When does Cyber Warfare become Warfare?

I think most of us would agree that hackers sponsored, aided, or working directly for a foreign government hacking into a nuclear power plant and causing a meltdown would fall into the category of "Act of War".

What about disabling the power grid, say a week or two long outage in the northeast? Causing a commuter train crash or airplane crash?  

How about hacking into the White House? 

What constitutes cyber warfare and when does it cross the line into warranting a "kinetic" response.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a kinetic response is good old fashioned warfare, i.e. blowing shit up.

One could launch a missile from a submarine off the cost, striking a nuclear plant, breaching containment, and pretty much ruin a good day and we'd all agree that is an act of war.  Is there a difference between blowing up a centrifuge with an iron bomb or causing it to self-destruct with a virus?

Now hacking the White House probably doesn't rise to the level of an act of war, more like the old school espionage days of breaking in and rifling through the desks and file cabinets, but the lines between cyber activities and kinetic activities are blurry and ill defined.  Where do you think they ought to be?

On a lighter note, pictured above is a Control Data Cyber 170 Mainframe, a system I used to work on many years ago.  The woman is changing a multiple platter disk drive, today... the equivalent of those four large disk drives would easily fit unnoticed in your pocket. The guy in the pink shirt is standing before a bank of tape drives and every eight minutes someone had to get up and change a tape... each reel contained over a mile of magnetic tape.

North Korean Censorship

Is Alive and Well in the United States

Sony cancels theatrical release of "The Interview" for Christmas.  Seth Rogen and James Franco star in the picture that centers on a hapless television host who is recruited to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. This is after the bulk of the country’s 10 largest theater chains — a group that includes AMC, Regal, Cinemark, Carmike and Southern Theatres — announced they would delay showing the picture or would drop it altogether.
Variety 

American intelligence officials have concluded that the North Korean government was “centrally involved” in the recent attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers.  “This is of a different nature than past attacks,” one senior official said. A cyberattack that began by wiping out data on corporate computers — something that had previously been seen in attacks in South Korea and Saudi Arabia, but not the United States — has turned “into a threat to the safety of Americans” if the movie was shown.  NY TIMES

For God's Sake

Have we become a nation of ball-less wonders?  Seriously, remember September 11th, 2001?  I say to Kim Jong Un, remember August 6th, 1945.  You and your nation are a blight upon humanity.  What's with the emblem anyway?  A pictorial representation of things you wish you had? Like food and electricity? Ah, the wonders of Marxism-Leninism in action.

Urbanization Project

And really, am I the only one to see the resemblance?