Slashdot Mirror
How the NSA Is Harming America's Economy
anagama writes "According to an article at Medium, 'Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. ... Cisco saw orders in Brazil drop 25% and Russia drop 30%. ... Analysts had expected Cisco's business in emerging markets to increase 6%, but instead it dropped 12%, sending shares of Cisco plunging 10% in after-hours trading.' This is in addition to the harm caused to remote services that may cost $35 billion over the next three years. Then, of course, there are the ways the NSA has made ID theft easier. ID theft cost Americans $1.52 billion in 2011, to say nothing of the time wasted in solving ID theft issues — some of that figure is certainly attributable to holes the NSA helped build. The NSA, its policies, and the politicians who support the same are directly responsible for massive losses of money and jobs."
#include "grumpycat"
printf("good!\n");
seriously, I would not trust US hardware and software, either.
but then again, those routers are already at every choke-point on the internet. the US owns the internet (public one, anyway) in all practical ways.
but for private networks when you can pick which routers and switches you want to deploy, picking a US based vendor would not be wise. I would not do it if I was in charge of a private network.
maybe its time we consider going back to software (oss) based networking gear. it will be much slower than hardware based ones but we can't verify hardware designs like we can software ones.
there is also no way to put this genie back into the bottle. once your cred is gone, its gone. and the US has lost ALL cred when it comes to safeguarding your privacy.
sad but true. as a US citizen, I am sorry for how badly we have botched the world's trust.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
As those companies who are avoiding Cisco are still going to buy someone else's stuff, and they'll be a whole new crew of people that have to either migrate off the cisco gear, or figure out if it really is bugged or not.
Either way, more jobs will be created than lost, they just might not be created in America.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
lol! show me the proof?
are you serious?
you can't be serious. you just can't be.
how exactly do you expose exploits in routers when no one will ever admit they exist, but we all are pretty damned sure they DO exist?
besides, if you do find an exploit, you can expect a NSL that will stop you from telling people about it.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Let Brasil and Russia buy Chinese then. They deserve only the best.
Is it good or is it whack?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
From one perspective some of us do care - they do make stuff that works reasonably well.
But my suspicion is that there's more to this than just abandoning Cisco. In many cases it's a lot cheaper to set up a router based on a PC and Linux, which probably is what happens in "emerging markets".
As for the NSA - they could probably do a lot better for the economy if they did put their effort into tracking down and nuking scammers, spammers and other internet pests - and their karma would be better. And they better use the CIA and others to really "take care" of those problems.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
As soon as software catches up and makes it practical, the rest of the world is going to dump the US cloud forever.
How much taxes is Cisco paying to the US government? Because if they pay like every other corporation (1%), then the fact that they now sell less won't have any repercussion on the tax income.
I still hate NSA, but this looks like two ass-holes pointing fingers at each other.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Quoting Bob Marley, economy is the bloodline of any society. It's where the buck stops. I hope that our "patriotic"(nationalist) Orwellian ways can play a second fiddle to our economy. If not, we are paving our path to our own demise.
"Proof" is classified. Move along citizen.
These are the people who invented the phrase "destroy the village in order to save it"--do you think they give a shit about Cisco stock?
Exactly, that's the part these self-professed "patriots" don't get. Ideology and nationalism doesn't put food on the table.
Harming America's economy? This is more about affecting Cisco's profits. And color me unsympathetic, as they are an "American" corporation (in scare quotes since it shifts as it suits them) when it comes time to complain about something, but they are apparently Swiss http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-28/biggest-tax-avoiders-win-most-gaming-1-trillion-u-s-tax-break.html when its time to pay taxes.
If the American security infrastructure is going to turn American corporations into de-facto arms of the intelligence process, then nobody has any choice but to not trust them.
Anything involved in the security of the internet that's been tainted by being complicit with the NSA et al can't be trusted. So Cisco is going to feel the pinch.
Anything in 'the cloud' ran by a US company is subject to PATRIOT Act demands. So Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon ... they're all going to feel the pinch. And Google's hosted solutions for email is also something you can't trust.
When the NSA undermines security for their own ends, then anything they've had a hand in can't be trusted.
So the end result is most governments and companies in other countries more or less have to look at any US player as not trustworthy, or actively hostile to your goals.
As long as you keep acting like your security trumps the sovereignty of everyone else ... well, the only answer is to say "OK, fuck you" and cut you out of the picture entirely.
All of your big corporations are more or less presumed to be lying (because they can't admit to participating in this), complicit with collecting data to send back to Big Brother, and violating local privacy and data access laws.
And since 'Murica has been railing about how the Chinese are infiltrating their stuff (while doing the same thing), and complaining about countries which restrict a free internet ... they've lost a position of having the moral high ground. The US is doing everything they accuse other countries of doing, only they're apparently doing it on a massive scale.
So, yes, this should have an impact on the US economy. And you can choose to stay the course and see it keep happening, or you can fix the problem. And so far, we've seen no evidence whatsoever there's any contrition or accepting that what they did was going to piss off everyone else.
But when all of those orders start getting cancelled, and new ones stop coming, don't stand around wailing about how unfair it is that people have decided they can't trust you and don't want your stuff.
But in a country which is actively ignoring its own Constitution and freedoms, I'm not expecting any meaningful introspection on behalf of the US. I'm expecting more bluster, claims about how everyone else is doing it, and continuing with the status quo.
I feel really bad for Cisco. They went out of their way to build all those back doors into all of their equipment for the NSA, and now people don't want to buy their products. Does that seem fair?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
When SOPA was a looming thing, I was in the market to move from shared hosting to a VPS, and so I made it a point to chose a VPS that was in another country.
Sadly, I chose the Netherlands, who are NSA collaborators. I'm just waiting for a specific piece of software to be released, and I'm out of there and on to a new server in a new country - I'm thinking Switzerland right now. Iceland is too expensive.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
SHOW ME THE PROOF
I would, but look what happened to the last brave American who tried that. I don't want to have to seek asylum in Russia and ask some crime ridden South American country to take me in, nor watch my back every minute for the U.S. agents trying to kidnap or kill me. The President talked big about protecting whistle blowers before this happened, but then all of that was quietly removed from his website Everyone of us that actually has the proof knows better than show it to you.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So they are countering this bad press by open sourcing the system and inviting everyone to verify that their hardware is ait-tight secure, right? Right?
*crickets*
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I don't know who is interested in cisco, but you missed the big picture.
As much as I love my country and as much as I despise the rise of the MIC and the borderline treasonous activities of the NSA I don't think anything is going to change. The very nature of Government now is different. I'm not going to wax romantic about an imaginary time gone by when the Government was all humble and citizen-serving but it now has something of a life and intent of its own. The public is a captive source of funding and their desires mostly just aggravation when they run counter to the collective aims of the incestuous clique of government agencies and their contractors.
Throw in that accountability is mostly gone and there's absolutely no reason to believe anything with the NSA will change. They have nothing to fear. There will be a Congressional hearing or two, concerns will be expressed, they will emphasize "strict controls" and whatever other language seems appropriate. A committee will be formed that in six months to a year will produce a voluminous report nobody will read. Then the closed-door meetings will resume and the quasi-legal FISA courts will continue the rubber stamping. The only real hope is a true third party but the red/blue conglomerate will due whatever it takes to stop that from happening.
The NSA is financially omniscient. NSA monitors all electronic communications. NSA internal groups study economies, governments, and companies and especially financial firms.
Might not profits be made by using this deep insider information? Might not profits be used by the NSA to fund more secret projects, even projects unknown to their Executive Branch leadership? Might not employees of the NSA financially benefit even without the awareness of the NSA?
Could the reason economies are flat be that the NSA and it's employees are performing social and financial arbitrage, capturing all profits by using their intelligence to benefit from the otherwise-secret plans of corporations, governments and individuals before they are completed?
Exactly, that's the part these self-professed "patriots" don't get. Ideology and nationalism doesn't put food on the table.
Actually, it would.
If everyone in the US would stop buying foreign goods or sending money oversees, the US can sustain itself. There is more than enough farmland, more than enough industrial capacity to produce everything needed and the world's most innovative area (silicon valley) is in the US.
So while I'm not at all one of those "the US is the best" folks, it is certainly true that the US will survive should the world decide to hate it.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Not really. Having demonstrated that American firms can't be trusted (because due to the PATRIOT Act they can't), American firms will see declines in sales from outside of America.
If American firms see declines in sales, they lay off people. So you get the double whammy of companies making less money, and having fewer people on the payroll.
All those consultants who might be engaged to do something, well, now they're persona-non-grata because they too can't be trusted since they could be compelled to hand over your business information.
All of those cloud based services and the like, well, people can't trust them either.
For a country which has staked its future in IP and a knowledge economy ... making your vendors into someone that can't be trusted means that all of a sudden those things which were supposed to save the economy are now floundering.
And America keeps acting like it's their right to violate local laws and generally act like douchebags. All while acting like if someone else did this it would be an act of war.
So, it's not melodramatic. It's real, and entirely deserved, and a product of your own creation.
Well since the NSA started its movement the free Internet we knew and loved has changed utterly, so I'd say some kind of identity theft has taken place.
May the Maths Be with you!
its policies, and the politicians who support the same are directly responsible for massive losses of money and jobs
How does that compare to, say, the policies that have made offshoring lucrative, or the changes to depression-era rules that allowed the 2008 global economic meltdown?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
For those curious how some of it is done, google "Cisco Lawful Enforcement"..
it's on Cisco's own site and public, but basically it shows they've pretty much incorporated backdoors for govt. They even have nifty pdfs describing how great and easy it is to comply with CALEA with it.
There have been absolutely no cases of identity theft which are even remotely attributable to the alleged (probable? proven?) weaknesses the NSA inserted into encryption algorithms. No one yet knows how to exploit these weaknesses, and if an intentional weakness does exist in the elliptic curve random number generation algorithm then it is a keyed weakness such that you need the secret values that only the NSA has in order to exploit it.
So the particular statement referring to the NSA making identity theft easier is flat out BULLSHIT. Only a moron or someone with no technical understanding of the issue would make such a claim.
Seriously, rag on the NSA for stuff that they have actually done, not this extrapolated crap since it just makes us look stupid.
dunno about that, but I don't get why bother with nsa created holes when the legislation allows the holder of information needed for such id theft to sell it and some have been selling them(credit check companies).
and about cert authorities with usa operations being coerced to co-operate? fucking no shit sherlock! that's not even news, that's just a direct consequence of the powers the agencies have.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"Proof" is classified. Move along citizen.
Only classified in the US and with cooperation of complicit nations. Of course, China's not about to publicly point out the holes in cisco routers, as they probably leverage them themselves. Likewise, Russia won't do it, as they've got crime syndicates taking advantage. It's up to countries like Brazil and India to speak out about these things... and do so in a way that they don't get silenced.
Yeah, as if it's just limited to Cisco, and certainly won't have an effect on the rest of the tech industry (like Cloud Computing) going all the way down to programmers... dumbass.
You could make the argument that this is overblown, but you cannot deny that it is true at least to some significant degree. The ironic part is how the U.S. government has been warning us about the coming cyber-apocalypse, and it turns out that they have done more to stoke those flames than anybody else.
"Emerging markets" (and god knows what the scare quotes are for) likely need enterprise class equipment too.
Emerging markets can use hand-me-down SOHO equipment in their houses, classrooms and hotels, but those machines connect to something bigger, and throwing Vyatta on a used PC doesn't compare to a 6500 for your campus or 9000 for your new ISP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyatta
Router based on PCs were there since last century, it wouldn't change projections beause they were always there. But putting an equipment that you can't trust in the critical point of your network where you must have the maximum trust (either because Cisco want to cooperate, or is forced to, secret laws are nukes in the trust domain) is not a great idea.
If these other Countries don't want to buy All-American products with Freedom® and Democracy® built-in, then they stand against us in our Global War of Terror
Exactly, The big issue would far bigger even than Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all go bankrupt at once because of this.
We have found that we cannot trust the networks of ISPs anymore: there can be an NSA tap anywhere. A good and practical move would be to start using more and more robust end-to-end encryption. Things like SSL are possibly out of question as NSA has corrupted the root certs.
"we find out that all these people started buying from China or some other country and those do actually have backdoors while the US companies actually didn't."
Never going to happen.
Not because china or some other country (e.g. USA?) isn't putting backdoors in, but that we won't find that US companies didn't, because actually, they did.
But even if you pop the champagne and throw a party when Cisco is hurt, I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.
Yours sincerely,
The government of North Korea^W^Wthe USA.
I wonder if Cisco can sue for damage to business. I know that if a government blunder cost me $35 billion, I would be pretty unhappy. Seriously that is nearly 12 US presidential elections bought worth of lost revenue.
Uhm..., no? Yes? Maybe? What is your point?
Personally, I despise Cisco for their heavy handed business practices. They lost my business a long time ago, but from the "what's good for the U.S. economy, they do still count. So it sucks, hard, to see our government's misguided policies affect them, not to mention just about every other U.S. tech company with an international market.
These leaks have cost America the trust of an entire generation. In the last few months I deleted my gmail, linkedin, facebook, twitter, ebay and amazon accounts, and when my cellphone dies I won't buy another. If US companies deny their customers the basic human right that is dignity through privacy then it will be to their extreme financial loss. Personally I want no part of what these services have to offer because they do not respect me as a individual. I don't trust the hardware, the software, the services, the network, the companies or the government. And google can stick glass up their ass.
A bit hard to prove a case of it but not too hard to show the possability. Google around for the documented cases in Greece and (IIRC Italy) where organized crime used U.S. mandated back doors into telephone switches to spy on their government.
It's not unreasonable that the NSA would have their own gear -- some kind of box connected in the middle. What evidence is there that cisco equipment has some kind of backdoor to the NSA, and this is not all FUD.. ?
> So the particular statement referring to the NSA making identity theft easier is flat out BULLSHIT.
How so? I thought it is pretty much fact. They introduced some weak encryption, and most of all they introduced weak random number generators, which means any key generated using it should be considered compromised. If the NSA can break it, the hackers will learn how to break it, too, especially if there is money behind it.
The only acceptable opinion of government is suspicion and loathing. When people like government it becomes this icky thing where the figurehead turns into a god and that figurehead's actions are revered by those who aren't getting killed or robbed by him/her.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Isn't this the same US government who's been slagging off Huawei hardware because the chinese might be sneaking backdoors into Huawei hardware...?
What goes around, comes around...
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Dude, it's agreed that slashvertizements are in bad taste...like asking a girl for sex when you go to pick her up for a date (i.e. it's super rude), but having said as much (seriously editors, do something about this), everything this blurb is talking about was predicted. NSA goes on privacy knifing binge, other Powers decide not to trust the US with their secrets, the businesses of the US cry out. Predicted, known, and they still didn't care. And now they want our trust, again, so they can betray it, again. The NSA's nickname might as well be Judas Iscariot or Jesus Christ, depending on whether you're on the receiving end, or the giving end. In either case, people are pissed.
So make a bad choice: pure honesty, with our super bad laws (God help you with that, as you're screwed inside and outside the US...victim of our foreign policy, or victim of our domestic policy)...or pure honesty, we're human, you're going to fail at some laws, and you might / might not receive some help when you do. Frankly, I see suffering, which, while not being a Buddhist, I am not a fan of...mine or others. Frankly, I'd prefer laws that everyone could follow flawlessly.
I am John Hurt.
Emerging markets ... likely need enterprise class equipment too.
Well, yes and no, but reportedly 98.9% no in the case of at least one huge deal that fell through.
SDN is coming, and the likes of Cisco are terrified of it. So would you be if your own executives thought it was going to cut your company's value in half and there was little you could do about it.
The main thing they've got left to compete with is the trust in their brand, the idea that they're a safe bet and no-one ever got fired for buying Cisco. They're in trouble even without all the NSA publicity, but if their own government is damaging their established brand, it doesn't exactly help their situation.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Not just the NSA, but the TSA aswell. Myself and many other Canadians that I know refuse to vacation in the States anymore because of the invasive border checks.
When it comes to hardware in terms of company and/or country, who can *anyone* trust?
And evoking Reagan 's speech writer, how the hell would you verify anyway?
Certain measures must be taken to assure the voters they are not to blame.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
From one perspective some of us do care - they do make stuff that works reasonably well.
But my suspicion is that there's more to this than just abandoning Cisco. In many cases it's a lot cheaper to set up a router based on a PC and Linux, which probably is what happens in "emerging markets".
As for the NSA - they could probably do a lot better for the economy if they did put their effort into tracking down and nuking scammers, spammers and other internet pests - and their karma would be better. And they better use the CIA and others to really "take care" of those problems.
Yup. NSA knows where all the child porn distributors are, what they are using to do it, and who the people are.
But do nothing about it.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all go bankrupt at once because of this.
That is extremely unlikely. What is more plausible, however, is:
1. They continue to lose the confidence of international customers.
2. Those customers seek alternative arrangements that they consider more trustworthy, possibly ad-hoc ones at first.
3. Over time, a new generation of more structured alternatives begins to develop to supply the new market demand, offering similar services and products to the big name US brands.
Some of these may be direct commercial competitors, but that's not really the concern for the current market leaders, because the barrier to entry for anyone trying to compete head-on is huge. Probably the greater risk is collaborative movements, whether Open Source tools or simply a degree of standardisation and compatibility between smaller vendors that means you can build (for example) a heterogenous network using a pool of specialist vendors and have a good chance of it working.
This is potentially toxic to broad US vendors such as Cisco in the networking space or the big cloud services companies who ideally want you to outsource almost your entire IT infrastructure to them alone. Which brings us on to...
4. Even in the US, long-time and lucrative customers start second-guessing whether they still need US IT Brand X, and those brands start losing serious money to both the foreign movements and, over time, also to new competitors in the US who are riding the open/collaboration wave to get a disruptive foothold in the market.
And at that point, the big US vendors are really in trouble.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I wouldn't be surprised if all other U.S. companies suffer similar harm, and that's no cause for a party.
For a lot of people and a lot of different reasons, it would be cause for celebration if these markets opened up and weren't dominated by a few giants any more. That's the heart of the problem for the giants.
The related problem for the US government is that new entrants in the markets won't necessary be based in, or even operate in, the United States. Aside from any potential security concerns that might give them, it's going to hit the US tax man right in the spreadsheet.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Likewise, Russia won't do it, as they've got crime syndicates taking advantage. It's up to countries like Brazil and India to speak out about these things..
Because Brazil is crime free and doesn't spy? I expect that India is similarly virtuous.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
SHOW ME THE PROOF
Ok...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130909/11430124454/john-gilmore-how-nsa-sabotaged-key-security-standard.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?hp&_r=0
I think you're just failing to understand the scope of what they've done. The NSA planted people in standards bodies to deliberately weaken those standards. Not only do we have eye whiteness's from those standards committees that have complained about this for years, but we've got leaked documents from the NSA bragging about doing it. One of their primary goals seems to have been to dissuade broadening the use of encryption in general. By making the standards complicated, hard to understand, a lot of people just gave up and didn't implement them. In other cases they tried to block standards from using encryption by default. All of this leads to a less secure network. Without a doubt those actions of made crime and identity theft much easier. Can we find some guy and say that his identity was stolen because of the NSA? No... but what we can say is that without the NSA's interference, there would be more, and better encryption... and more and better encryption would have definitely reduced the numbers of identity thefts in the world.
The problem with using "a PC and Linux" as a router is even if you are picky about the hardware its still gonna suck several times the amount of power a piece of dedicated hardware would and in most emerging markets power is anything but cheap. Now sure if the router is gonna be doing other jobs, such as the AMD Bobcat I set up that was a combo router/media server? it might make sense but you go with the traditional "just use this no longer useful P4 PC" route you'll be blowing through the juice.
As for the NSA...who cares about the hardware? Any company that gives 2 shits about privacy is gonna avoid the USA like an STD and the NSA also put the brakes on the whole "just use the cloud!" bullshit as we now know anything you put into a USA based cloud becomes the NSA's to snoop as they like. I'm sure the amount of money all this business avoiding the USA is just insane but sadly getting an exact dollar figure would be next to impossible.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We don't like what the US does. So we boycott this company because they may be working with the NSA...
However... the NSA can work with many "foreign" companies as well, As in today global economy the difference between a foreign company and a US company, is the location of the CEO's most used office.
Plant an operative, in the manufacturing area, when he installs the code of the firmware to flash, he puts in a slightly different version.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Idiot. Without export there will be no import. Who is going to sell you petrol
The US produces more oil than Iran
Or iPad
Can easily be manufactured in the US. It will just be a bit more expensive
Or precious metals?
Discovery channel has at least 5 different series of "Gold Rush Alaska" etc...
Or steel?
You're kidding, right?
Or lithium for you convertible's batteries?
http://www.mining.com/web/new-wyoming-lithium-deposit-could-meet-all-u-s-demand/
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
HAHAHAHAHA Yes this is so perfect! It just keeps getting better and better!" - Bin Laden's ghost
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And that is a basic consumer response to an inferior crippled service.
It's why most people are going to go for the less-intrusive less-pervy PS4 instead of the always-recording always-secret-police-enabled 1984 version of the xBox One.
Markets are made up of consumers.
not sheep.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This is exactly the reason given when trying to sell hardware from companies not based in the USA to the US government ...
these were not US Mandated as the equipment vendors implement such techniques because operators are obliged by local law to only use eq. that have such features. So if at all it was US inspired law that made such actions easy.
The true costs of trustable networking are starting to become much clearer. In the past we relied on the trust that the government wasn't actively fucking everyone. Its the exact opposite of a party, it's quite sobering the reality of what we must do to interfere with the spying machine and hold trust in our networks.
Good-bye
Rather than hurting the American economy, it has helped, by keeping tabs on the technologies and business plans of foreign competitors. What do you think industrial spying is? And don't you think that the Federal Government is involved in such espionage. In fact, every major government in the world conducts industrial espionage. Groweth up.
Oh - they do something about it - it ends up in their fap stash.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I've personally seen the declassified war documents written by the leaders of the DoD at the time.
Japan was on the verge of surrender before we bombed them. The USA knew this. It was a conditional surrender to USSR. The USA demanded an unconditional surrender to the USA, for strategic and practical reasons. The cold war was already ramping up. The USA President and War Secretary decided to drop the bombs to force this surrender.
You can read about all of the above in these docs. Copies of them are located at the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, Japan. There are copies in the USA as well.
The story we get feed by our teachers growing up in the USA is widely recognized as BS.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Brazil and Russia are not "emerging markets". Pay attention to the ramifications of this post. Seriously, this is not just about Cisco .. pull your head out of your ass.
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
I don't care about Cisco.
Mod points for everyone in the world except Cisco and its allies.
While it is appropriate for US citizens to focus on US wrongdoing, you should not, therefore, conclude that other countries are innocent.
OTOH, it may well be reasonable to conclude that they are less dangerous *to you*.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It is certainly appropriate for you to assert that you will not believe in the Easter Bunny without additional evidence. This, however, does no impose any obligation on the person making the claim to provide you with the evidence, unless his goal is to convince you.
Were I to consider the claim that the NSA had been a contributory factor to identity theft to be dubious, then I might doubt an assertion as to it's truth. This, however, would not impose any obligation on the asserting party to provide the proof, unless his goal was to convince me. If, instead, his goal was to convince those other folk over there who found his assertions convincing, then he would have scant reason to provide me with evidence.
So I find your claims invalid. You are assuming a motive that has not been demonstrated.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, your signature is accurate.
The US uses a lot more oil than does Iran. The last I checked it was a net importer.
Gold is only one of many precious metals. Platinum is actually more important, even though gold is quite valuable of coating fine electrodes, etc.
Lithium isn't something that we're going to stop needing. Yes, someone claims that some particular desposit could meet all the US demand. For how long? What about Tungsten? Indium? Titanium? Etc.
FWIW, as a US citizen I'm in favor of having a high tax on local resources, so that they will be saved for later, when they will probably be more valuable. This means trading to import them from elsewhere (and manufacturing fancy things from them that others will buy at a premium). We haven't been being good stewards of the land for at least the last several decades. To the extent that I can trust the history I was taught, the poor stewardship extends much farther back than that.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Likewise, Russia won't do it, as they've got crime syndicates taking advantage. It's up to countries like Brazil and India to speak out about these things..
Because Brazil is crime free and doesn't spy? I expect that India is similarly virtuous.
No, because Brazil and India have more to gain than they do to lose. And we already had that debate regarding Brazil, cold fjord... If I peek over the cubicle wall to see what my co-worker is up to, that's not the same type of spying as comprehensive meta-surveillance. Likewise, the oranges from Brazil aren't the same as the rotten apples from the US. First clue: Brazil announced what they were doing publicly, NSA lied to congress about what they were up to and have had a steady program of misleading information and character assassination ever since. If Brazil was able to openly admit to what they were doing, I'd trust them to speak out about what other countries are doing too.
In the first place. So screw them if you feel that way about it.
Got a reputable online source? Because the front page of results is all... a little tinfoily.
...since 'Murica has been railing about how the Chinese are infiltrating their stuff (while alleged to have done the same thing), and complaining about countries which restrict a free internet...
Given that the US has yet to do things that the other countries do to their networks, no moral high ground has been lost. The US doesn't censor to the degree that the BRIC countries do(no Great Firewall for example) and doesn't monitor like the other ones do(without *any* regard for a crime). The US is still bound by the Constitution, which makes it hard for the NSA to do what Third World countries do easily(which is to monitor without a specific purpose). The only thing that you could claim is that the US does it cleaner than everyone else.
If those other countries don't care for US equipment, then it will reflect badly on them when they receive lesser performing equipment - while being spied on by China. It's their choice - have lower performance and active espionage from a despotic country(China), or higher performance and possible monitoring from a First World country(the United States of America).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Cisco have just used their reputation to jack up the price of their equipment which is no better than competitors are selling at lower prices. A bit of reputation loss means they've either got to have equipment that can be seen to be worth that price or sell at a cheaper price.
It's also nice to see a this happen to a company that has got up to a variety of dirty tricks against their competitors. Add in the blatant gold plating of government contracts to rip off the taxpayer and it's hard to see anyone more deserving of this sort of blowback.
Of course not, both issues are important enough that they can be discussed on their own instead of bundling them together every fucking time. "But the Chinese ..." is getting to be a bit of a worn out excuse by now don't you think? This isn't about China, this is about Cisco and similar that have left backdoors that apparently hundreds of thousands of private contractors know about. Don't you think that is a big enough deal? What happens when one of that huge number of people has a money problem and sees the backdoor as a solution? What happens when the NSA does a Boeing vs Airbus again and you happen to be at the place with less political connections then get hit with taxpayer funded industrial espionage? Why shouldn't we know a vector by which criminals and spooks can get trade secrets?
There was exactly that with Boeing vs Airbus via taxpayer funded spooks but Boeing were the only ones to get financial benefit it. There's probably plenty of other stuff but that's the one that was looked at for quite a while in a courtroom and found to be real industrial espionage by taxpayer funded spooks.
Technically, the NSA have been doing what they are doing for a while. So irrespective of what you think about the NSA or Snowden, it was the information that they're doing it getting wider attention that is causing the demand to drop.
I really doubt that there's just one thing happening. There's usually more than one.
When you decide between two manufacturers, you consider several things. One of them is how secure you feel using the equipment, but that's only one. Sometimes it's a very important reason, sometimes it's less important. (If you're publishing GPL code, do you really care if the NSA reads it?)
For some people this will be an important reason.
For some people this will be trivial.
For some people this will be the weight of a feather that tips the scales.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's cause for celebration for another reason: when it becomes clear that US corporations are going to be seriously hurt by the NSA's activities, it provides some serious incentive to lobby against NSA surveillance.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But they did more than this. The backdoors are not the worst part. They manipulated the standards bodies into making the security tools hard to use, hard to manipulate and hard to maintain. There-by discouraging the adoption of encryption itself. You don't need a backdoor if the traffic isn't encrypted. They weekended the ENTIRE internet, and likely even private networks by doing this. The entire world is less secure because of their actions. Of all the things they've done, this is probably the most damaging to the modern world.
To paraphrase McCarthy, "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the government as being members of child trafficking rings and who nevertheless are still working and operating in the United States."
If you've got actual evidence to back up your claim, set the wheels in motion - but don't get trigger-happy. As much as I'm disgusted with government, we do not want or need another red scare.
Allow me to break it to you: The German Prism: Berlin Wants to Spy Too
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Disclaimer: I'm a network engineer in performance testing.
It certainly isn't cheaper to run a router on a PC than on appliance. A stock Linux has pretty bad performances, and the hardware is not as tuned as an appliance. Mostly, they take up more space, use more Watt per Gbps, and don't provide as much performance. There's a reason why these pieces of software are highly tuned, and performance usually is the main goal right after features.
The evolution of the market however is towards virtualisation. They call it NfV - Network functions Virtualization. They (the Network Equipment Manufacturers) provide virtual versions of their appliance, but not the binaries themselves because their (usually Linux) OS is so tuned, it can't be used on a generic platform if you want any kind of performance. Now this brings a lot of problems, such as, again, performance - a lot of these guys have FPGA/ASICs that do a lot of hardware acceleration (IP or TCP layers offloading, like calculating the CRCs in the headers), and removing that is a problem. Maybe paravirtualization will help but they're not there yet. The second problem is the overhead of the hypervisors. Whatever VMWare and others will tell you, it's more than 3%, and even if it's 3%, the scale of the data centers make these 3% turn into millions of dollars each year.
And what does this change? Spying by your own country is a different matter. Hint - representation.
For a state owned company or agency this is not a problem. For a private company it might not matter - that doesn't leak to competitors, and that's the only thing that really matters. And for a citizen it might or might not be a problem, that depends on your views. But these agencies are under control of a democratically elected government, so if they overstep the bounds you can react, at least in theory. In the EU this also partially works over borders - I don't have any direct influence over German authorities, but the european bodies include politicians from my country, either directly elected (the parliament) or appointed by elected national bodies (the commision), so I'm not entirely powerless.
On the other hand, I have precisely zero influence on US agencies. It's your democracy, I'm not part of it. See the difference? Whether this internal control works at all is a different question, but in this case no control is possible. Add to this the fact that the data they collect is more than likely to land in the hands of american competitors (the US loves protectionism)...
The only way to avoid that is to stay away, and that's starting to happen. Of course this will reduce the global income of US corporations, not a surprise.
So, the fact that others want to do the same thing doesn't change a thing. Avoiding US-based services still makes sense.
The recent events made it clear that globalization includes some risks. Most companies knew this - would anyone from, say, EU use a chinese cloud service for company data? Now we've seen that even the globally trusted US of A is not that trustworthy, so the world is taking a step back. High time.
Of course not, both issues are important enough that they can be discussed on their own instead of bundling them together every fucking time. "But the Chinese ..." is getting to be a bit of a worn out excuse by now don't you think?
Nope. The Chinese have yet to demonstrate that they are not a threat, and are thus a necessary part of the discussion.
This isn't about China, this is about Cisco and similar that have left backdoors that apparently hundreds of thousands of private contractors know about. Don't you think that is a big enough deal? What happens when one of that huge number of people has a money problem and sees the backdoor as a solution? What happens when the NSA does a Boeing vs Airbus again and you happen to be at the place with less political connections then get hit with taxpayer funded industrial espionage?
The Airbus deal was as bad as Dubai Ports and Huawei - all threats to national security. Thankfully all of them were rejected.
As for the private contractor, that's a question of controls, policy, and vetting of candidates for integrity. In your hypothetical case, the contractor gets canned and receives justice through the court system.
Thankfully, I haven't worked for a company in the United Statesthat is foreign-controlled such as Airbus, nor do I plan to do so.
Why shouldn't we know a vector by which criminals and (foreign) spooks can get trade secrets?
That is precisely why China deserves more attention. If Snowden had released stuff that was damning on Huawei, other PRC-linked "companies", or any Russian interests, he would be releasing redeeming information.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As for the NSA...who cares about the hardware? Any company that gives 2 shits about privacy is gonna avoid the USA like an STD and the NSA also put the brakes on the whole "just use the cloud!" bullshit as we now know anything you put into a USA based cloud becomes the NSA's to snoop as they like.
This is something I have never understood: If it were not the NSA doing it, it would be someone else. A commercial competitor, another government, or even another agency within the same government... or even hackers. Why would you ever trust "the cloud". WTF? Centralized computing gives control over to another entity. One break, breaks us all. I thought we moved beyond that model.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
The corporations are strong armed into doing this sort of thing on behalf of the government. If they dont comply or try to fight it, then they are found in violation of some law or regulation, saddled with court cases and punitive fines, or maybe even completely taken out of business. In some cases the government will get their competitor to do it. In the case of the telcos, their entire existence is at the whim of the government, so it's unlikely they would ever fight.
The government is the bully here. They really are the mafia.
Libertas in infinitum
So, the NSA is responsible for about 8 times as much damage to the AMerican economy as criminal identity thieves. This is terrible! America needs to launch a programme immediately to improve the quality of it's thieving underclass.
And, my friend, my Nigerian Internet Scamming Academy is just the place for you to improve your internet identity theft skills. With our 420 online courses, you too can reach the hallowed degree of Internet Success that Nigeria has. Simply send your name, email and bank details to "Prince Ojimbo's Academy, Lagos 90210" and we'll be back to you in minutes. At the speed of Internet!.
(We have discontinued one course. only 419 courses available now.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I have a solution to this problem. How about you stop being an idiot on the internet? I looked at the link and it's a video about the US and EU conducting trade deals showing once again I was right about a trivial fact.
It seems to be called "the cloud" partly in an attempt to encourage cloudy thinking by managers who have little technical knowledge. Each "cloud" has its own API, which causes an intended lock-in.
Maybe you hate yourself then, but you were opposing the entire idea of a lot of people working together to achieve what individuals can not - ie. government. News just it - "I've got mine, fuck you brother" is selfishness.
How about addressing the issue directly instead of using an incredibly stupid fiction?
I really don't get why you losers think someone like Rand who fled from Soviet Russia to live on welfare in the USA has all the answers on the US government. She didn't get to see much of what commerce, industry, trade and government actually did before shrugging it all off as worthless.