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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.'"
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
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.
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?