By the BashWeb at KLMBH (Kuala Lumpur Mountain Bike Hash)

Over eight years, Barack Obama has created the most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world. To what end? From 22,300 miles in space, where seven Advanced Orion crafts now orbit; to a 1-million-square-foot building in the Utah desert that stores data intercepted from personal phones, emails, and social media accounts; to taps along the millions of miles of undersea cables that encircle the Earth like yarn, U.S. surveillance has expanded exponentially since Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009. The effort to wire the world has cost American taxpayers more than $100 billion. America’s intelligence culture has grown frenzied. Agencies are ever thinking to get bigger, move faster and pry deeper. Into the NSA’s Bluffdale, Utah, facility would flow email, texts, tweets, financial records, Facebook posts, YouTube videos and telephone chatter. Quantum computing could be a game-changer in U.S. Intelligence. It would break the last line of defense against government intrusion. How big is too big, though, is a question the outgoing president has never answered fully. At what point does gathering data become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end? ...

Oui, la NSA hacked France in 20121 I received an order from Mr. Sarkozy’s successor, François Hollande, to go to the U.S. and tell them off. We were certain it was them2 3. At the end of the meeting, Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, was not happy. On the bus, he told me he was disappointed because he never thought we would detect them. He even added, “You guys are good.” We do not spy on the major Allied Powers. It was shocking that the U.S. broke this rule. — Bernard Barbier4. ...

Learn French. It is much easier than undertsand French speaking English.

If you care about privacy, Signal is certainly not an option. – Nikos Roussos Instead, use Conversations on Android with OMEMO encryption. Whisper Systems failed big once again. They just announced their “Desktop” version of Signal, which is actually a Chrome app. So just to get facts straight, this is neither a Desktop nor a Web app. And just like their Android app, you need a Google account to download it. Actually this is even worse, because you also need to use Chrome to use this app. Channeling all your (meta)data through a closed source browser, built & distributed by the biggest tracking ad company. – Nikos Roussos, 2015.12.05

On May 13th, I attended a conference at Sascha’s Shanghai. It’s a great place with lots of fresh beer on the first floor. But before rushing for refreshments - as we typically woukd do at a bar, we had a chat with Philippe Massonnet. He shared some thoughts on the development of China with us following the publication of his book The so-called “Chinese Miracle” [^1}. It was quite refreshing I reckon. ...

Surfing the web in China can be a real pain, even if you are not particularly looking for sites with questionable content or forbidden keywords, as described by China’s internet regulator. This is because of the heavy monitoring and censorship. As The Atlantic reports, this is how the Great Firewall of China works. The government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told [tech organizations in China] to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games. China has indeed erected a firewall—a barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside world—but that is only one part of a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship. If you’re trying to reach one on that blacklist, the Chinese international-gateway servers will interrupt the transmission by sending an Internet “Reset” command both to your computer and to the one you’re trying to reach. Instead of the site you want, you usually see an onscreen message beginning “The connection has been reset”; sometimes instead you get “Site not found.” Annoyingly, blogs hosted by the popular system Blogspot are on this IP blacklist. For a typical Google-type search, many of the links shown on the results page are from Wikipedia or one of these main blog sites. You will see these links when you search from inside China, but if you click on them, you won’t get what you want. The final step involves the newest and most sophisticated part of the GFW: scanning the actual contents of each page—which stories The New York Times is featuring, what a China-related blog carries in its latest update—to judge its page-by-page acceptability. This again is done with mirrors. When you reach a favorite blog or news site and ask to see particular items, the requested pages come to you—and to the surveillance system at the same time. ...

Nice post by Richard Brubaker on All Roads Lead To China regarding Competitive Intelligence and how companies obtain insider information in China. In China though, because so little is consistent in any industry and because everything here moves so fast, BI is very different here. It relies less on traditional tools (internet, news surfing, speaking to sales people, etc) and takes on a much more guerrilla approach. In many ways, it requires a deeper knowledge of the industry while at the same time having a real sense of where the hidden data lies, and being willing to go out and get that information. ...

Nice post by Richard Brubaker on All Roads Lead To China regarding Competitive Intelligence and how companies obtain insider information in China. In China though, because so little is consistent in any industry and because everything here moves so fast, BI is very different here. It relies less on traditional tools (internet, news surfing, speaking to sales people, etc) and takes on a much more guerrilla approach. In many ways, it requires a deeper knowledge of the industry while at the same time having a real sense of where the hidden data lies, and being willing to go out and get that information. ...

It seems like there’s still a long way to go… I’m starting this blog with a few thoughts on the Chinese approach to risk management and its implications for the big consultancies that have entered China thinking it would be a new El Dorado… as I did! I came across a post by Paul Denlinger on China Vortex that points out why it is difficult to be a risk professional in China and why selling risk consulting services to Chinese companies is still far from easy. ...