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Did North Korea Really Attack Sony?
An anonymous reader writes "Many security experts remain skeptical of North Korea's involvement in the recent Sony hacks. Schneier writes: "Clues in the hackers' attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one, since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It's easy to fake, and it's even easier to interpret it incorrectly. In general, it's a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the "evidence" to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.""
Occam's Razor: Is there conclusive evidence that it was North Korea? No. Therefore, rational people lack a reason to believe it was.
I always doubt North Korea would bother with this and then not admit it was them.
NK denied it, rather than taking credit.
Their tools are widely distributed, so faking the source is really easy.
The US government is weird combination of ineptitude and self-aggrandizement, so the FBI claims are likely pure BS designed to make the claimants look good (they were SOOO sure that had profiled the Yosemite killer years ago that it only took two more deaths to prove them wrong).
It is a very good way to stop anyone talking about what was actually in all the released internal documents though. While the media's been all over this stupid N. Korea angle, where are the reports about the actual scandals in the released documents?
I'm with you in spirit on that, but there's a tiny little problem with actually doing it: China actually likes North Korea for some reason, and would get very, very upset with us for even so much as supporting a South Korean invasion of the North
Would they? Perhaps, yes...
Would they DO anything other than wave their arms around? I'm pretty sure I could make sure they don't...
Taiwan and the disputed seas off Japan are far more important to China than North Korea is... I imagine I could make a deal with them over that. They might still wave their arms around, but even Japan may be willing to give up some of the disputed islands or do a joint oil development deal with China (oil is really what it is about there) in return for North Korea going away.
It just takes a President who is a leader and not a reactor and follower, and we really haven't had one of those since Reagan. (Bush is no better than Obama in this case, so I'm not picking sides there)
(sorry, have to say it) legitimate and sovereign leadership of North Korea.
So was the Nazi government in Germany, but we didn't let that stop us.
History is written by the victor. It sounds cold and heartless, but it is the truth. The current leadership of North Korea is only sovereign and legitimate until someone else comes along and knocks them off.
After all, England used to be the sovereign and legitimate government of America, or at least the 13 colonies. Shall we give that back? ;)
I'm sure Russia would pile on, too, since they're buddies with China.
Don't be silly, Putin needs a way out, I'd give him one...
In return for Ukraine joining NATO and Russia signing a treaty with Ukraine acknowledging its sovereignty, Russia could keep Crimea and we would recognize that. Crimea shouldn't have changed hands the way it did, but it happened and isn't likely to be undone, and it was Russia's just 50 years ago anyway.
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Everyone has their price, and most people have something else more important to them than any given item, other than of course the most important thing.
The islands off Japan are not as important as removing North Korea, Russia behaving is more important than who controls Crimea, etc.
If you try to lead people along by the nose, saying things like Bush did "you're either with us or against us", they just fall over and fight back. Give them a better option and most people will take it.
There is, however, possibly the world's largest repositories of rare earth metals.
Japan was already trying to surrender when they were nuked. If I remember right what they wanted were guarantees the emperor would live and that they wouldn't be completely destroyed by the peace deal.
SK wouldn't want NK back. NK is a backward country, and while the SK Presidency doesn't know who the NK population would vote for it surely wouldn't be a SK party. So it makes little sense to take them back. It's a completely different situation from Berlin, where the somewhat poor Eastern population wasn't badly educated.
Are you implying that DPNK will cause "a million [deaths] over 20 years" with the Sony hack? Most of the estimates I've seen are much lower than that. I do believe the animosity most Americans harbor against North Korea is based on PR and not on facts. The largest threat the Un-regime poses is to their own people, for whom I feel nothing but pity.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
How about a compromise - let's let Sony pay for the war. Just give them a one-time legal exception, let them hire whatever mercenaries (excuse me... "private military contractors") they want, then invade. It would cost Sony probably one or two years' profits, but they might be able to get other corporations to buy in under the idea that they'd be the next to be attacked.
That does leave the question of what to do with NK afterwards, but we can deal with that once it becomes an actual issue.
I don't think it would be a perfectly analogous situation to Iraq or Afghanistan though. For one thing, it wouldn't just be having a new government set up by the US, it would be rejoining with the ethnically identical South. There are probably a lot of cultural rifts and some serious economic inequality they'd have to deal with (German Unification Problems on Steroids), but probably what the USA would do is go "Okay South Korea, it's your problem now".
It's an interesting question though, how the population would react. They've been fed a diet of lies all their lives, but judging by what various defectors to the South have said, people have an inkling of what the truth is. After all, they can see that things are so much better even just in China. If I had to guess, you'd have initial euphoria over rejoined families, of the influx of economic aid and the restoration of liberty, followed by lingering resentment on both sides due to the massive difference in productivity and wealth. Southerners would gripe about having to support and rebuild the North, and Northerners would resent the Southerners in turn. It would be generations before the scars would start to fade. Many of the current defectors seem to have a lot of difficulty adjusting to life in the South for all sorts of reasons, even with assistance from the South's government. I think it would something like that, played out on a much larger scale.