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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the pedestrian comment, but,

watching the cyberwars happening is surreal. Nuclear material production being attacked by Stuxnet, this current event, others I'm sure, is amazing.

The cyberwars of disinformation as well - completely surreal to see this all play out. Sorry I don't have more to add. It's hard to describe how it feels to see the future arrive like this. Pandemic. Rocket milestones, Mars plans. Nuclear-targeted cyberwar. Cryptocurrency. And flying cars are seemingly coming before self-driving cars perhaps. (Edit: And all backed by an increasingly divided America.)

What a weird twist into the future the last few years have been.

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Just the other day i was watching a video of protestors taking down a drone with hundreds of laser pointers. People are literally having laser battles in the streets with police robots.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drone+lasers+protestors&t=fpas&iar...

I knew someone with plans to protest traffic ticket cameras by aiming a directional photocell at the flash and wiring it to activate a laser aimed at the camera for a few seconds. I wonder if they ever got around to it.

Low tech alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRnlRurTwFg

Why does this work?

I think most drones wouldn't be 'taken down' by lasers: flight control and GPS should still work fine. But seems reasonable that enough lasers could blind the camera, eliminating it as a surveillance asset.

My assumption is that people have cheap high power ~50 mw rated green laser pointers of questionable origin. The green is generated by optical pumping with an IR laser. Unscrupulous manufacturers omit an IR filter, allowing the much more powerful IR beam to also pass. This is problematic because the laser eye protection you're supposed to buy to match the green wavelength wont protect your eyes from this. Anyway given the number of beams it seems like there could conceivably be enough power delivered to overheat or damage something.

Too much of a dystopia for my taste. I wish that we had solved climate change, stopped a few useless wars, and fixed a big part of the cronic health problems. We are much better than a hundred years ago, but we have much more to improve.

Information Technologies have been weaponized, but not hardened, if that makes any sense. A lot of soft targets and heavy ordinance, not so many fortresses.

Yeah, it feels like the "golden age" in some way - there's lots of developments available on both sides.

I expect things will "calm down" over the next fifty years as defense-in-depth and security become ingrained into how we work. Compare a "modern network" with the first ARPANET.

Micheal Hayden during a Blackhat keynote likened 'cyber' to a new domain (like air, land, sea), that's universally like early WWI with open fields of men with no defenses being mowed down by attackers' machine guns.

As an aside, it probably would have been smarter to make Cyber Command it's own branch rather than the Space Force. Space operations are basically figured out with the Air Force taking most of the lead. Cyber Command is apparently a cluster fuck of separate command structures all vying for power. Spending the time making a Space Force always seemed like a 20th century move in a 21st century env.

all the possible scenarios that may happen are playing out equally and in parallel. I think it is part of everyone living different realities and we no longer share (e.g. we are all lonely and isolated). those who haven't been radicalized until now will be so in the future[0]. I think the outcome depends on how _much_ and hard we're squeezed. But everyone eventually falls over the edge. Our reaction to how we deal with it also depends on the individual (directing violence against ourselves e.g. depression or violence against others - e.g. mobbing). Adam Curtis made a fantastic documentary[1] earlier this year on how we got here. It had mixed reviews here on HN

[0] "The future is already here — It's just not very evenly distributed" -- William Gibson

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I9nquHUE0Y&list=PLtPP_-rkrT...

The fiction-to-reality pipeline is getting scary fast!

I'm with you on all of the things except for flying cars. I don't want some drunk driver(pilot?) flying over my house, but I want to be able to land at home. There are twice as many regulatory issues as tech challenges in my book.

"cyberwar" soften what may be a far worse situation. We may be witnessing the ignition -in slow-motion- of a generation defining global armed conflict. When it all finally goes hot nobody will remember how it started.

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