North Korea conflict imminent?

[Laszlo]

Magma on form today!

[alphacat]

Video of dancing North Koreans:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-22116930

WTF...

[test_recordings]

Actually, apparently NK likes to fuck around and caught SK offguard one time. When the SK news reported that the NK space rocket had been dismantled before launch and returned to it's hanger, NK then launched it with no prior warning

[alphacat]

Whitepaper from a known thinktank discussing the prospect of collapse at some point in the near future. Very, very long (novel length in fact) but full of very, very interesting tidbits.

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pu ... _RR331.pdf

[alphacat]

We Hacked North Korea With Balloons & USB Drives
An airborne challenge to Kim Jong Un’s information monopoly

[test_recordings]

Apparently SK banned that shit for while.

That stuff works though. I think people are getting fed up of lack of entertainment

[_ronzlo_]

Speaking of entertainment...

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/13/world/asi ... rth-korea/

The thing that bugs is that I can't really fault many of dude's arguments... But the forum he chose to convey them invalidates the whole thing.

Also, he seems... Off.

[magma]

Speaking of entertainment...

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/13/world/asi ... rth-korea/

The thing that bugs is that I can't really fault many of dude's arguments... But the forum he chose to convey them invalidates the whole thing.

Also, he seems... Off.

If a 16 year old had the same rant at you, you'd buy it... but I think the last thing you'd suggest to make it better would be do emigrate to a country that's famously worse on almost all counts.

He should've emigrated to Costa Rica.

We should all emigrate to Costa Rica, tbh.

[nowaysj]

Got dibs on Puerto Viejo.

[_ronzlo_]

From ; [/; [url=http://m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30283573]BBC article on North Korean hacking capabilities nothing we didn't already know/suspect, but interesting nonetheless - you can bet they're just mirroring what other world players are doing too. In a larger context, this is exactly why the US and close allies (like the UK) are pwning the whole goddamned internet.

The 62-year-old defector listed five reasons for North Korea's growing interest in cyber warfare:

"First, cybermilitary strength is cost effective. With the North's deteriorating economic situation, it cannot compete with South Korea or the US in building conventional military army, naval or air forces.

"Grooming prodigies, deploying them, setting up internet, buying programmes, and providing conditions for them to operate in China or another third country is considerably cheaper than buying new weapons or fighter jets which cost hundreds of millions of dollars," Kim said.

"Second, North Korea is extremely confident of its software development capabilities, as cracking passwords within a secured system and finding patches within networks are all based on mathematical capabilities.

"Third, cyberstrength provides higher utility than any other naval, air, or army force. A state may possess tens of thousands of foot soldiers or hundreds of jets - but rarely would be able to use them, "especially in this day and age".

"But cybermanpower - once you have that established you can steal any classifed information from enemy states, incapacitate their servers and cause social panic through psychological warfare. It's high in utility in terms of creating different types of confusion and chaos - and that is cyberwarfare's biggest merit," said Kim.

"Fourth, cyber warfare is asymmetrically advantageous for the North. None of its servers are yet connected to the internet, which makes it immune to cyberattacks. But South Korea and other enemy countries, or any other country for that matter, will undergo major chaos if their computer system were to crash. For this very reason North Korea is fascinated with cyberwarfare."

"Finally, North Korea has recognised the internet's inherent weakness from its very inception in the mid-1990s. It realised that, as long as it maintained an attack network, it could easily hack into strategic targets with considerable speed. That's why they were driven to aggressively engage China in military exchanges to quickly build up a cyberforce of 500 hackers.