President Obama Wants To Prevent a Cyber Weapon 'Arms Race' (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes:During an address to reporters at the G-20 international summit in China, President Obama stated that he'd like to prevent an "arms race" among countries that have various cyber weapons at their disposal. The remarks come after Russian president Vladimir Putin denied having any involvement with the hack of the Democratic National Committee's emails earlier this summer. Obama said that the world is "moving into a new era where a number of countries have significant capacities", before noting that the United States has "more capacity than anybody, both offensively and defensively" when it comes to cyber weapons.

Comments

Out of his depth

[flyingfsck]

The poor guy is a law professor. He is totally out of his depth when talking about any technical matters and he doesn't even know it.

Re:Out of his depth

[rtb61]

The US is at a major disadvantage and their cyber security forces know it and hate it and that disadvantage will cripple them. It's not a technical one either, it's a political one and that disadvantage is lobbyists. Corrupt lobbyists paid by corrupt corporations to pay off corrupt politicians to force the purchase and installation of poor security closed source proprietary software relying on nothing more than security by obscurity. Other countries will jump ahead with more secure FOSS, basically because their cyber security forces can than directly monitor and audit that software and not just alone but in indirect association with all other governments cyber security forces. The US government will be blocked by 'no no zones' which they are not allowed to touch because profits first, those 'no no zones' will of course be touched by other countries cyber security forces, whilst those countries will be blocking the entry of closed source proprietary software, especially back doored US proprietary software and hardware. The NSA played and now the US economy pays.

Self-inflicted vulnerabilities

[jxander]

We must make sure other countries don't attack us, because we've created so many back doors for us to attack ourselves.

The NSA and their ilk have made us prime targets, and now we rely on begging other countries to not exploit all those vulnerabilities we've created.

How much laughter greeted him?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone take Obama seriously anymore? Certainly none of the leaders at G-20 do.

*for* the people instead of against?

[dromgodis]

How about if the US government (and others) spent more of the effort protecting their people instead of spying on them? As in helping its citizens to safe(r) communication and storage through technology, legislation and practices instead of letting them be susceptible to any potential enemy and letting them further into the infrastructure.