See subject. Even the publicly known attacks are pretty scary.
ETA: Speaking of cyber attacks, Autocorrect zapped me on “casus.”
Just FYI, it’s bellum, and casus belli.
Thanks. I knew I was showing off.
It’s OK, when you’re starting 30 GQ threads a day, you don’t have time to proofread all of them, I understand.
Yeah, something’s wrong with me tonight. Could be that its 5:00 in the morning and my mind is running … a little fast. I’ve been reading and non-stop commenting on other threads too.
Call it hypomanic.
ETA: My name is listed as last poster in 13 threads in the first page.
My guess would be as soon as a nation declares war over it and the other nations are like “yeah, we feel ya bro.”
Yea, I don’t think there’s a GQ answer here. Things are casus belli once they cause wars, there’s no formal standard. Countries have gone to war over unbelievably minor issues, and refrained from going to war despite incredible provocations.
As a practical matter, two nuclear super-powers are not going to go to war over computer hacking.
What is cyberlooting? Are they actually stealing stuff?
Another problem with China is their blatant disregard for intellectual propery rights. It doesn’t really matter if you have trademarks or copyrights or whatever covering your work; once it hits China, they’re shamelessly copy it ad infinitum
Do the Chinese view intellectual property the same way we do? From what I understand, they have very different ideas on scholarly thought in that repeating accepted wisdom verbatim is the sign of a proper scholar. So maybe they don’t see it as a serious crime.
The Chinese have calculated that their activity won’t trigger an armed conflict with the West since it’s not in their interest to engage in a war at this point.
It’s not surprising they do it since stealing trade secrets can save billions of dollars in development costs and allow China to catch up with the West that much faster. In my view the West needs to guard it’s trade secrets much better than it has in the past.
I would vote for spending government money to help develop better cyphers to slow down this blatant theft of intellectual property. It doesn’t really matter who is doing the stealing…
Is this whoosh-bait?
Sounds about right, considering the absurdly plagiaristic bent of most Chinese grad students I’ve dealt with, and their propensity to cheat like hell on tests and assignments.
Personally, I don’t understand why we don’t set up a bunch of USAF and civilian contractors to go screw the Chinese internet infrastructure up in any and every way possible in retaliation. As in, you cyber-steal from us, and we’ll cyber-fuck-up your routers, firewalls, and computers.
Nobody will actually fire shots over that, but it would probably get the idea across.
That’s exactly the context in which I’ve heard of it. Apparently, a lot of the Chinese grads just don’t get the western idea of plagiarism. Being able to quote a previous master word for word has always been the Confucian way of doing things when it comes to tests. The idea that *a student *should come up with something original in their research is a little outside their viewpoint. Not beyond or above. Just alien to them. After all, a student is supposed to be learning from his teachers. It’s when he becomes a master that original research begins.
That’s why I wonder if they see intelecctual property differently.
I guess this issue won’t last long. China being now the country with the most patents, protection of property rights will soon become a priority.
Given that we have that very same problem with, oh, 90% of Americans under the age of 25, I think it’s a more complicated issue than one of different national cultures. Hopefully, it’s not reason enough to go to war; where would we source the troops? 
On the topic of the OP, Bruce Schneier recently wrote a good article on Cyberwar and Nationalism. His argument is that it’s a mistake to see recent hacking by certain Chinese groups as acts of war. They’re simply espionage, which has always happened. He also thinks that we have a lot to fear from the government militarizing and nationalizing the internet in the name of defending us from cyberwar.
And lots of Americans don’t see it as a serious crime. So maybe some of “we” don’t view intellectual property the same way some other “we” do.
Quoting isn’t the problem – it’s when they repeat if word-for-word without the quote marks or footnote, essentially pretending that those are their words, rather than the master’s.
They seem to do this automatically, even when it isn’t in their best interest. An example, from a professor friend: a Chinese student turned in a paper that included a lengthy quote lifted from a seminal work by one of the founders of the academic field, without any proper citation. That student seemed to not realize that the professor would surely recognize this quote, and that the writing style of an 1800’s German Professor clearly stood out from the students writing. But even more – a proper citation to this revered professor would ave bolstered his own argument in the paper, much more than just plagiarizing the quote did. His paper would have been improved by a correct citation!
I can vouch for the fact that it is far from unknown for white Anglo-Saxon students to do this sort of thing too.
(On the other hand, when I was an undergraduate one of my friends went to the opposite extreme in one of his essays, by “quoting” and citing his own word from an earlier, abandoned draft of the same essay! He actually wrote something like “as I said in a former attempt at this essay, ‘Blah, blah, blah …’.” That did not help his grade too much either.)
Because they are at least as capable of hacking into and screwing up our internet infrastructure as we are of doing it to theirs - probably more so, given the levels of manpower they would be able to throw at it.