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https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/french-supermarket-chains-cyberattack-forced-115141288.html
This is a poetry of stupid and the hackers are the least guilty party here. Lets start with the obvious. Why freezers needs to be visible, why do they need to be remotely managed, why is not this done on dedicated internal network, why do they need firmware updates. How did we get to the point where a device that should be pid controller, compressor and alarm can be hacked.
To make you feel better - all of your nice EVs are also permanently connected and I doubt that there is air gap between the infotainment and the firmware of the battery pack. Someday someone will be able to accelerate or set on fire EV remotely. And probably soon.
I despise this framing, and it is obviously false. The most guilty party in any situation is always the actual guilty party. When a women walks down a dark alley in skimpy clothing and gets raped, the most guilty party is the rapist. When a farm sets out an unattended stand with fresh produce and a box to put money in and someone comes and steals everything, the most guilty party is the thief. When a supermarket doesn't put locks on their toothpaste and someone comes and shoplifts a bunch of toothpaste, the most guilty party is the shoplifter. When someone puts refrigerators on the internet and they get hacked, the most guilty party is the hacker.
Yes, you need to be vigilant and aware that bad people exist and take precautions to protect yourself from them. If someone is in a low trust environment where bad people are prevalent, it is irresponsible and negligent not to take precautions, and anyone who fails to do so does share some of the blame for the obvious outcome where the bad people harm them. But they share less than half of the blame, because if the bad people didn't exist then obviously no harm would happen at all and the precautions wouldn't be necessary. There is a finite amount of blame to distribute, and the majority always belongs with the bad people who actually do bad things.
Yes. The sysadmin. IT security with minimal exceptions[1] always had serious component of victim blaming in the 90s.
The difference with the rest of your scenarios is that in IT there was never trust which could be betrayed. Everyone knew from the beginning that everyone is out to get you. There was never presumption of safety on the internet.
So a better analogy is who is to blame when a soldier dies on the battlefield - the enemy shooter or the soldier that didn't take cover?
[1] Technically illiterate activists in the third world and the likes.
You're missing the point. Low trust societies are worse than high trust societies, because even when you take all of the appropriate security measures, those measures inherently come with costs and friction that wouldn't be necessary if there weren't untrustworthy people around. The actual perpetrators are the people directly inflicting all of the costs, both the damages when they get away with something and the security costs when people move to stop them. The naive people are indirectly responsible for the costs caused by insufficient security measures. If they weren't naive OR if there weren't scumbags around, they wouldn't get sabotaged so drastically, but no matter how cynical they are there's nothing they can do to prevent the security costs and friction forced upon them by the scumbags. There's a clear asymmetry here.
I wonder if the issue is just treating criminals as sub-human or something, the fargroup, and thus absolving them of responsibility because you're not even being thinking of them as rational agents in the interaction. They're not just some environment, like wandering into the woods and getting mauled by a bear. They're people and thus deserve blame when they inflict harm.
I think you are missing my point. To commit crime you have to have law, the DNA of the internet was always lawlessness and anarchy. It started as a warzone. The fact that meatspace has claimed control and thinks its rules apply - doesn't change the nature of the place. Hackers are not criminals - internet was created to be unrulable - well it was created to be undisruptable, but the two kinda go together. So the burden is on the defender, by default. In the real world you have the whole monopoly of violence thing that says rape is not ok. Internet was designed so that monopoly of violence is impossible. Well the governments figured this one clever trick that if they can put chokepoints and match your digital to physical identity they could break your kneecaps. But still.
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However, the converse also applies: the most cynical (who demand others pay more for security) impose costs when they want too much security.
This is how progressives can [correctly] accuse everyone else of imposing too many costs on the community by impeding the immigration they want, and how everyone else [correctly] can accuse progressives of imposing too many costs through failing to ensure immigrants behave themselves.
There's a meme in software about "move fast and break things". Same thing- you can either have more software faster and cheaper but having more security issues [which create cost indirectly], or you can have no software and have systems that are extremely expensive [which create cost directly].
Either one fundamentally creates a cost, but it's asymmetrically enforced, as humankind hasn't figured out how to measure much less begin to force the people who argue conservatism in a particular area to pay the opportunity cost that creates beyond "move to a land of plenty such that conservatism doesn't work".
Sure there is- you organize meanness to degrade their capabilities. Typically this requires grouping people by class- sex, race, age, nationality [Irish need not apply], social standing, g, whatever- and forcing them to pay for "being scumbags".
And the ways you might force them to pay are many- you can levy fines, imprison them (which is more a fine on their time), disenfranchise them, physically injure them, and deploy various means of scumbag-icide (from assassinations of key figures to whatever prefix for -cide you wish).
On the other hand, of course, "being scumbag" is sometimes not something one can avoid. Perhaps one is born stupid, or with some trait that make their existence untenable (including relative statuses, since human beings work that way), so either they themselves, or those with whom they can co-ordinate, will seek to take away what you have because there's no particularly attractive alternative.
The thing that complicates this analysis is the fact that "people that just want to watch the world burn" (as in this case) are always a net positive to kill, but it's not possible to ensure the social machinery that kills those people is never turned in their direction.
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Agree this is how people in Johannesburg end up living their lives shuttling in between walled security compounds and still get robbed.
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I think you're on to something. A whole bunch of the thoughts I've been thinking about posts from the last couple weeks about the ongoing Lindsey Clancy drama, AI doomerism, European Diplomats, the Cornel 7, and Spiderman: Brand New Day, all seem to be converging on a similar conclusion and I really want to explore in an effort post but it's already late and I really ought to call it a night.
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