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<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6852473" data-attributes="member: 177">With respect, unless you are talking about a hard-wired connection, &quot;outside&quot; doesn't have any relevance.&nbsp; Either the data comes with proper authorizations, or it does not.&nbsp; If they are as good as you suggest later in the post, no security measure will matter.So, your concern is reverse-Independence Day?&nbsp; The aliens can and will, without clear and obvious threat, set out to destroy us through computers, and they're able to do so based on one example?&nbsp; Never mind that it contains only limited examples of the many sorts of hardware and operating systems we actually use?&nbsp; This makes as little sense with computers as it does with biology - just as you can't, based on the example of one organism, design a virus that will wipe out all life on Earth, based on one computer you cannot create an exploit that will apply to all computer systems.&nbsp; Heck, this was a selling point for Apple for a long while - all the exploits on Windows didn't apply to Apple machines...Heck, some of those nuke launch systems are probably sill updated using floppy disks, with no network connections to the rest of the world!&nbsp; But okay, fine.&nbsp; Let us say that's the danger.&nbsp; This argues for us to send probes that have *no security measures whatsoever* on them.&nbsp; The aliens, then, will have no understanding of what form our defenses take.&nbsp; They'll use the usual buffer-overflow and other exploits we've known how to deal with for ages, and their ugliness will die nascent, never reporting back to its Martian Overlords.Then, they'll send their huge battle fleet, which, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, will be swallowed by a small dog.(Sorry.&nbsp; I just felt the thread needed a Hitchhiker's Guide reference, and this is where it fit in <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 6852473, member: 177"] With respect, unless you are talking about a hard-wired connection, "outside" doesn't have any relevance. Either the data comes with proper authorizations, or it does not. If they are as good as you suggest later in the post, no security measure will matter. So, your concern is reverse-Independence Day? The aliens can and will, without clear and obvious threat, set out to destroy us through computers, and they're able to do so based on one example? Never mind that it contains only limited examples of the many sorts of hardware and operating systems we actually use? This makes as little sense with computers as it does with biology - just as you can't, based on the example of one organism, design a virus that will wipe out all life on Earth, based on one computer you cannot create an exploit that will apply to all computer systems. Heck, this was a selling point for Apple for a long while - all the exploits on Windows didn't apply to Apple machines... Heck, some of those nuke launch systems are probably sill updated using floppy disks, with no network connections to the rest of the world! But okay, fine. Let us say that's the danger. This argues for us to send probes that have *no security measures whatsoever* on them. The aliens, then, will have no understanding of what form our defenses take. They'll use the usual buffer-overflow and other exploits we've known how to deal with for ages, and their ugliness will die nascent, never reporting back to its Martian Overlords. Then, they'll send their huge battle fleet, which, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, will be swallowed by a small dog. (Sorry. I just felt the thread needed a Hitchhiker's Guide reference, and this is where it fit in :) ) [/QUOTE]

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