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Chinese Government Accused of Hacking Congress
Alotau writes "Chinese hacking is getting some serious Congressional attention. Two House members said Wednesday their Capitol Hill computers, containing information about political dissidents from around the world, have been hacked by sources apparently working out of China. Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf says four of his computers were hacked. New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith says two of his computers were compromised in December 2006 and March 2007. The two lawmakers are longtime critics of China's record on human rights."
The U.S. makes a lot of money off doing business with China, something like $386 billion in 2007. Retailers like Walmart and Target, manufacturers of every description, and shippers all have a huge stake in U.S.-China trade, even though China enjoys a growing surplus with the U.S.
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that some mischievous hacking of Congressional computers is overlooked by the people who are supposed to care about such things. Where it gets more serious is the hacking of Pentagon systems that seems to be originating from sites in China.
China's government today is trying to juggle a growing nationalism among younger Chinese, a nationalism that is not friendly toward the West and the U.S. in particular, despite our close economic ties. They have fostered a hostile attitude toward the U.S. through years of propaganda, and this, too, the Americans have ignored in the interests of making money.
It will be interesting to see what happens come the day that China's huge internal market is affluent enough and their technology level high enough that they no longer need the U.S. as either a customer or investor. But in the meantime, it would be advisable for these Congressmen and other officials like Carlos Gutierrez (whose laptop was compromised during a trip to Beijing) to switch away from easily hacked systems like Microsoft Windows, and maybe keep their systems offline or only on a secured and firewalled intranet.
I also think that the U.S. government should not be using home computers like Dells running Windows. The hardware components are largely manufactured in China these days and who knows what evil back doors might be implanted in ROMs, akin to the compromised printers that were shipped to Iraq from the U.S. in the pre-Gulf War days.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Harassing a human rights critic is the kind of thing a nationalistic script kiddie moron would do; the Chinese intelligence agencies have much higher-value targets to pursue.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I work at a place that is routinely attacked. As someone else noted there's a load of hackers in china, most script kiddies, but when you work at a nice juicy target you get thousands more hits. Where I work I've watched the hack attempts come in and regardless of other posts saying "Oh, China's actual government would be more careful", most of the time they are pretty brazen, easily traceable and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. We tried to run it up the chain once and after a lot of complaining we got sat down and told:
"Even if we confront someone from the Chinese government they'll just look at us and deny it."
but we have the logs.
"They'll say we faked them."
but we'll let them pull the logs themselves.
"They'll say that we are staging the attacks to frame the chinese."
I didn't have a response to this.
"We've done this before. Don't feel bad. Everyone who gets assigned to monitoring thinks they will be the first person to prove the chinese government is allowing its employees to target us. You get used to it after a while. Next year come to the import meeting and we'll let you hear how we are obviously setting up insecure servers just to tempt moral citizens to hack us." said the PHB.
George Bush and his crew of incompetence have NOTHING on the chinese when it comes to flat out lying, ignoring evidence, and blaming the target of the attacks.
gnutoo and westbake are both the same person
You're replying to your own posts with sockpuppet accounts. The ONLY possible reason that you're doing this is that you KNOW you are utterly incapable of making a legitimate argument, and must therefore LIE to make it look like you have a shred of credibility.
You don't even do a good job of hiding the fact that you're cheerleading yourself.
You are PRO-Microsoft, far more than even you claim your critics are.
And the same things have been said about unpatched Windows without an anti-virus. About how easy it is for spyware and keyloggers to help steal your identity, about how they will ruin your OS install, about how they contribute to spam, slow down your computer, etc. Still, I run into unpatched Windows installs with no anti-virus will probably hundreds of types of malware on the machine. These people probably see their machine as insignificant, and think that the laptop they have will never get a virus, will never get stolen, will never have a security breach ever in it's lifetime because they are the *insert high ranking official here* or think that because they don't go to *insert website here* or use *insert anti-virus here* or even have *insert names of tech-support people and sysadmins* working for me nothing can go bad! Basically, it is the "it won't happen to me" syndrome.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Is it really all that difficult to conceive of disposing of the nation state? Now that we live in an age of a global society, what do nations do for us? ...
You are in much the same position as a cow or sheep proposing to get rid of farmers.
It's easy to conceive of getting rid of nation states. It's really hard to do it. The people in power raise, herd, milk, and slaughter the bulk of the population for their own benefit. Part of this process is culling from the herd those "rogues" who attempt to change the situation, before more of the herd starts following them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I know many native chinese and have even been to Beijing. I can say that you should take Mandarin if you want to learn more about Chinese culture or because you want to travel there, not because your afraid of China becoming a super-power. They're not super-powering anywhere yet.
The same cultural factors that cause them to ship lead paint based toys and glycol laced toothpaste affects them too. It's called corruption. For one thing, the whole place is an environmental disaster. For another, if you look at building quality there it's the same thing -- buildings in China that have been made 15 years ago look like they were made 50 years ago, with water stains and poor quality maintenance. A good example of this? Look at the school buildings that fell down in the earthquake, bricks that fell apart like sand, rotten supports, etc. etc. etc. Classic corruption at work. This also extends to their military.
Let's put it this way, in the U.S. we have occasional overt corruption of politicians and government officials (notably the current administration and their no-bid contracts to Halliburton in Iraq, etc.), and some institutionalized corruption such as lobbying, but it's nothing like China. Imagine politicians like Bush and Cheney, or the democratic congressman with the $90k in his refrigerator were the norm. from the state to local level. Nothing would work, everyone would be promoted due to loyalty rather than competence. In the U.S. there's been tremendous damage just from seven years of the current adminstration, but think about what the country would look like after 50 years of it: that's China. So yeah, if the Chinese were to suddenly change their culture and make it dishonorable to be corrupt rather than just get caught, we'd have problems but as it is China is going nowhere fast.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
They have apologized many times, however poorly, and Japan is not elegant in international relations.
Heh, you should watch Australia and Japan in our current relations. From my perspective as an Australian, Japan's doing pretty well and Australia's suffering from foot in mouth. The new Prime Minister of Australia just pointed out in defending the fact that it took him over six months to visit Japan (but only two or three to visit China) that "in the period since his Government came in, how many Japanese ministers have visited Australia? None." (Not a literal quote, but that's the same expression.) Sounded like a child defending himself.
Yet the Japanese expression of displeasure has mostly been made known via leaks and it makes it almost look they're not really that displeased y'know. Much more elegant even if they are unhappy. I think I'm quite displeased about how the Australian government's handled it.
Look out!
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
If you think SE Asians are not still pissed at the Japanese, talk to older Filipinos sometime. You'll get an earful. Of course people in SE Asia are not as emotional about the Japanese in WW2 - other than the Philippines, SE Asia was relatively untouched compared to northeast Asia. Taiwan had already been fully occupied by Japan for 50 years prior to the war, so most of the populace had been pacified and assimilated by then (my Taiwanese in-laws can speak Japanese much better than Taiwanese).
Japan is not just culturally popular in Taiwan. Its culture is a main driving force all over East Asia, without exception. Japan's plan to wait it out has worked the way it was supposed to - the older people who lived through or have heard about the war are dead or are very old. Young people today hold no such grudges, and slurp up Totoro stuffed animals just as well.
I don't see why it's surprising that Chinese and Koreans are still sore about Japan. To this day, Japan's high-ranking officials have paid both personal and state visits to shrines containing memorials to convicted WW2 war criminals. If a German chancellor was to humbly visit Hitler's birthplace, that would certainly be seen as an unspeakable act. If Nazi Germany was in power today, would you also suggest the Jews of the world to "forgive" them as well?
The interesting thing is - the latest round of negative feelings toward Japan was not instigated by the Chinese government (although they certainly didn't work very hard to calm their citizens). Conversely, the Chinese government would rather not stir up any raw feelings because Japan is now a much more integral trading partner. Ironically, it was the freedom of information which let the average Chinese read about these war criminal shrine visits in Japan, or when naive Westerners shoot their mouths off about China.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
It probably is that straightforward. XO Communications, the U.S. ISP, apparently supplies a 2.5Gbps pipeline directly to the U.S. from China The bastards are using this link to try and hack us.
I looked into this because my FTP server was getting the dictionary thrown at it (happens regularly to that and everything else). Using ARIN, APNIC traceroute etc, I kept coming up with XO local IP addresses with Beijing physical addresses.
Does anyone know anything about this link? Does anyone else think it could possibly be a security issue? I'm going to ACL their asses right off my network if they don't knock it off.
Most of the stuff on
The Yasukuni Shrine I think has always been a scapegoat. 2.7 million Japanese died in WWII. 2.46 million are enshrined in the Yasukuni Shrine. The shrine is, more or less, a shrine to all those that died in the war. And of those enshrined there, 1086 were convicted of war crimes. That means 0.04% of those enshrined there are war criminals. But yet, the Japanese should be apologetic to other nations for visiting the shrine? Or they shouldn't visit the shrine to honor the other 2,464,932 people enshrined there? Does it not just seem like an excuse to be angry at Japan?
And the biggest reason China and Korea hate Japan still, I think, is those governments have been the most proactive in spreading anti-Japanese propaganda, until recent years when relations have finally improved a little. It wasn't the freedom of the press that made Chinese people angry enough at Japan to refuse earthquake aid from them, it was because they, and their parents, and even their grandparents have always been brought up being told that Japan is evil, they've committed atrocities, and the country is vile. So now that China is finally opening up, it's very easy for a Chinese person to look on the internet and see that, in fact, Japan DID commit atrocities. But Japan has forgiven America for the atomic bomb, because the Japanese people haven't grown up being told that America is a spawn of hell that heartlessly destroyed two cities filled with civilians. Chinese, on the other hand, have grown up being told that, so when they see facts showing that such atrocities did happen, it just reaffirms their anger that they've been taught to have. And even with little to no propaganda now, the damage has been done, and the hatred will stay for the next 50 years until the current generation is old and begins to die.