Hack-tacular

No, I’m not talking about right-wing punditry, but in a long overdue visit to our friends at Pravda, this brief piece on last week’s cyber-attacks on key governmental websites in South Korea and the United States [ attacks which seem to be ongoing… possibly attributable to forces in… North Korea… ]
While the Pravda discussion is a tad superficial (translation issues may be in play), the point is well-taken: we are in an era when it will get ever easier to impose potentially catastrophic damage on others remotely, without even having to get one’s hands dirty with a “traditional” WMD… and we won’t even talk about how easier and easier it is becoming to get one’s hands on (such as, by manufacturing a designer bio- or chem-weapon) such “traditional” WMDs.
We have to wake up to the fact that there is a yin and yan to everything: while computerization of the world has been a marvel in a great many senses, it opens up a number of Pandora’s boxes of potential horrors (remember how worried everyone was about “Y2K”?) I realize that was “so 1999″… but we were sure as hell worried… ever think about… this Simpsons episode?
Anyway, I guess we have to realize that just 40 years ago (when it was “so 1969”) we landed a man on the moon mostly using slide-rules (and the entire world’s computing power was probably less than you have in your I-phone right now)… I’m trying to say that by and large, these things are “non-essential”… much of the world doesn’t even have electricity or indoor plumbing… life can go on anyway. And if some hacker puts us back to some “pre-industrial phase”… our lives really can go on… and at the rate we’re going, we should really learn to live that way, just as a matter of sensible “planned redundancy”. Keep some water around, learn to fix your bike, make sure that “kitchen garden” can grow some stuff you might actually want to eat, a sewing kit or two around the house might be good…
Just saying. This has been: “Hack-tacular.”