141–144 of 144 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is terrorism the correct word for the US government infiltrating, manipulating and subverting technology and services all over the world? Is spreading fear about being monitored by a seemingly lawless entity terrorism?
Terrorism is like a catch-all word.
The fact that a request with a TTL smaller than 12 does not trigger a response does not mean the responder is the host after 12 hops. Assuming none of the previous hosts misbehaves (they could be increasing or at least not decreasing the TTL) you can only conclude that it is none of the later hosts, but it can still be any of the previous ones.
That leaves you with Comcast AND China Unicom hosts and, considering that the replies you see in the traceroute results can easily be spoofed, it can be any third party as well.
Possible scenarios include (I don't say they are more likely):
1. Comcast is producing the responses, but only does so if the request TTL is large enough to make you blame China Unicom.
2. China Unicom hands the packets over to a third party after just a few hops in their backbone. The third-party sends ICMP Time exceeded messages looking like they are from other China Unicom hosts to make you blame China Unicom.
Conclusion: This is either an obvious attack from within the China Unicom backbone OR a more sophisticated attack where the attacker wants to a) hide his identity and b) blame China Unicom for it (I can't think of a scenario where b) would be a by-product and not on purpose).
Just saying. The sentences in the post that include the words "prove" and "proven" are simply wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is, there's no well defined way to tell which version of the word someone's using. That's the point. So best to just not use it. (Obviously you do need to use it sometimes, in an academic context for example. It's a tricky one.)
I've been told by an academic in the field (International Relations) that even within the field there is no academic consensus about the term "terror(ism)". I'm not sure if that causes the word to be avoided in academic writing, I suppose largely yes (for its lack of any well-defined meaning) with some exceptions (probably by those who agree with the propaganda surrounding the word).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been told by an academic in the field (International Relations) that even within the field there is no academic consensus about the term "terror(ism)". I'm not sure if that causes the word to be avoided in academic writing, I suppose largely yes (for its lack of any well-defined meaning) with some exceptions (probably by those who agree with the propaganda surrounding the word).
Interesting, but are relatively few terms in academic writing that aren't contested. was the tenor of their point that there's no common ground, or is it the standard wrangling over technicalities/edge cases?
The only way to meaningfully use the term "terror(ism/ist)" in academic writing is to exactly define at the start of the paper exactly what you mean and also what you don't mean by "terror(ism/ist)". This may attract knee-jerks of "that's not what it really means/etc", thereby detracting from the main point of the paper.
The other problem is, that even if you nail down the definition, it's still contested because it's a very loaded term no matter how you turn it. The academic goal is objective description, not pointing out good guys and bad guys.
Once you get past that, next problem arises, which is that International Relations just isn't always a hard science (just like History is not). So even if you got a clear definition, and it's accepted that both parties are equally bad, it can still be quite fuzzy whether it's "really" terrorism, because the one guy did this, and the other troops such, but then the guerillas, however it was the rich families that something or other, and Ted supported George, while Bill's family lived on the land for generations, blah blah bla etc. I really suck at history, it's just confusing.
All in all it's just more accurate to describe who did what, and if you want to describe something "terrorism"-ish, it's better to just describe reasons behind the attacks, the psychological goals, and psychological effects certain attacks had on the population, etc. Basically just say what you mean (even if they're theories) and state the facts, but avoid the loaded term.