Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> The worst is that it undermines the actual Geneva Convention by borrowing its name to advocate something totally different

By "the actual Geneva Convention" do you mean one of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, or do you mean one of three previous Geneva Conventions that were predecessors of the First through Third of the 1949 Conventions?

> The Geneva Convention doesn't ask for "no fighting", but rather gives boundaries to keep fighting within "human-ish" levels.

As the article indicates, the new convention would parallel the protection of civilians in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 by protecting civilians from being targets of nation-state cyberattacks, not prohibiting cyberattacks generally.

Though I think a better model would be the protection of civilians in Additional Protocol I (1977) to the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

>As the article indicates, the new convention would parallel the protection of civilians in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 by protecting civilians from being targets of nation-state cyberattacks, not prohibiting cyberattacks generally.

Out of their six points four simply make cyber attacks harder or nearly impossible, one exempts civilian targets from attacks, and one guarantees government help in defense and cleanup.

I struggle to see much more here than an attempt from tech companies to prevent cyber war, and have them as untargatable combatants if cyber war st still occurs.

I think you lack imagination. Right now computer security may not seem like an essential scenario but consider a few of these cases:

1. Self driving cars getting hacked (and killing passengers?) 2. Stock market being hacked or retirement accounts getting hacked and losing data (we don't know how much money you had) 3. Election fraud

We're building a public infrastructure that is highly susceptible to security threats, meanwhile governments around the world only intensify their capacity to do inhumane things to this infrastructure (rather than building up the defenses).

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