North Korea Hasn’t Changed

So, we saw last week (several stories of which this is one) that North Korea continues to build up their nuclear capabilities in spite of statements to the contrary.  The cited reference from the Stimson Center in Washington is worth reading too (ref).  Remember that NK is a puppet, not an independent actor in all of this.  They don’t do anything without China’s permission, though occasionally they exceed expectations and do more than they should.  They get slapped for that.

Just to be clear, a friend of mine who is a nuclear physicist, did the analysis and said they are not likely to be building weapons grade material with this place.  It is not that big.  The press is playing this up when it is not relevant to nuclear weapons development.

So, from both of these articles, it appears the frost on the pumpkin is North Korea is continuing on with its nuclear development, given time by a pause created by the meeting between the US and NK leaders.  Over the years this seems to be their routine.  Ratchet things up, then calm them down and go on doing what you were doing.  The Chinese run this operation and North Korea has fun doing its part, but this time they are facing an administration that might not like that way of doing business.  This one does not like promises that are not kept.  No doubt General Mattis made that clear on his visit to China.

China consistently believes that it can do what it wants, anytime it wants, and proceeds accordingly.  When they meet resistance, they move around it or slow down.  They don’t quit.  If they really want nuclear weapons in North Korea, they may have taken on a task that exceeds what the US will accept.  They know that, of course, yet proceed to find out what we will do.  They have been doing that for a long time.  They are observing, correcting their path to strategic goals, but they don’t quit.

The next steps are for us to go back to the successful strategy of suggesting military options to this problem.  China does not want a North Korea that is radioactive anymore than we do.  If we start bombing this nuclear sites, the rubble will be there for a couple of hundred years before anyone can clean it up.  Though maybe North Korea wouldn’t care about the risk to cleanup, and just send people in anyway.  The cleanup crews love their leader - or else.

T Mobile and Sprint Merger Complicatiions

This is a more complicated deal than the one AT&T did with Time Warner.  The owner of T Mobile is Deutsche Telecom and the owner of Sprint is SoftBank.  In theory is is a Japanese company buying a German company to operate in the US as one, but SoftBank has a lot of Chinese holdings like Tencent so the integration of that conglomerate is a little more tricky.

The Chinese do a lot of this kind of dealing, using second-tier companies to get a foot in the door under a larger roof like SoftBank.  They pretty much ignore the owner after that, though they send all the right people to Board meetings and corporate picnics.  Remember Alipay for that lesson.  This one bears looking into in a little more detail.   It is not just about control, which SoftBank has with 66% of Sprint, but it about influence - that third part of foreign ownership, control and influence.  Conglomerates are a world of their own and they have many governments trying to stick fingers in their business.  But where that becomes important is when China has to pass on some business deals because they have ownership of companies by state-owned institutions.  Yes, its complicated, and China wants us to think their companies are just like the rest of businesses in the world.  We know they aren’t.

Shift to Malwareless E-mail Attacks

FireEye has an interesting report that they put together using email from July to December last year.  It shows a shift from malware infected email to other types not using malware.  The big 4 among those were whaling, credential harvesting, spear phishing and W-2 scams.  That last one is because these are businesses FireEye is protecting and the scams are at the corporate level.  We have had some of those around here.  Several people have reported trouble with their credentials of late and I wonder what use that credential is being put to.