Yeah, it was a little flippant, but here is more fleshed out reasoning:

With systems designed to be operated for weeks, months, or even years with out updates there must be much different underlying architectural considerations. Could you imagine how valuable a remote zero day would be if discovered by an aggressor state? Could you imagine a starship’s computer blue screening just as it jumped? Oof.

Quite honestly, IMHO that’s what lead to Virus - a fully AI, self modifying (program? Being? Something else?) crushed the Imperium. It had to be a dooozy to overcome the design and safely protocols, and IMHO may not even be physically possible.

I would expect systems to operate in far different modes than we are accustomed to. Given that the smartest folks in the Terran, 2I and 3I have had a long time to think about this, I cannot really imagine what those safeguards would look like. Given what we know now, I would expect things like

* Air gaps between sensor, commo, and control systems
* Physically controlled one way data gates
* triplicate unconnected consensus  based systems ( because everything on a ship is triplicate, right?)
* Hardware systems with read only underlying OS’s
* Some pretty intense crypto (and the real crypto, not NFT’s 🤣)
* Using that intense crypto to sign everything to insure that there is no tampering
* Only allowing sanitized messages between systems.
* Neural Network based firewalls.

Since we are borderline TL8, and have had networks for what, 50 years-ish, I really feel that what we are seeing now is a combination of stuff that was not build to be hyperconnected and an immature industry. Up and coming languages like Rust hinting at what a truly secure environment could be like.

The 3I has has space flight longer than we have had fire. I have a feeling they will have figured stuff out.

> On Jan 17, 2023, at 6:07 PM, Alex Goodwin - alex.goodwin at multitel.com.au (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>
> Greg,
>
> I'm a little confused where (presumably cyberpunk- or postcyberpunk-style) netrunning has to come in, since I mentioned contemporary networks in OTL.
>
> I was thinking more of oldskool, unsexy, red teaming - finding vulnerabilities in software and hardware, weaponising them into exploits (or obtaining such from third parties), then delivering the exploits where needed.
>
> I'll take your words as indicating an ecosystem where defense is dominant (as violently opposed to the offense domination we have in 2023 OTL), thus vastly mitigating the cyber vector as you implied.  What would change the underlying economics to favour that?
>
> Alex
>
> On 18/1/23 11:39, Greg nokes - greg at nokes.name (via tml list) wrote:
>> I did say naive, right? 🤣
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>>> On Jan 17, 2023, at 5:37 PM, Ethan McKinney - ethan.mckinney at gmail.com <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>> "Hydrogen and stupidity are the two most abundant materials in the universe." So long as you have systems, you will have people making stupid security mistakes.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 4:00 PM Greg Nokes - greg at nokes.name <http://nokes.name> (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>    As someone who has worked in tech for longer then I’d really like
>>>    to admit, I have the naive view that in the next 5,000 years we
>>>    will learn how to harden computers to a the point where things
>>>    like a axe applied to one will become the most effective method
>>>    of “hacking”.
>>>
>>>    IE, Yes hacking exists IMTU, but it’s all about physical access
>>>    to systems and social engineering rather than cyberdeck based net
>>>    running. ;D
>>>
>>>    I have other universes for that. :D
>>>
>
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