Google Cyber-attacked From Vietnam, China Had More Executions Than Texas

Thomas Friedman
Howard Fineman

"Republican donors aren't happy about this. It's not fair that rich Republicans spend huge amounts of money at sex clubs and poor Republicans have to go to airport bathrooms." –Craig Ferguson

The Daily Beast has tallied the score to see which political party had the more sex scandals. Unfortunately, the numbers don't have the sordid details that we like, and send people flocking to buy magazines like the national Inquirer at the supermarket check-out lines.

"After studying the 58 scandals over the past 20 years involving all politicians or major candidates for city mayor and above—many involved crimes, others just allegations, but all wound up as tabloid fodder—some conclusions can be reached.
• The number sex scandals has increased dramatically over the past few decades, thanks to technology, new press standards and a post-Clinton belief that everything is fair game.
• Republicans have more scandals (32 to 26), but Democrats have bigger ones, based on our methodology (13 out of the top 20).
• Democrats tend to have more problems with harassment, staffers and underage girls; Republicans tend to have more problems with prostitutes, hypocrisy and underage boys."


It's not that there have been so many scandals, we know how those who seek out power and use it end up being corrupted by it. Add to the numbers all of the other scandals involving abuse of power, and we can see that there are very few responsible among us. We need to have a national debate on how to reform our Congressional system so that we can make it more play-safe and child-friendly. Because with the male species, we never grow-up emotionally past five years old, and that's why we will always succumb to shiny objects and the allure of women's breasts. Throw in a bottle and a comfy blanket, and you will have one satisfied Congressman...

David Letterman's Top Ten Republican National Committee Excuses

10. 'We're fat, dumb, rich guys, nuff said?'
9. 'Thought 'SM' door was Sen. McCain's office'
8. 'It wasn't a sex club, just a regular club where grown men tickle each other'
7. 'Scott Brown raved about the place'
6. 'The Sheraton's meeting rooms were already booked'
5. 'I'm sorry, Ricky Martin is gay?'
4. 'Abraham Lincoln routinely spent $2,000 a night in sex clubs'
3. 'We're fat, dumb, rich guys, nuff said?'
2. 'If we can't spend donor money at a sex club, the terrorists have won'
1. 'Research for pending legislation 'No Stripper Left Behind''


cyberwars...

It's been a busy couple of months for computer security analysts. The folks working at Google have had a time of it, having their email clients attacked by mysterious forces inside of China, leading to an argument with the Chinese government over them and the extent of censorship the government wants imposed on its users. Google withdrew its servers and put them in Hong Kong, and the government tried to limit access to them even more.

Now, it seems that the next victims are the email clients of Yahoo.: "In what appeared to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of more than a dozen rights advocates, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers had disabled its Web site for five days in a row.


The infiltrations, which involved Yahoo e-mail accounts, appeared to be aimed at people who write about China and Taiwan, rendering their accounts inaccessible, according to those who were affected. In the case of this reporter, hackers altered e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address... The victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in the United States, a Uighur exile in Sweden, an analyst who writes about China’s security apparatus and several print journalists based in Beijing and Taipei."

“I’m 100 percent I’ve been hacked. I’m angry at the Chinese, but I blame Yahoo for allowing this to happen.”

Yahoo has about the worst customer service, they are arrogant and rude and hardly ever reply to you directly. If you are going to use a free email account from a large company like Yahoo or Microsoft or Google, don't use it for anything that you consider sensitive. Never use it for business.

And if headaches with China isn't enough for Google, it just had some more attacks aimed at all of its Vietnamese users, that seem politically motivated against critics of the Vietnamese government: "In attacks it described as similar to but less sophisticated than those at the core of its spat with China, Google said malicious software was used to infect “potentially tens of thousands of computers,” broadly targeting Vietnamese speaking computer users around the world.


Infected machines had been used to spy on their owners and to attack blogs containing messages of political dissent, wrote Neel Mehta of the company’s security team in a post late Tuesday on Google’s online security blog."

If you want to see what is daily being offered by Google and what is being blocked, Google has set up a web page which you can link to here.

All of this activity means that it will be a long, hot summer this year. It used to be that summer was hacking season, when all of the teenage boys were out of school and spent long, boring hours in front of their computers, from rural Michigan to New Delhi, India. With governments getting involved in promoting malicious behavior, the sheer volume of hackers trying to attack security networks may be overwhelming to our current systems, and we will see some pretty impressive crashes before Fall...


china at top of execution list...

Another feather that China can add to its cap, is that it has topped Amnesty International's list of countries that have carried out the most executions this last year. "Methods of execution included beheading, stoning, electrocution, hanging, firing squads and lethal injection." china topped the list, followed by Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the state of Texas.

China, of course, disputed the fact, but the number they execute is kept as a state secret. “The Chinese authorities claim that fewer executions are taking place,” said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty’s interim secretary general. “If this is true, why won’t they tell the world how many people the state put to death?”

The US can be proud of the fact that it alone, is the only country in the Americas that has executed anybody last year. That includes all of the small countries and islands that you love to hate, they behaved in a more civilized fashion. "Amnesty, which has long opposed the death penalty, said death sentences and executions continued to be used for political purposes, often after unfair trials, and were used “disproportionately against the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities.” Perhaps it would be a blessing for us to let Texas secede from the US...