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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.'"
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.
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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
i read about it in a blog once