And you know that how? By believing them? Here is news for you, people part of deceptions may lie.

Social engineering also works when NOT Internet connected. Just a bit differently.

Airgap isn't compatible with modern infrastructure requirements. Your city is bigger than the town of yesteryear. Remote control is a necessity, not just for basic control and optimisation but in many cases to maintain things like safe water quality.

Sure you could setup your own network, lay your own fibre, but how much do you want to pay for water?

The reality is the problem here is basic cybersecurity standards weren't in place which is not surprising for old infrastructure.

By the way air-gapped systems are not immune from cyber attacks. If your answer was airgapping rather than implementing modern cybersecurity standards, I wonder if you consulted with Iran right before they had to rebulid all the centrifuges that got destroyed in a cyberattack... one which jumped airgapped systems.

Airgap != security, airgapping is a toddler's understanding over security.

Not possible in today's world. Infrastructure is not just big, but relies on real time information across it accessible remotely by engineers. One could foresee a way around this by laying fibre lines with absolutely everything, but that is only cheap for new installations. How much more do you want to pay for water / power to retrofit this?

The problem here is the age of equipment. A lot of it just isn't up to modern standards. You don't need to recommend two layers of authentication, we already have far more nuanced ways of determining how to protect such systems including whole international standards on how to best implement cyber security on industrial plants: IEC 62443. Actually it's not a standard, it's a whole series of standards.

No one remembers this. This is Slashdot. We lack the ability to read to TFS.

But to your point: Countries clearly don't like the app allows truly encrypted messaging with no backdoors.

At no point did France request back doors or access to messages. The guy was arrested because the platform failed to co-operate with lawful orders they could execute without ever compromising encryption.

Correct, now re-read the OP's post.

Presumably a new CEO would be put in place. It may be a good idea for that new CEO to learn about Russia's open requests about how to run the platforms. You know... for the demonstrated personal health reasons associated with the request.

If murdering people to send a message wasn't a thing which worked, there'd be virtually no deaths in the illicit drug industry.

Alternatively, this is just the normal emergent behavior you can and should expect any time you have groups of entities competing and cooperating.

We didn't evolve to work the way we do because something made us evil, we evolved to work the way we do because it was effective. And that includes both the cooperation and the backstabbing. Being always and thoroughly evil to everyone quickly gets you excluded from everything. Being a perfectly-honest naif means you quickly get taken advantage of by someone slightly less-honest. So the most effective strategy is a well-chosen mixture of cooperation and betrayal, while trying to convince society that honesty and cooperation are the only correct values.

To make spreadsheets nobody will read and PowerPoints nobody will ever look at and code that could have been written by somebody was 6 months worth of experience...

Years ago I remember somebody talking about how they thought it was weird that they were a top class mathematician working for Google to try and trick people into clicking on ads. Like there was a hell of a lot more things this person could be doing that would be a huge benefit to human civilization and knowledge but when it came time for them to get a job Google was paying and they were paying a lot. So he spent his days tricking you in the clicking on ads through complex algorithms

This. Most solar inverters, batter inverters, and anything else used in home or even larger scales require the customer to buy an additional thing to actually make them internet connected.

Sensible legislation targets a problem. Trump legislation targets a nation. There's nothing wrong Chinese inverters, there's no security risk there either. There may however be good reason to regulate the use of inverters that don't have online connectivity as a 100% optional feature.

That's actually sort of irrelevant. The software doesn't know it's not operating a real business, and not having modelled 100% accurate human behaviour is not only irrelevant to the topic, it's far more important to maintain a consistent test platform over time than to accurately model human pricing sensitivity.

In other news, benchmarks aren't real computer games. That doesn't mean benchmarks aren't important.

This is what the trillionaires want. As soon as you let people have that much wealth you don't get a saying things anymore until you take it away.

And try as I might I cannot convince people that taking $750 billion dollars away from Elon Musk doesn't mean that I'm going to come for your house next.

I think the assumption on everyone's part is that you can't take away musk's money without somebody keeping it themselves and that somebody would be so greedy they would just keep taking all the money, kind of like how Elon is doing right now...

But I'm just guessing. I really do not know what goes on in the brain of somebody who thinks that trillionaires existing isn't a problem for them.

That's kind of clever, change the name so people who have already figured out the data centers are bad news now thinks of them as something else. Muddy the conversation long enough for you to ram it through after some bribes to do local politicians.

The data center build out really is letting people know, especially people in rural communities, just how much of their own autonomy they have given up over the last... When was Ronald Reagan elected?

Is the first thing these things do is break the law. Collusion is illegal even if we're not enforcing laws right now.

Heh. I still occasionally find people using Y2K as an example of "ludicrous sky-is-falling" claims that turn out to be a big nothingburger. That and the hole in the ozone layer and the dangers of acid rain.

What all of those things really are is examples demonstrating that when we decide we care about large-scale problems enough to invest in solving them, we actually can. I'm really hoping that climate change turns out to be another one that we solve before it becomes really bad (it's a little bad now, and definitely going to get somewhat worse, but not really bad), but it's not looking great.