hankschannel
VEDA #7 - Scared of China
YouTube: | https://youtube.com/watch?v=21m0TcaHzEw |
Previous: | VEDA #6 Brain Crack URLs |
Next: | VEDA #8 Blending the iPad |
Categories
Statistics
View count: | 8,737 |
Likes: | 289 |
Comments: | 89 |
Duration: | 02:55 |
Uploaded: | 2010-04-07 |
Last sync: | 2024-11-16 14:00 |
In which Hank admits he's kinda scared of China and what the recent spurt of cyber attacks mean/
Good morning, it's April 7th, one week from when I have to have my taxes done, which is annoying. Today, I found out that China hacked into the Dalai Lama's email and read all of his messages for two years. It's just so lame. God!
I'm actually kind of freaked out by the sudden surge of Chinese cyber attacks. There's this sense that... and I don't know, like, where it's coming from or how accurate it is, but this sense that it's the Chinese government actually perpetrating the attack. The attacks include attacks on Google, on the US government, and, most recently, on the Indian government, not most recently, but most recently we heard about because the Indian government wasn't telling anyone it was happening. And these aren't insignificant events. They're like big, serious, security-compromising... not just national security compromising, but like international security compromising events.
And with Google recently pulling out of China because they decided to stop censoring search results, which I applaud them for, there's a lot of tension going on. There's also a lot of economic tension, of course, between the US and China. China is worried that the US dollar will suddenly drop significantly in value and thus all of the debt that US has with China will suddenly be worth less money. Whereas, the US government, and our whole economy, is really pissed off that China doesn't change the value of it's currency so the value of their currency is artificially deflated and thus they can make products and sell them for way less and then they get more money. It's all very confusing. I don't know, I don't understand how it all works.
All this to me is very, very scary because when we have conflicts in this world that I have been raised in, the conflict is between one big superpower and one dude, basically, who's a jerk. I'm not belittling the wars that we have, but when you compare them to even Vietnam or more especially the Korean War or World War II where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people died, soldiers and innocent people, there's no comparison to these superpower wars. These superpower wars are really scary. Superpower wars are a bad, bad idea and we have two superpowers now, we have the US and China, and I really want the US and China to get along.
The thing that I'm realizing, hopefully, probably, hopefully, I'm hopeful that this is the case, is that the war that will be fought will not be a war with guns, it will be a war with computers, where we attack each other's computers. We cannot exist without each other and I do not seeing us taking up arms against one another. But the question is, how seriously can we be hurt by a cyber attack? Will it just be industrial espionage? Will it be nations spying on each other for, you know, economic gain? Or will it go beyond that, because this is, this is new ground to be treading, and I don't like it, I don't like it at all.
In other news, how is my haircut? Do you like it? This is my new hair. It does not have serious geopolitical implications. And spying on the Dalai Lama, that's just lame, you just gotta get over that guy, really, just what do you even want that for, China? What is even there? Why?
I will see you all tomorrow.