Tag Archive for: culture

Behind the doors of a Chinese hacking company, a sordid culture fueled by influence, alcohol and sex

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BEIJING — The hotel was spacious. It was upscale. It had a karaoke bar. The perfect venue, the CEO of the Chinese hacking company thought, to hold a Lunar New Year banquet currying favor with government officials. There was just one drawback, his top deputy said.

“Who goes there?” the deputy wrote. “The girls are so ugly.”

So goes the sordid wheeling and dealing that takes place behind the scenes in China‘s hacking industry, as revealed in a highly unusual leak last month of internal documents from a private contractor linked to China’s government and police. China’s hacking industry, the documents reveal, suffers from shady business practices, disgruntlement over pay and work quality, and poor security protocols.

Private hacking contractors are companies that steal data from other countries to sell to the Chinese authorities. Over the past two decades, Chinese state security’s demand for overseas intelligence has soared, giving rise to a vast network of these private hackers-for-hire companies that have infiltrated hundreds of systems outside China.

Though the existence of these hacking contractors is an open secret in China, little was known about how they operate. But the leaked documents from a firm called I-Soon have pulled back the curtain, revealing a seedy, sprawling industry where corners are cut and rules are murky and poorly enforced in the quest to make money.

Leaked chat records show I-Soon executives wooing officials over lavish dinners and late night binge drinking. They collude with competitors to rig bidding for government contracts. They pay thousands of dollars in “introduction fees” to contacts who bring them lucrative projects. I-Soon has not commented on the documents.

Mei Danowski, a cybersecurity analyst who wrote about I-Soon on her blog, Natto Thoughts, said the documents show that China’s hackers for hire work much like any other industry in China.

“It is profit-driven,” Danowski said. “It is subject to China’s business culture — who you know, who you dine and wine with, and who you are friends with.”

China’s hacking industry rose from the country’s early hacker culture, first appearing in the 1990s as citizens bought computers and went…

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How culture drives foul play on the internet and how new “upcode” can protect us

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Shapiro’s book arrives just in time for the last gasp of the latest crypto wave, as major players find themselves trapped in the nets of human institutions. In early June, the US Securities and Exchange Commission went after Binance and Coinbase, the two largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, a few months after charging the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the massive crypto exchange FTX, with fraud. While Shapiro mentions crypto only as the main means of payment in online crime, the industry’s wild ride through finance and culture deserves its own hefty chapter in the narrative of internet fraud. 

It may be too early for deep analysis, but we do have first-person perspectives on crypto from actor Ben McKenzie (former star of the teen drama The O.C.) and streetwear designer and influencer Bobby Hundreds, the authors of—respectively—Easy Money and NFTs Are a Scam/NFTs Are the Future. (More heavily reported books on the crypto era from tech reporter Zeke Faux and Big Short author Michael Lewis are in the works.) 

“If we are committing serious crimes like fraud, it is crucially important that we find ways to justify our behavior to others, and crucially, to ourselves.”

Ben McKenzie, former star of The O.C.

McKenzie testified at the Senate Banking Committee’s hearing on FTX that he believes the cryptocurrency industry “represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history,” and Easy Money traces his own journey from bored pandemic dabbler to committed crypto critic alongside the industry’s rise and fall. Hundreds also writes a chronological account of his time in crypto—specifically in nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, digital representational objects that he has bought, sold, and “dropped” on his own and through The Hundreds, a “community-based streetwear brand and media company.” For Hundreds, NFTs have value as cultural artifacts, and he’s not convinced that their time should be over (although he acknowledges that between 2019 and the writing of his book, more than $100 million worth of NFTs have been stolen, mostly through phishing scams). “Whether or not NFTs are a scam poses a philosophical question that wanders into moral judgments…

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Sixty hearty cheers to Jahman Anikulapo, ‘Nigeria’s culture ambassador’ 

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When you clock 60 years just like Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo, actor, art connoisseur, culture activist, journalist and man-of-the-people, it calls for celebration and thanksgiving. It’s Jahman’s Diamond Jubilee and you know what, 60 years looks so good on him and he is wearing it graciously – like his trademark “adire” outfits, reminding one of his stage production costumes.

Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc, claiming over 6 million lives globally since 2020. Clocking 60 years is therefore a rare gift and every day that we live is a bonus. Nigeria’s current life expectancy is 55.75 years, up from 53 years in 2020, according to World Bank sources.

Under the mentorship of late Prof Dapo Adelugba (1939-2014), theatre critic and playwright at the University of Ibadan where he was director of the university’s theatre troupe, Jahman was encouraged to write reviews of plays and films regularly which clearly influenced his career as a journalist.

Jahman always knew what he wanted to be right from his undergraduate days at the University of Ibadan: an advocate for the art and culture community and defender of the public interest. It was his own way of expressing himself and achieving a higher purpose in life.

The intersection of art and society fascinates Jahman during panel discussions. It is why he uses his prodigious intellect to explore diverse art and culture themes for robust engagements. For example, music and visual arts have enabled a thriving cultural diplomacy across borders for the creative industry with bountiful harvests.

But on the flip side of the same coin, Jahman wants practitioners in the art and culture sector to be the voices of oppressed people, fighting for their rights and insisting on a better society where government is held accountable. Is Jahman a rebel with a cause?

Through writing, television appearances, seminars, conferences and festivals, our “birthday boy” continues to communicate the values of a decent society in the midst of contrived chaos around us.

Going into the general election season, Jahman is clearly not impressed with our political leaders and their shenanigans. He believes strongly that nothing will change because…

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How to Rebalance the Navy’s Strategic Culture | Proceedings

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To be most effective, the U.S. Navy’s culture must equally leverage three pillars: operational, technocentric, and strategy-centric influences. With these in balance, the Navy translates its assigned ends into the ways and means needed to produce and wield sea power effectively. Most notably, the interwar years (1920–1940) and the late Cold War era (1970–1989) saw sound strategy driving force structure and doctrinal decisions with extraordinary success.

Since the Cold War ended in 1991, the Navy has not sustained the cultural balance established during the interwar years and renewed in the 1970s. A The processes for sustaining American sea power focus largely on developing means (programming and budget), while devaluing ways (strategic and doctrinal underpinnings) for rationalizing and justifying those means. Recently, a congressional leader chided the Navy for its “strategic deficit.”1 Given this situation, it is worth asking whether the U.S. Navy—after three decades of relative peace and uncontested supremacy at sea—has fallen victim to the misplaced fixation on technology, inspections, and micromanagement that Andrew Gordon attributed to the Victorian-era Royal Navy: “They thought they were good, but, in ways that mattered, they were not. They thought they were ready for war, but they were not.”2

The Navy has struggled to balance its three cultural pillars and reconcile them with the mandates of jointness. Today’s Navy often places means ahead of ways in the ends-ways-means process. It clings to an unbalanced organizational culture that privileges operational priorities and technological solutions, while neglecting the strategic thinking needed to address the emerging global landscape.

Navy leaders must address this cultural imbalance immediately, as they adapt the organization and its people to face significant emerging challenges. As a first step, they must develop an appreciation for how historical and cultural influences produced the organization that exists today and how it differs from more successful past models. With this understanding, Navy leaders will better determine where lasting changes are needed, imagine what those changes should look…

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