China Bears

[Mr Z]

and you know this how?

Because most major infrastructure existed well before the internet and is not dependent on it in any way shape or form. The technology is often simply not that sophisticated, they can simply unplug whatever connectivity exists and get things back up again should any attack cause an issue. Besides how stupid would you have to be to have mission critical infrastructure dependent on the web with no redundancy. You think they are actually that silly?

if cyber weapons are capable of messing with the PLC controllers that manage centrifuge speeds inside a nuclear plant then they are capable of messing with all sorts of control systems. the future is here now believe it or not, its far beyond a case of "lol my windows box got hacked", we're talking electricity grids, power plants, transport systems, water management, telecommunications systems and any other piece of critical social infrastructure you can conceive of being vulnerable to engineered and targetted cyber weapons.

LOL... only if they run windows, which the Chinese don't.

Like I said causing problems is one thing but disabling is another thing altogether. The future was here a while back... and these issues have been thought through, trust me.

they don't need to invade, occupy or even land troops on the mainland. there's no point occupying china, just ruin their infrastructure and let it collapse under its seething mass of humanity. but the whole china vs US armchair general games are just theorycrafting and is purely a matter of opinion so lets not get into a 10 page diatribe ridden derail on what if's.

Yeah look, you are severely overestimating the damage they can do and underestimating the ability to recover. They have a good level of redundancy in major infrastructure and can normally operate in isolation if needs be. Anyone with any sense would make sure this is the case, to think that they would allow national infrastructure to completely vulnerable is a cyber fantasy. The cyber security industry are great ones for over selling the threats.

anyway the US is setting up the arab world for its next world war. the arab spring will lead to islamist takeovers throughout the middle east and voila, instant enemy! /tinfoil hat

start with this really good article and google the rest to your hearts content.

They assume that Stuxnet destroyed about 10% of Irans centrifuges, not quite what you call disabling but certainly a disruption, which is what I reckon is the most they would achieve. For a cyber attack to be effective it would have to be a part of a strategic offense that involves other forms of attack that take advantage of whatever outage the cyber crew can create.

 

[Mr Z]

Its not the plc that get stuffed but the SCADA controlling the PLC. Most SCADA on this scale is on UNIX not MICROCRAP.

LOL yeah... mission critical on Windows is just asking for this sort of crap to happen!

 

[Starcraftmazter]

Yeah but you gotta remember that they don't really care about the people.
They have a massive army to protect themselves against there own peoples social unrest.

I can't help but disagree with everything you're saying. China is a complex country of 1.4Bn people. It's government has very crude tools to try and control it - it's one overriding objective is to maintain social order.

In the last half a decade or so, China has significantly downsized it's military. There is absolutely no way they could every hope to control any sort of significant uprising. The scenario you propose is simply nonsense.

The Coming China-India Conflict: Is War Inevitable?

There is a school of thought that say the US will provoke this conflict and fight China by proxy should push come to shove over resources.

I'm too stupid to know other than history teaches us that wars often occur in commodity cycles after trade tensions rise.

I don't think it will happen. China and India have had historically frosty relations, and people have been predicting all sorts of conflicts between them for a long time now, but things have actually only gotten better.

China had similarish territorial and interest differences with Russia very recently - but those got settled, and now they are "best buddies" so to say. Both governments are corrupt and are not driven by ideology. They have too much to gain and too much to lose by entering into any sort of conflict.

doesn't have to be conventional. stuxnet took out irans nuclear facilities without a shot being fired. cyber warfare can take out electricity grids, communications networks, industrial control systems, you name it. i would put the US cyber warfare division as light years ahead of any other national cyber division.

And yet it is the Chinese that have been causing havok in the US and around the world as of late, in terms of cyber warfare. Do not underestimate China in this department. In fact much of the smartest engineers in USA are Chinese or other immigrants...their education system simply isn't what it used to be.

why bother getting into the mess of a conventional war when you can disable an enemy over the net? and anyway if push did come to shove, the US would beat the everliving **** out of china, i don't care what the sino-fanboys and their zerg rush appreciation society says.

I fail to see how. China and Russia are formally allied, and either one of them individually could easily take on a US invasion. I don't care what US-fanboys say, the way military hardware stacks up, US does not have any sort of edge whatsoever over Russia/China. Nor does it have the numbers. Nor will it have the terrain advantage.

But getting back to economics. You do realise this would cause a complete collapse of the world economy in every way imaginable? This would then bring us back to the total war doctrines of WW1 & 2.

Now consider this, at 10% unemployment and closing on 20% underemployment, for a population extremely pissed off with bankers and politicians, can you really ask them to work in factories and go through austerity just to wage war on another country? The mentality of the populace today is very different than that of the great depression.

How are the elite going to make money off this?


There will not be any significant conflict on our planet anytime soon. We simply live in a completely different world now, where it benefits nobody to have conflict between any major countries.

start with this really good article and google the rest to your hearts content.

Stuxnet is a joke. Nothing remotely serious is running on Windows in any country of importance, and many countries (even Western ones) have made commitments to completely end it's use in government, and especially military.

What they use are GNU/Linux and BSD derivatives. Secure as secure can be, there is simply no way they can be hacked. The most foreign governments can do is launch denial of service attacks which are pretty meaningless to the defense intranets anyway.

 

[choofer]

What they use are GNU/Linux and BSD derivatives. Secure as secure can be, there is simply no way they can be hacked. The most foreign governments can do is launch denial of service attacks which are pretty meaningless to the defense intranets anyway.

Love it. So back to bits and bytes.

How do I learn assembler?

Give me another vinho pls

 

[mullokintyre]

I can't help but disagree with everything you're saying. China is a complex country of 1.4Bn people. It's government has very crude tools to try and control it - it's one overriding objective is to maintain social order.

In the last half a decade or so, China has significantly downsized it's military. There is absolutely no way they could every hope to control any sort of significant uprising. The scenario you propose is simply nonsense.



I don't think it will happen. China and India have had historically frosty relations, and people have been predicting all sorts of conflicts between them for a long time now, but things have actually only gotten better.

China had similarish territorial and interest differences with Russia very recently - but those got settled, and now they are "best buddies" so to say. Both governments are corrupt and are not driven by ideology. They have too much to gain and too much to lose by entering into any sort of conflict.

Today i was reading about the latest technology race where the Chinese have lapped the rest of the world.
From Zero Hedge

The world learned on Saturday evening that China had made "astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than U.S. officials realized," sources told F.T.

In August, the Chinese military launched a rocket that catapulted a hypersonic glide vehicle into low-Earth-orbit. It flew around the world before missing its target by only two dozen miles, three sources said.

The latest test raises an abundance of questions about China's rapid military modernization, which is beating the U.S. in the hypersonic weapons race.

"We have no idea how they did this," a fourth source said, referring to China's ability to fly a hypersonic glide vehicle across the world.

Chinese technology has now overtakebn pretty much everyone else.
Welcome to the new world order.
The previous post in this thread stretches back to 2011, some ten years ago. It is interesting to read people 's thoughts on China from ten years ago.
Not sure if the statement about Chinese Military being down sized has turned out as a great prediction.
Mick

 

[moXJO]

Nope read it wrong

 

[againsthegrain]

Looks like there is a bit of panic with officials warning to stock up on food amid fears of shortages in the great eastern land of dreams