Recollections of the war - part 1

[Prez]

A very good friend of mine when I was younger, had a proclivity for mercury. Incredibly toxic and dangerous to work with, but it was the closest thing to magic for a long time. Mercury is unique in that, it's a metal that's liquid at room temperature…but once you get it below a certain temperature, it turns into a Type I superconductor.

I'm not actually sure what his real name is, I've only ever known him as Bugman.
He used his mercurial knowledge mainly just to make cool levitating gadgets and gizmos. Some of the alloys he played with exhibited Type II superconducting properties, which is what first piqued my interest.

Naturally, I wanted to learn from him. The most important thing to find out was…just how the heck he made Type II superconductors so casually with early millennial technology and no money?!

Scientists have made Type I and Type II superconductors in the lab for years by this point. They knew the unique magnetic properties of both & how they could work together, but it just wasn't feasible to do anything with. Mercury by itself is too difficult to maintain superconductivity, since it has to be really cold. Mercury alloys, however, can be malleable + work at higher temperatures; which makes them perfect for superconductive machinery.

Imagine the surprise of all the world's greatest scientists, when they found out a hillbilly had been making Type II superconductors in his backyard & used them to create things like infinite fidget spinners. This is part of what I liked about him, harnessing such power without any malicious intent.

Once he was hooked up with unlimited funding, his gadgets quickly evolved into magnetic rail engines. Later on, his alloys would be integrated into aerial crafts and weapons. He really did not like the weapons part. I had to explain on more than one occasion, that it is not for us to decide what is or is not the just application of such technology. We needn't guilt ourselves if others have lesser visions. While we should never hope to use them, swords and shields are always a necessity.

They indeed became necessary, once it was found that our geopolitical rivals were also combining Type I & 2 superconducting metals in exotic ways and forms. None of them made a magrail engine though. They were too focused on weaponizing their alloys into (usually) railguns, terminators, drones, or other aerial craft that defied intuition. Lesser visions.

Nobody else thought about the implications of the magrail engine beyond the basic antigravity. It was called a magrail engine because you could project "rails" in front of your craft, that the engine in turn gravitated towards. Thus, there is no need for roads or runways.

Nor was there any need for inertia to hold us back. You cannot accelerate to the speed of light, because it requires infinite mass. So instead, you start at the speed of light and accelerate from there. Bugman's engines would ramp up from 0 to C in a Planck second, and then some. All while warping space around it so that someone could comfortably sip coffee if they wanted to.

"It's wicked fast" he'd say. I would concur.

By now you can imagine, we were clockstopping as soon as the first drones came out. Russia had hypersonic missiles, but it didn't matter. China had friggen terminators, and it still didn’t matter. Both of them had weird looking aircraft that could levitate and accelerate to ridiculous speeds, but it did. Not. Matter.

No matter what they pulled out or tried, they could never accelerate to C. Because they had lesser visions of war and supremacy, they neglected the novelty of something like the magrail engine.

After the North Koreans gave up on their war with Poseidon, they too turned their weapons towards America. They were also the first to give up in the war, after their rockets kept mysteriously exploding at their launch stations right before they tried to fire. Crazy stuff.

China, to this day, still maintains, that it meant nothing malicious when they named their military AI "Skynet" & that their AI "is different" from the movies because it's good. NOBODY was surprised when it was uncovered that China used Skynet to develop terminators. I think we were all just disappointed they weren't cooler.

Needless to say, when the terminators came out, they also kept mysteriously exploding.

Russia was embarrassed again, when their super-secret weapons exploded on the launch pads. By "super-secret" I just mean, really really fast missiles. All of them still slower than C.

The first part of the war played out mostly like that. Countries bringing out their weird and exotic weapons, that kept "mysteriously" exploding or failing. Everyone assumed we had aces in our sleeves, but since we showed up in t-shirts they couldn't figure it out how it was being done.

The "how", is actually quite elegant.
General relativity.

 

[Darby]

"It's wicked fast" he'd say. I would concur.

And it's "Fast! Fast, fast." too. If you're going to "borrow" a catch phrase from The Science Asylum you should at least give Nick Lucid proper credit.

I'm not actually sure what his real name is, I've only ever known him as Bugman

How convenient. Sort of like the convenience of IBM originally including something super special in the IBM 5150 but removed it prior to public release so another dream weaver could refer to it but which was not at all verifiable.

In all the time that you knew this person, all the intimate knowledge you have or him, all the advice you gave him...and never once did you ask, "Hey, ol' buddy, ol' friend, ol' pal - WFT is your name?" Riiiiight. Conveniently, we cannot verify the story.

We already heard about the Russia-China war 24 years ago. BTW: China can't invent it's way out of a wet paper tiger military let alone invent super secret weapons. Just like in Russia the Chinese oligarchs are in charge. They've gone so far as to steal the fuel from their ICBMs and replace it with water in some cases.

<Oh, Christ...China. How elegant. Maybe they read something in Physical Review circa 1965 and discovered that Extreme Type II Superconductors and mixed-state Pauli paramagnetism were well known and understood 60+ years ago. The true elegance is not GR, it is quantum mechanical involving the spin states of the electrons in the magnetic material.>

 

[Prez]

You seem like a pretty smart guy Darby, or at least like to think you're the smartest one in the room. I see it all the time.

In all the time that you knew this person, all the intimate knowledge you have or him, all the advice you gave him...and never once did you ask, "Hey, ol' buddy, ol' friend, ol' pal - WFT is your name?" Riiiiight. Conveniently, we cannot verify the story

Yes that's exactly what I'm telling you lol. I once went nearly a year with my neighbors thinking I only spoke german (I don't), until they had a german visitor they wanted me to meet. Then the jig was up. It happens. The guy wanted to be called Bugman, so who am I to pry? Maybe he identified as a bug.

We already heard about the Russia-China war 24 years ago. BTW: China can't invent it's way out of a wet paper tiger military let alone invent super secret weapons. Just like in Russia the Chinese oligarchs are in charge. They've gone so far as to steal the fuel from their ICBMs and replace it with water in some cases.

Probably because it's the truth. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran vs NATO. Those are the teams, and I can see I'm not the only one who has preached about this. Your lack of awareness and knowledge in the field of technology or geopolitics is also evident, because there is literally nobody in cybersecurity or the military that does not recognize China as the #1 threat. Heck, do some googling. China has been wrecking critical infrastructure and supply chains the last several years using hyper advanced tools, tactics, and procedures like firmware backdoors in fortiguard devices -> then using Living off the Land techniques (volt-typhoon) to conduct espionage and evade detection. Or the solarwinds supply chain attack that we're still seeing repercussions years later. All building up to the confrontation. If you think they're not capable, you're dead wrong. Don't just take my word for it.

The true elegance is not GR, it is quantum mechanical involving the spin states of the electrons in the magnetic material.>

General relativity is WAY more elegant than quantum mechanics. Even Einstein didn't like QM because of its lack of elegance. GR already permits FTL....all macro scale, no spooky actions needed. Elegance is definitely not "quantum mechanical involving the spin states of the electrons in the magnetic material". Time is just a part of space with the experience just a byproduct of entropy (which is really what you're getting at when you want talk about spin I think). Entropy + gravity causes spin == the experience of time. Overcomplication is what holds many people back--especially because you're never going to be able to reconcile QM with GR because of incompleteness.

Finally, you should know very well that there's always going to be some things you can't verify. I'd say you should just get used to it, but you probably won't like that. Since science is incomplete, there's no grand unified theory, and there's always going to be uncertainty. You'll never be able to verify what happened before the big bang, or the non-trivial zeros relationship to primes in the Riemann Zeta function, let alone "Which of these folks with unverifiable stories might be sprinkling some real truth in there & who is just trolling me?" It still doesn't matter.

This is fun though. I've lurked here for some time & see your responses, and was hoping you'd say something just so I could tell you how little you actually know + maybe be less than a jerk or a little more open minded. You seem old though so I don't have high expectations.

 

[Prez]

Welp, my comment on the article from 3/19/24 was deleted for being off topic. Others can google it if they're interested. I included the archive.org link and text in my comment for historical preservation here, because it was directly related to some of the things I laid out in my previous response back in January. Particularly that Volt Typhoon was called out as a major threat to US critical infrastructure, and that China / Iran are indeed major threats aligned and actively working together against the US.

Here's a few more predictions.

The teams for the upcoming conflict have always & always will contain at least Russia, China, North Korea, Iran vs NATO. Cyber warfare usually ramps up around this time, escalating further into large-scale active cyber-attacks near the beginning of 2025. Cyber attacks on vulnerable critical infrastructure in ways that people would normally not imagine--like poisoning city water supplies by increasing the amount of chemicals in the water treatment process. Or knocking out large swaths of the internet and comms by compromising the Level 3 (backbone) of the internet. Or severing the deep-sea cables, disrupting communications between the US and the rest of NATO. Or disrupting emergency services by strategically crippling hospitals and healthcare services). I've seen it all.

The free internet as we know today will always cease to exist, and will become militarized with security zones set up by countries. There's always a massive purging of data, leading to the loss of a lot of historical information. The internet dark times usually take place by 2026, but no later than 2028. The dollar usually crashes big time by 2025-2026, launching a worldwide depression for pretty much everyone but the countries that do not depend on US Dollars (i.e., not Russia, China, NK, or Iran). The dollar crashing usually occurs right before physical conflict really ramps up. Physical conflict happens after cyber conflict, hence the variance--but everyone should expect a brief but furious physical conflict no later than 2028.

Take all of this information as you will. There's really not much anyone do with it, other than just wait & see, or preposition yourself to be somewhere more rural within a few years with savings not all tied up in US Dollars. There's a pretty sizeable timeframe because of divergence, but one should expect almost or all of the things I mentioned above to occur within a few years because they're the most probable causal events in any universe containing WW3. This one is not really special or different, other than a few events that have no real bearing on escalating geopolitical tensions.

 

[RainmanTime]

The free internet as we know today will always cease to exist, and will become militarized with security zones set up by countries.

Hmmm. That first part of the sentence is logically incoherent. How can the free internet "always cease to exist" if the internet is currently free "as we know today?" You seem to often proffer such statements hoping someone here accepts them as true. It is quite difficult (in fact, impossible) to accept something as true when that something logically contradicts itself.

As for the second part of that sentence, the internet has always been militarized since its inception, which back then was known as ARPAnet. One could say the internet has never NOT been militarized. At all. Only that there may be islands of non-military activity going on within its expanse. But even that is difficult to establish as fact. This is because there is an inextricable link between military operations and technology development.

RMT

 

[Prez]

Hmmm. That first part of the sentence is logically incoherent. How can the free internet "always cease to exist" if the internet is currently free "as we know today?" You seem to often proffer such statements hoping someone here accepts them as true. It is quite difficult (in fact, impossible) to accept something as true when that something logically contradicts itself.

As for the second part of that sentence, the internet has always been militarized since its inception, which back then was known as ARPAnet. One could say the internet has never NOT been militarized. At all. Only that there may be islands of non-military activity going on within its expanse. But even that is difficult to establish as fact. This is because there is an inextricable link between military operations and technology development.

RMT

Howdydo RainmanTime, I don't think we're on the same frequencies. The "always cease to exist" is just a statement of fact, that we're going to see militarized zones on the internet in the wake of geopolitical conflict (no matter what). What you and I are interacting with right now IS the free internet. It's really honestly not militarized, and ARPAnet was just a precursor to the internet so I'm not sure where you were going with that. Also I'm guessing we have two different perspectives on what a militarized internet looks like.

You would know 100% if the internet that we're interacting on right now WAS militarized. Just like how Pornhub banned 8 US states from using their website, there's going to come a time when certain controls (such as country-based geo-blacklisting) are required by default, cross channel communications heavily monitored, lots more red tape just to start a website or get an SSL cert, harder SEO, actual data privacy laws & someone enforcing it (i.e., The Gov't), that kind of stuff.

 

[RainmanTime]

The "always cease to exist" is just a statement of fact, that we're going to see militarized zones on the internet in the wake of geopolitical conflict (no matter what)

No. You cannot claim something is a statement of fact that you cannot prove to be so. Moreover, you are ignoring that I highlighted a logical inconsistency in your choice of wording. If something, anything, has "always ceased to exist" then that wording prohibits us from experiencing a free internet right here and now.

It's really honestly not militarized, and ARPAnet was just a precursor to the internet so I'm not sure where you were going with that. Also I'm guessing we have two different perspectives on what a militarized internet looks like.

You would know 100% if the internet that we're interacting on right now WAS militarized.

You cannot just throw words around like that with a professor of aerospace engineering in the thread. I reckon, because of my age, profession, and past experiences in that profession, that I know a lot more about how the military works and the technologies they avail themselves of than you do. But that is just my guess. You are free to try to prove me wrong.

However, I have a question for you that you seem to be answering in the positive in your statement I quoted above: "If the military actually provided the funding to create ARPAnet, and they understood the value it would possess as a tool of information warfare, do you honestly believe they would wholesale give up on it just because the internet eventually became massively commercialized?"

The answer to that from anyone who works in military technology development and military intelligence is a resounding NO. Your last statement quoted above is correct, but not in the way you think. *I* personally do know 100% that the internet IS militarized, and has always been. Do you think China has not militarized it? (The answer is clearly yes, they have). And if China had militarized it, what possible reason could you give for the US military not having the internet militarized from the get go? Let me make sure you understand: Just because an average person may not identify any outward signs that the internet is not militarized does not, in fact, mean that is so.

So, you are going to have to do a much better job of proving what you say, rather than just throwing out words that you believe sound convincing.
RMT

 

[Prez]

No. You cannot claim something is a statement of fact that you cannot prove to be so. Moreover, you are ignoring that I highlighted a logical inconsistency in your choice of wording. If something, anything, has "always ceased to exist" then that wording prohibits us from experiencing a free internet right here and now.



You cannot just throw words around like that with a professor of aerospace engineering in the thread. I reckon, because of my age, profession, and past experiences in that profession, that I know a lot more about how the military works and the technologies they avail themselves of than you do. But that is just my guess. You are free to try to prove me wrong.

However, I have a question for you that you seem to be answering in the positive in your statement I quoted above: "If the military actually provided the funding to create ARPAnet, and they understood the value it would possess as a tool of information warfare, do you honestly believe they would wholesale give up on it just because the internet eventually became massively commercialized?"

The answer to that from anyone who works in military technology development and military intelligence is a resounding NO. Your last statement quoted above is correct, but not in the way you think. *I* personally do know 100% that the internet IS militarized, and has always been. Do you think China has not militarized it? (The answer is clearly yes, they have). And if China had militarized it, what possible reason could you give for the US military not having the internet militarized from the get go? Let me make sure you understand: Just because an average person may not identify any outward signs that the internet is not militarized does not, in fact, mean that is so.

So, you are going to have to do a much better job of proving what you say, rather than just throwing out words that you believe sound convincing.
RMT

Ah well, you see, I could say something like "I'm special" then, come November, Biden's bones could be paraded around again as the next POTUS. Military has had the funding for years. It's been funded. Do people really think some sub-contractors are out there needing $20,000 toilets or ceramic tea sets?

Also no. The internet is not militarized. Y'all don't know what a militarized internet looks like. This isn't it. People don't even know what it means to have a militarized internet, because it's all taken for granted. I'm talkikng about geofencing, realID verifications just to browse, etc.

 

[Darby]

The free internet as we know today will always cease to exist, and will become militarized with security zones set up by countries

Why would the military (US military, at least) go to the trouble of "militarizing" the World Wide Web (I'm assuming that's what you meant)? The US military has it's own secure militarized computer networks; Defense Information System for Security (DISS) and the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet).

ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. I was a student at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1969 when UCLA, UCSB, University of Utah and SRI went online with the four original nodes on ARPANET under a DARPA research and development grant. DARPA is US Department of Defense's "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency". It ultimately became the Internet of which the WWW is just a part. So the Internet, going back to the ARNANET period, was militarized from day one. The original intent of ARPANET/Internet was to provide secure computer communications between researchers at multiple universities, especially in the areas of nuclear physics and military technology and to provide a secure backbone for military communications in time of war. The WWW was just a bonus for the civilian side of the research.

So saying you can "foresee" a militarized Internet is a bit of a truism at best, trivial at worst.

 

[Prez]

Darby sir perhaps it would be beneficial if I elaborated more on what a "militarized" internet looks like. You and rainman seem to be defaulting to immediately thinking "US military" when "militarized" in the cybersecurity context has more to do with security zones, controls, and network trusts.

Demilitarized Zones (DMZs) have been a staple of networking and cybersecurity almost the entire time the internet has existed. They're special security zones that creates layers of security by strategically placing assets in a subnet that is designed to interface with the internet. The concept is that you can segregate things like internet accessible webservers outside your normal internal network, yet still manage it internally, and have it interface with the internet more securely. If an asset in a DMZ gets popped, it poses less risk and has less impact than a compromised asset inside the internal network.

Why would the US Military go to the trouble? Welp, again not the US Military specifically--but US lawmakers and other lawmakers in other countries across the world. They want to create logical security zones and layers of trust inside geographic regions, to limit the risk or impact of hostile foreign adversaries to carry out cyber-attacks in their borders. Once cyber conflict actually picks up, everyone will realize that not having more security in place leads to much greater monetary losses that affects GDP or peoples health and safety.

Right now, whether folks believe it or not, the internet is not that heavily policed. Anyone can register a new domain, privatize their information on the domain, spin up fake emails or use email relays to obscure their email, obscure their IP through public VPNs, engage with blockchains and smart contracts, create new social media accounts, etc., etc. The internet heavily favors cyber threat actors because of the lack of real restrictions. When it is policed, it's not the US military usually doing it, it's lawyers enforcing whatever laws or regulations they have (such as CFAA, COPPA, HIPPA, PCI DSS, etc.)

The US as a whole (taking the military out of the equation) is under-resourced and under-prepared to answer the growing cyber threats. Baseline security requirements for critical infrastructure sectors as well as small businesses has been virtually non-existent. Only entities working with regulated data are bothered to do anything, and only the minimum to avoid fines. Sometimes they make conscious decisions to break the law (i.e., Meta and data privacy) because the profits of breaking the law exceed the fines. Most orgs see cybersecurity as a cost center, instead of business enabler. Because of this, there are unbelievable security gaps out there, which are so bad that it's not an unfair estimate to say at least 1/3 to 1/2 of all US devices (laptops, servers, routers, IoT devices) are already compromised and used as part of botnets to carry out further attacks.

All of this brings me back to "what does a militarized internet look like?"
-Identity and age verifications just to create social media accounts like Facebook.
-Identity and/or age verifications to browse certain sites (such as Pornhub that's already happened)
-Internet connected devices must be registered. Non-registered devices are blocked at the ISP level by default.
-Minimum security controls enforced before browsing the internet (such as having active antivirus, encryption on the machine, etc)
-You have to be an authorized person to purchase new domains. Right now anyone can do it, and requires very little identify verifications. In the future, you'd have to go through brokers that collect more information on you for fraud prevention.
-Internet actions can have consequences. Section 230 shields most news and social media from lawsuits resulting from their words (i.e., trolls, misinformation, disinformation), and will eventually go away as liability shifts to the organizations hosting services.
-Open VPN services will either be outright blocked at the ISP level, or you have to go through additional identity verifications so they can whitelist you & deny everyone not on the list.
-Anonymizing services such as private email hosting, relays, public proxies, etc, become blocked by default unless the service is registered & you are authorized for that service.
-Increased civil or criminal consequences, such as fines proportional to profits, or minimum sentencing days for certain acts.

Just a few examples. Cybersecurity is my core subject of expertise, so feel free to ask me any questions as I can talk about it for days.

So saying you can "foresee" a militarized Internet is a bit of a truism at best, trivial at worst.

I'd say it's pretty trivial & doesn't take a time traveler to know what I say about the internet is true. The things I predict regarding the internet usually always happen because they're just natural progressions of a technology-integrated civilization. Just like how the early days of the internet was all HTML/CSS, MFA didn't really exist like it does now, and everyone was bright eyed with their geocities and AIM accounts. The natural progression was that security is considered as part of the design and development of services, and we're currently in the move towards security by default / security by design requirements already.

 

[Darby]

I'd say it's pretty trivial & doesn't take a time traveler to know what I say about the internet is true.

Thus we agree on this point. The "internet", as such, was a military project from the beginning. I defaulted to the US military because it was a US Department of Defense grant through DARPA that the network was invented, tested and deployed. The WWW is simply a side benefit of the initial program similar to microwave ovens being side benefits of the US space program.

As to Section 230 I also agree with you. The Section 230 protection has been misapplied to give civil liability cover to content hosting platforms who not so covertly have been acting as content providers. Content providers do not enjoy Section 230 protection.

If the platform host becomes an editor of the content, sets rules as to what can and cannot be released on the platform and demonetizes and/or bans certain providers because of their stated ideas they are no longer acting as a host - they are acting as a content provider. This idea does not extend to turning a blind eye to real and demonstrable criminal activity. The host has a duty to refuse to host criminal activity else they could b e viewed as a co-conspirator. But that's not the real issue, is it? The reality is that such hosting platforms are editing and restricting political communication, a situation where Section 230's intent is not to give them protection from liability.

 

[Prez]

Thus we agree on this point. The "internet", as such, was a military project from the beginning. I defaulted to the US military because it was a US Department of Defense grant through DARPA that the network was invented, tested and deployed. The WWW is simply a side benefit of the initial program similar to microwave ovens being side benefits of the US space program.

As to Section 230 I also agree with you. The Section 230 protection has been misapplied to give civil liability cover to content hosting platforms who not so covertly have been acting as content providers. Content providers do not enjoy Section 230 protection.

If the platform host becomes an editor of the content, sets rules as to what can and cannot be released on the platform and demonetizes and/or bans certain providers because of their stated ideas they are no longer acting as a host - they are acting as a content provider. This idea does not extend to turning a blind eye to real and demonstrable criminal activity. The host has a duty to refuse to host criminal activity else they could b e viewed as a co-conspirator. But that's not the real issue, is it? The reality is that such hosting platforms are editing and restricting political communication, a situation where Section 230's intent is not to give them protection from liability.

Agreed with all of your points as well. This might be a first that we're both in agreement on some things!