Technology

The US Army War College published a paper outlining the plan awhile back.

To start, the United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain. This could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the most important chipmaker in the world and China’s most important supplier.

First day of job training is to keep the one machine running that keeps the place from exploding.

West Taiwan friend. Lesser sounds odd when it's more populated and geographically larger. Though inferior sounds fitting

I'm assuming "disable" in this case is slightly more than just turning it off. I wouldn't be surprised if the building isn't left standing after it's "disabled" here.

This sounds more like a deadman switch.

I hope its a little better than remote access to disable. Internet access can be knocked out and cell signals jammed. Hopefully they've gorba deadman switch and disable things immediately in the event of an invasion.

This is entirely expected to any computer avid person tho no? Its like all computerized things today. Military equipment, trains, tractors, cars, web services, phones etc. Everything is backdoored and remotely controllable.

Techies: what if it bricks accidentally?

Manufacturer: *spinning the key fob* we didn't think that far, to be honest

A few moments later

Manufacturer: *proceeds to drop the remote and accidentally bricks everything*

Is it not obvious? To discourage Chinese invasion.

China wants Taiwan's technology and manufacturing. If they destroy it, China will gain nothing.

My understanding is that some of the benefits China would get from invading Taiwan is the control of Taiwan's world-leading semiconductor industry. So making it public knowledge that any invading force (i.e. China) would not be able to take over their production capabilities is a small deterrent.

Geopolitics aside, the technical architecture implementation of this mechanism is really interesting for me. I think over all, having extra ability to disable these systems would prevent US launching attacks against the plants — which could cause spill over local civilian injuries — but there’s just so many more things to consider.

Is it a dead-man switch style of setup, where if it doesn’t get authorization from HQ after some time, it will stop working? Or is it a kill switch style of setup, where they can remotely issue a command to stop operation? Because different vectors then come up depending on the securing method. For example: Dead-man switch might be tricked/overcame by turning back the clock, whereas kill switch might be circumvented by severing the network connection before the command could be issued (literally cut the underwater cables before they start the invasion).

How is the mechanism itself secured? If it is certificate based like everything else, then we’d have to worry about the certificate signing authority getting pressured into signing certificates by state backed actors.

Would really love to learn about the setup one day after all these is over, to learn about the thinkings that’s been done on such an important piece of … “infrastructure”?

Depends how its set up. So long as it's fully independent and disconnected from existing digital infrastructure it should be safer. It could be as simple as explosives hard-wired with a buried line running up into some bunker up in the mountains.