I am clueless on tech but between the hackers and internal incompetence I feel like the internet may be our next “black swan”. (now I guess it wouldn’t be a black swan if I see it coming but I digress…)
Insiders in the tech space… tell me your doomsday scenario. Could we get into a scenario where you best have a thousand or so in cash for food to ride a week(s) of disruption? Maybe something completely different?
EMP attack
Next
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A well known issue is our dependence on GPS. If GPS goes down we would be in a world of hurt. Losing position knowledge would be bad, but the real disaster would be the loss of the timing signal. All major electronic systems around the world rely on GPS timing. That includes banking and healthcare.
China invades Taiwan. Since Taiwan makes 90 percent of the high end computer chips and Taiwan decides to fight a shortage of these chips disrupts almost everything.
Sounds plausible and would give an excuse to jack prices everywhere setting off another stupid go-round with inflation.
I do have a fair amount of GPS knowledge. If someone could figure out wide-scale jamming that could be serious. I’ve dealt with localized jamming in the past few years and it’s an issue. Aviation was designed to deal with GPS failures. Jamming is something that wasn’t written into the books.
The world was going to end in 2000 due to the Y2K issues. People had supplies and money stashed away in case major systems failed. It turned out to be a big nothing.
I was working in IT on a mine site and spent the best part of a year replacing old hardware and software systems. At midnight I was sober and in the control room ready to take action. What an anticlimax.
Yesterday we could not get Google maps to work for about an hour. We are tourists in a strange town without any paper maps. It was very frustrating. As others have said losing GPS would have major safety implications.
I do have a fair amount of GPS knowledge. If someone could figure out wide-scale jamming that could be serious. I’ve dealt with localized jamming in the past few years and it’s an issue. Aviation was designed to deal with GPS failures. Jamming is something that wasn’t written into the books.
Isn’t there quite a lot of jamming happening nowadays around Scandinavia, most likely from the war in Ukraine? I seem to remember watching a video from the cockpit of all their GPS features disappearing for a period of time and then coming back on line, and needing to rely on their inertial systems to know where they were??
A well known issue is our dependence on GPS. If GPS goes down we would be in a world of hurt. Losing position knowledge would be bad, but the real disaster would be the loss of the timing signal. All major electronic systems around the world rely on GPS timing. That includes banking and healthcare.
https://www.gps.gov/applications/timing/
Aside from the timing signal and all those issues it would cause, there is a generation of kids that is growing up not having a clue how to read a map. My 12 year old was incredulous the other day when my wife and I told him we used to rely on map books to find how to get places.
People would be fucked without GPS.
A well known issue is our dependence on GPS. If GPS goes down we would be in a world of hurt. Losing position knowledge would be bad, but the real disaster would be the loss of the timing signal. All major electronic systems around the world rely on GPS timing. That includes banking and healthcare.
https://www.gps.gov/applications/timing/
Aside from the timing signal and all those issues it would cause, there is a generation of kids that is growing up not having a clue how to read a map. My 12 year old was incredulous the other day when my wife and I told him we used to rely on map books to find how to get places.
People would be fucked without GPS.
Just talking with a friend yesterday about a young employee they had who’s GPS went out when she was out on some sort of job and she had no idea how to get back to their home office.
In healthcare, and many other industries, ransomware is a huge threat. Change Healthcare is a recent example. This shut down the ability of physician offices (and many other healthcare entities) to bill for services through Medicare. May not seem like a big deal but cash flow is important to all industries.
Many physician offices rely 100% on EMR, so if this goes down, there is nothing about your history, meds, problem list, etc…that is available anymore (until the EMR issue is fixed). This could be a nightmare for both the patient and the treating facility
I think tech has made things so instantaneous (or near real time) that any disruption/delay becomes a doomsday scenario. But is it really such an apocalypse? As long as there isn’t a single monopolistic dependence and there is always an alternative of some sort to revert to, we can muddle through for a bit.
Crowdstrike was bad - but folks stranded at airports will eventually get to where they need to get to, and blue screens will comeback online. And while Windows is pervasive it’s good that there are other mature OSs running things (thank goodness).
GPS? Folks got around w/out it for ages. If someone can follow a GPS screen, they can learn a paper map. And maybe even develop their own cognitive map to know how to get around.
That cyberthing that affected car dealerships etc… Parts and transaction orders got delayed (not instantaneous like we’re used to), maybe using pen/paper systems
Y2k - turned out to be a big yawn.
*I’m in tech/data/analytics. My doomsday worry is a significant and widespread breach that devolves in a such a state that that real / fake systems become indistinguishable and there is no trust in what information is true/false to keep things moving.
Just talking with a friend yesterday about a young employee they had who’s GPS went out when she was out on some sort of job and she had no idea how to get back to their home office.
I was in Denver working a hail storm and had claims in three different areas. At some point I had the thought that it must have been very difficult for adjusters working large cities they weren’t familiar with before GPS. It would have been a big pain to have to plot out your path ahead of time using an atlas.
That being said, it might not be a bad idea for me to get an Atlas and keep it in my car just in case. My GPS went out on me recently while I was in Rapid City. I used my phone until I could get another one as I prefer to keep my phone for communication and rely on a GPS for directions.
A well known issue is our dependence on GPS. If GPS goes down we would be in a world of hurt.
So it’s a good thing that there’s more than a single GPS network. If two go down, there are at least three (four?) more available, eh?
Just talking with a friend yesterday about a young employee they had who’s GPS went out when she was out on some sort of job and she had no idea how to get back to their home office.
I was in Denver working a hail storm and had claims in three different areas. At some point I had the thought that it must have been very difficult for adjusters working large cities they weren’t familiar with before GPS. It would have been a big pain to have to plot out your path ahead of time using an atlas.
That being said, it might not be a bad idea for me to get an Atlas and keep it in my car just in case. My GPS went out on me recently while I was in Rapid City. I used my phone until I could get another one as I prefer to keep my phone for communication and rely on a GPS for directions.
I was coming back from Iowa last year, my car GPS sucks, if you are moving it won’t let you change shit, about 3 miles before the exit to head south somewhere around Valparaiso, IN my phone ran out of juice (I had been listening to music in the middle of the night and not paying attention to charge and the car doesn’t really charge it through the AUX port). Suddenly I had to choose between 3 or 4 upcoming exits because the car GPS wanted to take me the long way around. I chose poorly. No maps to save me. Buit I did get to tour some nice suburban neighborhoods while I found my way to a highway I recognized.
In healthcare, and many other industries, ransomware is a huge threat. Change Healthcare is a recent example. This shut down the ability of physician offices (and many other healthcare entities) to bill for services through Medicare. May not seem like a big deal but cash flow is important to all industries.
Many physician offices rely 100% on EMR, so if this goes down, there is nothing about your history, meds, problem list, etc…that is available anymore (until the EMR issue is fixed). This could be a nightmare for both the patient and the treating facility
Yup.
I’m a tech transactions lawyer who does a lot of work with companies either providing or buying licenses for EMR and other healthcare-related tech.
The #1 issue I fight over in those negotiations is confidentiality/data breach, cyber attack risk, and how much liability each party carries for the results of that.
15-20 years ago, it was almost a given that data breaches/inability to access the software was on the vendor, without a ceiling on liability for that. It was market that the vendor should make their product “safe”, and we mostly argued over risk of patent infringement lawsuits. Nowadays we’re all fighting over ceilings on liability resulting from bad cyber actors doing bad cyber actor stuff.
May not seem like a big deal but cash flow is important to all industries
Yes indeed. The amount of money that flows through these systems is remarkable. And for clients that are relatively small, it makes risk calculus hard. I have EMR vendor clients where they tell me “we do $80M a year in business, we have $10M in cyber insurance, we’re only getting paid $1M for this deal…but the customer says they bill $850M a year that will touch our platform and they want us to be on the hook for that if something goes wrong…”
Wow, I bet your line of work is fascinating. I can only imagine the back and forth discussions regarding this, and how busy you have surely become over the past decade.
Yeah nah. There is an army of nerds that would jump in and pull all-nighters to fix whatever is down. It literally just happened with the CrowdStrike problem.
Also critical end users, hospitals etc, have pen and paper workarounds. Well tested too, because small scale IT problems affecting one location are relatively frequent.
A well known issue is our dependence on GPS. If GPS goes down we would be in a world of hurt.
So it’s a good thing that there’s more than a single GPS network. If two go down, there are at least three (four?) more available, eh?
Again, it isn’t the navigation that is the doomsday scenario. You can tap into one of the other services or worst case use maps. The timing signal on the other hand is not as easy to swap. Lose GPS timing and you won’t be able to execute bank, stock or credit card transactions. Which you might not notice as the power grid, cell towers and the internet will go down.
A lot of countries and industries are building in hot alternatives, but they aren’t in place everywhere especially not in the US.