That is the setting and it is not a bad setting. The reporter, the spokespeople, no one broke any laws and no one created harm in the process. The latter reason is merely my reason, but with the tariff setting it matters. I am talking about the article in tech radar (at https://www.techradar.com/pro/pc-makers-are-planning-plants-in-saudi-arabia-to-try-and-avoid-us-tariffs) where we are given in the headline ‘PC makers are planning plants in Saudi Arabia to try and avoid US tariffs’, you see, it is not about tariffs at this time (perhaps partially).
You see, the article gives us “Major PC makers like Lenovo, HP and Dell are reportedly exploring building new manufacturing plants in Saudi Arabia in order to avoid high US tariffs on Chinese-made goods.” I reckon that ASUS is doing the same thing. There is a larger prospect. Consider NEOM Sindalah, NEOM Oxagon, NEOM Trojan, NEOM the Line, NEOM Magna and all its 12 subdivisions then we get the Mukaab project in Riyadh. These settings represent thousands of computers and most of them laptops and netbooks. A setting I predicted in January 2024 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2024/01/25/those-happy-dreams/) on the 25th of January 2024 I implied the need for Saudi Arabia (and the UAE) to change the way customer service was done in these places. With NICE as an example, Saudi Arabia could create a Muslim solution for this and considering the growth of travelers which is supposed to surpass 100,000,000, at present (last year) was over 800,000 people and NICE has that covered, but as it is an Israeli solution, it might not fly in Saudi Arabia or the UAE and as such the premise needed to be changed and in that article I set the premise out a little better (I had retyping my own words).
As such with these thousands of systems required, it makes perfect sense for Lenovo to get into the game on a local setting, I might not be a huge fan of the Lenovo, but plenty of people love them and as such I see tremendous strides forward for Lenovo, my personal vote goes to ASUS, but that does not make Lenovo a bad choice, it is merely not my cup of tea.
As such when we see “DigiTimes says HP and Dell have also sent teams to Saudi Arabia to scout out potential factory sites following local government invitations. The biggest attraction for manufacturers to relocate to Saudi Arabia are the 10% reciprocal tariffs, compared with 245% for China.” As I personally see it, it needs close tracks to each of these centers, likely it needs to favor Oxagon and Riyadh, but that is merely my point of view. Likely there will be service centers in each of the 4 locations, and relying on how Magna plays out, a larger setting is required there, but other with more geolocating intelligence is required.
As Lenovo goes there and as the others (DELL, HP) come too, the setting for Saudi Arabia increases, there is at the near coming time a setting where these brands could service clients in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria as well. It could explode service and sales settings a lot more for these regions than the EU and USA can. So when I see the quote “However, the PC market’s immediate future remains uncertain. “In addition to the direct impact of tariffs, the stop-start nature of announcements and delays have cast uncertainty around pricing for consumer electronics this year,” Canalys Analyst Greg Davis explained.” I merely mention “Go pull the other foot”, you see the tariffs are merely an excuse and an optionally bump in revenue for these companies. I reckon that these reasons Trump (oops typo) the tariff reason at present and as Saudi Arabia makes strides to completing these settings the need for systems increase a lot and the need for servers in these locations would explode the need for CISCO equipment as well.
This is a larger setting in the need for these companies to get ready as they might require localization and as I see it, the one who is there will get a larger options and a larger slice of the revenue stream. But that could merely be me.
Have a great day and enjoy the weekend. I have to kill hundreds of people in a place called Cyrodil this weekend and I am buying a nice house in Skingrad, but they tell me that I have weird priorities.
That is at times the question. There was an image on LinkedIn (see below) and I had taken notice of it. Yet today on LinkedIn we were given a rather large recruiting drive which seems odd, but it doesn’t need to be. The line “Amazon plans to cut 14,000 manager positions by 2025” directly opposes the recruitment drive on which 150 people applied for (as a presented fact).
We see all the big boys dumping staff around 120,000 of them and the others are planning to dump a significant amount of people (numbers unknown). One of them I know ‘personally’, it is the Swedish telecom company Telia. We were given a month ago “Swedish carrier Telia is set to cut 3,000 jobs this year as part of cost reduction measures. The proposed cuts would equate to around 15 percent of its workforce, and deliver annual savings of 2.6 billion Swedish crowns ($253 million), the operator said today (September 4)” the larger issue is not that they are dwindling down staff, a 15% decrease is significant. It is the other side of the coin that I cannot see at the moment. That 15% might be all over the place, but the turnover is that a company with 15% less staff tends to have issues all over the board. Perhaps it works out, perhaps not. But the issue that I see with 3,000 persons saving them 2.6 billion Swedish crowns is a more significant issue. You see that amounts to a personal saving of 866K per person and no one in Sweden makes that much (well almost no one) this means that Telia is downsizing a lot, as such we need to take a look at “As of 2023, the company had a market share of roughly 31.5 percent” This implies (implied does not mean factual) that Telia is downsizing a few more branches and that now leads us to a much larger setting. Another source on this gives us “I envisage that this intended approach will not only result in a Telia that is simpler and faster in decision-making and commercial execution, but also help us to grow our business and generate enough cash so that we can make necessary investments and cover our dividend, as we remain committed to our dividend policy” I feel uneasy on this. Especially the statement “we remain committed to our dividend policy”, now this might (and likely is) merely me, but it could also mean that Sweden is ripe for players like STC (Saudi Telecom Company) and Huawei (Ren Zhengfei) to take up the baton to wave a much larger change in Europe. I expect that Huawei might show links to China Telecom (a speculation, not a fact). You see, as these companies all dwindle down, these staff members (requiring a job) might be a nice niche for these two players. Saudi’s STC is already in Europe “Saudi Telecommunication Company’s subsidiary TAWAL officially began operations in Europe in August of that year. In September 2023, it was announced STC Group had acquired a 9.9% stake in the Madrid-headquartered multinational telecommunications company, Telefónica, S.A..” When you consider this stage, and Sweden is the next target, Finland and Norway are not far away. I saw some data on STC entering Slovenia (might have been Slovakia) and that puts the option of Poland on the table, at that point Saudi Arabia has a clear path from the South of Europe all to the far north. And with that on the road, Huawei will have negated a much larger win, it took them some time but with this in place America is out of the race in Europe. All that bantering of fear mongers (never showing any evidence) and now these players will succumb to a much larger setting. Mind you, I am speculating. I have no evidence of this. And when we consider that IBM and Cisco are also on the list, the internet overhaul could become a lot larger. We say ‘it won’t get this far’ but the stage where they could be replaced by other players There is a Chinese version of Cisco (not sure how that words), but the stage becomes that Huawei and STC would have a clear path taking over servicing the European population of 449 million people in the EU. It is what I would attempt to do and America losing 120,000 people to ‘streamlining’ businesses will not help. So what happens next? Well if this impacts Telecom in Europe, especially a well maintained network, America will lose more and more and now they have no data to look into, that implies that Google, Meta and Microsoft will get less data and that will hinder their actions in the long run as well, especially as the Department of Justice is seeking to slice and dice Google. In that setting Huawei and their Harmony OS NEXT will get a great option and as that vibrates through the Middle East and Asia, Huawei will get the sweetest revenge on America to start. In this setting (as I personally see it) Germany and France will soon count the chickens they have and the eggs coming from this setting. I feel that Germany will turn first, but that might merely be my view on the matter.
What is a given is that this is merely a setting as I see it (optionally very wrong), but as Saudi Arabia via BRICS makes more inroads into Europe, America will essentially lose these income streams. And that is the beginning of the end for America and its $35,000,000,000,000 debt. There is every consideration that more then 20% loss of revenue implies that America can no longer pay the interest bill. A setting I saw coming a mile away (5 years ago), so I do not see any hindrance to this scenario (which doesn’t make it correct).
And in all this China is seeking ‘revenge’ on the accusations America spouted and Saudi Arabia is aiming to become a technology hub and they are well underway to make that so.
So in this day and age of redundancies, there is a larger group of people almost desperate to find a new gig and there these two players can find all kinds of people ready and willing to give their new employer the best that they had. Will it be so? Time will tell.
I want to congratulate Vancouver as they join us on this Sunday and the rest on having an equally fine day.
This setting comes in a few stages. Lets start with the given that I have no opposition to the Pentagon getting involved. But the stage is not that simple. So we start with the quote “attacks on critical U.S. companies and federal agencies, and as the Pentagon eyes Chinese hacking efforts with increasing concern.” The first issue is that I would have said “Chinese and Russian hacking efforts”, it would be more accurate. There is an additional side to all this. If American corporations had done their job BETTER, this issue would not be the critical issue it currently is.
Equifax (2017) Marriott International (2018) Capital One (2019) First American (2019) Solarwinds (2020) Colonial Pipeline (2021) LikedIn (2021) Microsoft Exchange Server (2021) Twitter (2022)
This is merely a small grasps, this grasp has millions of records online for each of these cases, In this Linked in stood out with “Personal records of over 700 million users – 92% of the user base – were scraped from the platform and put up for sale in a hacker forum. Why did this happen? Attackers found a public API without authentication and breached it to scrape content.” This case is also the larger issue (beside the fact that it was an API and I wrote about that risk in ‘A simpleminded A, B, C’ On August 30th (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/08/30/a-simpleminded-a-b-c/) a simple setting now out in the open. People still think I was grasping at straws? Now here we see (in the LinkedIn case) “Attackers found a public API without authentication”, as such couldn’t they do their bloody jobs? I understand the setting of the Pentagon, but there needs to be a bill for utter stupidity and a link to your data without authentication is definitely one.
Corporations have been cutting corners on cost and staff and now that the consequences are out in the open, the Pentagon needs to rescue them? Screw that!
It is nice that the Pentagon comes to the rescue, but every rescue needs to come with an audit of that company and a hefty bill for the action. Consider a pointless rescue by coast guard and Marine rescue, these people get a hefty fine, I see that someone employs an API without authentication in pretty much the same way.
Yet the article is merely the start. You see, we can all agree on “Hackers are increasingly infiltrating private companies and government agencies far outside the Pentagon’s usual purview, and the hacks are being perpetrated by cybercriminals who honed their strategies abroad before striking the United States.” OK, that is fine and the fact that the Pentagon and its digital weapon systems are brought to bear is fine, but the utter stupid setting by corporations that cut corners is part one and that is on those corporations. I am even willing to accept that it took a disgruntled employee to hand visibility to the wrong people. Yet that also implies that these corporations have a larger problem and THEY have to pay for that.
So about Three weeks ago, we were handed the 2023 DoD Cyber Strategy guide. The PDF (see bottom) is a nice piece of work. My issue is with page 6 where we are given “The Department will continue to persistently engage U.S. adversaries in cyberspace, identifying malicious cyber activity in the early stages of planning and development. We will track the organization, capabilities, and intent of malicious cyber actors. We will leverage these insights to bolster the cyber resilience of the Nation and will coordinate with interagency partners to publicize this information as circumstances permit.” As I personally see it, it should say “The Department will continue to persistently engage U.S. adversaries in cyberspace, identifying malicious cyber activity in the early stages of planning and development. We will track the organisation, capabilities, and intent of malicious cyber actors, whilst registering corporate shortcomings. We will leverage these insights to bolster the cyber resilience of the Nation and will coordinate with interagency partners to publicise this information as circumstances permit, where corporate shortcomings will not be silenced.” In this case some will state that this is not the job of the DoD and they would be correct, but Corporate America fell short and they now want help, that shortcoming needs to be illuminated as well. You cannot have it both ways.
The document gives us a lot to think about and I agree with 99% of it all, especially when it comes to the Department of Defense Information Network.
I created the Hub+1 intrusion solution in 2014 (or 2015). As far as I know, no one is at this time ready for that creative little caper. I got there shortly after the Sony hack. The information never added up to me and I started to wonder how it could have been done (always a nice way to find the issue by re-engineering the possibilities). And all this is long before we consider issues like non-repudiation, a simple setting I learned about in UTS (University of Technology Sydney) about 3 years before the Sony hack and corporations have been cutting corners ever since. Consider the routers of the FBI, DoD, DMV, Department of Homeland Security and the postal services. Now check EVERY router and tally the ones where the password was Cisco123. I reckon you will find close to a dozen routers. I know it is more presumption than speculation on my side, but that is the larger failure and that is BEFORE we check all the corporate routers. People in IT have been too lazy (for many obvious reasons) and most of them involve resource shortages and why should the Pentagon pay for that bill?
I see that corporate America needs to pay for their cutting corners, the Pentagon has enough issues to work through and when it needs to step in (and when shortcomings are found) that corporation needs to get billed. This is specific. Corporate players cannot shield themselves from top tier hackers, that is BS. But letting the Pentagon pay for corporate stupidity is equally stupid and that needs to be out in the open.
The BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-asia-65920024) gives us ‘Blinken and Xi had ‘robust conversation’ in Beijing’ and I had to take a look, if not only to see what they mean with ‘robust conversation’, that is an expression that could go in any direction and not all of them good. The BBC hands us:
“He says he has been seeking to “disabuse” China of the notion the US is “seeking to economically contain them””, sorry this started a 5 minute intermezzo to get a hold of all the laughter I have. The US has been seeking to contain China since Huawei left Nokia and all others behind them in the 5G field, it is still going on, all whilst we have never ever been given CLEAR evidence that Huawei was doing anything negative. In that same timeline we have an Airman handing out classified information, a former president has more classified materials in his toilet than the CIA has in its archive and we have several other issues. That is before we look at Cisco and its issues (which was not intentional, I know).
And even as several statements came from Strasbourg, the manner of speaking implies a clear American hand on the shoulder of the speaker.
Then we get “Blinken reiterates that the US does not support Taiwan’s independence – stating it does not wish to change the status quo”,which is a harder issue. You see ‘The first agreement under the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade was signed on June 1, 2023.’ Might be seen as a declaration towards support for its independence. And that is debatable, I get that. It seems to me that America hopes it will go good, but at the same time it is afraid to anger China too much, so I can see how this plays and this is NOT against America. It is to acknowledge that some diplomatic strains are strained as far as they can get.
Then it is time for “Blinken says some parts of the talks were “constructive”, but adds there is “work to do” in other areas”, OK a diplomatic answer if ever there was one. But in there are missing parts and there is every chance that they are not for our eyes yet. The ties with Iran and Saudi Arabia are worrying America. The new petroleum refinery that they are building in China must be a cause for concern. You see, the refinery is large enough to hand a lot more oil to China and that is where it is most likely to go, a setting America does not find comforting. They are already losing out to a million barrels a day, but with that new refinery that reduction COULD (could being the operative word) be reduced three times over to minus 3 million barrels a day. This could collapse the American economy and create a third world nation called The United Stages of Anything. For Taiwan it is not such a good stage. I reckon that China has been dipping its toe in the water to see how America would react when Taiwan is added back to China and charges Taiwan for overdue book fees and that invoice is likely to be stellar. Now, this is not a given, but that is what I would have done (if I was Chinese). In all likelihood as the EU and the US are uniting with Ukraine against Russia, China sees an opportunity because America is too broke to stop anything and that leaves Taiwan separated, segregated and all alone. A setting China would like at present and with three optional supports for Taiwan too poor to do anything (US, EU and Japan) Taiwan might not have too many options left. I reckon that a similar conversation with Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud took place almost a week ago. I reckon that at present China has all the answers it needs, but that is pure conjecture from my side.
So as I see it, I wonder just how robust that conversation was, rejections by China does not make the conversation less robust, but that is about the only classification that conversation might have had overall. Am I wrong? Optionally yes, but the larger stage is catering to China, and with the ties with Saudi Arabia now stronger then anything, all whilst the ties with America are more and more dissolving leaves China in a much stronger position and as Saudi Arabia grows, so will the options for Huawei. It will not take long for the larger contracts with Egypt and Syria to start and when that happens, we get a triangle that covers part of Africa, towards Turkey all the way to India. It will not be overnight, but with the power core in Riyadh that setting would become one hell of a central chain for Huawei. And it is not a new setting, I saw this evolution come a little over three years ago. And with that infrastructure NEOM is not merely a small city, it will be a center piece of Saudi Arabia, uniting Africa to Saudi interests and they will all have that new Saudi news channel. It was a game well played and China is adhering to this not merely because it takes the wind out of the sails of America, it will diminish Europe in similar ways. Asia Times gave us in April ‘Huawei eyes Saudi Arabia as its regional hub’, I think it is only the beginning and it is a much larger partnership with China, who will have access to this and the Silk Road, which was never a secret. As such I wonder what expression they would replace ‘robust conversation’ with and very time that expression gets handed to us by the media, ask yourself. What did they mean with that?
This is an odd day, even by my standards, but to see that we need to take this chronologically. It all started with an article about 10-12 hours ago. The article (at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/21/pentagon-leak-modern-spying-ts-si-fvey-signals-intelligence-five-eyes) gives us ‘TS, SI, FVEY: what the Pentagon leak initials tell us about modern spying’. The Guardian article is quite good, there is nothing negative to say, but whilst I was reading it, thoughts came to me. The first came with “Teixeira was one of 1.25 million people able to access top secret material on the US Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, a share repository created in response to 9/11. A former senior British official said he believed it was obvious that now was the time to review the distribution of top secret material.” It took me back several years and the over BS imagery that Huawei was a danger. It was so dangerous that it had to be taken out of the networks. The UK had a decent reason, but merely barely. Now we see that there is causality between showing off gamers and the Pentagon. They do not need to wait for China, US intelligence staff are eager to please (optionally through peer pressure) and they will put it all online. No weakness in Cisco, or backdoor in Huawei equipment was required. It sounds harsh and it needs to be. The next part is “In an era where counter-state threats are taking over, and the danger of leaks greater, it looks like a rethink is needed, the ex-insider said.” That is actually quite deep. Rethinking the intelligence classification system is not an easy task, but one worthy of considering. I reckon the Navy (any Navy) is the hardest part, they are set in their ways and changing that is near impossible, making a 50 year old hooker a virgin is probably easier.
Anyway, I was contemplating these issues and suddenly an image appeared in my mind. It was a painting of General Lafayette I saw a long time ago and suddenly the cogs started to turn. I remembered certain arcade machines in the 80’s and now my mind redraw the specs and reset the issues to a new kind of arcade. One that might find great interest in places like Universal world in Orlando, and adjusted setting might make it also feasible for Disney-world (also in Orlando), and the idea didn’t stop there. The setting powered by Sony Playstation 5 (multiple) gives a rather different stage and one that I don’t think has been considered before. That being said, if one part works this thing could go in all kinds of directions. You see, if engagement is the power of marketing, what happens when rides become engaging and almost interactive? It is a new and different setting. The nice part is that the Sony Systems are more powerful then required, as such the stage isn’t merely what powers it, but HOW it is powered and I wonder if these two players ever thought in that direction. Now we merely need to fill in the blanks, almost like the pentagon is doing by handing blanks to people who should never have been given security clearance. Still it was the thought that counts and I reckon that even with the absence of Huawei equipment China is delighted with people like Jack Teixeira, I wonder if they will send them a Christmas card this year, just for jollies.
In part I wonder why the Pentagon doesn’t have a verification system. I read about it once, I forgot where. The systems creates almost identical documents, the punctuation was key here. They figured out the source by having different versions with here and there a different punctuation and with some punctuations missing. As such with only 33 punctuation alterations, you could drill down on the leak with the second document, consider the amount of punctuations 3-5 pages has, it would be an easy task and with deeper machine learning it could be automated to some degree. No interference and a clear path towards seeking verification. This was not my idea, I read it somewhere and for the life of me, I cannot recall where I read it.
Still this all led to a new idea in theme park options, it just came to me, thank you very much General Lafayette (he died 189 years ago, so the IP is all mine).
Still there is another link, the link is one the approach to classification. You see, mot nations have a clear track, the US and the five eyes intelligence group a lot less so. It does not matter how it is done, the issue is resources and staff and that link is not optimised. Tell me in all honesty, why do 1.25 million Americans with top secret clearance have access to all these documents? Why is there not a database where it is stored and people will have to access when needed. But when was there information? Is that not in reports THEY file. There needs to be a more intelligent tag system that allows people with access to seek document that they should be aware of. In all honesty, which documents did Jack Teixeira actually need? It is a serious question because there is part of the solution. Anyway, it is a slippery slope and it is not easy to navigate SIGINT and GEOINT and those are the two I have some knowledge of from 1981 onwards and my exposure was extremely limited. Still it makes for an interesting puzzle and it led me to a new IP options in theme parks and in all honesty I have no idea what to do with it next. I need to figure that out at some point.
Yes, that I how it started for me today. It all links back to the Optus failures and a few other matters, but cybersecurity is at the heart of it. Initially I saw the second article, but I will get back to that later. First we look at ‘Sydney teenager accused of using Optus data breach to blackmail indicates guilty plea in court’ (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-27/teenager-accused-of-using-optus-data-breach-to-blackmail-court/101584078), a simple deception. Yet one with a few sides. The first part “Australian Federal Police (AFP) charged Dennis Su with two offences earlier this month, claiming he sent text messages to 93 Optus customers demanding they transfer $2,000 to a bank account” sets the guilty party up, but in more ways when we consider part two “The charges were laid after a bank account belonging to a juvenile, which Mr Su allegedly used, was identified”, so he used a third parties account and wholly Moses, it is apparently of a minor. How the bough breaks! Well it actually doesn’t break. It seems that there was a serious amount of thoughts and planning here. Well, for some it is not a serious amount, but he had to know what was planned and he got a minor to be the front to some parts. It all refers not to the second article that as the first on my eye sight. It was ‘Medibank and Optus hacks spark warning over identity theft risks from former victims’ (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-27/identity-theft-warning-after-optus-medibank-hack/101576992). Here we get “The first thing the victim knew about her identity being hacked was when a man turned up on her parents’ doorstep asking for the sexual services he’d paid for online.” It is the start of a new steeple chase. When we consider “Former identity theft victims have shared how their details were used to steal luxury vehicles, take out personal loans in their name and hock fake goods online, because criminals got hold of the kinds of information millions of Australians are believed to have had compromised in the latest Medibank and Optus hacks” and this is not nearly the end of this. When we see “While living in Melbourne, she sent a photo of her licence to a real estate agent applying for a lease, and that image was somehow then uploaded into a gallery of property photos featured on that agent’s website” especially in the Australian housing market, can we please remove this bozo’s character from the housing market? How can anyone be stupid enough to ‘upload’ identity details? There is an unacceptable lack of common cyber sense in Australia. It goes from the big banks to the most stupid of housing players. They have no idea what they are doing and the excuse ‘we made a boo-boo’ just doesn’t play here. First Optus, then Medibank and that list keeps on growing. That is accelerated by alleged cowboy institutes that make money offering cyber degrees. Australia has a serious problem and it needs to be dealt with starting with a lot better protection regarding ID’s and identity documents.
And we do not blame Google here, but “Probably the most shocking and stressful part was just seeing my licence there on Google for anyone to use” should be seen as evidence that a much larger issue is in play. When we see newspapers give us “The federal government has promised to dedicate millions of dollars to “investigate and respond” to the massive cyber attack which rocked Optus” which according to some amounts to $6,000,000 over two years. I reckon that in two years the problem will be a lot larger and two years to investigate what I in part did in 5 minutes is a joke. Something needs to be done NOW and lets start by holding corporations accountable to cyber security and lets make sure that a certain housing agent is an Uber driver in 48 hours and not a housing agent any more. Yes, I agree that I am overreacting, but uploading ID details? To a photo gallery? I think we hit rock bottom on the village idiot scale and that needs to be addressed well within 2 years, within 48 hours be more likely. I think that my optional IP move to Canada might be a good thing. It is not out of the question that these players will set my IP on a server with a connected router that still has the password ‘Cisco123’, that could be how my luck goes and I have seen enough bad luck to last me a lifetime.
As I see it Australia has a lot of problems, not in the least the larger absence of Common Cyber Sense, I raised that in ‘The Bully’s henchman’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/01/31/the-bullys-henchman/) which I wrote on January 31st 2020, almost 3 years ago, it is that much of a failure and if I raised it then, it was already an issue. As such we see a failure that surpasses 3 years and now they want to debate it for two more years? These people are out of their flipping minds!
Yes, that is the indication. So far I have been busy redesigning over half a dozen games and I get the impression that asleep at the wheel is a common factor at both at Amazon and Google, might be at Microsoft a well, but I do not care about them, they can become obsolete all on their own. The redesign is essential as there are factors for a larger audience and one does want to entice that audience as such I started with half a dozen games, kept the overall appeal, kept the foundation of the game, but the rest got upgraded to the improvements we got the last decade. And 3 of them had 90+ scores, so they can be remade into something better fitting this decade and this generation. Even as I am looking into Unreal engine 5 (where applicable), we have a much larger optional setting and this I did after having a sandwich, before I had a cup of milk and I am merely waking up. We have had a lot of games that were contemporary, we had games that were in the stage or the age of the arcade, but why are they abandoned? They were good games and even as we see everyone go nuts for some goat simulator (for some reason Microsoft got that right and it is massively addictive to some), they forgot a game like Soul Edge (1995), the Dreamcast had it as Soul Calibur (1998) where it scored a whopping 97%, a game that close to perfection was partially forgotten and what was rereleased was nowhere near as perfect and the makers decided they were more clever and created a lesser product. The lines in those days were that this game alone was reason to buy a Dreamcast. Why are these gaming executives so short of memory? Soul Calibur was all about fun and they created a game that did that and more. There are a lot more examples and more could be done to make it changed enough to get a new IP registered. One day and I come up with half a dozen games that could be upgraded and Google (deciding not to be a developer and dropping the Google Stadia coming January) is letting $500 million a month slip by, well they must have the corner on something. I for one am willing to guess that they got the corner on Melatonin (sleeping ingredient). And that is merely one part of one branch. I truly wonder what Tencent is up to, because if they are more awake then there is every chance that Amazon will lose their share as well. And these two got that done in under two years. Good going guys (girls also).
And as I am vamping a few more titles, I remembered a game from 1991 called Streets of Rage, a simple game, but addictive and a game that could entice plenty of people. You see, this new ‘gaming’ industry is a lot less about making money. It is about the microtransactions, that is where they think the real money is and when my solution is accepted and 50 million subscriptions start cancelling the other options, these people will learn the hard way what an empty IP looks like. They all ignored that gamers want to have fun and for some it is racing, for some it is stealth, for some it is bashing and in these groups none of them are overly excited of microtransactions. So when they get a micro-transaction free environment, they will move. I am completely convinced of that. These people also are not interested to pay by watching advertisements. So there are two elements that would fall away pretty quickly and in all that the current ‘champions’ would end up being tomorrows losers. I reckon that is here Tencent is heading as well, so they will get two tiers of advantages of all those who haven’t figured it out yet and that will cost the wrong people a lot of marketshare. But not to fret, they are willing to lose that marketshare, I know because I cannot see them making any alterations, so they are definitely waiting until it is too late. But that is big tech for you. So whilst they are asleep at the wheel, I will continue embellishing my IP for the current customer line. And there it will stay, especially when the right people figure out I wasn’t making a funny, and that my part in gaming since 1984 implies I actually know stuff. But feel free to disagree, it is your right and when you come up short, you merely did it yourself.
As such I do hope to have a field day. Because hope is still part of that equation, we all hope, we can do little more. And lets give Microsoft a hand, only yesterday we were given “Many enterprises continue to leave cloud storage buckets exposed despite widely available documentation on how to properly secure them”, and the hand was not in sarcasm. You see ‘despite widely available documentation’ implies that this is a Layer 8 ID10T issue (aka: idiot users). So when we read “SOCRadar, the threat intelligence firm that reported the issue to Microsoft, described discovering the data in an Azure Blob storage bucket that was publicly accessible over the Internet. The data was associated with more than 65,000 companies in 11 countries and included statement-of-work documents, invoices, product orders, project details, signed customer documents, product price lists, personally identifiable information (PII), and potentially intellectual property as well.” Yes, it gets to be that bad and it is NOT all on Microsoft, some is, not all. But keep screaming that Azure is fine, especially when 65000 companies are placing their data on the internet. As such the China and Huawei issues are not an issue, people are placing their data online all by themselves. Cisco was also a factor, but they seemingly fixed the issues they had. In all this it matters, because streaming opens a new can of worms and I am opening a separate one as well, especially when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia buys my IP. In all this we see that there is a much larger need to stop being the inclusive wanker. It is time to call out the larger flaws and stop messing about, or buy a Jaguar (a Crazy People 1990 reference).
This is one of the reasons I do not want Microsoft anywhere near my IP, and that is in part why I offered it to Saudi Arabia. These tech players might bully me, but they have a much larger problem if they mess with Saudi Arabia and when the Saudi party realises just how big the IP can be, Microsoft will be kept outside, of that I am convinced. It was also in part why I hoped that Amazon would have called earlier, but they slept for months, so I am happy to head to plan B. And as I embellish my IP the chances will increase and increase. Some wheels might be for sleeping but my cogs rotate unrelentlessly and they keep on rotating, I owe that to myself even if it is merely to show where all the others went wrong.
My mind has been pounding on some new IP. Not really IP, more of a concept on what Ould become great IP. Yet will it be mine? I doubt it, there are plenty of takers, but for some reason I believe that Adobe has the inside track here. Whilst players like Microsoft make all the spin, make all the presentations, they deliver too little. Whilst they are all about Office365, we see a collection of bugs that still have not been resolved. And as they grow their product they also grow the traps and the pitfalls.
So as we see (or recall) “The bug in Exchange Online, part of the Office 365 suite, could be exploited to gain “access to millions of corporate email accounts”, said Steven Seeley of the Qihoo 360 Vulcan Team in a blog post published yesterday (January 12 2021).” It would be come time before we could see “The Exchange Server flaw is one of 55 vulnerabilities fixed in Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday update. Microsoft is urging administrators to apply patches for a remote code execution vulnerability in Exchange Server, which is being exploited in the wild. (Nov 2021)” as I personally see it, Microsoft is digging its grave deeper and deeper, all whilst complaining to Congress about anti competition issues. How about fixing your bloody program? Optionally in less time it take a woman to get fucked, get pregnant and deliver a baby? Rude? You ain’t seen nothing yet! Microsoft complains wherever it can, against Apple, against Google and it takes over 36 weeks to get the Exchange flaw seemingly under control. I used seemingly as we also got this year ‘Microsoft kicks off 2022 with email blocking Exchange bug’ with the added “A coding mistake after a January 1 auto-update is causing the FIP-FS anti-malware service to crash with the 0x80004005 error code when it encounters 2022 dates”
Apart from the idea that kicking Microsoft should be regarded as a civil service there is actually a bigger fish to fry.
The who now? You see this is in part about Web3, it was one of the stopping points that my mind entertained towards some of the software that I saw in ‘Pristine and weird’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/02/24/pristine-and-weird/), I gave additional views in ‘The hardware perimeter’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/02/25/the-hardware-perimeter/). I still believe that in some respects Adobe might become the salvation. In 15 years of Adobe I have crashed less than half a dozen times, Adobe, or as I tend to call them (with a giggle) Macromedia Plus. You see, Adobe is a union (OK, they bought the other place) of Adobe and Macromedia. You might think that this is not a big deal, but it is. The union of two great innovators in their field. I truly wonder if Microsoft understands what an actual innovator is, they spun it so often in so many area’s that I truly believe they forgot what true innovation is. But consider Adobe and Apple, what if Adobe gets the sources of Pages, Numbers and Keynote? They would be close to ready. They still need a good database to stage the next scene but there are all kinds of solutions in that direction.
The hardest part (for them) would be the web in a web stage. This is not some fictive side, it will be the connection side of collections of blockchains (finance, documentation, hardware foundations and document tallies. The example you saw earlier is something I saw somewhere and it fitted the bill as closely as I envision it (I do not have the right software to make my own) that might get the closest to what is required, as well as a new need for checking the integrity of blockchain based connections. The need to check the integrity becomes overwhelmingly essential and when it comes to integrity checking, there is every indication that Microsoft is not really on board with that need, or its board of directors might be filtering out anything negative until AFTER it launches. In that setting a player like Adobe (or Google) is a much safer bet and that matters.
You see, I saw as early as 2009 that the borders between hardware and software were overlapping in some grey area. The initial stage of brand of hardware would be overshadowed by the software controlling it and there is the rub, the court cases where we get some version of ‘She said versus She said’ will overwhelm courts and the law is nowhere near ready on such cases, because the rules of evidence are not ready to process what gets to court. You see, to some extent Web3 might be a solution, the blockchain need will govern the desire, but there is also the larger case. We are given settings like “the idea of decentralisation” as well as “a possible solution to concerns about the over-centralisation”, but the borders of what we see to what is centralisation and decentralisation is becoming blurry. We see voices like Kevin Werbach, author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust making mentions on the lack of decentralisation, some give us issues on scalability. But what is scalability? It is a serious question. You see Microsoft, Google and Apple have their own ’version’ on what constitutes scalability, but always towards THEIR OWN design and I get it, that is one point of view, but when did you see a clear presentation where the CONSUMER is shown a presentation to see scalability towards their organisation and another organisation? An accountant compared to KPMG? A consultant compared to Deloitte? You think it does not matter but it does and the cloud brought it a lot closer than anyone realises. The booklet version is “scaling is the process of adding or removing compute, storage, and network services to meet the demands a workload makes for resources in order to maintain availability and performance as utilisation increases”, but as I tend to say, cloud computing is computing on someone else’s server. The term of scalability ‘adjusted’ from home processing to cloud processing. It is there that you see the larger stage of bilateral processing. The workstation (like I described earlier) with a thick client and local stages, often connected with a secure server that protects its settings and a cloud environment. A sort of 2 stage security in place and that is the larger danger. Microsoft (et al) want you to trust them, all whilst they screwed up your life with 36 weeks+ Exchange online dangers and they cannot change, they are too much involved with their board of directors and THEIR needs of the story as it needs to be. And as I rudely stated at the beginning with every chance of getting screwed over and their ‘spin’ impregnating you, but the turnaround? There is none! And what do you think their liability is when you see that your IP is gone? So whilst the news gives you “Vulnerabilities are being exploited by Hafnium”, how long until a message from the cloud provider is given to you that due to configuration errors detected we do not consider any liability against us to be valid? And let’s be clear, Microsoft Office is Exchange, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access. They have had 25 years to clean it up, but the waves of iterations (new options) have given rise to issue after issue. Is it such a surprise that this stage might start flowing towards a player like Adobe who will add a near universe of new options and all that arranged in some next generation skin that incorporates some version of Web3?
There are other players (Amazon, IBM) but in what I saw in ‘Pristine and weird’ Adobe fits the bill better and more complete. Even as I saw additional parts, I saw a stage where hardware is more interchangeable with software and Adobe has proven the field there. You see, as hardware from Cisco, Dell, Huawei and Juniper become more generic, software will have a much larger impact and the hardware will merely open doors to WHAT is possible and how fast the new options could be. A different setting but not merely due to the cloud, but because the one man show technologies are on the way out, pretty much like Microsoft already is. A stage that has now become too unreliable to consider trusting. And where will Apple and Google be? Apple will most likely have a larger niche, Google has been accomodating on several levels, so they both have larger fields and for them it matters in the long run. Other players will need to push for their niche, a cooperative niche or they will become obsolete, almost as much as Microsoft soon will be. But that is merely my point of view on the matter and my point of view on where we are going. Feel free to oppose my side, but do not forget to check all the facts, for now they are on my side of the equation.
Yup, I had to go there. And when you see the headline ‘F-35 program seeks cyber reinforcements’ you might go there too. Now, you need to know that there is nothing wrong with the article that can be found (at https://fcw.com/defense/2022/02/f-35-program-office-seeks-cyber-reinforcements/361848/). Yet the quote given to us 2 days ago “To improve the joint strike fighters’ defences against cyber attacks, the program office responsible for it wants an open system design solution” implies there is close to nothing, all whilst this danger was out in the open for some time, so why react this late? And when we are given “the program office responsible for the aircraft is looking to create a multi-phased process that would enhance the security of F-35’s – and supporting ground systems – through newly developed or integrated technologies, such as real-time, automated in-flight detection, response and recovery” concerns should be raised. You see that dinky toy (the F-35) is not the cheapest of all Corgi toys, so something should have been in place already. The issue is not that simple, I get that. To take a more Cisco stage of expression. Every plane will need a router that has SecureX platform, Secure Firewall, Secure Endpoint and connects to the ground in a similar way and does it in real time, not the easiest of tasks and in this the real-time part will be the hardest to get working. A system that can interact with every system.
As I personally see it (see image), it is a setting that has a number of points (like hardware points) for fire solutions, navigation, weapons systems and the security station. It cannot check all, but each system has its own header, and the headers check each other, so if one is hacked the others fix the one hacked and the system is back on tour, there is no guarantee that this will work, but hacking one system is one thing, hacking all 5 becomes virtually impossible. And there is another problem, such a system will need online load balancing. Not online like we know online, but a system that is always checking the load balance of every header station and as this is all done in real time will require an upgrade of hardware, because there is no way that the added electronics will not have an impact on current efficiency numbers and with the costs already way out of proportions, I have no idea how this gets passed the budget committee and even if they get some kind of new Cisco device (which is one of the leading cyber authorities) the hardware will not come cheap and it will require a new OS to make it work. I wonder if relaunching ADA would be a solution. It would be allowing one of ADA strengths to be deployed and if the NSA can boost the security and it is implemented with a newer version of Cisco Cyber Constructs, there is a decent chance it might work but all this requires specialists working together and in the IT field that is almost a challenge on its own (like making a submarine fly). So I have no idea where it all will end, but taking into consideration that the expected acquisition costs is set to $406.5 billion, with total lifetime cost (i.e., to 2070) to $1.5 trillion in then-year dollars, and the cyber equation will ramp up costs by another 10% (rough estimation) and my estimation is set to the fact that it is smooth sailing, but that has never been the case so there is every chance that the F-35 will break all records, including cost to produce.
That is my mere speculative thought in the equation that the FCW brought to light.
Confused? Good! It has been going on for a little while, but Al Jazeera heads the setting of others with ‘Is the US crackdown on spyware firms just getting started?’, the article (at https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/12/22/is-the-us-crackdown-on-spyware-firms-just-getting-started) gives us “The Biden administration blacklisted Israeli spyware firm NSO in November, but experts say more needs to be done.” Well, that might b e nice, yet the absence of evidence means that they take to the streets with the stupid and flammable people. It becomes even worse with “a collaboration by Amnesty International and a coalition of media outlets – revealed that NSO’s software was sold to authoritarian governments that used it to spy on political leaders, journalists, executives and human rights activists, including people close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” As I personally see it, it was a collection of wannabe’s and fakes. They are that because evidence was not ever presented. And now the plot thickens, you think it does not? Well hold on, we are about to really up the throttle on this.
You see Bloomberg hands over the evidence I claimed all along. I wrote in several articles that if that list of 10,000 numbers was real the NSO Group would have a $400,000,000 piggy bank. But Bloomberg gives us ‘Pegasus Spyware Maker NSO Group Throws Cash at New Ventures to Survive’, where we are treated to “Israeli spyware firm NSO Group burned through most of its cash this year in a desperate bid to move past the scandal surrounding its phone-hacking tool Pegasus, according to a person with knowledge of the matter and private financial documents seen by Bloomberg News”, this could be seen as implied evidence that the money was never there, as such the list has to be (to a larger) part fake. Something I saw in less than 5 minutes, but all these wannabe essay writers You know, the one the Guardian has in Washington DC, as well as a wannabe essay writer at the United Nations with an outspoken hatred of Saudi Arabia. All going on flames and friends, but not a lot of evidence. Last Week at Wired we also get ‘Google Warns That NSO Hacking Is On Par With Elite Nation-State Spies’, but I will get back to that. You see the Bloomberg article (at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-21/nso-group-burned-up-most-of-its-cash-to-shift-away-from-pegasus) also gives us “Two American funds have expressed interest in NSO’s Eclipse technology — which can detect, commandeer and land drones — and in its new big-data analytics platform, for which the company signed its first contract this quarter, the person said. Pegasus would either be shut down or brought under the same umbrella as the other businesses in a bet that U.S. ownership would improve its standing, according to the same person.” In this I personally think that these American Funds can go and get fucked (apologies for the language), you see if the NSO is on a blacklist, the Americans can go try and make it run on a kite.
Although, there is every chance that China, Russia and optionally Saudi Arabia might want these technologies. So as we consider Wired giving us “The exploit mounts a zero-click, or interaction-less, attack, meaning that victims don’t need to click a link or grant a permission for the hack to move forward. Project Zero found that ForcedEntry used a series of shrewd tactics to target Apple’s iMessage platform, bypass protections the company added in recent years to make such attacks more difficult, and adroitly take over devices to install NSO’s flagship spyware implant Pegasus.” You see what Google (Apple too) isn’t telling you is that the transgression was possible to begin with. This is not some nerd in his mothers basement. This is the kind of person that can equal if not surpass both the NSA and GCHQ. More importantly both Google and Apple were not prepared, so just how many gaps are there in mobile phones? You want to complain about Huawei and their security dangers? Google and Apple are doing that all by themselves, just like Cisco did, but you probably missed those articles. Credit to Cisco of alerting everyone to this, but the media was eager to ignore it, much sexier to accuse Huawei without evidence.
So whilst the White House idiot gave the people a blacklisting, we get: “NSO issued a statement at the time saying it was “dismayed” by the Biden administration’s decision and that its technologies “support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime”” So now the parts are here, we get to my use of ‘White House Idiot’, fair enough! You see, as the finances show that members of the media have been lying (optionally by not vetting information). We also see that the members of the NSO Group might sell to anyone BUT the Americans. A stage that will cost America greatly, especially if China acquires this technology. So after they squandered weapons sales to Saudi Arabia (I am still hoping for my 3.75% bonus on sales to China), the setting is now that one of the most sophisticated pieces of intrusion software might end up where no one wanted it to go, it reminds me of the old saying regarding ‘A cornered cat’, and it serves the mother goose brigade as I personally see it and you can see it too, you merely need to look at the actual claims and the fact that we see words like ‘alleged’, we see ‘might be infected’ and we see no clear number system. No dashboard that gives optional validity to the claims by wannabe essay writers.
You know what? I am slightly too angry. First the yanks go all out on Huawei whilst evidence was never presented, now we see that the 5G networks are AT BEST a mere 50% of what Saudi Arabia has and in case of the US it is a mere 1.4% of 1%, it is THAT slow. Now we see the same exercise and it will be anyones guess who ends up with the NSO group software. It will be up to the NSO group to decide, yet I feel strongly that it should never end up in American hands. A person should not be allowed to be THIS stupid and being given a slice of cake, if it does happen, it better be valued at several billions. If you are THIS stupid, you cannot be much of a software maker, so pay you will, optionally Google could buy it to make their hardware more secure. It is a stretch and it is a steep price, but it could mean that the Apple supremacy ends and that might be worth a bag of coins to Google.
Yet the best moment was when I saw that the media nailed their own coffin (the finance bit), so whilst Wired and the Washington Post did the right thing, the others can take a long walk of a short pier as far as I see it. Oh yes, the Wired article was at https://www.wired.com/story/nso-group-forcedentry-pegasus-spyware-analysis/
One day until Christmas, I reckon it is that time of the year when we take a little more time to see what weapon systems are out for sale. I need a new hobby!
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 