I love Smedley Butler! Good link. Always wiki - the business plot to see how corporate america tried to get Smedley Butler to lead a military coup of mercenaries against the US government during FDR's presidency.
It's testing whether the virtual reality experience can 'prime' people for a behavior change. It was intentional priming and I don't see an inherent flaw there. The experiment does sound weak though. How reliable is the control on the amount of spilled, how accidental it seemed, and the timing for each group who had different events preceding the spill? Also, what does the behavioral difference matter if they do not carry that behavior beyond the single experiment or if the ones exhibiting that behavior were already more paper towel conscious without the VR. I find the article really weak because of a lack of substantial examples, and the examples given lack detail.
The paper offers VERY strong statistical evidence of vote fraud of a specific type occurred in Romney's favor in the 2012 primary. It seems that almost without a doubt, wide spread vote-flipping (the type of fraud analyzed in this paper) was in play and had large impacts on the primary, on the order of hundreds of thousands of votes and to the extent of causing the outcomes to differ (meaning the fraud caused Romney to win in places he maybe wouldn't have). The fraudelnt votes have compounding effects on the election that go beyond the flipped votes because of momentum loss effects on candidates election campaigns who were losing (but shouldn't have). Votes were being flipped from Santorum and Ron Paul to Mitt Romney. To a lesser extent votes were also flipped from Newt Gingrich. Other types of fraud were considered beyond the scope of the paper, such as ballot injection or vote removal.
Thank you. I know that feel. As for the OP : it's probably Russia, pretending to be Chinese hackers working out of North Korea. Destabilization indeed. North Korea's 1000 IP internet (seriously, their whole country, USA has almost 1billion IPs) was shut down for a long time recently. Things are moving! Speculate! Speculate! Speculate!
Seems to me, an insider wouldn't need to "breach the air gap". Quite literally they could just walk over to the controls.
So defending against the disgruntled employee, or impostor employee, armed invading non-employees,...that should be the problem realm for onsite security and management, not software designers.
But yes, you're right. That is baffling. People are fcking terrible with computers, and for most of the roles they shouldn't have to be more competent. The controls should be about as flexible as an atm machines user interface.