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Comment by kposehn | Hacker News Reader

I think it is very important to understand that the timing of this report is likely no coincidence. With Xi set to have discussions today with Obama, this is effectively a slap across the face to Xi right before an important visit that he can't back out of, and effectively puts china on a lower footing by showing them to be lying directly to the US about their intentions.

Edit: this isn't to say publication/announcement was done at the administration's request, simply that the timing is extremely suspect. Other interests also want to see Xi brought down a few pegs. Politics :-/

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It's possible this was coördinated, but likely it's rather one of those current trends things. Like on HN, article on X comes up, and soon after article on tangent of X comes up shortly after riding the coattails of X.

Mr Xi is in town, what else related to Xi can give us more eyeballs now that all things Xi/China are in the news, what do we have? Oh, yes, of course, spying!

I think Xi meeting with Silicon Valley business executives before meeting with Obama wasn't any better.

Ironical MSFT and FB are fawning over Xi's visit giving him the royal tours. China treats these two companies very poorly. Nearly all MSFT software in China is pirated. China bans FB partly for censorship and partly to protect internal social networking products.

Yes, so perhaps as a result, China will be more favorable to MSFT and FB.

MSFT and FB want to maintain and increase access to the 1.35 Billion people of China. Not ironic at all, those companies need to be in China even if treated poorly.

Except Google. But standing on principle is pricey.

Facebook is completely blocked in China, as far as I'm aware. In fact, it's not just blocked, a DNS lookup of facebook.com is returns a bogus IP address. I can't see why Facebook would think that they have any hope of getting unblocked, unless they are willing to let China's censors do their thing with Facebook posts.

MS technically has ability to shut off and cripple any pirated Windows over the wire if it wants to. But in this case, it has chosen not to for a lot of Asian countries. The reason? Market share.

It wants users to get used to how Windows works, versus to other alternatives like Linux, Mac, etc.

Freemium model.

Good observation. MS is willing to pay a high price for market share.

For example, nobody wanted Windows Mobile, so they paid Nokia to install it. Failing that (<4% mkt share), they bought Nokia.

X-Box is another product they're paying customers to take, in exchange for living room share. It's lost billions overall since its beginning.

I have no doubt there is significant espionage going on.

What the last some years have done, however, is to make me rather distrusting of both sides.

I may be in the minority. But a democracy is in significant trouble when its own population no longer trusts and believes it, in the large. The leadership either turns increasingly autocratic, or it loses its power.

The t-word wins again. The lies told ostensibly because t-word, are proving to be far worse than the original risk of t-word.

And instead of effective oversight to harden our own systems, we have blindness, lack of accountability, and scapegoating.

It's not just the data collection that makes me distrust the Feds. It's its gross mis-management, abuse, and the insistence that I can't know what is going on.

So, pump out your stories about the Chinese. Many of you politicians sold us down the river, in that regard, years ago.

> But a democracy is in significant trouble when its own population no longer trusts and believes it, in the large.

Actually, democracy is safest when the people distrust it.

The real problem is that we have far too many people who are either completely trusting or totally inert.

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