#module8

Buckland talked about several instances of human error that lead to a disaster. Some disasters mentioned were the Three Mile Island accident, Chernobyl, Bhopal and Challenger disasters. Buckland also briefly mentioned the Schlieffen Plan. I’d like to briefly talk about that here.

Back before WW1, Germany had a war plan. The main aim of this plan was to prevent a two front war. This was because of the convoluted system of alliances between various European nations.

Germany was part of the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy. The other major military alliance back then was that of the Triple Entente, consisting of Great Britain, France and Russia. The Schlieffen Plan was a plan that prepared for a war with Russia. This was because if Germany were to be at war with Russia to the east, Russia’s ally France would also likely attack Germany from the west. This meant Germany would have to fight a war on two fronts.

Because Germany would be outnumbered in a two-front war, it could not win the war via attrition. The Schlieffen plan was to take care of France. It involved sending most of the German army west to fight France, knock France out of the war then send the remaining army to deal with Russia. They would do this by bypassing the heavily defended Franco-German border. The German army would invade through Belgium and quickly flank the French army. The main aim was to quickly take Paris and eliminate France from the war.

WW1 started once Austra-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Serbia was allied with Russia and Russia subsequently declared war on Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary’s ally Germany declared war on Russia and France. Germany’s Schlieffen Plan was put into action.

The plan failed due to a variety of reasons. Firstly, Germany did not expect Belgium to resist the German invasion. Not only did the Belgian army slow the German advance, the invasion of Belgium brought Great Britain into the war further adding to the enemies that Germany had in the west. The Germans took way too long to reach France, and ultimately failed to reach Paris altogether due to British intervention in France.

Secondly, the Germans did not expect the Russians to mobilise so quickly in the east. The original plan expected Russia to be slow to organise and mobilise their armies. This was because Russia had recently lost a war with Japan when the plan was conceived. Russia’s quick mobilisation meant Germany could not commit all their forces to the western front.

The combination of both of these meant the Schlieffen failed to quickly eliminate France from the war. Germany did end up fighting a war of attrition on both fronts. It also did not help that their ally in Austria-Hungary was incapable of fighting on its own, and their former ally in Italy defected and joined the war as an enemy belligerent.

This video produced by The Great War (fantastic YouTube channel by the way) explains the Schlieffen Plan in more detail. It’s quite interesting and worth the watch.

She uses 2-step verification for her email account using Google Authenticator, and she signs up with new websites by using 'Sign in With Google', and for when she is at a computer she doesn't trust, she has generated a set of 10 one-use only passwords for her Gmail account.

TripAdvisor

Find an example of something that has been faked or spoofed. Describe how it was achieved, and how it could be detected or prevented.

The moon landing.

Lmao nah but the TripAdvisor is the example given. It was done by keeping the restaurant discrete and closed off such that those who had not been could never validate how bad it was and review it. This was done together with the efforts of his friends who helped craft genuine looking reviews, which altogether built up the status of the restaurant.

It doesn’t take that many to really build your restaurant up, since there’s not a huge population who will actually take their time out to review a restaurant. In general, most people review only if their experience has been REALLY GOOD or REALLY BAD; there aren’t many in-between. This is the case for a real restaurant, so for a fake one that can control their ratings and only have 5 stars coming in, getting to the top like that is quite easy.

The issue that allowed this to happen is that there isn’t a formal verification process for TripAdvisor. They pretty much took it upon good faith that it existed as a restaurant, despite it not being registered as a business or anything. There were no third party checks or multiple steps to becoming a legitimate restaurant on TripAdvisor. To prevent such things from occurring in the future, more rigid processes should be developed for validating and getting your restaurant up there. In fact, with the scale that TripAdvisor is, they should be able to afford having someone from their company come down and actually check that the restaurant actually exists and to taste their food and such.

Find an example of something in everyday life that could be easily faked and explain how it might be achieved.

Certificates and credentials on ambiguous things. You can easily develop your own course, and in the same vein as the restaurant create accounts and fake the reviews. If you make the course require payments, people will be discouraged initially until it gets popular.

DeepFakes

At the moment this technology is quite limited, so it’s not too hard to spot it by eye. However, eventually it’ll get good enough that will make it hard for the human eye to spot out. Although it remains to be seen a ‘perfect’ deepfake, perhaps we can spot the artificiality (but I guess that wouldn’t be perfect). The solution to that will then have to be to resort to machines to identify fakes, or analysis in other means, such as the binary data or formal tests like modifying real and fake videos for comparison.

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