I do engineering on these systems and have some expertise on this particular class of event. We’ve had tabletop red teams, and the general outcome is that rail systems being designed to ‘fail safe’ is an easy target. Failing safe at an individual actual ‘fault’ is still the best option, but it could be abused at scale.
It’s near impossible to cause two trains to run into each other (unless you are physically operating one of them), but it is really easy to cause all trains in an area to stop because a cross check or a bit has flipped. In this case, they literally flipped a bit by short circuiting the track circuit.
If done at scale, it is still possible to bypass and run trains safely the old fashioned way. It is less safe, but would probably be the decision if this was happening at multiple locations everyday.
1) That would need many people in different places doing the same question to a LLM at the same time, and them deciding to commit acts of sabotage that can't be linked to their demands as farmers, are very risky for the authors and don't bring the slightest benefit to their cause.
The only way the risk to end in jail by reckless homicide would worth the effort, is that they would had been paid for this work.
And 2) we have a much simpler explanation: Infiltrated leaders organized to direct the masses as sheep.
We had seen this in the Capitol assault (Do you remember the girl trying to sell that laptop stolen in the Capitol to Russian spies?), and in Ceuta (Moroccan police videotaped leading the immigrants), and in Barcelona ("professional rioters" experts on urban warfare coming from Germany for no reason), and every single time this things happen.
And, again, this acts require precise training, skills and moves that normal people never even achieve, but can be found in spades at FSB (or CIA, or Mossad). This farmers seem the only people in the planet so lucky as to arrange everything right at the first attempt. Every tiny detail. Zero mistakes. They should be hired to make software.
There are at least dozens of us doing this. My $5k bloated corporate laptop sits in my office 24/7. The 25% of time I’m traveling is with a $300 Chromebook with Linux Mini, a Bluetooth mouse, and logged into to a Windows VM.
Now that everything corporate is forced into the cloud, using a VM doesn’t carry all the extra downsides it used to.
and the bonus is that, when the workday is done, I have a machine I actually own and can use without breaking policy.
I think the root of much of this are money laundering rules. The feds want to be able to punish bad guys without actually proving the crime they are suspected of. There are now a large set of rules which the government isn’t efficient enough to enforce, so it has actually become the banking industry’s legal responsibility. Once such things are normalized, they get stretched.
I would be amazed if there are not interlocks to prevent an update while in drive. On normal updates there is definitely an interlock, plus a timer, but theoretically it is possible.
It is doable but highly location based and still really tight. I’m in a tier 2 US city. Our interns wage would equate to $58k annually. A car isn’t needed if in the city. Most people have a roommate, which works out to just over $1k a person.
Full time grads are around $20k higher….so roughly triple the amount left over.
Or you commute further. I’m mid career and commuted more than hour most of my career because it let me get a better/cheaper apartment while affording a used car.
State governments do this too. NY under Cuomo just dictated a 10% cut to invoiced labor. It was widely understood that saying no meant no more work in the future.
Alon Levy being brought up on this topic always tweaks my “but somebody is wrong in the internet.” I’ve been on several of the projects he talks about. He’s right about the macro numbers and the general vibe, but often wrong when he starts talking about he details.
The main issues are, in general:
1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow.
2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes.
3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.
As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
It’s near impossible to cause two trains to run into each other (unless you are physically operating one of them), but it is really easy to cause all trains in an area to stop because a cross check or a bit has flipped. In this case, they literally flipped a bit by short circuiting the track circuit.
If done at scale, it is still possible to bypass and run trains safely the old fashioned way. It is less safe, but would probably be the decision if this was happening at multiple locations everyday.
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