from the old-technology-never-fails dept.
Ars Technica reports that the government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which are used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."
Would upgrading the systems make them more safe and reliable, or a liability?
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Sunday November 20 2016, @10:43AM
The quoted text is not from the article. We need to be careful of this, as it attributes things to the original source that may not be there.
Papas Fritas writes a great submission, but one of the things that he does is takes individual lines out of the article, and works them into a summary that he writes. In this instance, we would let him use the "" to use the quotes in the summary without going into a blockquote becasue ti is part of the summary, not just used as a quote for the article.
For a well written summary like these usually are, it may not be necessary to add the line at the bottom. Though it can be added as [Ed Note: Would upgrading the systems make them more safe and reliable, or a liability?]