seawasp: (Default)
[personal profile] seawasp
... but it's not being done by a rogue AI. Instead it's being done by an arrogant, clueless investor techbro-Nazi working with an old grifter Nazi. 

Apparently, employees of Elon's DOGE have taken physical control of the OMB and other computers, which together control literally TRILLIONS of dollars, and of course hold an absolutely incalculable amount of personal and private information for every single citizen of the United States. 

Leaving aside whether you think Social Security, Medicare, etc.,  should even exist, this is the kind of thing that simply cannot be allowed to happen. These people have a week of experience bulling their way through government systems. You don't LET people with that little experience have any kind of operating control over major systems. When IEM gets a new office manager, it takes them a couple MONTHS to fully understand the flow of business, the specific way our accounting system works, the way payroll is handled, etc. -- and IEM is about five orders of magnitude smaller than this. 

No one without YEARS of experience, or at least a very deep background in these kind of systems AND a lot of experienced helpers, should be messing with these systems. No one without an AWFUL lot of need should have unlimited access to all that private data, certainly not without a lot of training on what kind of disasters you can cause.

My suspicion is that this is basically just a data theft on the grandest scale ever, with the same consideration for the victims that a ransomware scammer has. They don't care what happens to the systems, but they DO want the data in them.

The problem is that you can't just say "Okay, we'll yank a couple trillion out of the economy today and figure out how to fix it". If those systems crash or are badly screwed up, or simply can't be trusted, you're throwing millions of people instantly into poverty and a lot more into major difficulty. It's one thing if you think you can ease people into a different system, but when you don't care -- people will die. 

And on that scale, people will revolt. Violently. With fire. 

Date: 2025-02-07 12:42 pm (UTC)
claidheamhmor: (Default)
From: [personal profile] claidheamhmor
Greatest data breach in history. If that happened to most companies, you'd purge your servers and restore from backups. You cannot trust any code or data there now.

Date: 2025-02-12 05:58 am (UTC)
claidheamhmor: (Default)
From: [personal profile] claidheamhmor
I suspect you're right; giant systems like that are not quite the same as the little servers we back up at work. I work for a bank, and about 15 years ago we had a massive outage - electrical outages followed by a lightning strike - that corrupted the data on the banking mainframe. We were down for 9 days while the data was repaired; I imagine that was faster than any restore from backup could have been given the amount of data. Also...when you restore from a point-in-time backup, you lose all data after that point.

Date: 2025-02-17 12:03 pm (UTC)
claidheamhmor: (Default)
From: [personal profile] claidheamhmor
I can imagine!. I know how long it would take to restore some of the systems I manage...days, at the minimum. Multiply that by the number of systems you have...

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