Just Bloody Stupid!
Yesterday Juan Cole commented on another ‘leak’:
NBC reports that Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright is under investigation as the source for David Sanger’s 2012 New York Times article revealing that the United States is behind the Stuxnet computer virus, which was used to infect computers at Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facilities and at the Bushehr nuclear energy plants and delay their going hot.
Dr Cole’s point is that the MSM isn’t going to start calling Marine General Cartwright a ‘traitor’, and David Gregory isn’t going to suggest that David Sanger should be arrested.
Let’s consider the actual effects of the two leaks. Snowden informed the public and the world that the US was spying on its own people, in addition to spying on everyone else, which by the way everyone else already assumed. This has created domestic political problems, nothing else has actually changed because the rest of the world already assumed this was happening.
On Cartwright, I would like to point out that only a total psychotic would ever come up with a plan that injected a virus into a computer system that was involved in any way, shape, or form, with anything that included the word ‘nuclear’ in its description. Anyone who has that kind of concept in their mind for more than 4 seconds, should seek immediate psychiatric help, and be confined until the episode has passed.
Even without that, these clowns infected the Internet with yet another piece of truly annoying software that eats bandwidth and wastes people’s time, and this software is now in the hands of the ‘script kiddies’ who do things just because they can. Computer viruses are illegal under the laws of the US and most of the world, and the US sends people to prison for creating them. It was the height of hypocrisy for the US to start faking anger when Saudi petro facilities got infected, and accused Iran of being naughty. The US gave the world the go ahead to do this crap when they released Stuxnet.
Everyone involved in the Stuxnet project should be sentenced to prison until 51% of the attendees at a Linux convention can be convinced to switch to Windows 8.
14 comments
“…until 51% of the attendees at a Linux convention can be convinced to switch to Windows 8.”
ROTFLMAO!
The sarcasm boils out when I’m really pissed off at something. These people don’t seem to get it – when they do things like this, that makes it ‘acceptable’. The jerks in the world now have an excuse – the US does it.
We have always done nasty things, just like everyone else, but you damn sure don’t act like they are something to be proud of, or even hint that you are doing them. By taking credit for Stuxnet, it is almost guaranteed that the ‘vector’ for the infection was executed. They don’t think things through, which is why they should be in prison – they are too dangerous to be running around loose.
LOL Bryan! Best post this week m8! 😉 😀
It’s a shame that half my old team are dead now, and the rest of us are too old. 😉 We would have taken care of these morons for you, quickly, efficiently, and cleanly. Unfortunately, back when I could have done the job, I didn’t have the… hmmm… state of mind I now have to do so. You know what I mean?
They say wisdom comes at the wrong end of life (and for far too many morons, it never comes).
Yeah… They should all be rounded up and infected with a virus, something that makes all their bit’s fall off slowly, bit by agonizing bit!
A bullet is far too good for them.
It’s unbelievable. Instead of acting like it was a one-off aberration that will never happen again, they run around Script Kiddie on a hacker board taking credit for it. They just don’t get it, and they are annoying the real pros, who should just be left alone.
Instead of wasting resources on something like Stuxnet, they should have been working to harden the systems of their contractors to make it at least mildly difficult to steal real classified defense information, like the design specs on current and future aircraft and weapons systems. As things are currently the Chinese will probably have a functional F-35 before the US does, and at half the price.
They still haven’t explained how Snowden got removable media in and out of a NSA facility. That was a major screw up that damn sure wouldn’t have happened when I was in.
Yeah, when I heard about that (Snowden), that when I finally accepted that the USA is now totally run by the Keystone Cops and is completely FUBAR.
Back in the 80’s & 90’s, whenever I had to enter one of the ultra-secure facilities here (DIO, DSD, DSTO), if we had to take in any device of any kind (including pens), it had to be signed in and when we left, it was confiscated & destroyed (each facility had an automated 200ton press & a plasma furnace for the job, they just doped the item down a chute in the security office, and that was the end of that,) then a receipt was issued. If it was requited to take out anything, we had to have the appropriate orders, which also had to be on the security system, and a paper copy had to be in file at the facility (so it all had to be approved before hand). And they verified everything, and everyone was thoroughly searched in & out. Made no difference that I had one of the highest security clearances available. It never bothered me, I was happy about it, it was necessary. Even if the PM had decided to visit, he/she would have gotten the same treatment (though in somewhat more dignified way). 🙂
Oh, and all those facilities were not guarded by any standard Military security team (though our MP’s were pretty good actually), they were specially trained and usually ex-SAS or similar. I know because I got stuck with the job at DSTO for a few Months while recovering from Cambodia. I loved it actually, was easy duty, and the Scientists there were a good bunch (well, apart from their lack of concern for security), the *facility* (which was many acres, it’s where Jindalee was developed amongst other goodies), it even had it’s own Pub, which was big and served almost everything (all the staff at the facility had a strict alcohol allowance though, and it was enforced), the food was great!) D
I was asked (by a youngster) recently, why I reminisce so much… I thought about it and said “Because they truly were the ‘good old days’. The World is going to hell, and I am glad I won’t be here to see it. I feel sorry for you.”) To her credit, the lass thought about it and asked “What can we do about it?” And I smiled and said “You truly don’t want to know.”
From what I’ve seen lately… Looks like the keystone cops are taking over here also.
Glad I’m out of it! Screw ’em all m8!
Tell ya what m8, *IF* there is a God, & some kind of Heaven/Hell deal… I’ll tell God I’ll happily work in hell. I’ll watch as every one of these pious hypocritical SOB’s comes in and help spend the rest of eternity making them as miserable as possible (and I can get plenty creative!) You’ll know who I am… I’ll be the only bastard in Hell laughing for all eternity! I figure Hell will have to be a hell of a lot bigger than Heaven! Won’t be that many going there.
Bryan, everybody thought the Israelis were behind Stuxnet (and maybe they were — it certainly didn’t get written by anybody hired by the Pentagon, the Israelis at least had to be involved in writing the virus, if not involved in inserting it into Iranian facilities), and the USA was well out of it. Then General Turgidson got involved and leaked U.S. involvement. Sheesh. Talk about poor tradecraft.
BTW, roughly 1/3rd of the Israeli population is actually Russian “Jews” (in quotes, because during the declining days of the Soviet Union anybody could bribe the documents registrars to issue fake birth certificates alleging a Yid granny, and the Israelis with their demographic problem didn’t look too closely at said birth documents). Which, given how many of our viruses come out of the Eastern Bloc nowadays, is probably why they’re so good at writing viruses and other security-related software such as the Checkpoint firewall. For some reason surviving a crumbling Communist regime gives you the right mindset for writing (and defending against) computer viruses. Go figure.
I have a problem with the concepts of heaven and hell that really came into focus while studying Russian culture. It was noted that many Russians were put off by the Christian death procedure as being illogical. If heaven was above, why were you being buried in the cold, hard ground closer to hell, than the Russian custom of being burned on a platform. Then there was the question of hell being hot, as staying warm was a constant struggle for Russians, i.e. they didn’t know much about sunstroke, but they were all too familiar with frostbite.
Asking me to accept the concepts conceived by a bunch of nomadic sheepherders in a desert environment, isn’t very logical. Then there is the big problem with heaven – do you really want to spend eternity with the people who are convinced they are going? It is a lot of work to keep myself from helping them achieve their ‘goal’ much earlier than was scheduled.
Now let’s look at the Book of Revelation. It had to be a joke. It’s was the last thing that was added, and no one will ever convince me that it wasn’t a clerical prank that got out of hand. It is a description of an LSD trip that went wrong. If you have ever had to deal with someone on a bad trip, and I’ve escorted a few to the psych unit, it is totally familiar. It isn’t a religious revelation, it is ergot poisoning.
Then there is the prosecution of the Old Believers which shows it took less than 6 centuries for all of the hand copied religious books in Russia to be seriously different than the original texts they were supposedly derived from, and many of the ‘mistakes’ had resulted in changes that were obviously political in nature.
If you see any ‘good Christians’ where you end up, Kryten, you’ll know for a fact you are in hell, and your presence is designed to prove to them that they were wrong.
The kids need to get involved in elections, not just by voting, but by running for office. They need to figure out that if they let other people make the decisions, those people are going to waste all of the resources that future generations are going to need to survive.
They still haven’t explained how Snowden got removable media in and out of a NSA facility
The simplest answer is that it was a setup. Someone “inside” *wanted* this information to leak, and found a credulous rube to take the blame and arranged for certain other people to look the other way.
But then, I’m probably ascribing too much competence to the current clown college flunkees who run the place. SIIIiiiigh!
I use ESET out of Slovakia, Badtux. Kaspersky is heavier duty with more features, but it drags down the computer more while providing things I don’t use, like IM coverage. Kaspersky is out of Moscow.
When you spend your student years avoiding monitors and blocking to do what you want, and have to ‘borrow’ software because you can’t legally buy it, you get pretty good at low level programming and gaming the system.
After the Soviet Union collapsed I sent a lot of the old software that I had for the IBM PC to a Russian who was in an e-mail group with me. He had to pay customs duty on ‘used diskettes’ and books, but he couldn’t get a newer computer, and the software he could now buy wouldn’t run on his machine. He was thrilled to get it, and I was happy not to have to move it anymore.
They had the engineers, they just didn’t have the precision manufacturing facilities to make chips beyond something like the 80286, or to produced balanced propellers for their submarines, or a lot of other things. They were amazing at making big things, but the small stuff or the really uniform things were really beyond their capacity.
Oh, there are/were a few people in NSA’s crypto lab who could have done it as an exercise. The child of a member of the lab got into trouble for releasing one of his dad’s worms a few years ago. Mathematicians do that sort of thing for their own reasons, possibly to test defenses against them.
Oh, yes, the problem of the skinheads in Israel – young, anti-Semitic Israelis.
“Hoss” and the generals like him, are trying to impress and frighten people like the Revolutionary Guard, who made mass suicide charges during the Iran-Iraq War. They are totally worthless, and lacking in leadership potential.
My problem with most commercial antivirus vendors is that their business model is completely incompatible with my computing model, which is based upon regular changes/updates to my base platform. It’s the same issue I have with the Windows business model, which is why none of my homebrew systems run Windows on the bare hardware — the only Windows system (as versus VM) that I have is my big HP desktop replacement laptop, and that’s because it has the Windows activation in BIOS so I can change hardware to my heart’s desire and still activate without phoning home to Ma Microsoft. (As an aside, my former employer as a Windows OEM had a very expensive set of gear to compile new BIOS’s with Windows activation embedded, which comes in handy if you’re running Windows in a virtual machine where the BIOS is just a file on the virtualization host. Just sayin’ :twisted:).
Too bad Microsoft’s Security Essentials fell apart the past couple of years. For a while it was one of the best antiviruses out there, then apparently the Eastern Europeans figured out how to subvert its engine, so now it’s one of the worst. SIIIiiigh!
Funny speaking about AV s/w… I’ve been testing several the past 6 mths or so. Actually, I’m testing all-in-one s/w, Avira Internet Security 2013, BitDefender Total Security 2013, Comodo Internet Security Complete 2013, ESET Smart Security 6, Kaspersky PURE 3.0 Total Security, & Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security. The thing is, it’s so easy to get these at a huge discount now. For example BitDifender TS is normally over $100/yr, and every couple months I get a *special* discount offer like $27 (which is what I paid for it). I paid $27 for a two yr license for Avira (normally $107), $29 for COMODO, etc. I paid for all of them to test out without bias, and I have been greatly surprised. My plan was a detailed article about them and a few others. I am using Avira now, and I find it the least intrusive of them all. BitDefender, on the other hand, is a PITA! They have automated it to the point where the user has almost no control at all over it! It was even very difficult to disable or uninstall, just like Nortons AV (which I would never willingly use in this life)! Comodo & Eset were equally good. It’s a shame about Bitdefender because it regularly scores very high on the *reputable* AV test sites, and I used it for years since the 90’s. Same with Trend Micro, one of my trusted faves, but going the route of Bitdefender.
Anyway, there really is no excuse for people not to have a decent AV or system security s/w (including firewall, HIP, WiFi protection, SPAM, browser security etc. For my own personal use here… I am trying to decide between Comodo ISC & Avira IS. One nice thing about Avira IS is that it uses the least amount of system resources (especially RAM, with everything enabled, it uses less than 25MB). One of the things is that I still need to use Win XP, and many have trouble running on XP without crashing or hanging the system (BitDefender is the worst offender for this). Avira is quite happy with XP, W7 or W8, Commodo is also OK also (some minor trouble on XP), and has a decent Sandbox built in (though I use Sandboxie, so it’s not such a big deal). 🙂
And yes Bryan, agree about Kaspersky (at least the PURE 3 edition). And it doesn’t play very nice with XP either.
I have two others to test. Dr.Web Security Space (which I am about to buy on a special for 21 EUR, & VIPRE Internet Security 2013 (from Sunbelt s/w) which I just got a discount offer for about $35/yr.
It’s one of the first *serious* article I want to post on the Test & Review section of my blog. 🙂
MSs Security Essentials was based upon BitDefender, which is why it was so good. It was a cut down version, but the engine was all BD. Sadly, they had to stick with the old engine and it’s been compromised. However, there are 3rd party fixes/addons for that, but I haven’t tried them yet. The exploit didn’t actually compromise the engine itself, but the layer M$ added to check if you were using a legal copy of windoze and validating it online (good ol’ WGA bites again!) Maybe next article… *shrug*;)
M$ can’t do anything without allowing their rampant greed and paranoia screwing it up. 🙂
Bloody Norton – you uninstall it and then you have to download another piece of software from them to actually finish the job. It was dragging the speed of everything down and using all available resources.
I actually scored my current ESET license when I bought Win7 pro for the new box, it was a 3 machine license, and I had already bought separate licenses for the XP and the laptop, so I switched them over when their individual licenses expired. I use AVG free on the virtual XP just to get M$ off my case. Those are only on the ‘Net for updates, so there was no point in adding them to my ESET license.
I don’t know about most people, Kryten, but I spent a lot of time reading reviews from all over when I decided to dump Norton. I’m a little cautious about accepting the magazine reviews because the mags depend on ad dollars from the products they review.
I hear you, Badtux, that’s why I went with the AVG, I didn’t want ESET to have a fit over the virtual machine. All of the vendors have made hardware failures and upgrades even worse with their installation systems that are dependent on specific hardware being there. If your motherboard dies, you have to put up with grief after you put in the new one, even if it is the same make and model.
I used to swap motherboards and hard drives all the time – not anymore. They have made it a major PITA.
The one and only time I ever caught a computer virus, it was on a computer being “protected” by Norton. Norton came on an HP laptop that I’d bought, and it was still within the initial 1 year subscription period. Stupid me, I thought that hey, why pay for an antivirus if one came with the computer? Yah, right. Silly thing. Didn’t matter in the end though.
In other news, Microsoft has decided they no longer want the $200/year subscription from me for Technet. I’m not quite sure why they want to turn down my $200/year, given that I am not going to buy any retail bundles, all I used Technet for was a source of licenses for test/evaluation purposes such as for the Windows 8 virtual machine that I tried updating to Windows 8.1, but so it goes. I certainly am not going to *buy* Windows products. I have an OEM license to Windows 7 on my HP laptop, and that’s all I need. Technet was a “want”, not a “need”, something to play with when I was feeling nerdy and wanted to see what the latest greatest Windows software looks like. But I guess Microsoft doesn’t want my money. Maybe they think Technet is why Windows 8 isn’t selling — maybe they think everybody’s using their Technet licenses for Windows 8. Well, maybe so. But we’re using those licenses to eval Windows 8, not to run our systems with Windows 8 — because Windows 8 isn’t ready for production and it appears we’ll need to wait for Windows 9 to have something that *is* ready for production, because Windows 8.1 certainly isn’t either.
That’s weird, cutting off a rent source like Technet. I don’t see the savings, unless they didn’t have enough subscribers to support it, which I find hard to believe.
They’ve peaked and can’t figure out where to go. I’m on my last version of Windows. When it is no longer useful it will Linux, not Windows anything that will replace it.