By Professor Doom
Admin:
“Please be aware we had another phishing attempt on our servers, do not respond
to e-mails in the following format…”
--I get
phishing/hacking e-mails on my institution’s account about every week or so.
Like most folks, I
get many “phishing” attempts on my e-mail. Some are quite good, but many have a
weakness which exposes them. English is a ridiculously complicated language, you
see, and a non-native speaker, even one very fluent, often reveals himself as
such with a phrase that no American would ever use. For example, you can buy “hot water cylinders” (legit
site, but clearly not American despite the English language), but in America we
just call them “water heaters,” even though, yeah, they’re usually cylindrical.
Earlier I feel
like I came off as an apologist for China, in addressing hysteria over that
country’s establishing little fiefdoms on some of our campuses. To be more
clear, those fiefdoms aren’t the real issue, so allow me to cover something far
more sinister being done by China, though pretty much common to every country
on the planet:
Before
moving on to the issues in the article, I want to point out that while most of
our campuses are drowning in ideology and corruption we still have
universities, particularly “research universities,” where we investigate far
more relevant things than the number of possible human genders, where we invent
things far more useful than new personal pronouns like “xhe” or “xhim.”
This vastly more important research doesn’t make the news, because it’s
not supposed to be common knowledge. It’s sad that this knowledge must be
classified as “military secrets,” but the fact remains, other countries,
including China, would like to have that knowledge as well.
Chinese
hackers are ramping up their efforts to steal military research secrets from
U.S. universities, new cybersecurity intelligence suggests.
The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Hawaii, Pennsylvania
State University, Duke University and the University of Washington are among 27
institutions in the U.S., Canada and Southeast Asia to be targeted by Chinese
hackers, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Hey,
want to know where to go to get involved in real research that will matter?
Well, you can bet if China is interested in it, it’s probably worth something,
so the serious student should look carefully at the list helpfully supplied
above, to get some ideas of real graduate schools (where the research is done)
worth applying to. Do carefully note how few of those schools have time for
race riots…
The
primary target, this time, was undersea technology. Our oceans represent a vast
source of resources, and the country best able to control/explore/exploit the
seas has been the dominant country on the planet for several centuries now,
it’s reasonable to think the undersea will be the next big frontier.
One
school is absent from the list:
One wonders
why Harvard wasn't on the list of targets. Maybe it has something to do with
this?
"The fact that Bo Guagua was a couple
months from his Harvard degree
has sparked interest in the number of so-called princelings—the offspring of
powerful Chinese Communist Party officials—attending elite U.S. universities...
But there are people far more important than the children of Chinese party
leaders attending Harvard and other elite U.S. universities: Chinese leaders
themselves... Carefully vetted officials—a selection of some of the regime’s
rising stars—were sent abroad to study in specially designed programs at some
of the world’s finest universities. The first crop was sent to Harvard...
It’s certainly an
interesting theory, and I rather believe it to be true. We have an analogue
here in the U.S. Most of our higher education system is corrupted or
outright fraudulent, but each state still generally keeps one school, the
“flagship university” mostly legitimate. Why? Because the political leaders
need a place to send their kids. They can’t all go to Harvard, after all…
Again, a hidden
takeaway: if you’re looking for a legitimate university to send your kids, see
where the political leaders of your state send their kids. It’s not a sure
thing mind you, but it’ll increase the odds of getting an education.
China is not the first country to target U.S. universities with a
coordinated cybercampaign. Last year nine Iranian hackers were charged for
their role in a phishing scam that ran from 2013 to 2017 and attempted to steal
the passwords of hundreds of thousands of professors.
Yeah, no kidding. While I don’t want to underestimate the legitimacy of
this kind of threat, there’s a slant to this article, expressed in two ways.
The
first way is from the above, the “nine Iranian hackers.” Yeah, sure, but that’s
not Iran, those are hackers who happen to be from Iran. I get hit with phishing
attempts from foreigners on a very regular basis, you don’t need a government
to do that sort of thing. Why didn’t the article go ahead and mention the
Nigerian scam as well? I mean, at least a dozen people have died there, leaving
me tens of millions of dollars, after all.
The
second? What moron thinks the United States government doesn’t do much of the
same, at least when we can’t get their Secretary of State to simply just sell
the secrets off her private e-mail server (like many countries did with us)? I
respect our government is going to do that sort of thing, and thus we should
not be so quick to anger when other countries do unto us as we do to them. We
should be quick to guard our secrets, of course.
It is "just inevitable" that research universities will
be targets, Wheeler said. "The open culture of universities make us an
enduring target."
Jeez, these people. I’m sorry, criminals and thieves have always been a
big part of society, and while universities are certainly targeted by them, so
is every business, and I daresay every human being on the planet with anything
worth taking.
That said, yeah,
we need to safeguard things we value…but no harm in letting them take all they
can from our converged campuses.
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