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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

Systems behind air gaps are a pain to maintain and super expensive. Often the software behind air gaps needs to be maintained and developed. Trying to develop software behind an air gap puts you at a substantial competitive disadvantage.

There are ways to balance it and it is a balance, giving users access in one location to air gapped and internet-connected systems for example, but there's a context-switching cost (and risk) there. To keep up with and even ahead of the curve though it's so much easier to do as much as you can without an air gap.

I've worked with people who've spent decades behind an air gap and it can be like working with people from the past. Imagine being a developer in 2016 who doesn't understand how Google, let alone Stackoverflow, can help their work.

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The Galactica was a ship from the past, non-networked and seemingly out of date. It was about to be turned into a museum when the cylons took out the rest of the fleet through a very intimate social engineering attack that took out all networked defenses. The Galactica, because of it's air gaps, become the ark that gave humanity a chance for survival.

As the physical and virtual worlds blend more and more into one another, as bits become more capable of effecting atoms, we become more like the colonies on the eve of the attack.

Have there been any demonstrations of machine learning to either detect or initiate networked systems breach? All my internet connected servers are probed by automated bots trying to brute force their way in. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

I do know our systems are very fragile and we are incredibly vulnerable. In 2016 computing is just not secure enough for the tasks we are assigning it.

People developed software long before cutting and pasting from Stack Overflow became a thing.

A former boss told me about his time in the RAF, they had one machine in their office that could connect to the Internet, it was at one end of the office and hooked up to a big screen, so everyone could see that you weren't I dunno, browsing the Russian Embassy's website or something.

Do you have to do the development on an air-gapped system too?

Depends whether the software is sufficiently sensitive that you want it air gapped too. Doing development for an air gapped system on a different network without that data has a different set of challenges.

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