We have become too dependent on computers for just about everything
It’s seemed that way for quite some time. Years ago, I remember going to a supermarket when its computers were down. Things pretty much came to a standstill. Among other things, the cashiers didn’t know how to do basic math.
Now we have this:
Hackers targeted hundreds of French supermarkets in a cyberattack that reportedly caused refrigerators and freezers to overheat, spoiling food and sparking fires.
Fridges at French supermarket chains Carrefour, Monoprix, the Les Mousquetaires-owned Intermarché, and Coopérative U, among others, all saw fridges heat up to as much as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight, Reuters reported Monday.
Coopérative U’s CEO, Dominique Schelcher, confirmed that cyberattacks had affected “refrigeration production facilities of several stores.”
“Attacking equipment that is essential to the preservation of fresh products and the food supply of the French people is extremely serious and unprecedented. It is unacceptable,” Schelcher said in a LinkedIn post.
I love that word “unacceptable.” Just what are you going to do about it, Schelcher?
What is the motivation of a hacker? For some, it could just be the fun of “watching the world burn”:
For others, it’s a political statement much like Luigi Mangione’s deciding to kill the United Healthcare CEO. I think the common denominator is the attraction of having power at a distance, and I don’t just mean electricity. I mean power over a large swath of things, just because you figured out how to hack into a system and control it. Prior to computers, I don’t think there was any way to do this on a large scale.
There is only one way to break that dependency. A complete and extended “blackout” (think Blade Runner 2049). According to many defense theorists that will happen at some point in the future, and is likely the only way humanity as a whole will understand the life-saving benefits of redundancy.
Might not be a bad idea to work on certain redundancies now.
Just wait until AI reaches maturity. We get a taste now when the phone is answered, “I am your virtual assistant and I will do everything possible to keep you from speaking to a human.”
Speaking of present day irritants, call AT&T. “We are experiencing higher than normal call volume, press one to schedule a call back (tomorrow or the next day)”. Happily, I am a former AT&T customer.
unwillin says, “There is only one way to break that dependency. A complete and extended ‘blackout.’ ”
The practical and beneficial alternative is proper schooling in skills requiring self-discipline.
Last winter, I was on a bus going down valley from Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, and was chatting with a group of elementary school teachers in a Charter School in Salt Lake City.
Smart phones are prohibited. Cursive is taught. And field trips are frequent!
Sounds like childhood utopia to me.
Not sure I take this tale at face value.
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It’s perfectly gratuitous to hook refrigerators up to the internet (or electronic vote tabulators, while we’re at it). People do it just because.
There was an extensive discussion of this incident elsewhere, I believe on Legal Insurrection, including people who had experience with similar systems. The consensus was that the problem was not remote electronic *monitoring* of the refrigerator temperatures. It was felt that doing that was beneficial in that an actual malfunction say in the middle of the night could be caught sooner and a repairman dispatched sooner. The problems were:
1) Having remote temperature *control*, that was not necessary.
And worse
2) Putting on the internet!! Everyone agreed it should have been a private secure network. Putting it on the internet was just asking for trouble.
“It’s perfectly gratuitous to hook refrigerators up to the internet (or electronic vote tabulators, while we’re at it). People do it just because.”
It’s harder and harder to buy an appliance that isn’t “smart,” together with an app. I do my best to avoid it if possible, and if am saddled with one, I never download the app or make the smart feature operative, though I don’t know if that protects me. My guess is these store owners naively thought they could manage their refrigerators more easily with an app than manually. It’s remarkable how many people make these decisions without caring about the risks.
Yup. I bought a new fridge, and did NOT scan to connect it. I went to the website and registered it, but they can’t reach it remotely.
The area where I now live experienced a total blackout of all internet and everything else two years ago, with Hurricane Helene. A friend of mine was very prepared but she never thought about having cash. It’s on her disaster preparedness list now. And mine.
Any one dumb enough to omit an air gap for critical systems deserves what they get.
Several years ago I needed to purchase a new thermostat. A thermostat connected to the Internet cost $250; an unconnected thermostat cost $70. No brainer.
Not only a no brainer for price, but a thermostat connected to the Internet was totally unnecessary. When I am gone, I usually turn off the thermostat. Were I to keep the thermostat turned on, I see no need to adjust the temperature when I am not there. (One December I left for a week and kept the thermostat at 55. Which was warm for the old New England farmhouse I grew up in.)
Keith, what does “air gap for critical systems” mean?
That this happened to the French, well, let it be said that my “love” for the French goes back a long time. Schaudenfreude, oh schaudenfreude….
At my local city supermarket last year, a sudden freak thunderstorm took out the power. The store was open, but could not conduct business. Not because the cashiers didn’t know how to make change, or even that customers didn’t have cash (although undoubtedly both were true of many). The scanners didn’t work, and there was no way to manually ring up the sale. Apparently when an item is scanned, it deducts from inventory or something at the same time it is totaling up how much you owe. I think that is a ridiculous level of dependency on computers but what do I know. It’s quite efficient, when it works, and I know stores run on thin margins. Still – I guess it is cheaper to take the loss in spoiled food and no sales than to build some redundancy into their system.
Modern civilization is entirely dependent upon the electric grid.
For those unaware, look up the “Carrington Event”. Reportedly, we missed a similar one in 2012. Sooner or later, another one is inevitable. Grocery stores typically have just a 3 day supply of food on their shelves.
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” Winston S. Churchill
Remote control of critical systems goes back a long way; I’ve read about hydroelectric dams controlled remotely in the 1930s. And centralized traffic systems for railroads, which allow switches and signals to be operated remotely, go back to the late 1920s. These were private-wire systems, though: they could have been hacked, but it would require making a physical connection to the circuit, and there wasnt exactly a hacking culture in those days.
Lab Rat…”Apparently when an item is scanned, it deducts from inventory or something at the same time it is totaling up how much you owe” In her book The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton says that many of the resulting inventory balances are way off because of rushed and poorly-trained cashiers taking shortcuts. From my review:
A former Target cashier said she was under so much pressure to ring up sales as quickly as possible, so if a customer bought 10 bottles of Gatorade–in two flavors–she would scan the first one and then hit the quantity key for ten. The inventory system thought the store had sold 10 lime-flavored Gatorades and no cherry-flavored Gatorades, rather than the mix that had actually just been sold. And the cashier, who had received only 8 hours of training before starting work, probably wasn’t even aware of the problem she was creating via this shortcut.
The author cites a study of another company ($10 billion in sales) which found that the system had the right information for only 35% of the products…for the other 65%, the discrepancies between the system inventory balances and the actual quantities available averaged 5 units…a third of the target stocking levels. In one case, a certain item was continually out of stock, to the frustration of a regular customer. It turned out that the inventory system thought there were 42 of these on hand, whereas there were actually none. AND, since this particular store hadn’t sold any units in several weeks (because they didn’t have any to sell), the system automatically reduced the target stocking level for that item!
(Faust, in Goethe’s eponymous play, asserted that “One mind is ample for a thousand hands”…an approach that has definite limitations, even/especially when the mind is an electronic one.)
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60771.html
Keith, what does “air gap for critical systems” mean?
Isolated from the Internet ,
An air gap is important for potable water systems (drinking water). An air gap system is designed into backflow prevention plumbing systems and is part of required code compliance. An air gap for other things? Not so much, except as a concept of isolating critical control systems, and redundancy.
How Kieth’s “air gap” would apply to individuals beyond not having “smart” systems that you can control is a fanciful idea. Can you exert such control, as an individual, on your power company, your water company (not everyone has their own drinking water well), or your sewage treatment utility (not everyone has a septic system or outhouse)? So Kieth’s “air gap” has a few limitations.
Not completely unrelated; but I do a lot of hiking. I ALWAYS take an old-fashioned magnetic compass and water-proof maps (like the ones you can buy through the Appalachian Trail Conservancy).
A lot of my fellow hikers kid me for being rather “old fashioned” – telling me to download the app. But, I point out that I do not need to worry about the cell phone not getting service or the battery dying on me. Ha!
They are good friends and are just kidding; but, sometimes going “smart” just isn’t smart.
Society has also become highly dependent on GPS, which is very easy to jam and can also be spoofed.
Before I retired, I was the privacy architect for The Boeing Company. Keeping stupid people from installing malware by accident in certain systems was a challenge. To reduce the attack surface on some system, their USB ports were filled with epoxy to prevent the use of thumb drives.
Starlink and similar systems can reduce the vulnerability of GPS jamming, IIRC.
Oldflyer, @ 2:12 pm yesterday on AT&T customer service “press one to schedule a call back”
Sadly that is fairly common, now.
T-Mobile does it. I even had them transfer me around during my call-back & make me wait on another callback last week.
And my health insurance, sigh… !
Pharmacies, too. CVS is notorious.
(– Working in a pharmacy is surely brutal! Many or most customers are sick, understandably unhappy people.)
Many voice-response-based customer service systems seem to have been created years ago, grown and modified over time, but never reviewed and improved as a whole from the standpoint of the customer experience.
Air gaps are also important for isolating cutting-edge AIs from the internet to prevent them from going Skynet on us before they have been thoroughly tested.
This is like when nukes first appeared, we would pay nothing for energy, I’m still waiting.
David Foster,
Thanks for the link to your post about Target; very interesting!
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60771.html
“ The author cites a study of another company ($10 billion in sales) which found that the system had the right information for only 35% of the products…for the other 65%, the discrepancies between the system inventory balances and the actual quantities available averaged 5 units…a third of the target stocking levels.”
Noticed the other day that one of the local Kroger owned supermarkets was trying to solve this problem with robots. They had a machine slowly cruising the isles, marked “inventory control”. Moving at a similar speed to the floor cleaning machines that you see at groceries, and especially, I think, Walmarts. Maybe not quite the autonomy we see in our robot vacuums in our houses, because the routes are likely more programmed, but similar.
Y’know what doesn’t require refigeration?
Popcorn.