Hacker News Reader

Comment by persolb | Hacker News Reader

I do engineering on these systems and have some expertise on this particular class of event. We’ve had tabletop red teams, and the general outcome is that rail systems being designed to ‘fail safe’ is an easy target. Failing safe at an individual actual ‘fault’ is still the best option, but it could be abused at scale.

It’s near impossible to cause two trains to run into each other (unless you are physically operating one of them), but it is really easy to cause all trains in an area to stop because a cross check or a bit has flipped. In this case, they literally flipped a bit by short circuiting the track circuit.

If done at scale, it is still possible to bypass and run trains safely the old fashioned way. It is less safe, but would probably be the decision if this was happening at multiple locations everyday.

View on HN

Why all this farmers know so much about how to sabotage trains suddenly?

LLMs, likely.

1) That would need many people in different places doing the same question to a LLM at the same time, and them deciding to commit acts of sabotage that can't be linked to their demands as farmers, are very risky for the authors and don't bring the slightest benefit to their cause.

The only way the risk to end in jail by reckless homicide would worth the effort, is that they would had been paid for this work.

And 2) we have a much simpler explanation: Infiltrated leaders organized to direct the masses as sheep.

We had seen this in the Capitol assault (Do you remember the girl trying to sell that laptop stolen in the Capitol to Russian spies?), and in Ceuta (Moroccan police videotaped leading the immigrants), and in Barcelona ("professional rioters" experts on urban warfare coming from Germany for no reason), and every single time this things happen.

And, again, this acts require precise training, skills and moves that normal people never even achieve, but can be found in spades at FSB (or CIA, or Mossad). This farmers seem the only people in the planet so lucky as to arrange everything right at the first attempt. Every tiny detail. Zero mistakes. They should be hired to make software.

I will keep the simpler explanation.

False equivalence: These train sabotages aren't even remotely at the level you're presenting them to be.

Any random farmer (which is a convenient label for people working in a specific field, and says nothing else of those people's abilities) can plan such sabotages with LLM help.

Furthermore, they do not need to be done by the average farmer; As with any populace, there's variance between individuals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com