Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:
On Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:14:33 -0600, Vic Smith
wrote:

On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 01:36:36 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

On Sat, 8 Dec 2007 19:06:07 -0500, "Eisboch"
wrote:

Here's the "what comes first, the chicken or the egg" question though:

Does the technology produce the vulnerability or does the ever expanding
services made available by the technology make themselves vulnerable?
In my view it's the technology itself that produces the vulnerability.
Complexity follows the rules of unintended consequences - for every
intended expansion or result, you get four unintended consequences.

The problem is that you can't define what those unintended results
will be and that's where the exploitation or fault exists.

I don't think that's true on the unintended results. Not to say
snowballs don't happen, but most complex systems are well thought out.
Malicious exploitation is another matter entirely.

I respect your opinion, but even well thought out systems can fail
spectacularly and often for the simplest reasons.

January 28, 1986 - Shuttle Challenger blew up when an O ring failed in
the rocket booster igniting the liquid hydrogen.

February 1, 2003 - Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry after a
piece of foam broke off the hydrogen tank striking the left leading
wing edge.

I'm sure we can agree that space shuttles are very complex systems
with triple and even quadruple system redundancies. Yet, even with
the redundancies, both were laid low by simple mechanical failure.


Do any of you remember the nation wide telephone problem that occured on
e day in '89? I don't know the specifics of the problem but a bug in SS7
caused all of the major switches across the country on AT&T's network
started shutting down and would not restart. Took a software change to
fix the problem. I believe that the outage lasted about 10 or 12 hours.