Been one of those weeks so far and it's only Wednesday, two days away from the weekend and yet we have had multiple examples of amazing Irony and truly ridiculous mouth is open and noise is coming out. The sort of things where I hear them or read them and burst out laughing at how truly bizarre they are, things that highlight what an upside down and inside out world we live in, where up is down and left is right and truth is lies and lies are truth. Let me explain what has had me chuckling in disbelief and laughing at the Irony. Lots of GCHQ humour firstly. GCHQ is offering, via its new shiny front end the National Cyber Security Centre, to help companies defend themselves against the threat of hacking by reviewing their data security. Now this one got a chuckle, foxes advising on Hen house security and all that. White hats, so called ethical hackers work to uncover holes in company firewalls and digital security and help to fix them, bring a lot of skills and experience to the role and generally benefiting the companies who are at risk and need help. Which makes the GCHQ offer funny, given they are one of the threats that people should be protecting against. What with the joint NSA / GCHQ data mining, back doors in all sorts being added to the big search engines and social media sites and them being the people actually acting on the Investigatory Powers Act 2017 UK citizens and companies outside of the defence industry are a lot more likely to be hacked BY the GCHQ than the bogey men and women of Russian and Chinese hacking groups. I heard this, I chuckled, I thought to myself, how many people and companies would be stupid enough to invite in GCHQ and allow them access to their digital security systems, to snoop around, add a few back doors and weak points and make it easier for the government and security services to hack them, then I laughed at the state of the world we live in because how many would be quite a lot. Someone in GCHQ should be getting a bonus for this one, it's brilliant. Then we have GCHQ warning political parties about the threat of Russian hacking and digital influence in UK elections. Apparently one or more UK political parties have approached GCHQ for advice about protecting themselves from hacking and GCHQ decided to offer advice to all the political parties. The claimed intent being to help politicians and political parties protect their data and prevent leaks of voter information, emails and other confidential data that could damage the election prospects of the party and candidates. The US elections have been frequently referenced as an example of the threat. Also it's Russia being the big, dangerous enemy again, they swung the Brexit vote, they manipulated the US election and made Trump president, they leaked the Hilary emails yada yada yada. THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING ! To quote Boris Johnson "We have no evidence that the Russians are actually involved in trying to undermine our democratic processes at the moment. We don't actually have that evidence. But what we do have is plenty of evidence that the Russians are capable of doing that." Anyway GCHQ is warning politicians of the dangers and offering to help them make sure those embarrassing emails and data files that show the voters what sort of people they are really voting for never see the light of day. Can't have little things like the truth getting in the way of our elections after all. So in order to prevent the threat of cyber attack against our democratic institutions by agents of foreign states GCHQ is kindly offering it's advice. I wonder if the German security services have been offering the same sort of advice after they found GCHQ along with the Americans had been hacking Angela Merkels emails and data? Next we have GCHQ the following laugh out loud news: "Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook should be doing more to combat the emerging threat of fake news. The companies must recognise their “social responsibility” and help tackle misinformation spread by state-backed groups." This call for responsibility came from Paul Chichester, the director for operations at the GCHQ-controlled National Cyber Security Centre. Fake news, which is the political correct way of saying lies in much the same way that undocumented immigrant is used to describe illegal immigrants, is lies, deception, misdirection, statistics and data used in such a way that it deceives. Fake news is people, politicians and political parties basically lying. The phrase fake news, along with Alternative facts, came into common use as a result of the US elections but has been around for a long time, Lying to voters is nothing new, nor is lying to customers, lying to the Law, lying in general. Social media has simply replaced the older forms of media at spreading the lies. You only have to look at the headlines and front pages of a number of UK newspapers to see that. So anyway, GCHQ wants Facebook, Twitter and the like to do more to stop the lying. Not entirely sure how they are expected to do this but I'm sure with a big enough budget increase GCHQ could hire a few tens of thousands of people and help out, say by censoring UK social media posts, not allowing them to go public before they've been cleared by a member of the Ministry of Truth. Doing that might have some slight impact on posts but maybe by restricting how many posts a person has each day, or better yet how about only allowing people on the approved list to even access Facebook or Twitter. That works so well in the other countries that do it. Also given that GCHQ is now using software, search programs and data mining techniques to check peoples posts for keywords and phrases that can be used against them if they are ever classified as being 'of interest' at any point I would have thought GCHQ had a better idea of what was fake than Facebook does. But while this is funny it wasn't what made me laugh, instead it was a thought that came to me while reading this news: Will GCHQ be helping to fight the threat of fake news and lies when it's the Tories or Brexit? One final thing because I need to re-caffeinate and I don't have a coffee machine on my desk (not enough room). Scottish first minister Sturgeon stood in front of the worlds TV cameras and said that she would be going to the Scottish parliament for permission to hold another Scottish independence referendum. Not a huge surprise, given that Scotland voted by a large margin to remain, May is driving for a very hard Brexit and fuck anyone who objects and also Glorious Leader May's sound bite comment about returning devolved powers back to London. So Scotland is agitating for independence again and the usual talking heads are popping up and making the usual comments, little Scotlanders, rebels, treason, etc etc. But while the creeping inevitability of the UK being torn apart and being left as a diminished nation with a single party political system, provisional human rights and corporate exploitation of the masses being the accepted norm is hardly a laughing matter, the comments from May and no10 were. A second Scottish independence referendum would be 'divisive and cause huge economic uncertainty', says the woman who is forcing through the results of a badly worded referendum that will be 'divisive and cause huge economic uncertainty'. Scotland would be foolish to leave a Union with its largest trade partner says England, a country which is leaving a Union with its largest trade partner. Scotland Minister David Mundell said on the Scottish plans to hold a referendum in late 2018 or early 2019 (roughly two years from now) " It would be impossible for people in the timescale suggested by Nicola Sturgeon to make a reasoned view and, therefore, have a legal, fair and decisive referendum." Two years being not enough time for a country to properly consider an act as significant as leaving a Union with its largest trading partner. Remind me again how long the Brexit consideration period was. Laugh or cry, this is the crazy world we live in. Truth is lies, lies are truth, facts become alternative. Our own security services offer to protect us from those nasty foreign hackers while hacking us themselves and our politicians stand up and say do as I say not as I do when it comes to leaving unions with large trade partners. Laugh or cry, it's that bad. But I'm an old fashioned bloke, crying isn't manly. So I laugh . Then I go for more coffee. |
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