UK General Election 8th June: Shake it all about?

[Vanadium Gryllz]

B-b-but if we don't have them what's to stop other people using them on us?

[Junkenstein]

B-b-but if we don't have them what's to stop other people using them on us?

Just the same thing that stops us using them really, you become an instant pariah to the rest of the world who no nation will deal with. Trade stops overnight, your population suffers and starves and a coup is about a week away.

Seriously, the only groups that would value having them are terrorists and even then they're useless without the infrastructure a nation state provides.

[MMIX]

As far as I can tell, trident serves the following purposes:

1 - Jobs in largely labour areas.(The main reason orbyn got so much grief from his own party is down to this)
2- Allows the UK to keep feeling important as a "nuclear power"
3 - Err, that's about it.

1 is a little silly as you could easily turn the workforce to other much more productive things at a fraction of the cost.

2 is pants on head retarded as there is nowhere on earth that you could justify deploying a nuclear strike at. Russia, China and North Korea are not awake at night in fear of 3 submarines. I would doubt that ISIS or similar even know about them and wouldn't give two shits about them either, even if they do. So who does it keep in line? Argentina? Pakistan? Iran? The EU? I'm seriously asking, what nation or group are they supposed to deter?

I think the historic answer to that has been "Anyone the Americans want us to deter", because it isn't as if we really have any genuine level of control over the damn things anyway.

[Junkenstein]

As I recall, Corbyn made them fire towards the wrong continent because communism.

That's how it went, right?

[Junkenstein]

Nhs systems compromised by ransomware.

I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure the it contractor responsible for them is good old capita. It's their style of incompetence.

Being deadly serious, one of the parties should be campaigning to take away all government contracts from capita and g4s. Others too, but those two fuck up everything they touch with amazing consistency.

[Cain]

I'm not opposed per se to the UK having nuclear weapons.  However:

1) Its need to be actually independent from the USA.  We cannot trust America will remain our allies for forever.
2) the UK needs to adopt a minimal credibility, second strike nuclear doctrine.  In other words, it retains enough missiles to respond to any largescale WMD attack on the UK by another state, but only uses them in that scenario.  Our current strategic arsenal should be our actual arsenal.

[Cain]

NHS computer vulnerabilities were discovered in November.  Still not patched, obviously.

[MMIX]

The UK is truly divided. Not only are we not terribly 'united' anyway, being a cobbled together amalgam of four, yes four, nations into a land mass slightly smaller than Oregon but there is increasing exidence of the disturbing  divide that catapulted us into Brexit; the current exemplar of this being our relationship to the Eurovision Song Contest.

YouGov ran a poll on whether UK people wanted to leave the Eurovision Song Contest and the results were telling

"Broadly speaking, the Brexit dividing line runs through the results. Those groups that were more likely to vote for Brexit were more likely to want to pull out of the Song Contest: 81% of those who intend to vote UKIP, 78% of 65+ year olds and 76% of Leave voters. Likewise, those groups most in favour of staying in Eurovision are those who intend to vote Liberal Democrat (70%), 18-24 year olds (69%) and Remain voters (65%)."

YouGov didn't ask the important underlying question of whether people wanted to leave the European Broadcasting Union but it would have been interesting to know since the EBU is the premier cheerleading group for public service broadcasting in a large part of the non-american world. [Yes Australia competes in Eurovision]. I would suggest that Brexit voters are likely to also be the sort of people who want to see the BBC turned into the Imperial Broadcasting Service, showing film of the coronation on loop, patronising documentaries of the happy, smiling, faces of our colonial workforce [in their own damn countries, of course] and interminable re-runs of George V at the Delhi Durbar in 1911. Yeah, the thought of the IBS makes my bowel creep, too.

All of which, however interesting, is a pretext for this silly graphic that made me snirk this morning



and I can't even complain to my local MP because he is the Master of the Local hunt!

[Junkenstein]

NHS computer vulnerabilities were discovered in November.  Still not patched, obviously.

Workaround found by random blogger. Not seen a single comment from hunt on the farce.

[Junkenstein]

NHS computer vulnerabilities were discovered in November.  Still not patched, obviously.

Workaround found by random blogger. Not seen a single comment from hunt on the farce.

Hunt has been found and made to comment:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39918426

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt says it is "encouraging" there have not been any fresh attacks.
"We've not seen a second wave of attacks and the level of criminal activity is at the lower end of the range that we had anticipated," he said.

I'm kind of hoping someone launches another attack in the next day or so just to show this clown up. He's got literally no understanding of what occurred, why it occurred or why it might re-occur again in the near future. Small side bet on his family history being at least part ostrich.

What's really baffling is that this could have been spun a dozen different ways to say what you will do to improve the NHS against future problems but he can't even be bothered to do that. I assume the plan is along the lines of pretending that the only way to fix the problems is by shoving various bits of it into private hands.

[Cain]

Government is clueless when it comes to cybersecurity.  Hunt is clueless when it comes to government, so he's twice as useless when it comes to cybersecurity.

Early indicators are North Korea may have something to do with WCry, which would make sense.  Aggressive infection doesn't matter when your country is largely cut off from the world and global economy.

[Junkenstein]

There was apparently a fuck up in the code that would make it impossible to claim the funds or decrypt the data even if you were dumb enough to pay. NK would fit the bill there but I still doubt it. The chance of self infection is there and it could impact weapons development which I'm sure Nk would find to be an unacceptable risk.

Have a hunch it's a non state actor(s) fucking about. That said, the possible level of harm will be played up to put the fear of CYBER into the populace and justify throwing more cash at gchq and similar. Why fix a problem when you can spend far more on detection and workarounds after an issue appears?

[Faust]

The ransomware part of the virus isn't new, a few variants originated in Romania, Ukraine  and Turkey. All they did was modify it slightly and use a Day 1 exploit (as it had been patched on a great many machines). In fact all they really did was take a publicised but recent exploit and apply existing malware... To great effect.

[Cain]

Which is the worst part.  What if someone competent purchased something from the Equation Group/Shadow Brokers hack?

[Faust]

Then you could have widespread intrusion on many many systems, that could passively spread without detection, potentially compromising a lot more then this attack. This was loud and quick and invoked a quick reaction, a poorly executed cash grab.

If someone had wanted to make something to give them access to information and control of the critical infrastructure of many countries on a long term basic (similar to how the FBI would have been utilising it), they could have. It's not outside the realms of possibility, that they could have done so already. It validates what Tim Cook was saying when apple refused to create a back door for the FBI, because this is exactly the scenario they described.

The good thing about this attack is that it has inspired a lot of even companies to update their old out of date systems which will close off many of these exploits and result in a safer web.