US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5732

On October 22 2016 03:48 a_flayer wrote:
How close were we to the massive array of US nukes being under the control of a megalomaniac? NK's position of wanting nuclear weapons to be able to defend themselves against the American threat is suddenly a lot more credible.

On October 22 2016 03:50 KwarK wrote:

It's not even slightly credible. The only reason anyone wants to attack NK is because they're working on nuclear missile tech.

On October 22 2016 03:55 a_flayer wrote:


I'd say that's a good point, but somehow I get the idea that the US was funding groups to undermine the NK government long before they started their nuclear program.

On October 22 2016 03:55 a_flayer wrote:


I'd say that's a good point, but somehow I get the idea that the US was funding groups to undermine the NK government long before they started their nuclear program.

On October 22 2016 03:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
All this WW3 talk and we didn't mention we're going to attack Russia after accusing them of trying to manipulate our election (pretending we don't do that shit all the time in other countries).

Which, depending on the interpretation of the severity of the attack, could either be us responding to an act of war from Russia or making our own.

The US intelligence community coming out and saying it was Russia without being able to provide concrete evidence only further inflames tensions.

Like I've said before, anyone living near a military base should notice a significant ramping up of exercises. We're heading into another large scale conflict soon, or at least our military is preparing for one.

On October 22 2016 03:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
Like I've said before, anyone living near a military base should notice a significant ramping up of exercises. We're heading into another large scale conflict soon, or at least our military is preparing for one.

On October 22 2016 04:05 Dan HH wrote:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/789520268972601344

Uhm, does no one next to him dare tell him?

On October 22 2016 03:58 oBlade wrote:

Undermine in what way?

On October 22 2016 04:11 a_flayer wrote:


Covert actions, funding or arming the opposition. Hell, they even consider the alliance/collaboration with South Korea a direct attack on their interests. I'm not saying that their behaviour is very sensible, its just their view. And, personally, even I felt ill at ease when Trump started gaining momentum and I listened in to what was being said at the RNC, so yeah, I'd say that gives them at least some credit towards to being worried. Whether that's 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 1000 before being completely justified that's up to you.

On October 22 2016 04:11 a_flayer wrote:


Covert actions, funding or arming the opposition. Hell, they even consider the alliance/collaboration with South Korea a direct attack on their interests. I'm not saying that their behaviour is very sensible, its just their view. And, personally, even I felt ill at ease when Trump started gaining momentum and I listened in to what was being said at the RNC, so yeah, I'd say that gives them at least some credit towards to being worried. Whether that's 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 1000 before being completely justified that's up to you.

On October 22 2016 04:03 KwarK wrote:

The military is always preparing for a conflict. You might as well point out that ambulance crews are preparing for people to get hurt. It's literally their job.

As for cyber attacks, so far the rule of thumb with those has been the line between spying and cyberterrorism. If you send a guy to Russia to break into their files and look at some of their military plans, that's not an act of war, it's rude but it's not an act of war. If you send the same guy in to bomb the building with the plans in it, that's war. If you hack into their files, it's rude. If you hack into their electricity grid to overload a bunch of factories in strategic locations, that's war.

This is the same game we've always played and always denied doing. Hell, I would be in no way surprised if there had been frank discussions about where the line was drawn before any of this started, just to make sure everyone was on the same page and nobody accidentally crossed it.

SAN FRANCISCO — At least two successive waves of online attacks blocked multiple major websites Friday, at times making it impossible for many users on the East Coast to access Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr and Reddit.

The first attacks appear to have begun around 7:10 am Friday, then resolved towards 9:30 am, but then a fresh wave began.

The cause was a large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against Internet performance company Dyn that blocked user access to many popular sites.

Dyn reported the sites going down at around 11:10 a.m. UTC, or roughly 7:10 a.m. ET, posting on its website that it "began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure."

In an update posted at 8:45 a.m. ET, the company confirmed the attack, noting that "this attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue."

Others worried the attack could be from a nation-state rather than simply an individual seeking to wreak havoc.

“This is not a script kiddie,” said Markus Jakobsson, chief scientist at Agari, a computer security firm based in San Mateo, Calif. By that he meant unskilled hackers who use others' programs, or scripts, to hack into systems because they lack the expertise to write their own software.

“This not just an instant job, this is something that was probably worked on for weeks if not for months by really competent people,” he said.

Update 12:28 PM EST: Dyn says it is investigating yet another attack, causing the same massive outages experienced this morning. Based on emails from Gizmodo readers, this new wave of attacks seems to be affecting the West Coast of the United States and Europe. It’s so far unclear how the two attacks are related, but the outages are very similar.

On October 22 2016 04:20 KwarK wrote:

I don't think you know as much about NK as you think you do. It's not like the Ukraine where the US government discreetly funds a political party that opposes Russia. It's a single party police state. There isn't internal opposition and every state that exists outside of the borders of NK represents external opposition. The existence of people outside of the borders of NK undermines the NK government. Exchanging currency for goods, or simply reading the internet and exchanging ideas on teamliquid is undermining the NK government.

The US did not create a need for NK to add a nuclear deterrent to their already existing deterrents. The border was stable for 40+ years before they decided to get a nuke. The cities of South Korea already represent a hostage for NK to threaten if they need to.

On October 22 2016 04:22 oBlade wrote:
You went from their pursuit of nuclear weapons being credible to it just being their perspective. Well, the Kim dynasty is nuts. Their view could be that Hello Kitty is a Japanese plot that requires a military response.

On October 22 2016 04:20 KwarK wrote:

I don't think you know as much about NK as you think you do. It's not like the Ukraine where the US government discreetly funds a political party that opposes Russia. It's a single party police state. There isn't internal opposition and every state that exists outside of the borders of NK represents external opposition. The existence of people outside of the borders of NK undermines the NK government. Exchanging currency for goods, or simply reading the internet and exchanging ideas on teamliquid is undermining the NK government.

The US did not create a need for NK to add a nuclear deterrent to their already existing deterrents. The border was stable for 40+ years before they decided to get a nuke. The cities of South Korea already represent a hostage for NK to threaten if they need to.