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Comment Re:North Korea is itching for a fight (Score 2) 243

If we had any leadership in the White House we would implement a regime change in North Korea.

Exactly who is itching for a fight here? It's not that the NK leadership is exactly peace-loving, but can we blame them for being somewhat suspicious about the US' intentions if this is an accepted way of thinking about foreign policy there?

But countries like North Korea with unstable leaders need to be silenced as well.

'Unstable leaders' ... and this is coming from a country where Donald J. Trump could be chosen as the next president?

Comment Re:aggression inevitable? (Score 1) 243

They'll be all like "Raaaah look at us we are like SUPER dangerous! Give us oil and food or we use our spooky new powers!"

That has indeed been their peculiar form of diplomacy during some past crises.

Besides there's a long way from a functional nuclear device to a missile deliverable one.

Also true, but how far are they on their way by now? They're determined, have been busy for years, have taken several tests, and announced they're done. Hard to verify, but that might actually be the case.

Comment Re:aggression inevitable? (Score 2) 243

Not inevitable, but not impossible either, I think. The NK perspective/official party line is that they are under permanent threat and need to be able to defend themselves against SK, the US, and, through heinous manipulations, most of the rest of the world. That's a pretty paranoid perspective, and while it's defensive by nature, this can go wrong in many ways. The country is lead by a small, corrupt, misinformed elite, has a huge and soon nuclear-equipped army and, outside the capital, a poor and suppressed population. An internal crisis, or a diplomatic fuck-up, both seem realistic possibilities.

Comment NK technology (Score 1) 243

North Korea isn't that technologically adept, their regime certainly doesn't foster the kind of environment where the required talent can exist readily.

That's nonsense, or wishful thinking at best. Obviously there are talented people there too. I'm assuming the 'kind of environment' you refer to is the Western ideal one: creative, free, entrepreneurial etcetera. But people can be pretty creative is the alternative is horrible enough too, and that seems to work quite well there. As you can see, for example, here their computer technology may be somewhat outdated, but well past the 8" hard disk stage - more like beginning of the 21st century. Looks like the US has the 'handicap of a head start' here.

Comment Could lead? (Score 1) 256

This is a scary piece of technology. Could potentially lead to space race 2.0. If russia has nukes in space, it's only a matter of time before we will too.

Not 'could' - it already did. In the article about the X-37B, you can find:

The robotic space plane launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on May 20, 2015, kicking off the X-37B program's fourth flight. This mission, dubbed OTV-4 (short for Orbital Test Vehicle-4), remains a clandestine affair. "I can confirm the fourth OTV mission is approaching one year on orbit," Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Annmarie Annicelli said in response to Space.com's inquiry about the X-37B's activities.

So apparently a space race is already going on, initiated by the US (or possibly China), in which the US now has a head start of a few years on Russia. Same as with nukes, same as with H-bombs.

Comment Re:FTFA (Score 3, Informative) 47

They mention at least one previously used: downloads of the 'free, unsupported' DirectMailer software. So they were apparently targeting people who wanted to send bulk email for free. Poetic injustice? Just guessing, but they could use the same trick with other 'free' products now. From the report:

5.1. "Cracked" DirectMailer
On the homepage, Yellsoft makes sure to tell its visitors that the company doesn’t o er support for copies of the software downloaded from [link deleted], with a link to the page. This page is hosted on narod.ru, a free web hoster. Let’s see if we can get a copy of DirectMailer from there. Figure 9 Softexp web page with DirectMailer download link as seen in 2014 Sure enough, in 2014 you could download a directmailer-retail.zip le with a copy of DirectMailer. Since ESET Anti-Virus products started detecting DirectMailer as malicious, the software is no longer being distributed on softexp.narod.ru. The zip archive contains a dm.pl executable le. Despite the .pl extension, it is not a Perl script, but an ELF executable. This executable le contains a Perl script packed with the Mumblehard packer. Analysis of the Perl script shows that a function called bdrp is invoked before the main program is started. This function has a uuencoded blob, which, once decoded, generates another ELF le. This ELF le is a packed Perl script consisting of the Mumblehard backdoor. It is written to the le system and a cron job is added to run it every 15 minutes.

Comment Re:WTF is "guard"? (Score 1) 123

As NSHipser describes it:

guard is a new conditional statement that requires execution to exit the current block if the condition isn’t met.

You can exit the current block from an if-statement, of course. But it doesn't force you to. Also, having a separate keyword for things like preconditions can make code more readable, because you can express your intent.

Comment Re:If they use that nuke Pyongyang will be gone in (Score 1) 170

I agree nuking capitals is not a very bright idea or something to look forward to. However, I don't share your optimism about how far the Nato would be willing to go, if it came to a serious war. According to this article, well after Hiroshima, serious plans were made to nuke Moscow and Leningrad.

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