Re: Civil Disobedience (and the traffic light myth)

[Chris Kuethe <ckuethe () pyxis cns ualberta ca>]

I love the stories about kiddies busting up the traffic controllers.
That's a load of crap. A friend of mine is one of our city engineers
who design, maintain, and fix the traffic control systems. He was kind
enough to show me what happens when you feed invalid signals to the
light boxes: they all go red. it turns into a 4-way stop. There is
hardware in the lights to prevent that kind of thing. An old-fashioned
electromagnetic relay is kinda hard to synflood, y'know?

The rest of the network runs over leased lines or very long serial
cables. Its simplicity makes for great robustness. Be careful what
sarcastic nightmare scenarios you cook up: you might just read some
senator spewing it all over the front page of a paper...

CK

-- 
Chris Kuethe, GCIA: Secure Systems Specialist - U of A CNS
office: 157 General Services Bldg.       780.492.8135
chris.kuethe@[pyxis.cns.]ualberta.ca

Opinions expressed herein are solely the responsibility of
the author. And the author wouldn't have it any other way.