Max's Miscellaneous Musings

... and he's Chinese. Hands up anyone who's surprised.

There were two things I found really interesting about this article. First is - Botnets are alive and well. For all the antivirus and antimalware programs out there, we - the IT community - are still not getting it right.

Secondly, am I the only one who was surprised to find the Dalai Lama has an office, and that it is computerised? I really had this vision of this old dude spending his days praying and visiting empoverished/downtrodden people, and not much else. They have their own email server? Far out.

What really annoyed me about the article was this:

The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.

closely followed by this:

Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”

Sure. It's not run by the Chinese government, but government agencies somehow got a hold of information that let them intimidate diplomats and human rights activists. How convenient. Oh, it might be a private company doing this? Ever heard of outsourcing, you dummies? Let's take a scenario: China's government pays outsourced private for-profit operation to do its dirty work... yet we are supposed to believe that because it's the private company doing the dirty work, that somehow the government isn't involved? Are these people naive? Or just stupid? Or scared?

But they try to reel us back in with this:

“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”

Yeh, OK.

In all, the article makes reference to a few reports about this and similar incidents, and I think I will try to track them down. Should make for some light bed-time reading.