You’re Not Ready

When the lights went out across the Iberian Peninsula in April, everything ground to a halt. Scores of people were trapped in Madrid’s underground metro system. Hospitals in Lisbon had to switch to emergency generators. Internet service as far away as Greenland and Morocco went down. While the cause remains …

Google did not respond to a request for comment. In 2023, security researchers at Trend Micro got ChatGPT to generate malicious code by prompting it into the role of a security researcher and pentester. ChatGPT would then happily generate PowerShell scripts based on databases of malicious code. “You can use …

Around 12,500 miles above our heads, the satellites that make up the Global Positioning System (GPS) quietly keep the world running. A blackout would result in almost instantaneous chaos. “You would see traffic jams, a lot more traffic accidents, because transportation is going to see the first most immediate impact,” …

A quantum computer will likely one day be able to break the encryption protecting the world’s secrets. See how much faster such a machine could decrypt a password compared to a present-day supercomputer.

This may be obvious, but you also need to have a network set up before disaster hits, Meadors says. So, set up anyone who you might need to communicate with during a cell and internet blackout before it actually happens. And, due to relatively frequent firmware updates, you can’t just …