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Comment by diffeomorphism | Hacker News Reader

> which BTW isn't a country, so by definition, one can't go to war with it?

Suppose North Korea shoots artillery on Samsung factories. Is that not an act of war because they were targeting a company's buildings?

The US has some mixed messaging on cracking. On the one hand they reserve the right to consider attacks on them as acts of war (and to respond with bombs) on the other hand they have no reservations about cracking others (e.g. Iran).

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I would say that it's not an act of war against Samsung but South Korea which should be a difference.

This was corporate property insurance, and it excluded "acts of war". It doesn't matter who the war is between; the fact that a cost was incurred due to war would mean that you cannot claim that cost on the insurance policy. If it only referred to acts against a specific state, then you would have no need to include the wording in the contract as it would be a no-op.

Insurance policies have often tried to exclude the highly-unlikely-but-ruiniously-costly coverage; hence the similar "acts of god" exclusions (and obvs there's rarely any disagreement about whether god was specifically the actor). A war is a usually a large-scale event causing a large amount of damage; without excluding it you would expect many insurers to be bankrupted. "Cyberwar" is something of a different matter and I could see why either side would want to litigate to clarify the definition.

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