naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
In my tech career I've always treated monitors that have lost signal with the same priority as the monitored value exceeding some critical bounds. The idea being that without signal, the monitored value very well could be in a critical state, and loss of signal itself could be caused by some greater issue.
I have no military experience. Does the military not do something similar? For example, a lost camera feed must be treated as an attack until proven otherwise.
To support your point from an IT perspective, at a previous job, the server monitoring system malfunctioning is what tipped me off to a ransomware attack being triggered. Of course, as with anything this has to be calibrated so there aren't so many false positives that alerts or downtime is ignored, but an otherwise robust system going down for seemingly no reason should arouse suspicion.
I'd be curious to see a timeline of the entire event. Maybe they were able to time it quickly enough that the people monitoring these things didn't have a proper chance to respond before the para-gliders were on top of them.
The failure rate on, say, CCTV cameras is high enough that it’s not tenable.
Source: my manager was assigned to Afghanistan as a surveillance contractor. He noted that they had to run the cables between cameras at the top of the walls, or rats would chew them overnight. And they’d still try their best to get at the anchor points.
The whole point of running a surveillance system is to freak out when something goes wrong, even if it's rats 99.9% of the time. We have a burglar alarm at our summer cabin and so far it has been triggered only by power loss or by one of the family members tripping it because the were deep in their thoughts. I am sure it's the same for everyone else in the area and a sign that says "This home is protected by Unity Security Services" is enough of a deterrent. But the deterrent only works if you actually know that if you trip the alarm, the patrol will be there quicker than you can get that TV over the fence, even if 99% of the time they are met by the embarrassed owner who really had to take a dump pronto.
Or take fire drills. Can you imagine how terrible it is to walk all the way from the 70th floor of your skyscraper after you've sprained your ankle jogging? You need to find that weird-looking wheelchair with grippy runners, find someone willing to push it down one hundred and thirty eight flights of stairs, it's always raining when there's a fire drill because why wouldn't it, and then you have to limp back to the elevators and explain to your boss why your report is overdue. You sprain your ankle on September 10th, 2001 and limp to work the next day.
That's a fine theory, but it goes against human nature to expect people to not detect patterns like: each time I investigate, it turns out to be a rat. So you then need a mechanism to prevent people from acting normally, which is a hard problem to solve.
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Notes -
In my tech career I've always treated monitors that have lost signal with the same priority as the monitored value exceeding some critical bounds. The idea being that without signal, the monitored value very well could be in a critical state, and loss of signal itself could be caused by some greater issue.
I have no military experience. Does the military not do something similar? For example, a lost camera feed must be treated as an attack until proven otherwise.
To support your point from an IT perspective, at a previous job, the server monitoring system malfunctioning is what tipped me off to a ransomware attack being triggered. Of course, as with anything this has to be calibrated so there aren't so many false positives that alerts or downtime is ignored, but an otherwise robust system going down for seemingly no reason should arouse suspicion.
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I'd be curious to see a timeline of the entire event. Maybe they were able to time it quickly enough that the people monitoring these things didn't have a proper chance to respond before the para-gliders were on top of them.
More options
Context Copy link
The failure rate on, say, CCTV cameras is high enough that it’s not tenable.
Source: my manager was assigned to Afghanistan as a surveillance contractor. He noted that they had to run the cables between cameras at the top of the walls, or rats would chew them overnight. And they’d still try their best to get at the anchor points.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work
The whole point of running a surveillance system is to freak out when something goes wrong, even if it's rats 99.9% of the time. We have a burglar alarm at our summer cabin and so far it has been triggered only by power loss or by one of the family members tripping it because the were deep in their thoughts. I am sure it's the same for everyone else in the area and a sign that says "This home is protected by Unity Security Services" is enough of a deterrent. But the deterrent only works if you actually know that if you trip the alarm, the patrol will be there quicker than you can get that TV over the fence, even if 99% of the time they are met by the embarrassed owner who really had to take a dump pronto.
Or take fire drills. Can you imagine how terrible it is to walk all the way from the 70th floor of your skyscraper after you've sprained your ankle jogging? You need to find that weird-looking wheelchair with grippy runners, find someone willing to push it down one hundred and thirty eight flights of stairs, it's always raining when there's a fire drill because why wouldn't it, and then you have to limp back to the elevators and explain to your boss why your report is overdue. You sprain your ankle on September 10th, 2001 and limp to work the next day.
That's a fine theory, but it goes against human nature to expect people to not detect patterns like: each time I investigate, it turns out to be a rat. So you then need a mechanism to prevent people from acting normally, which is a hard problem to solve.
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