Interesting Article on Marcus Hutchins
This is a good article on the complicated story of hacker Marcus Hutchins.
Comments
ATN • March 16, 2018 8:11 AM
So, simple to remember: do not try to do/take the job of the NSA, they do not want to loose their own job – whatever the price.
@Winter
continuing on your line:
https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/
he say more or less the same, today everyone is violating some law.
i don’t know (the details of) his story so i’m not judging him but still i think that what winter wrote is correct.
in fact when i was installing fallout4 from the dvd i was reading the “contract/terms of service” and it said that i was forbidden from copying the files on the hard disk.
i was thinking: “wtf? setup is all about copyng dvd to hdd so is illegal to play this??”
not that i care at all about what they write but still is kind of strange.
I prefer swiss cheese and fresh tomatoes with my ham sandwiches. Must also be on fresh rye bread, with freshly ground black pepper.
Reads as if he is under house arrest for his own safety and for political reasons due to the suspected North Korea involvement in wanna cry. Makes for an easy press target to re ignight the US – NK political dramas.
blablablaginger • March 16, 2018 9:06 AM
Every American should read and memorize this:
https://www.popehat.com/2017/12/04/everybody-lies-fbi-edition/
If the FBI — or any law enforcement agency — asks to talk to you, say “No, I want to talk to my lawyer, I don’t want to talk to you,” and repeat as necessary. Do not talk to them “just to see what they want.” Do not try to “set the facts straight.” Do not try to outwit them. Do not explain that you have “nothing to hide.”
Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.
@BS ( Bruce Scheinet )
have you gone though the current NIST or US Federal process for cryptographic evaluation for inclusion on their shopping list of approved product for .gov departments ?
AISEF / Common Criteria
@blablablaginger Americans believe that a polygraph test is able to tell when people lie. I don’t know the Marcus case in detail, but the timing and political motivations definitely have to be considered.
Have the FBI actually produced tangible evidence ?
Winter • March 16, 2018 9:48 AM
@blablablaginger
It is not limited to the FBI. Everybody should watch this (very funny) evergreen:
Never talk to the police
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Summary:
Never, never never talk to the police without a your lawyer present. But if X? In case of X, do not talk to the police without your lawyer present.
If it is that important that they talk to you, they can wait for your lawyer.
echo • March 16, 2018 10:55 AM
‘Rigged games’ and ‘kick the vitcim’ who exposed flaws in the competence of ‘authority’? Offered information ignored or abused for ‘don’t rock the boat’ career advantage or protection? Complain and they double down on instituational harssment and wilfully ignore or obstruct knowledge of internal abuse procedures? Use unlimited taxpayer funds to outlast a citizen with limited resources right to the steps of the court? Offer a buy-off without accepting liability under NDA which heads of organisational accountability and reform while insinuating the citizen is a shake down artist?
This kind of thing is sad when it happens and it happens too many times.
I hope Marcus Hutchins is innocent for his own sake and will feel personally let down if he isn’t. While the Russian issue is orthogonal to this topic I am keeping on open mind on whether the whole affair is driven by an out of control beaurocracy and backseat tiny minds with agendas. The Russians are opening their own investigations.
Whatever happens I hope the truth – the real truth gets out.
Clive Robinson • March 16, 2018 12:17 PM
@ Mark,
Have the FBI actually produced tangible evidence ?
Note that I am aware of, not that they realy have to under that old law, the scope is so wide that if you used a calculator on somebody elses desk without their –written– permission then that’s about five years worth of jail time.
What the article does mention is a hundred and fifty pages of web chat logs…
There is that line about “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged” – Cardinal Richelieu.
From that we can assume the FBI will assume they have enough to hang him out to dry.
@ All,
Yes there is rather unpleasent politics, nationalism and racism involved with much the FBI do. It’s become quite clear to many now –even though I’ve been saying it for over a decade and a half– the US has a “rights striping” legal process, further that US jails are very far from safe and that due to private prisons, prison terms are rapidly rising. A number of UK journalists have published articles that show corruption from rookie cops all the way up to very senior judges in the US system.
Worse still the system is all about incentives from the bottom to the top. The bigger and more brightly coloured the scalps on your war belt the more you rise in the various tribes.
It became clear that President Obama after a few fire side chats with Silicon Vally crooks and IP stealers put preasure on DA’s to go after even protesters. Such that the cyber equivalent of a sit down protest was being pursued with more vigour than serial killers. Some DA’s spouses even got in the act of claiming that the ridiculous levels of preasure heaped on a defendent by the DA were the defendents fault because they would not plead guilty when told to by the DA…
Oh and do not be a foreigner visiting the US you will be very much discriminated against and villified by the US Justice system. It’s got so bad that these days when I see the FBI or the DoJ pushing, I assume it’s because they actually have nothing but will try anything including theft of paper clips or jaywalking just to ensure they look right and the defendent guilty of something…
Remember it’s assumed that each person in the US commits over a thousand crimes a year… That’s not a reflection on US citizens but the US legal system, where you have to know the exact words to not commit a crime by declining to talk to the FBI for your own protection…
@Clive we call that scenario kangaroo courts hear in Australia, and we have had our historical fair share of judicial incorrect decisions, in fact the ABC was running a series of podcasts of some rather famous ones here in Oz called Wrongfull, [ http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/features/wrongful-stories-of-justice-denied-and-redeemed/ ], worth a listen if you can get access from your part of the world.
Has anyone ever taken DARPA to court for designing the standards for TCPv4 ? After all, they engineered the backdoors.
@ALL seems Adrian has moved on, [ https://www.wired.com/story/adrian-lamo-has-passed-away-at-37/ ]
@Hmm free pizza for the homeless this sunday ?
Arthur • March 16, 2018 9:34 PM
Something is very peculiar in the explanation of his success in stopping a major exploit – all he had to do was register a domain name transparent in the exploit code to accidentally execute a kill switch? This could easily have required return of a private key to kill the exploit – are serious criminal hackers really this arrogant, that they would allow theft of their control out of hubris?
Arthur • March 16, 2018 9:48 PM
Sorry, I mean a control command encrypted with a private key.
Mark • March 16, 2018 10:38 PM
@Arthur
The whole WannaCry model of encrypting someones data and then forcing them to by the password is a lame criminal model. 100% of business do backups, individuals, do backups, apart from the time by the business or individual to resort the affected data, there really is no point in paying the ransom for a key which may not even decrypt the affected data, and you are going to have to rebuild / restore anyways, to ensure peace of mind over the integrity of your data / OS.
Running /bin/strings -a -n 1 over a binary and seeing a domain name [ 10 seconds ] ?
Knowing that what it does and how it effects the binary can only be done in a lab, testing the DNS / binary network queries / running forensics over the OS the binary is being tested on. [ days to weeks ]
Guessing it is a kill switch without profiling the binary and testing all possible responses via forensics is a big recklas leap.
Criminals don’t write worms which have a kill switch, governments do, testing labs do.
Why on earth would someone who is hoping to ream in as much money as possible, by spreading a ransom ware worm, using an exploit that the NSA was using illegally, want to stop it ?
Clive Robinson • March 17, 2018 5:17 AM
@ Mark,
Why on earth would someone who is hoping to ream in as much money as possible, by spreading a ransom ware worm, using an exploit that the NSA was using illegally, want to stop it ?
Oh there are a couple of reasons.
The first is “the bomber wants to stay alive switch” theory. The second is it was a badly designed anti-investigation mechanism.
There used to be the idea that bombers were reasonably inteligent and thus would include a hidden off switch so they did not get killed by their own bomb. Thus on the same idea a malware writer would put in a kill switch for similar reasons when they were in the build or test phase, but also in the deployment phase to avoid the gun to the head threat if caught.
The argument was made that the malware writers were in such a hurry to deploy they forgot to remove the safety mechanism. This was I gather based in part on the fact the attackers had not setup the backend to cover the payments etc of their ill gotton gains. Others pointed out that, that along with the fact the code was so badly written that it might have escaped during the early development phase, or that the developers were little more than script kiddies taking the next step of ambition.
Which brings us onto the second point, of anti-investigation code where they made a mistake in their logic. It is known that malware writters put in the equivalent of anti-tamper devices to slow down investigators getting at the code to look for flaws in the design. One such is based on the observation that an investigator will run the code in a sandpit with no network connectivity etc to prevent it escaping. So such an anti-investigate device would ping hosts on the Internet. If the code did not get a response then nomatter what else it was told by the sandpit the malware was not running on the Internet thus should cloak it’s self from investigation. The argument thus goes on they forgot to flip the invert logic from development to deploy mode.
But my naturally suspicious mind can also see other arguments atleast one of which you are thinking of.
Which brings up the point I keep making about attribution especialy atribution without a real HumInt component it’s unreliable at best and is very likely to reflect an investigators assumptions and prejudices than reality. Further anyone well versed in such investigations would know how to fake things so investigators would be misled.
@Clive
Dunno mate, I never worry about staying alive switches, usually just a dead man switch, Ive been a prostrate cancer patient for 6 years now, so the gun to the head to force someone to stop something they may or may not have created, would be like playing Russian roulette with all chambers loaded at a DefCon Conference.
Looks like a witch hunt, something americans also made famous ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp_l5ntikaU )
echo • March 17, 2018 9:35 AM
@Mark
The UK is not above ignoring the UK Supreme Court and using anti-terrorist legislation (after quitely forgetting about proportionality) to cover up potential human rights infringing deportations.
Did you read the George Monbiot article in the Guardian? I know it won’t help you medically but perhaps a fellow patient may find the article lifts their spirits?
Mark • March 17, 2018 10:47 AM
@echo
Nope, I have a look tomorrow.
Just remember, if you end up having Robotic Surgery like I did, ( DaVinci Dual-SI ) [ https://www.intuitivesurgical.com/products/davinci_surgical_system/davinci_surgical_system_si/dualconsole.php ] you actually can have the DaVinci record the whole surgery, just as the surgeon sees it. Quite an amazing solution. Does not run on Windows….;)
UK passed the ‘Snoops’ legislation Nov 2016 as well and quite funnily, the former head of MI5, actually gave an interview, regarding the Oz gov’s DTCA – DSGL – Cryptology screw ups here late last year. [ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-10/former-mi5-chief-says-encryption-cut-could-lead-to-more-hacking/9136746 ]
‘The Turnbull Government is working on legislation designed to force tech companies to hand over encrypted messages to prevent terrorism and solve crimes.
It is thought that the planned legislation could draw on British laws introduced in 2016.’
mmmmmm, I do cryptology hardening via “FooCrypt, A Tale Of Cynical Cyclical Encryption” which has Defence Export Control approval under the 2012 DTCA(act), 1958 Customs(Act) etc,
I take away ‘BACK DOORS’ and wrap the data in “QUANTUM ENCRYPTION”. Thats kinda impossible to put a back door in, as the user has the ability to select any cypher engine they wish to use.
I by pass key loggers with a software keyboard.
Mouse loggers with Auto Key
Screen captures | shoulder surfers | remote cameras | etc by modifying the colors
Runs in a VM from a Live Linux ISO
Runs on a Bootable USB disk, just put it in your pocket, shoe, cufflinks, sunglasses, mmmm where ever you hide your USB Boot Disks whilst your walking around with them.
Live does not need any physical disks, does not need any NIC’s, just 4GB of memory and access to the data / keys via a shared source ( USB – Other Disk | VM Shared Directory )
Mark • March 17, 2018 11:16 AM
@echo et al
I forgot I did this jpeg-2000 bone scan results thing [ https://www.fookey.net/diagnosis–2-years/psa-and-bone-scan-results ] nearly 4 years ago now. Unfortunately, the root cause analysis is actually possible. Ohh what fun it is to have an IT background when you need medical tests / treatment….!
Post RALP is extremely difficult if they have to find a secondary cancer, and full body bone scans [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_scintigraphy ]
echo • March 17, 2018 11:48 AM
@Mark
With an original background in software and analysis it’s extremely annoying being in front of a doctor who doesn’t read their own policies and standards of care nor verify their own results. I don’t want to describe the horror show of gross negligience and worse I experienced.
Stanford Research Explains Lack of Women in Tech: Men Make Them Unwelcome Before They Even Apply
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/stanford-research-explains-lack-of-women-in-tech-men-make-them-unwelcome-before-they-even-apply.html
Google engineer James Damore famously suggested that there are few women in technology jobs because we’re biologically unsuited for those rules. Now research from Stanford reveals a simpler explanation: Technology recruiters on college campuses subtly make it clear from the beginning that women aren’t supposed to be in those jobs. That message may be delivered unintentionally and even unconsciously. But it’s being heard loud and clear: Women with STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math) degrees are dramatically less likely to wind up in tech jobs than their male counterparts.
https://www.inc.com/the-muse/signs-great-leader-manager-google-research-study.html
It’s no secret that being a good manager can make all the difference in how happy your team is and how well it performs. Google not only proved this to skeptics years ago, but also identified eight (later updated to 10) behaviors of its best managers. So why not learn from one of the most successful data-driven companies out there?
D-503 • March 17, 2018 11:55 AM
@Mark “The whole WannaCry model of encrypting someones data and then forcing them to buy the password is a lame criminal model.”
The way to test that is to check whether anyone has made money from ransomware, and how often people and businesses hit by ransomware have paid up. I suspect that some people have gotten rich from ransomware, but I wouldn’t be able point to any convincing examples. Nevertheless, ransomware seems a lot more common than one would expect if no one was making money from it.
“100% of business do backups”
I think you and I live in different bubbles/worlds. I know a lot of highly knowledgeable, highly competent people in the tech sector, but I also know that they’re not representative of people one encounters in most businesses. I’d be surprised if more than 20% of businesses do proper backups, and more than 50% of businesses do any kind of backups at all. But then I’m biased, because I’ve seen the insides only two kinds of workplaces: 1) places that often out-Dilbert the Dilbert cartoons, and 2) places that have no one even vaguely computer-literate or interested to try.
“individuals do backups”
I do, but I’m several orders of magnitude more paranoid and geeky than the average person. I’m a little bit baffled by the lackadaisical attitude people have about backing up their data, but there are real reasons why most people don’t do backups.
I’d be surprised if more than 1% of individuals in the general public do adequate backups. As for an untrained person doing a rebuild / restore in a production environment while facing deadlines… it’s not that people are stupid (or, at least, stupider than the experts), it’s that these tasks really aren’t all that trivial, they have a steep learning curve and require time, planning, and a technical mindset – luxuries most people (or businesses) don’t have.
Sorry to hear of your cancer. Its interesting how different people react differently to a terminal diagnosis. When I had a terminal diagnosis many years ago I was beside myself with sheer terror. Fortunately, the diagnosis turned out to be false. Stephen Hawking, on the other hand, embraced life with extra enthusiasm after being diagnosed with ALS, and refused to give up.
@echo
@D-503
You should definitely try penetration testing a blood collection lab from a theoretical perspective, with a man in the middle attack, on the blood sample, the transportation process, the end testing lab, the assay they use, the accuracy of the assay, the lab returning the results to the doctor, the doctors IT environment, etc, etc.
Nothing is perfect in any testing / diagnostic process. Worse when you know how to break it and it is your blood being tested.
Getting access to accurate research data / prediction tools [ https://www.mskcc.org/nomograms ] in order to be able to make an informed decision on treatment, is the hardest issue here in Oz. I was fortunate with early detection.
Back in the early 80’s when I started my career, most corporations in the mainframe space that I started in, had barriers so that women would’t even be considered for employment. Weight lifting restrictions in Mainframe Operations, had to cater for being able to move removable disk packs, lifting / mounting hundreds of open spool tape reels, not to mentioning impact printers with 30Kg box’s of paper or early laser printers which most organisations actually put on their job descriptions / employment conditions even for non operations roles of just pure programming roles. Starting in ICT today is completely different to 40 odd years ago, the majority of those sexist barriers are gone. The playing field has been levelled to remove those physical data centre constraints and the variation of positions within ICT cater now for an unlimited spectrum of educational requirements. Programming, etc is a skill that anyone can learn, regardless of their age, sex, race, education, etc.
Employer bias on genders when it comes down to a male and a female, with identical qualifications, experience, etc is a business decision based purely on women taking time off for maternity leave and government policy on supporting the female / business whilst the female is on maternity leave.
Apple has TimeMachine by default for the individual end user, buy a disk 4 times your hard disk, your protected, buy 2 times 4 * your hard disk, your protected, with off site storage, quite easy to apply the same formula to any other OS / Hardware model.
8TB external USB 3 disk drives * 2, enough to protect a 1TB local disk drive for a year.
MS has always made restore / recovery difficult for the home user to understand and provided limited tools apart from a complete rebuild. Third party tools are quite expensive as opposed to a simple ‘rsync / find | cpio’ that linux / macOS users have access to by default.
echo • March 18, 2018 1:56 PM
@Clive
This is pretty much the entire system (even before we get into issues of professional negligience by lawyers let alone the state sector and well funded bandits in the private sector).
Courts that are like an A&E unit on a Saturday night, violent abusers walking free because evidence has gone missing, and lawyers doing hours of unpaid work to keep the system from collapse, are all part of a damning picture painted in a new book on the legal system by a barrister.
According to the anonymous author of The Secret Barrister: Stories Of The Law And How It’s Broken, the courts in Britain have been brought to their knees by government cuts and left so plagued by daily errors they are no longer fit for purpose.
[…]
The book says: “Walk into any court in the land, speak to any lawyer, ask any judge, and you will be treated to uniform complaints of court deadlines being repeatedly missed, cases arriving under-prepared, evidence being lost, disclosures not being made, victims made to feel marginalised, and millions of pounds of public money wasted.”
echo • March 18, 2018 1:58 PM
@Clive
This is pretty much the entire system (even before we get into issues of professional negligience by lawyers let alone the state sector and well funded bandits in the private sector).
Courts that are like an A&E unit on a Saturday night, violent abusers walking free because evidence has gone missing, and lawyers doing hours of unpaid work to keep the system from collapse, are all part of a damning picture painted in a new book on the legal system by a barrister.
According to the anonymous author of The Secret Barrister: Stories Of The Law And How It’s Broken, the courts in Britain have been brought to their knees by government cuts and left so plagued by daily errors they are no longer fit for purpose.
[…]
The book says: “Walk into any court in the land, speak to any lawyer, ask any judge, and you will be treated to uniform complaints of court deadlines being repeatedly missed, cases arriving under-prepared, evidence being lost, disclosures not being made, victims made to feel marginalised, and millions of pounds of public money wasted.”
@Arthur:
that was NOT a kill switch, that was probably a way to detect if you are online or not, if you are on a virtual machine used for malware analysis or in a real pc:
-you try to connect to google, if you fail you know ou are offline, probably in an isolated malware analysis enviroment, and don’t trigger the bad code, you just exit.
so what the av vendor does? they return success on every connection to trick the virus into thinking that it is online, to see and analyze the bad behaviour.
-you try to connect to a random not existent domain say 2e8f7yh28fiyu43f2wef.com
if you succes than you are probably under some testing enviroment which return success on every connection, so you detected the malyare analyst and you exit without doing nothing.
journalist have reported this a a killswitch/backdoor. but this is just a way to thetect malaware analyst enviroment.
Dan H • March 19, 2018 7:43 AM
@Clive Robinson
“US jails are very far from safe”
Have you ever been in a US jail or prison that you’ve had personal and first-hand experiences?
“Oh and do not be a foreigner visiting the US you will be very much discriminated against and villified by the US Justice system.”
Stop with the hyperbole. That just ruins any credibility you bestow upon yourself and just highlights your anti-American diabtribe.
I’m sorry so many Americans had to die twice in European wars. You’d have been much happier Clive being a Third Reich citizen.
US Navy Nimitz class aircraft carries displace 100,000 tonnes. The newest (and only carrier, do you have the money for the second one?) UK HMS QE is only 65,000 and is diesel powered. The U.S. Navy also has the largest underwater force in the world. The UK has 3 amphibious ships and the US Navy has 31. Our Navy is about 325,000 active and 110,000 reserve, while the UK has only a paltry 33,000 active and 2,600 reserve.
If Britain was a state it would be second poorest, right behind Alabama. The US is the UKs second largest trading partner and second largest export market.
Dan H • March 19, 2018 1:35 PM
@Hin
“you would also be speaking Japanese.”
Hardly. The Japanese knew they had one shot, and that was to cripple the US fleet in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor, and if they failed they knew they would lose a war with the United States. They did not destroy the Pacific fleet and carriers were at sea. Once the Japanese lost their carriers at Midway, it was just a matter of time.
But my point was that Clive is so anti-American, but it is American power that has fought and won two European wars started there; and that Britain today needs American military power, as does the world. Even though I’m American, and served, thus biased, but I’d prefer a stronger America in the world than Russia or China being the predominate power.
wumpus • March 19, 2018 2:04 PM
@blablablaginger
While I agree you should never talk to police, this likely only works if you are carrying two cameras. One to hand over when you tell them you aren’t talking to the and they are being recorded and the other [carefully concealed*] one to record your subsequent beatdown while “resisting arrest”.
The degree of which you will accept this beatdown depends on how much you want to keep silent. And (especially for those who can’t afford Ken White as a lawyer) this seems to happen regularly when cops aren’t aware that cameras are rolling.
- if you don’t tell them about the camera it can be dismissed in a number of jurisdictions, but I’d be shocked silly if you have to inform them that their assumption of privacy is incorrect after confiscating the obvious go-pro. This ancient trick should be familiar to all readers of this blog (and can be used to convince cops not to look for a camera even in single party states).
Clive Robinson • March 19, 2018 2:29 PM
@ Dan H,
US Navy Nimitz class aircraft carries displace 100,000 tonnes. The newest (and only carrier, do you have the money for the second one?) UK HMS QE is only 65,000 and is diesel powered.
Oh and you forgot to mention the QE does not have the 36 US designed and built F35s yet, you might want to look up why. A simple google of F35B with debacle” “disaster” “failure” or similar will give most a fairly clear idea.
But either you have a very bad memory or you are grasping at straws to make a body for your diatribe.
As I’ve noted here in the past the golden age of the aircrfat carrier was very brief at the end of WWII. They are without any doubt a “sitting duck” in moden warfare amongst the super powers and quite a few other countries.
It’s not just the US that aquired the designs of nuclear weapons in an underhand manner (see history of Leo Szilard and the British Tube Alloys project[1]).
As tactical devices they can be mounted on the head of cruise missiles (~2000Km range) various torpedoes and smart mines. A Navy carrier group is extreamly vulnerable and can not defend it’s self against such weapons. Likewise an older style ICBM etc which other countries such as North Korea have developed. Oh and the over priced aircraft that have a habit of falling out of the sky don’t have the range (~1100 if you want to get home) of these less expensive weapons which should be telling you something rather more important.
So we all now know what your knowledge is in that area.
As for US prisons even the US’s own reports on the safety of their prisons tells you they are dangerous places and are far from equiped to deal with people with certain health care needs. As judges have pointed out when denying extradition.
So we all now know what your knowledge is in that area.
I could go on but to be quite honest it is pointless you have developed a very strange somewhat sinister set of beliefs about the US that appear worse than those you would expect from an ingrained authoritarian follower, with a bad case of the very outmoded view point of “My Country Right or Wrong”.
Sadly this manifests it’s self with you haranging and otherwise attacking people who don’t share your authoritarian follower ideals or less than reasoned party political out look. But sadly for you each time you do so you reveal to the world your lack of rationality, education and ability to look things up…
Perhaps you should go look atleast one thing up, Einstein’s definition of madness…
Gerard van Vooren • March 19, 2018 2:41 PM
@ Dan H,
“But my point was that Clive is so anti-American, but it is American power that has fought and won two European wars started there;”
You’ve been watching way too many (mostly US) war movies. The reality is, and that is a well known fact, that WW2 was fought and lost by the Germans in the Soviet Union. If you want any numbers about WW2, call us, but the US did not win WW2!
Ratio • March 19, 2018 3:20 PM
@Gerard van Vooren,
The reality is, and that is a well known fact, that WW2 was fought and lost by the Germans in the Soviet Union
That’s true to an extent. But that includes this tiny detail called Lend-Lease. According to Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs:
I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin’s views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were “discussing freely” among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany’s pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don’t think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.
Maybe reality is a bit more nuanced than what well-known facts (either way) would have you believe?
Clive Robinson • March 19, 2018 4:16 PM
@ Ratio, Gerard van Vooren,
Maybe reality is a bit more nuanced than what well-known facts (either way) would have you believe?
Lend lease was about industrial production. The US had a significant advantage not having it’s factories being bommed out or it’s supplies of raw materials being blockaded (Something Germany did in both world wars with submarines).
But it’s fairly clear from national records that most US Politicians wanted to bleed the UK white and take as many UK assets and later IP as they could.
It’s without a doubt that the US did very nicely out of both World Wars better in fact than the MIC did with the near four decades of the “cold war”.
What stopped what would have been the beginings of a third world in Europe was the unbelievable generosity of individual US citizens sending food parcels to the UK and what became known as the Marshal plan. Have a look at what history shows between the end of WWII in Europe and the start of the Marshal plan, you might well be shocked at what various US military and political seniors were pushing for.
But there is also something else to look at and consider and that was the post war effect of two decades of Keynesian Economics.
Gerard van Vooren • March 20, 2018 2:08 AM
@ Ratio,
Aah, Nikita Khrushchev, that’s a guy that I would like to have a visit with when he was still alive. I adored his way of working and his attitude. But that said, it was the cold that killed the German forces in WW2. A very costly “oops” one could say.
I don’t think that a person like Dan H is even capable of recognizing everything what happened and that is because I don’t think that he is the person who reads the memoirs of Khrushchev.
hooodathunkit • March 21, 2018 5:30 PM
@Clive “What stopped what would have been the beginings of a third world in Europe was the unbelievable generosity of individual US citizens sending food parcels to the UK and what became known as the Marshal plan. Have a look at what history shows between the end of WWII in Europe and the start of the Marshal plan, you might well be shocked at what various US military and political seniors were pushing for.”
After WWI the Versailles Treaty’s conditions and reparations made possible the rise of Germany’s nationalistic expansion under Hitler. [VT did not cause it, they made it probable.] After WWII, Henry Morgenthau’s plan —signed off by FDR— was not much more than a doubling down on the same principles of punishment. It was civilian bureaucrats and politicos all the way (with some notable exceptions), but no military involved.
In post-war Germany, the US military defied the Morgenthau Plan as much as possible or safe from courts-martial; it may be the largest mutiny in the world. Eisenhower returned to the US to politically lobby against it, leaving his former aide Clay in command. The Marshall Plan didn’t start until ’48, but US soldiers did what they could from ’45 until the aid started flowing. It wasn’t always enough, but it was better than nothing, and a far, far cry from what had been intended by the deep state.
D-503 • March 27, 2018 1:22 AM
@Mark re backups on a mac
If we count the user’s time as being worth minimum wage, I’d say Time Machine is more expensive than rsync, and rsync is more expensive than third-party COTS software.
I used Time Machine for several years on different macs, and can report that it’s the most unreliable and crash-prone backup method I’ve seen, by far[1]. Even when it works as advertised, it’s very limited in what it can do.
Using rsync via the shell: the user needs to know what they’re doing, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. That a single typo can spoil your whole day is a deterrent for beginners.
Third-party COTS software, in my experience, is close to 100% reliable no matter how large the backup, can get the user back in business within 2 minutes of the computer’s system drive dying, and those software bugs that do occasionally turn up get fixed within days.
I currently use rotating manual backups to 3 hard drives in 3 different physical locations, supplemented by Carbon Copy Cloner for more frequent backups. Super Duper also gets good reviews, but I haven’t tried it.
[1] For example: at random times, Time Machine will perform Monty Python’s “waffa-thin mint” sketch when it does a minor file update, even when the computer has several Gb free memory, the source disk has 100s of Gb free space, and the destination disk has >1 Tb free space.
Also, Time Machine won’t back up a working copy of the OS, and won’t back up the Recovery Partition. The lack of these makes a full system restore a lot more… interesting.
At the heart of the problem is that Time Machine competes with Apple’s revenue-generating iCloud, so maintaining and fixing Time Machine is low priority.
@history buffs
The Morgentau Plan has a complex history. There were two or three different Morgentau Plans, the main thing in common among them was that Germany would be converted into a third-world agrarian economy where roughly 40% of the civilian population would have to be culled. None of the versions were officially implemented, because of the public outcry over the massive propaganda boost that the plan gave to Nazi Germany.
A watered-down version was implemented from 1945 to1949 in the western occupation zones, and longer in the Russian occupation zone. The Soviet Union, the US, and France did systematic, large-scale looting. The Soviets were by far the most thorough about asset-stripping their zone, but the US, France, and the UK did a lot. Even in the western zones, infrastructure that couldn’t be dismantled and shipped to Allied countries was being blown up. It got bad enough that Germans in the western zones started to rebel. Meanwhile, the Soviet occupation zone experienced a major famine.
Around 1947-1949 the Americans came to realise that 1) an industrialised Germany would be essential for western Europe’s economic survival, and 2) “former” Nazis would be an important ally against the Soviet Union. Consequently, punishment of the western zones stopped, and under the Marshall Plan much of the war reparations were written off. This set the stage for a much more impressive economic miracle in West Germany than in East Germany 15+ years after the war.
Here’s a little snapshot from 1949:
https://www.cvce.eu/obj/letter_from_konrad_adenauer_to_robert_schuman_26_july_1949-en-a03f485c-0eeb-4401-8c54-8816008a7579.html
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Winter • March 16, 2018 7:08 AM
To put this story in perspective, read:
Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713
And here is where the title comes from: