Modern systems are highly resilient and redundant in places where this is likely to pay off. Look at the power system. Look at the Internet. They are capable of working in spite of big localized failures.
The Internet is sometimes capable of working. It can go down and has; the Morris worm wasn’t even malicious (according to Morris). Designs for ‘Warhol worms’ which do the same thing in just a few minutes have been floating around since the mid-nineties—it’s just that botnets are more profitable. And even inadvertent mistakes can cripple lots of functionality.
“It has been proved that the scale-free network is robust to random failures but vulnerable to malicious attacks.”
In the real world, malicious attacks are just as valid a source of failure as randomness. (It doesn’t matter why the patient dies if he dies.)
Modern systems are highly resilient and redundant in places where this is likely to pay off. Look at the power system. Look at the Internet. They are capable of working in spite of big localized failures.
The Internet is sometimes capable of working. It can go down and has; the Morris worm wasn’t even malicious (according to Morris). Designs for ‘Warhol worms’ which do the same thing in just a few minutes have been floating around since the mid-nineties—it’s just that botnets are more profitable. And even inadvertent mistakes can cripple lots of functionality.
In the real world, malicious attacks are just as valid a source of failure as randomness. (It doesn’t matter why the patient dies if he dies.)
Neither Morris worm nor any other worms caused long term damage to the Internet.
Neither societal collapse nor any other economic failure caused long term damage to the Humanity.
This is also true, but Internet worms have particularly little effect of any kind, even for definition of “long term” being a “month or more”.