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The Undeclared "Cyber Cold War" With China
First time accepted submitter lacaprup writes "Chinese-based hacking of 760 different corporations reflects a growing, undeclared cyber war. From giants like Intel and Google to unknowns like iBahn, the Chinese hackers are accused of stealing everything isn't nailed down. Simply put, it is easier and cheaper to steal rather than develop the legal way. China has consistently denied it has any responsibility for hacking that originated from servers on its soil, but — based on what is known of attacks from China, Russia and other countries — a declassified estimate of the value of the blueprints, chemical formulas and other material stolen from U.S. corporate computers in the last year reached almost $500 billion"
Take yer data prease?
Yep pretty sure us Yankees invented the concept, along w the personal computer and the internet, shame some of us are getting schooled on it, a glimpse into American decay? Or the start of a security renaissance?
It's a hot trade war, with one side believing the rules don't apply to them, and the other side letting them get away with it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
... to Chinese Gold Farmer.
Check your premises.
I'm sure the Chinese government has their crack team of hackers, just like we do. Having said that...
I run a honeypot at work. 70% of the attacks do come from Chinese machines, but I suspect that's because the Chinese buy those $2 pre-hacked warez'd Windows CD's at the market and don't install security updates.
Of the actual living, breathing hackers that log into my honeypot, 1/3 of them come from Romanian IP's, and another 1/3 come from other eastern European countries, but the text files/strings in their utilities are Romanian. Wired has a good article which partly corroborates this.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/all/1
I see two modes of attack. 98% are single machines launching 100's of attacks. 70% of those are in China. The other 2% are distributed attacks. These are more likely to be major power intelligence agencies, and don't have anywhere near the geographic concentration as the single-machine attacks (Chinese IP's are 15% of distributed attacks, same as Brazil).
Every black hat is probably running their operations through proxies in China these days so that the Western companies they break into will just say "damn dirty Chinese!" and never suspect someone in Europe or maybe just a few blocks away. China is a jurisdictional black hole.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I work for an infrared camera manufactuerer that does government work. We know that the chinese are trying to get into our servers on a daily basis.
Undeclared my ass. It's in the media, it's widely known, and pretty much the only rule is not to do something to the other side's infrastructure that kills people directly or gets too much of the population upset. That's like calling the intelligence war undeclared because the sides don't admit that they try to get plans of the other side's military hardware--only more so. We don't declare war, and this isn't a physical war, and there are certain proportionality requirements--and we argue for a pretension of deniability, but not plausible deniability.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Half a trillion dollars in stolen data? I'm sorry, that's fucking impossible.
Why do people have so much trouble with financial scale?
This is probably going to sound racist, when I don't really intend it to. It's more "culturist" than anything else.
I work for a post-secondary institution with a large international student program. Most of our international students come from China, and when we break down the stats, the Chinese students are the most likely students to plagiarize others work, both in our online learning management system and in our face to face classroom environments.
What's more, they make no effort to hide their "enhanced group work" skills from their instructors. We've asked several of the students about this behaviour and have been told "that's how things work in China. It's commonplace there."
So it doesn't surprise me that Chinese hackers are trying to steal information from western companies.
The world keeps on turning.
So where is the physical retaliation you were speaking of?
Stole informational assets worth $500 billion over the past year? Um, does anyone bother to do basic reality checks?
$500 billion is about 1/3 of the US's GDP for all of 2010.
So ... no, just ... just no.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Corps are looking for further tax breaks, that's all. Seeing as China makes almost everything the US uses, they already have the specs, blueprints and formula in their manufacturing plants.
to flood this discussion with pro-China propaganda....
We're seen this same shit since the 90's. Main function of it is to gain further laws in the US that makes it easier to abuse US nationals. Apart from the technical ignorance (if you were hacker, would you think of doing the connection yourself or using Chinese proxy!), US and Israel are the only countries in the world that want to use internet for sabotage. There have been numerous news about how hardly cybersabotage would hit US infrastucture, but it doesn't. It's a play to get acceptance towards U.S. doing that exact thing for nations they don't like, like Iran.
U.S. has every time shown that they ignore any good practices and just abuse when they can. I do not trust Iran any more, but since U.S. lies about their tactics too, why should I trust them either? Lieing to me makes you an asshole.
So it appears that the Chinese have "stolen" data relating to green energy and drugs... What's the likely outcome of this horror? It appears that potentially now Chinese citizens may have access to life saving drugs, and that Chinese energy companies may now have greater incentive to use cleaner energy. Damage to any US company has yet to be demonstrated (Google's shares haven't taken a hit) - and claims of potential loss of future income seem churlish against the potential positive outcomes of this. It seems that the real problem isn't that the data has been taken, but that it has been kept from achieving it's full humanitarian potential by keeping it secret. China should go further and post their info on Wikileaks so that the whole of the world benefits.
I'd don't know the right figure for US GDP in 2010
but your number is wrong but at least 1 order of magnitude
It's more than time for the poor little American-based multi-nationals to think about seriously investing in real security. If your stuff is so valuable (don't believe that figure for an instant) how come it's so easily snatched?
You're an order of magnitude off. US GDP is $15 trillion so that's only 3.3%. Learn2maths.
Oops, you're right. The source said $15 Trillion. Still, that would make it 3% of GDP, and still way too high to be plausible.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
It's RIAA/MPAA math.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If I made a dollar 3 years ago and had it stolen this year how much did I have stolen this year? $0 because I didn't make that dollar this year?
I don't believe the $500 billion estimate either but refuting it based upon how much money was made in the US in 2010 doesn't sound right to me.
Like say Google's source code for their search index was stolen how much is that valued at? Does the value only count for parts that were developed in the past year or could it have just been made MORE valuable in the last year.
Cut the damm cable
Why is it way too high? Cause you said so?
How's ya maths there sunshine?
500 billion = 0.5 trillion in a 15 trillion dollar economy?
The US GDP is about $15 trillion. You're only off by an order of magnitude.
Because you can't suck out an amount of value equal to the output of several large US states or countries via cyber attacks that no one really notices.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
No, you did your maths wrong. $500 billion is 1/30th of the US's annual GDP (that is, about 3%).
From your own link:
GDP (official exchange rate):
$14.66 trillion (2010 est.)
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
have put lot's of poor security in place now if trained to people to do IT work and not let a theory based class room do the training and payed for the hardware needed to do the job right vs trying to get by with the old stuff for a very long time.
True, the IP's value isn't based on the sales it generates this year. It's at the very least spread over the number of years of a patent.
Also, patent violations were an American concept back in the day (see Hollywood). Countries (and companies) on the way up view patents as a hindrance, shackling their energy and creativity. Countries on the way down view them as a benefit, holding on to their accumulated wealth and power even once they're no longer earning it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It is not just the Chinese, most major world powers are engaging in corporate espionage.
Palm trees and 8
Isn't the GDP 14 trillion? I think you mean 1/3 of the exports, which its 1.3 trillion
as what can they do about it?
We wanted the "information economy", we got it. We ignored material progress and persisted in keeping an antiquated notion of "work" going for what? The work week was about 100 hours in the 19th century and was closer to 50 by the beginning of the 20th century. Despite all the "progress" I keep hearing about and how "productive" we all are sitting at our computers, the work week hasn't reduced, and it still takes 25 years to pay for a house built out of standard parts in six weeks.
We insist on performing theater for each other while farmers feed us, instead of really analyzing what gets done by who and FOR who.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN
TLDR: English-speaking nations around the world have conspired to use their signals intelligence capability (ECHELON) to engage in industrial espionage and pass trade secrets on to their own corporations.
Palm trees and 8
How would you expect their story to be captivating and awe-inspiring if they used realistic numbers? Seems a bit impracticable if you ask me. For instance, if they used the following:
"a declassified estimate of the value of the blueprints, chemical formulas and other material stolen from U.S. corporate computers in the last year reached $11,654.17"
Sigh. Please upgrade your pentium
http://saveie6.com/
"US is dead."
What the hell does that mean? That's a really stupid comment.
Sure you can, when the thing being "sucked out" is digital files and doesn't get removed from the original location.
Digital security only reached great public consciousness in the past decade and a half, after much infrastructure was already built up in the US. China is modernizing in a much more security conscious time, so they have a bit of an advantage there. The US is also further along in digitizing things (whether they should be or not), which puts them at a disadvantage.
Also, and this is probably the biggest one imho, the government has privatized everything. All other considerations aside, if you have digital and classified documents in a lot of third parties' hands, you're going to open yourself up to a lot of attack vectors. All in all, it's a nightmare thinking about keeping a network that includes every military contractor secure.
Stole informational assets worth $500 billion over the past year? Um, does anyone bother to do basic reality checks?
The reality check is it's impossible to put a monetary value on "stolen" data, because data only has value if it contains useful information. If I stole the production plans for the Boeing 747, it wouldn't be of value because I do not have the means to build 747s. Or in the '90s, the RIAA claiming that everyone who illegally downloaded an mp3 would have bought the album it it weren't available on Napster.
Good thing the money was "lost" the same way that the RIAA "lost" money from copyright infringement.
Palm trees and 8
A little consistency, please. Making a copy doesn't deprive anyone of anything, right? It's all just math anyway, 1s and 0s. Corporations bad, tree pretty.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yeah, because Europe is just a thriving example of greatness right now.
"said Richard Clarke, former special adviser on cybersecurity."
Two words: BOOK SALES
Yours In Ashgabat,
Kilgore Trout, C.I.O.
I welcome our slant-eyed script-kiddie overlords
But then we'd be secure against them too.
And that's just unacceptable.
Stole informational assets worth $500 billion over the past year? Um, does anyone bother to do basic reality checks?
$500 billion is about 1/3 of the US's GDP for all of 2010.
So ... no, just ... just no.
These are "assets", not revenue so aren't tied to GDP. If someone stole all of the gold out of Ft Knox, they'd have $200B worth of assets that would have no relation to GDP. Likewise, if they steal a secret chemical formula valued at $1B, that has no relation to GDP. (though the valuation is related to how much revenue it could earn).
In any case, the numbers are very suspect. No one knows who exactly is stealing the data, what data is stolen, or what they are doing with it, yet somehow they came up with a surprisingly round figure of $500M for the value.
More likely it's just a wild-assed guess that has no basis in reality, just like the piracy numbers that the MPAA likes to throw around.
$500 billion is about 1/3 of the US's GDP for all of 2010.
Damn. The US should just download 8 million chinese-produced songs to even all that out!
Mod parent down.
1) US GDB for 2010 is 15 TRILLION, not 1.5 trillion (citation is the same as above, but the parent misquoted GDP)
2) It could be that a decades worth of IP was stollen in one year, so comparing with 2010's GDP is irrelevant and misleading.
And it's perpetrated by every nation on the planet.
It's no secret that the Industrial Revolution got a kickstart in the US via "stolen IP." The legend is that Samuel Slater memorized drawings across the pond in Blighty and came here with them in his head.
Another example would be dumpster diving at your competitor's company. Cutting up start strips from stamping operations is not because you want them to fit in the recycling dumpster better. The same for shredding code printouts and printed spreadsheets.
To suddenly be surprised that this is being done electronically on a systematic scale is to be utterly ignorant of history. And frankly, singling out China smells of hypocrisy, especially after two decades of US manufacturing companies willingly transferring their core manufacturing to China completely oblivious to the long term effects.
Why reinvent the wheel from scratch when you can simply snag the wheel.dwg from your competitor's computer?
--
BMO
What exactly did you expect? It's not just China, of course. We outsource to India, China, the Middle East and even Pakistan. We also educate foreigners here, and not in ethnomusicology or interpretive dance either. Do you think no theft will occur? No backdoors in hardware or software? No designs, models or code will be resold to competitors for a profit without your knowledge?
First we sold our security to the Arabs for cheap oil. Then we sold our minds to China and India for some cost savings. Our children will be selling their bodies, I expect.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If there's one thing I've learned about IT security, it's that it's almost impossible to secure data anyway. Maybe it would make more sense to follow development models in which there's no such thing as stealing.
You are failing to take into account the simple fact that a single piece of paper, digital or real, can contain information that cost billions to obtain.
There is no reason to assume what is being stolen was created within a single calendar year.
If I stole the production plans for the Boeing 747, it wouldn't be of value because I do not have the means to build 747s.
The story, and the world, don't revolve around you.
The $500 billion in research compromised doesn't have to come from 2010 it was developed over multiple years and so 3% of GDP is misleading.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
They probably broke into the RIAA's servers.
I believe that estimate like I believe the RIAA's damage estimates.
It's not that hard to find a balance between security and usability. At least try. When I read about:
* un-encrypted data on portable devices getting lost[1]
* tapes being swiped in people's cars[2]
* servers with egregiously unsecured login portals[3]
I'm not sure why people aren't just allowing google to index their entire infrastructure. Really. It would be cheap backup and really easy to find your stuff. Sure, 0-days happen, mistakes are made, admins are not infallible but I can't blame the Chinese (or whoever) for picking the low-hanging fruit when it's been places so close to the ground.
[1] - http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=6572
[2] - http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/military/article/Tricare-patient-data-lost-in-car-burglary-2195822.php
[3] - www.dataprotectioncenter.com/antivirus/sophos/second-dutch-security-firm-hacked-unsecured-phpmyadmin-implicated/
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Money talks, hackers from all over the world have nothing to fear and the US is a donkey with the blind fold on.
have put lot's of poor security in place now if trained to people to do IT work and not let a theory based class room do the training and payed for the hardware needed to do the job right vs trying to get by with the old stuff for a very long time.
I have to say I cannot agree with this -- IT folks from tech schools tend not to have any knowledge of security, and these are the folks who set domain admin passwords to the company name. You find the worst problems when doing security audits where the IT people are from tech schools. Completely self-taught IT people tend to do better in my experience, and ones with CS degrees the best because they understand RFCs and cryptology etc -- this experience comes from having done dozens of compliance/security audits.
Also, I'd hate to have to quip at you for this but, maybe that college education would have paid off in you being able to write complete senteces, understand contractions (e.g. lots, not lot's), capitalization and punctuation. If you're trying to defend seemingly less-educated people, writing at a first grade level is not going to help your cause..
"it is easier and cheaper to steal rather than develop the legal way."
this sentiment is emanating from a nation that has no credibility on 'the legal way' to develop anything in the 21st century. A nation comprised of just a few megacorporations that hover over an infinite sea of frivolous patents, casting them forth like pokemon at the slightest sight of national or international competition that cannot be bought, licensed, bribed, or outlawed by their pre-pay capitalist representatives in government.
information assets amount to the brainfarts of talented engineers and scientists who are in many cases ostracized entirely from the most meaningful components of their work such as the revenue stream and general application.
yeah, its an ideological battle that americans immediately jump around and compare to the cold war, but its the ideology of
ideas come from people, and they must be nurtured and encouraged for the good of all humankind
versus
ideas come from people, and they must be incarcerated, exploited, litigated and profiteered until a group of old white men get another yacht.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Touché
I just wish giving up your citizenship meant giving up the right to sell anything to the American citizens that are left.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Air Gap, motherfuckers! DO YOU SPEAK IT?"
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It does.
I am John Hurt.
Not to be picky, but there are a number of places other than Europe right now that aren't really suffering during this global depression.
I am John Hurt.
Whereas the number of chinese and european expats in the US is so small?
I can understand why China (if that's who is doing it) would do this, it seems like better business sense to steal the data rather than pay for the research/development and then have to compete with an established product
The thing that always comes to mind is, why is the data so (apparently) easy to steal? Why is it so available to hackers? Because as often as it seems to happen, it just feels to me like the corps getting ripped off have left the keys in the car with the window rolled down so someone drove off with it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I mean come on guys, how hard is it to proof-read a submission before you post it to the front page?
Is it really that hard to read it and see that the grammar needs fixing? Is it that hard to insert the missing word "that" in the second sentence?
This reflects poorly on the quality of the people who work for Slashdot. This is 2011, basic spelling and grammar checks are just a few mouse clicks away.
The US always prided itself on doing "the fastest, most practical" way. And priding itself too in ouwitting the rest.
Now the arabs have the tallest buildings "eh, they're useless!"
Chinese companies bypass "the best security in the world" and steal trade secrets, improve on them and sell them back "eh, that's unfair"
The US should change its name to "Decadent Nouveau Riche: The country"
I think you a word.
Although you need to obfuscate the rather obvious sloppy attempt at connecting "China-based" and "China".
Other than the slight sloppiness, I have great expectations that you will be a fine sinophobe with some guidance from us more experienced sinophobes.
Once again, a hearty welcome!
And don't be dissuaded by China backers' valid argument that you're a hypocritic pot calling the kettle black. Hypocrisy is totally over-rated.
Aww ... that's so adorable! Another genius that thinks he's the hottest thing because he can make a "stocks vs flow" argument!
It still doesn't change the fact that 3% of one year's entire GDP is way too high, it just means the supposed assets came from different times.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
We've only known about issues with computer security for like 20 years now
Perhaps the time has come to treat the issue more seriously.
Plan My Week for iPhone
I don't know how the mix-up of patents with copyright in the first sentence didn't trigger mods' troll alarms. Add to that the fact that Chinese patents applications have grown massively in recent years to nearly equal US patent filing rates, making parent's premise entirely wrong.
No, countries on the way up don't view patents as hindrance -- they view patents by established competitors as a hindrance, while patents by them are advantageous and pursued emphatically.
Only responding because 1) conflating Hollywood (copyright) with patents, and 2) disgusting +5 insightful for a post that's pretty much wishful thinking.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Those who create new things have no fear of copying, because they have confidence in their ability to do better than people who can do nothing but copy.
Those who continue to profit from innnovation long-since departed fear copying, because they know that's all they've got.
Perhaps you missed the reference, but Hollywood became the mecca of film precisely because they were ignoring the draconian restrictions imposed on them by Edison's patent enforcement group. In fact, the very reason film-makers congregated in Hollywood was because it was out of the reach of those patents.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Aww ... that's so adorable! Another genius that thinks he's the hottest thing because he can make a "stocks vs flow" argument!
It still doesn't change the fact that 3% of one year's entire GDP is way too high, it just means the supposed assets came from different times.
Thanks, I think you're cute too. We should have sex.
Why is 3% too high? Is there some law in finance that says that stolen information assets must be less than 3% of GDP?
At least you no longer think that the USA GDP is only $1.5T.
Grandparent is correct. Hollywood came about, in part, because the film industry wanted to be on the opposite side of the country as Edison who held patents concerning moving pictures.
Are you seriously comparing USSR to what China was 30 years ago? I'm asking because it's like comparing South and North Korea.
USSR couldn't develop... bombers on its own?
Dear God, how did they fight in WWII, may I ask?
Why did they say no to the glorious "Shermans" and used their own T-34 instead (34 stands for year, mind you).
How come they were the first to send Sputnik then Gagarin into space, despite US having German rocket genie, von Braun?
Where did they get "Mig"s that caused so much trouble in Vietnam war?
Where did they get missile technology to down U2?
Maybe they couldn't develop computers? Oh, what was BESM-6 (1965) based on?
Most of what western world "knows" about "commies" are myths.
USSR collapsed after 30 years of stalemate under Brezhnev's rule, followed by sharp reduction of oil prices. Under his rule, by the end of 70th USSR was in regression even according to the official statistics (with double digit growth under previous rulers). But it was still capable of creating pretty much anything on its own.
Germany is indeed a thriving example of greatness right now; their economy is strong and they export all kinds of high-value, high quality stuff. If it weren't for Greece and Portugal, the place would make us look pathetic (which isn't hard, honestly). The way it's looking now, they might just kick Greece out of the EU (or Greece might leave on its own), which will probably be a lot better for Germany.
Yeah right, those Hollywood movies (which are all remakes of decades-old movies or poor adaptations of novels) are real paragons of "creative work".
Where do you get your kool-aid?
Patent begins with it's first "VENTING" and that is at the source.
If you don't disclose your patent to a witness, then you don't have a datestamp or timestamp to assert your paramount disclosure in a possible race of others who may also have been enlightened to such intelect.
BOTTOM LINE: if you don't disclose to anyone, then that doesn't mean your idea is protected or unprotected, but that none know what *is*. The mail is the first element of disclosure through a cancelled stamp, and that is the patent concerning your relation to govern the commerce of your patent interacting to others. US Patent & Trademark Office is nothing more than a corporation that protects your interests disclosed to them. In effect, by asking for protection, you are lighting a fuse for how long you have to enrich yourself in the COMMERCE of your idea. THAT IS ALL. There is no protection other than pain of torture. Making money of ideas is the PERVIEW. There is no protection. As long as you are stuck in the Space-Time coninuum then MONEY is the only motivation.
The best kind of protection is obfuscation. If you hide in an imaginary place then none can steal that idea: worked well for religions to this day.
by Richard C. Clarke
Atricle I ...
Section 8 - Powers of Congress
The Congress shall have Power
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
from the US Constitution, 1787 C.E.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Only responding because 1) conflating Hollywood (copyright) with patents
Ignorance is no excuse in a world with Wikipedia. Google before posting.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The way it's looking now, they might just kick Greece out of the EU (or Greece might leave on its own), which will probably be a lot better for Germany.
They won't leave the European Union. At most they would leave the European Currency Union.
According to this article that might not even be that bad for them:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/oligarchie-der-finanz-der-krieg-der-banken-gegen-das-volk-11549829.html (in german)
Though the strange thing with "financial experts" seems to be that you will allways find another "expert" who tells you the exact opposite of what the previous guy said.
I have the feeling those finance gurus are more close to fortune-tellers than to scientists.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
When did that start? When I looked at it a few months back, it was still essentially free. Unfortunately, an ex-citizen in the US is lower legally than a "normal" non-citizen, and with family still back home, that causes issues.
Learn to love Alaska
The US started the industrial revolution by blatantly ripping off European patents in the late 1800s. It wasn't until they discovered some value when they retroactively started enforcing them worse than everyone else.
Learn to love Alaska
Though the strange thing with "financial experts" seems to be that you will allways find another "expert" who tells you the exact opposite of what the previous guy said.
I have the feeling those finance gurus are more close to fortune-tellers than to scientists.
I'm sure you're correct about that feeling. "Economics" simply isn't a real science, it's pseudoscience as it doesn't produce any theories that can actually be tested. Unfortunately, our societies depend greatly on economics, so even though it's really not much different than shamans trying to cure diseases with chants and incantations and potions, it's the best we've got.
and I'll say it again . . . . if it's important, DON'T PLUG IT IN TO A NETWORK!
No, it doesn't, not under the current WTO rulings, which allow any businessman to sell anywhere on the planet without fear.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Nonsense. Patents only protect the new, which means it is only active innovators who stand to gain from their existence. One cannot "hold onto [one's] accumulated wealth and power even once [one is] no longer earning it" with patents, they don't work that way. They are useful to innovation in the same way that government enforcement of contracts allows one to safely pour money into developing a leased property into a business establishment; you can fail by doing poorly, but not by someone else simply walking off with your investment. They then expire, after the inventor has had a chance to reap his or her reward and incentive for taking risks and innovating, so that they can benefit the whole public. You seem to be confusing patents with copyrights, which are theoretically there for more or less the same reason, protecting new works, but which have been elongated and degraded into more or less everlasting protectionism.
A joint Iran/Pakistan/Chinese operation made it possible with the absolute and corrupt collusion of Corporate America and the Wall Street-owned American government!
The Chinese penetrated the drone operations *** in the USA, inserting malware and permanent key loggers to copy operational data. Then from that Chinese network penetration, and aided by elements within Pakistan who had previously intercepted drone satellite communications, Iran was successfully able to compromise the stealth drone (otherwise its self-return and/or self-destruct subroutines would have functioned).
And this was made possible only by Wall Street’s monolithic offshoring of American jobs, American technology, foreign aid and strategic assets to China.
And President Obama, taking time away from his constant and impeachably false pronouncements that the bankers didn’t break any laws, asks Iran to return the incredibly expensive and compromised spy drone ---- and Iran says “NO!”. (FYI: Since you’ve demonstrated zero knowledge of the law as president, Mr. Obama, allow me to explain that under international and maritime law, Iran gets to keep the drone! Understand?)
Actions Have Consequences
Patents protect things for two decades. I guess if you consider your 486 chip "new", then your statement is correct. That's assuming you just don't apply for the same patent again but "on the web" or "on mobiles", and get it rubber-stamped by a PTO that's concerned more with throughput than validity.
And no, I'm not confusing patents and copyrights. Hollywood was setup where it was because in those days it wasn't feasible for Edison to enforce his patents on video technology across the continent.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Do you inhabit the minds of all those who create new things thus that you can declare, for all of them, that they have no fear of copying? I have heard plenty of creative people express concern about whether they will be able to get the rewards for their work or whether someone else will. Where unfettered, free copying is allowed, it is not the most creative people who will succeed, it is the people with the biggest marketing budgets. A few rare individuals will come up with brand new things and hit the jackpot before better-funded competitors can duplicate their work, but most creators will be outdone in profits by someone who has a fully funded team, an existing factory, and a standing army of salesmen ready to hit the market worldwide before the original inventor can get known by anyone or build a relationship with more than a handful of retailers.
Also, you seem to have a strange notion that the world is divided into "people who can create" and "people who can only copy," where people who can create have some infinite store of inventions or writings and an unending, Godlike power of creation, that at a moment's notice they can spit out a new, improved version of whatever someone else just copied, thereby holding some kind of perpetual lead based on a pure and complete mental superiority over all competitors. It is more accurate to say that many people have occasional points where they come up with a really good idea, and that working out the way these ideas can be put into practice is a difficult process. To imagine that someone who once innovates successfully is guaranteed to be able to generate an infinite stream of successfully implemented new ideas, each abandoned to competitors as quickly as those competitors can implement the same, is to dream of people having a different sort of nature than they really do. (Ayn Rand happened to have much the same misunderstanding, but it is nevertheless a misunderstanding.)
Countries and companies who have no intellectual property protections are "on the way up" in the same sense that, in a complete free-for-all, dog-eat-dog system, the dogs on the eating end are benefiting. Nobody can claim that it is not at the expense of other dogs or that those on the rise are doing anything whatsoever to introduce new calories into the food chain.
I meant that you are confusing copyrights with patents by suggesting that the latter allows you to rest on your laurels and forever accumulate riches (and use the government to protect them) from long-ago inventions. Patent law needs to be updated to apply to fast-moving technologies differently than to old-style, mechanical inventions by having a much shorter protection period, because both the returns on investment and the speed at which one generation of innovation is superseded by another are faster, but even the over-long protection doesn't cause things to work completely the way you suggest, because the profitable period on a 486 chip completely runs its course in under 20 years. Protecting it that long is silly, but the ownership of that property at year 19, when you can't even sell it anymore, isn't exactly "accumulated wealth".
but even the over-long protection doesn't cause things to work completely the way you suggest, because the profitable period on a 486 chip completely runs its course in under 20 years. Protecting it that long is silly, but the ownership of that property at year 19, when you can't even sell it anymore, isn't exactly "accumulated wealth".
Depends. If you can artificially stifle competitors from making any enhancements on your basic design due to your patent protection, you can extend the profitable period of your invention artificially, while at the same time, retarding the progress of the art for a couple of decades.
Of course, most companies find it more profitable to just licence their technologies, and so skim a bit of cream off the top of every technological development for the next 20 years, due to an obvious "invention" that they managed to get to the patent office before anyone else. If that invention has since become a de facto standard, so much the better.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I've always wondered why we put proprietary/critical design/ect. stuff on systems connected to the the internet in any way shape or form. If that design is critical to your future business why not keep it on a completely closed internal network?
P226
One word. Hayek.
It is easy to imagine that China has an interest in everything they've hacked, cracked or jacked. Everyone who has been hacked, cracked or jacked by them most likely owes them money, to put it another way. No story here. Your toothbrush are belong to us..
Recently they blocked ports from shipping in goods on the US West Coast. Most of those imports probably originated in China. So their actions were a blow against China, a repressive Communist regime.
This is weird. The Republicans are supporting a Communist regime in China while left wingers are taking part in protests protecting the US from Chinese imports. We're through the looking glass people....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Gesundheit!
Blank until
Salma Hayek is hot, but what does she have to do with economics, aside from marrying a billionaire?
The Industrial Revolution started at least 100 years before that, if you mean the US industrial revolution (whatever that may be) you should say so.
China may be using thousands of miles of underground tunnels to hide a nuclear missile arsenal that is far bigger than current estimates, according to researchers.
They spent three years translating secret military documents, scouring the internet and studying satellite images for clues – and concluded that China may have as many as 3,000 missiles, compared with general estimates of between 80 and 400.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
by the US more like.
More Chinese coming to the US than US citizens going to China. Doesn't prove a whole lot either way.
Yep pretty sure us Yankees invented the concept, along w the personal computer and the internet, shame some of us are getting schooled on it, a glimpse into American decay? Or the start of a security renaissance?
"Security renaissance?" How about a death-blow to the concept of information property. So you can tie down you product with patents, spend billions on litigation, legally destroy all competition, and donate money to your priest who wants to teach that intelligent design is science... and in the end, some enormous state with billions of people (a good number of them better-educated in science than the average Joe in your country) who don't play by your rules just steals your intellectual property and uses it for themselves anyway.
So what was the point of all those patents, litigation, anti-competitive maneuvering, and anti-science-education lobbying? All it did in the end was stifle innovation in your own country and let the renegade Chinese and Russians win the day in science and technology.
But the king of the United States (the top 1%) will never learn that lesson in time to save us. The only remaining question is: is the US just dying, or it's already completely dead?
Considering what the story is about that is the problem, stealing of research data to make use of the latest Republican driven fuck up 'first to patent', which corrupt corporations thought would enable them to steal ideas from little people. In this case it is facilitating exactly what the morons were warned about, industrial espionage on a previously unheralded scale.
First to file $500 billion lost, now hows first to file working out for you, you greedy shit heads and your only just starting to taste the impact.
Now of course consider the wildly corrupt US financial sector and the criminal advantages of tying into their digital communications as the plot and conspire to create scams to steal billions of dollars, what percentage of that action can China pick up and of course what kind of indirect leverage can China gain to force changes in US law.
Consider the current damage being done to the US manufacturing sector and the dozy stance of the US congress, how out of control has lobbyist controlled congress become.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
when there are two ways to take something and you always take the one that lets you say "you are wrong" then i is you who is wrong and a jackass.
Learn to love Alaska
500 1 million dollar R&D projects to put it into terms you can grasp.
No, go re-read the article, that's 500 Billion (with a "B"). It should be $500 billion == 500000 x 1 million dollar R&D projects.
A million bucks goes decently far in funding a very small R&D team, and half a million R&D teams can do a heck of a lot of innovation. This is not a drop in the bucket, this is a gaping hole.
Time to start honey-potting a great deal more. Worked for the Japanese in the late 90's for capacitor electrolyte formulas.
Only caveat might be to actually make the honey pots look harder to get to than the real stuff (double honey pots? one easy, one hard - thank you virtualization).
p
Aww, that's so adorable. Another genius that thinks he's the hottest thing because, OH MY GOSH, 500 billion is just too high!
Shit, seriously. You don't even HAVE an argument, which is why there isn't any meat to your posts. Well that, and those goalposts you're busy moving.
Two items about the Soviet Union:
1) It was rebuilt with a lot of financial aid from the US - mainly from corporations.
2) Stalin killed off more of the Soviet Union's people than Hitler did. If you kill off enough people - like several million - there's enough food to go around for the rest. (This worked in China, too.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Seven hundred sixty, eh? So where's the list?
Over the last several years I warned the Silicon Valley hi-tech networking company I was at that they were a prime target for a spear-phishing attack from both China (to steal their IP for their Chinese competitor) and from the malware industry (which was turning from attacks on the leaves to attacks on the network infrastructure machines). And during this time the conglomerate that ate us switched the engineers' machines from Linux to Windows, destroyed the internal IT department, and outsourced network management to an external supplier. (In a networking company, no less. We WERE the relevant experts. B-b ) And the external supplier "upgraded" us to machines with built-in remote administration backdoors in the firmware of the networking cards.
I want to see if the company in question is on the list, and what happened to it, so I can give them a big "I TOLD YOU SO".
One mentioned in TFA is HP. I'd like to know what division is in question. One of HP's divisions is just such a supplier of outsourced IT administration, which moves much of their clients' functionality (including, especially, email and authentication services) to their own servers. If that department got compromised the list may be far longer than 760, because all their clients may have been compromised by that single attack. (Same is true if any of the several other such providers got hit.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Uhm.no.
The industrial revolution was started by us English in the 18th Century (Google Ironbridge and Coalbrook dale).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I was under the impression that there was no way to repudiate your US citizenship and that the IRS will consider you liable for tax regardless. Not true?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Oh please. as if Europe is somehow convulsing in its last pains before death. It's not.
You can head off to Portugal or Spain and see how "bad" they are doing. Hint, they are not. Things are tough in mainland Greece, yeah, but it's still much less so than business as usual in bad areas of let's say Los Angeles.
Europe is doing fine. Do your homework. Even the fiscal union will probably survive.
Put in better terms, the U.S. spends about $30 billion on NIH per year, and about $7.5 billion on NSF. So for the main two civilian agencies in charge research, we could double their funding for 10 years.
Well, we could, it would never happen though because with the Republicans in Congress, they believe that research grows on trees and that researchers are part of a giant conspiracy against them. The Democrats are just as bad because they are sure that money won't go toward proving their prized theses. And if they did all decide to spend it (not that it is there to spend), they'd find a way to do it in earmarks since every congress person knows s/he's a better judge of quality science than scientists.
There probably isn't any way to fix the problem since to do that we'd have to get the Business School Product to understand that they aren't just selling widgets and that any theft should be removed from their salaries. I like that last, taking way their money is the only thing Business School Product understand.
Of course, this did not stop Americans from blatantly disregarding British copyrights and patents. I believe Charles Dickens bitched about this quite a bit. Also note that other countries of the period did the same.
How to say it politely...?
Yea, like Edison, Ford, Orville and Wilbur... All were stealing patents
Lets rewrite history some more
Does AK Marc know who Edison was?
Does AK Marc know when the Industrial revolution started?
Does AK Marc know who was credited with starting it?
Nice to see the parent get modded to 3. AK Marc must have friends.
You can complain about the quality, but the fact is that the US has the most successful movie industry in the world by a wide margin. It brings in billions of dollars to the US economy, and they have an interest to keep it that way.
Well, didn't the patents apply on the west coast? Never understood that one.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
There is an easy, easy way to keep computers from being hacked by the Chinese or Russians, or anyone else. Don't attach them to the freakin' internet! Is corp. America so dumb that the concept of a stand-alone network not even register? "What's a stand-alone network?"
Goes further back then Hollywood. The first thing the young nation did was to give the middle finger to UK patents, allowing a industrial bootstrap not dissimilar to the one seen in China.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Hollywood was actually set up to get away from the east coast and Edison's patents.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/thomas-edisons-plot-to-destroy-the-movies.ars
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I did misspeak. The US started *its* industrial revolution blatantly ripping off everyone else.
Learn to love Alaska
Germany got into their current position by basically freezing wages so that product prices stayed low.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Some, like the Australian Steve Keen, is working on creating actually testable theories and models. Thing is tho that modeling economies is a bit like modeling weather, as there are several feedbacks involved.
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/
I hope his blog can take being linked to on slashdot...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
That is true, as if you do give up citizenship and the IRS deems it to have been for tax evasion, they'll treat you as a citizen for tax purposes (taxation without representation). But they almost never do it, and there's no way to check what status you have, other than fly through the US and see if agents escory you off the plane. It's easier to just never file taxes again and hope they don't put you on a wanted list (never happened that I know of, though they do track down non-filers in their country of residence sometimes, after which, traveling back to he US would be ill-advised). So there's no practical reason to ex-pat yourself at this point, unless you are a businessman who deals with the US and will travel to and from sometimes and has no family there and no intentions of ever returning for more than 3 months at a time. Otherwise, it's eaiser to live as an out-law by never filing and hoping no one notices. There are supposedly millions, though nobody tracks Americans fleeing the sinking ship. I'd love to see the figures. There are some rough ones, but they are not deemed accurate, and other countries don't list "american" as a origin for immigrants (I'm "european" despite the fact that most of my family has never been to Europe). Culturally, I'm closer to Hispanic ,having been raised in Texas and with a number of friends from Latin America (And more trips to Latin America than anywhere else on the globe), that I am "European." But the lack of genetic tie would seem to make that selection silly.
Learn to love Alaska
It seems like modeling weather would probably be a lot easier than trying to model economics, unless you constrain yourself to a very small, closed society that doesn't trade (which wouldn't be very helpful in modeling modern economies).
I wouldn't go so far as saying that economics is pseudoscience. First of all, there's a gross division between micro-economics and macro-economics. Micro is substantially scientific, relying heavily on controlled experiments. A lot of good results have come out of micro which are useful to individuals and companies. Of course, a lot of the most interesting questions are in the realm of macro, which is much less scientific in nature simply because it is very difficult to run controlled experiments.
That said, it is possible to apply scientific methods to large scale things. After all, Earth science suffers from many of the same issues as macro-economics but the field of Earth science as a whole is rarely derided as being outright pseudoscientific (even when some people find some of their findings controversial). In both macro-economics and Earth science, there's issues with chaotic dynamics and poorly measured starting conditions that make accurate predictions of specific events impossible in practice, but it is possible to apply scientific thought to help us better understand the big picture and make gross predictions.
Now the really big issue that macro-economics has to deal with that other large-scale scientific areas do not have to deal with is that their observations have a major and immediate impact on the system that they are studying. Lets say someone published a perfect global macro-economic theory tomorrow...the system would promptly fly off the rails as people started exploiting the new theory, at which point it would look as though the theory was full of holes even though it was initially correct. Of course, the real situation is even worse, since we don't start with perfect theories. Earth science doesn't have to deal with this issue (presently): while the human impact on the planet may be growing larger, we hardly control it at this point, so human-caused changes to the Earth are slow and theories have time to play out.
This may seem like a hopeless situation...and in one sense it is. In order to truly understand the system, you'd have to understand the parts that make up the system: humans. Unfortunately, understanding humans is not possible. Our minds are Turing-complete, so there are many undecidable problems associated with them. As it boils down, a complete and consistent theory of the mind is impossible, and as such so is any theory that relies on understanding the human mind. You can see hints of the Godel and Turing's theorems in the problems with macro-economics that I pointed out earlier...to be successful, macro-economic theories must account for their own impact.
However, we should not give up hope entirely. We can't truly understand the system...but we can come up with pretty good theories and methods. These issues haven't stopped mathematicians from continuing their studies...or software engineers from striving for quality in software. We can understand economic systems reasonably well using scientific and mathematical ideas...what's so pseudoscientific about that?
That said, the thing to look out for is proponents of economic theories that overstate the effectiveness of their pet theory. Claims of extraordinary accuracy should require extraordinary proof. Even the best macro-economic theories out there these days leave a lot to be desired. Plus, some of the stuff out there is indeed pseudoscience. There is great incentive to create false theories for various reasons, ranging from get-rich-quick schemes to political expediency. I'm simply arguing against the idea that economics is necessarily a pseudoscience.
Except there wasn't and the USSR was forced to buy grain on the world market, including over 600 million bushels a year of American grain in 1974. Canada alone was selling during the Cuban missile crisis 300 million bushels a year to them too and it only went up after that to levels nearing the American numbers.
Yes, Canada and the US sold them food, even at the high of the cold war. Why? Cause if the people went hungry, they'd demand war, one which no one really wanted to fight in the first place.
Communism that works is a myth, the USSR didn't understand that till it was too late, China has however since the early 1980s.