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gishhyesterday at 8:11 PM2 repliesview on HN

Safety-critical systems aren’t connected to a MAC address you can ping. I didn’t move the goalposts.


Replies

josephgyesterday at 9:28 PM

Sure they are. Eg, 911 call centers. Flight control. These systems aren’t on the open internet, but they’re absolutely networked. Do they apply regular security patches? If they do, they open themselves up to new bugs. If not, there are known security vulnerabilities just waiting for someone to use to slip into their network and exploit.

And what makes you think buggy software only causes problems when hackers get in? Memory bugs cause memory corruption and crashes. I don’t want my pacemaker running somebody’s cowboy C++, even if the device is never connected to the internet.

AlotOfReadingyesterday at 10:38 PM

Individual past experiences aren't always representative of everything that's out there.

I've worked on safety critical systems with MAC addresses you can ping. Some of those systems were also air-gapped or partially isolated from the outside world. A rare few were even developed as safety critical.