Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

210National Energy Securityteen percent were expected to be detected. The current cost of computer crime inEurope is estimated at over three billion dollars per year, with the “average holdupof a computer” netting the white-collar criminal “a profit of five hundred thousanddollars compared with only ten thousand dollars for the traditional armedholdup.” 101 Evidently with central computers, as with centralized energy systems,sabotage and extortion can threaten commercial and even national survival.Security of data stored in computers is yet another worry. In one recent fiasco,the file of passwords to the centralized memory banks of one of America’s largesttime-sharing companies was electronically purloined. Its possessors gained completeaccess to the private files of more than eight thousand corporations. 102 In alarge computer system “it is virtually impossible for a user to control access to hisfiles” and to prevent “subversion of software structure”—unauthorized alterationor erasure of stored programs or data for purposes of embezzlement, spying, orextortion. 103 Every known attempt by competent analysts to “penetrate” and “subvert”a major computer system has succeeded the first time. In one test, systematicexploration disclosed seventy-six promising chinks in the computer’s armor. 104Thirty-five of these were readily confirmed, offering levels of penetration up toand including the option of seizing remote control of the entire computer system.One expert reported, “To my knowledge, no such attack on a ‘real’ system hasever failed. As an exercise, I just broke into my [company’s sophisticated] systemafter seven minutes’ effort.” Here too, centralized computers, like centralized energysystems, lend themselves to exploitation by the malicious.The response: “distributed processing”Rising concern over these vulnerabilities during the 1970s reversed theever-greater centralization of computing power. The leaders of the industry,both manufacturers and users, fully participated in the reversal. Major banks,such as Citibank and Bank of America, decided to seek as dispersed a computernetwork as they could reasonably achieve, putting adequate andautonomous computing power as close as possible to each user. IBM changedits marketing strategy to emphasize more dispersed systems that fail moregracefully. By the mid-1970s, the new conventional wisdom was thatThe solution…may be decentralization. In the past few years, advances in…technology…havemade networks of interconnected minicomputers a plausible alternative tocentrally oriented operations. At the same time, pressure from dissatisfied users of centralsystems has speeded the trend toward decentralization…[Decentralized processingmeets] an important need for more functionally oriented, more manageable, and moreflexible approaches to data processing problems. 105