Mar 09
Times Enemynews Dish Network, Google, news, search engines, television
Google Tests TV Search Service
By JESSICA E. VASCELLAR
MARCH 8, 2010
Google Inc. is testing a new television-programming search service with Dish Network Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving race to combine Internet content with conventional TV.
The service, which runs on TV set-top boxes containing Google software, allows users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites like Google’s YouTube, according to these people. It also lets users to personalize a lineup of shows, these people said.
With the test, Google moves deeper into a crowded field of companies, large and small, that have been trying for years to marry the Web and TV and their business models—from rivals Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. to the manufacturers of televisions and set-top boxes.
Just last week, TiVo Inc. announced new digital video recorders that blend broadcast and online content.
Google’s test, which began last year, is limited to a very small number of the company’s employees and their families and could be discontinued at any time, said the people familiar with the matter.
Viewers in the Google test, these people said, can search by typing queries, using a keyboard rather than a remote control. Google hopes to connect the service with its nascent TV ad-brokering business, allowing it to target ads to individual households based on search and viewing data.
A Google spokeswoman said the company doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation.
A spokeswoman for Dish Network, which has roughly 14 million subscribers, declined to comment.
Previous efforts to access Internet programming on TV sets have failed to catch on, partly because they required consumers to purchase extra hardware. By working directly with an operator like Dish and its hardware, Google could avoid the such issues. Unlike earlier efforts, Google’s service isn’t just about accessing Web content. It is also a search service that is integrated with the operator’s programming.
For Google, which dominates Web search and the advertising revenue generated by it, the test represents another effort to extend its technology for delivering targeted ads into new fields, as its search business slows down.
The company is already playing a major role in the market for smart phones and mobile ads, for example, using an operating system called Android that is gaining popularity and supports a range of Google services.
Google appears to be pursuing a strategy to deliver ads across many Intenet-enabled devices from many Web sites.
The company has begun to target the market with a nascent ad-brokering business called Google TV. On the content side, its YouTube site has struck a variety of syndication deals with TV makers and console companies.
In addition to the test with Dish, Google has been talking to a range of other television-service providers and hardware makers, prodding them to use its Android-based technologies to offer a broader range of programming, a more personal experience and ads.
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a January interview that it “makes sense that people would use Android as an operating system for set-top boxes and buddy boxes and TVs” and added “all of those ideas have been proposed by our partners.” Mr. Schmidt said Google isn’t in the business of making the hardware itself, however.
But playing any major role in TV won’t be easy. Despite moves to create more open standards around set-top boxes, most cable and satellite companies closely guard their set-top box software and their overall programming experience.
While many are scrambling to find ways to take advantage of programming delivered using the Internet, hardware companies and operators have tended to custom-tailor such offerings rather than offer access to all Web sites. They may actively resist the notion of opening their services to Google.
To make TV ads more targeted, cable companies have banded together to form Canoe Ventures, a consortium that has agreed to roll out ads targeted at particular demographics– and eventually households—on a national scale. The project has been delayed due to technology issues.
Google’s own TV ad business is a cautionary tale. Google has sold ads on TV since 2007, opening the program up to all advertisers in 2008. Currently advertisers can buy TV ads online for nearly 100 national cable networks, according to the company, and track how the ads perform.
But the program, which relies on an online auction similar to its search business, hasn’t generated any material revenue for the company.
Google has attributed the reception to the fact that many set-top boxes or TVs aren’t capable of delivering the two-way feedback it uses to tailor its algorithms. That problem has eased somewhat lately, as a large number of new TVs now come with Internet connections.
People familiar with the matter say Google plans to pursue a similar strategy on TVs as it did with mobile phones, using Android and other software technology to help open TVs and set-top boxes to new content and new ads.
Richard Doherty, director of technology consulting firm Envisioneering Group, says Google has a good shot of luring users due to technology advantages. For instance, he says set-top boxes running Android or other bits of software Google developed, like Chrome, could be updated instantly, while operators take much longer to refresh their offerings.
“No one Net entity has the deep resources to give so many viewers free features which could enrich Google far beyond the operators’ own dreams,” he said.
Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com
Mar 08
Times Enemynews news, search engines
Google Targets Microsoft With DocVerse Deal
By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
MARCH 5, 2010, 7:11 P.M. ET
Stepping up its fight against Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. acquired DocVerse, a technology startup that allows people to edit Microsoft Office files online.
Google paid around $25 million for the San Francisco-based company, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In an interview, Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager for Google Apps, said Google acquired DocVerse to make it easier for people to transition from desktop software to online software. The latter is an area where Google is trying to get a leg up over Microsoft, with its Google Apps service, which includes online word-processing and spreadsheet software. He declined to comment on the deal’s price.
Google will make DocVerse’s technology part of its Google Apps, Mr. Rochelle said, allowing users who upload Microsoft files into Google storage to edit and collaborate on them. Google also made the software, which carried fees for some types of usage, free and temporarily suspended new sign-ups.
The deal is one of around a half dozen acquisitions that Google has announced since the end of 2009. Other deals include AppJet, which also makes collaboration software, and mobile advertising company AdMob.
DocVerse was founded two and a half years ago by two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. The company has raised about $1.5 million in venture financing from Baseline Ventures and others. In addition to allowing people to do things like edit PowerPoint slides online, it also allows users to comment on documents online and display those comments visible to other users.
In an interview, Mr. Sinha said DocVerse was excited to help foster Google Apps as an effective service for collaborating across different files types. While noting that Microsoft is also developing ways for people to collaborate on files online, he said Google is “better positioned to reinvent Web-based business software” than Microsoft and executing “more effectively and quickly.”
A Microsoft spokeswoman said in a statement that Google’s DocVerse deal acknowledges that “customers want to use and collaborate with Microsoft Office documents.” The statement continued to say that “businesses around the world” are using Microsoft’s collaboration service, SharePoint, citing Coca Cola Enterprises, Kraft and Volvo as examples.
Separately Friday, Google disclosed its top three executives will be paid $1 in compensation in the current fiscal year and will not receive bonuses, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The search giant’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page also were paid $1 and took no stock, stock options or bonus in 2008.
Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com
Mar 06
Times EnemyChina, news China, news, search engines
Microsoft Will Continue Chinese Strategy In Search, Cloud
By: Nicholas Kolakowski
2010-03-06
Microsoft executives have indicated repeatedly throughout 2010 that the company intends to stay in China and compete aggressively for the search and cloud-computing markets, despite some controversy between the Chinese government and Google earlier in the year that saw the search-engine giant briefly threatening to pull its operations from the country. Both Microsoft and Google lag behind homegrown Chinese search engine Baidu in that market, considered one of the world’s fastest-growing. Both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Google CEO Eric Schmidt have reaffirmed their commitment to human rights within the context of doing business in China.
A Microsoft executive indicated that the company plans to stay the course in China, despite the recent dispute between Google and the Chinese Government that saw the search-engine giant threatening to pull its operations out of the country.
“Regardless of whether or not Google stays, we will aggressively promote our search and cloud computing (in China),” Zhang Yaqin, Microsoft’s chairperson of its Asia-Pacific R&D Group, told Reuters on March 5. “We hope to achieve a relatively important place in the China search market…but we must be very patient, we need a lot of time.”
Google threatened to pull out of China on Jan. 12, after a widespread cyber-attack which the company claimed targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The Chinese government has repudiated accusations that it was involved in the cyber-attacks, which additionally struck over 30 companies and supposedly originated from the Chinese mainland.
One of the pieces of malware involved in the attack, according to a Jan. 14 analysis by McAfee Labs, utilized a zero-day vulnerability present in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Microsoft would later pinpoint that vulnerability as an invalid pointer reference affecting Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8.
“Accusation that the Chinese government participated in the cyber-attack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China,” a spokesperson of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told the Chinese newspaper Xinhua in January. “We [are] firmly opposed to that.”
During Google’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Jan. 21, CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to retreat from Google’s more belligerent position from earlier in the month, saying that: “We have made a strong statement we wish to remain in China. We like the Chinese people. We like our Chinese employees. We like the business opportunities there and we would like to do that on somewhat different terms than we have. But we remain quite committed to being there.”
On Jan. 29, Schmidt emphasized a similar line of argument at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “We love what China is doing as a country and its growth. We just don’t like the censorship. We hope to apply some negotiation or pressure to make things better for the Chinese people.”
But whether Microsoft sees the potential for some sort of opening in the aftermath of Google’s conflict, or whether CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives merely want to re-emphasize for the media that they intend to keep cordial relations with the Chinese government, is a line of thought likely to be closely retained by the strategists in Redmond.
“Engagement in China and around the world is very important to us, in part because we believe it accelerates access to 21st century technology and services and helps provide the widest possible range of ideas and information,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in a Jan. 27 posting on the Official Microsoft Blog. “We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to stay engaged, which means our business must respect the laws of China.”
However, Ballmer added in that posting, “Microsoft is opposed to restrictions on peaceful political expression, and we have conversations with governments to make our views known. In every country in which we operate, including China, Microsoft requires proper legal authority before we remove any Internet content; and if we remove content, we give users notice.”
Within China, Google and Microsoft lag behind homegrown search engine Baidu, which commanded 56 percent of that market at the end of 2009, compared to Google’s 43 percent. According to analytics firm StatCounter, Yahoo and Bing’s combined share of the Chinese search market stood at around 1.18 percent through 2009.
Mar 06
Times Enemynews, security insecure news, Israel, news, US DoD
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Department of Defense is loosening the security in regards to social networks … glorious!
Soldier’s Facebook post about raid gets him jail
by Shira Rubin – Mar. 3, 2010 03:15 PM
Associated Press
JERUSALEM — Israel’s military has “unfriended” one of its own — after a combat soldier potentially updated Israel’s enemies on Facebook.
The military said Wednesday that a planned raid on a West Bank village was called off after the soldier disclosed its details online. The military said the soldier posted the time and location of the raid on his Facebook page, saying that troops were planning on “cleaning up” the village.
Fellow soldiers reported the leak to military authorities, who canceled the raid, fearing that the information may have reached hostile groups and put troops at risk.
The soldier was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 days in prison. He was also removed from his battalion and combat postings.
A military statement added that it is cracking down on soldiers’ use of social networking Web sites and has launched a campaign warning of the dangers of sharing military information online.
“Uploading classified information to social networks or any Web site exposes the information to anyone who wishes to view it, including foreign and hostile intelligence services,” the military statement read. “Hostile intelligence agents scan the Internet with an eye toward collecting information on the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), which may undermine operational success and imperil IDF forces.”
The military said that soldiers were prohibited from publishing classified information, including photographs containing military data.
In posters placed on military bases, a mock Facebook page shows the images of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. Below their pictures — and Facebook “friend requests” — reads the slogan: “You think that everyone is your friend?”
Mar 05
Times EnemyChina, news, security China, economics, insecure news, news, politics, Taiwan, Tibet
China rhetoric raises threat concerns
By Bill Gertz
Friday, March 5, 2010
Recent statements by Chinese military officials are raising concerns among U.S. analysts that the communist government in Beijing is shifting its oft-stated “peaceful rise” policy toward an aggressive, anti-U.S. posture.
The most recent sign appeared with the publication of a government-approved book by Senior Col. Liu Mingfu that urges China to “sprint” toward becoming the world’s most powerful state.
“Although this book is one of many by a senior colonel, it certainly challenges the thesis of many U.S. China-watchers that the People’s Liberation Army’s rapid military growth is not designed to challenge the United States as a global power or the U.S. military,” said Larry M. Wortzel, a China affairs specialist who until recently was co-chairman of the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
A Reuters report on Col. Liu’s book, “The China Dream,” appeared Tuesday in the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily. It quoted the book as stating China and the United States are in “competition to be the leading country, a conflict over who rises and falls to dominate the world.”
Mr. Wortzel said the statements in the book contradict those of former President Jiang Zemin and other Chinese leaders who said China’s rise to prominence in the 21st century would be peaceful. They also carry political weight because the book was published by the Chinese military.
The book was released after calls by other Chinese military officials to punish the United States for policies toward Taiwan, U.S. criticism of China’s lack of Internet freedom and U.S. support for the exiled Tibetan leader Dalai Lama.
One official, Maj. Gen. Luo Yuan, called for using economic warfare against the U.S. over arms sales to Taiwan and urged selling off some of China’s $750 billion in holdings of U.S. debt securities.
China’s military also recently cut off military exchanges with the Pentagon after the announcement of a $6.4 billion sale of helicopters and missiles to Taiwan.
Asked about Col. Liu’s book, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said it would be wrong for China to view itself as a U.S. competitor. For the 21st century, U.S.-China relations are the most important ties in the world and “it is a mistake to see the relationship in zero-sum terms,” Mr. Crowley said.
Some U.S. officials in the past dismissed similar alarming statements from the Chinese military as not reflecting official views.
However, Chinese leaders have not disavowed Gen. Luo’s remarks or those of others, such as Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, who in 2005 said China would use nuclear weapons against the United States in response to any firing of conventionally armed long-range cruise missiles against Chinese cities. The statement contradicted Beijing’s declared policy of not using nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
Gen. Zhu reportedly was criticized and demoted but surfaced in print Feb. 10, calling for increased defense spending and boosting military deployments in response to the Taiwan arms sale.
China on Thursday announced that it would increase defense spending this year by 7.5 percent, a smaller increase than in previous years, in an apparent effort to limit criticism of its double-digit annual spending increases for more than a decade.
The recent military statements also counter insistence by many U.S. officials that China’s strategic intentions toward the United States are masked by the lack of “transparency” in the communist system.
U.S. intelligence analysts, in analyses and estimates, also have dismissed or played down evidence of Chinese military deception to hide its true goals. They instead have said in classified reports that the use of strategic deception to hide China’s military buildup is similar to masking efforts of Western powers.
Critics of those analysts’ “benign China” outlook say such views resulted in missing major strategic and military developments by China for more than a decade, such as new missiles, submarines and other advanced military hardware, some that were built in complete secrecy.
The recent Chinese military statements have renewed the long-running debate in U.S. policy and intelligence circles about China’s long-term military intentions and whether they pose threats to U.S. interests.
Mr. Crowley said the U.S. is a global power and “will remain so for the indefinite future,” while China is a rising global power moving to gradually integrate into the global system.
Both countries “have a shared responsibility to cooperate where we can to solve critical international challenges, and manage areas where our national interests may collide,” he said.
Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon policy official in the Reagan administration, said Chinese military authors have reignited a “nasty debate” in Washington on China.
Mr. Pillsbury, author of two books on Chinese military views of the future, said some U.S. China hands tried to trivialize the nationalistic views because senior Chinese officials do not make such statements at official meetings with U.S. counterparts.
“China’s foreign minister once told the U.S. secretary of state that China has no intention of ever pushing the U.S. out of Asia,” he said. Yet, “the Chinese military itself seems to function with considerable autonomy and no real civilian oversight, so it is plausible that these Chinese military hawks are not mere mavericks or fringe elements at all. Rather, their publications may be indicators of future Chinese programs that are veiled today,” he said.
For example, reports of China’s development of a high-tech ballistic-missile design to attack aircraft carriers first surfaced 15 years ago but were dismissed by many analysts as implausible. U.S. naval intelligence sources, however, expect China to conduct a flight test soon of the new missile that increases the threat to U.S. warships in the western Pacific.
Adm. Robert Willard, the new commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, added fuel to the debate last fall by highlighting intelligence shortfalls on Beijing’s arms buildup. He told reporters that for more than a decade China “exceeded most of our intelligence estimates of their military capability.”
Earlier this year, Adm. Willard questioned Chinese assertions about a peaceful rise, saying they are “difficult to reconcile with new military capabilities that appear designed to challenge U.S. freedom of action in the region and, if necessary, enforce China’s influence over its neighbors.” He told the House Armed Services Committee Jan. 13 that the Chinese military buildup was “aggressive.”
For years, senior U.S. civilian and military officials, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, have stated in public that they do not consider China a “threat” or an “enemy.”
Yet military statements like those of Col. Liu are making it difficult to continue those claims.
“I don’t think anyone who reads Col. Liu’s work can honestly deny that it reflects a consensus mindset in the Chinese military and political leadership,” said John Tkacik, a former State Department China hand.
“There’s no question that Col. Liu and other very influential and like-minded strategists … are psychologically preparing the People’s Liberation Army for confrontation with the United States.”
Richard Fisher, a China military analyst with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said Col. Liu’s book has helped the debate by “piercing the Beijing-Washington propaganda continuum of China’s ‘benign intent.’”
Chinese Embassy spokesman Wang Baodong did not address the Chinese military statements but said Chinese leaders have said repeatedly that China seeks peaceful development. “China pursues a national defense policy of [a] defensive nature, will not engage … in any arms race, and will never seek hegemony,” he said.
Mar 05
Times EnemyChina, news China, economics, news
China May Have to Accept Higher Iron Ore Prices, Angang Says
March 05, 2010, 7:07 AM EST
March 5 (Bloomberg) — Steelmakers in China, the world’s biggest buyer of iron ore, may have to accept a price increase higher than the 20 percent they expected for this year, Angang Steel Co. said.
“The price talks aren’t optimistic,” Chairman Zhang Xiaogang said in Beijing today while attending the National People’s Congress. Angang Steel is China’s biggest Hong Kong- listed steelmaker.
Contract iron ore prices may soar by 60 percent this year as demand from steelmakers increase with the global economic recovery, Morgan Stanley said this month. Chinese steelmakers in 2009 failed in their attempt to cut prices by more than 33 percent in talks with suppliers including Rio Tinto Group.
China, the world’s largest steelmaker, may add 50 million tons of steel capacity this year, Zhang also said. The nation produced a record 568 million metric tons of steel last year, spurred by government spending.
Angang plans to increase output of auto steel to 2.5 million tons in 2010, up from 1.7 million tons a year ago, Zhang said. The steelmaker also plans to boost production of silicon steel, he said.
–Helen Yuan and Feiwen Rong. Editors: Tan Hwee Ann, Indranil Ghosh.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Hobbs at ahobbs4@bloomberg.net
Mar 05
Times EnemyChina, news China, news
China Premier Details Economic Plan
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: March 5, 2010
BEIJING — Prime Minister Wen Jiabao crafted a portrait of a China on a steady course toward greatness on Friday, telling his nation’s unelected legislature that the government could expand social spending, increase lending, pour money into strategic industries and still meet its traditional 8 percent economic growth target in 2010.
But he also sounded a cautionary note, warning that the nation faced structural economic and social problems, and that China still confronts “a very complex situation” in the wake of last year’s global financial collapse.
Delivering his annual work report to China’s unelected legislature, the National People’s Congress, Mr. Wen said that “destabilizing factors and uncertainties” in the world economy posed a challenge to China’s continued growth. But he affirmed that China’s plan to slowly wind down last year’s large economic stimulus program, which spared China the worst of the recession, would continue unchanged.
Economic and political analysts had anticipated little new in Mr. Wen’s annual address, given that he and president Hu Jintao will leave power in 2012, and China’s opaque politics allow little room for fresh initiatives.
“There’s no surprise here,” Tao Wang, an economist for UBS Securities in Beijing, said in an interview after Mr. Wen’s address. “This has been the working assumption for a long time.”
Mr. Wen’s 35-page speech, the rough equivalent of an American State of the Union address, was a litany of statistics aimed at underscoring the government’s successful policies, swathed in boilerplate assertions of arduous struggle and glorious achievement.
Like many political documents, the report presents a rosy picture of China’s achievements and ambitions, occasionally at odds with conventional wisdom. Mr. Wen pledged, for example, that the government would “give high priority to protecting the cultural heritage of ethnic minorities and the ecosystems in ethnic minority areas,” one of many passages dedicated to the need to unite China’s 56 ethnic groups under one national banner.
But government policies toward ethnic Muslims in western Xinjiang region are widely credited with contributing to riots there last year, and the government is currently razing the region’s greatest cultural treasure — the thousand-year-old Silk Road center of Kashgar — to erect apartment blocks.
That said, few would contest Mr. Wen’s boasts of China’s economic achievements. While the rest of the world struggled, China managed an 8.7 percent rise in its gross domestic product last year, capped by 10.7 percent growth in 2009’s last quarter. Many economists, including Ms. Wang, predict that China will easily beat its goal of 8 percent growth this year.
The impressive numbers. Mr. Wen stated, are testament to the advantages of a government that need not consult with political factions or voters to take sweeping action.
“At the same time as we keep our reforms oriented toward a market economy, let market forces play their basic role in allocating resources and stimulate the market’s vitality,” he said, “we must make best use of the socialist system’s advantages, which enable us to make decisions ef{filig}ciently, organize effectively and concentrate resources to accomplish large undertakings.”
But Mr. Wen’s address also warned of problems in China’s booming economy that some experts say could hamstring future growth if they are not quickly addressed.
He pledged to clamp down on speculative real-estate purchases that some analysts say are created a bubble in China’s housing market, and said the state would take measures to rein in an explosive rise in urban land prices.
Speculation is both an economic bane and a political one: soaring land prices in urban areas have made homes unaffordable for many in China’s emerging middle class, and low-income residents in big cities have been hit with waves of evictions by both private and government speculators that have bought up their properties.
Mr. Wen also warned that some Chinese industries, fed a diet of easy money and loose regulation, had developed serious overcapacity problems.
And even as he committed to boost the nation’s money supply by 17 percent in 2010, increasing lending by $1.1 trillion, Mr. Wen warned that “latent risks in the banking and public finance sectors are increasing.” Some more skeptical economists have argued that China’s flood of lending during the recession will create a mountain of bad debt that will hamstring future growth.
Mr. Wen said the government will run a $154 billion budget deficit in 2010, in line with economists’ expectations. As a share of gross domestic product, the projected deficit is unchanged from last year.
Over all, spending will rise about 11.4 percent this year, half the increase during last year’s recession.
Beyond economics, Mr. Wen’s speech laid out a familiar blueprint for raising China from a developing nation into the top ranks of the developed world. Last year, he said, the government’s stimulus measures helped increase auto sales by 46.2 percent, housing by 42.1 percent, as measured in square meters, and retail sales of consumer goods by 16 percent.
He recited a series of often-staggering numbers to highlight the country’s rapid development: 800,000 aged homes were renovated in 2009; 165,000 miles of power lines were upgraded; 3,450 miles of new rail lines were laid; 2,900 miles of new freeways were opened; 35 airports were either built from scratch or renovated.
Mr. Wen said the government had dramatically increased spending on low-income housing, pensions, education and health care, and that the increases would continue in 2010. The government will take new steps to recruit top-level educators to China, to improve teacher training and to direct talented teachers to impoverished rural areas, he said.
Mr. Wen also said that China would pour money into strategic industries, boosting research and development and infrastructure spending to “capture the economic, scientific and technological high ground.” Among the areas he singled out were biomedicine, energy conservation, information technology and high-end manufacturing.
In a bow to China’s status as the world’s single largest polluter, Mr. Wen also pledged to increase environmental protection measures, planting nearly 23,000 square miles of new forests, expanding sewage treatment and clean drinking-water programs, and retrofitting coal-burning power plants with advanced machinery to cut emissions.
Mar 05
Times EnemyChina, news China, insecure news, news, search engines, Tibet
Even if Google Uncensors Its Chinese Search, Microsoft has no Plans to Follow
Talks between Google and the Chinese government quietly continue
Censorship is the name of the game in China’s media market. If you aren’t willing to filter out content the government finds unacceptable, you aren’t allowed to do business with the nation’s over 1 billion people. For most companies, that’s too tempting a target to miss. Blind compliance has been a typical precedent in the past.
However, Google, far and away the internet’s largest search provider, is hardly your average company. When Chinese hackers stole information from Google in mid-December, the search giant’s simmering frustration boiled over and it announced on January 12 that it would begin uncensoring it Chinese search. Currently the company complies with local laws and filters out banned topics like the forbidden Fulun Gong spiritual movement and Tibetan independence.
Now the company has cooled slightly and is in talks with the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, in Beijing according to Reuters. News of the talks was released by Li Yizhong, minister of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
Google is still quite unhappy with China. The results of its investigation concluded that the attack in December originated from two Chinese schools and used malware written by a Chinese security consultant in his 30s, a man who reportedly had deep government links. Google is also trying to reconcile the idea of continuing to obey China’s censorship edict with its policy of internet freedom and equality.
China, meanwhile insists censorship is essential for maintaining a healthy society. They point to current U.S. child pornography laws and pending legislation in the U.S. that would monitor citizens’ online activities for copyright infringement as proof that it’s not the only major nation with plans to filter objectionable traffic. As to the claims that the Google attacks originated in China, a Chinese official called them “groundless.”
It’s important to bear in mind that Google is not the top search engine in China. Google China, which launched in 2006, currently holds about 31.3 percent of the market, while Baidu, a Chinese search firm, owns a whopping 63.9 percent of the market. A third company, Chinese firm Sohu.com, takes up much of the remaining share.
Google’s U.S. rival Microsoft has been eager to get a piece of the Chinese search revenue pie that last quarter amounted to 2 billion yuan ($293M USD). In June, it launched a beta version of the Chinese localized version of its search engine Bing complete with the required content filtering.
According to Reuters, Microsoft’s at times boisterous CEO Steve Ballmer says that his company has no plans whatsoever to uncensor its search engine or pull out of China even if Google does so. Zhang Yaqin, chairman of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific R&D Group states, “Regardless of whether or not Google stays, we will aggressively promote our search and cloud computing (in China). We hope to achieve a relatively important place in the China search market. But we must be very patient, we still need a lot of time.”
Microsoft is advancing with an ambitious design to increase 2010 investment in China that includes $150M USD in outsourced software projects and $500M USD in new search investment. Aside from search, Microsoft is also hoping to gain ground in China’s mobile market, in which Google also competes. Microsoft recently unveiled its Windows Mobile 7 smart phone operating system, which will debut on select handsets later this year.
At the end of the day, despite moral objections, even Google may relent and accept the cost of doing business in China. After all, the country has more wired users than any nation in the world with an estimated 350 million internet users. Figures on cell phone usage vary wildly, but tend to place the total user base at over 700 million subscribers. China also reportedly has close to 155 million smartphone users.
Mar 05
Times Enemynews, security DEA, insecure news, news
Brutal DEA agent murder reminder of agency priority
Budget still put on back burner
By Jerry Seper
Friday, March 5, 2010
Twenty-five years ago today, the brutally beaten body of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Enrique S. “Kiki” Camarena was discovered wrapped in plastic bags and dumped along a road near a ranch 60 miles southwest of Guadalajara, Mexico – a death that continues to echo even now throughout the agency.
The veteran agent, along with his pilot, Capt. Alfredo Zavala Avelar, had been viciously tortured by the bosses of a Mexican drug cartel fearful that he had uncovered a multimillion-dollar smuggling operation tied to top officers in the Mexican army, along with Mexican police and government officials.
Over a 30-hour period, Camarena’s skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones and windpipe had been crushed. His ribs were broken; a hole was drilled into his head with a screwdriver. The agent had been injected with drugs to ensure he remained conscious during his torture.
The brutality of the torture shocked even the most hard-core of DEA agents. While the agency acknowledged this week that no single event has had a more significant impact on DEA than the Camarena abduction and slaying, what might have been a wake-up call in Washington – not only to the rising threat of “narco-states” but also to the DEA’s role in combating it – fell mostly on deaf ears.
Camarena’s “vicious kidnapping, torture and murder 25 years ago remains a burning reminder of the dangers and high stakes involved in drug law enforcement,” acting DEA Administrator Michelle M. Leonhart said. “Special Agent Camarena’s murder endures as a turning point in the fight against drug traffickers and the brutal violence they use to oppress others.”
Yet 25 years later, the DEA has since seen only modest budget increases – along with one major reduction – and has been subjected to prolonged hiring freezes by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Much of the available funding has been diverted in recent years to combat terrorism, which has caused rancor among many of the agency’s supervisory and rank-and-file agents.
The agents said funding shortages and hiring freezes not only threatened efforts to reduce rapidly increasing violent drug crime, but also hampered efforts to combat terrorism worldwide. Many, in interviews this week with The Washington Times, noted that the illicit profit from global drug trafficking is a key source of revenue for terrorist organizations, adding that half of the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations have drug ties.
While the DEA maintains 227 field offices and 86 foreign offices in 62 countries, the agency has fewer than 5,600 agents.
Even now, talks are under way in El Paso, Texas, between U.S. and Mexican government officials in an effort to coordinate drug-fighting efforts. The DEA, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) all have agents in Mexico, but their activities are limited – mostly to sharing intelligence.
Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan on Wednesday reaffirmed that country’s position, saying Mexico does not “intend to weaken, violate or modify the laws that regulate the presence of foreign agents, in this case Americans, on Mexican territory.” He noted that Mexican law forbids the use of weapons by foreign agents on Mexican soil.
James H. Kuykendall, the agent in charge of the Guadalajara DEA field office at the time of the Camarena killing, said the agency immediately got additional funding and more agents after the death and the Mexican government began to help “clamp down” on drug smugglers, but he said efforts to disrupt and dismantle the problem “didn’t last.”
He said the Mexican government acted because it was “embarrassed” when the Camarena investigation established a link between the drug gangs and the Mexican military, police and government. That link was clearly confirmed after DEA agents discovered an audiotape of the torture session, according to government records.
Mr. Kuykendall, now retired and living in Laredo, Texas, said he can look across the Rio Grande from his home and see the drug violence that has since overtaken Mexico. He described corruption south of the border as the root cause of the rising violence.
He also challenged the resolve of the United States to fully confront the drug problem, asking whether the U.S. government – and the public, for that matter – “cares enough” to adequately fund efforts at combating the rise in drug crime.
“Apparently not,” said Mr. Kuykendall, who initiated the Camarena investigation when the agent’s wife, Mika, called to say her husband was missing. “Agent Camarena was a good man and a good friend.”
Drug-related violence on the U.S.-Mexico border has surged over the past several years, the result of intense competition between two warring drug cartels. More than 8,000 people, including about 800 Mexican police officers and soldiers, have been killed in the resulting war, which has spread into the United States.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently reported “an unprecedented surge” of border violence, and the Justice Department has reported that Mexican drug cartels represent the “largest threat to both citizens and law enforcement agencies in this country and now have gang members in nearly 200 U.S. cities.”
Abducted in Guadalajara by five Jalisco State police officers, Camarena was still bound and gagged, his eyes taped shut, when his body was found.
Due to be reassigned less than a month after his body was discovered, he had infiltrated a number of drug gangs, confiscated thousands of pounds of cocaine and marijuana, and seized millions of dollars in illicit drug profits. He had become the worst nightmare for drug smugglers throughout Mexico, particularly those in Guadalajara, then the center of that country’s drug-trafficking empire.
DEA investigators, after discovering the audiotape, determined that Camarena had been beaten with a cattle prod, a tire iron and a broomstick. On the tape, according to those who have heard it, the agent is heard moaning in pain and pleading with his captors, “Don’t hurt my family.”
An autopsy report showed that Mr. Zavala Avelar, who flew small planes to help Camarena scout out marijuana fields, had been buried alive.
The kidnapping and slaying led to the most comprehensive homicide investigation ever undertaken by DEA, which ultimately uncovered corruption and complicity by numerous Mexican officials. Operation Leyenda, translated as Operation Lawman, was established in May 1985 to investigate the abduction. DEA was ultimately successful in securing indictments of several people connected to the slaying.
The investigation, according to the DEA, was long and complex, made more difficult by the fact that the crime was committed on foreign soil and involved major drug traffickers and corrupt Mexican government officials.
The 37-year-old agent, a former U.S. Marine who grew up in a dirt-floored house in Mexico and later moved with his family to the U.S. to pick fruit, was kidnapped on Feb. 7, 1985, as he left the DEA office in Guadalajara to meet his wife for lunch. He had locked his badge and his service revolver in his desk drawer.
According to a reconstruction of the kidnapping by DEA investigators based on witness statements and physical evidence, Camarena was crossing the street en route to his pickup when he was surrounded and grabbed by the Jalisco State police officers, who shoved him into a van and sped away.
The kidnapping occurred in broad daylight within a block of the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara. Mr. Zavala Avelar was kidnapped the same day in a separate incident. Both were taken to a ranch owned by the drug smugglers, where they were sadistically beaten and tortured.
Immediately after the agent was kidnapped, John Gavin, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, demanded that Mexican authorities do whatever was necessary to find the agent and return him safely. When Mexican authorities showed little interest in pursuing the case, Operation Camarena was ordered all along the U.S.-Mexico border – every vehicle entering this country was searched. As a result, a border crossing that usually took five minutes took five hours.
The initial suspect in the kidnapping was Rafael Caro Quintero, then 32 and the owner of a marijuana ranch that employed hundreds of workers and had operated with apparent immunity for years. Three months before the kidnapping, the ranch had been raided by Mexican authorities on Camarena’s insistence. The raid resulted in the seizure of $160 million of marijuana already baled and readied for shipment to the U.S.
The U.S. government sought an arrest warrant for Caro Quintero, but he and several of his lieutenants were allowed to leave Guadalajara for Costa Rica on the drug czar’s private jet after giving First Comandante Jorge Armando Pavon Reyes a check for 60 million pesos – equivalent to about $265,000 in 1985 U.S. currency and twice that much today.
On his way to Costa Rica, Caro Quintero – then known as the “drug lord of drug lords” – picked up his teenage girlfriend, Sara Cristina Cosio Martinez. The DEA later tracked a call she made to her parents in Mexico City back to a mansion in Costa Rica, where Caro Quintero was arrested by Costa Rican police and returned to Mexico.
A second suspect, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, then 60, was arrested in Puerto Vallarta, along with 23 suspected members of the Guadalajara drug cartel – 14 of whom were Mexican police officers.
Caro Quintero and Fonseca Carrillo received 40-year sentences, which they are still serving in Mexico.
Camarena’s death has since sparked what is called the annual Red Ribbon Week, in which millions of parents and children wear red ribbons during a week in October to support DEA’s efforts to reduce demand for drugs through prevention and education programs. Participants pledge to lead drug-free lives to honor the sacrifices made by the agent and others.
Students, teachers, law enforcement officials, drug-prevention specialists and community leaders will take part in the first “Marching for Kiki’s Red Ribbon” to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death on Saturday in San Diego.
Camarena is survived by his wife, Mika, and three children, Enrique, then 11, Daniel, then 6, and Erick, then 4. He was given a hero’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
Mar 04
Times Enemynews DARPA, news, Pentagon
DARPA to build military App Store, battlefield 3G
Android wins war for battle phones, iPhone and MS lose
By Lewis Page
Posted in Mobile, 4th March 2010 11:40 GMT
Not content with merely soliciting bids for smartphone apps useful to the military “and the national security community more generally”, the Pentagon’s tech hothouse now plans something resembling a military App Store – and has unveiled plans to deploy civilian mobile coverage onto the battlefield.
In an announcement issued yesterday, DARPA added to its recent “Mobile Apps for the Military” plan by outlining a further “Transformative Apps” scheme. First on the war-boffins’ shopping list is their own App Store, or something very like one:
A military apps marketplace will be created to enable rapid innovation to meet user needs based on a direct collaboration between a vibrant and highly competitive development community and involved communities of end-users.
The earlier announcement had already ruled Windows Mobile developers out of the running, stating that “initial interest will focus on apps developed on the iPhone or Android platforms”. DARPA has now thrown the iPhone off the sleigh as well, specifying yesterday that “for the initial implementation, all apps should target the Android platforms”.
As to what kinds of wares should be offered for the new DARPA Android war-app store, developers take note:
DARPA is seeking applications to fill a diverse set of needs, including the tactical battlefield, humanitarian missions, disaster recovery, and other mission areas. Example functionalities include command and control, reporting, mission planning, intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance, real-time collaboration, geospatial visualization, analysis, language translation, training, and logistics tracking. Special attention must be paid to the apps’ user interfaces and usability functions, as well as striving towards general simplicity and ease-of-use.
One of the main snags to using many smartphone capabilities on the battlefield (or often enough in a major western city, for that matter) is lack of reliable network coverage. DARPA expect their Android developers to be sparing of bandwidth and able to cope with occasional dropouts, but even so it might seem a little worrying to have troops in combat dependent on the patchy GSM networks of Afghanistan, for instance – especially as these are occasionally menaced into shutting down by the Taliban.
DARPA, fortunately, don’t expect soldiers to rely on the local cell towers. Rather, it seems, the US forces will take their own 3G coverage with them:
An affordable, robust, and secure mobile tactical network capability compatible with commercial smartphones will be developed. Infrastructure kits that allow for light-weight mobile base stations need to be easily deployed in multiple variants (e.g. for a large fixed site location, an outpost, a vehicle on-the-move or at- the-halt) and will be used to reach mobile dismounted users. The program will leverage, to the greatest extent possible, commercial components and standards and focus on demonstrating “good enough” solutions with appropriate security and functionality enhancements for tactical users. Non-developmental commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware should be favored when available.
We at the Reg suggested this years ago. Keep up, DARPA, for goodness’ sake.
DARPA would also like to hear from people with ideas on middleware for the apps and from those who can help it set up the “marketplace”. However if you want to run the marketplace you can’t also be an app developer:
An organization that is proposing to implement an apps store will be expected to maintain full fairness and impartiality, and hence are strongly discouraged from developing apps.
On the matter of security, the Pentagon tech chiefs don’t seem to want to get bogged down in trying to comply with military protection standards – they’re no doubt aware how this tends to cripple and/or slow down a project. They say:
Attention must be given to the software modifications required to address key security vulnerabilities in commercial devices and wireless networks. If hardware modifications are recommended, a justification must be clearly articulated and the approach must be consistent with the program goal of affordable per-unit cost and rapid execution. The Transformative Apps program will primarily focus on the use of apps in unclassified environments and networks.
They aren’t kidding about “rapid execution”, either, at any rate in a government/military sense. They want to see “very aggressive” proposal schedules, with proof-of-concept demonstrations up and running in 6 months and improvements, final polish etc delivered thereafter.
Full details on the project for those interested in participating – whether as app developer, marketplace manager or pack-up-and-go network provider – are available here in pdf.
Comment
We [The Register] would just like to mention that we suggested a scheme along these lines three years ago, as an alternative to the ludicrously expensive and slow-to-appear UK Ministry of Defence FIST (Future Integrated Soldier Technology) digi-trooper plans. Nice to see DARPA keeping up.
One does also note that even the MoD has lately been forced to plug in some ordinary commercial networking gear in Afghanistan, replacing expensive and not-very-good military kit which is now back in the UK. ®
Mar 04
JavierBible Bible
David’s Mighty Men
8 These are the names of the mighty men whom David had: Josheb-basshebeth a Tahchemonite; he was chief of the three. He wielded his spear against eight hundred whom he killed at one time.
9 And next to him among the three mighty men was Eleazar the son of Dodo, son of Ahohi. He was with David when they defied the Philistines who were gathered there for battle, and the men of Israel withdrew.
10 He rose and struck down the Philistines until his hand was weary, and his hand clung to the sword. And the LORD brought about a great victory that day, and the men returned after him only to strip the slain.
11 And next to him was Shammah, the son of Agee the Hararite. The Philistines gathered together at Lehi, where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the men fled from the Philistines.
12 But he took his stand in the midst of the plot and defended it and struck down the Philistines, and the LORD worked a great victory.
13 And three of the thirty chief men went down and came about harvest time to David at the cave of Adullam, when a band of Philistines was encamped in the Valley of Rephaim.
14 David was then in the stronghold, and the garrison of the Philistines was then at Bethlehem.
15 And David said longingly, “Oh, that someone would give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem that is by the gate!”
16 Then the three mighty men broke through the camp of the Philistines and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate and carried and brought it to David. But he would not drink of it. He poured it out to the LORD
17 and said, “Far be it from me, O LORD, that I should do this. Shall I drink the blood of the men who went at the risk of their lives?” Therefore he would not drink it. These things the three mighty men did.
18 Now Abishai, the brother of Joab, the son of Zeruiah, was chief of the thirty. And he wielded his spear against three hundred men and killed them and won a name beside the three.
19 He was the most renowned of the thirty and became their commander, but he did not attain to the three.
20 And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was a valiant man of Kabzeel, a doer of great deeds. He struck down two ariels of Moab. He also went down and struck down a lion in a pit on a day when snow had fallen.
21 And he struck down an Egyptian, a handsome man. The Egyptian had a spear in his hand, but Benaiah went down to him with a staff and snatched the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with his own spear.
22 These things did Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and won a name beside the three mighty men.
23 He was renowned among the thirty, but he did not attain to the three. And David set him over his bodyguard.
24 Asahel the brother of Joab was one of the thirty; Elhanan the son of Dodo of Bethlehem,
25 Shammah of Harod, Elika of Harod,
26 Helez the Paltite, Ira the son of Ikkesh of Tekoa,
27 Abiezer of Anathoth, Mebunnai the Hushathite,
28 Zalmon the Ahohite, Maharai of Netophah,
29 Heleb the son of Baanah of Netophah, Ittai the son of Ribai of Gibeah of the people of Benjamin,
30 Benaiah of Pirathon, Hiddai of the brooks of Gaash,
31 Abi-albon the Arbathite, Azmaveth of Bahurim
32 Eliahba the Shaalbonite, the sons of Jashen, Jonathan,
33 Shammah the Hararite, Ahiam the son of Sharar the Hararite,
34 Eliphelet the son of Ahasbai of Maacah, Eliam the son of Ahithophel of Gilo,
35 Hezro of Carmel, Paarai the Arbite,
36 Igal the son of Nathan of Zobah, Bani the Gadite,
37 Zelek the Ammonite, Naharai of Beeroth, the armor-bearer of Joab the son of Zeruiah,
38 Ira the Ithrite, Gareb the Ithrite,
39 Uriah the Hittite: thirty-seven in all.
Mar 03
Times Enemynews, security DHS, insecure news, news
Tracing attack source key to cybersecurity strategy, Chertoff says
Former DHS chief talks of difficulties in creating a national deterrence plan
By Jaikumar Vijayan
March 3, 2010 06:53 PM ET
Computerworld – SAN FRANCISCO — The difficult task of identifying the true sources of cyber attacks remains one of the biggest challenges in the development of a national cybersecurity strategy, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Computerworld in an interview at the RSA Security conference here today.
Chertoff, who is participating in a panel discussion at the conference, said there is a growing need for the U.S to create a strong, formal strategy for responding to cyberattacks against American interests.
Such a strategy would need to clearly articulate possible U.S. responses to attacks, which could include diplomatic and other tools.
Chertoff noted that by comparison, physical attacks are relatively easy to track down and respond to. “In the Cold War we could attribute an attack. It was clear where it came from and we could respond,” he said.
Finding the source of cyber attacks, though, is far more complicated, he said. While investigators could find the physical systems from which an attack is launched, the owner of the systems could have nothing to do with the criminal activity.
Similarly, he said, it is very difficult for investigators to determine whether attacks are state-sponsored or are being carried out by individuals on their own.
Chertoff said that defense officials still have to determine specific potential responses to cyberattacks, which could include disconnecting attackers from the internet, using diplomatic tools or military action. “We haven’t really laid down the rules of the road yet,” he said. “It’s challenging.”
Chertoff’s comments come amid growing calls for the U.S. to develop a clearly spelled out formal strategy for dealing with threats in cyberspace.
Recent attacks against Google and other companies from within China, along with dozens of similar attacks against numerous federal agencies in recent years have increased the call for developing a strong strategy.
For example, in a white paper published last month by the Cyber Secure Institute, General Eugene Habiger, a former commander of U.S. Strategic Command for nuclear and deterrence forces, said: “For deterrence to work, the threat of retaliation must be credible enough to alter the cost benefit analysis of our cyberadversaries.
Habiger acknowledged in the white paper that effective cyber attacks can be launched “just as easily from a Starbucks in our own nation’s capital as a cave in Pakistan,” making retaliation extremely difficult.
“Modestly sophisticated cyberattacks leave almost no trace, no return address,” he said. “It becomes extremely to effectively retaliate when you cannot say with certainty who attacked you,” he said.
Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at Twitter@jaivijayan, send e-mail to jvijayan@computerworld.com or subscribe to Jaikumar’s RSS feed Vijayan RSS.
I guess they need to start somewhere, but this is not news.
Mar 01
Times Enemynews news, politics, search engines
I am of course biased towards the comments made by, me, which state:
Sprinkle some Open Source Intelligence with a profit motive and it only makes sense that the evil empire is guilty of this charge. However, Google would be foolish to not be doing the exact same thing. I am curious to know if Google complaining about this will help them in any way or make their insane amount of various market control more visible … ie, make them a bigger target.
Google Says Microsoft Waging Proxy War
The search giant sees Redmond’s hand behind a series of antitrust actions in the U.S. and Europe.
By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
March 1, 2010 09:25 AM
Google claims Microsoft is hijacking lawsuits and complaints brought by third parties to stir up antitrust sentiment against it and pressure regulators into limiting the search giant’s business practices.
“It’s become clear that our competitors are scouring court documents around the world looking for complaints against Google into which they can inject themselves, learn more about our business practices, and use that information to develop a broader antitrust complaint against us,” a Google spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal, in a story published Monday.
Google noted that a collections lawsuit it filed against a small, Ohio-based Internet site called myTriggers.com was met with a sophisticated antitrust countersuit. Representing myTriggers.com is none other than Charles Rule, of the high-powered D.C. law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
Rule frequently acts as outside counsel for Microsoft in antitrust matters.
Google also sees Microsoft’s hand in antitrust actions in Europe, where the European Commission last week launched a probe into Google’s dominance of online advertising on the Continent. The probe was sparked by complaints of search-rank discrimination by three companies—legal research firm Ejustice.fr, and online price comparison sites Ciao and Foundem.
Microsoft acquired Ciao in 2008, while Foundem is a member of a Microsoft-backed lobby group called Initiative for a Competitive Online Market Place (ICOMP).
“It’s no secret we share many of these concerns,” a Microsoft spokesperson conceded to WSJ.
That Google is drawing antitrust scrutiny should come as no surprise. The company controlled 65% of the Internet search market in the U.S. as of February, according to comScore, and its influence is growing abroad, as well.
For its part, Google maintains its search ranking practices are fair, and that antitrust concerns are just par for the course for one of the world’s fastest growing tech firms.
“This kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company,” said Julia Holtz, Google’s senior competition counsel, in a blog post last week.
“However, we’ve always worked hard to ensure that our success is earned the right way—through technological innovation and great products rather than by locking in our users or advertisers, or creating artificial barriers to entry,” said Holtz.
InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on Oracle’s road maps for key Sun products. The report also analyzes what changes the acquisition will bring for business technology decision makers. Download the report here (registration required).
Mar 01
Times EnemyChina, security China, insecure news, the atlantic
When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon—China doesn’t even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar. Attacks—not just from China but from Russia and elsewhere—on America’s electronic networks cost millions of dollars and could in the extreme cause the collapse of financial life, the halt of most manufacturing systems, and the evaporation of all the data and knowledge stored on the Internet.
Cyber Warriors
by James Fallows
Early in my time in China, I learned a useful lesson for daily life. In the summer of 2006, I saw a contingent of light-green-shirted People’s Liberation Army soldiers marching in formation down a sidewalk on Fuxing Lu in Shanghai, near the U.S. and Iranian consulates. They looked so crisp under the leafy plane trees of the city’s old colonial district that I pulled out a camera to take a picture of them—and, after pushing the button, had to spend the next 60 seconds running at full tilt away from the group’s leader, who pursued me yelling in English “Stop! No photo! Must stop!” Fortunately he gave up after scaring me off.
The practical lesson was to not point a camera toward uniformed groups of soldiers or police. The broader hint I took was to be more careful when asking about or discussing military matters than when asking about most other aspects of modern China’s development. I did keep asking people in China—carefully—about the potential military and strategic implications of their country’s growing strength. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and consequent disappearance of the U.S. military’s one superpower rival, Western defense strategists have speculated about China’s emergence as the next great military threat. (In 2005, this magazine published Robert Kaplan’s cover story “How We Would Fight China,” about such a possibility. Many of the international-affairs experts I interviewed in China were familiar with that story. I often had to explain that “would” did not mean “will” in the article’s headline.)
The cynical view of warnings about a mounting Chinese threat is that they are largely Pentagon budget-building ploys: if the U.S. military is “only” going to fight insurgents and terrorists in the future, it doesn’t really need the next generation of expensive fighter planes or attack submarines. Powerful evidence for this view—apart from familiarity with Pentagon budget debates over the years—is that many of the neoconservative thinkers who since 9/11 have concentrated on threats from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran were before that time writing worriedly about China. The most powerful counterargument is that China’s rise is so consequential and unprecedented in scale that it would be naive not to expect military ramifications. My instincts lie with the skeptical camp: as I’ve often written through the past three years, China has many more problems than most Americans can imagine, and its power is much less impressive up close. But on my return to America, I asked a variety of military, governmental, business, and academic officials about how the situation looks from their perspective. In most ways, their judgment was reassuringly soothing; unfortunately, it left me with a new problem to worry about.
Without meaning to sound flip, I think the strictly military aspects of U.S.-China relations appear to be something Americans can rest easy about for a long time to come. Hypercautious warnings to the contrary keep cropping up, especially in the annual reports on China’s strategic power produced since 2000 by the Pentagon each spring and by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission each fall. Yet when examined in detail, even these show the limits of the Chinese threat. To summarize:
- In overall spending, the United States puts between five and 10 times as much money into the military per year as China does, depending on different estimates of China’s budget. Spending does not equal effectiveness, but it suggests the difference in scale.
- In sophistication of equipment, Chinese forces are only now beginning to be brought up to speed. For instance, just one-quarter of its naval surface fleet is considered “modern” in electronics, engines, and weaponry.
- In certain categories of weaponry, the Chinese don’t even compete. For instance, the U.S. Navy has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft-carrier battle groups. The Chinese navy is only now moving toward construction of its very first carrier.
- In the unglamorous but crucial components of military effectiveness—logistics, training, readiness, evolving doctrine—the difference between Chinese and American standards is not a gap but a chasm. After a natural disaster anywhere in the world, the American military’s vast airlift and sealift capacity often brings rescue supplies. The Chinese military took days to reach survivors after the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May of 2008, because it has so few helicopters and emergency vehicles.
- For better and worse, in modern times, American forces are continually in combat somewhere in the world. This has its drawbacks, but it means that U.S. leaders, tactics, and doctrine are constantly refined by the realities of warfare. In contrast, vanishingly few members of the People’s Liberation Army have any combat experience whatsoever. The PLA’s last major engagement was during its border war with Vietnam in February and March of 1979, when somewhere between 7,000 of its soldiers (Chinese estimate) and 25,000 (foreign estimates) were killed within four weeks.
Beyond all this is a difference of military culture rarely included in American discussions of the Chinese threat—and surprising to those unfamiliar with the way China’s Communist government chose to fund its army. The post-Vietnam American military has been fanatically devoted to creating a “warrior” culture of military professionalism. The great struggle of the modern PLA has been containing the crony-capitalist culture that comes from its unashamed history of involvement in business. Especially under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese military owned and operated factories, hotels and office buildings, shipping and trucking companies, and other businesses both legitimate and shady. In the late 1990s President Jiang Zemin led a major effort to peel the PLA’s military functions away from its business dealings, but by all accounts, corruption remains a major challenge in the Chinese military, rather than the episodic problem it is for most Western forces. One example: at a small airport in the center of the country, an airport manager told me about his regular schedule of hong bao deliveries—“red envelopes,” or discreet cash payoffs—to local air-force officers, to ensure airline passage through the sector of airspace they controlled. (Most U.S. airspace is controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration; nearly all of China’s, by the military.) A larger example is the widespread assumption that military officials control the vast Chinese traffic in pirated movie DVDs.
The Chinese military’s main and unconcealed ambition is to someday be strong enough to take Taiwan by force if it had to. But the details of the balance of power between mainland and Taiwanese forces, across the Straits of Taiwan, have been minutely scrutinized by all parties for decades, and shifts will not happen by surprise. The annual reports from the Pentagon and the Security Review Commission lay out other possible scenarios for conflict, but in my experience it is rare to hear U.S. military or diplomatic officials talk about war with China as a plausible threat. “My view is that the political leadership is principally focused on creating new jobs inside the country,” I was told by retired Admiral Mike McConnell, a former head of the National Security Agency and the director of national intelligence under George W. Bush. Another former U.S. official put it this way: “We tend to think of everything about China as being multiplied by 1.3 billion. The Chinese leadership has to think of everything as being divided by 1.3 billion”—jobs, houses, land. Russell Leigh Moses, who has lived in China for years and lectures at programs to train Chinese officials, notes that the Chinese military, like its counterparts everywhere, is “determined not to be neglected.” But “so many problems occupy the military itself—including learning how to play the political game—that there is no consensus to take on the U.S.”
Yes, circumstances could change, and someday there could be a consensus to “take on the U.S.” But the more you hear about the details, the harder it is to worry seriously about that now. So why should we worry? After conducting this round of interviews, I now lose sleep over something I’d generally ignored: the possibility of a “cyberwar” that could involve attacks from China—but, alarmingly, could also be launched by any number of other states and organizations.
The cyber threat is the idea that organizations or individuals may be spying on, tampering with, or preparing to inflict damage on America’s electronic networks. Google’s recent announcement of widespread spying “originating from China” brought attention to a problem many experts say is sure to grow. China has hundreds of millions of Internet users, mostly young. In any culture, this would mean a large hacker population; in China, where tight control and near chaos often coexist, it means an Internet with plenty of potential outlaws and with carefully directed government efforts, too. In a report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last year, Northrop Grumman prepared a time line of electronic intrusions and disruptions coming from sites inside China since 1999. In most cases it was impossible to tell whether the activity was amateur or government-planned, the report said. But whatever their source, the disruptions were a problem. And in some instances, the “depth of resources” and the “extremely focused targeting of defense engineering data, US military operational information, and China-related policy information” suggested an effort that would be “difficult at best without some type of state-sponsorship.”
The authorities I spoke with pooh-poohed as urban myth the idea that an electronic assault was behind the power failures that rippled from the Midwest to the East Coast in August of 2003. By all accounts, this was a cascading series of mechanical and human errors. But after asking corporate and government officials what worried them, I learned several unsettling things I hadn’t known before.
First, nearly everyone in the business believes that we are living in, yes, a pre-9/11 era when it comes to the security and resilience of electronic information systems. Something very big—bigger than the Google-China case—is likely to go wrong, they said, and once it does, everyone will ask how we could have been so complacent for so long. Electronic-commerce systems are already in a constant war against online fraud. “The real skill to running a successful restaurant has relatively little to do with producing delicious food and a lot to do with cost and revenue management,” an official of an Internet commerce company told me, asking not to be named. “Similarly, the real business behind PayPal, Google Checkout, and other such Internet payment systems is fraud and risk management,” since the surge of attempted electronic theft is comparable to the surge of spam through e-mail networks.
At a dinner in Washington late last year, I listened to two dozen cyber-security experts compare tales of near-miss disasters. The consensus was that only a large-scale public breakdown would attract political attention to the problem, and that such a breakdown would occur. “Cyber crime is not conducted by some 15-year-old kids experimenting with viruses,” Eugene Spafford, a computer scientist at Purdue, who is one of the world’s leading cyber-security figures (and was at the dinner), told me later via e-mail.
It is well-funded and pursued by mature individuals and groups of professionals with deep financial and technical resources, often with local government (or other countries’) toleration if not support. It is already responsible for billions of dollars a year in losses, and it is growing and becoming more capable. We have largely ignored it, and building our military capabilities is not responding to that threat.
With financial, medical, legal, intellectual, logistic, and every other sort of information increasingly living in “the cloud,” the consequences of collapse or disruption are unpleasant to contemplate. A forthcoming novel, Directive 51, by John Barnes, does indeed contemplate them, much as in the 1950s Nevil Shute imagined the world after nuclear war in On the Beach. Barnes’s view of the collapse of financial life (after all, our “assets” consist mostly of notations in banks’ computer systems), the halt of most manufacturing systems, the evaporation of the technical knowledge that now exists mainly in the cloud, and other consequences is so alarming that the book could draw attention in a way no official report can.
Next, the authorities stressed that Chinese organizations and individuals were a serious source of electronic threats—but far from the only one, or perhaps even the main one. You could take this as good news about U.S.-China relations, but it was usually meant as bad news about the problem as a whole. “The Chinese would be in the top three, maybe the top two, leading problems in cyberspace,” James Lewis, a former diplomat who worked on security and intelligence issues and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, told me. “They’re not close to being the primary problem, and there is debate about whether they’re even number two.” Number one in his analysis is Russia, through a combination of state, organized-criminal, and unorganized-individual activity. Number two is Israel—and there are more on the list. “The French are notorious for looking for economic advantage through their intelligence system,” I was told by Ed Giorgio, who has served as the chief code maker and chief code breaker for the National Security Agency. “The Israelis are notorious for looking for political advantage. We have seen Brazil emerge as a source of financial crime, to join Russia, which is guilty of all of the above.” Interestingly, no one suggested that international terrorist groups—as opposed to governments, corporations, or “normal” criminals—are making significant use of electronic networks to inflict damage on Western targets, although some groups rely on the Internet for recruitment, organization, and propagandizing.
This led to another, more surprising theme: that the main damage done to date through cyberwar has involved not theft of military secrets nor acts of electronic sabotage but rather business-versus-business spying. Some military secrets have indeed leaked out, the most consequential probably being those that would help the Chinese navy develop a modern submarine fleet. And many people said that if the United States someday ended up at war against China—or Russia, or some other country—then each side would certainly use electronic tools to attack the other’s military and perhaps its civilian infrastructure. But short of outright war, the main losses have come through economic espionage. “You could think of it as taking a shortcut on the ‘D’ of R&D,” research and development, one former government official said. “When you create a new product, a competitor can cherry-pick the good parts and introduce a competitive product much more rapidly than he could otherwise.” Another technology expert, who serves on government advisory boards, told me, when referring to the steady loss of technological advantage, “We should not forget that it was China where ‘death by a thousand cuts’ originated.” I heard of instances of Western corporate officials who arrived for negotiations in China and realized too late that their briefing books and internal numbers were already known by the other side. (In the same vein: I asked security officials whether the laptops and BlackBerry I had used while living in China would have been bugged in some way while I was there. The answers were variations on “Of course,” with the “you idiot” left unsaid.)
The final theme was that even though these cyber concerns are not confined to China, the Chinese aspects do deserve consideration on their own, because China’s scale, speed of growth, and complex relationship with the United States make it a unique case. Hackers in Russia or Israel might be more skillful one by one, but with its huge population China simply has more of them. The French might be more aggressive in searching for corporate secrets, but their military need not simultaneously consider how to stop the Seventh Fleet. According to Mike McConnell, everything about China’s military planning changed after its leaders saw the results of U.S. precision weapons in the first Gulf War. “They were shocked,” he told me. “They had no idea warfare had progressed to that point, and they went on a crash course to take away our advantage.” This meant both building their own information systems—thus China’s aspiration to create a Beidou (the Chinese name for the Big Dipper) system of satellites comparable to America’s GPS—and being prepared in time of war to “attack what they see as our soft underbelly, our military’s dependence on networking,” as McConnell put it, noting the vast emerging PLA literature on defending and attacking data networks.
Ed Giorgio, formerly of the NSA, has prepared charts showing the points of “asymmetric advantage” China might have over the long run in such competition. Point nine on his 12-point chart: “They know us much better than we know them (virtually every one of their combatants reads English and virtually none of ours read Mandarin. This, in itself, will surely precipitate a massive intelligence failure).” But James Lewis, of CSIS, pointed out an “asymmetric handicap”: “For all the effort the Chinese put into cyber competition, external efforts”—against a potential foe like the United States—“are second priority. The primary priority is domestic control and regime survival. The external part is a side benefit.” For many other reasons, the China-cyber question will, like the China-finance and China-environment and China-human-rights questions, demand special attention and work.
The implications of electronic insecurity will be with us in the long run, among the other enduring headaches of the modern age. The “solution” to them is like the solution to coping with China’s rise: something that will unfold over the years and require constant attention, adjustments, and innovations. “Cyber security is a process, not a patch,” Eugene Spafford said. “We must continue to invest in it—and for the long term as well as the ‘quick fix,’ because otherwise we will always be applying fixes too late.”
No doubt because I’ve been so preoccupied for so long with the implications of China’s growth, I thought I heard a familiar note in the recommendations that many of the cyber-security experts offered. The similarity lies in their emphasis on openness, transparency, and international contact as the basis of a successful policy.
In overall U.S. dealings with China, it matters tremendously that so many Chinese organizations are led or influenced by people who have spent time in America or with Americans. Today’s financial, academic, and business elite in China is deeply familiar with the United States, many of its members having studied or worked here. They may disagree on points of policy—for instance, about trade legislation—but they operate within a similar set of concepts and facts. This is less true of China’s political leaders, and much less true of its military—with a consequently much greater risk of serious misunderstanding and error. The tensest moment in modern China’s security relationship with the outside world came in January of 2007, when its missile command shot one of its own weather satellites out of the sky, presumably to show the world that it had developed anti-satellite weaponry. The detonation filled satellite orbits with dangerous debris; worse, it seemed to signal an unprovoked new step in militarizing space. By all accounts, President Hu Jintao okayed this before it occurred; but no one in China’s foreign ministry appeared to have advance word, and for days diplomats sat silent in the face of worldwide protests. The PLA had not foreseen the international uproar it would provoke—or just didn’t care.
Precisely in hopes of building familiarity like that in the business world, the U.S. Navy has since the 1980s taken the lead in military-to-military exchanges with the PLA. “I think both sides are trying to figure out what kind of a military-to-military relationship is feasible and proper,” David Finkelstein, of the Center for Naval Analyses, in suburban Washington, D.C., told me. “We have two militaries that, in some circumstances, see each other as possible adversaries. At the same time, at the level of grand strategy, the two nations are trying to accommodate each other. There is a major chasm, but both sides are working hard to bridge it.” Such exposure obviously doesn’t eliminate the real differences of national interest between the two countries, but I believe it makes outright conflict less likely.
A similar high-road logic seems to lie behind recommendations for cyber security in general, and for dealing with the Chinese cyber threat in particular. The NSA, which McConnell directed and where Giorgio worked, is renowned for its secrecy. But both men, along with others, now argue that to defend information networks, the U.S. should talk openly about risks and insecurities—and engage the Chinese government and military in an effort to contain the problem.
As a matter of domestic U.S. politics, McConnell argues that we now suffer from a conspiracy of secrecy about the scale of cyber risks. No credit-card company wants to admit how often or how easily it is cheated. No bank or investment house wants to admit how close it has come to being electronically robbed. As a result, the changes in law, regulation, concept, or habit that could make online life safer don’t get discussed. Sooner or later, the cyber equivalent of 9/11 will occur—and, if the real 9/11 is a model, we will understandably, but destructively, overreact.
While trying to build bridges to the military, McConnell and others recommend that the U.S. work with China on international efforts to secure data networks, comparable to the Chinese role in dealing with the world financial crisis. “You could have the model of the International Civil Aviation Organization,” James Lewis said, “a body that can reduce risks for everyone by imposing common standards. It’s moving from the Wild West to the rule of law.” Why would the Chinese government want to join such an effort? McConnell’s answer was that an ever-richer China will soon have as clear a stake in secure data networks as it did in safe air travel.
We’re naturally skeptical of abstractions like “cooperation” or “greater openness” as the solutions to tough-guy, real-world problems. But in making the best of a world that will inevitably be changed by increasing Chinese power and increasing electronic threats from many directions, those principles may offer the right, realistic place to start.
Feb 27
Times EnemyChina, news, security China, insecure news, news, politics
Mike McConnell on how to win the cyber-war we’re losing
By Mike McConnell
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing. It’s that simple. As the most wired nation on Earth, we offer the most targets of significance, yet our cyber-defenses are woefully lacking.
The problem is not one of resources; even in our current fiscal straits, we can afford to upgrade our defenses. The problem is that we lack a cohesive strategy to meet this challenge.
The stakes are enormous. To the extent that the sprawling U.S. economy inhabits a common physical space, it is in our communications networks. If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce — or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions — chaos would result. Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well.
These battles are not hypothetical. Google’s networks were hacked in an attack that began in December and that the company said emanated from China. And recently the security firm NetWitness reported that more than 2,500 companies worldwide were compromised in a sophisticated attack launched in 2008 and aimed at proprietary corporate data. Indeed, the recent Cyber Shock Wave simulation revealed what those of us involved in national security policy have long feared: For all our war games and strategy documents focused on traditional warfare, we have yet to address the most basic questions about cyber-conflicts.
What is the right strategy for this most modern of wars? Look to history. During the Cold War, when the United States faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union, we relied on deterrence to protect ourselves from nuclear attack. Later, as the East-West stalemate ended and nuclear weapons proliferated, some argued that preemption made more sense in an age of global terrorism.
The cyber-war mirrors the nuclear challenge in terms of the potential economic and psychological effects. So, should our strategy be deterrence or preemption? The answer: both. Depending on the nature of the threat, we can deploy aspects of either approach to defend America in cyberspace.
During the Cold War, deterrence was based on a few key elements: attribution (understanding who attacked us), location (knowing where a strike came from), response (being able to respond, even if attacked first) and transparency (the enemy’s knowledge of our capability and intent to counter with massive force).
Against the Soviets, we dealt with the attribution and location challenges by developing human intelligence behind the Iron Curtain and by fielding early-warning radar systems, reconnaissance satellites and undersea listening posts to monitor threats. We invested heavily in our response capabilities with intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and long-range bombers, as well as command-and-control systems and specialized staffs to run them. The resources available were commensurate with the challenge at hand — as must be the case in cyberspace.
Just as important was the softer side of our national security strategy: the policies, treaties and diplomatic efforts that underpinned containment and deterrence. Our alliances, such as NATO, made clear that a strike on one would be a strike on all and would be met with massive retaliation. This unambiguous intent, together with our ability to monitor and respond, provided a credible nuclear deterrent that served us well.
How do we apply deterrence in the cyber-age? For one, we must clearly express our intent. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered a succinct statement to that effect last month in Washington, in a speech on Internet freedom. “Countries or individuals that engage in cyber-attacks should face consequences and international condemnation,” she said. “In an Internet-connected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all.”
That was a promising move, but it means little unless we back it up with practical policies and international legal agreements to define norms and identify consequences for destructive behavior in cyberspace. We began examining these issues through the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, launched during the George W. Bush administration, but more work is needed on outlining how, when and where we would respond to an attack. For now, we have a response mechanism in name only.
The United States must also translate our intent into capabilities. We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.
Of course, deterrence can be effective when the enemy is a state with an easily identifiable government and location. It is less successful against criminal groups or extremists who cannot be readily traced, let alone deterred through sanctions or military action.
There are many organizations (including al-Qaeda) that are not motivated by greed, as with criminal organizations, or a desire for geopolitical advantage, as with many states. Rather, their worldview seeks to destroy the systems of global commerce, trade and travel that are undergirded by our cyber-infrastructure. So deterrence is not enough; preemptive strategies might be required before such adversaries launch a devastating cyber-attack.
We preempt such groups by degrading, interdicting and eliminating their leadership and capabilities to mount cyber-attacks, and by creating a more resilient cyberspace that can absorb attacks and quickly recover. To this end, we must hammer out a consensus on how to best harness the capabilities of the National Security Agency, which I had the privilege to lead from 1992 to 1996. The NSA is the only agency in the United States with the legal authority, oversight and budget dedicated to breaking the codes and understanding the capabilities and intentions of potential enemies. The challenge is to shape an effective partnership with the private sector so information can move quickly back and forth from public to private — and classified to unclassified — to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure.
We must give key private-sector leaders (from the transportation, utility and financial arenas) access to information on emerging threats so they can take countermeasures. For this to work, the private sector needs to be able to share network information — on a controlled basis — without inviting lawsuits from shareholders and others.
Obviously, such measures must be contemplated very carefully. But the reality is that while the lion’s share of cybersecurity expertise lies in the federal government, more than 90 percent of the physical infrastructure of the Web is owned by private industry. Neither side on its own can mount the cyber-defense we need; some collaboration is inevitable. Recent reports of a possible partnership between Google and the government point to the kind of joint efforts — and shared challenges — that we are likely to see in the future.
No doubt, such arrangements will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the private sector. We must define the parameters of such interactions, but we should not dismiss them. Cyberspace knows no borders, and our defensive efforts must be similarly seamless.
Ultimately, to build the right strategy to defend cyberspace, we need the equivalent of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Project Solarium. That 1953 initiative brought together teams of experts with opposing views to develop alternative strategies on how to wage the Cold War. The teams presented their views to the president, and Eisenhower chose his preferred approach — deterrence. We now need a dialogue among business, civil society and government on the challenges we face in cyberspace — spanning international law, privacy and civil liberties, security, and the architecture of the Internet. The results should shape our cybersecurity strategy.
We prevailed in the Cold War through strong leadership, clear policies, solid alliances and close integration of our diplomatic, economic and military efforts. We backed all this up with robust investments — security never comes cheap. It worked, because we had to make it work.
Let’s do the same with cybersecurity. The time to start was yesterday.
Mike McConnell was the director of the National Security Agency in the Clinton administration and the director of national intelligence during President George W. Bush’s second term. A retired Navy vice admiral, he is executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, which consults on cybersecurity for the private and public sector.
Feb 26
Times Enemynews, security insecure news, news, Pentagon, US DoD
This is a mistake. The people who truly oversee the gates should have fought harder to not only keep the ban, but to block more sites. The decision-makers simply do not understand what is going on and are trying to be people-pleasers. Security should trump this type of access. If you need the access, request it, go to a less secure network, go to a public network even, but do not drop the security standards across the board!
Pentagon Will Allow Troops Broad Access to Social-Media Sites
February 27, 2010, 12:02 AM EST
By Tony Capaccio
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) — The Pentagon reversed a directive that has blocked access from U.S. military computers to about 10 social-networking sites, such as YouTube and MySpace.
Troops will have unrestricted access to these and other sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, if security precautions are applied and ethical guidelines are followed, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said yesterday in announcing the new policy.
The military’s unclassified Internet gateway “shall be configured to provide access to Internet-based capabilities,” he said in a nine-page policy memo.
“Official uses of Internet-based capabilities are permitted,” Lynn said. Postings should include a disclaimer “when personal opinions are expressed.”
Lynn’s directive applies to all military computers used by troops ranging from the squad level in combat zone to a base in the U.S.
The previous restrictions were designed to ensure the security of military computers and preserve the use of bandwidth.
The May 2007 directive was reversed because “we’ve become smarter,” Pentagon Deputy Chief Information Officer David Wennergren told reporters. “We realized that the right thing to do was work with the companies to make sure they were doing good security practices and to work with our employees to make sure they were practicing good security hygiene.”
Precautions
Commanders “shall continue to defend against malicious activity affecting Defense networks and take immediate actions as required to safeguard missions, such as temporarily limiting access to the Internet to preserve operations security or address bandwidth constraints,” Lynn said.
Commanders also should continue to deny access to sites engaging in pornography, hate-crimes or gambling, Lynn said in the policy memo.
Admiral James Stavridis, the supreme allied commander of NATO, is one of the scores of military officers and officials who have an account with Facebook or other social networks.
The Pentagon’s Web site lists all major military users of privately held, Palo Alto, California-based Facebook Inc.
–Editors: Don Frederick, Robin Meszoly
-0- Feb/27/2010 05:00 GMT
To contact the reporters on this story: Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jim Kirk in Washington at jkirk12@bloomberg.net.
Feb 26
Times EnemyChina, news, security China, insecure news, news
China Attacks on Google May Have Hit 100 Companies, ISEC Says
February 26, 2010, 10:04 PM EST
By Brian Womack and Katrina Nicholas
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) — The Chinese cyber attacks that Google Inc. reported last month may have targeted more than 100 companies, a larger number than previously thought, according to security research firm ISEC Partners Inc.
ISEC said it discovered the additional targets while working with victims of the attack, which originated in China. Google initially alerted 30 companies to the problem, San Francisco-based ISEC said.
Google disclosed last month that it suffered “a highly sophisticated” cyber attack on its corporate infrastructure and threatened to withdraw from China. The Mountain View, California-based company said Gmail e-mail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists were targeted by the hackers.
Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said Jan. 21 that Google had begun talks with the Chinese government and would be “making some changes” to its operations in China. The company was still following Chinese laws and censoring its search results locally, he said.
“Although none of the attacks or technique used in this series of attacks are particularly novel, the skill set, patience and tenacity of the attackers is much greater than most enterprises are equipped to deal with,” ISEC said in its report.
Jill Hazelbaker, a Google spokeswoman, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
An exit from China would cost Google $600 million in annual sales, with would-be advertising clients instead spending at rival Baidu Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in January. As concerns ease the Chinese government will shut the company’s operations, advertisers are returning and Google’s China business is hiring again, media buyers said earlier this month.
China, whose authorities censor media through state ownership of all newspapers, television and radio stations, may have 840 million Internet users, or 61 percent of the population, by 2013, according to EMarketer Inc. in New York. The country had 384 million users at the end of last year, according to government data.
Google climbed 37 cents to $526.80 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading Friday. The shares have fallen 15 percent this year, after gaining 93 percent in 2009.
–Editors: Stephen West, Peter Vercoe
Katrina Nicholas in Singapore at +65-6311-2468 or knicholas2@bloomberg.net
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net
Feb 26
Times EnemyChina, news, security China, news
China passes National Defense Mobilization Law to safeguard security
English.news.cn 2010-02-26 15:24:08
BEIJING, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) — China’s top legislature passed the National Defense Mobilization Law on Friday after three readings, setting down rules on how and when the military should be mobilized in times of war or emergency.
The Law was approved at the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee’s three-day bimonthly session which ended Friday. President Hu Jintao signed a decree to publish the Law, which will take effect on July 1.
The 72-provision law sets out principles and organizational mechanisms for national defense mobilization, personnel and strategic material storage, and the prevention and relief of war-related disasters.
According to the Law, the NPC Standing Committee will declare national or regional mobilization in line with the Constitution and laws “if state sovereignty, unification, territorial integrity or security is threatened.”
The president will issue a mobilization order based on the decision of the NPC Standing Committee, the Law stipulates.
The mobilization work will be jointly led by the State Council and the Central Military Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to the Law.
The country should ensure storage of military articles including facilities, materials and special production devices designed for military use according to the demand of military orders and equipment in wartime, it said.
Male citizens aged between 18 and 60 and females aged between 18 and 55 should provide service for national defense, including giving support to military operations during wartime, engaging in prevention against war-related disasters as well as related relief tasks, and helping to maintain social order, it stipulates.
Drafting of the Law started in September 2000.
Editor: Lin Zhi
Feb 26
Times EnemyChina, news, security China, insecure news, news
I suppose it is only fair to post some opinions from the “other” side as well…
Commentary: China cyber attacks against Google pure fabrication
English.news.cn 2010-02-24 00:23:06
BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) — The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and some other newspapers have published articles indicating that cyber attacks targeting Google and several other U.S. companies were from China. Such allegations are arbitrary and biased.
These articles take as evidence that hackers’ IP addresses could be traced back to two schools in China. However, it is common sense that hackers can attack by hijacking computers from anywhere in the world. This fact also explains why hackers are hard to be tracked down.
Computers in China are easy to be hijacked by hackers as internet security technology and services are still underdeveloped in China. The majority of Chinese internet users also lack security awareness and adequate protection measures.
The hackers’ IP addresses could by no means vindicate the newspapers’ allegations that the attacks were carried out by Chinese citizens or from within China.
Certain newspapers went even further by indicating that the Chinese government and the military might have supported those cyber attacks.
The New York Times says the Lanxiang vocational school in eastern Shandong province, one of the schools from which the cyber attacks were said to originate, has military support. Another school, the Shanghai Jiaotong University, “has received financing from a high-level government science and technology project.”
The New York Times went to great lengths to mention that “graduates of the (Lanxiang) school’s computer science department are recruited by the local military garrison each year.”
The paper, however, did not care to tell its readers that a school in China does not need to have any special relationship with the military to have its graduates in uniform. It is also true in the United States, where the New York Times is based.
China’s attitude toward cyber attacks has been unequivocal and has adopted laws against such crimes, as China is one of the countries that bear the brunt of cyber attacks. It is way far-fetched to say that cyber attacks — even if they were to originate from China or were to be carried out by Chinese citizens — would have the support of the Chinese government.
The U.S. government, on the other hand, takes a dubious attitude toward cyber attacks.
According to media reports, the U.S. Homeland Security and Defense departments have both openly recruited hackers.
People with a “blackhat perspective” and know how to “do threat modelling” are the best choices, said Philip Reitinger, Department of Homeland Security deputy undersecretary, at an information security conference last October.
Cyber crimes could cause immense losses for individuals, enterprises and nation-states. Effective supervision and closer international cooperation are ways to boost cyber security. Finger pointing is not.
Editor: Mu Xuequan
Related Story:
Feb 24
Times EnemyChina, news, security China, insecure news, news
Another China vs USA which does not bode well for my team…
We Would Lose Cyberwar says former DNI Mike McConnell
This was written by Michael Cheek on Wednesday, February 24, 2010, 11:33.
Cyberwar is increasingly entering into the mindset of policy makers. Earlier this month, DNI Dennis Blair outlined the cyber threat in his Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, saying that “The United States confronts a dangerous combination of known and unknown vulnerabilities, strong and rapidly expanding adversary capabilities, and a lack of comprehensive threat awareness.”
In a hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, former DNI Mike McConnell, of Booz Allen, told legislators that “If the nation went to war today, in a cyberwar, we would lose. We’re the most vulnerable. We’re the most connected. We have the most to lose.”
McConnell also said that the US is unlikely to really secure cyberspace until a major cyber disaster occurs. “We will not mitigate this risk. We will talk about it, we will wave our hands, we’ll have a bill, but we will not mitigate this risk,” he said.
Mary Ann Davidson, CSO of Oracle Corporation, said “We need to change our collective mindset so that elements of critical cyber infrastructure are designed, developed and delivered to be secure. We do that in part by changing the educational system so that we have a cadre of people who know that critical cyber infrastructure will be attacked – and they build accordingly and defensively.”
“Too much is at stake for us to pretend that today’s outdated cybersecurity policies are up to the task of protecting our nation and economic infrastructure,” said Senator Rockefeller. “We have to do better and that means it will take a level of coordination and sophistication to outmatch our adversaries and minimize this enormous threat. It is that simple. We cannot wait for a crisis to occur, the consequences would be far too grave.”
Feb 24
Times EnemyChina, news, security China, insecure news, news
China denies cyber attacks on Google originated in two of country’s schools
By Aileen McCabe, Canwest News Service
February 24, 2010 7:54 AM
The Chinese government came out swinging Tuesday against allegations the cyber attacks that led Google to threaten to pull out of the world’s most populous nation originated in one of China’s top universities and at a little-known vocational school with suspected links to the military.
“Reports that these [attacks] came from Chinese schools are groundless, and accusations of Chinese government involvement are irresponsible and out of ulterior motives,” a Foreign Affairs spokesman told reporters.
Qin Gang said China has laws against hacking that are strictly enforced.
His words came as reports leaked out that Google is preparing to resume talks about its future with Beijing, which were interrupted for the Lunar New Year holiday.
Since Google announced in January that hackers it believed were based in China breached its defences, the company has been trying to determine whether it is possible to stop complying with Chinese Internet censorship rules and still continue to operate its popular Google.cn search engine in the country.
The California-based Internet giant’s attempts to deal with the hacking controversy quietly were hijacked on the weekend when the New York Times published new “evidence” further implicating China.
Citing “people involved in the investigation” of the online attacks against Google and about 30 U.S. companies, the Times said Shanghai’s Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province appeared to be involved.
London’s Financial Times followed with more revelations this week, claiming a Chinese programmer in his 30s wrote at least part of the script that was used to target a hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
It claimed U.S. analysts have identified him as a freelance security consultant who posted his work on a “hacking forum.”
Both schools identified by the Times have denied any knowledge of, or connection to, the sophisticated hackers.
Jiaotong, which is one of China’s elite universities, has a strong computer science department and proudly boasts of professors who have worked with the People’s Liberation Army.
Lanxiang, on the other hand, is little-known, even in China, and claims its students are nowhere near advanced enough to carry out anything close to the kind of attack that Google suffered.
“The reports are too boring, simply unfounded and politically orientated,” Li Zixiang, Communist party chief at Lanxiang School told the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua.
The Times claimed that Lanxiang’s dean and chief professor have both worked on “technology matters” for the PLA.
© Copyright (c) National Post
Feb 24
Times Enemynews news, search engines
Google Europe: A No Good, Very Bad Week
Ian Paul, PCWorld
Feb 24, 2010 8:13 am
This has not a good week so far for Google’s European operations. The search giant has been hit with official complaints of anti-competitive behavior from three companies based in the European Union, and three Google employees have been convicted of violating Italian privacy laws.
European Commission
Three companies have filed complaints with the European Commission, the EU’s regulatory board, charging Google with anti-competitive behavior, according to a Google Blog post. Foundem, a price comparison site, is reportedly arguing that since it is a direct competitor to Google’s own shopping services, the search giant ranks Foundem lower in its results. Ejustice.fr has similar complaints to Foundem, while Microsoft-owned Ciao has taken issue with Google’s terms and conditions, Google says.
In my own tests, using the search terms “price comparison sites uk” on Google.co.uk, Foundem was listed towards the bottom of the third page of search results after an extensive list of UK-based price comparison sites.
Microsoft
In its blog post about these issues, Google not so subtly ties Microsoft to these complaints. Ciao’s ties are obvious since it is a Microsoft-owned company, but Foundem had indirect ties since it is a member of a group called Initiative for a Competitive Marketplace (ICOMP), which is supported in part by Microsoft. That does not necessarily mean, however, that these companies’ complaints are unfounded. As the Financial Times points out, the Web browser maker Opera, a direct competitor of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, initiated the successful antitrust case recently brought against Microsoft in Europe.
Woe is Google
Charges against Google for unfair practices relating to its search algorithms are nothing new. In 2006, a US-based company named KinderStart took Google to court, arguing the search giant was unfairly excluding KinderStart from its search results; the suit was dismissed a year later.
But interestingly, the charges against Google in Europe are occurring at the same time as accusations of unfair trade practices against Google in the United States. Eric Goldman, an Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, suggested in a recent blog post that some of these US-based lawsuits might be part of a Microsoft campaign “to harass Google on antitrust issues.” The evidence Goldman provides in his blog post is largely circumstantial, but the suggestion of Microsoft involvement are interesting given the new European complaints.
Italian Privacy
Google announced in a separate blog post early Wednesday that three of its employees in Italy have been convicted of violating Italian privacy laws. The case dates back to 2006 when school children in Turin, Italy filmed themselves bullying a 17-year old boy with Down Syndrome and uploaded the evidence to Google Video. The search giant complied with requests from Italian police to remove the bullying video, but not before it received about 12,000 views online. After the video was taken down, Google says it also helped police find the perpetrators.
Italian prosecutors decided to hold Google responsible for the video by charging four Google executives with defamation and failing to protect the privacy of the boy with Down Syndrome. The charge of defamation was ultimately dismissed, and Google says it will appeal the conviction of its four employees.
As Google points out in its blog post, the message these convictions send is particularly troubling. If Web sites were held accountable for every piece of user-generated content, then many aspects of the Web most users enjoy including social networks, blogs, and video and photo sharing sites would be severely threatened. Imagine if every blog owner could be hauled before a judge for comments left on their blogs, or if Twitter was sued every time someone was slandered via the microblogging service.
I’m not sure many companies would be willing to take the risk associated with the kind of responsibility the Italian court’s decision implies. It will be interesting to see if Google can successfully overturn the conviction, or whether the concept of holding Web-based services accountable for the actions of its users will spread beyond Italy.
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Feb 24
Times EnemyChina, news al jazeera, China, news
China new web rules condemned
New regulations on internet use in China have been condemned by a media rights watchdog as an effort to tighten political control and a “disturbing step backwards” for online freedoms.
Under the new regulations announced on Tuesday that potential individual operators must submit their identity cards and photos of themselves.
The applicants are also required to personally meet regulators and representatives of service providers before being registered.
The country’s ministry of industry and information technology said the news rule was aimed at cracking down on pornography.
The ministry issued the new guidelines to local authorities on February 8 and lifted a ban imposed in December on individuals acquiring .cn domain names, state media said on Tuesday.
US pressure
The state-sanctioned Chinese group that assigns domain names froze registration of individuals after government media accused it of failing to check whether their sites provided pornographic content.
The new regulations come as Beijing is in talks with Google Inc about whether the US-based internet search giant will be allowed to continue operating in China after it said it would no longer cooperate in web censorship.
Recently the US stepped up pressure on Beijing to break down its vast system of web controls – the so-called Great Firewall of China – for the more than 380 million people now online in the country.
Washington issued those calls after Google said last month it was considering pulling out of China over cyber-attacks and Chinese government censorship of its search results.
China has the world’s biggest online population, and the government operates the world’s most extensive system of web monitoring and filtering.
The government says it censors the web to curb “unhealthy” content including porn and violence, but critics counter it is mainly trying to prevent the posting of information that challenges the ruling Communist Party.
Intimidation
Authorities have launched repeated crackdowns on online pornography and the government says nearly 5,400 people were detained last year.
Following Tuesday’s announcement, media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders said the Chinese government was trying to scare people offline.
“These new regulations represent a very disturbing step backwards for the Chinese internet,” the group said in a statement.
“The pretext of combating pornography does not hold. The aim is to tighten political control and get internet users to censor themselves by bringing them face-to-face with their censors or their agents.
“What netizen will dare to criticise the regime after meeting the person who could put them behind bars for one wrong word?” the statement said.
An online poll by admin5.com, an internet industry website, showed more than 70 per cent of 1,300 respondents would not register a .cn address, despite the lifting of the ban, the Global Times, a Chinese daily close to the government, reported Wednesday.
Feb 18
Javierseo budget, internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo
iCrossing released a paper on how important first impressions are. Here is an excerpt from their research page:
A brand’s position on search engine result pages (SERPs) is critical to driving site traffic. iCrossing analyzed natural search results for non-branded keywords for 10 clients and found that more than 95 percent of all site traffic from search engines comes from page-one results … Our findings also validate the trend towards longer keyword search strings by users and that there are opportunities for marketers to improve their page-one rankings by optimizing for keywords that show up lower in the results. In order to compete for today’s sophisticated online consumers, brands must have a deep understanding of how users arrive at their website, and the tools and know-how to optimize their site to stay in front of the consumer at every step of the purchase cycle.
The original PDF is available at http://www.icrossing.com/articles/The-Importance-of-Page-one-Visibility.pdf. (local copy) It starts off with “in order to compete for today’s sophisticated online consumers, brands must have a deep understanding of how users arrive at their website,” which is something most people who tinker with SEO will eventually state, but it has fun eye-candy charts, and is essentially a decent piece of propaganda to validate your SEO budget to higher-ups.
Feb 18
Times Enemyseo China, insecure news, news, Taiwan
2 China Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks
By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA
Published: February 18, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO — A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.
They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.
Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.
Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.
The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.
The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.
Jiaotong has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.
Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.
Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated.
“We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.
Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said they had not heard that American investigators had traced the Google attacks to their campuses.
If it is true, “We’ll alert related departments and start our own investigation,” said Liu Yuxiang, head of the propaganda department of the party committee at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.
But when asked about the possibility, a leading professor in Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said in a telephone interview: “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.” The professor, who teaches Web security, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“I believe there’s two kinds of situations,” the professor continued. “One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”
At Lanxiang Vocational, officials said they had not heard about any possible link to the school and declined to say if a Ukrainian professor taught computer science there.
A man named Mr. Shao, who said he was dean of the computer science department at Lanxiang but refused to give his first name, said, “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. Also, because our school adopts close management, outsiders cannot easily come into our school.”
Mr. Shao acknowledged that every year four or five students from his computer science department were recruited into the military.
Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.
A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.
Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies’ servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.
Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique — called man-in-the-mailbox — to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.
After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.
John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei and Chen Xiaoduan in Shanghai contributed research.
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