Addressing more than 40,000 people, Christopher Poole, who is known as ‘Moot’, said he felt deeply proud of the community he had created
Christopher Poole, the founder of the anarchic image-board site 4chan , told users on Friday his retirement had been “a long time coming”.
“This is it for me,” he said. “This is goodbye.”
Addressing more than 40,000 people via a live YouTube broadcast, Poole, who is known as “Moot”, said he felt deeply proud of the community he had created.
On Wednesday, in a post on the front page of the site, Poole announced that he would be moving on. “I look forward to one day returning to 4chan as its Admin Emeritus or just another Anonymous,” he wrote.
“The journey has been marked by highs and lows, surprises and disappointments, but ultimately immense satisfaction. I’m humbled to have had the privilege of both founding and presiding over what is easily one of the greatest communities to ever grace the web.”
Poole founded the site 11 and a half years ago, when he was 15. It quickly grew into one of the internet’s most influential – and chaotic – communities, spawning memes and jokes that spread far and wide. Today, it has a base of more than two million active users and more than 20 million “lurkers” every month.
The site has often proved controversial over its no-holds-barred approach to posts, especially in the /b/ (random) board. /b/, the site’s first forum, is infamous as the sweaty engine-room of the internet; the dank primordial ooze from which most internet culture, at one point or other, emerged.
Related: White House rickrolls Twitter user who complains of 'dull' feed
Rickrolling – the now-infamous practice of tricking people into clicking a link to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up – originated here. So did LOLcats. Anonymous, the powerful hacktivist collective, is thought to have taken its name from the label that accompanies posts by users – known as “anons” on 4chan.
4chan was also one of the sites at the centre of the leak of naked pictures of celebrities hacked from Apple’s iCloud in September. The month of the leak, Poole said, was a difficult one.
Related: Gang of hackers behind nude celebrity photo leak routinely attacked iCloud
“It took a toll,” he said. “We had close to a billion page views that month. I was completely overwhelmed.” He said he “got many a legal nastygram from firms representing the actresses, spent a shitload of time on the phone to lawyers” and spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
He said he had been considering retiring long before that.
One anon asked Poole if there was any board on the site he hated. “There are no boards I hate,” he said. “I find it’s very tiring to hate people on the internet.” Asked about his state of mind, Poole said that he had found “a kind of zen” and was “in a good place”.
“For people who are angry on the internet,” he added, “I hope that one day you find the beauty in things.”
On Wednesday, on /b/, a thread was started that called for tribute. “Let us all rejoice in this final calling to Moot”, the original poster wrote. Before the board disappeared, a chorus of anons had joined in joyous ululation – more than 63,000 shouts of “Moot!”
It was a fitting fanfare.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
Wikipedia’s arbitration committee, the highest user-run body on on the site, has banned five editors from making corrections to articles about feminism, in an attempt to stop a long-running edit war over the entry on the “Gamergate controversy”.
The editors, who were all actively attempting to prevent the article from being rewritten with a pro-gamergate slant, were sanctioned by “arbcom” in its preliminary decision. While that may change as it is finalised, the body, known as Wikipedia’s supreme court, rarely reverses its decisions.
The sanction bars the five editors from having anything to do with any articles covering Gamergate, but also from any other article about “gender or sexuality, broadly construed”.
Editors who had been pushing for the Wikipedia article to be fairer to gamergate have also been sanctioned by the committee, but one observer warns that those sanctions have only hit “throwaway” accounts.
“No sanctions at all were proposed against any of Gamergate’s warriors, save for a few disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned,” says Mark Bernstein, a writer and Wikipedia editor .
In contrast, he says, “by my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the Gamergaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia.”
The conflict on the site began almost alongside Gamergate, a grassroots campaign broadly targeting alleged corruption in games journalism and perceived feminist influence in the videogame industry. Even the title of the article was fought over: Gamergate itself is taken by an article about a type of ant, leaving the article about video games to move to “Gamergate Controversy”.
At one point, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, was drawn into the debate , telling a student who had emailed him over perceived bias in the article that “gamergate has been permanently tarnished and hijacked by a handful of people who are not what you would hope.”
Wales’ advice for gamergate supporters who wanted to change the wikipedia article was to be constructive, and present a vision for the article which they wanted to read rather than engage in a war with feminist editors who were trying to maintain their vision.
Arbcom’s rulings don’t mean that war is over, but for some editors, it’s still giving cause for concern. Abigail Brady, a former wikipedia editor, left the site over its treatment of the page for whistleblower Chelsea Manning, which was kept under Manning’s old name, of Bradley Manning, for months after she came out as transgender.
There’s a crossover between the two conflicts. One of the five editors banned from editing articles on gender had previously been an active edit-warrior in the debate over whether or not to move Manning’s page – but arguing against the move. He “was a major anti-Chelsea editor who then came out as false flagging,” Brady explains. In other words, he was arguing against moving the page in an emphatically hostile manner, in order to discredit the people genuinely holding that view.
“I think what this shows is how poisonous Wikipedia politics has become,” Brady says. “It’s a game of provocation chicken, both sides try to work as close to the ill-defined edge of acceptable behaviour to provoke the other into crossing it.”
“All the arbcom does it play its part, it never looks at its role in creating that climate. And the wider Wikipedia community isn’t going to fix it because most of them are exactly the sort of toxic people who weren’t driven out.”
The byzantine internal processes of Wikipedia are incomprehensible for many, but they serve to shape the content on the site, the seventh biggest on the internet . Its reportedly unpleasant internal culture and unwelcoming atmosphere for new editors has long been blamed for an overwhelmingly masculine make-up – just one in ten editors are thought to be female – which in turn contributes to what topics get featured on the site.
As the Wikipedia article on Wikipedia’s systemic bias explains , “research suggests that the gender gap has a detrimental effect on content coverage: articles with particular interest to women tend to be shorter, even when controlling for variables that affect article length. Women typically perceive Wikipedia to be of lower quality than men do.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
In a rebuke to a legion of online supporters and what the journalist and one-time member of Anonymous called a “dangerous precedent”, Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison by a federal judge in Dallas on Thursday.
Brown’s backers from across the web had hoped he would be able to walk free with his 28 months of time served for what they insist was “merely linking to hacked material”. But the 33-year-old, who was once considered something of a spokesman for the Anonymous movement, will face more than twice that sentence. The judge also ordered him to pay $890,000 in restitution and fines.
At one point he was facing a possible combined sentence of over 100 years, but after prosecutors dropped several charges against him following a plea deal, Brown’s sentencing parameters were reduced.
An investigative journalist, essayist and satirist who has written for the Onion, Vanity Fair and the Huffington Post, as well as for the Guardian , Brown claims to have split with the group in 2011, and the leaderless structure of the collective makes the idea of a “spokesman” difficult to even imagine.
Related: Barrett Brown statement: 'This is not the rule of law, it is the rule of law enforcement'
Brown also founded Project PM, a crowdsourced investigative thinktank dedicated to looking into abuses by companies in the area of surveillance.
In September 2012, Brown was arrested by the FBI for allegedly threatening a federal agent in a video posted to YouTube. In October 2012, after being held for two weeks without charge, he was indicted on charges of making an online threat, retaliating against a federal officer and conspiring to release personal information about a government employee.
Two months later, he was indicted on 12 further charges related to the hacking of private intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011.
Jeremy Hammond, the hacker who actually carried out the Stratfor breach, was sentenced to the maximum possible 10 years. Writing for the Guardian from prison in December, Hammond bemoaned that Brown “continues to await his sentencing for merely linking to hacked material” .
Brown, who was accused of sharing a link to the data Hammond obtained from the breach (as well as several further indictments related to withholding or hiding evidence and obstructing the FBI), at one point faced a possible sentence of 105 years.
In a statement to the judge before his sentencing, Brown expressed regret for posting the threatening videos which led to his arrest, calling them “idiotic” and reiterated his defence’s contention that he made them in a manic state brought on by drug withdrawal.
But he also criticised the government’s methods in pursuing his case, and expressed concern that contributors to Project PM might be “indicted under the same spurious charges” as he had been.
“This is not the ‘rule of law’,” Brown told the judge. “[I]t is the ‘rule of law enforcement’, and it is very dangerous.”
You can read his full statement here .
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
Imagine a world where mosquito-sized robots fly around stealing samples of your DNA. Or where a department store knows from your buying habits that you're pregnant even before your family does.
That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, where the assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.
"Welcome to today. We're already in that world," said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.
"Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible... How we conventionally think of privacy is dead," she added.
Another Harvard researcher into genetics said it was "inevitable" that one's personal genetic information would enter more and more into the public sphere.
Sophia Roosth said intelligence agents were already asked to collect genetic information on foreign leaders to determine things like susceptibility to disease and life expectancy.
"We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism," she said, referring to witch-hunts against Communists in 1950s America.
What's more, Seltzer imagined a world in which tiny robot drones flew around, the size of mosquitoes, extracting a sample of your DNA for analysis by, say, the government or an insurance firm.
Invasions of privacy are "going to become more pervasive," she predicted.
"It's not whether this is going to happen, it's already happening... We live in a surveillance state today."
- 'Nasty little cousin' -
Political scientist Joseph Nye tackled the controversial subject of encrypted communications and the idea of regulating to ensure governments can always see even encrypted messages in the interests of national security.
"Governments are talking about putting in back doors for communication so that terrorists can't communicate without being spied on. The problem is that if governments can do that, so can the bad guys," Nye told the forum.
"Are you more worried about big brother or your nasty little cousin?"
However, despite the pessimistic Orwellian vision, the academics were at pains to stress that the positive aspects of technology still far outweigh the restrictions on privacy they entail.
In the same way we can send tiny drones to spy on people, we can send the same machine into an Ebola ward to "zap the germs," Seltzer said.
"The technology is there, it is up to us how to use it," she added.
"By and large, tech has done more good than harm," she said, pointing to "tremendous" advances in healthcare in some rural areas of the developing world that have been made possible by technology.
And at a separate session on artificial intelligence, panellists appeared to accept the limit on privacy as part of modern life.
Rodney Brooks, chairman of Rethink Robotics, an American tech firm, took the example of Google Maps guessing -- usually correctly -- where you want to go.
"At first, I found that spooky and kind of scary. Then I realised, actually, it's kind of useful," he told the forum.
Anthony Goldbloom, a young tech entrepreneur, told the same panel that what he termed the "Google generation" placed far less weight on their privacy than previous generations.
"I trade my privacy for the convenience. Privacy is not something that worries me," he said.
"Anyway, people often behave better when they have the sense that their actions are being watched."
The World Economic Forum in the swanky Swiss ski resort of Davos brings together some 2,500 of the global business and political elite for a meeting that ends Saturday.
Microsoft pulled back the curtain Wednesday on the upcoming Windows 10 operating system focused on bringing harmony to the diverse array of Internet gadgets in people's lives.
As it previewed the new operating system, Microsoft also unexpectedly added to the roster of modern gadgets with the unveiling of headgear that overlays holograms on the real world and lets wearers use their hands to interact with virtual objects.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella touted HoloLens capabilities that will debut with Windows 10 later this year as the next generation of computing.
The US technology titan is also trying to make it more natural to interact with devices, such as conversational-style speaking with the company's virtual assistant Cortana.
"The number of devices is just exploding around us," Microsoft's Terry Myerson said during a presentation to press and analysts at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
"It should be easy to put one device down and pick up another where you left off; technology needs to get out of the way."
HoloLens was touted as an entry to "the world's first holographic computing platform" which enables users to place three-dimensional holograms in the physical world.
"Until now, we've immersed ourselves in the world of technology," Microsoft's Alex Kipman said while introducing HoloLens.
"But, what if we could take technology and immerse it in our world?"
- Walking on Mars -
Windows Holographic creates three-dimensional images in the real world, then lets people wearing the headgear reach out and manipulate virtual objects.
Examples shown during the event ranged from someone getting visual prompts during a routine home plumbing repair to being able to virtually walk on Mars and control a rover lander actually on that planet's surface.
Kipman said he invited virtual reality innovators, including Facebook-owned Oculus VR, to explore adapting different applications for the goggles.
"Holograms can become part of our everyday life," he said.
Nadella called HoloLens and Windows 10 a "mind-blowing" experience that will open a new type of computing.
"Today is a big day for Windows," Nadella said as Microsoft provided a look at its latest operating system at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
"We want to move from people needing Windows, to choosing Windows, to loving Windows; that is our bold goal for Windows."
Approximately 1.5 billion people around the world use Windows-powered computers, and Microsoft is intent on renewing its relevance in a age of mobile computing dominated by Apple and Google-backed Android software.
Windows 10 is being designed with feedback from millions of "insiders" testing early versions of the operating system, Myerson said.
- IE cedes to Spartan -
Microsoft is so intent on distancing Windows 10 from its predecessors that it skipped directly from Windows 8, which failed to deliver on its promise as a platform for a variety of devices.
The Windows 10 design creates a foundation on which developers can build applications for smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, and Xbox One video game consoles, he said.
During the first year after the release of Windows 10, the operating system will be available as a free upgrade for computers running prior generation Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 software.
Microsoft said it will also keep Windows 10 upgraded during the lifetime of devices.
Personalized virtual assistant Cortana, and its touted ability to answer questions conversationally, will be now available on personal computers. Cortana made her debut on Windows-powered mobile devices.
Microsoft also unveiled a new Web browser code-named Spartan, which will have Cortana built in and ready to chime in at presumably helpful moments.
Spartan is poised to be the successor to Internet Explorer.
"Project Spartan is a new browsing experience tuned for being mobile and working across this family of devices," said Microsoft's Joe Belfiore.
Windows 10 is also designed to hook gamers, according to Xbox team leader Phil Spencer.
Along with modifications that allow for more sophisticated play on smartphones, an application for Xbox will let people use Windows 10-powered computers or tablets at home to play games with or against friends using one of the Microsoft consoles, Spencer demonstrated.
"I think there are lots of developers who want to bring their experiences to the Xbox," Spencer said.
The private space exploration firm SpaceX said Tuesday it had secured a $1 billion investment that could help founder Elon Musk's plan to build a satellite Internet network.
The latest round of funding comes from Google and the financial firm Fidelity, which will own some 10 percent of the company.
The statement offered no details on plans for the funds, but Musk has said he wants to build a network of satellites to deliver the Internet around the globe.
The plan could conceivably tie in with Google's efforts to bring the Internet to underserved parts of the world.
"Space-based applications, like imaging satellites, can help people more easily access important information, so we're excited to support SpaceX's growth as it develops new launch technologies," a Google spokesperson said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.
In November, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Tesla Motors and other ventures confirmed that he is working on a web of small, low-cost satellites that could provide wireless Internet around the world.
Musk said in a message last year on Twitter that SpaceX "is still in the early stages of developing advanced micro-satellites operating in large formations."
SpaceX in 2010 became the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.
The new investors in SpaceX join existing investors Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn.
The statement confirms earlier news reports, which said SpaceX would be valued at $10 billion as part of the deal.
Google has been testing ways to bring the Internet to remote parts of the world using drones and high-altitude balloons.
A plane powered by the sun will attempt an unprecedented flight around the world next month, the project's founders said, seeking to prove that flying is possible without using fossil fuel.
Solar Impulse 2 is set to take off from Abu Dhabi with stopovers in India, Myanmar and China before crossing the Pacific Ocean and flying across the United States and southern Europe to arrive back in Abu Dhabi.
On its five-month journey of 35,000 km (22,000 miles), the engines will be powered only by solar energy. The two Swiss pilots will take turns at the controls in the tiny cabin for five consecutive days and nights in the air.
"Miracles can be achieved with renewables such as solar power. We want to show we can fly day and night in an aircraft without a drop of fuel," Bertrand Piccard, one of the pilots and the project's co-founder, told reporters on the sidelines of the World Future Energy summit currently underway in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.
The plane, which has the weight of a family car (2,300 kg, 5,100 pounds) and a wingspan equal to that of the largest passenger airliners, will take off in late February and return by late July. Its journey will span approximately 25 flight days at speeds between 50 and 100 km (30 to 60 miles) per hour.
Feasibility studies, design and construction have taken 12 years, said Andre Borschberg, the second pilot and co-founder.
"It is not the first solar airplane, however it is the first able to cross oceans and continents," he said.
Piccard said of the challenge: "It is simply the unknown. It is a question of technical reliability, of human weather and it is the challenge of discovery."
If something goes wrong, they will build another aircraft and continue the journey, he said.
"There's a will in humankind to make a better world and find solutions to climate change."
Companies involved in the project include Bayer AG, Solvay, ABB, Schindler, Omega and Abu Dhabi's Masdar.
(Reporting by Stanley Carvalho; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
Latest issue of French satirical magazine available in Apple and Google Play stores
A new app for French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has been released for iOS, Android and Windows devices, letting readers worldwide get hold of a copy without queueing at newsagents.
The app is illustrated with the current cover, a cartoon of the prophet Muhammed, in a change from the norm for Apple’s notoriously censorious App Store which has previous banned satirical and controversial apps.
The launch of the app on Apple’s store comes after the firm put a Je Suis Charlie banner on its French homepage, a rare move for a company with a typically conservative web presence.
Shortly after the banner appeared, Apple reportedly fast-tracked an app called Je Suis Charlie through its approval process. The app let users find vigils for the magazine’s murdered staff happening near them, and show their support using social media.
Currently, only the most recent issue of the magazine is available, in both English and French editions. But the app also offers annual subscriptions starting at £69.99, alongside the individual issues for £2.29.
User reviews for the app have been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of negative comments coming from users who couldn’t find the English translation. One one-star review does, however, brand the app “bad”, saying it is “based on racism and anti-muslim”.
Apple’s relationship with satire has not always been so rosy. In 2010, the company banned apps from string of prominent editorial cartoonists for breaching a policy against “ridiculing public figures”. Mark Fiore (a pulitzer prize-winning editorial cartoonist), Tom Richmond and Daryl Cagle all saw their apps denied approval for sale .
The first two were eventually allowed on after public outcry, but the latter’s app was never granted permission. In September that year, the company updated its guidelines to make explicit that “professional political satirists and humorists are exempt from the ban on offensive or mean-spirited commentary”.
Under other rules, however, the company continues to prevent edgy content from being sold on its storefront. Most recently, the game Papers Please, which mimics the experience of being a border guard in an authoritarian regime, was forced to remove nudity from a scene involving body scanners before the company would allow it on the App Store.
Apple has also censored publications sold through in-app purchases, perhaps the closest direct analogue to Charlie Hebdo. In November 2013, it rejected two issues of the comic Sex Criminals , and retroactively removed another, over the book’s explicit content (the award-winning comic features two lovers who discover that time stops when they have sex; they use that ability to rob banks).
Apple was unable to respond to requests for comment at press time.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
Google is only removing search results from European websites when individuals invoke their "right to be forgotten", contrary to regulators' guidelines, but will review that approach soon, the company's chief legal officer said on Monday.
The issue of how far the so-called right to be forgotten should extend has concentrated the minds of Europe's privacy regulators since the continent's top court ruled in May that individuals could have "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" information removed from search results.
Google has consistently argued that it believes the ruling should only apply to its European websites, such as Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France.
But the group of privacy watchdogs from EU countries, the Article 29 Working Party, concluded in November that they want search engines to scrub results globally because of the ease of switching from a European domain to Google.com.
David Drummond, Google's Chief Legal Officer, said the Internet giant's approach had not changed since November and it would review it when a group of experts publishes a report on last year's court judgment towards the end of this month.
"We've had a basic approach, we've followed it, on this question we've made removals Europe-wide but not beyond," he said at an event in Brussels on Monday.
Between September and November, an advisory council, including a former German justice minister and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, held public meetings across Europe to debate the balance between privacy and the free flow of information.
It is expected to publish a report with its conclusions at the end of January to help inform Google on its application of the ruling.
"We'll take that (the report), along with the Article 29 input and other input and arrive at an approach," Drummond said.
"It's our strong view that there needs to be some way of limiting the concept, because it is a European concept."
Since the ruling in May, Google has received more than 200,000 requests from across Europe affecting over 700,000 URLs, according to its online transparency report.
The EU's privacy chiefs adopted a set of non-binding guidelines in November to ensure the ruling is applied consistently across the bloc's 28 member states.
Citizens whose removal requests have been refused by a search engine can appeal to their national data protection regulator, who can then take action against the company.
On Friday, the Article 29 Working Party wrote to Microsoft, Yahoo and French search engine Qwant to remind them of the regulators' view that results should be scrubbed across all relevant domains.
(Reporting by Julia Fioretti; Editing by David Clarke)
A group of people targeted with online harassment have launched a support network aimed at helping others who find themselves in the same situation.
The network, Crash Override , will go further than many previous attempts to help harassment targets, not only providing emotional support but also helping those affected interact with law enforcement and the media, institutions which often fail to understand the realities of online abuse.
Crash Override is the brainchild of Zoë Quinn and her partner Alex Lifschitz. Quinn’s abuse, at the hands of the nascent anti-feminist Gamergate movement, saw her website getting hacked and her personal details posted online, including her home address and her parents’ phone numbers. She plans to bring the lessons she learned dealing with that harassment, as well as the contacts made along the way, to bear in helping others – initially on a pro-bono basis.
Quinn said: “We are a small group of people working out of pocket and we’re not asking for funding right now, which may or may not change down the line based on our needs, so we can’t take every single case.”
One of the groups’ first clients was Israel Galvez, a web developer and Gamergate critic who was the target of an attempted “swatting” from a forum linked to the movement. Swatting, which involves calling in fake tip-offs in an attempt to encourage the dispatch of armed police to the target’s home, is a tactic for bringing online harassment into the physical realm.
Galvez said: “Crash Override helped me immensely when I was working with police to ensure I would be safe when I was swatted.”
Alex Lifschitz adds that the network’s immediate priority is to sort out who needs help, saying that it is “quite cognisant of the likelihood of false-positives, trolls, and harassers brigading us as we launch in the current environment”.
“We will be assisting people in being able to take care of themselves while putting active priority on very particular cases of relentless and dangerous harassment that we have pre-vetted, while continuing to alert and assist new targets. We’re remaining as adaptable as the situations we encounter.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
The United States secretly penetrated North Korea's computer systems four years ago -- a breach that allowed Washington to insist Pyongyang was to blame for the recent cyberattack on Sony Pictures, the New York Times reported Monday.
Citing former US officials and a newly released National Security Agency (NSA) document, the Times detailed how the US spy agency in 2010 "penetrated directly" into the North's systems via Chinese networks and connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers.
Primarily aimed at gathering information on the reclusive nation's nuclear program, the NSA's clandestine operation switched focus to the growing threat posed by North Korea's hacking capabilities following a destructive cyberattack on South Korean banks in 2013.
Hidden US software provided an "early warning radar" for North Korean activities, and provided the evidence that persuaded President Barack Obama that Pyongyang was behind the Sony hack, the Times said, citing an anonymous official familiar with the NSA mission.
US investigators concluded that North Korean hackers spent two months mapping Sony's computer systems in preparation for what became the biggest cyberattack in US corporate history.
North Korea denies any involvement, although it had publicly threatened Sony if it released the comedy film "The Interview" about a CIA plot to assassinate leader Kim Jong-Un.
Given that threat and the reported level of US penetration, the Times report raised the question of why the NSA was unable to warn Sony in advance.
According to one US official cited by the newspaper, the intelligence agencies "couldn't really understand the severity" of the attack that was coming.
While North Korea's conventional military hardware is largely outdated and unsophisticated, its cyberwarfare capabilities have long been considered a significant threat.
South Korean intelligence believes North Korea runs an elite cyberwarfare unit with at least 6,000 personnel, trained in secret government and military programs.
A number of experts suggest the North's cybercapacity is heavily reliant on China, in terms of both training and the necessary software and hardware.
They say telecommunications giant China Unicom provides and maintains all Internet links with the North, and some estimate that thousands of North Korean hackers operate on Chinese soil.
According to South Korea's National Intelligence Service, more than 75,000 hacking attempts were made against South Korean government agencies between 2010 and September 2014 -- many of them believed to be from Pyongyang.
The Times interviewed a former North Korean army programmer who said the North began training computer "warriors" in earnest in 1996, despatching many to undergo two years' training in China and Russia.
The U.S. National Security Agency began tapping into North Korean computer networks in 2010, an effort that ultimately helped provide evidence to persuade the Obama administration that Pyongyang was behind the cyber attack on Sony Pictures, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
Citing former U.S. and foreign officials and a National Security Agency document, the Times said the spy agency was able to penetrate North Korean systems with the help of South Korea and other U.S. allies after first tapping into Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the rest of the world.
The newspaper quoted officials as saying the program grew into an effort to place malware that could track many networks and computers used by hackers in North Korea.
Such activity ultimately proved crucial in persuading President Barack Obama to implicate the North Koreans in the Sony attack, the officials told the paper.
It was the first time the United States directly accused another country of a cyber attack of such magnitude on American soil.
Obama "had no doubt" in this case, a senior U.S. military official told the Times.
North Korea has described the accusation as "groundless slander."
Sony's network was crippled by hackers in November as the company prepared to release "The Interview," a comedy about a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The attack was followed by online leaks of unreleased movies and emails that caused embarrassment to executives and Hollywood personalities.
U.S. officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
(Reporting by Peter Cooney; Editing by Eric Walsh)
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