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    OutlawPlanet: What's the worst that could happen?

    What are your biggest fears for the Outlaw Planet superthreat?

    Started by: jfpickard Raves:17

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    What's the worst that could happen? In what circumstances could hackers and griefers do the most damage? What are your biggest fears for the Outlaw Planet superthreat?

    Not being able to use the Internet. Almost 100% of my job depends on the \\\'net. If it goes totally down, how am i gonna be able to work? The traffic in the city is chaotic, and i won\\\'t be able to deliver BluRays containing the client\\\'s materials on a timely fashion. I could send it through the cell phone, but the whole communication network would be paralyzed, since hackers wouldn\\\'t want to leave anything standing.

    There will be an enormous decrease in the productivity of several of the most important companies on this planet if the internet were rendered unusable. Countless people, myself included, will have to switch jobs. Communication across vast distances will have to occur if people want to contain these superthreats, but because it is done through an intricate series of networks, it too is vulnerable for attack. Imagine living without knowing what is going on beyond the horizon, not knowing whether or not food, water, or electricity will run out at any moment. This is not a world I want to live in. This is why griefers and black hat hackers must be stopped.

    The consequences could be very dire indeed. Hackers could very easily gain access into the electronic voting systems of democracies around the world. If this occurs, they can put someone of their own choosing into power. If the hackers can gain enough power, they can overthrow governments or even gain access to nuclear launch codes and use them at their discretion. The whole world could be held for ransom by a small group or even a single individual. It is not a pleasant future.

    My biggest fear is the danger of large consumer corporations morphing into micro state-like bodies with fascist governance structures. They hold the resources and assets of food and technology, and can control distribution as well as enforce law and order. They trample anything that gets in the way of their profit motive, and can invest in both organized crime, and the police forces to battle the crime, meaning that they can profit from both ends of the spectrum.

    what if someone where to comprimise the worlds economic markets along the lines we\\\'re seeing today. this would be possible using a large-scale distributed hack or media manipualtion campaign

    Yes, loss of the internet as a secure place to do business could be a drastic hit to our economy and modern way of life. I think the threats could be a lot more \\\"real\\\" too though. Terrorism could well become more commonplace, meaning people would have to drastically alter their day to day life. Large gatherings, travel (domestic and international) and large facilities as work-places could all be threatened. Our idea of freedom could be significantly threatened.

    The biggest threat would be giving control to others. Be that control of the internet, the media, security or our identities. Currently the \\\'hacker\\\' meme is being used to support the idea of giving control away out of fear. If the public makes their opinion based on what is being fed to them, they will give that control away. This will not decrease attacks but likely the opposite. And in such a situation, each hack could be much more damaging.

    I see 2 possible \\\'worst outcomes\\\' - 1: Misinformation and hacks crashing/deleting actual information cause so much miscommunication that countries and corporations miss most chances to work together or make decisions based on bad info, or 2: networks and security programs get so bogged down that the internet effectively will be shut down, causing negative ramifications for just about every industry there is and the common people will no longer have access to thier money to pay bills or buy necessities. Banks would likely be the first to be hit in this way as we\\\'ve already seen in Kuala Lumpur.

    going to first principles, human beings have progressed most when there is a predictable set of rules (formal and informal) that governs actions. when outlaw elements alters these set of rules without notice or general buy-in to the new set of rules, conflict will ensue (with differing levels of grief). there are two strategies to deal with this. first is mitigation. there is a need to minimize the effect and impact of these disruptions. when these attacks do occur, this should not induce greater fear. people should be educated, and key groups trained, on how to react and be resilient in the face of temporary breakdowns. the second strategy is prevention. social stigmatism and creation of moral revulsion of certain activities will be enough to prevent most people from the most heinous of activities. creating cross-border agreements and promulgation of these value sets will be the start. basic \\\"golden rule\\\" type stuff. transparency and speed of information dispersal will also be key. detecting, analyzing, and disseminating information among the good guys trying to maintain order in a credible fashion is the critical first line of defense. this will require official and non-official entities operating in a cooperative, not combative, fashion.

    As democratic civilization matures, free flow of information is essential to it\\\'s continued operation. The viability of the internet or a predecessor as a vehicle for this information is all that is keeping us afloat. The disruption of that process would be catastrophic.

    since we augment our world with avatars, ghosts and virtual it gets more and more difficult to differentiate between the real and the virtual world. hackrs had today fun with that and osted a lot of virtual trees into the augmented world. it got real difficult, if you depended on the augmentatino, like police officers etc. to set a step into the city, as they didn\\\'t knew which trees had been real. so what shall we do: we need more specialist, who are able to fight down virus attacks. I don\\\'t hope the next time they will send hypnotic pictures to manipulate us.

    Just like the Large Haldron Collider was hacked ‘back in the day’, it is inevitable that a NimbleTeam of griefers will keep targeting the Space Based Solar Power plant. http://superstructgame.org/SuperstructView/107 Greyhats are probably trying to slave, or zombie, our supercomputing resources. Can you imagine what they can do with that kind of power? Rewrite the Social Security Index of numbers/people? Crash the Library of Congress? Rewrite the index of shipping/train/plane cargo manifests? Spoof some ‘false-positives’ in hospital records – flagging everyone with ReDS. That might get some attention to the problem! But OZ is tougher than that. Considering what she’s got under the hood, I can’t really say I blame them. Truth is, I somewhat sympathize with their cause. Of course, that sympathy won’t keep me from telling the guards to fire on sight, if anyone tries to breach our sanctuary. And that same sympathy won’t keep me from ReverseHacking those punks, either. And if somebody was unlucky enough to slip through, they are gonna have a really bad day. So, for now, I’d say our ‘net security is managed. Of course, Moore’s Law was “Krushed by Kursweil’s Korollary”, and with the advent of nanodrives and nanostorage, even OZ might be in trouble next year… Michael Laine http://www.twitter.com/mlaine2019 and/or /mlaine – real world.

    The inherent problem here is that we\\\'ve come to depend to heavily on a system that is vulnerable and unreliable. The worst that can happen is that we continue to put critical systems online and hope for the best. The internet, while wonderful, is not actually a necessity for life or civilization. At least, not unless we make it so. I think the lesson to take home here is that we should reduce our dependence on these systems and make certain to explore and use parallel, non-computer based solutions to the same problems. Restated, the worst thing that can happen is that we turn computers from a useful time-saving device into a critical necessity.

    The loss of Truth, as a kind of Platonic ideal. If every record, every book, every picture, every financial transaction, every memory becomes mutable and subject to both manipulation and corresponding distrust, humanity loses all collective sense of verity.

    The global divide between rich and poor still exists, but the West spent so long worrying about physical resources, that our global datasphere played second fiddle. Now, one unhappy hacker can bypass even 1024-encryption keys and play havoc throwing elections, extreme weather warning services, and medical databases into disarray. Unless we work towards a global informatic equality, soon anyone could have the skills to pull the plug ... on almost anything!

    My biggest fear is everyone\\\'s biggest fear, really - Fear of Change. Will I still matter? Did I ever? Answer: Of course. We ALL do! We\\\'re all special folds of the Universe turning in on itself to have a look from this unique (YOU-nique) perspective. In that sense, no matter whatever happens, we all did and do matter. It\\\'s a letting go thing.

    Think bigger. Hacks into a nuclear plant to override coolant procedures, disruption of air traffic control systems would both absolutely devastating.

    The fear is the formation of misinformation that could sweep over networks. We rely heavily on the internet and networks for news media. Those sources becoming falsified would confuse, scare, and mislead people and have major implications. Soon, nobody could trust anything.

    It\\\'s interesting to notice that most of the fears that emerge from the Outlaw Planet superthreat are linked to the \\\"map\\\" replacing the \\\"territory\\\" - effectively, data supposed to representreality replacing, to an extent, reality. Why would that be ? Probably because the vast majority of people (myself included) estimate the Internet is a generaly valid space for information. It is of course a big mistake, one which information scientists and teachers worldwide have tried to correct over the course of years - ever since at least 2003 when I started my own carried as one such teacher, and most probably long before that. The problem is not so much that information can be true or false, or that we cannot identify it as valid or invalid : the use of asymmetric encryption, control procedures and common sense should soon help tackle the continuous hacking of sensors, media and the likes - to the expense of at least some rapidity in the process of information treatment. But is it such a bad thing ? Continuous rapid streams of information, in my opinion, are not necessarily a good thing. They do not lend themselves to the creation of knowledge - instead, one\\\'s \\\"infosphere\\\" (the amount of collected information that surrounds us at the end of a day) can quickly be filled with information that means, in the end, nothing. What we need is for people to return to a more scrupulous information check, and to take the time to verify their sources. Comments have been made above regarding transaction security and the likes. May I remind that even though computers have been making leaps of progress in the recent years, systematic asymmetric encryption (or even less complicated algorithms, depending on the context) are still secure enough to guarantee information protection ? The matter, in a world threatened by extinction, rests at least equally if not more on widespread extinction panic and the liabilities to social engineering it generates as on software and hardware being compromised.

    Perhaps the most crippling thing would be if public money became increasingly used as ransom or blackmail payments for hackers. Everyone loses if the infrastructure starts to fall apart so getting themselves paid off through the threat and occassional disastrous hack would be oh so painful. Government would have to cut back on an already underbudgeted social system.

    Some of the effects of the Outlaw planet superthreat can be seen in 2008. As piracy of the shipping lines off the Horn of Africa and the Straights of Malaka increases, shipping insurance costs are beginning to rise. This drives up the price of transporting goods, not to mention delaying important shipments of food and medical supplies to countries in Africa. This ties in with the Ravenous and Quarantine superthreats very clearly. Surely things could get worse, as right now most pirates are not actually offloading the goods of the ships but rather holding them for ransom and then releasing the shipment and the crew when it is paid.

    Just as it seemed the net would offer solutions to many problems - less travel, so less need for energy, less need for valuable land to be given over to offices rather than much needed housing; easier flow of information so that people could work together and solve problems; new ways of monitoring everything from global flashpoints to disease spread so that we could respond swiftly and act on the old adage "a stitch in time saves nine"; and so on - the whole fabric of the net is now threatened on every level. The threats are too numerous to mention - from machines being slowed down simply by running the software needed to keep themselves from being turned into a zombie (my machine today runs slower as a result than the one I had in 2015!), to major hacks bringing down corporations so that companies are now afraid to have people working from home, to the most insidious, the low level spread of misinformation, where no specific hack or attack is done so that it can't be stopped by software or blocked by a firewall, putting at risk our collective knowledge that we've been painstakingly making available to all over the last 20 years - now it is becoming polluted in ways that are hard to identify. The greater reliance on the net as an information source has meant less people ("experts") carrying that information in their heads or in uneditable printed text books, and more of such knowledge becoming stored in what was once quaintly termed "the cloud". And without the experts and books, who is to verify and validate what is there in our new collective consciousness, stored as vulnerable bits and bytes?

    Security won't get worse. Lots of the examples posted here is probably impossible, even in 2019. As hackers gets better, security will follow. The main concern would be that hundreds of hackers did small-time acts of crime, leavin the rest of us without trust for any networked system. We will all be afraid of using the internet, withdrawing from an ATM, etc.

    I agree with Syc the main threat from Outlaw Planet is mass panic or mistrust among society. Though as we rely even more on the internet we will have much more at stake and much more lost evry time the hackers succed. Even with high level security both identiy theft and hacking still happens today as more is at stake will that number rise. If in 2019 will bring poverty, hunger, and disease what will stop desprate people from breaking the law.

    The somalia model. A total and irreversible collapse of civilization. Gigadeath. And after that the model of Mad Max or Salute of the Jugger - no central government, no more industry or progress, global feudal warlords and endless, thousands and thousands years of the same. A sustainable world, with no more than 100 million people.

    My biggest fear would be large groups of highly organized, highly efficient botnets ran by criminal originations, governments, or corporations that would be virtually impossible to defend against and massively destructive in the virtual world.

    It's interesting to see the role of fear in our intellectual lives. It worked for Bush and it's working for Superstruct. It reminds me of the traffic jams caused by accidents, when people want to watch.. I wonder if a Somailian Child-soldier when playing Superstruct would be attracked to this section. The horrible truth may be that War and Superthreats are not very exiting when you are really in it. You are just sitting around in some cold place waiting for nothing. And when you got out for a pee, you get shot by a sniper. Not very glorious is it. That's my fear, that our Superthreats may be demoralizing and lack any glory or excitement that might motivate or unite us.

    When most of us take our turn at looking into the Crystal Ball, we look for things we recognize and extrapolate how things can change. While these are important the things that we don't current recognize as having a potential for harm are what can really spoil our day. My vision I throw into the ring is a near future world where the world is at war with a new threat, that of memetic manipulation. Memes are ideas, and a memeplex is a body of ideas that makes up our worldviews. Memes like religion, politics, economics, and so on are of course big deals in our lives. What would the world be like though if you could covertly change another person's memes in a matter of hours? Hate the fact that your boss is a Godless atheist, how about changing him into a born again christian just like that! Or maybe you can't stand people who drive SUV's and you decide to infect theme with a real mind virus that gives them a strong belief that cars are evil and we all must walk everywhere. Sound like science fiction, unfortunately it may not be. Once the genie is out of the bag for easily changing beliefs and paradigms, all bets are off everything! You could well become a criminal because someone else changed your mind. Read my story for more details. How does this relate to things like the great communications we enjoy, hackers, and so forth? Anything that can be used by us can be used against us. Psst, don't stand too close to your cat's litter box.

    Biggest fear: the collaspe of all global communication-> Chaos-> mass Riots-> Tension, btwn everyone-> Intensification/explosion of other Superthreats. #1 If we can't communicate and funding is in jeopardy how can we sent aid? etc...

    my biggest fear is that the industry i work in and love so much (the games industry) will be crushed by the weight of human trash as every facet of digital life becomes daily more corrupted and decayed.

    In 2008 there were great economic upheavels driven initially by problems in the credit markets, but later driven by fear. Many use the Internet as a source for information and knowing this those with particular purpose can manipulate the masses by using the Internet as a source of misinformation. Over time since the run in 2008 we have see a new form of industrial espionage no longer based on theft of information but instead by the propogation of misinformation. Do you want to close a bank? Just spread the rumor the assets are no longer viable and watch how fast people will withdraw their money.

    Well i believe that the worst that could possibly happen is our tech being hacked, through losing the World Wide Web we would lose a stupidly high percentage of our community, information etc

    I am not saying that teachers before internet were not good teachers but I am saying most of today’s teachers have the power to be really great. The internet and what it can do brings a whole new level of teaching to the front lines. Teachers can do so much more and access so much information to use in their classrooms. If the outlaw threat is going to take away our security for accessing this information teachers are going to lose their information, which in turn will limit the information and education of their students. It’s almost as though education will be driven underground, like a secret society.




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