WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILIY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #451: SYSTEM FRAGILITY (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 This summer, in the space of a week, two episodes shook the sleep of

technocracies around the world and materialized the dreams of those who
have never stopped fighting them. ---- From July 18 to 21, global air
traffic suddenly collapsed (on Saturday July 20 alone, 6,855 flights
were "officially" canceled and another 50,000 suffered major delays),
dragging other sectors with it, from railways to banking, from
supermarkets to hospitals, to the automobile industry, with damages
amounting to tens of billions of dollars. A banal computer crash, due to
a corrupt file in the update to the Windows security software called
"CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor", quickly turned into an unprecedented disaster.

Five days later, on the eve of the opening of the Paris Olympic Games,
rudimentary incendiary devices, placed at strategic points on three of
the four main high-speed rail lines, sent the French rail system into a
tailspin, stranding over a million travellers.

These are two events of different nature, but united by the sudden
collapse of completely automated computer networks governed by
artificial intelligence, which have surprised the many catastrophists,
even among anarchists, who, foreseeing the unconditional surrender of
humanity in the face of new technologies, have so far reacted in two
opposite and specular ways: by totally renouncing the fight against new
technologies or by attacking them head-on, in an ill-advised and
suicidal manner

Yet extreme events such as those that occurred at the end of July, and
others that are repeated daily with less devastating effects, are there
to demonstrate the extreme fragility to which the global computer system
has reached and the real possibility that one has of jamming it, by
infiltrating it or conditioning it from the outside, with relatively
simple tools.

It is clear that this system, as it becomes increasingly immaterial and
alien to any form of human intermediation, encounters increasing
difficulties in dealing with unforeseen situations, restoring its
functionality after a computer block and finding immediately practicable
alternatives to it. Furthermore, the more the system becomes
centralized, the more difficult it is for it to intervene at the various
territorial levels to mitigate any disruptions and cushion the damage.

The immediate and universal propagation of the computer chaos of last
July finally signals another important criticality, linked to the very
essence of artificial intelligence. Built on the example of human neural
networks, even the artificial ones, interfacing with each other, when
they are hit or host defective elements, replicate them, with a chain
effect, changing the entire system.

Taking advantage of the defects inherent in it, it is therefore possible
to wedge oneself inside it, sabotage it or, even better, reprogram it to
serve free and supportive communities. Let's equip ourselves.

Natale Musarra

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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