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Microsoft Launches A Counterattack Against Russia's 'Fancy Bear' Hackers (thedailybeast.com)
Kevin Poulsen writes on the Daily Beast:
It turns out Microsoft has something even more formidable than Moscow's malware: Lawyers. Last year attorneys for the software maker quietly sued the hacker group known as Fancy Bear in a federal court outside Washington DC, accusing it of computer intrusion, cybersquatting, and infringing on Microsoft's trademarks... Since August, Microsoft has used the lawsuit to wrest control of 70 different command-and-control points from Fancy Bear... Rather than getting physical custody of the servers, which Fancy Bear rents from data centers around the world, Microsoft has been taking over the Internet domain names that route to them. These are addresses like "livemicrosoft[.]net" or "rsshotmail[.]com" that Fancy Bear registers under aliases for about $10 each. Once under Microsoft's control, the domains get redirected from Russia's servers to the company's, cutting off the hackers from their victims, and giving Microsoft a omniscient view of that servers' network of automated spies.
"In other words," Microsoft outside counsel Sten Jenson explained in a court filing last year, "any time an infected computer attempts to contact a command-and-control server through one of the domains, it will instead be connected to a Microsoft-controlled, secure server."
Nope, you are looking at WWII without Russia, but failed to account for the 10,000 years before that. If there were no Russia, the Mongols would have conquered the land in that area long ago, then the question of who would have been holding it for WWI. If Russia didn't participate in WWI, the results may have been different. And since WWII was a result of WWI, that would cause a great difference in WWII, if it ever happened. So no, it's unlikely we'd be speaking German, though it has been proposed as the official language of the USA, back when there were almost as many German speakers as English speakers, Before WWI, we've fought the English, but not the Germans. Another reason there was a big push to join WWI with the Germans against the English. Had we not soured on Germany from WWII, we'd still be talking about whether we entered WWI on the wrong side. But with Germany earning villain status in WWII, we retcon'ed justification for fighting against them in WWI.
Based on what I read, the theory that the US was close to joining the German side in WW1 seems to be a bit of revisionist history.
US banks had lent money to the allies, a large number of American citizens had joined the Allies, and the Germans were sinking unarmed American ships in WW1 prior to the US entering the conflict. It seems highly unlikely that the US would have ever joined the German side. There was propaganda from both sides lobbying the US form their initial neutral stance. However, there were a large number of factors against joining Germany.
It's possible that I missed something. If so, provide some sources please.
In WWI, the US really had no business getting involved or picking sides, and its involvement was a part of Woodrow Wilson's interventionist policies, which was the ancestor of yesterday's neocon policies of Clinton/Bush/Obama. WWI was really the activation of alliances in Europe drawn up along a combination of ethnic and political lines - Serbia + Russia + France + Belgium + UK + myriad other countries along its fringes vs Austria-Hungary + Germany + Bulgaria + Turkey. The US had the lend-lease policy w/ UK and Wilson was busy selling armaments to one of the parties in the war - the Allies, so if you were Germany, that was obviously an act of war. The trigger that had the US join in was the German sinking of US ships carrying weapons to the allies, but it takes a completely subjective view of that to state that the US was provoked into joining the war. The US joined a war it had no business being involved in: there were no national interests involved, nor for that matter, even humanitarian interests: Kaiser Wilhelm II was not remotely similar to Hitler!
What you are describing is more WWII - the US was in no mood to join the war, and didn't. There was an anti-war movement within the US that saw to it. However, once Pearl Harbor happened, and both Germany & Japan declared war on the US, it wasn't up to FDR at all.