Those who thought stealth warships were the stuff of Bond-movie fiction should think again: the BBC reports that the Swedish Navy is about to take delivery of a new and stealthy corvette, the Visby, with a carbon-fibre hull designed to cut its radar signature by 99 percent. The Visby is controlled by "state-of-the-art computers using a Windows NT operating system", according to the BBC. The Swedish Navy denied that the choice of software would leave the ship vulnerable to script kiddies: one of the designers said, "I am not an expert in computer security but we have focused a lot on that and this ship has a lot of firewalls and clever ways of avoiding [being hacked]." Assuming that nobody has been silly enough to link the ship's innards to an internet chatroom, Sneak agrees that land-lubbing hackers should be the least of the crew's worries. More unnerving is what will happen if and when the Swedes stumble over a show-stopping bug. The ship is not due to enter active service until January 2005, but Microsoft is adamant that it will halt all support for Windows NT at the end of this year. Perhaps someone should tell the Swedes...

10 Jun 2004