36 thoughts on “UPI’s Tw**ter feed hacked, fake headlines rampant”

  1. I just realized that if I were 19 and a computer whiz, this is the sort of thing I would do.

    1. I think I’d post more funny stuff, like “Obama declares War on Terror over, now begins War on Pants” or “Pope officially decrees that cats are superior to d*gs.”

      2. If it’s the North Koreans who did this…first, they don’t have a sense of humor; second, their goal is to provoke fear and panic; and, third, the person carrying out the attack would have been expected to treat the party line of the States poised to launch all-out war on North Korea and abstaining from doing so only out of fear of the might of their armies as the gospel truth.

        Add it all up, and you get the result we see, which is a decidedly unfunny and rather sad and disturbing joke.

        b&

  2. That is such good news. There are already too many useless businesses that deal with pseudo-news. One less. If they can’t secure a twitter account how can anybody trust they are able to secure anything other than copy&paste what the all-knowing fax machine tells them?

      1. I’ve heard some serious historians claim that really, the two world wars were really just one very long one with a pause for breath in the middle.

        1. I’ve heard historians claim that there really weren’t any “World Wars” but just a series of International Civil Wars. World War I, or International Civil War III, still goes on today.

  5. The Pope can’t even tell obvious faery tale from historical fact. Why on Earth would anybody trust him to report the weather, let alone current affairs?

    b&

  6. Is it just me being completely paranoid, or is it just a bit scary to imagine a tweet along the lines of “Top US official privately confirms nuclear attack on N. Korea imminent” being taken seriously by N. Korea.

    1. North Korea has no launch on warning nuclear capability, but they could lob plenty of shells into Seoul on short notice.

      1. North Korea has no launch on warning nuclear capability

        They don’t necessarily need one. If they’ve managed to smuggle a non-flyable bomb out into (say) a storage locker in New York somewhere.
        I wouldn’t put it past them, in the slightest.

        1. Great, now you’ve got me thinking about what the effects would be if someone loaded a nuclear weapon into a shipping container on a cargo ship and detonated it in a busy port.

          1. Oh, that situation’s been imagined many times, thought about a lot, and to the best of my knowledge the only solution reached was to throw up one’s hands and declare the situation impossible to deal with.

            I’m actually surprised that it hasn’t happened yet.

          2. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

            The kinds of bombs you can build without the sorts of engineering the US and Russia put into them are physically large and give off more than enough radiation to set off geiger counters.

            I can’t imagine getting such a bomb onto a container ship bound for the US. But, if it happened, it wouldn’t leave the harbor. Same thing with any private ship — fishing boat or what-not.

            It would be really, really bad for somebody to set off a nuke on a ship at a loading dock, but that’s nowhere near as bad as the middle-of-Manhattan scenario. And the middle of the harbor is as close as such a thing is realistically likely to get.

            Plus…not only would it be guaranteed that the ship would be traced back to its port of origin, the whole point in doing something like that would be to take credit.

            And anybody who did do that would be guaranteed of a disproportionate response.

            The worst case scenario there is North Korea.

            If it’s ISIS or somebody else in the Middle East, NATO would launch an attack that would make “Shock and Awe” look like a child’s birthday party, and it would be a great tragedy, but it would be swift total war and conquest with unconditional surrender from all relevant parties the only end. A nasty business, a terrible tragedy for humanity, but about as contained as such a thing could possibly be.

            North Korea…would only do such a thing with a simultaneous all-out artillery barrage on South Korea followed by their own total war on the South. And we’d likely respond with nuclear strikes of our own, which would have a real possibility of drawing China into the mess…at which point it’s lights out.

            Crazy as the North Koreans are, I don’t think they’re quite that suicidal or that far out of touch with reality. Yes, it’s very very bad there, but this would be a degree of insanity significantly beyond what they demonstrate.

            b&

          3. Would 8′ x 8′ x 40′ be big enough? (And there are even bigger containers.)

            Or imagine a bunch of smaller bombs sent to different ports. As soon as there were human fatalities (and there would be) the ports would be called upon to examine every container, and one ship can hold up to 3000. The international economy would grind to a halt.

          4. It would be a challenge but not an insurmountable one for a somewhat-industrialized nation to fit an Hiroshima-style bomb into a standard shipping container.

            But, even still, there’s the problem of getting it onto a ship undetected, and there’s no way it’s leaving the harbor without setting off all kinds of alarms. It’s going to be seriously radioactive, enough for the geiger counter you might have played with in high school to go crazy. And shielding sufficient to keep it from being detected is going to make it so heavy it’ll tip the crane when it tries to lift it off the boat. Hell, the bomb itself is going to be seriously heavy.

            And that would be for the easiest bomb to make. Anything smaller is going to require some serious nuclear engineering skills and facilities, and that’s not the sort of thing that can hide from major power spy agencies.

            None of this is even remotely within the technological reach of Al Qaeada or ISIS or the like.

            And simultaneous conventional bomb attacks, of the scale of Timothy McVeigh’s…would require a level of coordination and the like that they’ve yet to come close to demonstrating.

            What you should worry about is a traditional explosive vest set off just before the end of the security line at the airport the day before Thanksgiving. Though the body count would be minimal, the reaction from the public and the politicians could very well turn us into an unabashed police state, with pat-downs at every street corner and chokeholds for those who forget to carry papers.

            b&

          5. You haven’t had to worry about that previously? The threat has been there since the Iraqis and Libyans were running their nuclear acquisition programmes in the 1980s.

          7. So, when you got to secondary school, it was a live issue of concern. The number of players had probably increased, but the basic potential mechanisms remain the same.
            I don’t know if you live in a port city. I do. But it doesn’t much matter. If you can get the equipment into the international trading system without arousing suspicion (a definite “if” ; the system is full of suspicion of tax evasion and theft, as well as more esoteric crimes), then you can get it delivered pretty much anywhere in the world. If I was going to go for maximum effect in the UK, I’d arrange detonation somewhere around Stoke on Trent – maximum number of people in the fallout zone – around twice as many as if I’d targeted the capital city. I guess that’s part of the logic that the 9/11 bombers used in sending 2 planes to New York and one to Washington (I don’t know the geography of America well enough to know where the 4th plane was trying to get to.)

    2. Or possibly worse, “Top US official privately confirms nuclear attack on Iran imminent.”

      No, I don’t think you’re being paranoid.

      1. What was it that Reagan said? “With this legislation, Russia has been outlawed forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

        Or something like that?

  10. Thanks for scaring me almost then i read it was false.Didn’t read the beginning so was like what the…my sons friend might be on that navy ship.Usually it is someone famous had died.

  13. I remember the baddy in Tomorrow Never Dies managed to start a major military conflict between China and Britain using similar methods.

    Then Jimbo Bondage wiped the floor with him and all was well. If only there was a Bond in the real world to sort everything out.

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