Slashdot Mirror
Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats
An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Science for a long article on the loose, uncoordinated bands of patriotic Chinese hackers that seem to be responsible for much of the cyber-trouble emerging from that nation. Quoting: "For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China's government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it's more than that: it's hundreds of thousands of everyday Chinese civilians. ... Jack Linchuan Qiu, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [says:] 'Chinese hackerism is not the American "hacktivism" that wants social change. It's actually very close to the state. The Chinese distinction between the private and public domains is very small.' ... According to [James Andrew Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies], 'The government at a minimum tolerates them. Sometimes it encourages them. And sometimes it tasks them and controls them.' In the end, he says, 'it's easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.'"
The chinese are just as nationalistic as any other group. Do they like how their gov operates? I doubt it. BUT, do they love their country? Sure. Of course, telling the crackers that if they crack local systems, they will get the death penality, but if they crack Foreign systems (namely the west) and share with the gov, they will get money, has a LOT to do with this. Basically, we are still in a cold war with one side KNOWING that it is, while the other side hopes that it is not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
To date, we've had hacks that are serious enough to alert us to the real threat, but rarely or never serious enough to cause us real harm.
It's a gentle warning to our vulnerabilities, with plenty of lead time to do something about it. At this point, if we keep on producing vulnerable and exposed important computer systems, we share the blame for the consequences of a serious hack.
I read that article in my latest Pop Sci issue. It was very interesting that many of the Chinese hackers were not explicitly sponsored by the government, but do it for the fame and nationalistic pride. The hacker that the article zeroed in on seemed to disappear after college, but it was fairly obvious he was hired by some level of the government. It's like the Chinese government lets these young hackers learn on their own (so long as they aren't hacking their sites), then offers them jobs once they get skilled enough. The more direct damage from Chinese hackers is more likely from these uncontrollable hobby hackers than from the government sponsored and controlled ones.
'At 8 a.m. on May 4, 2001, anyone trying to access the White House Web site got an error message. By noon, whitehouse.gov was down entirely, the victim of a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Somewhere in the world, hackers were pinging White House servers with thousands of page requests per second, clogging the site. Also attacked were sites for the U.S. Navy and various other federal departments'
The solution is obvious, get a 'computer' that can't be hijacked to be used as part of a botnet, to launch DDOS attacks, to me co-opted in a spam farm, to be used to steal online identity and steal all your money from your bank account.
What's up with all these "chinese menace" news? There are two in the front page right now, and more or less a dozen this year. Stirring up the herd with this "us vs. them" mentality is something that I'm not be surprised to see on the mainstream media, but here on Slashdot?
When it is not about the Chinese it is about Venezuela. Or Cuba. Brazil and Iran. Good old (ex)Soviet Russia. The french and the european in general.
Echoing Homeland Security FUD the way Slashdot is doing is only to generate buzz, flamebaiting the pro- and the anti-american, creating nothing but more endless threads of mutual accusations and jingoistic regurgitation, overgeneralizing statements and outright racist/xenophobic ones.
Fuck that, if there is nothing better to fill the main index, please, post less, not worse.
We only take action when our bean counters say we've sustained enough damage to cover the cost of change. Just look at flight safety regulations, or car safety regulations, or food safety regulations, or environmental regulations...
mmmm...forbidden donut
What happens when you have most of a country of over one billion people trained to be consistently nationalistic?
In fact, I thought that this was already well-known information.
I am also wondering about this - "LET them have access..." is probably a bit crude, since no one really controls the whole intarwebs and nobody could decide who gets it and who doesn't... legally, but surely the peering links can be removed via a "dropped anchor" or "fishing accident?"
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
by the idiocies of nationalism
if anyone looks to the far east and sees a land blissfully free of the stupidities of monotheism, think again: china does have a religion. that religion is called china. han imperialism is on par with all of the other vicious forces in this world we must contend with and defeat. not that china is alone. russian nationalism and imperialism, american nationalism and imperialism... it's all evil, it all must be defeated
one day we will have a world if not free of organized religon and ethnocentrism, at least outside the all-controlling clutches of such
until then, we must all contend with blind pride: the source of so much evil in this world
nationalism and organized religion are forces in this world which must be defeated if we are all to live in peace
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Isn't that government sponsored cyber terrorism?
I'm not real worried about insurgents altering the geopolitical balance of power. I am worried about China doing the same.
Simple test. Get two oil tankers. Put a Chinese flag on one, put a US flag on the other. Sail them along the Somali coast. See which one gets fired upon and which one does not.
How much of this is just loose, uncoordinated hackers, using proxies in china?
Seriously, if you think there is anything capable of being connected to the Internet that "cannot" be used for any of this nefarious crap, you're either seriously delusional, or woefully uneducated in security
Run the device from a read-only device and flush all the detritus from the cache at shutdown. Have the base system run the screen, mouse and keyboard and run the rest from a U3 type device. I'm using something similar, a bunch of portable apps on a USB stick.
Don't allow internet access to classified documents and critical technological webpages.
Wait, that would make sense.......
A series of defacements left little doubt about where the attack originated. "Beat down Imperialism of American [sic]! Attack anti-Chinese arrogance!" read the Interior Department's National Business Center site. "CHINA HACK!" proclaimed the Department of Labor home page. "I AM CHINESE," declared a U.S. Navy page.
Yep, that everything your read on the internet is true is a well established fact. Or, could this just possibly be psyops with the purpose of generating fear, fishing for funding and any other of a myriad of other possibilities beside that it is a Chinese attack, which of course that too is a possibility.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
it's easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.
The American Government is as capable as any to do the same. Anyone like to relive the political/social environment when Bush #43 was justifying a war on two fronts? I'm old enough to remember the fabrications used by Bush #41 to get congress to go to war in Kuwait.
There is nothing special about the Chinese.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Congressional whitepapers on China have been warning for 15-20 years that they are actively working to develop non-traditional means to pursue asymmetrical warfare against the United States. That is, China has been gearing up to go to war with the U.S. that whole time, and we foolishly allowed ourselves to be distracted by the ridiculous Chicken-Little "Terrorists! Terrorists!" meme. It is China, not a bedraggled pack of guys hiding in caves in Pakistan, who poses the existential threat to us.
Everyone acknowledges that Taiwan will be the flash point, meaning that the mainland will forcibly repatriate them if the Taiwanese don't surrender peacefully. Beijing took a run at it about 15 years ago when they started shooting missiles across shipping lanes in the Strait of Taiwan. The U.S. sent a carrier battlegroup to sail up and down between the two parties and that put a hasty end to that, because the Chinese realized that one tiny part of our navy packed enough firepower to sink the entire Chinese navy in 15 minutes.
Since then they've been going at it much more systematically. They've been working hard on the diplomatic front in Africa and South America to develop relationships with resource-rich countries there who are tired of the West lecturing them about morality and corruption. On the business front, they've been moving their corporations closer and closer to strategic locations and critical technology; a shell company for the People's Liberation Army, for example, now administers the Panama Canal, which the U.S. navy uses to redeploy ships between Atlantic and Pacific. Economically, they have built up enormous reserves of U.S. dollars and have now got the entire U.S. economy by the throat--all they'd have to do to throw us into a tailspin is to STOP buying our debt. On the cyberfront they're infiltrating our systems and trying to crack our power grid and military satellites and gain access to classified information. And even their military is catching up. They're actively acquiring Russian Alpha submarines and aircraft carriers, shore-to-ship missiles, amphibious landing craft, and anti-satellite weapons (which they tested last year, you may recall).
The CCP has been very crafty in doing all this, quietly building up their capabilities and pinging us from time to time to test the viability of their strategy, which is to attack first economically and with crackers, and then while we're running around screaming at the chaos, they'll move to seize Taiwan. One of those pings was a couple weeks ago when the Chinese minister expressed doubt about the utility of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. The shockwaves from that one are still reverberating. Another ping was a couple weeks before that when their ships were harassing our boat in the South China Sea. They may believe the time is almost ripe to make their move, because this stuff is coming more frequently now, and because there are signs that the Obama administration, unlike the Bush administration, is choosing to employ intelligent, capable people who keep careful watch on things that matter and are winding down the terrorist! terrorist! crap so they can focus on China.
But that's why the decentralized nature of the Chinese crackers is so dangerous, because it may make the cascade of events to open hostilities inevitable--they can't be controlled by the Chinese government and may start things in motion on their own.
Fortunately, for now, the United States still has the ace up its sleeve that instantly puts an end to all the CCP's plans, as well as the crackers. That ace is called nuclear submarines. China's numerical troop advantage matters naught there, and American submariners have been past masters for decades at outclassing Alphas run by Russians who know how to drive them. And 15 minutes after the U.S. president gives the greenlight, the brutal reign of the Chinese leadership would come to an abrupt end.
I hope the guys in Beijing bear that thought in mind, and reel in the yahoos like the crackers before they start real trouble. I'd really like to avoid us having to draft every single male with two legs and a pulse to fight a war with them, and for my baby daughter to have a chance to grow up.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
i agree with you 100%: blind pride is part of human nature, and we're never ridding ourselves of it. i have blind pride. you have blind pride
i wrote the following line with your complaint in mind:
"one day we will have a world if not free of organized religon and ethnocentrism, at least outside the all-controlling clutches of such"
for example: you can't say with a straight face that organized religion is in complete control, nor that countries aren't coming out of the shadows of it even today. witness european history. witness laws that go against catholic edicts on human sexuality all over latin america today. witness the usa going from puritanical colonies to open separation between church and state. these are all positve developments. the muslim world though of course has a long way to go, but its not like the average intelligent muslim can't look at something like the taliban eating up pakistan and not believe and not understand that religious fundamentalism will only destory the muslim world. he or she will plant the seeds that will result in a progressive secular muslim world someday. we are a long way from it, but are you going to tell me its impossible or improbable?
which brings me to the tone of your comment: if i can put a finger on a force even more destructive than blind pride (something else, alas, intrinsicially human), it is: cynicism, negativity, stasis, lack of belief in progress
there actually is progress in this world, in spite of your naysaying. your cynicism is no replacement for real intelligence
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
says it all
The US Government Reminds All Citizens to Keep Their Daily Fear Quotient at Maximum Level
While the article itself properly describes the phenomenon in its early stages as "loosely coordinated", the word uncoordinated is never used, and is in fact misleading in this write up.
the truth of course is that we all belong to a group: humanity. but there are people who fimly 100% believe that their han ethnicity, that their islamic beliefs, that their americanness, etc., is something that is more important than their shared sense of humanity
this person is a source of our doom. it doesn't even have to be active. a wily demagogue can enunciate and manipulate their prejudices and sense of blind pride in such a way that death and suffering at the hands of islam, or the usa, or the red army is rationalized and perfectly acceptable
the entire history of humanity, which we are only beginning, is the journey to understand that our shared humanity is more important than our ethnicity, our nation, or our religion
unfortunately, we still live in a world where a majority of us have this backwards
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ok, over the last couple weeks, several stories have made their way into the news about cybersecurity.
These stories overstate the threat, and, in particular, only serve to loudly announce things which are already well known. For example, the fact that DoD systems are probed continuously by the Chinese. But! That's always been true. Where were all the alarming sounding news reports last year? Two years ago? Ten years ago? Where was Jay Rockefeller's Senate bill, S. 773, which aims to restrict Internet freedom in the United States in previous years? We can all expect the media heat to increase even more as the public is whipped into a frenzy of fear, and then comes to accept that we need the Federal Government to restrict our Internet freedom--for our own safety, of course!
As these stories come through Slashdot, we all bicker amongst ourselves as to how grave the threat is. Or where it's coming from. Or how we might combat it. It's so predictable. And while we're distracted with these irrelevant (although admittedly interesting in some cases) discussions, Senate and House bills are moving through our Congress right now which I consider to be "Patriot Acts" for the Internet. Nobody is talking about those, though.
We get what we deserve when we demand nothing at all.
I Want To Believe
Just a bunch of children, script kiddies, with a dialog box complexity like programs lead by pimpled face Napoleon size frustrated colonel.
They're a joke.
in which the countries of today are like the states of the usa today
if i live in new york, and you live in ohio, we may harmlessly jeer each other at sporting matches, or fight over highway funds in the federal government, but there is no rationale or basis for me to pick up a gun and go murder you
we see this congealing of countries into larger constellations already with the EU, ASEAN, african union, etc...
unfortunately, we have hardcore ultranationalists right now, in china, in russia, in the usa, who are actively supportive of the notion of killing each other, or at least stomping out nearby smaller ethnic minorities and weaker nations nearby (tibet, cuba, georgia, etc.)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The question remains, if this just (a very large) bunch of isolated individualists on the hunt for fame and fortune, or if they could be united under a common belief and turned into a nationalistic, anti-foreign mass movement like the "Boxers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion, lashing out violently against anything or anyone that critizises or threatens mother China. A lot has been writtten about the downtrodden rural masses that could destroy the chinese "Wirtschaftswunder" in a bloody uprising with unforseeable consequencesfor the world, but I wonder if we also have to be wary about something like a boxer movement in cyberspace.
After RTFA. I had to say, the person responsible for the article was an ex military, but contracted to do recon about chinese hackers, but should the US not be doing this, instead of some freelance contractor. Now we know that the gov does not have the most capable people working for them to filter cyber crime, imagine some dude walks in ...says hey did you look here? and presto the biggest chinese
cyber gang bang around.
Imagine if they actually really wanted to do something about the problem, instead of spending so much time wasted on appearance that they do care. Just do the work, here is a guy who after 5 weeks ...gave you 300,000 hackers ...imagine if you had your whole task force doing this, they could get even a bigger clue on how big a problem this really is!!!
My first reaction was that the most amazing thing about this was that with the internet at their fingertips, those people still believe in the oppressive system. But as already pointed out, it isn't that amazing, altough hard to understand for the American Mind[tm]. Then again, at least the Europeans will forcibly learn to love oppression that with 'net-cencorship in full rising swing over there.
The really scary thing is that the danger of Chinese World Domination[tm] is not that much because the effects are diminishingly distinguishable from American World Domination[tm] or European World Domination[tm] or even Muslim World Domination[tm]. To us, that is. To the people at the various tops it matters a great deal, but not to Joe Average or even Jack Slashdotter. Think about it. The only difference is which freedoms you're losing first, not how many.
Don't believe me? Blackmailers and tyrants never stop at their first success, ask any criminologist.
Oh, and maybe you'll have to learn Chinese. Big deal. Otherwise all the Chinese would have to learn English. At least their literature has a bit of history behind it.
Just bunch of frustrated children with dialog box complexity like programs.
Oh yes, those people hacking your computers with remarkable professional aplomb in a nation of peasants are just loose uncoordinated rogue citizens.
If you believe that, I have a lovely bridge in Brooklyn for you, and a sister you just *have* to meet!
Following the tradition, I did not RTFA, but I did read the ad on this article. Cisco is advertising something called "The Realm" and illustrating it with some superhero types. Can't those guys take care of China for us? Cisco, save us! And make a reality show of it for our enjoyment.
there is nothing wrong with being catholic
there is nothing wrong being scottish
there is nothing wrong with being american
etc.
the problem comes when one of these features of your identity is something you consider more important than your shared sense of humanity
for example, the pope breaks this rule:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19692094/
his assertion is that only the catholic church is a true church
here the pope is clearly asserting that catholic identity is superior to protestant identity
now not to gang up on the pope, as pretty much all other religions have this sort of exclusionary belief as a foundational concept: look to islam and its teachings on the superiority of the ummah, for example. but this is very much the source of all the problems in the world: "i am in group {xyz}, you are not in group {xyz}, therefore i am better than you"
it is very possible to be a proud catholic, or a proud sunni, or a proud sikh, or whatever, and yet know the limits of that pride, and subsume your pride in that identity to your identity as a human being. for example: knowing that just because you are a sunni, that does not mean you are automatically better than a shiite. unfortunately, someone just bombed and killed 60 shiites yesterday in iraq. most probably a sunni who views all shiites as dogs. not that there is not also some sunni who sees shiites as inferior but would never kill anyone, but the "original sin", if you will, that makes all crimes in this world possible of race upon race, ethnicity upon ethnicity, nation upon nation, religion upon relgion, etc., is this initial belief: "being in group x makes me superior to people not in group x"
until such a better time in our distant future when this sentiment is seen as the clear and vile evil that it is, right now we are very much mired in a barbarian era of foolish pride, as exemplified by the pope's own statements, a pope who openly embraces and encourages this vile evil of blind pride, of putting membership in some arbitrary group as a basis of superiority, openly breaking the bond of common hunaity we all share
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are over 9000 Chinese blackhats... and they are ALL raping children.
There are over 36 million lines of COBOL code in the world, and they are all raping children.
We have an extensive and poorly secured (as no un-passworded systems, vulnerable dictionary-based passwords, no system auditing, almost no network auditing) IT infrastructure, we have loads of national and international computer burglars banging away at it, we have a lot of people who know something about IT looking for a job, and we have a government looking for sensible ways to spend money so as to alleviate the recession.
Am I alone in thinking that it would be money well spent to set up 3 or so military schools in the US specifically to train network administrators? Students to enlist for the duration of their training (basic raining plus 2 years specialist training), subsequently 5 years of operational service as a sergeant. Graduates of this course to be unconditionally qualified for all basic network security and operation anywhere in the government (from local to federal).
It helps protect both our civillian and our military IT infrastructure, it builds a reservoir of people who know how to secure and operate a computer network for any government agency to draw from, and it provides jobs.
So ... how about it?
Why do people not just drop the traffic from these harbors of hostile activity? Even if a cracker was located outside of China and using TOR or something similar to route through China, drop them at the last mile. This will provide at least a small amount of relief. I am sure somebody will respond to that idea with "well they would just use local zombies then". Yes, but dealing with hostile intent on your own soil is much easier to deal with than trying to shut down a connection on foreign soil. Can anyone come up with a reason that doing this on and government network/resource shouldn't be a standard practice? Does anyone in China have a legitimate reason for going to a DoD/FBI/NSA/Military network presence? Nope, not really. Should anyone care if somebody in Hong Kong cannot get to the NYPD website? Nope, not really. Sorry if this sounds a bit extreme but come on, when somebody is able to siphon off terabytes of stolen data on one of the most expensive military projects ever, measures need to be taken.
Maybe our government should start sponsoring patriotic groups of our own in the same way that China does. Instead of treating misguided young hackers as hardened criminals, give them a free pass to operate outside of our borders. Send them a case of Red Bull and a job offer in a few years. Sounds fair to me.
it is 100% possible to be proud of your catholicism, your scottishness, your whatever, and yet still know the limits of that
you present the false choice that you have to be proud of that at the sacrifice of knowing your shared sense of humanity, or visa versa. no, not at all
for example: i know murder is wrong. but i most definitely will kill someone who is pointing a gun at my family. there is no inconsistency in that view whatsoever. likewise, i can take pride in the catholic church, in its teachings, in its grand spectacle, and know at the same time, that the pope is 100% wrong when he says this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19692094/
no, pope, you are wrong: nothing about being a catholic means i am better than anyone else. and i have in no way reduced my catholic pride, nor have i inflated my pride into blind smug superiority over noncatholic humanity
its all about limits. it is a false dichotomy to say i have to choose between my belief in essential human equality and my religion/ nationality. no, it is not one or the other. would you tell me that if i don't bleieve in murder that i can't defend my family from being hurt or killed with deadly force of my own? of coruse you wouldn't. you understand why that's a flase dichotomy 100%. because its not so cut and dry. then don't present a false choice on the nature of pride either
and ps: please don't babble about "socialism". the word socialism has lost all meaning. before recent times it was already a very broad complex term, but recently its become nothing but a propagandistic term for anything outside certain partisan hackery. so you can label something "socialism" and then cease to think about the merits or detriments of a person's argument, and enter a retarded kneejerk automatic unthinking rejection of whatever someone says. if you wish to be an intellectually honest person, debate someone on the merits of what they say or lack thereof, don't apply mindless lightning rod labels and think you actually somehow defeat the other person's point of view, valid or not
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Am I the only one who thought of the century old photos of the funny looking Chinese man in top hat and tails?
I suppose the modern equivalent would be China Dressage top hat exporters
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
that what is motivating some people in china is exactly the kind of "us vs them" mentality you denounce in the west?
yes, such blind nationalist rabble rousing exists in the west
but what good does it do to pretend it doesn't exist in china?
at best, you are intellectually dishonest, at worst, you are exactly like those who are blindly nationalistic: criticism is something that you can only point at yourself. you are exactly like a blind nationalist because you think only in terms of western actions, as if there are no other actors in the world. in your world view, all we can do is criticize the west, that, for example, if china does some horrible crime, who are we to judge?
well, yes, we CAN judge. as a nonchinese, i am 100% free to criticize china. as long as i do it with intellectual honesty, that openly admits western crimes as well
in fact, to NOT criticize china at all, and only the west, is to serve only some sort of defeatist attitude. not nationally defeatist, but defeatist in terms of the idea that we need to move beyond nationalism, and think critically in terms of world problems free of nationalistic prejudice. you still have a nationalistic prejudice, you just apply it backwards than most. this is an intellectually inferior approach than the idea that you freely criticizing all parties in the world, free of nationalistic prejudice, basing your observations on principles, and principles alone
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
STUMBLING ONTO THE DANGER
In 2004, Scott Henderson, a trim 46-year-old with sandy brown hair, had just retired from decades as a language expert for the U.S. Army to work for a private intelligence contractor in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. With a command of Mandarin, not to mention a Taiwanese wife, Henderson's knowledge of China makes him valuable in the intelligence community. His mandate at the new job was open-source intelligence, which meant using only information from publicly available sources, mimicking the capabilities of the average civilian. Although he had little experience in the subject, he was assigned a report on Chinese hackers.
Sitting down at a desk overlooking the Fort Leavenworth military base, Henderson started, like any novice, with Google. Using Mandarin characters, he typed heike -- literally, "black guest" -- pulling up the characters for "hacker." Probably, he thought, he'd find articles rehashing weak Western reports. But when he hit "return," his browser displayed a slew of unfamiliar sites: hackbase.com, hacker123.com, hack8.cn. There were hundreds, maybe thousands. He quickly realized that each was the online headquarters of a Chinese hacker organization, with detailed logs of hacks, contact information for hackers, and forums where users discussed targets. Chinese hackers, it turns out, take credit on their own sites for attacks, leaving a long trail of documentation. They are so attention-driven that when they post images of their successes to online trophy rooms, they tag them with e-mail addresses, URLs, even cellphone numbers. Within three minutes, Henderson had more information than he knew what to do with.
He spent the next few months trying to make sense of the data. To map connections among hacker sites, he laid a large sheet of paper out on the floor of his office and started sketching the network by hand. The diagram quickly extended off the page. Then it extended off several taped-together pages. After a co-worker suggested the computer program i2 Analyst's Notebook, an investigative tool that allowed him to craft a more sophisticated model, Henderson, following links from site to site, connected 250 hacker pages. Monitoring a cross-section of sites over several days to estimate the number of people logged in at any given time, he came up with 380,000 hackers.
There were localized clubs, whose members saw one another regularly. There were fleeting groups, whose sites appeared and disappeared in a matter of weeks. There were kid hackers, femme-fatale hackers and hacker wannabes (although most hackers are simply computer-savvy 20-somethings -- what Henderson calls "normal guys"). One group penned a theme song. Henderson recognized early on that such publicity ploys were not the work of the state. "If this was some secret government-run organization," he says, "it was the most horribly run secret government organization in the universe."
Without something to fear we might become interested in domestic politics or worse, thinking.
Quack, quack.
"Certain privacy/full session SSL email hosting services have been purchased/changed operational control by NSA and affiliates within the past few months, through private intermediary entities,"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Somebody cut the fiber optic lines leaving China.
This is rather idiotically expressed but it is not an unimportant fact.
Because of the One Child policy and the preference for boys there are around 60 million more males than females. The men who won't end up with wives are very likely to be poor, under educated, and angry. Add chronically horny and frustrated on top of that and you have a problem that is likely going to manifest itself somehow, somewhere in an ugly manner.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Fear of a black hat
if you understand that one subsumes their identity to a group, you fail to see that someone can also subsume their identity to THE group (ie, all of humanity)
yes, as a facet of the evolution you are refer to, and are correct about
not because anyone wants to beleive in some cotton candy idealism of all of humanity, but simply as an evolutionarily superior attitude. groups do better than individuals and smaller groups when it comes to survival, which is indeed why we have these national and tribal and relgious identities in the first place. and we already see these metagroups evolving: religion. france and germany can murder each other for hundreds of years, yet they are both christian. you can be part of many different groups at the same time, and as you sort these allegiances and decide which is best, the dominant group that winds up surviving better than most, in our modern era, is the one who sees our allegiance to our global humanity as the superior approach, while the blind nationalists and religiously proud murder and impoverish each other
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I believe that the proper term for these Chinese hackers is "Useful idiots".
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"I may view them as on a wrong spiritual path, but certainly not inferior to myself."
if someone is on a wrong spiritual path, they are inferior to you. if you insist that noncatholics are NOT inferior to you, then you must give up the assertion they are on a wrong spiritual path. its either one or the other, as a simple consequence of logic. you cannot assert a wrongness in what someone else is doing, while at the same time saying what they are doing is not wrong. its either wrong, or its not. search your feelings, determine which opinion of yours is more true, and stop being logically contradicting yourself
"All comparisons aside, the pope's assertion doesn't compel me to go do violence to Protestants or any other religious group"
no, not at all. but the arbitrary reason for being superior to another group is the "original sin", the first step towards that violence. that if you don't believe you are superior for arbitrary reasons to another group, you won't ever commit violence against them. only when you beign to rationalize your superiority do you begin taking a journey down the road towards that violence. more likely, you are willing to listen to far off anecdotes and propagandistic assertions by demagogues, and accept some far off distant violence as acceptable according to your prejudice of superiority due to arbitrary reasons. a complcity of inaction to violence committed somewhere in your world in the name of your group
of course, you could say that no violence in the name of catholicism is acceptable to you, and you would protest for that fact. good for you. then you have already accepted you are not superior to other religions according to arbitrary reasons... but that is what the pope is asserting. to disavow violence in the name of catholicism, you must renounce the words the pope has spoken, because he has just given you the groundwork for the justification of that violence: he is saying catholics are superior for arbitrary reasons. this is the beginning of all the evil in the world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...will be working on my Mandarin.
of course violence will never end for bullshit reasons
do you believe we can minimize it, or not?
or are we doomed to hellish deaths by the millions for stupid reason forever?
if you don't believe in progress, you are part of the problem. you have complicitly accepted the evil that will happen in this world. this is not intelligence, this is mindless cynicism
i believe we can do better. do you believe that or not?
are you intellgient? or are you an empty pointless negative cynic?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Other than most IT newbies-gone-hired being unable to politically think critically, and therefore being liberals wanting a huge government that doesn't care for them....how does hacking *ever* spur social change?
And not just that, but how does enough of it happen from American to identify it with the nation?
Let's not forget Cap'N Crunch and the guys hacking for fun. That's where we came from. The modern hacker does it for fun, money and vanity.
But just like journalism students go to college "to make a difference" when all they're supposed to do is report the truth, hacking now is hacking. It's almost always just ugly, damaging, and flat mean.
That's not American; that's Communist.
I've never understood why the United States engages in "free trade" ...
This made me almost made me lose my esophagus (I wasn't drinking coffee). When the US enacts trade barriers is it to prevent dumping, so if NZ fruit are cheaper in US supermarkets than Japanese supermarkets it is clearly because NZ is dumping it fruit in the US (not because Japan could have any trade barriers against other countries). In the latest and most bizarre case, "free trade" means messing around with Australia's public health system.
rarely are motivations so one-sided
but surely you admit there is a very strong han nationalism, occasionally flamed by the press
witness the anti-japanese sentiment a few years back when the japanese pm visited a war shrine
and many years back, a us spy plane crashed off hainan, and chinese hacking of the west went crazy. i know, because i had a website then whose homepage was replaced with the chinese flag, the text "hacked by chinese, f*** poisonbox" (poisonbox was apprently a pro-western nationalist hacker of chinese sites)
so you may belittle nationalism, but you can't deny it is very real, and can be used for criminal purposes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do they live in their parent's basement, and can we get them hooked on a MMORPG?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I wish I had mod points, or I would mod it up myself.
Parent is one of the most insightful analysis I've seen of the current situation with China. It's quite a bit more complex than what everybody appears to think, and parent has done an excellent job encapsulating it succinctly.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"Doing something wrong doesn't inherently make someone inferior, it just means they made a mistake. Is someone who got into a car accident less of a human being than someone who did not? "
no, not at all. the problem is equating someone doing something religous that is different than you as equivalent to a car crash, a mistake. surely you agree a car crash is a bad thing, right? well can you phrase someone who has a noncatholic religion as doing something that is in no way a bad thing, in no way a car crash, in no way a mistake? you can't compare their religion to a car crash without asserting your superiority, you realize that right? surely you can see the logical incoherence there. if i tell you that i think catholicism is a mistake, but a catholic is my equal, surely you can see the contradiction there, right? you can't think what someone else is doing is a mistake, no matter how innocently or accidentally chosen, without also saying at the same time that you think you are doing something superior. you are proposing a concept which is self-contradictory in nature. work out the contradictions in your own words
"Furthermore, your comments about original sin are off the mark. Catholics believe everyone, *EVERYONE*, is born with original sin. It is not a point of inferiority or superiority, but something that is common to all mankind. If I am Catholic and believe that my religion frees me from original sin, then I would be inclined to convert others to my religion, not kill, maim, or enslave them."
why should what a catholic believe apply to me? what if i believe i am not born with original sin? i am rejecting catholic dogma. now: how do you deal with such a person? do you accept that for other people they can reject these assertions and be your equal? or do you believe they must agree with the principles you have just outlined above before you may deal with them in fairness and full equality?
work out the inevitable logical conclusions of your own assertions, and find me waiting there, waiting for you to see that asserting any sort of "better way" versus "mistaken way" like the pope comment is the road to our doom
because surely you don't believe that if i think i believe i have a way that is closer to what god intends as ultimately true, that this is in no way dangerous to you or your family at some point. that i can believe in my superiority to you, however artfully or delicately phrased as you phrase above, and at no point in the future am i going to exclude you from equal justice and equal consideration. surely you see the problem there. what the pope said does not endorse genocide. it merely lays the groundwork for some other guy to endorse it. if i am fully true before the eyes of god, and some other group is less than before the eyes of god because they don't admit their "original sin" or whatever, than i am beginning the road to all of the evils in the world
surely you can see the path this sort of "i have a better path than you" thinking inevitably leads to. surely you don't believe that if one group considers itself on a better road than another that nothing bad will ever come out of that self-flattery
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that should be Russia, not the US.
i firmly believe that historically, religions have reduced bloodshed, rather than increase them, by asserting brotherhood of men over stupid tribal knuckleheads
now, why don't you join me in taking the next step and jettison religion altogher?
because surely you don't believe that people don't commit heinous acts in the name of religion. yes, less acts are conducted in the name of religion than in the name of the various tribal idiocies that came before religion, absolutely, just as you say
but this is no argument against progress. progress being: now that we've jettisoned tribalism and replaced it with the superiority of religion, let us now replace religion and with the next step in human progress
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
False dichotomy (..) no, pope, you are wrong: nothing about being a catholic means i am better than anyone else. and i have in no way reduced my catholic pride
You are avoiding the question I posed. The question I posed was, to repeat myself, exactly what mechanism you propose for reducing pride in some characteristic about your group belonging.
I have seen many, including the aforementioned "Our culture is just a silly joke, we Swedes are envious of your culture because you have a real one", which I name as one example of reducing nationalist pride. My observation, to repeat myself, is that it seems in my view, and according to my reasoning, that this has negative influences on the emotional health of a populace.
As one example, out of all groups of children in the United Kingdom, the category 'white boys' are currently the one with the lowest aspirations for their future out of all matrix combinations of gender and ethnicity. That's a big contrast to the imperialist-ethnocentrist-institutionally-racist view of the white majority claimed by many.
In fact, your entire post did nothing at all to answer the very specific questions I posed. I ask anyone to reread the questions in my post again, and your post, to contrast what is asked with what is replied.
The dichotomy is only false if specific, tangible methods can be constructed to reduce nationalist pride without negative effects while still preserving a strong group feeling. If this cannot be done, the dichotomy is true. I ask what these methods are, and whether doing so is likely to have negative consequences.
Actually, I even question the extent to which a populace can have true pride in having a characteristic, as you claim about catholicism, without consciously or subconsciously this automatically implying a superiority to others that lack the characteristic.
and ps: please don't babble about "socialism". the word socialism has lost all meaning.
You are picking fights in an intellectually dishonest way. In Europe, parties still describe themselves as 'socialist' and their opposition as 'non-socialist'. While at the same time, there's hardly a word I see more than 'rightwing' or 'NeoCon'. In fact, the entirety of political communication is label-based. 'Socialist' is possibly, I would say, even far better defined than 'NeoCon' or 'Fascist', yet the latter two are used with regularity even on Slashdot.
This may be interesting - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP-9qmSCe7o (A little dated though).
i am asking for balance: have pride, and know its limits. that your common humanity trumps your pride, and be aware of that. that's not easy. whoever said the right thing was easy?
but you seems to be saying this balance is impossible. i think this is just mindless cynicism on your part
howabout this: propose to me an alternative, better idea than mine
right now i see these ideas in play:
1. subsumation of all pride: what you refer to as the problem
2. blind pride in race, religion, nation, etc: my identification of the problem
3. be proud, but limit it when shared humanity is involved: my solution, which you reject on grounds i understand as nothing more than cynicism
now, propose a superior solution than #3, or you are just being an empty cynic. it is not good enough to merely tear down someone else's argument. you must propose a better argument yourself, or we are left with the argument whose flaws you point out as still the best solution
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if you can enunciate what you just wrote above, how you are able to believe in the ascendancy of catholic dogma? the words you just wrote above is a refutation of catholic dogma
"I just think it's bad form to blanket bash any group and put the responsibility on them."
again, i don't understand. you are saying what i am saying. maybe you think like this: i am the one who is pointing at prideful groups and throwing responsibility at their feet for various failings in the world. except i ask you what these groups are basing their pride on. and what they are basing their pride on IS THIS BLANKET BASHING AND RESPONSIBILTY PUT OFF YOU ARE REFERRING TO
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I was in China 2001, and I can promise you that the DDoS is not generated by some advanced tools or scripts, it just because there were too many people connecting. People sent each emails and agreed on visiting the White House website several days before the "attack". Among those who visited the website, 95% were just normal internet users using Internet Explorer 5.
What the hell! Have all of the US hackers succumbed to death by mountain dew? Has all of the young talent gone to Russia + China?
Smokedot.org
only exists parasitically on someone else who actually tries to make meaning of their existence. you've only enunciated the philosophy of the parasite
someone who believes in meaning, meanwhile, is creating something that serves their survival. someone who believes as you wrote, meanwhile, is only rationalizing their parasitical existence on someone else's product
the philosophy you expound above would not exist by itself. in other words, the philosophy you've expouinded above is incomplete. it does not explain the world or human existence in totality. it merely justifies an empty parasitical subset of humans who only exist because someone ELSE believes in some sort of meaning
don't worry about it though, you'll grow up someday
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Useful idiots for the US to have, or useful idiots for China to have?
That there hackin' stuff could backfire, ah reckon.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
i can only begin to speculate at the weird logical degenerations that would allow you to ascribe to my pov the very thing i'm arguing against
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is a little disappointing to see /. add to the Chinaphobia media feeding frenzy.
I mean, there are many internal problems with China, and this hacking issue is clearly a potential cause for concern but is there and evidence that there are more hacks coming from China per capita than anywhere else in the world? I would like to see that sort of evidence first before pointing fingers.
"I am in no way justifying the parasitic behavior that you speak of."
well that's a lot words for no justification of parasitism (snicker)
"You seem to feel that you are superior to the "parasites". You aren't."
the host organism can exist without the parasites. the parasites cannot exist without feeding off the host organism. sounds like superiority to me
for example, superiority: i am now leaving this retarded conversation and forgetting all about you, while you can ruminate and feed some more off my words. seeing as i was able to extract so many paragraphs from you, i obviously was able to elicit some sort of higher cognition in that dim bulb. good luck on your future maturity. you'll get there kid, i got faith in you! (snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i describe an intellectually dishonest point of view, and you come in with a comment which is exactly that point of view i am trying to describe
if you are trying to be slyly humorous: haha
if you are actually so dense as to miss the irony: it is perfectly appropriate to criticize china from a point of view of principles, having nothing whatsoever to do with western nationalistic agendas
lookie here:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/controlling-the-chinese-people/
so when taiwan and hong kong go apeshit over jackie chan's remarks, which are clearly pandering to the regime in beijing, are the hong kong and the taiwanese merely puppets of western nationalism in your point of view? or are they angry at jackie chan out of their own independent principles?
actually, its funny, because your words are exactly what the propaganda mouthpieces in beijing say all the time when someone tries to criticize beijing from inside china: they are stool pigeons of the west and they are serving china's enemies. as if you can't criticize china, even if you are fucking chinese, without being some sort of secret agent. that any criticism of beijing only weakens china: as if internal debate within china can't actually STRENGTHEN china. no, there's only one point of view from beijing, and it can never be wrong and it can never be questioned. pfffffft
why is it impossible for you to perceive that you can criticize china on the grounds of purely principles, having nothing whatsoever to do with western nationalism? maybe even what motivates you is love of china when you criticize beijing? imagine fucking that!
do you believe the slashdot editors are serving secret masters at the cia? or perhaps the slashdot editors are neocon dick cheney sympathisers? gee, maybe the editors see a genuine issue, and report it, out of purely principled reasons? naah.. impossible! secret nationalist agendas EVERYWHERE!!! ;-P
in your worldview, everyone is just acting on a nationalistic agenda. no one can be motivated on principles. you're fucking retarded
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Any hardware today that isn't Made in China? Even if the product is a well known big name, the actual assembly is contracted out and ROMs could be swapped on the assembly line of wireless routers, etc.
Passphrase "Help Im Being hEld Prisoner in a Chinese Electronic Assembly Plant" for root ;)
8x on our rw military as theirs to defeat them in a cyberwar. measure the costs, and truly come up with a non-defeatable argument regarding that fact, if anyone wants to be serious about spending too much friggin' money on this...
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You've had this thing for years. Are you saying that "honour" is missing, in a general vague way or is the "'u' in honour" your cryptic way of insulting your readers by assuming all of them lack "honour" by some standard you fail to mention? Because that doesn't seem very "honourable" to me. In fact, the "u" would seem to be missing from honour in this case.
In reply to: Shakrai 'At least when the British came apart there was another world power that was committed to democracy to take their place'. Let me remind you PAL, the reason Britain 'came apart' as you so succinctly put it, is that WE were involved in two World Wars of attrition, both of which YOU were extremely reluctant to join ! WW1. When the result was already a foregone conclusion, rich 'pickings' to be had, and Britain and France already having lost the flower of it's youth. and WWII. Only when you absolutely HAD TO, having had the shit bombed out of you at Pearl Harbour ! So yes indeed Britain bankrupted itself, trying to defend the Free World and democracy, and let me remind you that we're STILL in there helping pull the USA's chestnuts out of the fire ! (as in Korea, and more recently Kuwait Iraq and Afghanistan). Let's face it, the only one you tried WITHOUT our help, you LOST ! (Vietnam) Next time, don't be so bloody INSULTING.