On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 12:22:21AM +0200, Arnt Karlsen wrote: > On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 19:24:56 +1200, cr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Never do it the easy simple way if you can do it > > the hard complicated way. ;) > > > > Incidentally, even the truck-on-the-line won't normally cause a huge > > death toll. Trains are remarkably crash-resistant things. If you > > want to kill heaps of people, an airliner's a *much* better bet. > > ..in the open, I agree, train impact survivors just escape into the > neighborhood or the surrounding terrain. Now, try that in a tunnel, > and then consider the common major metropolitan rush hour numbers.
True. But the difficulty of setting up a collision is correspondingly much greater. An exploit on the signalling system alone probably isn't enough; you'd have to coordinate it with a hijack of at least one train, and you'd have a job to get it done quickly enough to avoid someone noticing something odd was going on and cutting the power. Again, there are far simpler methods of inducing disaster: starting a fire, for instance, or using nerve gas, like in Japan. In fact, if you stood at one end of a crowded Underground platform and shouted "Nerve gas! Nerve gas!" you'd probably cause a fairly severe death toll as people panicked and trampled each other to death, pushed each other onto the track etc. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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