Monday, December 22, 2014

Commentaries, Opinions, And Editorials -- December 22, 2014

Kim must be feeling pretty pleased with himself.(ReutersS/KCNA)

In North Korea, Kids Don’t Even Know The Internet Exists. So How Did The Country Pull Off The Sony Hack? -- John McDuling, Quartz

So the FBI has now formally accused North Korea of being behind the gigantic cyber-attack that has brought Sony Pictures to its knees over the past month—culminating in Sony’s decision yesterday to pull The Interview, which is about a fictional plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, from theaters.

In other words, arguably the most damaging cyber-attack against a company ever, was, astonishingly, carried out by a very poor country where citizens are thought to lack basic internet access.

“My students did not know the existence of the internet,” a North Korean school teacher and author, Suki Kim, said in a recent New York Times Book Review podcast. Hard numbers on internet access in North Korea are hard to come by (the International Telecommunications Union has no data for the country), but we do know cellphone access is booming.

Read more ....

Commentaries, Opinions, And Editorials -- December 22, 2014

Why Kim Jong Un Can’t Take a Joke -- Josh Rogin, Bloomberg

Played for a Fool: The Sony hacking story has unfolded just as North Korea’s propagandists would have wanted. -- Suki Kim, Slate

In response to Sony hack, US should focus on China not North Korea -- Jason Healey, CSM

Forget the Sony hack, this could be the biggest cyber attack yet -- Patrick Tucker, Quartz/Defense One

The electronic equivalent of war -- James K. Glassman, AEI

Iraqi Kurds Get Their Groove Back, End Siege of Mount Sinjar -- Jamie Dettmer, Daily Beast

Pakistan After the Peshawar Massacre -- Shahid Javed Burki, Project Syndicate

The Taliban’s ‘alarmingly efficient’ war on education -- Jon Henly, The Hindu

Nigerian Islamic Extremists Pose Regional Threat -- Michelle Faul and Haruna Umar, AP

Beware of Chinese Hegemony -- Rebecca Liao, National Interest

Ukraine’s economy is on the rocks and needs Western help -- Washington Post editorial

Why Ukraine’s internally displaced have given up hope of returning home -- Luke Harding, The Guardian

Is Putin to blame for the plunging rouble? -- BBC

Russian Billionaires Are Putin's Hostages -- Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg

For many Spaniards, Princess Cristina's trial date is welcome news -- Sara Miller Llana, CSM

2 comments:

James said...

The guy on the left of the photo isn't smiling!

War News Updates Editor said...

You know James .... I noticed the same thing. Everyone is laughing but that guy, and the first thing that went through my mind is .... he is on the receiving end of a joke.