US newspaper's 'Biden will hack Russia' claim: A good way to reassure Putin you'll leave him alone The US government might have subtly signalled that it likely won't hack Russia this month – by telling credulous journalists it has a "clandestine" plan to, er, launch an attack against its rival before April. The counterintuitive move came over the weekend when The New York Times published a story setting out how "over the …
Right now Biden appears to be having difficulties dressing himself. Just who is running the US because it certainly isn't him.
Harris can't be, her role appears to be nursemaid. It's going to hurt the cause of women seeking political power in the US when she becomes their first female President next month because it's very clear that someone else is pulling the strings.
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Now then, don't be racist. Nobody else brought skin colour into this. Why would you?
Harris is 'BAD' because while AG in California her own lawyers argued that prisoners shouldn't be released because their slave labour had economic benefits to the State. Me, I think keeping prisoners as slave labour is a bad thing, whatever their skin colour. Refusing to free them because the State wants them as slaves? I don't want that person to be President.
I just recognise that it'll happen, and very soon.
Watch those goalposts move! You started with baseless ad hominem and conspiracy-mongering and then moved onto, remarkably, something resembling a valid and coherent point about Harris' past record as AG. How those two things are in any way related is completely unclear, unfortunately. If you want to criticize Harris based on her record as AG, go for it. Buying into the lunatic fringe conspiracy theories about how Biden is Harris' puppet (and how she herself the puppet of ... whom, exactly?) does your credibility no favors.
I was responding to someone suggesting that Harris is bad because of their skin colour, and pointing out that this is entirely irrelevant and that she's bad for other reasons.
As for my point about Harris being a puppet, perhaps you'd care to explain why Biden isn't being allowed to hold any press conferences, why he's incapable now of even reading a teleprompt and, given this was known ahead of time, why someone deeply unpopular in her own party's Primaries was selected to take over when he's removed from office.
My last post was whacked. Let's see if this edit is accepted:
Biden was handed a total dog's breakfast on all fronts by the corrupt and incompetent former administration, so he may be a little busy for press conferences right now. You'll note that the Biden administration has been rapidly executing on a series of thoughtful and well-planned policies, and that takes real work, as opposed to simply denying that problems exist and heading off to golf or holding ego-inflating rallies.
1, Announce a US Cyber-force
2-49, Decide on name for 'soldiers' (discover Guardians of the Galaxy already taken by Space force, reject Ninja as cultural-appropriation) and uniform design
50-99, Political in-fighting about which agency gets to own/staff/control/get-the-budget-for
100-
The NYT are classic idiots. They shit on Robert Goddard's plans to go to the Moon, saying rockets didn't work in a vacuum and any slack jawed idiot with the most basic understanding of physics would understand that.
They only "kinda sorta" published a retraction during Apollo 11.
They published a story on December 8th, 1903 that "Man won't fly for a million years".
9 days later the Wright Brothers said "surprise motherfucker!"
In short, if the New York Times said water was wet, I'd dip my toe in the Atlantic to make sure.
They make The Sun and National Enquirer look good.
There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq :)
Here's something from only a few months ago: the "Caliphate" podcast was complete and utter bunk.
NYT is a great paper but it certainly has its blind spots. Don't trust them blindly but they have also broken many an important (true) story.
"It might teach you some respect for the trade."
I'm not sure how much respect should be given to story writers.
I mean we all like a good story, but at the end of the day, they're just stories
Unnamed spokesperson said this or that
Maybe, might, possibly, something happened
Most intelligent people when reading some material that is littered with spelling mistakes, especially if the source is a so-called professional editorial, will usually give it little credit, because lets face it, who is going to listen to some cockeye'd crayon wielding "journalist"
Many of them believe themselves to be celebrities in their own right. Like... wtf?
Well, yes, of course they're in it for the money. It's a trade. What else are they supposed to do?
Does that make them unworthy of respect? Do you feel the same way about professional authors? Actors, shopkeepers, couriers, hairdressers, engineers...? They're all of them doing it for the money. Is that wrong?
Yet the effect of those words is to warn Russia that an attack of some sort is on its way, and it'll be soon, thus putting Vlad and chums on high alert.
The russians know that that the western world celebrates April Fools day, so telling them that there will be a cyberattack in 3 weeks, means they will ignore it 'cos they will think it is just yet another spaghetti tree story. Once they realise their mistake it will be too late because their entire infrastructure will be pwned.
Or maybe not.
But at least trying to discover the truth will keep them distracted for a while.
This announcement was not for Russia but propaganda for American citizens to give the impression that anything Russia and China can do with hacking, America can do too. They are constantly hacking targets but have maybe slacked a little with choosing enough proper targets.
These days though, foreign governments seem to be ahead of the US with actual hacking. The US is too busy with mass surveillance and building backdoors in to American products and worldwide standards that they often have the keys to begin with and don't even need to reverse engineer software to get their exploits.
But a good news article in news outlets that are happy to do the governments bidding can at least change public perception of the truth.
"These days though, foreign governments seem to be ahead of the US with actual hacking."
The USA hacks for political information. Probably very successfully.
Certain other countries hack also for industrial & technological information that they can pass onto national champions.
In all cases, we generally only hear about it when something has gone wrong.
After the fact bragging is also endemic. Remember the 2011 Stuxnet worm which, in the long run, probably had zero net effect. Such blatant "accidental leaks" afterwards, e.g., [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html] "Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay". We could all get top security clearance to read about the "top secret" work in the NYT.
Except there is nothing cunning or clandestine about it. The Americans are constantly spying on all and sundry. So is the UK, and the Russians, and the Germans, and the Israelis, and the Japanese, and the North and South Koreans, and China, and the Indians, Brazilians, Australians, etc. etc. ... and everybody knows it. And everybody denies it.
Gawd/ess knows who they think they are foolin'...
> Except there is nothing cunning or clandestine about it. The Americans are constantly spying on all and sundry.
Exactly! Which makes it clear it's only intended to reassure Americans that something's about to be done, and the Bad Guys will soon rue the day they decided to be disrespectful to the good old US of A.
As a technique it's just as ridiculous as it is as a message, but I guess it might be enough to prop the bruised ego of the masses.
The NYT article says this of the attacks:
a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks that are intended to be evident to President Vladimir V. Putin and his intelligence services and military but not to the wider world.
So we and the american public will just have to take Biden's word that an attack has taken place. Because there will be nothing for anyone to see, unless you are Putin or his mates.
It sounds like a great weapon. One that leaves no trace and apparently causes no damage that anyone except its intended targets can see. More like propaganda: "yesterday we attacked .... and destroyed ..... " but with nothing to prove anyone actually did anything!
However, the same article also says this is in retaliation for
rivals who regularly exploit vulnerabilities in government and corporate defenses
Rather than expend effort in damaging both someone else's systems and your own "high ground" position, why not fix all those vulnerabilities? Or better still, take all this vulnerable stuff off the internet so it can't be exploited to begin with.
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