The Register pokes fun at claims that Chinese hackers were the real cause of the 2003 blackout.

In a passage that would do Bruce Schneier proud, George Smith lambasts the fantasy world of threat assessment:

“Officially, the blackout was attributed to a variety of factors, none of which involved foreign intervention,” reported the magazine. And then came the procession of private sector consultants, stating things were otherwise. The magazine’s report was lengthy, working through the logic that the truth of a thing is determined by the number of Americans who can be found to assert it. In another manner of speaking, if one can fill a room with bull, hearsay and gossip, there’s always a magic tipping point where it transforms into fact, like lead turns into gold when touched by the Philosopher’s Stone in alchemy.

To spend too much time arguing details is to be drawn into the deranged world of the American way of threat description. Absence of proof is not proof of absence, goes the slogan, and before you know it, you’re off to war.

A supercomputer at Los Alamos has broken the petaflop barrier.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years.