the "hacker" movies. You are creating plausible deniability and muddying up the water for anyone trying to figure out who is really behind the attack. This approach is also in pretty much direct opposition to the whole concept of the global economy. If you prevent Internet commerce and communications with large countries deemed to be the "cyber enemy" but who also happen to be a "major trading partner" it will certainly be disruptive to that trade. Go ahead and ask the obvious question as to why we are trading partners with our enemies - I can't figure it out either.

Really? I think the defining characteristic of space is the mind boggling emptiness of it all. Resources are not abundant, as there is a whole lot of nothing between us and anything else.

If outer space really is the land of milk and honey, we'd be mining already. The reason we don't is because it is more expensive to do it "out there" than it is to do it "down here."

Drive-by download exploit of browser or browser helper applications is prevalent. Firewalls won't help with these, and AV software can struggle with this vector as well.

Also, for the pattern-matching component of AV software, this technology is pretty reliable once a new variant is discovered and the AV vendors know about it. There is usually a window of time when a new variant is released and infecting systems *before* the pattern is added to the AV software. This means that there are some lucky winners who have been infected. These are new variants and not necessarily targetting 0-day vulnerabilities.

*slaps head* Yep. Java should do it, but you're also dead on with respect to the slowness.

Maybe this is how it already works - but if it isn't here's an avenue I would investigate:

Shouldn't it be possible for Steam to build a hypervisor type environment? If they have a common hypervisor they port the game once to run in that environment. Then all they need to do is get their hypervisor running on Windows, *NIX, MAC, whatever.

There's definitely some additional processing overhead on this, but it seems that it would be a very efficient model once you have the hypervisor built. I would think you could probably push the specs/API/etc to the game publishers and have the game developer team adopt their game to the platform.

I don't know anything about how Steam works under the covers so maybe they're already doing this. I'm curious, but not enough to do the legwork.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion

Or if you do have them fall into the wrong hands, you now have a credible threat that will justify legislation to force the civilian air fleet to install expensive countermeasures. At the same time you will also have justified research projects to develop the next generations of stealth and anti-air missile technology for the military. Finally since the technology will now be well understood by potential nation-state adversaries, you have also justified research projects for the next generation of anti-air portable missile systems.

Qui bono?

No, I don't really buy in to any of this as a motivator - but these reactions do seem to be plausible consequences of letting this type of technology out in to the wild.

Seriously, +1 Internets to the first person who can put a positive spin on this one. Wow. Just wow.

How soon we forget:
-War of 1812
-Mexican American War
-First World Trade Center
-Oklahoma City
-More bombings, assassinations, and other acts of terrorism too numerous to list.

I know I'm not. They can't upgrade the infrastructure fast enough to keep up with the explosion in devices and bandwidth-hungry applications, so they rate-limit, restrict, and jack the rates on an increasingly over-subscribed (with corresponding decreases in performance) in the interest of keeping things just usable enough to not lose too many customers.

It's not like there are a lot of alternative providers out there who offer better service or more compelling pricing....

An electro magnetic event (man-made or natural) that is sufficiently powerful enough to corrupt magnetically stored data is also more than likely going to be sufficiently powerful to really mess with everything that relies on microprocessors to work.

There has been some proposals around requiring the electric industry to harden their infrastructure and systems to deal with this type of event. Assume the utilities do manage to somehow fund this type of hardening (which would be a massive undertaking in both time and expense). You still need to ask yourself what is going to be left to consume this power. The event is likely to leave many if not most things inoperable on a very wide scale. This means cell phones, computers, televisions, air conditioners, refrigerators, stoves. Any car made after around 1980 is probably also a non-starter. So there's power available, but not much left to consume it. Even if you have protected your data and your data center and have power, what percentage of companies have not?

This would be a hugely disruptive event that would take massive effort and years to recover from for any modern society. Maybe when the dust settles it might be nice to know what you have in your 401(k) and how much back taxes you owe; but then again it's equally possible that all this stuff will be irrelevant in the "new normal."

I agree that this is not an "extinction event" but it could very easily be sufficient to significantly change the political and societal landscape.

Thank you for the sudden and entirely unwelcome steampunk-esque vision of some battered guy covered in soot shoveling coal in to a raging furnace with arcane pipes running to filthy server racks.

See if you can get approval to for contracting with a uniform-supply company to furnish you and your staff with identical sets of snappy-looking jumpsuits. This will be met skeptically at first but eventually embraced by the group as they realize that:
1) They no longer have to pay for "work clothes"
2) When they are crawling around tracing cables they are not ruining their work attire
3) They no longer have to worry about finding a clean shirt to go to work (assuming you contract with a service that also provides laundering)
4) They no longer have to think about what they're wearing.

I've always thought this would be a great plan for those in the IT trenches, probably since the first time I ruined a tie or pair of new pants crawling under a desk or behind a server rack 20 years ago.

When deploying an 802.1x WLAN infrastructure, the way I provide more bandwidth for an increasing user population is to add access points to my topology. This allows for fewer users per access point, which provides the users with more effective bandwidth. An ancillary benefit is my topology tends to have more fault tolerance with lower degradation in the event of a node failure.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but can you explain how this principle would not work for a cellular data provider's network? Would adding more cells not yield similar benefits?

If the principles are roughly the same, then I would contend that providers may address the challenges of serving more bandwidth over limited spectrum by adding more cells (which granted means they are making a substantial capital investment in their network infrastructure).