Stifling Beijing in cyberspace is now British intelligence’s number-one mission Regular attendees of CYBERUK, the annual conference hosted by British intelligence unit the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), will know that in addition to the expected conference panels, there is usually an interwoven theme to proceedings. Last year the tech-security operatives' event revolved around "securing an open …
The current 13:45 program or BBC Radio 4 is about China, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001z66b and the threat Western intelligence agencies consider it poses. Today's (Thursday) episode included the hacking of Nortel Networks and that company's collapse a couple of years later.*
(You may need a login, sorry.)
*Personal issue, I have a (very) small pension fund with Nortel, which would have been quite a bit bigger otherwise.
>might only work on UK IP
If you do need a {particular-country's} IP, Tor Browser is your friend in need.
The config file can specify country restrictions for the exit node, the point you will appear to be present at.
Older versions had a Setting for Do Not Use/exclusions; you simply get the full list of standard country short-codes off, say, Wikipedia, delete the one you wish to "be" in, and paste the remainder into your config.
Newer versions now have an extra Setting for Only Use These Exit Countries/enumeration. So just biff in the short-code you want.
Easy way to watch BBC iPlayer from Australia, for example. (I was in the middle of some comedy series when I moved back. ("Plebs"?))
@Eclectic Man:
> Today's (Thursday) episode included the hacking of Nortel Networks and that company's collapse a couple of years later.
"According to reports, hackers with Chinese IP addresses infiltrated Nortel’s computer networks"
DOH!
:-) But surely the West is equally as busy beavering away at establishing a predominant cyber lead, and ideally one suspects for their own exclusive overwhelming advantage in all manner of practically real and virtually remote command and control of space projects, as the East is suspected of being engaged in.
To imagine the West isn't, and for it to be proven so, has any notion of Western intelligence being anything to be worried about or considered worthy of heeding and following/obeying, laughable.
The 'West' has a long, and not entirely honourable, history of relations with China. Recall the opium wars, where the UK waged war on China so it could sell opium to the Chinese population. that is how the UK acquired Hong Kong. Of course it wasn't just the UK, Portugal had Macau, the first and last European holding in China.
quote: securing an open and resilient digital future.
Ha! Nothing here works. The other day the border software for imports fell over. A couple of weeks back the e-gates at airports failed (again). The airport scanner fitting has been put back. The rail network barely functions. The 57 varieties of war-on-driving toll gate software isn't reliable, sending threatening letters to the wrong people. Badly built RAAC buildings are falling down. There are not enough staff to run SEND services, the health service, the care sector or pretty much anything else as Brexit has banned access to them. The economic model upon which UK universities operated has been broken by state xenophobia. And how much did they spend on that covid app?
SAGE worries endlessly about foreign threats, but the problems are all in the UK. Everyone here in a position of power or authority is incompetent, corrupt or both. We don't manage water well enough - floods and drought. Solar farms are blocked because the locals don't like the view. There are around 40,000,000 licensed vehicles in the UK, and 61,000 EV charging points. Bit behind there, chaps.
You want resilient systems, run with distributed topologies, end to end encryption (which the government wants to ban), air gapping and get infrastructure completely off the public internet. It's not rocket science. Which is a good job, because the UK's attempt at space blew up and our nuclear deterrent made like a catharine wheel.
Nice country, innovative people, completely ruined by its government.
"...Ha! Nothing here works...."
The other day I dropped the wife at Stansted airport.
I used the free 1 hour parking.
I took a ticket at the entrance to the car park, settled my wife at the covered bus stop, and a few minutes later I presented the ticket to the scanner at the exit to make good my escape.
The screen said "ticket already used for exit".
Sigh.
Whenever I hear pundits and politicians refer to "Bejing" instead of "China" I know they really don't know what they're talking about. China is a large and complex society of about a billion and a half individuals. They obviously have a cultural identity but they're individuals just like us, individuals who are honest, dishonest, good, bad and so on, I'd guess in roughly the same proportions as they exist in our society. That there are criminals and opportunists among them should be no surprise.
The use of terms like "Bejing" (and "Putin" for that matter) is an old linguistic trick designed to depersonalize the other. Its designed to divide us into camps, all the better to be manipulated.
You have it exactly the wrong way round.
The external aggression & parasitism is almost entirely driven by the CCP, not "China", and that is almost entirely driven top-down by, yes, Beijing. (That's what "centralised, authoritarian" is referring to.)
So emphasis on Beijing rather than China is actually explicitly acknowledging the points you claim they don't understand.
"Beijing" a metonym for the Chinese government, just like "Washington, D.C." is a metonym for the U.S. government. The distinction between a government and its people is especially important for a nation ruled by a dictatorship, where the people do not choose their government.
In these contexts "Bejing" is just intended to refer to the Chinese government, which, as you so admirably point out, is not the same thing as the country and its people. The convention of using the name of the capital as a stand-in for the government of a country is quite a well established one; and is (and has been) applied to most countries at one time or another, whether they be European, American, African, Pacific, or Asian.
First clean up the SSL/TLS abomination. It is designed to be very hard to implement securely. For a long time it was effectively an open front door. There exist much better alternative concepts from Europe.
Then proceed to smoke out C in the kernels, go for microkernels. Have a look at Oberon, its ingeniously compact.
But do you really have the will, the minds and the money ?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
