Imagine if all the hacks we've seen in the last year happened all at once. We'd be screwed.
I agree that things should be kept off the internet unless they absolutely need to be there, but realistically companies need to have internet connected services to be able to do business.
With this wacky invention known as a telephone. Merely three years ago I used a telephone to order tickets on the Alaska Marine Highway (a ferry service operated by Alaska) while driving through BC. No websites needed; it was utterly painless.
I'm not sure a perfect solution, but the standard of living was pretty good before the internet. Doing away with reliance on infrastructure for critical things like food processing, energy, and transit does not seem like a high price to pay to avoid a Thanksgiving turkey conundrum.
All these services are going to go unhacked, until they're hacked. And it's a complete skewed problem. We get minor conveniences for having them online. We suffer massively when they go offline.
They get by temporarily by doing things manually until they get their services back up, and they get compensated by insurance, but a few day partial loss of business pales in comparison to how much revenue they would lose by going offline. A vast swath of their current and potential users wouldn't even know they existed without them having an online presence. The only solution would be buying that knowledge from someone else such a travel agent. Even with that knowledge, it would be orders of magnitude more inconvenient to book and receive tickets, there would be a lot more fraud, and everything would move much more slowly.
> We get minor conveniences for having them online. We suffer massively when they go offline.
We get MASSIVE convenience by them being online and we suffer transient, relatively painless outages when they go offline. The most serious outage we suffered was that pipeline going down, and it was down for under a week.
