Time and Price are tradeoffs. I'd certainly pay a certain amount to go faster, or to fly in better comfort, but that is highly dependent on exactly what the added cost is. My time is certainly valuable. I'll pay a few hundred bucks for a plane ticket to fly from New York to LA rather than take a multi-day bus ride, but when we're talking about flying to Tokyo, is an extra day of travel time worth a few thousand dollars? To most travellers, probably not.
Air travel used to be a luxury that only the rich enjoyed, and there the difference was vast enough to make it worthwhile. I don't know the numbers offhand, but the time difference between taking a train coast to coast and a flight in the 1930s was probably on the order of 4 to 5 to make a wild guess. Either way, it was significant enough to be desirable, and over time the price came down to where it was so much more advantageous that now air travel is the dominant mode for long distance travel. If supersonic modes of travel can reach that time to price differential, I think we might see them come into play, but certainly not at a 1 to 1. New York to Tokyo in 3-4 hours or less, instead of 16, at twice the price? New York to London in 1-2 hours? That might be a little more tempting.
They've already managed a vertical takeoff/vertical landing on the ground: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxKWh7kLDzw
Most likely this is a step towards general reusability from a cost perspective, as there are advantages to doing recovery on water (generally less problems if you somehow screw it up I would think).
North Korea is one of, if not the most, horrible nations in the world. If anything, the sad thing is that we need to use this hack as an excuse for the sanctions, rather than the horrific treatment of their own citizens.
I'm not completely convinced either - specific attribution is hard. I won't hold my breath on all the evidence being released. In the end, as a computer security professional, the most important thing wasn't who was really behind it - it's what they did/how they did it, and how much of a risk my organization is at from them. Who it was is just a subset of that, and a somewhat less important one given the fungibility of tools. I digress however.
Sanctions targeting officials in the North Korean government don't bother me one bit. They're ruling over one of the most brutal systems in the world, and about the only thing you could say in the defense of a given individual is that they're stuck in the system and don't want to get their entire extended family sent off to a gulag to die. I'm a little concerned that it might impinge on basic food aid (even if a lot of that is diverted to their military), but overall, if sanctions are all that's going to come of this, that's a lot better than other possible outcomes (See the whole "Iraq has WMD so we need to invade" debacle).
The best we can say at this point is "it's a valid theory", because that's all it is. Similar, the disgruntled insider theory is a valid theory. I have yet to see anything that would conclusively prove or disprove either. We can argue all day about which Security Firms/Experts or Government Agencies we trust on their views, but in the security world, attribution is hard. 100% positive attribution is almost impossible.
But let's put that aside for the moment. The important thing to look at, I think, isn't who they want you to think was responsible. It's what they want to sell you with that. In the US Government's case, well, if sanctions are all that's going to come of it (was there anything that wasn't already sanctioned on the most pariah state in the world?), well, that's far less worrisome than trying to use it as justification for bombing them.
If I remember correctly, Japanese has two readings for each character, one that's native and one that's derived from the Chinese pronunciation. Which one is used tends to depend on context and what other characters it's combined with in a word. Different characters can also have the exact same pronunciation, so in spoken language one has to rely on context to understand the meaning. Confusion based on misinterpreted kanji is a big source of humorous situations, both in the case of exact homophones and close ones.
As for Asian language in general, probably the most interesting case is for Korean, as they share the exact same situation as Japanese, having lots of words based on Chinese roots/characters, and a native script that's entirely phonetic. Unlike Japanese however, Korea ditched the common use of Chinese characters (hanja) entirely, and while they still see use in certain situations, it's not the same. In Japanese class we started learning Kanji right away, whereas in Korean class I only even heard about them from the teachers after I asked when noticing similar roots (Daigaku and Daehakgyo for instance), and was considered proficient without even being exposed to them. Modern Japanese could probably make a similar shift, as knowing the pictographical representation isn't necessary for knowing the intended meaning, but it's what they're used to, and there won't likely be any pressure to change anytime soon.
Romanized Chinese exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
Incidentally, it's useful not just for writing out Chinese names/terms for foreigners, but also for language standardization. One thing that's missed in all the discussion of "Chinese" is that historically "Chinese" has been a very broad swath of local dialects united by the writing system. Some of them are even so broadly different that they're mutually unintelligible. Various successive Chinese governments dating back to the Qing dynasty have been trying to standardize on Mandarin, which is what most of us in the West are familiar with, and what you'll get taught if you study "Chinese". Cantonese is probably the other dialect commonly known in the West, due to its significance in Hong Kong/Macau.
Languages are a funny thing really - they're living, changing things that are altered with common usage, and increased communication seems to only be accelerating that process. New words ranging from technical terms to slang to memes to acronyms to foreign loan words seem to be entering use all the time. At the same time, the regional boundaries that used to give rise to divergences in dialect are much broader, meaning that chatting with someone in Britain or Australia is as easy as chatting with someone in a bordering state. I expect that this will have the impact of 'standardizing' English (and similarly other languages within their major group), or at least keeping changes mainstream enough that everyone can still communicate with one another.
I suppose it really depends on the job you're all trying to do. If your work is very collaborative, analytical/consensus based, and has a lot of bouncing ideas back and forth, then a more open space might be best. If your work depends on you being able to concentrate on a task however, you need to be able to shut out distractions, and an "open" format is going to be a serious drag on your productivity.
Not speaking to your suggested control in particular, I do think that in general the non-technical/MBA world, especially the older ones, simply do not take network security seriously enough to properly evaluate the tradeoff in risks to dollar figures. They see it as a cost center (which it is), but do not properly appreciate just how bad things can get. It's our job as network security professionals to make the case for this, but it's not easy when a lot of them still seem to have a view of the computer as a magic box. This is even before we get to the problem that good security can be tough for large enterprises even when you can shovel truckloads of money at it government style.
I think that it's going to take a lot more breaches, and fired CEOs, before enough of it gets taken seriously.
As with many things, a lot depends on the context. In the context of the 18th century, the American Revolutionaries and the U.S. Constitution were examples of Liberalism, espousing a vision of government that included things like elections and popular representation rather than hereditary monarchy and nobility. Those who were "Conservatives" at the time were predominantly Monarchists. They wanted to keep the current way of doing things, and to heck with all these radical notions of democracy and change.
Fast forward a bit, and the context of those terms have changed. We've applied them to new and different things, but the only thing that's remained constant is that one tends to be roughly associated for arguing with "We need to change how we're doing things" and the other "Things are just fine, we don't need to change anything". The words we use to describe them are varied, and can range from reasonable to not so reasonable, depending on the baggage the speaker is trying to attach or avoid.
Probably we've gotten lazy and allowed most of the terminology to get badly muddied. It's become more about advertising and messaging (both for and against) than about accurately describing the positions of a given politician/party/candidate/etc. There's certainly a lot of daylight between someone who thinks that unions are okay and maybe we should think about restricting emissions, versus someone who wants to nationalize all major industries. Likewise, there's a difference between someone who thinks that we should be wary of trying to embark on massive transformative (and expensive) federal programs, versus someone who thinks that we need to enforce 1950s style morality and eliminate all effective regulations on business.
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.
I'm not sure Sony is really a believable target for a false flag attack. Wouldn't you want a sympathetic victim if you're trying to generate outrage? Sony/Hollywood aren't exactly the most sympathetic victims, to put it mildly.
Also, North Korea HAS WMDs, and has even set off nukes. They have far more WMD than Bush/Blair/Cheney/etc ever claimed Iraq had. They're also responsible for all sorts of horrible things done both to their own people and others. Really, if North Korea was behind the Sony hack, it would be one of the less evil things done by North Korea.
It's certainly not unreasonable to identify a trend. The existence of trends doesn't automatically infer the cause behind the trend though, merely that if you can identify the cause of one event, you can then infer that it was likely also the cause of the other events. If the FBI in this case was wrong that those were North Korea, then that would mean it's wrong to use that to infer this was North Korea too.
That said, assuming we believe these events to be related, it does seem like the likeliest answer would be that a group with some kind of North Korean nexus was involved.
I wouldn't mind at all if North Korea were suddenly free and part of South Korea. Almost everyone in North Korea would be far better off. However, doing so by military force is utterly INSANE.
Even if China didn't intervene, the fact that millions of South Koreans live within artillery range of the border with North Korea means that in a shooting war with North Korea we'd probably be looking at tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties just for the South alone, and probably as many or more North Korean civilians just from economic hardships and displacement - and that's leaving out the North's ballistic missles, nukes/etc. So even if the worst case scenario doesn't occur, the minimum expected result is already horrific enough that no sane person would want to pursue it.
As for it being a publicity stunt, I considered that too at first, but Sony is going to get hammered so badly by the stuff that's been released that the lawyers' fees alone will outweigh any http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/24/1757224/did-north-korea-really-attack-sony#additional profit they could make off the movie. It would have to be something like a shady coalition of greedy entertainment industry lawyers, or a cabal of deranged Seth Rogen/James Franco fans trying to boost the movie's popularity... but at that point we're going completely off the deep end.
I don't think the timing is right for that. Moreover, the evidence seems to be (sadly) that most people in the USA just don't care about torture, or support it (many of them because they buy into the 'ticking time bomb' fallacy).
I'm not sure if I'd say it was "really easy" to fake attribution without leaving your own traces. It's very easy to screw up and leave inadvertent traces of stuff in places, even for reasonably skilled hackers. That's not to say it isn't possible, just not as easy as we may sometimes think.
The FBI could certainly be wrong (there's a reason there's a joke that the acronym stands for "Famous But Incompetent"). There's also a lot of 'experts' out there pushing that it was/wasn't North Korea, most of whom also have a business interest one way or the other (since most security experts are also in the business of selling security services). All that I think we can conclude here is that we shouldn't simply trust the conclusions based on asserted authority.
What makes me really curious though... let's play Devil's Advocate a moment and assume the hack wasn't North Korea or affiliated, and instead was a frame job. Why frame North Korea specifically? From what we know, it couldn't have been an opportunistic thing (since the "frame" theory assumes the hackers chose the malware and prepared the files in a way that would finger North Korea). Wouldn't it be easier to pretend to be someone like Anonymous? And if you were Anonymous, why not just take credit openly as Anonymous?
I'm certainly not just going to take the FBI/etc at their word, but right now the least convoluted explanation is that there was some kind of North Korean nexus. I think we can debate all day whether they were acting on orders, whether it was a 'plausible deniability' setup, how much or if they had NK Govt support, etc. Just because the FBI and the US Govt. do some awful things, and have lied, and are sometimes incompetent doesn't mean they're incompetent/wrong/lying 100% of the time.
North Korea has never claimed credit for any of the non-computer related provocations they've made, from the violent to the subtle, with the sole exception of those which they're unequivocally responsible for, such as North Korean Artillery firing on a South Korean island. They've denied any number of things that basically the entire rest of the world believes to be their doing.
Consider the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan a few years ago. It was sunk by an explosion not far from North Korean waters. Pretty much the entire rest of the world concluded that it was a North Korean torpedo, but North Korea denies responsibility.
This isn't to say that they did it - just that a denial isn't inconsistent with them having done it, based on past patterns of activity.
Stability and confidence is what keeps it going. Stability and Confidence in the US economy. For all the USA's faults, it is a technologically advanced nation with a skilled workforce, infrastructure, and abundant natural resources, protected by a strong military. It also has a pretty strong legal tradition and rule of law. Now, it's certainly not perfect in all these areas, but overall it's better than anyone else. If you have to ask yourself, "What currency is least likely to completely implode in the next X years", your answer is going to be the US Dollar. You would certainly be wise to hedge your bets, and I'm certainly not saying it can't - but that's the core of why the international reserve currency remains the US Dollar.
It's also the same nation that gave us Hobbes's Leviathan, which took a rather different view of government and government power than Locke, to put it mildly.
It's uncanny just how bad we as humans can be at predicting the future. We fixate on the way things are, and suffer massive failures of imagination that the current situation could fundamentally change. You can easily see evidence of this by looking back at how people in the past thought their world was and where it was going. Even people whose job it is to try and predict the future never saw the fall of the Soviet Union, the Japanese economic malaise, or any number of other major shifts in the course of world events coming. Certainly there were rumblings, and some who pointed to the signposts, but it never changed the general perception until after it had happened.
It certainly could happen to China. China has experienced massive growth for decades now, but is starting to run into trouble. Its growth, while still impressive, is noticeably slowing. If China runs into a major economic crisis, things could get very uncertain, very quickly.
Based on my understanding of history, I don't think China will ever wipe out Russia. Russia (and Russians) are simply too tough and stubborn. You've survived and fought off all comers for centuries - Mongols, French, Germans, etc. (Though China will probably try and buy up the rights to much of the material resources, much as they do in Africa and elsewhere)
That said, I do think it would be better for everyone involved if Russia was better integrated with Europe/USA. I think Russian Culture/Russians are pretty cool, and it saddens me the way things have gone recently. I wish humanity would realize that we have better things to do than kill each other over land and nationality.
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Time and Price are tradeoffs. I'd certainly pay a certain amount to go faster, or to fly in better comfort, but that is highly dependent on exactly what the added cost is. My time is certainly valuable. I'll pay a few hundred bucks for a plane ticket to fly from New York to LA rather than take a multi-day bus ride, but when we're talking about flying to Tokyo, is an extra day of travel time worth a few thousand dollars? To most travellers, probably not.
Air travel used to be a luxury that only the rich enjoyed, and there the difference was vast enough to make it worthwhile. I don't know the numbers offhand, but the time difference between taking a train coast to coast and a flight in the 1930s was probably on the order of 4 to 5 to make a wild guess. Either way, it was significant enough to be desirable, and over time the price came down to where it was so much more advantageous that now air travel is the dominant mode for long distance travel. If supersonic modes of travel can reach that time to price differential, I think we might see them come into play, but certainly not at a 1 to 1. New York to Tokyo in 3-4 hours or less, instead of 16, at twice the price? New York to London in 1-2 hours? That might be a little more tempting.
They've already managed a vertical takeoff/vertical landing on the ground: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxKWh7kLDzw
Most likely this is a step towards general reusability from a cost perspective, as there are advantages to doing recovery on water (generally less problems if you somehow screw it up I would think).
If only Sanctions like this had been the response back then too, we'd all be a lot better off.
North Korea is one of, if not the most, horrible nations in the world. If anything, the sad thing is that we need to use this hack as an excuse for the sanctions, rather than the horrific treatment of their own citizens.
I'm not completely convinced either - specific attribution is hard. I won't hold my breath on all the evidence being released. In the end, as a computer security professional, the most important thing wasn't who was really behind it - it's what they did/how they did it, and how much of a risk my organization is at from them. Who it was is just a subset of that, and a somewhat less important one given the fungibility of tools. I digress however.
Sanctions targeting officials in the North Korean government don't bother me one bit. They're ruling over one of the most brutal systems in the world, and about the only thing you could say in the defense of a given individual is that they're stuck in the system and don't want to get their entire extended family sent off to a gulag to die. I'm a little concerned that it might impinge on basic food aid (even if a lot of that is diverted to their military), but overall, if sanctions are all that's going to come of this, that's a lot better than other possible outcomes (See the whole "Iraq has WMD so we need to invade" debacle).
The best we can say at this point is "it's a valid theory", because that's all it is. Similar, the disgruntled insider theory is a valid theory. I have yet to see anything that would conclusively prove or disprove either. We can argue all day about which Security Firms/Experts or Government Agencies we trust on their views, but in the security world, attribution is hard. 100% positive attribution is almost impossible.
But let's put that aside for the moment. The important thing to look at, I think, isn't who they want you to think was responsible. It's what they want to sell you with that. In the US Government's case, well, if sanctions are all that's going to come of it (was there anything that wasn't already sanctioned on the most pariah state in the world?), well, that's far less worrisome than trying to use it as justification for bombing them.
If I remember correctly, Japanese has two readings for each character, one that's native and one that's derived from the Chinese pronunciation. Which one is used tends to depend on context and what other characters it's combined with in a word. Different characters can also have the exact same pronunciation, so in spoken language one has to rely on context to understand the meaning. Confusion based on misinterpreted kanji is a big source of humorous situations, both in the case of exact homophones and close ones.
As for Asian language in general, probably the most interesting case is for Korean, as they share the exact same situation as Japanese, having lots of words based on Chinese roots/characters, and a native script that's entirely phonetic. Unlike Japanese however, Korea ditched the common use of Chinese characters (hanja) entirely, and while they still see use in certain situations, it's not the same. In Japanese class we started learning Kanji right away, whereas in Korean class I only even heard about them from the teachers after I asked when noticing similar roots (Daigaku and Daehakgyo for instance), and was considered proficient without even being exposed to them. Modern Japanese could probably make a similar shift, as knowing the pictographical representation isn't necessary for knowing the intended meaning, but it's what they're used to, and there won't likely be any pressure to change anytime soon.
Romanized Chinese exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
Incidentally, it's useful not just for writing out Chinese names/terms for foreigners, but also for language standardization. One thing that's missed in all the discussion of "Chinese" is that historically "Chinese" has been a very broad swath of local dialects united by the writing system. Some of them are even so broadly different that they're mutually unintelligible. Various successive Chinese governments dating back to the Qing dynasty have been trying to standardize on Mandarin, which is what most of us in the West are familiar with, and what you'll get taught if you study "Chinese". Cantonese is probably the other dialect commonly known in the West, due to its significance in Hong Kong/Macau.
Languages are a funny thing really - they're living, changing things that are altered with common usage, and increased communication seems to only be accelerating that process. New words ranging from technical terms to slang to memes to acronyms to foreign loan words seem to be entering use all the time. At the same time, the regional boundaries that used to give rise to divergences in dialect are much broader, meaning that chatting with someone in Britain or Australia is as easy as chatting with someone in a bordering state. I expect that this will have the impact of 'standardizing' English (and similarly other languages within their major group), or at least keeping changes mainstream enough that everyone can still communicate with one another.
I suppose it really depends on the job you're all trying to do. If your work is very collaborative, analytical/consensus based, and has a lot of bouncing ideas back and forth, then a more open space might be best. If your work depends on you being able to concentrate on a task however, you need to be able to shut out distractions, and an "open" format is going to be a serious drag on your productivity.
Milton: I was told that I could play my radio at a reasonable volume...
Not speaking to your suggested control in particular, I do think that in general the non-technical/MBA world, especially the older ones, simply do not take network security seriously enough to properly evaluate the tradeoff in risks to dollar figures. They see it as a cost center (which it is), but do not properly appreciate just how bad things can get. It's our job as network security professionals to make the case for this, but it's not easy when a lot of them still seem to have a view of the computer as a magic box. This is even before we get to the problem that good security can be tough for large enterprises even when you can shovel truckloads of money at it government style.
I think that it's going to take a lot more breaches, and fired CEOs, before enough of it gets taken seriously.
As with many things, a lot depends on the context. In the context of the 18th century, the American Revolutionaries and the U.S. Constitution were examples of Liberalism, espousing a vision of government that included things like elections and popular representation rather than hereditary monarchy and nobility. Those who were "Conservatives" at the time were predominantly Monarchists. They wanted to keep the current way of doing things, and to heck with all these radical notions of democracy and change.
Fast forward a bit, and the context of those terms have changed. We've applied them to new and different things, but the only thing that's remained constant is that one tends to be roughly associated for arguing with "We need to change how we're doing things" and the other "Things are just fine, we don't need to change anything". The words we use to describe them are varied, and can range from reasonable to not so reasonable, depending on the baggage the speaker is trying to attach or avoid.
Probably we've gotten lazy and allowed most of the terminology to get badly muddied. It's become more about advertising and messaging (both for and against) than about accurately describing the positions of a given politician/party/candidate/etc. There's certainly a lot of daylight between someone who thinks that unions are okay and maybe we should think about restricting emissions, versus someone who wants to nationalize all major industries. Likewise, there's a difference between someone who thinks that we should be wary of trying to embark on massive transformative (and expensive) federal programs, versus someone who thinks that we need to enforce 1950s style morality and eliminate all effective regulations on business.
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.
I'm not sure Sony is really a believable target for a false flag attack. Wouldn't you want a sympathetic victim if you're trying to generate outrage? Sony/Hollywood aren't exactly the most sympathetic victims, to put it mildly.
Also, North Korea HAS WMDs, and has even set off nukes. They have far more WMD than Bush/Blair/Cheney/etc ever claimed Iraq had. They're also responsible for all sorts of horrible things done both to their own people and others. Really, if North Korea was behind the Sony hack, it would be one of the less evil things done by North Korea.
It's certainly not unreasonable to identify a trend. The existence of trends doesn't automatically infer the cause behind the trend though, merely that if you can identify the cause of one event, you can then infer that it was likely also the cause of the other events. If the FBI in this case was wrong that those were North Korea, then that would mean it's wrong to use that to infer this was North Korea too.
That said, assuming we believe these events to be related, it does seem like the likeliest answer would be that a group with some kind of North Korean nexus was involved.
I wouldn't mind at all if North Korea were suddenly free and part of South Korea. Almost everyone in North Korea would be far better off. However, doing so by military force is utterly INSANE.
Even if China didn't intervene, the fact that millions of South Koreans live within artillery range of the border with North Korea means that in a shooting war with North Korea we'd probably be looking at tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties just for the South alone, and probably as many or more North Korean civilians just from economic hardships and displacement - and that's leaving out the North's ballistic missles, nukes/etc. So even if the worst case scenario doesn't occur, the minimum expected result is already horrific enough that no sane person would want to pursue it.
As for it being a publicity stunt, I considered that too at first, but Sony is going to get hammered so badly by the stuff that's been released that the lawyers' fees alone will outweigh any http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/24/1757224/did-north-korea-really-attack-sony#additional profit they could make off the movie. It would have to be something like a shady coalition of greedy entertainment industry lawyers, or a cabal of deranged Seth Rogen/James Franco fans trying to boost the movie's popularity... but at that point we're going completely off the deep end.
I don't think the timing is right for that. Moreover, the evidence seems to be (sadly) that most people in the USA just don't care about torture, or support it (many of them because they buy into the 'ticking time bomb' fallacy).
I'm not sure if I'd say it was "really easy" to fake attribution without leaving your own traces. It's very easy to screw up and leave inadvertent traces of stuff in places, even for reasonably skilled hackers. That's not to say it isn't possible, just not as easy as we may sometimes think.
The FBI could certainly be wrong (there's a reason there's a joke that the acronym stands for "Famous But Incompetent"). There's also a lot of 'experts' out there pushing that it was/wasn't North Korea, most of whom also have a business interest one way or the other (since most security experts are also in the business of selling security services). All that I think we can conclude here is that we shouldn't simply trust the conclusions based on asserted authority.
What makes me really curious though... let's play Devil's Advocate a moment and assume the hack wasn't North Korea or affiliated, and instead was a frame job. Why frame North Korea specifically? From what we know, it couldn't have been an opportunistic thing (since the "frame" theory assumes the hackers chose the malware and prepared the files in a way that would finger North Korea). Wouldn't it be easier to pretend to be someone like Anonymous? And if you were Anonymous, why not just take credit openly as Anonymous?
I'm certainly not just going to take the FBI/etc at their word, but right now the least convoluted explanation is that there was some kind of North Korean nexus. I think we can debate all day whether they were acting on orders, whether it was a 'plausible deniability' setup, how much or if they had NK Govt support, etc. Just because the FBI and the US Govt. do some awful things, and have lied, and are sometimes incompetent doesn't mean they're incompetent/wrong/lying 100% of the time.
North Korea has never claimed credit for any of the non-computer related provocations they've made, from the violent to the subtle, with the sole exception of those which they're unequivocally responsible for, such as North Korean Artillery firing on a South Korean island. They've denied any number of things that basically the entire rest of the world believes to be their doing.
Consider the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan a few years ago. It was sunk by an explosion not far from North Korean waters. Pretty much the entire rest of the world concluded that it was a North Korean torpedo, but North Korea denies responsibility.
This isn't to say that they did it - just that a denial isn't inconsistent with them having done it, based on past patterns of activity.
Stability and confidence is what keeps it going. Stability and Confidence in the US economy. For all the USA's faults, it is a technologically advanced nation with a skilled workforce, infrastructure, and abundant natural resources, protected by a strong military. It also has a pretty strong legal tradition and rule of law. Now, it's certainly not perfect in all these areas, but overall it's better than anyone else. If you have to ask yourself, "What currency is least likely to completely implode in the next X years", your answer is going to be the US Dollar. You would certainly be wise to hedge your bets, and I'm certainly not saying it can't - but that's the core of why the international reserve currency remains the US Dollar.
It's also the same nation that gave us Hobbes's Leviathan, which took a rather different view of government and government power than Locke, to put it mildly.
It's uncanny just how bad we as humans can be at predicting the future. We fixate on the way things are, and suffer massive failures of imagination that the current situation could fundamentally change. You can easily see evidence of this by looking back at how people in the past thought their world was and where it was going. Even people whose job it is to try and predict the future never saw the fall of the Soviet Union, the Japanese economic malaise, or any number of other major shifts in the course of world events coming. Certainly there were rumblings, and some who pointed to the signposts, but it never changed the general perception until after it had happened.
It certainly could happen to China. China has experienced massive growth for decades now, but is starting to run into trouble. Its growth, while still impressive, is noticeably slowing. If China runs into a major economic crisis, things could get very uncertain, very quickly.
Based on my understanding of history, I don't think China will ever wipe out Russia. Russia (and Russians) are simply too tough and stubborn. You've survived and fought off all comers for centuries - Mongols, French, Germans, etc. (Though China will probably try and buy up the rights to much of the material resources, much as they do in Africa and elsewhere)
That said, I do think it would be better for everyone involved if Russia was better integrated with Europe/USA. I think Russian Culture/Russians are pretty cool, and it saddens me the way things have gone recently. I wish humanity would realize that we have better things to do than kill each other over land and nationality.
So... you're saying the DRM is shit? :)
They obviously need to reinstall. Even Windows could manage the resources of North Korea better than the Kim dynasty.