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The Clean Network – United States Department of State

state.gov

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Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#391

Post by blaser-waffle »

ENOTTY wrote: post #331
novok wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FANMAG is also the infrastructure that most of these companies are running on, so in a way, they are delivering it bit by bit to most companies. Especially as companies move from doing things like 'running their own exchange server' to 'buying a microsoft 365 subscription'. Chromebook + google apps is what most companies need, and really good security for the most part.

Eh, configuring SaaS stuff to be secure is not easy either.

Aye, a lot of moving parts, and most of them aren't in your space. You gotta take it on faith that the SaaS provider is doing their due diligence.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#392

Post by blaser-waffle »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #224
munificent wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This document looks like a prop from Starship Troopers or Robocop.

Cyberpunk is now!

"Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology won't." - Stephen Lea Sheppard.

This is definitely in the "won't" category.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#393

Post by blaser-waffle »

smithza wrote: post #256
ISL wrote: post #80

I have the same feeling about this as I did the announcement of the "Department of Homeland Security". The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. "We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network." is a sentence straight out of an authoritarian playbo…

Just read in the news this morning that the intelligence community acknowledges China has a steak in Biden being put in the Oval Office and Russia has a steak in Trump staying put. Interesting that Russia's name was not in this piece anywhere...

Mmmmm office steak.

China has an interest in anyone not Donald Trump being in office, since he's picked fights with the CCP and started a trade war.

Russia got him there in the first place, and wants to keep flexing, as it allows them to damage both China and the US.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#394

Post by blaser-waffle »

8note wrote: post #300
ISL wrote: post #80

I have the same feeling about this as I did the announcement of the "Department of Homeland Security". The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. "We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network." is a sentence straight out of an authoritarian playbo…

As a Canadian, I learned about the American melting pot as "drop your culture and adopt ours" in contrast to the Canadian multiculturalism. The melting pot makes non-white people idealize white people, which is hard to imagine as anything but a top down imposition of standards

I'm an American in Canada and this is bunk. "I learned about" translates to "I've never spent any time below the border".

It's literally 99% American culture here. There isn't any "love and tolerance" that you couldn't find in any Blue State, and most of hard left types take their cues from what they see in the US; e.g. the prevalence of BLM wankery despite the fact they're in a different country with wildly different histories regarding slaves. The only things you can't find in the US are Nanaimo bars and banknotes with the Queen's face on them.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#395

Post by blaser-waffle »

8note wrote: post #303
squidlogic wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a natural decoupling between our two nations. We did the same with Soviet Union when we realized their ideology left no room for long term peaceful coexistence (see the Long Telegram). A lot of political leaders are realizing that the communism of China, while different in many ways to the Soviet variety, is still incompatible with the USA.

I'm not sure China under any ideology would allow for peaceful coexistence with the USA. It seems like a national pride thing that China cannot be subservient to the US, and the US can't survive a world where it's billionaires aren't in complete control. There's maybe a synthesis where the Chinese billionaires take over America? That way it's still wealth in charge in the US, and the Chinese in control of china

All ideology exists to, ultimately, justify the growth and success of its promulgators; ideologies that don't rapidly stagnate or die off. Basic meme theory.

China's specific ideology is irrelevant; "Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics" or balls out Marxism won't change the fact that the CCP needs to feed and manage a billion people. They will eventually engage in aggressive, even ruthless, behavior because they have to; 'tis the nature of Realpolitik. National pride and ideology have nothing to do with it, hegemonic competition is inevitable.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#396

Post by blaser-waffle »

saagarjha wrote: post #268
reaperducer wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's just another sign of the US's government technical incompetence. Not "the government." "A person in the government." The federal government has a very good design system. But for some reason, whoever built this page chose not to follow it. https://designsystem.digital.gov

> The federal government has a very good design system. Having no knowledge of how the federal government works, but having worked for fairly large organizations, I would still guess that the design system exists and is used in many places but a significant fraction may not even know it exists much less that they are supposed to use it.

Seconded. Plus many Fed'Gov orgs have explicitly different systems, requirements, and silos. The DOD or NSA would put out something flashy, but this is State...

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#397

Post by rtkwe »

solstice wrote: post #308
rtkwe wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to maintain that mixture of manufacturers broadly across all the 'critical' bits of infrastructure for it to really matter and there's a lot of infrastructure to defend. Just disrupting payments or mobile data sporadically across the US could deal a big blow to a lot of businesses. Just look how poorly they've fared with the COVID disruptions.

Disruptions would be there for sure. But I think building up that kind of capability is necessarily single-use only, and only makes sense if your goal is to use it as a direct prelude to an invasion of a country. Because people will relatively quickly discover where the problems came from, punish whoever's responsible and then switch manufacturers. I don't see how this could be of benefit to secret services whether f…

Just OSS isn't going to solve the paranoia around hidden backdoors in Chinese manufactured network equipment. A tiny co-processor looking for a trigger to brick the rest of the device would maybe require delidding to notice. The old adage is once they get access to your hardware there's very little in the way of attackers doing anything, how do you secure something when it's being manufactured almost 100% by an 'attacker' country's industrial base?

I think the China-hawk paranoia is going too far but for national security paranoia it's relatively well grounded. It's hard to justify being able to certify that a thing is secure when the hardware could just be lying to you about the firmware checksum for example.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#399

Post by _lsq »

wyuenho wrote: post #330
_lsq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all valid reasons for concerns yet these do not qualify as proof of wrongdoing from Huawai. For 2) specifically, I'm not sure it would be helpful to declare all private companies started by veterans as "sharing deep ties to $Country's military operations". There's no shortage of "guesses" and "plausible connections" around but the parent comment is specifically asking for actual proof in this instance.

People suspected the NSA were snooping and introducing backdoors and proactively places countermeasures against that. Why should the standard be different when it comes to China?

The standard shouldn't be any different and that's precisely the problem here:

* NSA is a governmental agency that by construction is tied to the state. Bytedance, Huawai and Tencent are privately owned companies in China and all "ties" to the Chinese governments are unsubstantiated. Blanket ban on private companies because of their country of origin and unsubstantiated suspicions results in clear discrimination and suppression of open competition in my mind.

* For my understanding, could you help by providing context on what specific counter-measures have been taken against NSA's intelligence effort based on people's suspicion?

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#400

Post by codemonkey-zeta »

chillacy wrote: post #284
codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you are correct, but the tools available to other governments still concern me greatly. Are we actually presently capable of making sure nobody snoops on our data? If so then I agree it is a better solution. But is it not better to use an imperfect plan which is implementable than wait for a perfect plan (if such a thing exists for cyber-security) to become implementable when a threat is present?

Depends how paranoid you want to be, and to what degree of certainty (after all it's impossible to prove a negative). But in general, backdoors for "the good guys" are just more surface area for "the bad guys", and developers of products which take security seriously lock themselves out too.

Is this about installing backdoors? Or is it just about ensuring the network doesn't run on known-compromised hardware/software?
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