'Foreign Policy' Should Stick to its Home Turf

Foreign Policy has published some good features; this isn't one of them:

Although the newest oil rigs, which cost upward of $1 billion apiece, might be loaded with cutting-edge robotics technology, the software that controls a rig's basic functions is anything but. Most rely on the decades-old supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, written in an era when the "open source" tag was more important than security, said Jeff Vail, a former counterterrorism and intelligence analyst with the U.S. Interior Department. "It's underappreciated how vulnerable some of these systems are," he said. "It is possible, if you really understood them, to cause catastrophic damage by causing safety systems to fail."

Sorry, old chap, but "open source" and "security" are orthogonal, independent axes. And this, from the same article:

"The worst-case scenario, of course, is that a hacker will break in and take over control of the whole platform," Jaatun said. That hasn't happened yet, but computer viruses have caused personnel injuries and production losses on North Sea platforms, he noted.

suggests we're talking about *Windows* systems, not "open source". So, pretty much 100% wrong. (Via @cdaffara.)

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