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Britain To Create 2,000-Strong Cyber Force, Boost Budget By £250M (sky.com)
Slashdot reader cold fjord writes: Britain's Ministry of Defence and GCHQ signals intelligence establishment have put forward a plan to increase staff devoted to offensive cyber operations up to 2,000, quadrupling it over current levels. Funding would also increase by at least £250m, according to one source. The initiative comes
"amid a growing cyber threat from Russia and after the UK used cyber weapons for the first time to fight Islamic State."
General Sir Richard Barrons commented, "By adopting offensive cyber techniques in the UK we are levelling the playing field and providing new means of both deterring and punishing states that wish to do us harm."
Nobody with an actual clue uses that word. They will probably only get wannabees that are eager to fulfill their authoritarian masters bidding though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
subjects and citizens, largely men victimizing and predating women, was not sufficient cause to employ a "force", but harm of the nationhood is. I have come to new levels of disdain for bureaucrats of "free market" nations (and many regular folks) who justify the ambitions of trans-national corporations (protected by limited liability) collating and correlating consumer profiles (aka You-Are-the-Product) but insist less developed economies allow such vital statistics be collected by western corporations.
But of course I support securing admin directories and increasing awareness of manipulation (such as phishing), but as another poster has dismissed the very term cyber as hopelessly dated and ignorant, I am alarmed by the complete lack of specificity by the given descriptions.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
"Britain is significantly increasing its ability to wage war in cyberspace..."
Translation: "to fuck up the Internet"
The Conservative conference is about to start and the UK government is desperate for anything to distract them from the Brexit catastrophe. This is why a group of people who have regularly compared the EU to the Nazis are suddenly getting upset about a photo with no cherries. The real translation is "please don't notice the puppeteer .
. . . but then again . . . nobody in the UK besides Theresa May seems to like her Chequers Plan either . . . so maybe she wants to keep an eye on the UK bastards, as well . . . ?
(what's the spaces between the dots?)
That aside, yeah no one in the UK really likes it.
For the vaguely sane, leaving the EU is clearly incredibly stupid and it's clear we're going to much worse under Chequers than we're doing now[*].
For many Brexiters it's not acceptable because Brexit was supposed to make everything better and it won't. they're stil waiting for a magical solution which makes everything better not worse.
And for the Jacob Reese-Moggs and Boris "250k is chickenfeed" Johnsons of this world, they simply don't care that a hard Brexit will utterly fuck everyone less rich than them. They see it as a route to power and they don't care how many people have to die for them to get it.
Thing is though the reception in the UK is barely relevant. No one in the EU likes it either. The May government is very good when it comes to blustering about our "red lines", but they seem to have forgotten that the EU has some too.
[*] There are some interesting things though, particularly the emphasis on goods rather than services. The UK is largely a financial service economy so that will effectively heavily boos the goods side relative to the services side. That could potentially help with the inequality problems because manufacturing of goods can end up employing a lot of people relative to financial services. However, in order for that work, the Tories would have to be a lot more pro British manufacturing than they've ever been in the past which is deeply unlikely. And the EU will have to agree which they won't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
We just lived through decades of criminalizing trivial transgressions (whenever "with a computer" would apply), of making even copyright circumvention (think: copying a DVD) a criminal act more punishable than assault. At the same time countless cases of extreme carelessness regarding security, many of them leading to massive private data dumps, were without any adverse consequences to the responsible decision makers.
There will be two kinds of people signing up for these newly created cyber corps: reckless people with a criminal past who could be blackmailed into service, and people who fancy the term "cyber corps", which makes them feel like space marines from SC2. Every decently skilled and responsible hacker in the western hemisphere wants nothing to do with this whole topic any more, and even less with the two groups of people I just described.
The days of 2600 are gone in the west, and they ain't coming back through cyber corps.
Did you see the recent episode of Question Time from Dewsbury? I grew up not far from there and frankly I'm thinking about developing a Scouse or maybe Brummie accent to avoid the stigma of being associated with such a bunch of thick ignorant cunts.
But froth froth sovereignty! Froth froth get behind the leader!
The fact that we haven't had that since the yanks told us we couldn't invade Suez seems to pass them by. As for getting behind the leader, that's what lemmings do.
I don't see that. It won't make, say, our carmakers any better than they already are, but we could still lose huge amounts of jobs and the related tax revenue from financial companies moving - which is already happening.
Referring back to QT, there was a woman on the panel who was the first to say it publicly AFAIK - what the people voted for is irrelevant it if it can't actually be done.
As to all those deals we'll be able to do, India (one of the most protectionist countries there is) told her to go pound sand last year and she's been reduced to trying to flog weapons to those lovely Turks and Saudis.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."