While I do agree that it was indeed developed by one, I'm not sure how it could only have been developed by one. Would it truly take massive levels of money to do or simply some smart, determined people?
At least, you would _hope_ criminal enterprises don't actually have the means to fund and recruit their own secret, cutting-edge math research labs/networks :)
It's not like drug cartels are Dr. No like enterprises...
But what about, well, drugs? Don't drug cartels employ chemists to refine old drugs and develop "better" ones?
No, of course not :). The point was about crime organizations hiring elite specialists to do high-tech research for them.
They mostly iterate on known drugs to make their making cheaper / more addictive. And they can easily test on junkies (I presume).
Of course, sometimes they get it wrong, and you end up with face flesh eating humans in Florida.
Citation?
Also, I don't own a TV, don't watch TV, and get my news from friends and NPR. So I don't generally see much of this news-of-the-wierd. Thankfully, it appears.
During years EPO wasn't detectable by anti-doping testing. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it requires cutting edge pharmaceutical drug research to avoid detection.
Its non-trivial building these submarines and most competent engineers would balk at being asked to, explaining they were not competent enough.
Don't mistake a lack of polish, fanfare and machined parts for primitive as in easy to make work.
Value is a subjective thing. Some people want money and fame, and for them it would be better to publish. But if you want to get rid of Iran's nuclear program because, well, you don't like nukes, or you don't like Iran, or you Just Want To Watch The World Burn, then well...
> At least, you would _hope_ criminal enterprises don't actually have the means to fund and recruit their own secret, cutting-edge math research labs/networks :)
Why not? Big business is big business.
What these people are saying, essentially is that very few countries have lots of smart people in different industry's, which is wrong.
The zero days can come from all over, the PLC and SCADA system knowledge is all over the world.
meh, I'm rambling now, I agree with you kposehn. Its more obvious that this is the work of USA/Israel simply because they are the ones desperate enough to try anything. I might be wrong but who else is threatening war with Iran?
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-nation-state.htm
You people are fucking ignorant.
EDIT: Or compare the US and the EU. The typical New Yorker regards people in Florida as the same sort of person as them, so the permanent fiscal transfers from New York to Florida don't spark the sort of outrage in the US that permanent transfers from Germany to Greece do.
From what I've read, SCADA leaves an aspect of its system wide open and insecure, to make development easier.
Industrial espionage would be similar: hard to keep secret, fairly high risk and in most cases it'd be easier and more reliable just to take your megabucks and pay someone for whatever data you want. Why spend millions funding a big R&D team when you could just pay one of your target's sysadmins a million or two to get the data for sure?
Plus, we can all guess what wealthy nation-state developed the software and similar things in the past, let's not be hypocritical here...
There are a lot of organizations in the world, corporate, criminal, and otherwise, that can muster say $25 million (which, I admit is a number I just pulled out of my ass) to accomplish a monumental task. I'm just not sure that I'm ready to believe that the money amounts we're talking here are restricted only to the wealthiest of nation states. Is the claim that you would need literally billions of dollars to get the smart people and equipment?
Plausible deniability is useful after all.
I realize something like that is totally conjecture; but, I don't see it as any further conjecture than, "it must be the US and / or Israel"
[Edit] Since somehow this didn't come across in my post; throwing up conjecture at another possible source of Flame outside of US / Israel doesn't mean I believe any of these explanations--my point was merely that both ideas are pure conjecture with little (at least that I'm aware of) evidence to support the claim.
I mean, if I had the capability to screw up Iran's nuclear program in my spare time I probably would, because, y'know, fuck Iran.
Several smart, determined people capable of it together would be easier to find, and well within the reach of many nations and large organizations.
Fuck Iran why exactly? Because toppling their democratically elected government and establishing a puppet in the fifties wasn't enough? Or arming Saddam's Iraq to fight them in the eighties?
Or maybe because, say, TX can execute 15 year old "criminals" and ban abortion and/or gay marriage, but Iranians don't get to decide how they want to live? Or maybe because what's OK for Saudi Arabia is not OK for everybody?
Or is it because they haven't harmed anyone in the region, where other nations have already invaded 2 nearby countries?
Or just because, you know, muslims are bad in general? (I don't like the religion myself, but they have the right to do as they damn please in their OWN country).
Sure, but those are "refugees/dissidents", of course they would think that. It's not like the great Iranian masses are held there by force or hate their culture.
In general, dissidents are also overplayed for political gain by other countries. I mean, even the USSR played upon US political dissidents, the McCarthy era etc. If you are going to judge a whole country better ask the locals, not the dissidents.
You are arguing a very weak position.
Now, put this to perspective. The Kent students were shot doing a mostly harmless protesting, in a country that had sent troops to a third country (Cambodia), and that was in no danger itself. The tension in Iran, on the other hand, is in a country that feels threatened by the US, that has seen 2 other countries invaded in the region, and that foreign powers are known to support vocal dissidents and minorities against the state. In the name of "democracy" of course, and not crude oil. Same foreign powers do nothing for countries having even more extreme muslims, and far less democracy, like, say, Saudi Arabia.
What would the US police do if the US was feeling directly threatened, say like in the WWII? Well, we know what they did at the time: concentration camps for Japanese, for example.
Ok, look man, I'm down with anyone who wants to say the US could do better. I could do better. You could do better. But a fact, always beats a strawman, which is what you presented previously. Because the reality is that the Iranian government killed a bunch of its own people and did their level best to suppress that information. Now you've switched from defending Iran to reaching back a generation to find something you can cite to prosecute the United States.
Just to add another fact, Here's a more comprehensive discussion of casualties in the protests where that Iranian lady died
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_election_protests#...
My point stands: you are arguing from a very weak position. Further weakened by the fact that your thesis keeps moving around. If you're going take on the martyr's quest of defending an outrageous position, you can expect you're going to be expected to present an outragously good argument: all your shit in one bag, sewn up tight. If you're frustrated that people can come along and shoot holes in your argument with a sentence or two, maybe you could consider that as evidence that your argument may not ever hold water.
There's a great passage, I think it's TH White's Once and Future King, where Lancelot has a dream where he sees two armies of knights, white and black fighting. The white side is loosing, so he takes their side. And gets slaughtered. On waking, he is told: know what you're fighting for. Don't fight for the losing side just because they're losing.
Western media just overplays dissidents and people that talk to our "sentiments". Insignificant opposition parties and small protests are elevated to the level of mass popular protest.
If the situation was reversed, imagine what other countries would say of the 2000 US Bush-Gore elections, what with the electoral fraud et al, or things like the Vietnam protests, etc.
And it amuses me, because, you have an example right in your backyard: the "middle america" has tens of millions of people that want to live in a Christian state, with no evolution teaching in schools, no abortions, no gay marriages, the death penalty, Bible, etc. Those people are not "forced by the state" to want to live like so. If anything, they think the state FAILS them by not being more christian.
If you consider this --that even within the US there are people who want those kinds of things--, you might understand why your San Franciscan or whatever ideas are not directly applicable to muslim countries, with a much different history and culture than what the US has.
Just saying.
No, because of polluting what is generally a rational place of discussion with ludicrous extremist propaganda and general idiocy.
In World War II, you had such in Poland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski (Who deserves some of the credit for cracking Enigma and thus for the outcome of World War II.)
What you can get for lots of money, you can also get for patriotism and somewhat less money. There are over 30 countries with populations over 40 million. Most of these are industrialized. The odds are that they've produced the requisite mathematical talent. The only question is if they've been able to retain and apply it.
Plus, the rest of the context is the target of the attack and precedence. Given those constraints, one can only thing of 2 such states. And it's not like those "30 countries with populations over 40 million" are not spied to death already, or that they had foreign policy autonomy on the level of making such attacks without asking consent from a certain power.