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cyanotic

-7 karma · joined April 10, 2017

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cyanotic··on When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
Okay, come on, Razengan. This thought experiment is not a difficult one.

I invent a machine that "scans" your body in such a way that I'm able to create a perfect replica of the state your body was in, nearly to the atom. Molecule, by molecule, the machine can rebuild your body, within a near infinitesimal margin of error.

I put you inside this machine, and scan your replica file, and then I save it to a massive storage device, and, when called upon I can rebuild that version of you whenever I want.

Now, after being successfully scanned, you exit the device. I blow your head off with a shotgun, and your headless corpse slumps on the floor. No witnesses.

Do you really think you'll come back to life, if I print out your replica from the file?

cyanotic··on Hackers set off Dallas’ 156 emergency sirens over a dozen times
Part of me suspects that there might be something in this related to current events. If I were to spitball ideas about motives and modus operandi, it feels like the kind of thing a state actor would tamper with, and in terms of style I'd gravitate toward looking in North Korea's direction, since it feels like their style.

Why do it? Raising noise with false alarms, desensitizes the intended signal of an alarm, ruining signal-to-noise, as people slack off about responding to alerts. It also serves as a probe to see what an actual outcome would look like. There's no profit (no money), and no incentive to whip emergency responders up into a confused state, for most non-state actors.

Even SWATTING is usually more targeted, with the prank being played on a specific person. Sometimes SWATTING serves to distract the target from something under their control. That doesn't seem to be present here.

North Korea's hacks usually come across as sort of impish in a lot of ways. They seem to like the attention of getting into the news. Messing with something reminiscent of air raid warnings seems to fit the personality of their general profile, given their ballistic missile ambitions. Other state actors in the news lately, probably wouldn't be as interested in domestic civil defense systems in the U.S.

They (whomsoever is responsible) might be motivated to do something like this (if it were a North Korean team) given some of the sabre rattling going around this season. It rings of something that would score points with Dear Leader.

But then again, yeah, maybe this is just the typical sort of "because it's there" hack, and some script kiddie found his way into another cookie jar.