A Stubborn Old Coot Learns Programming Again
I was a programmer once, and that experience showed me I was not a natural programmer – and that I could not compete with natural-born, genius types.
I could compete as a writer, however, so I became a technical writer – documenting mainly software products. It was a horrible job; companies don’t want good documentation – no matter what they say – and most tech writers were dropout English majors, or something equally useless, who couldn’t cut it there. They had no interest in their job – only in the politics of getting ahead – while pretending to be somebody important.
At the time, Microsoft was derisively called The Evil Empire – for good reason. And no one expected it would last. It did last, quite to everyone’s surprise. One reason for its success, was its approach to programming. It had a hard-headed business approach: it wanted to make programming so simple that programmers would not have to be paid much.
As a result, companies that used its approach got into huge messes that only top-notch programmers could figure out – and these guys got big bucks for doing this. And some companies got into such a mess that nothing could save them. But Microsoft excels at high-tech flimflam, and high-level executives excel at stupidity – and the two of them are still in bed, and doing you-know-what.
Microsoft has refined its programming tools until they are something respectable – but also something requiring considerable high-priced expertise – precisely the situation they were trying to avoid! So they are developing something easy again – something called NetMatrix – which is what I am learning now. It takes a building-block approach “All you have to to us connect these clever little blocks together in the right way – and you too can produce a miracle!”
I just tried it, doing exactly what it told me to do. I didn’t get the right result. Shit! After some fiddling around, I got it to work. Their damn documentation has a bug in it!
Immediately, I notice something I had forgotten: programming sucks up a lot of time. Determined to figure out what is going on I switch to some of their other documentation, which does a better job of it. Their stuff is beginning to make some sense. But that will have to wait until tomorrow – I have burned up too much time on this already.
Stuxnet
Christian Science Monitor
Jerusalem Post - Stuxnet may have destroyed 1,000 centrifuges at Natanz
Stuxnet is the world’s first publicly known cybersuperweapon – a computer program that is able to cross the digital divide and destroy a real-world target. In the case of Stuxnet, that target seems to have been Iranian nuclear facilities. But future variants could be used to hammer US critical infrastructure, too, the Congressional Research Service warned this month.
Discovered in June by a Belarus antivirus company and later revealed as a cyberweapon by a German researcher, Stuxnet was designed to control and destroy industrial control systems. It could be activated merely by plugging a thumb drive loaded with the malware into the target computer system.
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Stuxnet required a team of experts working clandestinely for months or more to build it – and cost millions of dollars to produce and test. Only a few nations – Israel, the US, China, France, or Britain – could create it, many say. Now a rich terrorist could buy a Stuxnet variant.
The original Stuxnet was a cyber “guided missile” that unleashed its digital warhead only under very specific conditions (believed by a number of experts to be part of Iran’s nuclear plant designs). The son of Stuxnet might not be so selective. If retooled slightly, a Stuxnet clone could be made to detonate and damage a wide swath of critical infrastructure facilities – water, power, energy, and transportation facilities, for instance.
Software