From: <https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1>
> Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of > computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and > started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get > total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and > ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four > hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and > discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After > nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the > files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive > into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to > go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told > anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug > get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t > extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security > scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse. > > It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely > works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by > the IT equivalent of baling wire. > > Computers, and computing, are broken. ... > Software is so bad because it’s so complex, and because it’s trying to > talk to other programs on the same computer, or over connections to > other computers. Even your computer is kind of more than one computer, > boxes within boxes, and each one of those computers is full of little > programs trying to coordinate their actions and talk to each other. > Computers have gotten incredibly complex, while people have remained > the same gray mud with pretensions of godhood. > > Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one > person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how. > ... Much more at the link. -- David Boxall | "Cheer up" they said. | "Things could be worse." http://david.boxall.id.au | So I cheered up and, | Sure enough, things got worse. | --Murphy's musing _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
