A carefully choreographed expose by a US security company Mandiant on Chinese military unit 61398 hacking critical US infrastructure hit the news recently

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/19/video-released-of-shadowy-chinese-army-hacker-unit-in-action/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/126209983/Mandiant-APT1-Report

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/mandiant-in-the-spotlight-as-cyber-attacks-on-companies-increase/2013/02/15/f067cb88-76d0-11e2-8f84-3e4b513b1a13_story.html

http://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2013/02/19/high-tide-from-unit-61398-to-hollywood-unnerved/

will refrain from writing about how clean the screen capture of remote login sessions of alleged Chines intruders experiment on US computers. I mean, without inflammatory audio, you’d think you were watching a prepared screen-cast of some installation instructions of some software. too clean, too easy to be fake.

I will refrain from writing about how it is unbelievable that the US, inventor and creator of all this technology. All those smart people recruited by Microsoft with money$$$, all those smart people who invented and wrote unixes, the super smart people who work on these best cryptographic algorithms, all those insanely sharp folks who do core networking infrastructure, who have Ph.D.’s and patents and all the fame and much money of the world, all those smart friends of mine who are so insanely intelligent and agile in thinking and comprehensive in technical knowledge–all those people, things, designs which is property of the USA fail to beat “military intelligence” of Chinese origin.

I just cannot believe this. Is there a punch line to this?[[[UPDATE: actually, there is. the punch line was a news drop two days later admitting that they only caught the low-end of Chinese hacking that there are more advanced hackers. Undoubtedly this is a call for blood of Chinese Americans. It is a call for racism and unsupervised pervasive monitoring of all people of Chinese origin. I am of Chinese origin and I know racism when I see it. As a Chinese American I feel threatened. I feel insecure. I feel that there eyes watching me every moment of my life with all neurons firing thinking of all the bad intents I have for America or my company or the economy or “critical infrastructures”]]]

Seriously. if this was real, it would have been from pride of design and ownership. I am sure all those people involved in the design and implementation of compromised systems also had this feeling of invincible American computer technology. For god sakes! it was invented here, designed here, and for the most part implemented on the USA proper.

I just cannot believe this story.

At best, given my current knowledge and believes, this story is a thorough fabrication. And it is not as hard as faking moon landing. I can probably do it, and if I can’t the coworkers who has actually done a remote desktop on MS window server can surely arrange for this to happen. (okay, okay, I didn’t actually go and download the md5 section of the report, perhaps it gives evidence that the session were really from China, I don’t see how tho.)

I will also refrain from writing about the lack of properly trained security professionals in the US. There some professional training in computer security, for example by the SCPD(http://scpd.stanford.edu/computerSecurity/), certainly one can obtain a PhD in computer security from the likes of CMU or MIT or Berkley.  I think a better story would have been: Those companies/critical infrastructure not guarded by trained professionals were compromised, but those that were guarded by trained experts were safe. If it was fake–and I think it was–Generating a large unknown enemy creates uncertainty that may crash the stock market or ruin the economy where as spreading positive message about serious organized effort promotes solidarity and confidence.

I will also refrain from writing about the main motivation for creating such stories: If China, a military state is doing all this shit to America then we need give more power to the US military to respond, to defend–it is a call for increase in defense budget. It is a call for even more powerful version of the de facto at-will monitoring policy–to mandatory monitoring policy.

I will also refrain from mentioning illegality of entrapment. given the amount of monitoring and manipulation of network that occur at my work place where I am there in person, and you know what I’m talking about, you will surely be giggling at this story about remote intrusion–it is impossible unless somebody not only opened/installed/designed the security holes and then leaked it to the Chinese.

crap! crap! this is total crap!

Also, wtf is up with China? Why not respond, in addition to “We don’t hack” with “And we will investigate this certain unit 61398” ? The civilian government(who is trying to strength Sino-US relationship and building the “Made In China” brand) should have the curiosity about this fact if it was happening autonomously. Would it not be better for it to discover a corrupt unit of the military and punish them? The Chinese loves reform and publication of corruption, it would make story that the US will have to respond to.

Alas, I am not the screen writer for the world of international hackery show.

Oh, hehehe, if the Chinese police show up at that building, surround it with choppers and tanks only to find a bunch of teenager subcontractors clicking on google ads. hahahahha and it gets caught on cell phone video and is leaked to youtube.. that would be a real hoot! hahahah the irony.

Looking at my old blog entries, I think there is a problem with our earlier attempt at addressing tri-transitivity and higher order valences. The problem actually points to a larger issue. Let us try an extended example of trivalency

I am giving you a slave named Tom.

Subject: I

Object: you

Object being done with: A slave named Tom

Thinking of ethical issues: My giving a slave may be considered wrong and you allowing a slave to be given to you my be considered immoral. But ultimately, that Tom is a slave is perhaps something not ethical in and of himself. What about

I am giving you a slave named Tom to keep you alive from being quadriplegic and demented.

This seem to make me a good person and give you just cause to require full time service of a devoted person. Is this act allowable? I would if I followed Jesus’s way, and I could if I followed Confucian way.

What about the veil of innocence, how come it isn’t compatible here? at first glance, it seems that it should, what if you were Tom and you were being given. You would then choose not to give tom as slave right? But in Bi-transitive Action Space, let’s call it BTAS for short, we have no way of evaluating that, you are either subject or object, there is no third position.

The reasoning here, therefore, must extend analysis of Tri-Transitive Action Space, TTAS, and other higher valencies, HTAS’s,  to analyze the TAS itself for inclusion and usage of ethical entities that are considered of same importance as the subject and objects of TAS analysis.

* Giving a person as slave is unethical.

* Using a person as a slave is unethical.

* Being used as a slave is unethical.

The first two come from a traditional ethical systems. One cannot use another ethical entity in a subjugated manor, and one should not force an ethical entity into such a position. But what about the third, that seems a little stranger, allowing oneself to be enslaved is an unethical act. Certainly an ethical entity may be able to enslave another and should do that instead of being enslaved. Alas, these problems are indeed at the heart of concerns driving these current carpal tunnel stiffened hands into worse states than they are in already. At least, our action space needs to give us the ability to consider the third ethical entity.

Let us be more specific about BTAS as well, it is really very easy to include HTAS inside BTAS. So we need a class of TAS that include exclusively Bi-transitive verbs where the verb themselves do not use or influence any other entities affecting ethical value. This class of actions we shall refer to as Full-Bi-Transitive Action Space, or FBTAS(ef-bee-taz) for short. And similarly FTTAS for tri-transitive verbs with clearly distinguishable subject, object, and third thing which the action uses and affects evaluations of ethical nature.

I fear soon we will run out of letters and theory synonyms as we look into this matter deeply. I am driven to think of another way to think about this issue… Naming a new space for different situations is too troublesome and impractical.

But Clausewitz’s work seem much more interesting. The expression “fog of war” started there. These things that are so obvious today, but probably rarely fully understood, very difficult to clarify in author’s own head, and much more difficult to write in language at that time: Obviously the leadership of military has personalities, and obviously those personalities greatly affect what battles are fought and who wins wars. Obviously war includes clearly distinguishable elements (in fact physically separate aspects) of “force” and “uncertainty” and that their “resolution” would rely on the “creative spirit” of those involved, (aka fascinating trinity, die wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit). It sounds so obvious and so right and needless to write–Obviously, now, that I read it’s summary in Wikipedia after more than two centuries of people reading and summarizing it) But at that time, perhaps nobody has yet fully grasped all these insights and put them together–except for Clausewitz, of course.

I want to quote a line describing the Ninjas from Shapiro’s book, that they excel at “the art of espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination” OMG, my heart stopped when I read this. This is the kind of people that the above fine print speak of. Those that spies and sabotages in complete secrecy! they infiltrate my work, hack my accounts, befriend my friends, family, and they kill. Powerful! very powerful, very insightful! exhilarating passage!

Link to the book on Amazon: Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses.

Additional links on Clauswitz’s work:

Holiday season 2012, wishing everyone a happy new year. Merry Christmas.

I had a frank conversation with my father and asked him to read Round II. He felt my explanations were unclear. Instead, he drew the following picture to illustrate from my conditionalization of the ethical imperatives. It stems from his ever present grammar school math basics which says that in a set theoretic axiomatic logic system the statement

if P then Q has the following Venn Diagram:

Because Q is true exceeds the situations when P is true, but not vice versa, therefore the containment relationship. After some quick calculation, due to the inversion and making sure the relationship still matches, the golden and silver rule when put into the same “action space” produces the following Venn Diagram:

It takes a moment to convince one’s self that the smallest set “Confucius wants” fits inside what “I want”. But if you image the outside of “Confucius wants” is Q above in the negative space and outside of “I want” is P in negative space and is therefore superset to Q.

This is now indeed very clear. By visualizing the action space over which both ethical imperatives
reside—those things within my ability to do to other and to be done onto–suddenly we find that these sets of actions: things I can do, things jesus wants me to do, things Confucius wants me to do, and things I want to do, have a superset relationship. The large sets are always proper super set of smaller sets unless I want done to me include all possible things or nothing.

It’s kind of surprising that Confucius silver rule recommends doing fewer things than Jesus’s golden rule–But then again, it may make sense, Confucius speaks much of humbleness, about learning from teachers, he puts greater value on meta-knowledge about one’s own knowledge than the knowledge themselves. Perhaps this conservative valuation of self prevents him from doing as much.

Jesus on the other hand, son of god, savior of the world asks follower to do more in pursuit of heaven. Let’s celebrate his birth…

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Okay, I recently found out that the Chinese (PRC) government couldn’t stop buying American debt (That is it lends money to the US government which gives it a little bit of interest regularly until sometime in the future when it gives the money back)

There are some attempts, by the Chinese to spend money in the US. Some were blocked blatantly by the US government such as 3Com and UNOCAL, while in other cases, it seemed almost certainly win-win for both sides due to Chinese expertise, manufacturing resources and unique perspective but ultimately failed: Yahoo, Maytag, etc. All this protectionism may or may not be beneficial to the American people. Here for instance is another very very specific case of preventing China from spending all this debt America owes it by way of the “country with special concern” designation which prevents lobbyist from being paid by the PRC. article. Btw, I’ve heard of this from a second radio source as well, but it doesn’t appear to be listed on congressman Wolf’s website.

This, btw, is fantastic news for the people of PRC. The government won’t be spending their tax money on American politicians. AND it is fantastic news for other lobby interests all of whom now have one fewer competitor and therefore has to pay much less.

But let’s for the moment assume that China has too much US $$, and that most avenues of investment: equity in companies, real estate, lobbying, etc. have been ruled out as certain losers. What else can it do with it’s money

Well, let’s see… The one thing that we see the most in America, aside from Chinese restaurants and those evil cult protesters are poor Chinese students. They come to the US having beat everyone else in their own country in their respective arts and sciences or skills, and they often end up delivering food for those aforementioned restaurants or joining evil cults for residency and working rights in the United States. Why doesn’t the Chinese government establish a scholarship for any Chinese student being normally accepted into an American institution so that they can pursue their dreams of excellence in their arts and crafts? Would that not be the most effective investment?? And let me assert that the Chinese government have enough money in the bank to pay for a decent education for all of its students accepted in the to schools in the US. This, btw, is entirely legal in America, even if the funds are managed and disbursed in an American entity.

Oh, WTF, while we are at it, why don’t the PRC. government endow a general scholarship (name it the People’s Republic of China Scholarship for Excellence) that is given to the best candidate of any nationality and race. Imagine some twenty years later, and the president of France, or prime minister of India, or some Nobel laureate proudly thanks American university for an education and China for it’s awesome scholarship. Wouldn’t that be quite an accomplishment ?!!

The money can be spent on establish libraries. They can start a Museum collecting arts of Chinese origin but that have been admired and possessed by non-Chinese. These art are true treasures that have possessed not only their originators but also many other peoples of other race and culture. Wouldn’t that be an awesome museum??!!

Why don’t the Chinese people take all that debt and rent a county; and on that county why don’t they build a university. Build the Chinese University of America. This act not only revitalizes a whole American town, or perhaps a whole state, but also produces jobs, educates new minds, and most of all creates the most perfect nexus of the two cultures and the enlighten minds of the two people. This not only creates jobs in America, it would not only be building American infrastructure, but would also be creating a new believe, a new trust, a new friendship–a new hope for the two people.

Why don’t they spend their money that way?