Two major reports in recent days tell us that unless we take immediate action to slow climate change, the consequences will be dire. But the world has waited so long to take that action, that there is a growing dread that it's too late. The parameters have to be so severe at this late hour that there is no political will to force drastic changes nor would humans be willing to endure them.

Just as the reports came out — from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the National Climate Assessment that is mandated
by Congress every four years — and just as representatives from the 197 nations that signed onto the Paris climate accord were about to meet in Poland for the U.N.'s 24th climate conference, out came bad news. Instead of the reduction in emissions that all these nations had pledged, the year 2018 is registering an increase of between 1.8% and 3.7% in greenhouse gases emissions. Following an encouraging three-year 2014-2016 trend of flat emissions, the new record high of 37.1 billion metric tons is the second straight year of increase. Mostly, the causes were India with a 6% rise and China with 5%, both heavy users of coal. Even United States emissions were up 2.5%, after declines in seven of the last ten years.

The members had asked the IPCC what needed to be done in order to hold temperature rise to 1.5° centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a notch below an increase of 2.0° centigrade (3.6° Fahrenheit) generally agreed to be a threshold beyond which planetary changes would be catastrophic. The report's answer was that emissions must be cut 50% by 2030 and driven to net… Read More »

There's no better tale to demonstrate the threat of China's sinister deceit than what Bloomberg Businessweek magazine brought to light in an October article.

Amazon's Web Services division (AWS, their data storage "cloud") was in 2015 looking to buy Elemental Technologies of Portland, Oregon, which develops software to compress massive video files and conform them to different devices
for faster transmission. Elemental uses servers assembled by Supermicro Computer in San Jose, California, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards. It has these manufactured by subcontractors in China.

As part of due diligence, Amazon sent a server to an outfit in Ontario that securitizes such devices. It found a tiny microchip on the motherboard that wasn't a part of the original board's design. It was hardly bigger than a grain of rice.

Investigators have been able to deduce that the chips, present in all Supermicro boards, were inserted by the Chinese subcontractors, most likely required to do so by the Chinese government or the People's Liberation Army, and that their function is to open a door for an attacker to pass through into any network to which the server is attacked. Hardware attacks are about access, access to whatever sensitive and secret data was on that network — corporate, government, military, whatever. The infiltration of the tiny saboteur chip is looked upon as the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.

Hardware hacks are a magnitude more difficult to pull off than software implants, "like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow" said one hardware hacker. It's "like black magic". Engineers who have analyzed the chip say it appears to alter bits of code on their way to the CPU telling the device to communicate… Read More »