reliance that's scary

[Roy M. Silvernail]

On Sunday 17 August 2003 11:43, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> I had the pleasure ca 1997 of figuring out how to browser-enable a
> multiton
> industrial machine (the kind with big red "stop" buttons, rotating
> lights on it when it was operating, and stickers showing various forms
> of dismemberment possible) once.  A password was the only
> access control.  I hope anyone who installed this understood firewalling
>
> and air gapping...

Don't count on it.  I know of a number of the type of machine you describe 
that shipped with default networking on NT 4 SP3, destined for some factory's 
LAN.  These are machine tool users, not IT grads.  Think they'll remember to 
air-gap the tooling?

They also shipped with explorer as the shell.  Guess they never heard of 
alt-tab.  Oh, and let's not forget... no virus scanner and no OS update 
policy.  "The old DOS system didn't need those extra costs!" ;)

The high point of one service call was catching the operator playing solitare 
on the control console of a very large and very dangerous machine.