Note that their priority was to undermine public confidence in the election, not to actually manipulate the outcome. (There are lots of other ways to accomplish that.)

Maybe this can help explain why a whole buncha Democrat primary voters got turned away?

That said, while I admit the seriousness of this issue, I have to say that the federal government just can't be permitted to spend your hard earned tax dollars willy-nilly on welware programs, like the FBI, or other beuracracies that might be claiming to do things like harden local voting machines. President Trump has already managed to save a ton of money by restricting the out of control growth of the federal government by cutting off the inspectors​ general from new hires, appointees, etc., and if his budget passes, funding as well. We need to reign in the federal government and stop using excuses like Russian hostility to justify all the gravy that could be returned to your paycheck where it can actually do some good.

The point of the article was that 2016 was a trial run.

The Russians now have had 3 years experience to understand the attack surface of a sprawling network of systems and local voting organizations, and a man in the oval office whose massive personal ego can only be preserved by looking the other way, and while he slashes funding to federal agencies, continues to ban new hires, etc.

It would appear that somebody set us up the bomb. :-/

Hard to imagine that we'll get any better at preventing cyberattacks leading up to 2020.

The best way to prevent election interference by cyber attack is also the cheapest way. Don't use computers. Everyone votes by paper, and ballots are counted by hand.

also for everything else

Complete and utter rubbish. Edit: to clarify, I don't mean to say that we necessarily can get "better", but that we can get a lot worse. And over time, "worse" means lack of progress, but that we took before as par for the course.

With budgets set to be slashed, federal hiring already frozen, the vast majority of cabinet appointments unfilled and the POTUS generally out to lunch, this kind of fatalism about the efficacy of counter-intelligence will be proven to look very silly once future events reveal just how less equipped an underfunded and understaffed government will be in even doing its job as well as it has been able to thus far.

Yes, and the best way to subvert attempts at social engineering of local officials and volunteers in charge of the election is to not slash funding and hiring of federal law enforcement that can work with these people so that they are aware of the threat.

Has President created a well staffed task force to tackle this issue head on? I didn't think so.

Weapons, especially.

Technology is an arms race, in which we have to outspend the enemy proportionally to our own use of technology that scales up in vulnerability with the utility we derive from it.

Trump is our Boris Yeltzin.

Attacking a large organization through social engineering is only possible when you pair it with widespread, badly designed automated systems. That doesn't just mean electronic systems, it also means things like forms, and rigid process, and anything else organizations do to increase productivity at the cost of decreasing thinking.

You might be able to social engineer one retail worker into opening their cash drawer, but it's impossible to clean out them all because the attack doesn't scale. ACH lets you social engineer one banker into bankrupting an entire company. Things like SCADA in utilities, business intelligence databases, customer relationship management systems, government taxpayer records,... they don't just increase the electronic attack surface, by their basic productivity-enhancing function they massively increase the social attack surface too.

This attack surface grows exponentially with respect to the utility of automation. There's no way to win this game, least of all by throwing money at it.

Awareness campaigns and post-hoc enforcement don't work.

The best way to subvert attempts at social engineering is to compartmentalize your organization so that compromising a single business unit doesn't result in catastrophic failure.

So in other words, we're screwed out here in the Anglo-American corporate universe and in for some rough times with no end in sight to the madness.

I remember last December (I believe), Bruce Schneier was testifying on Capitol Hill about how the risk of ****ty embedded systems being scaled up as the "Internet of Things" poses an existential threat to society in dire need of regulation, and was basically pulling his hair out.

The fat, sweaty corporate stooge to his right, when he got his turn, mumbled something about self-regulation, not stiffling innovation, etc.

We're not screwed. What we're talking about here is the SNR of a technocracy dropping to zero within a decade. We're turbo-****ed.

Target lost the personal information of, what, 110 million Americans? All because, at one point, Target corporate decided that centrally spying on their customers was more important than resilience. Now imagine that scenario repeated everywhere. Every store. Every factory. Every bank. Every government department. Top-to-bottom. And then imagine what'll be possible in 10 years when 80% of the internet is hosted by Amazon.

Oh, and our governments' answer to this problem is to basically eliminate the possibility of electronic authentication. So that's something to watch for, too.

I suppose then it's time to go the way of this fellow, who apparently has taken his software career off the grid and is building a social network in New Zealand that is entirely offline (syncing with other members whenever they are within range of another member whose WiFi is a node in the mesh network), learning generally how to survive without too much dependence on society, and living off his sailboat.

Ridiculous. Computers were phased in to corporate and government processes quickly, and they can be phased out quickly, too. It won't be painless but it's not going to turn life into post-apocalyptic communal subsistence farming either.

Approximately zero percent (0%) of the systems currently controlled by networked computers actually need to be controlled by networked computers. Something major enough happens, and even the most ****-for-brainsiest people will realize the computers aren't actually helping anything. Then life will march on pretty much the same as normal.

That's interesting. So a major series of catastrophes can turn public sentiment to the point where we agree as a society on the pitfalls of networked technology.

I guess Spook will be disappointed that we didn't actually have to become survivalists after all.

The fact that voting in the US is so decentralized and each state possesses its own system for collecting and counting votes produces some friction that protects against fraud, thankfully.

Well Jon, 80% of the internet won't be hosted on Amazon, because we are going to put everything on the blockchain. Chipotle burritos will be tracked on the blockchain from seed to fecal content being monitored at your home. So, checkmate.



Somehow I don't think the entirely prudent (and unlikely anytime soon, because as much as I am excited about the fun narratives to watch coming out of the blockchain space it is the next panacea for our dumb structural decisions) decision to not stick computers up all of our asses is going to avert the several degrees of warming we already have coming down the pipe. No survivalists (not most of us anyway) just a smear in the shale.

The blockchain will be hosted on Amazon.

I'm actually excited to find out how they'll manage to secure an immutable content-addressable distributed store when 80% of nodes are hosted on AWS though.

They will host AWS on AWS.

Oh they will also virtualize the synergy

Not to keep harping on this topic, but:



People who worry about human extinction greatly underestimate both human adaptability and the potential energy of 1% of the population throwing the other 99% under the bus.

The human species isn't going anywhere.

YOU are.

Buy gold.

So the 90's technofuturist dream was truly just a nightmare.

lol, so you seriously think that the human race is going to go on and on forever?

No, Spook. Eventually there will be a near gamma ray burst, or an asteroid, or Homo sapiens will speciate. But it's not going to happen because of a problem solved by airponics and a sufficiently deep hole.

Oh so we are on the same page.

Looks like senate voted 97-2 for new sanctions on Russia, so Donny can't veto.

https://youtu.be/MOYoou3genk

In case y'all haven't seen this.

Those people are oblivious to the greatness they are witnessing.

love too complete the system of german idealism

I would be very cautious around overly intellectual people who exhibit overt absurdity.

My judgement is that, very deep down, the extreme contrast between the beauty of this man's interior world, and the chaotic ugliness of the exterior world, has pushed him to the brink of a psychotic break.

"Trump = German Idealism" is merely his latch ditch effort to paper over this inner turmoil, and I bet you could uncover his true, unhinged nature by uttering the precise incantation of words to him that provokes the vulnerability of his psyche.

Well the good news is that one of the GOP's more Nazi-friendly members of Congress got shot, and despite the top-flight medical treatment he may still actually die.

Holy **** I thought he got hit in the shoulder or something, getting shot in the pelvis is generally a career ender in one way or another.

Is this Trump's craziest tweet?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/875701471999864833

Although I'm more inclined to believe that what it suggests (i.e., the firing of Rosenstein and Mueller) is more terrifying than promising, one can only hope that this, finally would put enough pressure on the GOP to change their tune.

Fortunately for him, internet of things is corporate wank and isn't going anywhere.

Just reading through the way that any of the four billion competing IoT protocols work will make you pull your hair out. There's this obsession with removing any local control and directly connecting and controlling every single end node from a remote server. There's no reason at all to do that, and a trillion reasons not to. It's like the novelty of giving a low power microcontroller it's own IPv6 address is so compelling that we have to try and think of some ridiculously contrived reasons to put as many of them as possible on the internet.

Yes there is a reason to do that:

Packaging software is, like, really hard, but anybody can write a node app.

It may be corporate wank, but it's definitely going somewhere:

On all of our faces. I'm not even going to use that **** and I'm sure it will **** up my life somehow. I definitely see myself not staying in hotels anymore, because those are just the kind of stupid companies who will partner with an IoT protocol to provide 'better service' to their customers and kill me because their smoke alarms are repackaged amazon alexas.

FTFY