Coding to the end of the world!

Oldsmar, Florida.

I had never heard about this town.  The name itself is new to me.  Oldsmar?

It is a small town northwest of Tampa.

What was my interest in this town?  Because it was in the news.

Hackers remotely accessed the water treatment plant of a small Florida city last week and briefly changed the levels of lye in the drinking water, in the kind of critical infrastructure intrusion that cybersecurity experts have long warned about.

The attack in Oldsmar, a city of 15,000 people in the Tampa Bay area, was caught before it could inflict harm

This is the world in which we live, unfortunately!

As the report makes it clear, this is merely the latest--and small potatoes at that--in attempts by terrorists and nation-states alike to hack into various utilities of their target countries.

It began "when the plant operator noticed his mouse moving out of his control":

The cursor began clicking through the water treatment plant's controls. Within seconds, the intruder was attempting to change the water supply's levels of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye or caustic soda, moving the setting from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million.

Creepy.

Coincidentally, Jill Lepore writes in a book-review essay in The New Yorker that "the infrastructure of our daily lives has never been more vulnerable."

In writing about Nicole Perlroth’s “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race,” Lepore discusses "zero-days":

[Nicole] Perlroth is interested in one particular plague—governments using hacking as a weapon of war—but her book raises the question of whether that’s the root of a lot of other evils. For seven years, Perlroth investigated the market in “zero-days” (pronounced “oh-days”); her book is the story of that chase, and telling that story, which gets pretty technical, requires a good bit of decoding. “A zero-day is a software or hardware flaw for which there is no existing patch,” she explains. Zero-days “got their name because, as with Patient Zero in an epidemic, when a zero-day flaw is discovered, software and hardware companies have had zero days to come up with a defense.” A flaw can be harmless, but zero-days represent vulnerabilities that can be turned into weapons. And, as Perlroth demonstrates, governments have been buying them and storing them in vaults, like so many vials of the bubonic plague.

After the state-sponsored hackers and free-wheeling lone-wolves are all done, the indigenous folk like those in Namibia or the Amazon might be the only ones who will survive thanks to their of-grid lives!