SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ars Technica reports that Kaspersky Labs have released further details tying the NSA to a group of expert hackers dubbed "Equation Group".
The Kaspersky researchers once again stopped short of saying the hacking collective they dubbed Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA, saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project. Still, they heaped new findings on top of a mountain of existing evidence that already strongly implicated the spy agency. The strongest new tie to the NSA was the string "BACKSNARF_AB25" discovered only a few days ago embedded in a newly found sample of the Equation Group espionage platform dubbed "EquationDrug." "BACKSNARF," according to page 19 of this undated NSA presentation [PDF], was the name of a project tied to the NSA's Tailored Access Operations.
Similarities have been noted in the procedures and capabilities of Equation Group and those detailed in Edward Snowden's disclosures concerning the NSA, most notably the the ability to interdict hardware and software during shipping to be replaced with duplicates infected with highly sophisticated malware. The article also points to timestamp analysis that indicates the authors of the captured malware worked regular office hours: 8-5, Monday-Friday in the UTC-3 and UTC-4 time-zones. The Kaspersky report discounted intentional manipulation of these timestamps and suggests that Equation Group are located in the eastern United States.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday March 13 2015, @02:48PM
japan WAS trying to surrender, it is just that WE were (PURPOSEFULLY) being intransigent in making it an unconditional surrender, where they could not keep their emperor, etc...
there was NO MILITARY REASON to bomb them, other than to 'test it out', and scare the russkies, etc...
there was ESPECIALLY no reason to bomb NON-MILITARY targets/cities as we did...
the oft-quoted 'oh, we'd lose a zillion soldiers taking japan...', was bullshit when it was promoted as a spurious reason to bomb them...(AFTER the fact)
(not to mention -again- a war krime: there is NO excuse for killing CIVILIANS to limit the casualties of soldiers...)
it WAS/IS a war krime, plain and simple...
(but war krimes are for the losers...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @03:34PM
I guess I am a little forgiving about decisions made in that World war against a nation siding with Germany and attacking us at Pearl Harbor. That was a hell of a war and lots of mean ugly sinful things were done. Bombing cities was the order of the day on all sides. Precision warfare was not feasible then like it is todays with guided missiles.
Perhaps the U.S. didn't need to drop The Bomb, or to do further fire-raids. I think what some are arguing for here is:
a)the A-bomb was not a worse atrocity than the fire-bombing of Tokyo, for example, or any other fire-bombing European cities by any side in WW II, and
b) don't fucking mess with the U.S. of fucking A.