US Slaps Sanctions On North Korea After Sony Cyberattack
wiredmikey writes: The United States imposed financial sanctions Friday on North Korea and several senior government officials in retaliation for a cyber attack on Sony Pictures. President Obama said he ordered the sanctions because of "the provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions and policies (PDF) of the Government of North Korea, including its destructive, coercive cyber-related actions during November and December 2014." The activities "constitute a continuing threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," he added, in a letter to inform congressional leaders of his executive order. The new measures allow the Treasury Department "to apply sanctions against officials of the Government of North Korea and the Workers' Party of Korea, and persons determined to be owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of" these bodies.
Since the place is locked up as tight as Tibet once was, it's hard to imagine subsidies doing much. But yay for empty gestures!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
not north korea, is slashdot becoming just another source for government misinformation and propaganda???
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I seriously doubt they care. N. Korea gets all of their shit from China and China ain't going to quit supplying them just because the US government said so.
This is just another show of theatrics by the idiots in charge of the USA to make it look like they actually have some kind of authority.
The Slave Islands are the worst kept secret in South Korea. http://www.news.com.au/world/a...
POTUS hits NK with sanctions because, well, cause Merika that's why.
There fixed that for you.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
http://marcrogers.org/2014/12/...
"So in conclusion, there is NOTHING here that directly implicates the North Koreans. In fact, what we have is one single set of evidence that has been stretched out into 3 separate sections, each section being cited as evidence that the other section is clear proof of North Korean involvement. As soon as you discredit one of these pieces of evidence, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down."
I really look forward to similar language being used by foreign countries that the US got caught spying and hacking on and the ensuing financial sanctions against the US as well.
Sony is like 0.00000001 of our economy. Most of us don't care if they fail and disappear entirely.
Actually, most of us would like to see them sink into obscurity. Might suck for the half dozen Slashdotters who are still using Sony Walkman, but them's the breaks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I posted last week the same thoughts, even providing links to other professionals who ask "Where any evidence demonstrating that North Korea is the culprit?". I was subsequently rated a "TROLL" for linking the Wired Article and asking the question. Specifically stating like you, that it's become propaganda and facts don't seem to matter. Since people seem to be too lazy to read the Wired article (or any others) here is a 30 minute video.
The quote "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." surely comes to mind, and since people don't seem to be able to discern fact from opinion these days it's an easy game for propagandists to play.
Why is it relevant? Because sanctions against the DPRK will not hurt the people in charge of the DPRK. They will have their food, wine, and women (or what ever they prefer) no matter what. North Korea can get what ever they need through China, and already does in large part. The people who will be suffering are those already starving.
Not only is the punishment unjustly targeted, but it harms exactly the _wrong_ people.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I hear her phone got hacked or something.
I mean, it was pretty convenient timing for a government looking to distract the American public, gave Sony a feasible scapegoat for their security failings, and the only people that could contradict the story aren't about to give evidence against themselves. I guess slapping these "sanctions" on NK means they're doubling down?
Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. used to be called Columbia Pictures. Headquartered in Burbank, California, it's run by an American CEO and produces American films for an American audience. It was renamed after Sony bought almost half of the stock.
Justice served. Just like when we invaded Iraq for their involvement in 9/11.
Gold isn't generally a good investment. There are exceptions however and one of the big ones is what Beck took advantage of. Realizing that the housing market was about to collapse, which in retrospect should have been obvious and evidently it was obvious to Beck at the time, Beck pulled his money out of the stock market and bought gold. Given the fallout that occurred when all those banks tanked and had to be bailed out stocks dropped out and gold spiraled up having a twofold payoff for those who saw it coming. Not only did they avoid losing their ass in stocks but they more than doubled their money on gold. What most people did wrong then was to buy gold after it has gone out of sight. Once you miss the boat you might as well go back home because it's not coming back to port for a looooong time. You always pick up gold when it's cheap. It's a long term safe investment. Right now it's too fucking high to buy. Beck's fat little ass got rich as hell though and then he made millions more hawking it as an investment.
There is very little public evidence proving or disproving who conducted the hack. That is as much as anyone knows as a fact.
Of course it was an inside job. Where do you think Kim was last fall when nobody saw him for a month? In the hospital? No, he was working as a sys admin at Sony installing the necessary software to pull of this hack.
It's an American subsidiary of a Japanese Corporation. It's in the US but it answers to Sony in Japan. Japan and the US are tied together by trade agreements and military alliance. An attack on Japan is generally treated like an attack on the US.
Bruce Schneier posted an analysis on his blog that points out a few things.
The timestamps on the data suggest that it was downloaded at USB2.0 speeds, and happened on the day that Charles Sipkins, Sony Pictures' head of corporate communications, publicly resigned.
The USB2.0 speeds implies an inside job, and the timing of Sipkins' resignation is suspicious.
What was the evidence for NK again?
Gold isn't a bad investment all by itself. What is bad is a strategy that buys gold as if it can overcome the need for market research and diversification.
There are times that you increase your investment in gold, or bonds, or stock. Those depend on the characteristics of the investment and how the overall economic situation is panning out, but such a move nearly always takes the form of adjusting your exposure, not completely divesting other forms of investment.
Of course, the biggest problem is that most people are idiots when it comes to investing, but think they are geniuses. So just about every move they make is worse than just dropping their money in an index fund and forgetting about it for a few decades. Sort of like trying to wildly switch lanes in heavy traffic and realizing you'd have gone farther with less risk by simply being patient and sitting in the lane you started in.
And that is where the unscrupulous can make real money by hawking fear among people who think they are getting "the inside track".
Relax about the evidence thing. This is how superpowers do things. If you don't know stuff then just make it up, no-one's going to argue. The USS Maine blew up from a boiler and ammunition explosion and that was enough for the US to start the 1898 Spanish-American War. As for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the UN said to the best of their knowledge there were none, up to the bounds of scientific certainty. Which was interpreted by US decision-makers, for whatever reason, as not meaning 'no'. So carry on, this is business as usual, there's nothing extraordinary here.
Private matter? How is that?
Yes, there is a private enterprise involved, however the matter is piracy on american soil, breaking american laws by a foreign country. That is how a private matter becomes a POTUS matter. If you remove the foreign country from the equation, it is still a POTUS matter since it is related to the domestic laws and law enforcement is then involved.
Achille Talon
Hop!
They only have two, 175.45.176.0/22 and 210.52.109.0/24 as far as I can tell. It's not like we'd be blocking the general population of NK.
Source.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
OK so NKorea subjugates an entire people, no sanctions, but mess with Sony, sanctions. What gives?
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
Er Sony is a Japanese corporation with overseas subsidiaries.
"There is no doubt about it because the rebels announced the news themselves to the whole world before they realized their mistake".
Thank you for your polite expression of dissent. It's fortunate that information like that could never be faked by any group of vicious, self-seeking propagandists who habitually lie about everything. (Which could equally well describe the current "Ukrainian government" or the current US government - it makes no difference as the first is operated by the second).
Unluckily for your conspiracy theory, we know for sure that there were jet fighters within firing range immediately before MH17 went down; that there was no smoke or noise indicating a BUK launch; that the BUK unit captured by rebels (if any) was incomplete and incapable of shooting down an airliner at 10 Km height; that photographs clearly show the cockpit section riddled with cannon holes; that the Ukrainian authorities deliberately diverted MH17 directly over the fighting, for no good reason; and that mysteriously the highly detailed US military satellite images of the attack have never been released. Apart from which the Russians and Novorussians had every reason not to shoot down a civilian airliner, while Kiev had everything to gain from staging a false-flag attack.
Your faked "social media" evidence loses hands down.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.