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.'"

Comments

Not surprising

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Not surprising

[maxume]

Or you might have read comments that are coming from someone more extreme than the typical Chinese. There are plenty of wack-job nationalistic Americans, and plenty of more moderate Americans.

As far as a new cold war, who cares? China can't invade America anymore than America can invade China, and they aren't seriously rattling the nuclear saber (they would rather sell us crap than blow us up...).

China probably could find the bodies to invade the U.S., but they would have a tough time holding any territory whatsoever (unless they found a really nifty way of shifting those bodies over the Pacific ocean). The U.S. doesn't have the bodies to invade China.

I guess there is the possibility of an economic war with China, but the coal on mainland America means that we will still be able to make electricity, mitigating the impact on our quality of life, and the fact that China has 4 times the people will make it nearly impossible for the U.S. to continue to 'dominate' the world economically.

Re:Not surprising

[magarity]

Long before the US worries about Chinese military superiority there needs to be a good hard look at the very real threat of economic superiority.

The Chinese economy is still growing, albiet at a much slower pace, while the US shrank lately. And there are only the tiniest of social programs that the Chinese government spends its money on and pretty much nothing on entitlements which make up 2/3 of the US's federal budget. There is no institutionalized 'somebody owes me' mentality keeping a large number of otherwise able bodied adults out of the workforce.

China will out-produce the US in short order if things continue as they have been. Then the US will no longer be able to afford to keep up militarily much like the Soviets could no longer afford to keep up in the 80's.

Re:Not surprising

[maxume]

It's inevitable. If you accept that people aren't equal, the best 10% of China's workforce is larger than half of the entire United States workforce.

Throw in that it is much easier to transfer knowledge and technology than it is to create them, and any notion of keeping a lead goes right out the window, especially over the long term.

The upside is that we are quite a bit more likely to benefit from Chinese advancements than we are to be hurt by them.

Re:Not surprising

[Shakrai]

We have built 135 F-22s as of now, don't you think that's enough for the time being?

The thing is that once you shut down a production line for a modern aircraft like that it's very hard to impossible to start it back up again. I could understand if Gates wanted to reduce the number of them that we are ordering (although that also runs into issues with economy of scale, see the B-2 for an example) but shutting down the production lines altogether seems short-sighted to me.

But then, this is the same DoD that axed production of the Seawolf in favor of the "cheaper" Virginia's -- which turned out to be only 10% cheaper in exchange for only having half of the weapons load of the Seawolf. Hmm......

So keep your F-22 money, they're not likely to take on the Chinese air force anytime soon

I don't think we are going to take them on "anytime soon". God willing, we'll never have to take them on. But it takes years to decades to design a new fighter aircraft. It takes years to start up a production line even for existing designs. You can't think about tomorrow when looking at these decisions -- you have to think ten to twenty years ahead.

Re:Not surprising

[Shakrai]

China probably could find the bodies to invade the U.S

WOLVERINES!

Sorry, that was just the first image that came to mind ;) I think invading the US would be a pretty tough undertaking. Logistically it would be a nightmare -- you'd need to move men and material across the largest ocean in the World against the World's foremost naval power. Even if you could manage to do that you'd then have to defeat the American military on it's home soil and pacify the American population.

Pacifying a nation of 32 million where a sizable portion (a majority even?) of the population supports the invaders may well prove to be impossible. How would you go about pacifying a nation of 300 million where none of the population would support the invaders and where said population is armed to the teeth and presumably willing to fight for it's freedom and independence? Then there's the matter of nuclear weapons to consider....

No, I'm not real worried about them invading us. I am worried about falling behind them in military capability and having to abandon allies and/or interests. At least when the British came apart there was another world power that was committed to democracy to take their place. Who is going to take our place? I suppose India is a possibility in the long term but they've got enough problems of their own right now. China isn't being very open about their military build-up and I find that troubling on many levels. Unless that changes I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be concerned and taking steps to ensure our own supremacy.

Re:Not surprising

[xiong.chiamiov]

Would American cars actually *sell* in Japan?

Re:Not surprising

[Shakrai]

To be fair, manned fighter aircraft will soon be a thing of the past.

Says who? Our unmanned aircraft are all dependent upon communications with operators on the ground. For the most part those communications rely on satellites. Are you going to lay odds that an advanced nation-state like China can't figure out a way to disrupt these types of communications systems?

What's up with all these "chinese menace" news?

[vivaoporto]

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.

This is America

[castironpigeon]

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...

Re:the idiocies of religions are only matched

[themacks]

nationalism and organized religion are forces in this world which must be defeated if we are all to live in peace

I think that contains a subset of the real problem. The real problem is people thinking that, because they belong to a certain group (country, religion, secret club), they are somehow better than people not in the same group. Nations and religions are not the problem, it's the idea that "I'm better than you" because of some group.

Re:This is Only the Beginning

[NeutronCowboy]

Wow. I rant quite a bit about the threat that China represents, but you certainly take the paranoid cake.

A few issues with your post:

1. China is not an existential threat. That would indeed be the Muslim extremists. You're simply confusing the intent of terrorists with the capability of China.
2. Nuclear boomers are not the solution, and a volley of missiles from them will not terminate the Chinese leadership. Not to mention that it will also mean the end of the US. Remember MAD? Apparently not.
3. Panama owns the Panama Canal. You're referring to the two ports on the exits/entries of the Canal which have been leased to Hutchinson Whampoa. There's a slight, but significant difference there, especially since the US retains the official right to intervene militarily to protect its access to the channel.
4. The treasuries currently bought by the Chinese are their Achilles hill as much as it is ours. How does it go? If you owe a bank 20k, the bank owns you. If you owe a bank 20 million, you own the bank. The comment by the ministry was the sound of a concerned investor: "Please don't fuck with my money."

I find mostly two types of misconceptions about China: either it's a monolithic group of "Reds", with the best of the Cold War rhetoric attached to it. Or it has a master plan to gain world domination, and is deploying it relentlessly.

Both are wrong. China has as many internal issues as any other country, and is subject to all the economic pressures that affect others. The two things that are true are:
1 China thinks longterm. I'm talking decades, centuries.
2 Land and respect is everything.

China can be an issue, and is aggressively pursuing a strategy that will make it the superpower of the world. But that doesn't mean that the only interaction with them will be through nuclear volleys.