Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: General Battuta on June 01, 2012, 11:23:10 am
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the world stands in shock, completely flabbergasted by this unexpected turn of events
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto
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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/confirmed-us-israel-created-stuxnet-lost-control-of-it/
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I don't know what to think of this.
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the world stands in shock, completely flabbergasted by this unexpected turn of events
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto
From your article:
...the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after...
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But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.
What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar. The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room, often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant foldout schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously.
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Weak on security!
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Why the hell is this being published?
I don't think this information comes as a surprise to anyone, but still, someone needs to discuss the meaning of "right to know" versus "need to know" with media sources sometime. There's a reason it's still highly classified and none of the sources spoke on-record.
Argh.
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People were fired because of stuxnet. I feel sad... :(
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People were fired because of stuxnet. I feel sad... :(
Obama has cost this economy too many jobs
- mahmoud ahmadinejad
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"As the International Strategy for Cyberspace notes, these sorts of electronic attacks are serious business. The US in fact reserves the right to use even military force to respond to similar attacks."
(https://public.sn2.livefilestore.com/y1plO5Sm-nujj6NwWsKhmcL3xviOd97wubEq5AQoJ2b6R17zD1AMd7vIsoL4P5a67gpIDx-ixiTJBpV82h00MArGA/MutuallyAssuredTrolling.png?psid=1)
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For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s systems — even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up
This is the best mental image of the entire article. Forget Neuromancer-style glowing matrices and military cyberweapons, we've got spies posing as incompetent electricians.
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This is the best mental image of the entire article. Forget Neuromancer-style glowing matrices and military cyberweapons, we've got spies posing as incompetent electricians.
To be honest, it was always so much more likely we'd do that than anything from Neuromancer. It's cheaper and easier and you're less likely to get caught and more likely to get through.
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And yet here we are with our console cowboys making runs on all that Iranian I.C.E, ranging through the nonspace of the mind, like city lights, receding into flash drives
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Right up until they disconnect it. Which they did.
Then it's up to the incompetent electricians again.
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Why the hell is this being published?
I don't think this information comes as a surprise to anyone, but still, someone needs to discuss the meaning of "right to know" versus "need to know" with media sources sometime. There's a reason it's still highly classified and none of the sources spoke on-record.
Argh.
Election year. Expect the Osama bin Laden thing to come up again in a weak attempt at subtlety also.
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Why the hell is this being published?
I don't think this information comes as a surprise to anyone, but still, someone needs to discuss the meaning of "right to know" versus "need to know" with media sources sometime. There's a reason it's still highly classified and none of the sources spoke on-record.
Argh.
Election year. Expect the Osama bin Laden thing to come up again in a weak attempt at subtlety also.
The last thing Obama wants is to have something like this hot on the news in an election year
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Why the hell is this being published?
I don't think this information comes as a surprise to anyone, but still, someone needs to discuss the meaning of "right to know" versus "need to know" with media sources sometime. There's a reason it's still highly classified and none of the sources spoke on-record.
Argh.
Election year. Expect the Osama bin Laden thing to come up again in a weak attempt at subtlety also.
The last thing Obama wants is to have something like this hot on the news in an election year
On the contrary, perhaps the American people will be impressed with the tech-savvy, subtle approaches the Obama administration takes to combating threats to world security!
Even if it wasn't Obama who started it.
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Why the hell is this being published?
I don't think this information comes as a surprise to anyone, but still, someone needs to discuss the meaning of "right to know" versus "need to know" with media sources sometime. There's a reason it's still highly classified and none of the sources spoke on-record.
Argh.
Election year. Expect the Osama bin Laden thing to come up again in a weak attempt at subtlety also.
The last thing Obama wants is to have something like this hot on the news in an election year
On the contrary, perhaps the American people will be impressed with the tech-savvy, subtle approaches the Obama administration takes to combating threats to world security!
Even if it wasn't Obama who started it.
Except it wasn't tech-savvy.
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No, it was definitely pretty tech-savvy by all accounts
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honestly not surprised. and dont really mind. Is guessing that this is the norm and will bet this will eventually be regular interplay between nations.
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No, it was definitely pretty tech-savvy by all accounts
If it hadn't gotten loose, I'd agree.
::EDIT::
Unless.... Maybe that's what they intended all along! :eek2:
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I don't think it getting loose has anything to do with it. The weapon itself baffled many security teams that tried to decipher it, and utilized many zero-day exploits which were only revealed with the discovery of stuxnet. The worm demonstrates a technological and logistical competence that should make many people (some we want to and some we don't want to) very uneasy.
Granted, the acknowledgement of this is likely going to cause a ****storm with Iran, unless they already knew.
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The problem with these highly destructive exploits is that once they're known, everyone and their dog has an incentive to take it apart and harden their systems against it. They are, essentially, one-shot weapons; once their initial run has finished, everyone a state actor would want to hurt with it will probably have implemented countermeasures already.
And since there's no way to remove the actual malware from the world, once it has been used and disseminated, the probability of people figuring out how to control and subvert it rises sharply.
The best "cyberwarfare" (god what a stupid word) weapons are ones where the target only realizes they've been targeted by them years after the fact. Basically anything that can do intelligence gathering and communication interference for years without being detected.
Recommended reading: Halting State, by Charles Stross.
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No, it was definitely pretty tech-savvy by all accounts
If it hadn't gotten loose, I'd agree.
::EDIT::
Unless.... Maybe that's what they intended all along! :eek2:
It qualified for 'pretty tech savvy' the moment it actually did something. Getting loose in the wild is filed under 'totally inevitable and unsurprising'
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The best "cyberwarfare" (god what a stupid word) weapons are ones where the target only realizes they've been targeted by them years after the fact. Basically anything that can do intelligence gathering and communication interference for years without being detected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_%28malware%29
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Can't wait till hubris let's loose those new and improved "adaptive" and ultimately truly "self learning" worms in a few years or decades... and god forbid self replicating nanites ever life up to their potential.
... this event reinforces my belief that yes we are as stupid and yes some government around the world or the other will be delighted to sick uncontrollable selfreplicating cyberweapons on their neighbors as soon as the option to becomes available.
My impression might be wrong... but from the article it didn't really sound "tech savy" to me, but rather more like fooling around with it because we can.
P.S. If the US considers these activities to be a serious offense along the lines of military attacks... then what about Congress approval for said attacks?
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Can't wait till hubris let's loose those new and improved "adaptive" and ultimately truly "self learning" worms in a few years or decades...
Yes, because that's a real risk.....
....in science fiction, that is. In the real world, this whole self-learning business is strictly theoretical. As in, we don't really know how to do it reliably.
and god forbid self replicating nanites ever life up to their potential.
Yeah, because those are a realistic threat now....
....in science fiction. The biggest somewhat self-replicating mechanism we have right now is called a RepRap (http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap), and it lacks the capability to replicate its own basic function blocks. Doing self-replicating nanoscale machines is something we can only do by using (drumroll) bacteria. And that's a different kind of thing.
but from the article it didn't really sound "tech savy" to me, but rather more like fooling around with it because we can.
Right, yes, because a government spending god knows how much money on engineers clever enough to find a vulnerability in an enemies' weapon production pipeline, then creating an incredibly sophisticated and highly target-specific piece of software to surgically take out that pipeline without any of the messy "Let's drop bombs/send in special forces" business normally associated with such things is not in any way deliberate. This was a long-running intelligence program with a clear end-goal, and let us not forget that it worked rather well, and without any real persons getting hurt in the process. To me, that sounds like a real savvy move. But I can see how opinions might differ.
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Certainly beats the hell out of Israel's other "Let's plant car bombs" approach.
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to be fair, Israel's plan does have some degree of effectiveness.
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Can't deny that. But it does have collateral damage too. And that's not a good thing when you're trying to claim that the other side is the aggressor.
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Erm, did I read something wrong here? I thought Israel was a co-developer of the stuxnet worm..?
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well, he is saying that it's the better plan.
I suppose I was the one to make the mistake of saying things to make it sound like Israel was uninvolved in stuxnet.
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I suspect Israeli involvement had more to do with delivery than with coding.
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I'm more interested in who was behind Flame though. Might be the US as well I suspect
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is this one of those take credit for the previous administration's projects to impress the voters so as to get re-elected kinda things, because thats what it smells like.
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is this one of those take credit for the previous administration's projects to impress the voters so as to get re-elected kinda things, because thats what it smells like.
It is kinda, although the one who saw the whole thing trough till the end should get the same credit as the one who started it all.
It's still quite a bit better then blaming the guy for what his predecessor did wrong, which is how the Republicna party appears to handle things nowadays.
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The article does say that Obama accelerated the program after he got into power. So while it wasn't his idea, he definitely deserves a lot of credit for seeing the value of the project and continuing it when he could have shut it down or let it languish with a much smaller budget.
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What I think it scary is that the US and Israel have no qualms in getting nuclear power plants blown up or otherwise go critical due to a virus. Isn't it kind of a big deal for inhabitants (and everyone living on the jetstream) if they go kaboom? Is there no other way to disable a nuclear power plant without a possibly catastrophic event?
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Umm.
Where do you get the nuclear power plant angle from? stuxnet was targeted at centrifuges used to enrich Uranium, not reactors.
Besides, unless your nuclear power plant was designed and is run by monkeys, getting one into a fatal failure mode (as opposed to a safe failure mode) is hard.
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nuke power plants go critical all the time. that's how they operate.
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nuke power plants go critical all the time. that's how they operate.
thats because so much scifi misuses the terminology so bad. "reactor critical were all gonna die abandon ship". i always found that derpy. rarely do they use the proper term meltdown.
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nuke power plants go critical all the time. that's how they operate.
thats because so much scifi misuses the terminology so bad. "reactor critical were all gonna die abandon ship". i always found that derpy. rarely do they use the proper term meltdown.
Meltdown=
(http://images.tutorvista.com/content/feed/u1006/Atomic%20Bomb.gif)
:P
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Something like "Reactor criticality achieved Captain", would only leave 90% of viewers scratch their heads if it isn't followed by a huge explosion...
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nuke power plants go critical all the time. that's how they operate.
thats because so much scifi misuses the terminology so bad. "reactor critical were all gonna die abandon ship". i always found that derpy. rarely do they use the proper term meltdown.
Meltdown=
(http://images.tutorvista.com/content/feed/u1006/Atomic%20Bomb.gif)
:P
thats more like outright vaporization.
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Yes, but I'm sure many people have the misconception that nuclear meltdown = mushroom cloud.
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and that is why humans deserve to get nuked :D
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More people need to see The China Syndrome, apparently. :D
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aye
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I was under the impression that it's actually physically impossible to have a nuclear bomb type reaction in a power reactor. The fuel isn't dense enough for a supercritical (hope I'm using the term right) reaction, where the reaction not only is self-sustaining, but also wildly accelerates, and is packed close enough that it doesn't just fly apart and slow down again. Basically, dirty bomb vs. hiroshima.
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yea the material is not the same. stuff will run in a reactor that you cant make weapons out of. uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are your primary weapons grade isotopes. for uranium you need at least 90% purity, and plutonium you need 93% purity to be considered weapons grade. i think you can also use u233 if the u232 content is less than 50ppm (or 1ppm if gun type). reactors dont need such high enrichment, some can even run on natural uranium. though i know far less about reactors that weapons, obviously :D, so you need klaus for that.
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I was under the impression that it's actually physically impossible to have a nuclear bomb type reaction in a power reactor. The fuel isn't dense enough for a supercritical (hope I'm using the term right) reaction, where the reaction not only is self-sustaining, but also wildly accelerates, and is packed close enough that it doesn't just fly apart and slow down again. Basically, dirty bomb vs. hiroshima.
supercritical just means power is rising. reactors do this routinely to start up and get to power. the term you never want to hear is PROMPT critical. "delayed" neutron lifetime is on the order of seconds. this is where reactors operate so we can control them. prompt neutron lifetime is 10^-14 seconds. this is what bombs do. reactors CAN do this, but it won't result in a nuclear explosion like a bomb. and if your core wasn't designed by the russians, it may not even damage the core. our research reactor at NC State used to do this on purpose.
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russians were always good at designing stuff that was really effective at killing their own people.
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Meltdown=
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/Chernobyl_lava_flow.jpg)
More people need to see The China Syndrome, apparently. :D
The China Syndrome, as portrayed in fiction, isn't really a thing either. See above photo. The fuel in Chernobyl #4 did melt through the bottom of the reactor core, but it couldn't get through the floor of the structure.
Supposing it could get through the floor, though, the fuel rods would hit the water table, where the water would flash to steam, sending the fuel rocketing skyward into/through the reactor's containment dome. Stuff a turkey with a couple of onions and drop it in a deep fryer at some point to get an idea of how this would work. In the absence of a containment dome (such as with Chernobyl), the fuel would disperse, as sent skyward, creating a much greater fallout hazard than simply exposing the fuel to atmosphere. This would start and be worst nearest the melted-down reactor, though, not the opposite side of the planet.
Removing the water table from the equation, the spent fuel still doesn't get to the other side of the planet. As the fuel travels through the planet, to the core, it will experience dissipative forces of friction and viscosity. In other words, the act of travelling through the Earth's crust, mantle, and core results in a significant portion of the reactor fuel's gravitational potential energy being converted into (more) heat, instead of kinetic energy. Because the kinetic energy of the fuel doesn't equal its original gravitational potential energy, once it reaches the center of the Earth (assuming that the dissipative forces aren't adequate to counter gravity, which is another leap that we're making for the sake of argument), it will be unable to continue anywhere near as far in the other direction, before gravity reverses its direction to return the fuel to Earth's center again.
Okay, now let's suppose that you built a tunnel, all the way from your melt-down location to the other side of the planet and that you have the means to keep atmospheric gasses from entering that tunnel. No dissipative forces, right? Wrong! You're now operating under the assumption that the mass distribution of Earth is uniform. Guess what.... Earth isn't a uniformly distributed spherical mass. Some parts are denser than others, and those variations in density are not symetrical (and almost certainly not about the axis defined by your magic tunnel). That means that, at various points during the fuel's transit through the tunnel, it's going to get pulled into the tunnel wall, experience friction, lose energy, and therefore still won't make it to the other side of the planet.
So, in order for The China Syndrome to be, in any way, relevant, you have to prep the reactor site as follows:
1) Build the site with a floor that the melted reactor fuel can actually melt through. (Meaning that, not only will the reactor fuel melt the floor, but the fuel cannot be bouyant, in the liquid that the floor becomes.)
2) Pump out all of the water from local aquifers, and seal them off, so that they cannot be replenished.
3) Build a magic tunnel that can maintain a perfect vaccuum, while open to the atmosphere, and traverses a diameter of the planet.
4) Rebuild the entire planet, upon which the reactor is built, such that it will be uniformly dense, or symetrically dense, about the axis defined by your magic tunnel.
Or, when informing yourself about possible dangers of nuclear energy, don't turn to fiction.
Incidentally, Mongoose, I know you probably weren't bring that up seriously, but others have. Specifically, it's come up as a counterpoint to how safe modern reactors with proper containment domes are. As a result, I bang out this kind of post almost as a reflex.
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our research reactor at NC State used to do this on purpose.
So can the one at K-State.
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Incidentally, Mongoose, I know you probably weren't bring that up seriously, but others have. Specifically, it's come up as a counterpoint to how safe modern reactors with proper containment domes are. As a result, I bang out this kind of post almost as a reflex.
From what I remember of the movie (which is a damn good one), that phrase is mainly used as a buzzword, and the actual scenario presented in it is far more realistic. But yes, your reflex holds true, and these issues don't exist in modern reactor designs.
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Yes, but I'm sure many people have the misconception that nuclear meltdown = mushroom cloud.
Blame Red Alert 2. :nervous:
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Incidentally, Mongoose, I know you probably weren't bring that up seriously, but others have. Specifically, it's come up as a counterpoint to how safe modern reactors with proper containment domes are. As a result, I bang out this kind of post almost as a reflex.
From what I remember of the movie (which is a damn good one), that phrase is mainly used as a buzzword, and the actual scenario presented in it is far more realistic. But yes, your reflex holds true, and these issues don't exist in modern reactor designs.
i read an interesting article that the size of the containment dome is calculated based on the amount of water in the reactor, if you were to flash convert it into steam, the size of the containment dome would contain that steam, so as to prevent an explosion.
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well, yes and no. it might be sized for the initial reactor vessel volume of water, but if you're flashing that to steam, you're also sure as **** pumping a **** ton of water in to replace it. if the sumps can't keep up, eventually you have to unload some of it to atmosphere. of course we've yet to have a loop fall off or blow the head off of the reactor vessel, so i wouldn't worry about it.
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It seems stuxnet was a fork of Flame.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Kaspersky-Flame-Stuxnet-Resource-207-Malware,news-15499.html