Although it seems obvious now they would spin this against DPRK which diverts criticism of NSA, and keeps the pressure on DPRK in wake of Moon's win. The US government and security industry got very little public criticism for the obvious bullshit accusations against the DPRK in 2014 regarding the Sony hack, sadly I don't expect this to be very different.
Gssh posted:I suppose it's interesting to see the dynamic more publicly of intelligence agencies creating the tools used by cybercriminals.
the statement microsofg released that opnely says what the NSA did was as irresponsble as losing track of atomahawk missle. is pretty interesting to see corporations more ublicly are politically trusted than the governemtn. not just defacto more trusted as before, like the trust you have in mcdonalds fries being hotter and salteir than
So I was discussing China's belt and road program with a friend yesterday. North Korea came up and he said that instead of talking to DPRK, just talk to PRC, implying it's a Chinese client state. I said that's untrue. He brought up two moments in a documentary on DPRK that he saw: first, they wanted to shoot inside a church when they were told to wait for couple of hours. The people arrived after that time and sang in unison quite well. He found the proceedings suspicious. Second, they tooks shots inside a computer lab with Hewlett-Packard PCs. Now what were HP computers doing in DPRK when there are sanctions against tech transfer?
The first claim can be countered easily - to an atomized consumer in a cynical economy always asking 'where's mine', the life of a DPRK citizen free of marketing imperatives to build your brand (at the expense of others), a disciplined life in service of communal organizing is stupid, whether religious or communist. So my friend remains suspicious.
The second point about HP PCs inside DPRK at first glance could be guessed as Chinese knock-offs that flood Asian markets but light digging revealed my friend was right! There was a minor ‘conspiracy’. Fox News reported five years ago an "EXCLUSIVE: Cash for computers: Is the U.N. busting its own sanctions in North Korea?" on "An agency of the United Nations " that "has quietly shipped computers and sophisticated computer servers to the government of North Korea, despite ongoing U.N. sanctions... procurement and payment for the WIPO goods appears to have been arranged between WIPO’s Geneva headquarters and China, bypassing the U.N. offices in North Korea." After building up the threat of a "truculent communist dictatorship with a thirst for nuclear weapons, whose often-starving citizens are brutally kept in line by a military-dominated elite with widespread international criminal ties", the writer George Russell admits "the latest WIPO technology transfer has little to do with nuclear weapons or satellite launches. It involves laptops, printers and servers intended to create a high-speed digital archive for North Korea’s Inventions Office - the equivalent of the U.S. Patent Office." The DPRK patent office had ~5 TB of storage in toto before this deal; now they got a RAID setup, some printers and a reliable UPS.
Moncef Katab at WIPO snitched on this ‘conspiracy’ and was fired two years later in 2014 but not without raising enough noise to get an enquiry into Francis Gurry, the DG of WIPO. Katab managed to get a petition out with the help of trade unions of UN workers in Geneva for his reinstatement while Gurry's Wikipedia page is permanently marked with the 'cash-for-computers' scam. Fox news has helpfully uploaded emails, memos, invoices, and the patent office plan.
This is a topsy-turvy situation, a non-scandal that left a stain - The head of UN IP enforcement went against the IP regime's sanctions and gave the DPRK patent office hardware better suited for running Counter-Strike servers, nvm enterprise level tech. They would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for the whistleblowing union member. Just some guy on top (!) trying to do some good, going against rank-and-file to help out a 'truculent' dictatorship. His reward was the undying suspicion of Fox News. George Russell continues to warn against the DPRK, his latest scoop that WIPO is helping DPRK develop patent application for production of sodium cyanide, a ‘banned nerve gas chemical'. Of course, he wouldn't mention that the chemical is also widely used in extracting rare metals (like gold) used in electronic components. To close all brackets here, guess which company reported using 'conflict minerals' processed from DPRK? Yes, it’s HP. Thus the circuit of global market completes itself by including the exception to it.
This is common knowledge here but for the sake of continuity i recite - neoliberalization provides the framework for circulation of capital globally at the expense of political and economic self-determination of the people. Nations that reject come-hithers of capital are exsanguinated and replaced with governments (or militias) willing to sell resources for cheap while the people in such nations are forced to migrate just to survive. Thus capital gets resources at rock-bottom prices and destitute labour that cannot organize itself because it isn’t a citizen anywhere. This economic circuit is replicated at the ideological level as well.
The role DPRK plays in capitalist ideology is of the ridiculous remainder of the cold war - every effort at demonizing it in the vein of 'socialist dictatorship' fails, the confrontation a farce between an empire and a holdover. This doesn’t stop paranoid Americans from practicing the spy version of ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ though, recognizing messages where there are none and attempting to decipher them. The NYT report on North Koreans playing volleyball (posted earlier in the thread by aerdil) is better than any satire. Similarly, the bohemian blogger dude went to the market in Rason and was “struck by the sense of having stumbled across that fabled thing which seems so hopelessly impossible to find: the ‘real’ North Korea.” As chill as he might be, the bohemian dude is prey to the widespread 'Truman Show' syndrome, looking for the ‘real’ DPRK. This ‘real’ DPRK is thoroughly ambiguous in the capitalist ideology - the expectation of a nightmarish failure outside the circuit of capital is also the expectation of an authentic life outside the semblances of capital. The true horror, as the bohemian blogger realizes at the Kum Yong restaurant (“the service and surroundings had been so carefully and thoroughly Westernised, as to give little or no impression of how real locals live. I guess the same could be said for five-star restaurants the world over, though.”), is that there is no outside to capital.
OTOH, Roland Boer on his blog crossposted an article by Marcel Cartier on misconceptions about DPRK. North Koreans make fun of Canadians (who doesn’t?), the young listen to Linkin Park (again, who doesn’t) and there are ‘microbreweries’ everywhere. More interestingly, the DPRK knows it’s position in capitalist ideology and consciously completes the ideological circuit by returning the message of the sender in an inverted form. Boer writes
... a desire by some visitors to act as pseudo-journalists, attempting to find out about what is being kept hidden. It may take the form of trying to photograph items they think they are not supposed to photograph, or of ducking off from a tour group for a few minutes to see what might be seen. But let me give two examples.
When travelling the metro system, one is told not to photograph the metro tunnels. So of course one or two try to photograph the tunnels. But as soon as the photographs are taken, a platform attendant immediately walks up, calls to a guide and demands that the photograph be deleted. This only exacerbates the mystery. I happened to be standing next to one such culprit when the deletion took place. The photograph merely contained a black space, with nothing to see. But the fact that you could not take a photograph of black space meant that it much conceal something.
It’s horses. The subway is infested with horses. But let’s continue,
The other example is the fabled ‘fifth floor’ of the Yonggakdo Hotel. The lifts skip by the fifth floor, jumping from four to six. And if one has bothered to check the internet, then stories abound of the mysteries of the fifth floor (check google or youtube). Many are speculations: here the guides are kept under guard so as not to be corrupted by foreigners; here is equipment to spy on visitors; here is a crack military squad ready to deal with any problem. To add to the mystery, occasionally a guard may appear and sternly demand that you depart. In our group, a few tried to get to the fifth floor by the stairs. One or two even managed a photograph. What did they reveal? Some pipes, perhaps a door or a wall or a corridor. And of course rooms with doors. Nothing else.
That is the point: nothing is there. The Koreans are very good at creating the impression that something is there, hidden from prying eyes. I suspect that they have created such zones precisely to maintain the mystery, for it appeals immensely to some foreigners, especially of the bleeding heart liberal type. Nothing actually exists in the metro tunnels except tracks for the trains. And nothing is to be found on the fifth floor of the hotel, except rooms and a possible guard to tell you not to enter. After all, if there really was something to hide, why have stairs with a door that opens on the fifth floor, or why have a ‘secret lift’ that visitors can actually use to get close to the fifth floor?
To go full Zizek here - Isn’t this ideology at its purest? The deepest wish of a liberal tourist is to find some ‘real’ behind the peace and order on the surface. The DPRK has already taken this wish into account and provides for blank spaces protected by needless prohibitions to serve as a screen, to reflect liberal desire back at itself, to sustain desire instead of giving them the ‘real’ (like a tour of a model prison camp). Isn’t this the Christian gesture par excellence? Instead of treating the neighbour (liberal) with solidarity, the DPRK demeans itself needlessly, playing its expected role in capitalist ideology to give liberals what they want. this isn’t just the communism we need, but the communism cynicism deserves...
Edited by slipdisco ()
oh yeah, the sony hack also definitely for sure done by the dprk, right
Some computer security experts have said it is too soon to accuse North Korea, and North Korean officials have denied involvement.
Before the latest evidence came out Monday, James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, called the early attribution “shoddy” in an online post, and said the “attribution to North Korea is premature and likely false.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/technology/north-korea-ransomware-attack.html
slipdisco posted:including tears' songbullshit takedown.
i feel bo th acconwledged and validated, thank
North and South Korean religious leaders to dialogue
2017-06-05 Vatican Radio
Various religious leaders from North and South Korea met in Beijing and decided to further extend their dialogue by meeting in Pyongyang, North Korea this month. The Korean Conference of Religion for Peace (KCRP) announced on May 26 that North and South Korean religious leaders would meet in Pyongyang on June 17-20. The decision to bring spiritual people from the rival countries together came from the executive committee meeting of the Asian Conference of Religions for Peace which was held on May 18-22 in Beijing.
Members of the KCRP and Kang Ji-young, president of the Korean Religious Association who attended the meeting, reaffirmed the need for reconciliation and peace in the Korean peninsula and for the resumption of the inter-Korean exchange. They decided to hold a North and South Korean religious exchange meeting in the North Korean capital. Currently, the KCRP is discussing the matter with newly elected President Moon Jae-in.
Archbishop Hyginus Kim Hee-joong of Kwangju, co-chairperson of the KCRP, welcomed the upcoming meeting. "Dialogue is the most effective way to solve a problem. We need to meet as as possible," he said. (Source: UCANEWS)
pretty brave that all those DPRK christians who were boiled and fed to dogs at birth are still putting on a pageant just for us
toutvabien posted:
THE MOST DOOMED MAN IN TH EWORLD
this guy was more doomed than i thought initially
in a high-profile case like this, it stands to reason the country's leadership was apprised of this situation the whole time. i wonder which (if any) government actions from March 2016 to now could be retroactively read as at least partly motivated by the fact that they were providing coma care to a possible casus belli
Keven posted:If every single negitive story about. North Korea is lies how come 2 months in a work camp put this guy in a coma ?? 🤔
maybe his feeble western brain couldn't handle how awesome it was
normie: *seizes up*
How should the United States proceed?
What to do about North Korea has been an intractable problem for decades. Although shooting stopped in 1953, Pyongyang insists that the Korean War never ended. It maintains as an official policy goal the reunification of the Korean peninsula under the Kim dynasty.
The article actually concludes that the USA is powerless to do anything "about" the DPRK and will have to leave it alone 
Edited by swampman ()
swampman posted:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/
How should the United States proceed?
What to do about North Korea has been an intractable problem for decades. Although shooting stopped in 1953, Pyongyang insists that the Korean War never ended. It maintains as an official policy goal the reunification of the Korean peninsula under the Kim dynasty.The article actually concludes that the USA is powerless to do anything "about" the DPRK and will have to leave it alone
My god, getting past the casual racism, the rambling wet dreams of implausible military invasion scenarios (none of which would play out the way he hopes), the outright and numerous falsehoods (like one every sentence) you finally get to the meat of the article.
With the right inducements, Kim very well might decide to change direction. Or he might die. He’s an obese young man with bad habits, a family history of heart trouble, and a personal record of poor health. In such a system, things might change—for better or worse—overnight.
Swampman, you were wrong, this is the actual conclusion: Kim Jong-Un is Fat, and with "right incentives" of fatty American foods, he will eat himself to death, because he is a fucking fatso.
Keven posted:If every single negitive story about. North Korea is lies how come 2 months in a work camp put this guy in a coma ?? 🤔
Warmbier is most likely alive and thriving in the DPRK, with news of their defection being covered up by this coma/death propaganda
Edited by ilmdge ()
thirdplace posted:lin manuel miranda as the coma-american
It's a perfect fit for his dramatic abilities
Omar Epps: Tortured to death.
Other doctor: He was forced to labor too hard
House, MD: Soft hands, fingernails intact. It's a labor camp, not a Baltimore police van. You're not trying.
Omar Epps: Then he must have eaten some poison spinach because, this was no accident.
Other doctor: Maybe he was totally brainwashed -
Omar Epps: What? "Washing" is just a metaphor, it doesn't actually -
Other doctor: - by insidious Juche ideology -
House, MD: Let me stop you right there Doctor. Juche is a principle of independence, self-reliance and self-defence, practiced by the masses in the face of world imperialism. It is a very pure form of popular democracy and a major contribution to international socialism.
Lisa Edelstein (bursts in): That's it House. I'm shutting your clinic down and making you all dental assistants. You've been warned about tankie apologetics far too many times.
Omar Epps: House, you've ruined my career. I don't know why I ever agreed to come back to work for you. This kid gets a disease from a dank dungeon and all you can do is spout Stalinist totalit -
House, MD: Wait. Say that, again.
Omar Epps: I said, "...disease from a dank dungeon and all..."
House, MD: Dank. That's it. (He goes to the medicine cabinet) Doctor, get him ready for an injection.
Lisa Edelstein: What do you think you're doing?
House, MD: In 1998 Secretary of Defense William J Cohen was up late one night and saw a Slipknot video on TV. Out of pure malice, Cohen set up a branch within the army to come up with an antidote for marijuana that can be aerosolized and dumped out of the backs of planes. That's what I'm injecting into the kid.
Omar Epps: So you mean...
House, MD: Warmbier's not dead. He's been in the DPRK. He's high as a motherfucker. (Warmbier's heart monitor begins beeping.) Looks like this "tankie apologist" just saved your hospital's accreditation.
Edited by swampman ()