Re: U.S. Plans Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies

[Brandon Ross <bross () pobox com>]

On Wed, 7 Jul 2010, Michael Painter wrote:

> Have we all gone mad?
> I find it hard to understand that a nuclear power plant, air-traffic control 
> network, or electrical grid would be 'linked' to the Internet in the interest 
> of 'efficiency'.  Air gap them all and let them apply for "Inefficiency 
> Relief" from the $100 million relief fund.

Absolutely!  For example, those thousands of flight plans filed every day 
by airlines across the globe, not to mention private flights, should be 
done manually the old fashioned way, with a paper form and stopping by 
your local FAA office where a human keys them into the ATC computer.  Oh 
wait, we closed all of those offices when we moved all of those functions 
to the Internet.  I guess we'll just have to re-open them.

And flight tracking data that airlines and freight companies use to track 
their aircraft, yea, let's cut those off too.  If they want to know where 
their plane is, just have them call the FAA.  Surely the government can 
staff some huge call centers to handle the load of each airline calling 
about each flight every few minutes.

Heck, removing all of these functions from the Internet will create jobs, 
too, right?  And no one would mind paying for all of this out of their 
airline tickets, it should only increase fares by a third or so.

--
Brandon Ross                                              AIM:  BrandonNRoss
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