Cheap Blogging Crutch 11.13

Making Health Care Better
The New York Times' David Leonhardt provides us with an exhaustive story on doctors, administrators, and public policy dorks who are doing the hard work of trying to hold down costs and make health care more effective in the current broken system. You may know them by their other title: people who aren't as smart as our elected betters in the Senate. He focuses specifically on the work of Brent James, who probably wakes up every morning, reads about the health care debate, and then has to spend 15 minutes talking himself out of suicide. It's an article that's worth your time.

How the US Funds the Taliban
I bet you're thinking "I'm sure it's just some labyrinthine trail where we find out that things we buy and things we do eventually flow back to the Taliban and terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, meant to teach us a lesson about the complexities of war." Nope! We're just straight up paying them. In cash. Sometimes just to not do anything, sometimes we pay them for protection. Often it's just huge, corrupt payments to Hamid Karzai's family. It's all very sordid and is definitely one of the many, many things your shouldn't think about when we decide to send a bunch more troops over there.

CDC Estimates 22 Million H1N1 Cases In US Between April And October
Oh, you forgot about Porcine AIDS, didn't you? Well it didn't forget about you, infecting maybe as many as 36 million and killing 4,000. Ok, that doesn't sound frightening, but what if I pointed out it was Friday the 13th and said it in a spooooky voice? No? Fuck you anyway, we're all going to die. Might want to think about getting that flu shot.

Al-Qa'ida prefers U.S. to stick around
What would you say if I told you that the United States military and political establishment didn't really understand Al Qaeda or it's political and military goals in reference to Afghanistan. Would you say 'no shit' or 'no fucking shit'? Well, anyway, it basically boils down to how they really, really, really, want us to stay and keep sending troops in. Boy, good thing we're not going to do anything stupid like that. By the way, this is also one of the many, many things your shouldn't think about when we decide to send a bunch more troops over there.

China proves to be an aggressive foe in cyberspace
Hey, while the US is spending trillions on not having health care, building super duper fighter planes, missiles, and various things that Michael Bay totally beats off to, you know what China is spending their money on? Well, infrastructure, energy, and wrapping its tentacles around the world. But militarily? Mostly they're watching Hackers over and over again and taking notes. Aaaand they're pretty much countering any intelligence imbalances and could do major damage to us if we ever started a war with them. In fact they're pretty much already running an undeclared war on us. I'm sure this is a problem a few more F-22's that are built the districts of every congressman on an appropriations committee will solve.

North Korea escalates prank war

Well they finally figured it out. Remember how pissed we all were over the weekend when we tried to access the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, and Transportation Department web sites and found our ability to load them up difficult and scattershot? How all you heard during fireworks was stuff like "Where the hell else am I going to get to read Tim Geithner's blog", "It just isn't the same without hot dogs, fireworks, and up to date press releases from the Transportation Department", and "This holiday is barely worth celebrating without the ability to check out the FAQ on the Secret Service's website"? Well, now we know who ruined our nation's birthday: North Korea.

South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government Web sites, aides to two lawmakers said Wednesday.
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Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The Korea Information Security Agency also attributed the attacks to denial of service.

DoS attacks are when a number of people go to a website at the same time, causing an overload to the servers. Sometimes it can happen when a popular blogger links to you (something we've never had to experience), or when it's a coordinated attack. This vicious NK attack swelled some sites traffic to 9 times their usual load. 9 times! This had lead to experts in multiple articles on this to call the attack "sophisticated", which leads me to believe they aren't actually experts. Atrios or Daily Kos are probably going to do it once or twice today with a link and a sentence telling you to click said link. Making a website hard to load doesn't equal heinously sophisticated cyber-terror.

But nevertheless this is war! We're coming for you Kimbo! You think your DoS attacks are funny, just wait until we start up the LOLJong-Il site, start sending out embarrassing e-mails from your Gmail account, and hack your Twitter feed (TallBoyNK). My the CIA will escalate into putting itching powered in your onesies, ordering multiple pizzas to your house, killing you in a missile attack, or dyeing the water in your pool blue. You don't want to get into it with us.

Cyber Wars...the Punishment Due

If you had to guess one high tech thing you were almost certain the Pentagon was already doing, it would be working to protect government, stock exchange, and air traffic computer systems with a elite squad of hackers and nerds, right? I mean Michael Bay thought to have it in the first Transformers movie. Surely our government is smarter than Michael Bay. Nope. But they are finally getting to it. The Pentagon is finally making steps towards weaponizing and militarizing Geek Squad.

The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.
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Mr. Obama, officials said, will announce the creation of a White House office — reporting to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council — that will coordinate a multibillion-dollar effort to restrict access to government computers and protect systems that run the stock exchanges, clear global banking transactions and manage the air traffic control system.

White House officials say Mr. Obama has not yet been formally presented with the Pentagon plan. They said he would not discuss it Friday when he announced the creation of a White House office responsible for coordinating private-sector and government defenses against the thousands of cyberattacks mounted against the United States — largely by hackers but sometimes by foreign governments — every day.

This is a tricky issue. Will this enable Skynet or can it be used to fight Skynet? I guess we'll never find out until the bombs start dropping.

But you will also be grateful to know that our government's deranged perversion about putting someone in control of something and then calling them "_______czar" is still intact. The man who'll run the militarized Dell Support Center will be given the title Cyberczar. If that title gave you an idea for a movie about a Putin-esque despot who, through some electrical accident that happens while he's touching his computer, is transported into the intarwubs, and an elite squad of Ukranian hackers has to do battle with him for control of cyberspace, well then you can just fuck right off, because I already thought of it and patented the idea.

Still, better late then never. I mean it's not like China has been launching cyberattacks on us for years, is it?