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One argument would be that China for some time has maintained the world’s largest biological weapons program which dwarfs anything the US and the Russians have

One argument would be that China for some time has maintained the world’s largest biological weapons program which dwarfs anything the US and the Russians have even when combined. In fact there is a rule of thumb from the Cold War...US - Nuclear, Soviets - Chemical, Chinese - Biological. Indeed most plagues have originated in China due to the population density and the prevalence of swine (there is a reason many religions don’t consume certain types of meat and in particular pork, it’s correlation with plague goes back thousands of years). Besides these biological weapons which can be quickly looked up online at US Think Tanks and places like the Army War College...China has also maintained a pretty firm grip on HackerNews. Twice now as a cybersecurity researcher I’ve come across Elasticsearch clusters employing Logstash in combination with a filebeat that streams in HackerNews topics and comments. This ingestion pipeline seems to be set off if you hit enough “hot words” after which time an Elastalert is sent out to presumably trigger human-in-the-loop to comment and pounce on any criticism. Based on the architecture that I saw in both cases this is a straightforward if not modest and not that sinister interpretation of the infrastructure. Yet it is still very concerning in the aggregate. In conclusion, China could use these innovations for weapons to kill not as much us as their own people. Additionally their attempts to monitor and at times squelch free speech abroad goes against...a lot of things that people who live in Democracies would agree is valuable and worth protecting.

colechristensen 7y ago
>In conclusion, China could use these innovations for weapons to kill not as much us as their own people. Additionally their attempts to monitor and at times squelch free speech abroad goes against...a lot of things that people who live in Democracies would agree is valuable and worth protecting. Two assertions I can extract from this * China would use medical research for nefarious uses Ostensibly, all of this research would be public anyway. Whether or not Chinese agents were involved seems irrelevant. That information would be available to them either way. * China would force it's own state-interest moral code in these organizations Well, ok, possibly. Is this something people are really worried about with hiring researchers with Chinese ties? I suppose you could combat this with well formed organization policies, but it seems hard to justify strict reporting of certain ties to prevent this. It just seems like xenophobia if there isn't specific evidence.
solotronics 7y ago
The automated response pipeline I something I always assumed existed but couldn't prove. Is there a way you can anonymously publish info about this?
- rshnotsecure 7y ago
  Lol my full name is in my profile. I published about the Wyze Breach, and a couple of other things, here: https://blog.12security.com https://blog.12security.com These posts were rapidly put up as I wrestled with the cloud hosted Ghost platform, so excuse the grammar mistakes. Further posts on the topic you’re referring to, broad surveillance of the forums, comments, and chat rooms of the internet using streaming timeseries databases, I am working on now.

colechristensen 7y ago

>In conclusion, China could use these innovations for weapons to kill not as much us as their own people. Additionally their attempts to monitor and at times squelch free speech abroad goes against...a lot of things that people who live in Democracies would agree is valuable and worth protecting. Two assertions I can extract from this * China would use medical research for nefarious uses Ostensibly, all of this research would be public anyway. Whether or not Chinese agents were involved seems irrelevant. That information would be available to them either way. * China would force it's own state-interest moral code in these organizations Well, ok, possibly. Is this something people are really worried about with hiring researchers with Chinese ties? I suppose you could combat this with well formed organization policies, but it seems hard to justify strict reporting of certain ties to prevent this. It just seems like xenophobia if there isn't specific evidence.

solotronics 7y ago

The automated response pipeline I something I always assumed existed but couldn't prove. Is there a way you can anonymously publish info about this?

rshnotsecure 7y ago
Lol my full name is in my profile. I published about the Wyze Breach, and a couple of other things, here: https://blog.12security.com https://blog.12security.com These posts were rapidly put up as I wrestled with the cloud hosted Ghost platform, so excuse the grammar mistakes. Further posts on the topic you’re referring to, broad surveillance of the forums, comments, and chat rooms of the internet using streaming timeseries databases, I am working on now.