Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 507 posts

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#451

Post by EdSharkey »

If elaborate/sneaky/surprising real world modeling is the quora answer's mark of sophistication, (which I agree with personally), then I have another "most sophisticated in 2018" nominee. And the nominee is ...

Facebook's graph database!

Consider, Facebook has modeled:

* All our PII (face scans, key dates and times in our lives (birth to death), employment history, and on and on)

* All our activities (web, real-world)

* All our relationships/interactions (facebook, web, person-to-person, person-to-business, business-to-business, face recognition over practically all digital photos, chat, audio capture from mobile? what else?)

* Data appropriately tagged and categorized: Geo-location and a million other things

* Place information

* And then, the coup de gracie ... how all that data changes over the time dimension

And it's all searchable! A search of that database must be thrilling. You can know what's going on at every level of society at any point in time. You could quantify moods, trends, money, stars and governments currently rising and falling, etc. Consider the unholy power of that graph database, nothing else must come close! Sometimes, I want to get a job there as a data researcher just so I could query it.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#452

Post by noobermin »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #360
coldtea wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you really say that the second bit of code is more "complex"? Yes. Complexity in the sense discussed is related to the domain knowledge (including CS knowledge) required for the program to be written and work well. Else even a trivial BS program could be very complex, just sprinkle it with gotos and unnecessarily convoluted code...

This is such a powerful distinction that I feel it should help us rethink language paradigms. Complexity is not (just) the complications one can impose by construct or the involutions required of ones algorithms, it's the overall real world system your code addresses. Simple programs which are coded simply may address complex phenomena to complex ends--perhaps that's even the ideal?

Sure, I suppose you'd just need a good definition for complexity. Notions like computational complexity have clear definitions while what I think you're describing might not. Or may be it would require some thinking and be valid in some limited regimes of "real world" effects as you call it.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#453

Post by thaumasiotes »

csomar wrote: post #424
ordinaryradical wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a powerful distinction that I feel it should help us rethink language paradigms. Complexity is not (just) the complications one can impose by construct or the involutions required of ones algorithms, it's the overall real world system your code addresses. Simple programs which are coded simply may address complex phenomena to complex ends--perhaps that's even the ideal?

Most people perceive complexity as things they don't understand. In that case, complexity will be relative.

> Most people perceive complexity as things they don't understand.

I don't think this is true. For example, as a math teacher, I couldn't do a very good job predicting how easy or difficult students would find particular problems. But I could easily predict which problems would be easier and which would be more difficult. I could do that even though I personally understood all the problems.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#454

Post by masswerk »

asah wrote: post #379
masswerk wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to ask all those who lost their lives in any of the numerous conflicts. Only, because the big clash didn't happen (it nearly happened three times in 1983), this doesn't mean that there weren't any conflicts. E.g., the biggest air war in history, in Laos, even was conducted in secrecy, African politics is just a single mess, etc.

Please consider orders of magnitude - we really do live in peaceful times. Example: there's far fewer cold war deaths than from traffic accidents, let alone real wars. WW2 killed 3% of all humanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties The end of the Han dynasty killed a large percentage of all chinese people. For perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll http://asirt.org/…

Hm – Consider this piece (you may or may not appreciate the political perspective): https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...

In brief, it concludes that the US alone (there have been lots of conflicts without any manifest involvement of the US) has been involved since WWII in conflicts causing "the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people".

[Edit] You may also consider the ongoing war in Syria, which is not only exceeding WII in duration already, but also overshadows the total death count of the US in the WWII Pacific "theatre" (161,000 dead, including 111,914 in battle and 49,000 non-battle) by 500,000+ dead (last consensual figure was 470,000, issued by the Syrian Center for Policy Research in 2016).

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#455

Post by vertexFarm »

projectileboy wrote: post #230
vertexFarm wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the evidence we have, MAD has worked. Still here. Still no WWIII. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time. As best we can tell, nukes actually did end large-scale war. I would call that at least a partially mitigated disaster.

You're not wrong, but there were multiple incidents during the cold war where the US and Soviet Union came very, very, very close to a nuclear exchange, and it was only dumb luck (and sometimes the heroic actions of individuals who were in the right place at the right time) that saved us. We were lucky, and luck is not a plan.

The unwillingness of people to start a nuclear exchange is exactly the plan. In the examples you speak of, common soldiers and technicians refused to launch the missiles. It's noteworthy that the idea of a full-scale thermonuclear exchange is so horrifying that even soldiers who assume they are already dead and have orders to launch still refuse. I think that speaks a lot about the inherent goodness of humanity, but that's a different story.

I know it came very close, but the assumption was that it would come to the brink yet nobody would want to go through with it and begin open aggression. Seems dubious and risky, but once again it worked. And let's not discount the negative risk--a conventional world war with the Soviet Union, China, the US and Britain would have been so terrible.

With such a small data set we should still be dubious, but I don't know if we can consign it merely to luck. I think it was a good plan. Terrible publicity, though. Nightmarish. But so is war.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#456

Post by vertexFarm »

burfog wrote: post #421
vertexFarm wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the evidence we have, MAD has worked. Still here. Still no WWIII. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time. As best we can tell, nukes actually did end large-scale war. I would call that at least a partially mitigated disaster.

I think that weapons range, combined with either precision targeting or large numbers, gets that job done. Picture a world without nukes, but with lots of highly accurate ICBMs and SLBMs. The attacker can expect to be attacked, with the destruction being stuff like the Kremlin or Whitehouse or parliament building. In the days of WWII, an attacker could rightly feel confident that there could not be an immediate respo…

Maybe so, I have no idea. I think they'd just hardened bunkers and go to war anyway. But really it doesn't matter; the genie is out of the bottle, so MAD is really the only plan available. Can't un-invent the bomb.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#457

Post by csomar »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #453
csomar wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people perceive complexity as things they don't understand. In that case, complexity will be relative.

> Most people perceive complexity as things they don't understand. I don't think this is true. For example, as a math teacher, I couldn't do a very good job predicting how easy or difficult students would find particular problems. But I could easily predict which problems would be easier and which would be more difficult. I could do that even though I personally understood all the problems.

I don't think difficulty is complexity. For example, the bitcoin mining protocol complexity is the same but the difficulty goes up or down.

I'll attribute difficulty to the energy required to resolve a system. For example, pulling weight. The complexity of the action is the same. But the difficulty depends on the weights to pull.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#458

Post by rabidrat »

vertexFarm wrote: post #456
burfog wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that weapons range, combined with either precision targeting or large numbers, gets that job done. Picture a world without nukes, but with lots of highly accurate ICBMs and SLBMs. The attacker can expect to be attacked, with the destruction being stuff like the Kremlin or Whitehouse or parliament building. In the days of WWII, an attacker could rightly feel confident that there could not be an immediate respo…

Maybe so, I have no idea. I think they'd just hardened bunkers and go to war anyway. But really it doesn't matter; the genie is out of the bottle, so MAD is really the only plan available. Can't un-invent the bomb.

Actually, the bomb and its design and construction require so much tacit knowledge that we might be on the verge of uninventing it already.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230699

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1018881.pdf

http://public.lanl.gov/bsims/pdf/4S%20tacit%20knowledge.pdf

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#459

Post by agmiklas »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #360
coldtea wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you really say that the second bit of code is more "complex"? Yes. Complexity in the sense discussed is related to the domain knowledge (including CS knowledge) required for the program to be written and work well. Else even a trivial BS program could be very complex, just sprinkle it with gotos and unnecessarily convoluted code...

This is such a powerful distinction that I feel it should help us rethink language paradigms. Complexity is not (just) the complications one can impose by construct or the involutions required of ones algorithms, it's the overall real world system your code addresses. Simple programs which are coded simply may address complex phenomena to complex ends--perhaps that's even the ideal?

You might enjoy Fred Brook's essay "No Silver Bullet", where he distinguishes between "Accidental Complexity" (basically, complexity created by software engineers when implementing a solution) and "Essential Complexity" (complexity that arises because software is written to solve some real world problem and the world is complex).

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#460

Post by forapurpose »

bambataa wrote: post #389
forapurpose wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While my humble opinion is that MAD was effective, let's be careful not to infer causation from a sequence of events (the rooster crows and then the sun rises). And the events of 'MAD' and 'peace' are not in sequence: WWII ended in 1945. MAD wasn't an idea until the 1960s and not implemented in a treaty until the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, AFAICT.[0] It makes more sense if you remember that nuclear wea…

I partly agree with you but a less charitable interpretation is that we had a bipolar hegemony that prevented full-scale wars. Many regions experienced significant violence, often caused or abetted by Western powers that turned out to be less committed to democracy and human rights when they got in the way of power politics. (Edit - or other powers that barely bothered paying lip service to human rights) Again, I bro…

I agree. The reason I didn't go into the detail you did was that I just had to draw a line on the length of the comment, for my sake and for the sake of the reader. I'm glad you added your comment.
Post reply on HN