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Vast Electronic Spying Operation Discovered
homesalad writes "Researchers in Toronto have discovered a huge international electronic spying operation that they are calling 'GhostNet.' So far it has infiltrated government and corporate offices in 103 countries, including the office of the Dalai Lama (who originally went to the researchers for help analyzing a suspected infiltration). The operation appears to be based in China, and the information gained has been used to interfere with the actions of the Dalai Lama and to thwart individuals seeking to help Tibetan exiles. The researchers found no evidence of infiltration of US government computers, although machines at the Indian embassy were compromised. Here is the researchers' summary; a full report, 'Tracking "GhostNet": Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network' will be issued this weekend." A separate academic group in the UK that helped with the research is issuing its own report, expected to be available on March 29. Here is the abstract. They seem to be putting more stress on the "social malware" nature of the attack and ways to mitigate such techniques.
The U.S. and other governments have been doing things like this for years...
Unless I missed it, I don't see Windows mentioned...but I'm going to go out on a limb here and figure the targeted OS is Windows.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Im wondering how many posts here are submitted on behalf of the Chinese Government?
They can join and influence our conversations but we can never join theirs..
I would guess that the Russian crooks are doing it today with very targeted attacks. We just have not discovered it, or if discovered the financial institutions attacked have covered it up.
You can't bitch slap China. China owns the USA to a large extent. They could bankrupt the USA.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Yeah, it's definitely the government and big business. It couldn't possibly be hundreds of millions of Americans spending hundreds of billions of dollars, demanding cheap products made in China.
Maybe not
Sanctions against China are way overdue. Our gov't and big businesses are just feeding that monster.
That won't happen until (and if) we get our own manufacturing base back on track and can wean ourselves off the Chinese tit of cheap imports. That, or grow some balls and raise the tariff structure to prevent the destruction of our remaining domestic industries. I don't see that happening in the near future: the Feds are too corrupt at this point and don't really care about our future (or even, I'm convinced, understand why a dependent cannot ever be a truly free nation.)
Right now, any noises we make towards sanctions are just that: noise. All they have to do is threaten to send fifty or sixty million "refugees" here and that's that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It would destroy their economy to do so... Reminds me of a quote about the definition of allies being two nations with hands so deep in each other's pockets that they cannot fight.
China does not have to get anything it owns to pwn you. They just have to stop buying your treasury bonds and you'll go down in a blink.
If China stops buying our treasury bonds, they won't be able to support their export economy. Sure, they could destroy us economically, but they would fare no better. It's economic MAD.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
That is only happening because america's excessively strong intellectual "property" dogmatic bullshit prevents real manufacturing taking place on american soil (because you get immediately sued into the ground by vampiric lawyers). The best way to compete with china is to break the WIPO propaganda machine (the chinese sure as hell aren't stupid enough to pay more than lip service to western intellecutal monopoly laws), and reestablish independent american manufacturing - which you do by weakening patent recognition. The perennial solution offered by already-rich-and-wanting-to-stay-that-way "captains of industry" of strengthening the patent system is exactly the wrong thing to do, a "beatings will continue until morale improves" solution.
the abstract mentions that the attack was done using malwares. Firstly, I expected Chinese hackers (read govt.) smarter than this.
Considering how effective it was, why use a different technique? I mean if they get something really super-hot, they would save it for more critical times. Until every copy of Windows is patched, firewalled, run thru Tor, buried in peat and recycled as firelighters, why bother?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why exactly you think they will leave the non-windows untouched?
Eclipse PDE and Me
the abstract mentions that the attack was done using malwares. Firstly, I expected Chinese hackers (read govt.) smarter than this.
The bulk of Chinese intel is heavily distributed. The world's largest families don't need to rely on 007 agents; they can aggregate huge quantities of data by getting observant volunteers from the chinese diaspora to send bits of info back home through regular channels, like aunt Ping or even uncle James. It's so distributed it doesn't look like spying, and it isn't really, in the traditional sense.
This has driven counterintelligence agencies in 'western' democracies and republics to distraction. There are hardly any spooks to catch, mainly just a giant global gossamer net of informers, and enormous compiling and analysis operations in China. The 'agents', who are barely agents if at all, have strong deniability and can always fall back on complaints of harassment due to ethnic targeting. (Google the issue, it's amusing.)
I think it's brilliant, even if wholly dependent on the chinese sense of family ties. A malware attack is a similar approach: it doesn't look like the work of spies, at first, and it's broadly distributed. So, it's plausible that it could be a chinese intel operation, just from the M.O.
Damn those pesky terrorists
With their 3 million troops, 860 warships [...]
So they're going to pile ~3,500 troops per warship, cross the entire Pacific Ocean, and launch some kind of amphibious assault against the continental US? We had a hard enough time crossing the English Channel.
[...] 60 submarines, 400 nuclear missiles and 1400 fighter aircraft.
A submarine isn't capable of taking territory. Fighter jets can't make the 10,000 mile round trip. And nuclear missiles are a death sentence for us both.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
That isn't how treasury bonds work. There is no "call in debt" they are Bonds that are not instantly redeemable. Ten Year Bonds gets paid off in Ten years etc.
All they can do is attempt to sell all their bonds on the open market and destroy their value. In that case they cut off their onw nose to spite themselves.
Windows is much more prevalent and the low hanging fruit. I don't think Mac and Linux will be totally ignored, but the bulk of the effort will go where the bulk of the target are, and in a normal office environment that means Microsoft Windows, Office and Internet Explorer.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It is definitely not only China that employs some monitoring techniques on its citizens' Skype accounts. Last year during Myanmar's Saffron Revolution, my Burmese roommate organized information sessions and candle light vigils on our small, liberal arts school's campus, taking care to remain anonymous or using my name as a proxy for his actions. The only Burmese contact he had at the time was Skyping with his ex-girlfriend, a student at a nearby liberal arts school who organized protests of greater scope on her campus. After about 3 days he mysteriously received a call from his mother who sounded scared (remember, most non-satellite phone lines were all but taken down during the protests) assuring him that she was OK but he needed to stop everything he was planning on campus. My roommate had no choice but to stop his involvement in the protests.
Uhhhh - the Chinese are smarter than that. They know they can't come over here and take what they want using military power. That is the very reason they are attacking us asymmetrically. Google around for Assasin's Mace. China has been at war with the US for years already, and the US is to stupid to know it, let alone defend itself. But, Sun Tzu was more akin to the Communist Chinese than to any Americans, so they understand him better than we do.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Hi. This is reality calling, ding-dong. If you increase tariffs against China, you will (a) immediately increase the prices of all goods, (b) you will seriously increase your tax rates, because your government will no longer be able to fund its debt by selling its Treasuries to China (because China will have no more greenbacks coming in). You won't have a domestic industry to take up the slack, because you will have destroyed domestic demand. Seriously, buy a copy of the Wealth of Nations, for the love of God. Oh, not to mention the risk of provoking a war with China; and if you think that's going to be an easy fight, I have more bad news for you.
[FUCK BETA]
Errrr, you're about half right. Stupid people do demand and buy the cheapest thing they can find, even if it's melanine laced. So, yes, they are at fault for not recognizing or demanding quality. On the other hand, government and big business has been actively exporting American jobs for quite a long time now, along with American technology, American money, and American education. Yeah, the idiot "consumer" takes his share of the blame, but the coordination comes from higher up. Who was it, exactly, that gave China it's "most favored trading partner" status? Oh yeah, that same traitor who sold missile technology to China, later sold to N. Korea, then exported to the mideast for use against Israel. Hmmmmmmm.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Do you assume he arranges all of his international trips and conferences sitting cross-legged on the side of a mountain?
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
Uhhh, Utopia is just a dream. In the year 25,000 SOMEONE is going to have to dig ditches. And, wipe baby's asses. And, cook dinners. And, manually move stuff around. What's more, if we ever DO develop robots to the point that we rely on them to do everything for us, we will be joining the Elves and the Atlanteans in the list of by-gone races. Maybe the Monkeys will learn from our mistakes? Unless, of course, the robots just take over for themselves.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
And keeping that work in China signals to all Americans that "you will not be able to earn a living doing mindless work".
Presently, a lot of Americans are laboring under the delusion that they should somehow get a house, car, TV, medicine, and internet in exchange for installing wingnuts all day on an assembly line.
High-sounding but irrelevant verbiage having no bearing on the facts. I mean, how grandiose you are in dismissing one simple fact: working our manufacturing economy was how Americans managed to have a standard of living envied by most of the world. How do you think wealth is created? By magic? Hardly: it's by building and selling things to other countries, it's called trade. The fact is, we've been doing a lousy job of that for the past thirty-odd years and that's why our standard of living is dropping and unemployment is increasing. Suppose we took your idea to its logical conclusion, and ended up with an entirely automated production system with no need for people at all. We'd all be unemployed at that point. No thanks. Fact is, there are millions upon millions of people that are perfectly happy installing wingnuts for a living, and there's not a goddamn thing wrong with that. Sure, in your idealized world we'd all live up to our "full potential" (whatever that is) but the reality is, most people are all they're ever going to be.
Open your eyes, and dispense with the notion, nay, the fiction, that a nation can be an industrial superpower without the industry. People with blinders on call that a "service economy" but it's really a synonym for "third world hellhole." Now, it may be that you're willing to live in some socioeconomic armpit (my girlfriend came from one: I could let her tell you what that means) but I'm not. Let me tell you, I've spent thirty years as an engineer working in our industrial sector, and we need it.
China may be willing to accept pollution (for now) but that doesn't mean that you must accept pollution in order to have an industrial base. We cleaned up our act and still managed to become a superpower. So can they, and eventually the cost of Chinese-made products will increase to reflect that. So the question is: will we still be around, or will we be just another third-world country ripe for the plucking?
You decide. But at this point in history, there's only one way to create wealth, and you don't do it by not working. Robots may be more efficient at manufacturing some products than human beings, but keep firmly in mind that civilization does not solely revolve around manufacturing trade goods efficiently. People have to figure in there somewhere. That's China's biggest problem right now: their people are little better than organic robots. In any event, if you look at efficiency as the only reason for industry, then you're no better than the typical American CEO slimeball that sold his own people down the river for a quick buck.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Perhaps, next time, you might not want to impose sanctions on the government that holds by far the largest share of the US debt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Foreign_Holders_of_United_States_Treasury_Securities-percent_share.gif
You impose sanctions, they call in that debt. And who else do you really think is going to loan you the money to pay that back?
The US/China relationship is not as much of a black-and-white situation as nationalistic extremists both in the USA and China would like it to be. If the Chinese 'call in' all of that debt at once in some way, shape or form, there is no way the USA could pay up. Effectively the US would have to default, i.e. welch on the debt. That would wipe out an awful lot of hard earned Chinese wealth. Some of the noises coming out of Beijing lately only confirm that the Chinese are getting nervous even at the mere suggestion of the possibility of a US default. Another thing to consider is that the Chinese are very dependent on exports to the USA and it's NATO allies who are likely to eventually follow the USA's lead, however grudgingly, in any major conflict of any kind with China. If the Chinese were to 'call in' this debt it would be self defeating exercise, as likely to harm the Chinese them selves as much as it would harm the USA. The economies of these countries are very intertwined.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The most secure US government network I've seen (datacenter for a Three Letter Agency) used a mix of NetWare servers and a mainframe. While client machines can be compromised, I suspect someone was thinking along these lines when it came to the servers. Linux and Mac aren't particularly obscure or uncommon, but the US governemtn probably has the address of every programmer who ever worked on the NetWare kernel. I don't know what OS the mainframe was running, but there are several where, like NetWare, the total number of humans worldwide with kernel hacking knowledge is "dozens".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I wonder how much Microsoft's Malicious Software reporting tool would be to help in targeting specific systems?
See: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/29/Microsoft-botnet-hunting-tool-helps-bust-hackers_1.html
Someone care to expand on the above??? I've googled some but came up with nothing so far.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
i just love the way people poopoo american foreign policy and big business
as they gas up their SUVs
and go shop at walmart
the problem is not big business
the problem is not the american government
nothing but empty cruft compared to the real problem: the behavior of the american consumer
you convince them to spend $10 a gallon on gas, you convince them to buiy their crap at 2x the price. go for it
stop blaming esoteric entities when the real problem is sitting right there, in front your computer, reading this post
YOU AND YOUR OWN BEHAVIOR
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's not typically how imporovements in technology work, though. The jobs don't go away or become fully automatic, they just become less labor intensive.
Take ditch digging, for example. 200 years ago digging a 100 meter long ditch, a meter deep could probably take a few dozen men with shovels a few days. Now, one guy with an excavator can dig the same ditch in a day or two all by himself.
There will always be a need for humans to decide what gets done. Technology helps with actually doing it.
Maybe not
If Chinese people do it, it's spying. If westerners do it (such as via twitter, or even wikileaks) it's just social media.
Nah, it's more than twitter; GP made it sound like the "informers" are more innocent than they actually are. It sounds like he's talking about cases like that of Chi Mak (which is sort of an archetypal case). Yes, he wasn't particularly professional, but he did know damn well that he was passing along secrets he wasn't supposed to:
At one point, Chiu said to her husband that the "things" his brother was asking him to take "are certainly against the law," states an FBI affidavit.
The simple reality is that we have to start increasing the price of imported goods to reflects the realities of producing goods in this country. That is, of course, if you'd like to keep some manufacturing in the country.
Note that it's not labor costs that make up most of the difference, but rather pollution countermeasures. For example, China dumps water untreated back into rivers. Here it needs to be filtered and cleaned. That costs a lot more money than whatever the labor difference is.
If this thought process still doesn't convince you, start thinking about how rubber kickballs can be manufactured in China and shipped, inflated, across the Pacific, be unpacked from their shipping containers here and repacked into trucks at least once before getting to stores and still be cheaper than domestically made kickballs. (Go to any nationwide toy store and you won't see a single US made rubber/plastic anything anymore)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
China and India have both made a career out of using their population as robots. Both have legal and cultural systems in place to keep the status quo. India have been doing this for five hundred years. The population bomb is the wildcard here. With India the lack of control over population growth may lead to starvation within a generation. With China central population controls are tied to controls over population movement.
Both of these things could break down. In fact, looking at the population issue, it is hard to see it not breaking down.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Even the Cylons had their slave class ;-)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Reminds me of a quote about the definition of allies being two nations with hands so deep in each other's pants that they cannot fight.
Fixed that fer ya ;)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I am with you mostly but have you tried looking for this Chinease goods demanding consumer in um China? I susupect given how nationalistic that societ is you will find them there at least.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You are right about MAD at some level, but not for the reason you think.
The reason why the Chinese have to be careful is that, by wiping out the US economy, they would pretty much ensure that their biggest market collapses, so their own economic growth would be severely affected.
By comparison, spending excess money is easy. They could invest it in other economies, or just ramp up their own R&D or military development, thus boosting their own job market & economy.
The Chinese economy is not self-sustaining at the moment - they are very much dependent on an export market (primarily the US, but also Europe to some degree). However, they are taking huge steps towards economic independence, and in a decade or two, the situation will have changed drastically. That is the day the US should dread.
How do you think wealth is created? By magic? Hardly: it's by building and selling things to other countries, it's called trade.
This is categorically incorrect. You can create wealth without ever trading with another country on the entire planet. The idea that wealth only comes from a positive current account is a discredited idea that dates back to mercantilism.
You know how you really create wealth? By growing your GDP faster than your population, resulting in a growth in disposable income per capita. It doesn't matter if we're digging holes and filling them again, as long as at least one party in the economy finds this valuable to them.
Let's say I write a book and sell it to you for $10. Then let's say I pocket $2 of that as profit, then turn around and pay someone else $8 to print the book. That person turns around and pays someone else $6 for paper and ink. Etc., etc.
In exchange for your $10, you've made a whole series of people $2 richer, and you now own a book presumably worth $10 to you. That $10 just became $20 of national wealth, by the "magic" of economics. And no other countries were involved, no mining of gold or printing of money, just an input of domestic labor, capital, and resources to provide a product you value.
Economics is ultimately about everyone providing goods and services to everyone else. Money is just a mechanism for keeping score of who owes who what.
The only Burmese contact he had at the time was Skyping with his ex-girlfriend, a student at a nearby liberal arts school who organized protests of greater scope on her campus
Did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, your roommate was sold out by his "burmese contact"? Skype sniffers can't tell the Burmese government that the other person was the ex-girlfriend of a...I don't know what the fuck is going on in that set of connections, but dude, it's far more likely the guy in Burma is on the take...or someone in his apartment is.
Or maybe you all wildly misinterpreted his mother's "don't make waves" urgings.
Please help metamoderate.
Consumers have always demanded cheap products. I've never met anyone who willingly pays more than necessary unless there is a huge gap in product quality between the cheaper and the more expensive.
So-called 'free trade' is the reason American manufacturing has moved overseas. American government knowingly colluded with multinational corporations to lower trade barriers that formerly protected American workers from having to compete with slave labor in the third world.
Knowing that Americans would catch on to the scam, the corporate media has propagated the myth that the loss of jobs is due to organized labor. That myth is exposed as soon as one recognizes that even non-union labor is incapable of competing against laborers being paid pennies on the dollar w/o benefits for comparable work.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
and c) everybody who imports your goods and services retaliates with tariffs.
I recall when Bush applied import tariffs to steel in 2002. The EU responded with tariffs designed to be equal in value, but applied them to a selection of goods very carefully picked to do him as much political damage as possible.
You mean the guys that could totally kill what's left of our economy just by calling their stock brokers? And don't give me the theory of 'oh, they need us as much as we need them' If they'll roll tanks over student demonstrators, they won't be too threatened by some unemployed factory workers - especially if they buy them off with good unemployment wages from their overflowing coffers.
laws allowing to retaliate against China would, I think, be unfair in the same laws do not apply vs other governements including our own... warantless illegal wiretapping anyone ?
China is simply following on the US's footsteps.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
How can you be sure your computer is 100% secure, and not infiltrated? Even in a fresh-installed, never-connected OS (any OS), how to be sure all executables on the CD don't have some hidden code in them, even when first released, that was somehow slipped in? What OS do they use in embassies, military, etc? What security measures, products, procedures?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Defaulting on the Chinese debt would put all of the rest of the U.S. debt into question; this could make if difficult to receive oil in exchange for paper (at the very least, Saudi Arabia and other petroleum funded societies would want to continue to trade with the U.S., but they almost certainly wouldn't do it in dollars anymore).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The Pope has a whole country.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The post reminds me of the parable of the broken window. $20 of wealth is not created. If one book is created and sold for $10 then $10 value is created. The various items purchased along the way merely effects distribution of that $10 value, in the form of currency. To put it another way, you add the value of the book to the $10 currency spent, but forget to subtract that $10 currency which already existed.
It's an easy mistake, evidenced by the need for the parable. But I'll labour the point since it's something of a bugbear of mine, especially since politicians and the media seem to follow the same error.
True, $20 of movement is recorded in the economy, but it's merely a case of cash flowing from one pocket into another. Consider what happens if you paid the $8 to one guy who not only prints, but produces the paper and ink too. Or, how about just passing money to and fro between two companies? Similarly, if once the book is bought the buyer decides the book is only worth $5, the increase in wealth is $5! The other $5 is merely an exchange of wealth from one person to another.
It also shouldn't change GDP, which is "It is the total value of all final goods and services produced in a particular economy". It probably would, but that's a problem of measuring GDP.
You won't see any buggy whips either.
The solution is not to raise tariffs because that has all kinds of long term problems for us. The solution is to raise the standard of living in china because that has all kinds of long term benefits for us.
Maybe ... but it's the short term consequences that are the current problem. It's all fine and dandy for you to talk about how wonderful the U.S. will be once China deals with it's own pollution and wealth-disparity issues (which, by the way, they show no sign of doing.) And perhaps you'll be proven right. History is not on your side, though ... quite the opposite. Your belief (for that's all it is) is driven by the same sort of pained hopefulness that typifies those who believe that a "service economy" is a viable substitute for an "industrial economy." It's not, never will be, and it's time we as a nation woke up to that fact and got back to work.
... well, you'd feel very differently. We were the nation that made everything for everyone, and we enjoyed the fruits of that status. Then we let a few political and corporate thugs throw all that away ... and for what? I'll ask that again: for what?
... like surviving long enough for China to become the kind of civilized high-technology Utopia that you seem to think they want to be. Personally, I think you're giving them way too much credit, but whatever.
Furthermore, I guarantee that if you had seen the devastation that Japan and China have wrought in our manufacturing sector (aided and abetted by our own shortsighted, greedy, corrupt leaders to be sure) that I have in the past thirty years
Even if you're right, don't forget that China is grabbing an exponentially-increasing share of global resources, and worse yet, is going to be competing with the remaining industrialized nations for what's left. Ultimately, there's going to be very little good coming out of China's rapid advance to a high-tech, heavily-militarized nuclear-capable superpower for anyone but China.
Regardless, we have some serious near-term consequences to deal with
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
But apart from that you're happy with wiping out your country's economy and permanenty damaging its economic prospects? Look, protectionism on the face of it seems like a good idea. In practice it's the worst idea possible.
No. I see you're one of those people who sees protectionism in black and white: free trade good!, protectionism bad! As always, it's not that simple and I think you probably know that. There is a difference between a limited degree of protectionism whose only purpose is to keep domestic manufacturing from disappearing entirely, and punitive tariffs.
... would you consider that a reasonable example of "free trade"? Good business? Or would you consider that a hostile, destructive action? No, I'm not talking about China, I'm talking about Japan. They went after our domestic suppliers of basic electronic components, rapidly put them out of business, and then walked the supply chain until they'd wiped out manufacturers of virtually all commercial electronics. Fortunately, Japan is a small nation, but at that they did substantial damage.
... I don't. The Founders didn't either: they wanted us to be free and independent. The two are inextricably interlinked. If you believe otherwise you're ignoring history.
Suppose we have a foreign nation who is deliberately subsidizing their manufacturing in order to sell goods at below our domestic manufacturer's costs. In addition, they're doing this with the express purpose of wiping out our own manufacturing base. Let's further suppose that our government failed to enforce the laws already on the books designed to prevent this very activity
Moving forward a couple decades, we see that China has taken a page from Japan's book, but is going after everything at the same time. All of it, from Christmas tree bulbs to avionics. Everything that we used to make they now make for us, and here's the danger in all this: we can't make it for ourselves anymore. It's an incredible onslaught, unprecedented in the history of Mankind, and the reality is that unless our government does something, we will become so dependent upon China that they'll be able to walk in and take us over without firing a shot. Do you realize that Americans no longer even make their own clothing? No? I have news for you: the giant textile mills back east are lying fallow, huge empty buildings with broken windows, the machines that used to put the shirts on our backs sold off to China for pennies on the dollar. And that's only one of many industries that were deliberately destroyed by China, which (in case you've forgotten) is a hostile totalitarian state. Maybe you think that's a good thing
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That one was such a stretch that it would give Dhalsim a leg cramp.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Because it's exponentially more difficult to infect non-Windows computers?
After all, Macs are what, 5% of the computing world at this point? And yet, not 0.005% of the virus infections are on Macs.
The old saw of Macs or Linux or whatever not being worth targeting doesn't sing.
Suppose we took your idea to its logical conclusion, and ended up with an entirely automated production system with no need for people at all. We'd all be unemployed at that point.
This is the logical conclusion of all modern societies. Imagine a world where every menial task is performed by a robot... robot farmers, robot chefs, robot maintenance men. Would all men in this world be required to starve to death 'cause there was no "honest work" for them to do? To flip this around; why should a man be required to do something that is easily achieved by a machine? Shouldn't there be a greater task for a man's mind than its direct application to menial, repetitive labour?
A perpetual, sustainable, all-encompassing leisure class is the greatest thing that humanity can ever strive for. What better life could there be for a man than to do as he pleases for the rest of his life? Note that this *does* *not* mean that no man-driven "real work" ever gets done. There are people in this world who have great ideas and will set their mind to working on them without provocation. For people like these, the pursuit of their passion is leisure.
It would destroy their economy to do so... Reminds me of a quote about the definition of allies being two nations with hands so deep in each other's pockets that they cannot fight.
Ah ... when, exactly, did China become an ally??? We are beholden to a hostile wannabe superpower who most definitely is not an "ally". Unless some dramatic changes to their governmental system occur (as in, a revolution) they never will be either.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.