8/21/2018

Foreigners setting agenda for serious discussion in local media

17 Aug, I looked through the few pages next to the editorial column of the ST where more serious articles are posted, not the kind like who is eating what, which dog is prettier or why we should not feed the birds or monkeys, I noticed that only one or at best two articles were written by Singaporeans. Perhaps another one or two could be new citizens or PRs. This is the pathetic state of news reporting and journalism in Singapore, just like IT and banking, Singaporeans not good enough. In news reporting, Singaporeans would be good enough to write about hawker foods and Michelin stars or sports.
 

Two articles got me reading to see the agenda of the writers, one, ‘That China worry, again by Ravi Veloor and another, ‘China’s trouble economy a bigger worry…’ by a Suchir Sharma. Not dissimilar to the western media’s China bashing, the two biased western coloured lens articles, if you are to believe in them, had one theme, China is in big big trouble.
 

Ravi Veloor started by laughing at Alibaba for having only a market value of US$440 billion, far behind Apple’s US$1 trillion and close competitor Amazon. And this is the fault of Xi for the bad relations with the USA. He would not want to tell you that Alibaba has only recently been listed in the NY Stock Exchange and has a history of a couple of decades old at most while Apple and Amazon have more than double, triple or quadruple the history of Alibaba.
 

He then went on to talk about Trump winning the trade war and China is now faced with a long list of problems. On the other hand the Americans are merrily going around as if nothing is happening, nothing is affecting them. He even went on to say that Xi Jinping is having a lot of trouble at home, his popularity challenged, he is being attacked for causing the trade wars with the USA and would be held responsible for it. Other leaders that were in trouble were Putin and Modi.
 

Trump and the USA have no problem. Trump is having a great ball of a time putting pressure on other countries and leaders. No one is troubling Trump or putting pressure on Trump. The tape recordings of him hiring prostitutes and other saucy stuff are good Sunday morning read, the whole media industry attacking him is only for fun, making enemies of everyone and countries, including traditional allies and national leaders are non issues. Simply said, everything is fine in the USA and in Donald Trump. America is another Disneyland and Donald Trump is the happy Donald Duck.
 

Suchir Sharma’s article dismisses Turkey’s lira problem as chicken feed and claimed that China’s economy is the real problem. As usual, China is in deep economic woes. The greenback is rising and Yuan is falling which can only be good for the Americans and bad for China. And China cannot lower the value of its Yuan to boost export as it would lead to a loss in confidence on the Yuan as a reserve currency. China is in a dilemma. No a weakening of the Yuan is bad for China and the rising value of the dollar is good for the USA. 

The USA is riding high and carefree. The higher the greenback appreciates the better. No, it would not affect American exports. America is in control of everything and everything is in favour of the Americans. The falling Yuan was due to the trade war launched by the Americans, not a deliberate move by China to counter the hike in tariffs.
 

And the greenback is in high demands and the Yuan is not.
 

Reading the two articles, anyone would believe that China as a country is failing apart and would soon be bankrupt and broken up as a lost country. Xi is going to be removed from power. Hip hip horray! Long live the American Empire!
 

Now, are these articles fake news, distorted news or objective and serious intellectual discussions that no Singaporean journalists could produce? What are their agenda and motive for disparaging China with these fishy and loaded views?

33 comments:

Anonymous said...

China sticks to a gradual n steady depreciation of the Yuan, unlike that of Japan in the late 1980s, then China will be OK. China will become more competitive n mitigate Trump tarriffs. The whole world will then have to adjust to USA n China. The "exodus" or hollowing out of China will be prevented.

Anonymous said...

Our Poppies leaders are so insecured that they need millions a year as pay to affirmed themselves n their greed. Of course ang moh tua kee n kee leng better in talking n IT.....like you said "stupidity has no cure" or insecurity has no cure" . The Leeder got no idea n tried to copied his father shouting Medaka! N tried to cried but no rain leh.

Virgo49 said...

Mr RB. Not only the Shits Times. Any Mediacock advertisementaadvertisements or propanganda of what's Multi Racial Harmony and Sing Cocks Songs, the first picture you see be the Black Ants.

Inviting foreigners to homes by Open Hearted Singaporeans also shown those wayang brought by their Traitous kinds Chinkees to also the Black Ants.

Channel 5 Mediacorpse dramas all on the Black Ants and Chap Chengs.

These Chap Chengs and Black Ants hated any thing Yellow.They are too jealous and envy of the Yellow Wave of Human Humanity.

So, they have to put them down and wallwoed in their own shits.

As I said, same time we have too many Traitous Sinkee Chinkee babanas who also loved to bash the true breed Chinese as they are been recognised as one of us.

But the most unfortunate scenario is that our own feared one Another and would prefer to be on the Traitous side to ruin our own

Not knowing that when they are also down and out, they be also be kicked around by those who they think are their friends and saviors.

You see Chinkees betittling and squabbling own Chinkees and chum chum with Others.

Their daft mentalities to be manipulated and enslaved.

Titiana Ann Xavier said...

Uncle Sam is now worried that the more the POTUS wants to MAGA, the more problems Uncle Sam will face from the cradle to the grave. Tariffs on Chinese-made cribs and coffins are pushing the cost of birth and death up. This have businessmen calling to MASA (make America sane again). Cobras from state-controlled press will not even mention it. They want to perpetuate the myth of white supremacy.

Anonymous said...

Let the facts of hundreds of millions of investors (and trillions of dollars) speak for themselves:

http://schrts.co/hf5oci

China goes thru big booms & busts .... right now it's not booming.

Anonymous said...

"If you tell a lie again and again, and again and again, long enough, it will be accepted as truth." - LKY.

This quotation has become a maxim. It has been used by the PAP as one of its strategies in mass communication.

Anonymous said...

It is even being practised here by a few of the commentators.

Anonymous said...

Quote:

"I have said this on many a previous occasion: that had the mix in Singapore been different, had it been 75% Indians, 15% Malays and the rest Chinese, it would not have worked. Because they believe in the politics of contention, of opposition. But because the culture was such that the populace sought a practical way out of their difficulties, therefore it has worked."

. Debate on President's Address, Parliament of Singapore (March 01, 1985). Retrieved on January 16 2015.

Anonymous said...

Always remember the photo of the Singapore flag being ripped apart to reveal the India national flag . . .

Anonymous said...

Ai think the only solution is for the two dudes to sodomize each other to wake up Lor. Agreed? 😀

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

1/2
@ RB

Aiyah fuck those guys lah.

The falling Yuan has thrown a spanner in Trump's tariff war. 25% tariff, Yuan down ~20%. China's exports are still competitive lah.

Turkish lira and all the other currencies printed on a mountain of US-Dollar denominated debt---they were in trouble from the time they decided to borrow in USD, and cannot pay. Edrogan hates interest rates. So he lowered them to unsustainable low levels and borrowed heavily. Dumb fuck. Come to Singapore lah. We have no foreign debt. We have over 100% sovereign debt---one of the highest in the world, but it has never and will never be sold to foreigners. We have CPF---a constant never ending BIG cash-flow, plus billions in capital to back up our outrageous debt, created by our expensive Elite government. Come over, learn from us. Don't be a turkey. We have debt. But we are RICH, bitchez!

China is playing The Big Game. The Big LONG Game. It therefore has to do all sorts of "unconventional things" to achieve it's goal of beating the west. They are very clear about this. It is a sort of MANIFESTO, and the CPC are driven to deliver by whatever means possible.

So the Chinese govt is going to assert itself wherever and whenever it suits their long-term goals. They are going to IGNORE international conventions and laws, just like the USA does. They are going to hack, break in, eavesdrop, run covert ops and intelligence gathering---just like the US, UK and 5-9-14 Eyes cuntries do. They are going to use their laws to appropriate IP from foreign companies doing business in China. Perfectly OK by me. Why?

If you are so greedy for the China market, and you know this shit is going on but don't like it...then don't come to China to do business. Stay the fuck away!. But oh no, these fuckers kick down doors to get into China then complain (already knowing what is likely to happen) later that thy've been "ripped off". Fuck off lah. Dishonest cunts!

Innovation is expensive and takes a bloody long time. So the best option is TO COPY, and if you like adapt and improve to your situation. This is what China does. They save a shit-ton of money by not doing as much R&D as they might have to if they didn't copy and steal.

Between sovereign borders of cuntries is a state of anarchy---i.e. no government, no effective laws. Nah the UN a is bullshit no power motherfucker. International Court of Justice can tekan a small tin-pot dictator now and then, but they are powerless to take on Big Cuntries. The US thumbs its nose at them, and so does China.

Why The Fuck NOT? “You can do? So can I!”

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

_CONT 2/2

China plays by China's rules. Many people are uncomfortable with that. They expect some sort of "level playing field" or some other fantasy which is IMPOSSIBLE when nations are engaged in competitive behaviour.

China gets a bad name because many people just don't like China or what they are doing. I am amoral about this: They said they want to achieve, and so they HAVE TO DO STUFF to get there, and it is going to create some blow-back. They are going to re-order the geopolitical landscape and the world's economy---using their own playbook, not anyone elses so everyone in the world can be "happy" with their methods.

China has problems. Every cuntry does. Every cuntry has financial panics, banking crisis, liquidity and debt issues. But mostly they recover. Japan got hammered in the 1980's and has been in and out of recessions ever since. But Japan is still thriving and is one of the worlds biggest economies---despite systemic problems which don't seem to go away.

Of course there are going to be crashes in China. Big ones---because they play a Big Game. If you play a small 5 sen 10 sen kacang puteh game, you won't lose much in a crash. China is playing for global dominance, leadership and they are on the clock. So they will move fast and spend big. And so when shit crashes, it will be HUGE.

But here's the thing: They will recover from any financial or liquidity or banking or whatever crisis. Crashes are GOOD. They are necessary to get rid of the underperforming losers, and allow the repricing of assets, and reallocation of capital to its most effective uses.

Even if the banks suffer a liquidity crisis (which they will), the CPC with the help of the rich cashed-up Chinese businesses will re-capitlaise the banks so quickly that the anti-China critics would be in a state of, they won't know what to say.

China is very very (robust and capable). 𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐥𝐞

Titiana Ann Xavier said...

Cobras have been living in the shadow of the Chinese Dragon since 1962. They take every opportunity to belittle the achievement of the Chinese people. They will applaud the white men if China lose the trade war. Envy and jealousy surge through the blood vessels of a venomous cobra whenever it writes about the Chinese people. Such cobras are unable to differentiate between myths and facts.

Whoever said...

BEIJING, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) -

China and El Salvador signed a joint communique in Beijing Tuesday on the establishment of diplomatic relations.

The communique was signed by Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Salvadorean Foreign Minister Carlos Castaneda.

Whoever said...


BEIJING, Aug. 20 (Xinhua):

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday met with a senior official of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), calling for efforts to further promote bilateral ties.

During the meeting with Tran Quoc Vuong, Politburo member and permanent member of the CPV Central Committee's Secretariat, at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, Xi said that complicated and profound changes are currently taking place concerning the international and regional situation.

Xi, also general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), said that bilateral ties and the socialist causes of both countries have entered into a new phase of development and face new opportunities and challenges.

Xi said he and Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the CPV Central Committee, again made mutual visits to each other's countries within a year in 2017 and reached a series of important consensus on deepening relations between the two parties and the two countries.

China is glad to see the momentum of the sound development of bilateral ties be consolidated and potential of bilateral cooperation be released, he said.

"We stand ready to work with Vietnam on in-depth conversations on overall and strategic issues and enhance the political guidance on bilateral ties so as to further promote relations," Xi said.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of forging the China-Vietnam comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation. Hailing the achievements scored in the past 10 years, Xi said China has always viewed the bilateral ties from a strategic height and a long-term perspective.

China is willing to work with Vietnam to make sure bilateral ties forge ahead along the right path under the guidance of the policy of long-term stability, forward-thinking, good-neighborliness and comprehensive cooperation, and the spirit of being good neighbors, friends, comrades and partners, said Xi.

He called on both sides to maintain high-level exchanges, enhance the synergy of development strategies, continue dialogue and consultations, manage differences and consolidate the foundation of people-to-people exchanges.

Xi said the CPC and the CPV share common views on party building. The CPC is willing to further promote exchanges with the CPV and upgrade both sides' governance ability.

Vuong congratulated China on the progress it has made under the leadership of Xi and the CPC Central Committee since the 19th CPC National Congress held last year, and spoke highly of China's contributions to regional and world peace and stability.

It is of great significance at present to cement and deepen relations between the two parties and to remain true to both parties' original aspirations, said Vuong.

Vietnam values its traditional friendship with China, he said, adding that it is the top priority in Vietnam's foreign policy to develop relations with China.

He said Vietnam is willing to work with the party and the government of China to promote the healthy and stable development of the comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation.

(Xinhua News)

Anonymous said...

Does that mean Vietnam willing to give up its claims on part of SCS?!? LOL!

Anonymous said...

Vietnamese also like the black cobra, hard to trust. The only diff is the Vietnamese women are very pretty and most have fairly large tits for Asian standard. 😀 😳😬😀😄😌😝😛

Anonymous said...

Sweden In Crisis: Leading PM Candidate Vows Migration Reforms As Nationalism Surges
--------------------------
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-20/sweden-crisis-leading-pm-candidate-vows-migration-reforms-nationalism-surges


After reeling from the sight of approximately 100 burning cars, frequent shootings, grenade attacks and sexual assaults, populism is rising in Sweden - as evidenced by the anti-immigration right-wing Sweden Democrats party surging in polls leading up to next month's September 9 elections.

Anonymous said...

'They break down the door to enter China and then complain', supposedly after entering.
Any difference from Sinkies having given their votes to PAP, then kpkb?
Sin celebrates Sg100 as imagine by Chan Chun Sing.
Will he be around ?

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

@all

Cobras, people who get in your way, people who go out of their way to trip you... these are all expected obstacles when you're on your chosen path doing your thing.

In fact, even if you're not doing anything, and just chilling out, sooner or later some cunt will come and kacau you... none of their business, but do they care? Nope. Due to intention or sheer ineptitude, they WILL mess you up, you will suffer a loss of some type... even if it's wasted time and effort on your part.

You can mitigate some of this shit, but no-one gets out without having to bear some form of "sunken cost". It's part of life, and that's that.

Human relations wax and wane. China is strengthening ties, making new ones. It's all part of their plan, and everyone knows it. You would EXPECT them to do so. Even if you hate China, you cannot deny that they're "action-biased"---just do it, worry about consequences later.

For those interested, "bias toward action" is a CORE PRINCIPLE in DESIGN THINKING. See: https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/548fb/bias_toward_action.html

Meanwhile, there could be some "design thinking" going on here: Germany is on the rise... again. Maybe this time, they'll get it Reich ,🤡
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/why-germany-is-talking-about-getting-its-own-nuclear-weapons.html

I keeping telling you folks, humans are the best entertainment value especially when our social nature manifests itself in politics. Everyone can play. Occasionally lethal weapons are involved, and the world becomes one big shooting video game.

Damn shiok 😂 Money, power, sex, envy, competitiveness, collision, gang on gang action, death, destruction, rebirth, getting killed at birth... C'mon lah, you can't deny the party is awesome!

Biased toward ACTION. See what happens

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

Game ON! Space Force needs to strap up and deploy!

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-military%E2%80%99s-worst-nightmare-russia-attacking-our-satellites-28992

More entertaining than James Bond... even a Black James Bond. 🕺👯‍♂️👋

Whoever said...

A 11 year- old girl hacked into the US electronic voting system and altered Donald Trump's votes!

Can you believe that?

Virgo49 said...

Wow Zapper.

So next GE, Papies toying with Electronic Votings??

Think last info only selected constituencies.

Why only selected Constituencies??

Anyway, the sword cuts both ways.

You can hack so can others.

State sponsored hackers can do wonders. Don't suay suay backfired.

Anyway, they already win hands down.
The dafts had already swallowed the bait,line and sinker.

Many were requesting for VERs earlier thinking they are good deals. Windfalls. Wait till they realised that they are going to be indebted again.

Back to the 40s/50s/60s black sauce with broken rice and porridge.

Cheers

Whoever said...

To hack into an electronic voting system is child's play. Read this:


Bianca Lewis, 11, has many hobbies. She likes Barbie, video games, fencing, singing.… and hacking the infrastructure behind the world’s most powerful democracy.

“I’m going to try and change the votes for Donald Trump,” she tells me.

“I’m going to try to give him less votes. Maybe even delete him off of the whole thing.”

Fortunately for the President, Bianca is attacking a replica website, not the real deal.

She’s taking part in a competition organised by R00tz Asylum, a non-profit organisation that promotes “hacking for good”.

Its aim is to send out a dire warning: the voting systems that will be used across America for the mid-term vote in November are, in many cases, so insecure a young child can learn to hack them with just a few minute’s coaching.

Bianca Lewis, 11, believes election technology needs to be made more secure
"These are the websites that are very important because they report the election results to the public,” explained Nico Sell, the founder of R00tz Asylum.

“They also tell the public where to go to vote. You could imagine if either of these two things were changed, the chaos that would ensue.”

Hacking the real websites would be illegal. So instead, Ms Sell’s team created 13 sites that mimicked the real websites, gaping vulnerabilities and all, for 13 so-called “battleground" states - parts of the country where the vote is expected to be tight.

Over the course of a day, 39 kids aged between 8 and 17 took the challenge - 35 of them succeeded in bypassing the trivial security. Pranks ensued. At one time the site told us 12 billion votes had been cast. Later, we were told that candidate “Bob Da Builder” was the victor.

Eager children:

The first competitor to break in was 11-year-old Audrey Jones. It took her 10 minutes.

“The bugs in the code makes us [able] to do whatever we want,” she tells me.

"We call somebody our own name if we want to, make it look like we won the election!”

The kids' zone at Def Con had more than 300 attendees on its first day - around half of them were girls
The contest was part of the kids' zone at Def Con, the annual hacking conference in Las Vegas. This year it was attended by more than 300 eager children, trying everything from lock picking to soldering. At one table I meet two-year-old Catherine Sabonis, happily picking apart a debit card reader. Organisers tell me around half of the attendees are girls.

This year is the first time election hacking has been a theme, one which was inspired by similar hacks being carried about by adult attendees at 2017’s show.

While the hacks learnt here wouldn’t change actual vote counts - even if carried out for real - they could alter how the vote results were displayed on official websites. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the furore that would be caused were an official election website to declare the wrong candidate the winner.

The fallibility of these systems has been of concern since 2016’s presidential election, and in some cases well before that. Each state in the US is able to come up with its own system, and with budgets tight, many are relying on poorly secured databases and voting machines that run software that’s well over a decade old!


(From BBC Technology News)

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

Ah Def Con...the world's largest and most famous of hacker conventions. Never bring your regular cellphone. Buy a "burner" and throw it away after the event. Everyone gets their cellphone hacked at Def Con...it's part of the culture.

DefCon has ALWAYS BEEN held in the USA, in Las Vegas since it began 25 years ago. This year, 2108 was The First Time it was held overseas...in May: Def Con China [Beta] 2018, in Beijing, no less.

Those of you who are aware of hacker culture (real citizen hackers, not those working for the state, big corporations or the military) know that it is based on fun, curiosity, creativity, individualism, respect for each other, intellect, logic and reason. It is very anti-authoritarian because hackers reject any notion of arbitrary control: Do or don’t do such and such because I’m telling you. Hackers are apolitical, and mostly atheists, The love the Socratic method , scientific inquiry, and most of all MACHINES, and the ability to control machines by PROGRAMMING them (software alteration) or altering the hardware, or a combination of both.

As a result, Chinese hackers openly defied their govts request not to “hang out” with hackers from other cuntries. Hackers don’t give a damn about race, culture, religion, politics, sexual orientation…these are nonsense. whether you have the intellect and skills to hack, be creative and have fun…that is all.

“Information should be FREE”. That is a key part of hacker lore. They share knowledge, software and tools with each other. “Fuck the government” is the corollary to the aforementioned mantra when the govt or any cunt-stain of arbitrary “authority” tries to prevent such camaraderie. http://www.ft.com/content/f03995de-5711-11e8-bdb7-f6677d2e1ce8

The Chinese govt. like all govts are using a broad range of surveillance measures to spy and gather SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) on their citizens. That’s the way the world is going, so be thankful that there are hackers (freelancers, unaffiliated with The State) determined to “break” insecure and poorly designed/ coded systems.

Like many other cuntries, China has hackers working for The State at various levels—-from police to the military to intelligence agencies, and corps of hackers engaging in “cyberwarfare” with other nation states. (everyone tries to hack everyone else).

It is the huge number of unaffiliated hackers from the general population that keep the true hacker culture going. Like all those kids at Def Con. They have no idea of politics and abstract myths which divide our species into one group vs another, locked in never-ending conflict and division. Kids are curious and want to have fun. And they love to find weaknesses so they can “break into” stuff and reconfigure them for other uses (creativity).

It’ll be interesting to see if Def Con China 2019 happens, because the CPC “allows it”. They know they have little choice, if China is to be a tech leader, they need citizen hackers. They need 10 year old lock pickers, and 11 year old website code mavens.

When a govt gets hacked by one of its kid citizens: They usually deserve it. CPC, look out. You’re gonna be pWNed, by a CHILD. 🤡

Anonymous said...

Knn matilar it's mo fun to get your data stolen, your identity wiped off from the surface of earth or your financial assets zerorised. As its now we all got tons of fraudulent calls to try to get u to believe in what they wNted u to believe in.

Matilar if u kena, imagine all your resources gone, u no longer can afford to play with your payable young blondes anymore as a small botak, u can't attract the young blondes. Then u get only get relied from 70 plus old ladies who are still active so don't laugh or encourage this sort of thing.

b said...

'' I noticed that only one or at best two articles were written by Singaporeans.''

- its the same in the corporate world, especially corporations owned by temmysick/gic. only one or two heads are born singaporeans. the rest are imported ones so they can do what they want to sinkies without any feelings.

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

If an organisation is headed by a foreigner and he brought in all his relatives, his villagers, what kind of security risks would the company face? Can the company be stolen, all its money, if it is a bank, emptied by the kins of the CEO?

If the country is run by foreigners and their kinds, what is the risk of the country being taken over by the foreigners?

Stupidity has no cure.

Whoever said...

I Just Hacked a State Election

By RIVER O'CONNOR
August 21, 2018

It took around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming Mid-Term Elections. Once I accessed the shockingly simple and vulnerable set of tables that make up the State Election Board’s database, I was able to shut down the website that would tally the votes, bringing the election to a screeching halt. The data were lost completely. And just like that, tens of thousands of votes vanished into thin air, throwing an entire election, and potentially control of the House or Senate — not to mention our already shaky confidence in the democratic process itself — into even more confusion, doubt, and finger-pointing.

I’m 17. And I’m not even a very good hacker.

I’ve attended the Hacking Convention DEF CON in Las Vegas for over five years now, since I was 11 years old. While I have a good conceptual understanding of how Cyberspace and the Internet work, I’ve taken only a single Python programming class in middle school. When I found out that the Democratic National Committee was co-sponsoring a security competition for kids and teens. However, my interest in politics fed into curiosity about how easy it might be to mess with a U.S. Election. Despite that limited experience, I understood immediately when I got to Las Vegas this year why the professionals tend to refer to State Election Security as “child’s play.”

The Voting Machine Village at DEF CON, the aforementioned competition where attendees tackled vulnerabilities in State's voting machines and databases, raised plenty of eyebrows among Election Boards and voting machine manufacturers alike. It’s a hard pill to swallow for the public, too: No one wants to believe that their ballot could be thrown away or altered.

The replica State Election websites used in this year’s competition were built on MySQL, a database management system that stores data in simple tables containing columns and rows. By inputting a command into the search bar to see all the website’s tables, one could then see all of its data, including vote tallies, candidate names and tables of basic website functions. Once someone has that kind of access, they can do plenty of damage.

The entirety of the hacking came down to entering no more than two lines of code: the first to display all columns and rows for the site, the second to alter the vote tally.

Of the few dozen participants, most completed the very simple hack assigned by the instructors. About a quarter figured out how to rename or delete other candidates and their parties from the list.

I wanted to see how much damage I could do without the instructors' or staff's assistance.

So, I wrote down the IP address of the server hosting the competition, no different than the first step a foreign agent would take. Then, I accessed the DEF CON-hosted website from a secure Wi-Fi spot and Googled a list of common MySQL commands. The whole thing, from search to shutdown, took me less than 5 minutes.

To take down the entire website, all I needed to do was enter a command to drop the table — to remove it from the database entirely. This caused the page to return an execution error, which took a reset of the website’s host server to fix. Essentially, I had crashed the website, similar to the Denial of Service Attacks more familiar to the public, but more direct and even more effective.

The fact that someone as untrained as myself could theoretically bring an Election to a screeching halt with nothing but a quick Google search should be a wake-up call.

Anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled device could have done what I did to the Mock Election database!

Anonymous said...

Who stands to benefit from electronic voting? Who is likely to play monkey tricks in an electronic voting system?

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose if our main media are controlled by foreigners and they set the agenda to prime the thinking of our unthinking masses?

It is highly dangerous for any main media to be controlled and run by traitors in any country. There is no press freedom when national interest is concerned, not even in the West, not in the USA. The main media is always under the control and scrutiny of national security agencies to make sure they did not sell out the country's interests.

The only time a country loses control of its main media is when the national security agencies is sleeping or manned by idiots.

Anonymous said...

Haha....
l dropped out of school at lower secondary education.
Though I did retail in electricals and electronics over three decades ago, I shunted away from computer. The One and Only reason is that I believe computerization shall bring about the Demise of Civilization and Humanity, not nuclear weapon.
The Next Warfare is not Nuclear Base, it's gonna be Cyber Warfare.
Hopefully,
the World ends after me.
I do not wish to witness Armageddon and Apocalypse.