Why Is Anyone Surprised?

I don't know about you - OK, I probably really do know about you, but let's leave that for another post, shall we? - right, I don't know about you, but I'm totally stunned and amazed that other people who should know better are stunned and amazed that Huawei and ZTE might not be good guys just selling knockoff products cheaper than we can make them here in the USA or even in Japan or Mexico or something.

Why is it a surprise to think that the Chinese government is using the companies they control to get access to the computer systems of other countries' companies? Isn't that exactly what all the tracking of hacking has told us? that it's all coming from China or Russia or Iran? Good grief, folks, use your brains once in a while instead of just your credit cards. Remember when we used to say that you get what you pay for? Now you're finding out what that might mean in an interconnected, always-on, internet-dependent society, and it means that the ones who sell you something for less than it's worth are probably making up for that apparent loss somewhere else - not like the old "we lose a little bit on each sale, but we make up for it with volume" kind of scam; this is more like the we'll sell you a magazine for less than it costs us to make because you have to take some advertising in there along with the "articles" and such, only where you didn't know the ads were going to borrow your computer to dig up your personal details for auction on the open black market or steal your company's plans and designs to make it easier to create knockoffs and counterfeits of your products before you can get them out the door and for less money because they're going to do the same thing to the next suckers who become customers.

Get a grip on reality and realize that Chinese companies may be owned by those rich Chinese guys you deal with, but those guys and the companies and their customers are pwned by the Chinese government, and that's the way they play the game, bub!

If you don't want to look like a total chump, you'd better wake up and smell the oolong tea and start buying equipment from reputable manufacturers who don't have a business model of sell stuff to chumps for less than its worth, but steal everything that's not nailed down to turn a profit for your commie masters.

Sheesh!

Posted by Gyro Gearloose

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Won't Someone Think of the Voters!?

Good grief. 
First we have elected officials actually proposing that we suspend elections so we can "get something done" in Washington.
Now we have evidence that the voting machines that we may (or may not?) be using next November are susceptible to some of the easiest hacking we've ever seen.

Isn't it obvious that having a voting system where there's no way to check the results other than to read the same numbers again is nothing but a recipe for disaster? Folks - there are no electronic chads, hanging or otherwise, running the numbers from the same machine through the same machine isn't a recount, it's a rerun! and at least the scantron kinds of ballots can be confirmed by a different counting process, it could be a human or it could be a different machine but at least there's some reason to think that errors would be caught instead of just repeated.

But it's worse when you find out that the machines can be hacked to give different results while the voter is voting but the voter can't even tell it's doing something other than what he intended because there's no way to find the error or fraud when it comes time to get the total votes counted.

Give me a paper ballot or the old mechanical voting booth machines any time - something that simple is easy enough to understand so it's easy to understand what might go wrong - not like software that no one ever really sees like that Excel bug that gave the wrong answer to a simple arithmetic problem that had to get fixed by Microsoft after they had already started selling the program.

I don't know what would be worse - that the people trying to install these machines are too stupid to realize their mistake or that they're actually trying to wreck stuff on purpose.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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That's NOT Hacking!

Oh great, another old-line traditional media company gets in trouble for breaking the law and the rest of the oldsters writing it up call it "hacking" because they don't know any better and they figure everyone knows that hackers are all criminals and bad guys, so we might as well paint these guys with that same broad brush, right?

Paying a corrupt cop or security guard for phone numbers isn't hacking.
Guessing someone's voicemail password isn't hacking.
Deleting voicemails from someone else's voicemail isn't hacking.

Good grief, people, at least learn what the words mean before you use them! Don't they teach anything in journalism school any more? Did they ever teach anything in journalism schools?

What a bunch of chumps reporters must be - including the supposed reporters at NotW!

Posted by Gyro Gearloose