Growing up, I always wondered why war happened in real life versus in video games. You can duke it out without actually costing lives. I guess this kind of thing tends to do both.
Sounds like "A Taste of Armageddon"[1], a Star Trek episode where neighboring warring planets decide to wage simulated war in order to spare expensive real infrastructure. Except in this imagination, the people declared "dead" were required to report to disintegration chambers within 24 hours.
I remember a story about space combat where just transmitting a firing solution would disable the enemy ship. Can't remember the title or author for the life of me.
There's an entire worldwide underground black market economy of these sorts of things. "Dark web" isn't just a meme. If there's any propaganda it's that it's just China. It's all over the place.
Given the long, well-documented history of US government shenanigans [0, 1, 2], I would hope for a more thoughtful response to GP's comment. You would have to be somewhat naive to dismiss such claims.
You might actually be interested in this but last week the ex chief of operations for the CIA who was involved in both the Chile and Iran Contra fiascos sat down for a 3 hour chat about it amongst other topics in a fair amount of detail.
If for no other reason than to just understand how those things came to be and what the chain of command actually looks like in real life covert action programs and how things go wrong because I think you and maybe a lot of people here who don’t have any real background on these things outside of what they heard on a Joe Rogan podcast for example are missing some important pieces of the puzzle which leads to ridiculous comments like the OP made.
In this particular instance, I think all evidence would suggest that "western" security companies have been extremely successful in developing exploits for iOS, Android, and plenty of other platforms. So it would make a lot of sense that China would develop additional tools and talents outside of gov orgs and gov owned companies.
Genuine question, what does the US have to gain from making up this narrative? That's not always a useful question - obviously there are instances where something is true & someone also stands to gain. But in this case, cyber is the threat. If the NSA hacks you, does it really matter if they bought the exploit instead of developing it themselves?
> I think all evidence would suggest that "western" security companies have been extremely successful in developing exploits for iOS, Android, and plenty of other platforms.
Indeed. Other platforms include Stuxnet attacks Siemens software on PLCs controlling Iranian centrifuges. [0]
As to your question, while I don't see an obvious reason why the US would make this up, I can see situations where government agencies might desire that this information be released. (For example to justify funding or to send signals to China.)
