Of Playstations And Battle Stations

 

This idea is not new, with the University of Illinois building a similar model from the first Playstation by 2002 that cost less than $200k and which beat supercomputers costing $100m in performance tests. There are guides on how to link them readily available on the net now. These arrays are not only used for war gaming simulations - they can also simulate nuclear tests and so allow cheaper (and more covert) weapons testing and development programmes. They are also terrific code breakers.

 

At this point, if you're benefitting from outsourcing to China, you may well wish to look away or take the dog for a walk instead. If you're still reading, you may also be aware that China runs the world's biggest ever cyber-espionage programme. Of course they target hi-tech industrial secrets, but they also infiltrate every corner of the Pentagon they can (as the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission's latest report, written by experts in counter-espionage, pointed out as recently as October) regularly accessing institutions like the US Naval War College and the nuclear weapons laboratory at Oak Ridge over the years.

 

Indeed, the PLA has created hundreds of 'cyberwarfare militia units,' which are rather like Minutemen with mice and keyboards instead of rifles. These can be drafted in to help with data analysis when successful entry has been gained by the thousands of full-time Red Army tech guys. The report, in the WSJ, also describes the sophistication of an espionage intrusion at a main US defense contractor, so if you run a big company you might want to make sure your IT security staff know how it was done.

 

Espionage is nothing new, of course, as relatives of the Rosenbergs could testify, but the Chinese do seem to be at least as good at it as the Cold War Russians, especially with the alleged breaches of security at Los Alamos in 1999, which may have resulted in the stealing of blueprints for miniaturized nuclear warheads, and have been part of a whole raft of spying attempts which some commentators still accuse the Clinton administration of deliberately downplaying so globalization under GATT could happily continue.

 

Now the point of the Playstation reference is that the sort of supercomputers that are needed to crack Pentagon codes don't just come in very big boxes with the Cray logo on the front that you can spot as they're wheeled through Customs (although Cray and Sun computers have also ended up in Chinese military and security applications). Certainly the picture I've had in my mind over the last decade or so is of very determined CP PC night-owls, huddled round own-brand CRT monitors and smoking like chimneys, while swapping passwords to classified portals.

The Playstation supercomputer trick puts a whole new light on theories of what equipment some of the teams could be using, on the basis of if it's good enough for the Pentagon, it's good enough for the PRC, and in any case, any info about it on a Pentagon computer is probably archived on a hard drive somewhere in a dimly-lit office in Beijing anyway. Imagine now all those IT guys with numerous linked Playstation arrays, all busily cracking codes, and their success is easier to explain. To put it in perspective, the US Army Research Labs' Cray XT-5 hotship performs at a speed of 100 TFlops, but 2,200 linked Playstation 3 CPU's could go to more than double that without breaking sweat, so you can see that complex code-cracking can be started while you're making a fresh pot of coffee for the nightshift.

 

Given that all Playstation 3's came out of Hon Hai's mega-factory in Shenzhen, it would be just great to get a glimpse of their order book for the last few years, and check any bulk sales within China, especially those dispatched by lorry to Beijing directly. Perhaps an Apple employee, on the next visit to Hon Hai to check over how the Tablet trials are going, might get lucky and manage a few snaps of the order book on an iPhone?

 

And the names to look for? Well, it's unlikely they'd be end clients blatantly called Espionage Inc or even CyberWars'R'Us. But if they also included any of the following: Beijing Alite Technologies Company Ltd, China Aero-Technology Import Export Corporation (CATIC), China Great Wall Industry Corporation, China North Industries Corporation (NORINCO), Wha Cheong Tai Company, and Zibo Chemet Equipment Corporation Ltd, amongst others, you might want to pause for thought. Because these firms were indicted for supplying WMD proliferation technology to Iran in 2004 and they might be hoping we'd all forgotten. Because if the Iranians are also using linked Playstations as supercomputers, those War Games may be nearing the end game sooner than we'd all like to think.

 

So the whole interaction between a consumer electronics industry, the development of products with sophisticated processing and graphics chips, and the overt and covert needs of defence and security establishments, is proving a lot more complex than some of us had previously thought. Of course, I don't know if my hypothesis above is true or not, which is why I'd really like to see that order book, if we can posit that such a thing still exists just for the argument.

 

On a lighter note, as for the US military's own stocks, well, they may want to keep a handle on what happens to 336 unneeded Blu-Ray players from the consoles......

 

By the way, we are still trying to secure a main sponsor for our COOLXmas Competition. If any men in shades with earpieces are reading, there's a PayPal account below under Contributions. No middle men, front-companies or Swiss bank accounts necessary.