China paper warns Google may pay price for hacking claims
reuters.com
reuters.com
It seems like it would be SO easy to carry out a false flag attack with computers. What stops a random malicious person from popping a few boxes in Country X and using them to base his attack? And if Country X was engaged in bad behavior, why wouldn't they take a similar step?
Now, if it's true that the attacks focused on human rights workers that gave China trouble, the claim is a bit more substantial, although it's not hard to imagine tacking those names onto your list to disguise what was really important in your unrelated attack.
However, attributing attacks to Anonymous really makes my head spin. By definition, Anonymous doesn't even exist as a group, it literally means anonymous in most contexts, yet the media report as if they're saying something other than 'unknown'.
Craziness, and as far as I see, details about the foundation of these claims are never released. How the hell does Google know the Chinese attackers weren't proxy boxes?!
"Anonymous" doesn't mean anything more than "unknown names" - it doesn't imply "doesn't exist as a group".
Moreover, "anonymous" is the name that they've chosen. It describes some of their attributes, but not all, and certainly doesn't define them. (If they called themselves "superheroes", would you think that they could fly?)
I often wonder why Baidu does not receive as much press, as it has experienced astronomical growth, and is clearly a strong(er?) contender in terms of users.
Want to shoot a war movie? Need access to military assets? You're going to have to run the movie by the Pentagon first to make sure it portrays "The Right Side of the Story".
Also the US has tax credits for scripts which incorporate messages in support of the war on drugs. This is why you see ridiculous bullshit on CSI like kids dying after falling off a roof while high on.. GASP.. MARIJUANA!
Land of the free, home of the brainwashed. This is why I try not to consume very much mainstream media. It's not exactly on the level with denial of historical events - people wouldn't stand for that. It has to be more subtle, and it is, and it works.
Basically, if someone tries to tell me something is bad and it's not a paper on PubMed, I don't really buy it. But I guess most people believe secondary sources.
You mean like Avatar? Or Redacted? Stop-Loss? Battle For Haditha? Green Zone? Or any of a host of other war movies made by Hollywood in the last 40 years that trash the US military to varying degrees. Go further back in time and you get movies like Casualties of War, Apocalypse Now, etc.
You accuse others of lying in the service of their politics, all the while you engage in that very thing. The term for this is projection.
The most effective form of censorship is self censorship. Let's not say really bad things about X, because I don't want to burn any bridges. There is a popular image of the US military has little to do with reality. Consider the number of times an active army US soldier is portrayed as raping someone in a movie vs the other guy's army. Or the extremely high unemployment rate rate for soldiers you only serve one tour.
The reason you see a positive portrayal of the US soldier in movies is because a large percentage of the audience either is or if friends with someone who is a soldier. So unless you movie is explicitly about evil US soldiers there is no profit to be had in portraying the US army in a negative light.
Filmmakers don't offend people without gaining something from it. It's not just a question of the military + audience but also producers and actors etc. Also, sound effects people don't bother using actual hoof beats when people are so used to hearing cocoanuts and writers / producers don't challenge perceptions unless that's their direct goal.
PS: The DoD does not try and get people to think that most US soldiers are Captain America wannabes. The goal is closer to: "Well trained, Deadly, Loyal, Young, Americans, that need all the support they can get." For various reasons they would rather be seen as crazy than infective.
Where did Avatar use current military technology?
Watch much of Fox News? Even if you don't, a lot of people do.
More obvious case: The reasons for going to war in Iraq were entirely agg-prop, that was later proved to be false.
We "the west" don't have an explicit "Propaganda department" like communist countries generally do. But our media, and government still use propaganda to control peoples opinions.
Not quite the same as China's Propaganda Department, which vetts all media (great firewall is under it's control).
Wow.
I got a Google warning of my gmail being access from the Jinan province back in January with also a break-in of twitter account. Since my security changes no break-ins.
Despite China's denials the threat is real.
Why did google choose to publicise the event at all? surely that only tells the attackers to find a new attack vector (rather than thinking there existing vector is still okay).
The attacks relied on the victim's naivety and lack of knowledge. If you read the blog post [1], I think it's pretty clear that the purpose was to educate users on how to improve their security when using Google products.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/ensuring-your-informa...
The usual practice is to warn of potential issues, not publicise a specific attack, and then say "beware!" -- In fact the article didn't even give the common advice of 'check url, https, etc' to avoid phishing.
More relevant, it's one of the three largest military centers in China, which I'm guessing is why the attacks stem from there. This does lend credence to the idea of a government sanctioned operation.
However, Jinan is also the home to one of the top computer science schools and software engineering colleges in China, so it could be just student hackers I guess (though I'm not convinced).