It's funny you say that, because I'm a security engineer and I talked to loads of other security engineers who didn't question it. People at the top of the field. It looked bogus as hell at the time, but you couldn't easily say so.
Hackers are as susceptible to partisan politics as anyone else. At least we now have the benefit of the CrowdStrike President's declassified testimony.
It took me forever to find out that the “back channel” with trump tower and Alfa Bank was a hacked Point-of-sale terminal in the lobby sending spam mail. Snopes still laughably lists this as “unproven”
I remember at the time thinking “what are they doing, using an IRC channel?”
I was screaming inside when the FBI started waving around that they had evidence and all they could show for it in public at the time was a handful of incoming HTTP requests from Russian IPs.
I get hundreds of MB of traffic from Russian, Chinese, etc IP addresses every week scanning for drupal/wordpress/etc vulnerabilities. It hardly meant anything.
Worse still is that we know that this happens and my colleagues still just go along with whatever companies like CrowdStrike or Trail of Bits or whoever say. Like we make business decisions based on their word alone. They're popular, so they must be correct. Group think is real and there's large numbers of us who aren't as capable as we claim to be. 95% of the work for most is checking the boxes on compliance questionnaires and getting shut down/stalled by the engineering & ops teams who actually make their companies money.
The US has the better navy but china has a crap tonne of anti-ship missiles (because of the US having the better navy) and that's before the risk of it going nuclear.
I wonder how far the US would actually go to protect Taiwan, would they risk someone tossing a nuke or the situation getting spectacularly out of hand.
Even a large number of people in Taiwan today do not want to be associated with the RoC. There is a growing sentiment to express a distinctly Taiwanese identity.
The Tawainese government used to rule mainland China back when it was known as the Republic of China, before retreating to Taiwan during a civil war.
They were also the "China" entity that was the founding member of the UN. It was only a few years after the UN's founding that the Communist Party won the civil war and formed a new country (the People's Republic of China), yet it took several decades for the UN to officially recognize them as the representative of "China".
The argument to make isn't that they should have a mandate to rule mainland China, nor even that they should be mainland China's representative of the UN. But rather that they should be their own representative at the UN, and have claim to the permanent seat of the Security Council that mainland China currently holds, since it was originally theirs to begin with.
It's a nuclear strategy that'd cause all hell to break loose if that were ever attempted, but is a plausible enough argument that it could likely be forced through if enough parties truly wanted to strip China of their veto power.
I think this would be a functionally useless move that might hasten the coming of a potential ww3. It doesn't seem like a solution to me, just provocation. It doesn't make the PRC less powerful, it doesn't change how much of the world's manufacturing has been moved there, it doesn't change who owes them money, or their cyber abilities/actions.
What does it do but exclude them from any dialog to make force and violence more likely alternatives?
It’s the kind of stuff that wouldn’t pass the smell test with security engineers here.