Why is the act usually perpetuated against the US. China trades with other countries but rarely you hear news of China stealing their tech. Why does China strive to a great deal to steal tech from the US
Maybe it's language related.
I'm Chinese, and I can tell you there are many people in the dark corners of China's Internet are talking about similar kind of things: Spy stories, military secrets, dark politics & histories, rumors etc. Basic human nature. But if you don't read Chinese and look into the right place, you'll simply unaware of their existence.
I don't think all English speakers can also speak or read German, so maybe that's the reason, rather than "They just don't care".
2) If you are reading US news then you only have access to the biggest international stories since everything else is deemed irrelevant, e.g. [1] "Train Makers Rail Against China's High-Speed Designs"
3) Chinese companies simply buy companies in other countries to gain access to knowledge (Volvo)
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704814204575507...
We don't hear about it because it's a national matter and only the national news outlets cover it.
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlant...
IP theft is also a problem in Europe, Australia, etc, but again, the news doesn’t reach us often.
The article also mentions the previous Nanya case that made national headlines in Taiwan. These incidents don't make it on Hacker News or US media, though.
Reimplementing what Nortel had is non-trivial, but look at where Freeswitch and Asterisk are today. The closed competitors are limping along, with most repackaging the two main open source solutions.
This worries me as much as this article, because it make people associate China and Chinese companies with unfriendly behaviours.
If you say "not all", you are called a government shill. The same goes with articles trying to point out discrimination in US university admissions.
This is not posted to create dissent, but to reduce exclusion or invalidation that other reader may feel.
Maybe I should say differently: if you replace "asian" by "jewish" or "black" and the phrase sounds horribly racist, maybe that is because it is racist in the first place. Please do not do that.
Or you can buy Xilinx FPGAs, which are available with PPC-compatible cores built right in.
Or you steal the source code, instead of the deployment binaries.
Yeah our (US) civilization has plenty of flaws, I'm not meaning to suggest otherwise. Just saying since you asked, if it seems they are targeting the US a lot, this could be part of it. Plus the obvious fact that the US is the biggest and softest target.
In China, the manager class, the bureaucrat class have an opinion of their own people as worthless.
They don't believe that a Chinese engineer can make a widget better than an American engineer, because they think there is something inherently wrong with everything Chinese.
In their disturbed minds, they think if everything Chinese is bad, this also makes them bad too. Thus, they make themselves appear as un-Chinese as possible:
See, the only place in the world where American car brands making "falling apart as you drive" cars made a dent in the market is China!
In reality though, this conduct of theirs, acquiring material attributes of "Americanness" themselves, is just a psychological compensation.
I'm not trying to insult anybody here. This is my observation from working in trade with China for 10 years, and living there for 3 years.
What needs to be fixed, is the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China.
A real world example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217995
Is this largely a generation-specific culture, that will mostly pass on as the generation dies off, or embedded within the Chinese culture itself, and has a far greater inertial momentum to overcome and thus will take much longer to turn around (perhaps even generations of change)? My gut feel from my general reading is this is an intrinsic part of Chinese culture, though slowly changing starting at the more youth-oriented demographic-populated fringes that interact the most with the outside world.
That hasn't been reality in a LONG time. And even at their worst, American cars were still light years ahead of what China has managed to produce thus far.
I'd suggest that China is beginning to match US creativity with software -- a quick glance at the rising popularity of several github repositories that have Mandarin README's would confirm this. https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-ar...
Also, Vue.js seems to have a lot of Chinese contribution.
Their Google, FB and Twitter knock-offs seem to be doing good too.
Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions. The only reason the Chinese versions are alive is because the competition is blocked.
I'm not suggesting Chinese people aren't good, there's plenty of them working on top tier stuff outside of China. What I am suggesting is that China's policy of crippling the internet has consequences. As long as their internet is crippled China will lag the rest of the world in software.
Tencent has $35b in revenue and Baidu has $12b revenue (USD). Meanwhile Twitter has $0.7b in revenue (for reference, FB is $40b).
Yes Twitter appeals more to me but just because I'm not the target market of those Chinese platforms doesn't mean they are crap. They make real money and work for their users.
To address the sibling comment by kuwze, the reason why Tencent is successful in payments is because the Chinese government blocked everyone competing with it, and also because the Chinese market lacked credit cards. Same thing for Alibaba. It's similar to how African countries went straight to mobile before more developed places did, and nobody holds those carriers up as examples of innovation. If we didn't already have complete acceptance of credit cards we would probably be using wallets from Microsoft or Amazon or some other tech giant.
I have to respect Alibaba on the e-commerce though. In my opinion they're better than Amazon. Their software is dismal compared to Amazon, but when you measure them by the range of products you can get delivered, how fast and inexpensively, it's clearly superior, and they enjoy no protection from competition by Amazon. Alibaba is really great, the best perk of living in China hands down. Didi is cool too, though like all the copy cats it's just crap as a software company compared to Uber or Lyft.
So anyway, no disrespect to the business savvy of China's big tech. And I also see that there's some awesome units in them. For example, Tencent has some absolutely fantastic security groups. All I'm saying is that China's tech giants didn't get here by technical innovation, whereas America's did. And not only that, China's internet policy has the side effect of crushing innovation so we're not likely to see anything interesting spring from there.
- (this is handling double 11 traffic! if you don't know what that means, a few X prime day traffic) https://medium.com/@alitech_2017/open-source-pouch-alibabas-...
- from BAIDU http://apollo.auto/
Wechat is a killer mobile app, no web red herring. look at FB's app, so awkward.
Disclaimer: I worked for one of FAANG and it's not that easy to adopt new things.
I know what singles day is about. I'm unconvinced by your arguments, but will concede that it's not a good idea to for the US to drive good talent away with shitty immigration policy.
Have you used Alibaba's cloud service? Why is it as clunky as a second rate shared hosting service from 15 years ago? Can you explain that to me?
Also, given the fact that I have to go through insane bureaucracy just to get an account on it, what do the tech kids of China have the option to do except publish miniprograms on WeChat? Is China really going to be a leader based on returning engineers from the US?
Apollo's code looks pretty interesting. Will keep an eye on that. Funny though, I'm having trouble browsing the site. Requests fail half the time. Oh look, it's hosted by Baidu.. no wonder.
This breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to call names in arguments. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. Your comment would be fine without that first sentence.
Dubbo - 20,634 stars - https://github.com/apache/incubator-dubbo
FastJSON - 14,483 stars - https://github.com/alibaba/fastjson
RocketMQ - 4,962 stars - https://github.com/apache/rocketmq
https://github.com/iikira/BaiduPCS-Go
https://github.com/Jannchie/Historical-ranking-data-visualiz...
Just to name 3. You can see them on https://github.com/trending when filtering by langauge
Can you think of an example that is widely popular and not trivial? Is there some software related thing that originated from China that is just so fundamentally important that the rest of the world could not resist copying it or building on it?
I'm willing to bet you have never heard of Aamir Khan -- but considering how much of the world is a fan of him (largely in China and India) he is considered by Forbes & Newsweek to be the biggest movie star in the world (attribution: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/10/05/heres-why-aa... )
I think the same can go with software. Just because it's not popular in the West (and it's not discussed widely on Hacker News or trade mags/sites) doesn't mean it's not very popular worldwide.
My only point (originally) was that Nationalism and confirmation bias can cloud objective judgement about something. Is your point that that Chinese software is at best 'trivial'? (If not, please clarify)
No business could survive and make long-term plans and large capital investment if that's how the world actually worked.
How about walking out of an accounting firm with private business files and handing them to competitors for a fee? Still not information stealing?
If I take your car, you biggest concern is that you don't have a car now. If I somehow copied your car, you probably wouldn't care too much.
If I take your banking info, your concern is that I have a copy. That you didn't lose your copy is a lesser concern than that I have a copy and the damage I can do with that copy.
While these two things seem related, they do seem different enough that having a different word to differentiate them.
Taking a copy of something which is available to buy without paying is perhaps depriving the company of one sale, or not if you weren’t going to buy it but would happen to look at it for free. In some cases this free copy can even have positive net expected value, e.g. in the case where you read a book or watch a movie without paying for it and then tell people how great it is.
However in the case of stealing trade secrets it directly undercuts the entire value proposotion of the company, particularly since trade secrets are not patented so anyone is free to replicate the result and sell it in the marketplace, presuming that they independently invented the same process.
So taking a copy of a trade secret is considered espionage or corporate warfare and is a direct attack on a company in a way that personally ripping a copy of DVD doesn’t come close.
Would the ability of the company to challenge the sharing of the game really make a major distinction, especially since it would be possible to host the website in a country that doesn't care enough to take it down?
Of course, in the case in the linked article, I think it is reasonable to assume this wasn't done just for sating some curiosity.
"Conversion" is a tort (so, not a criminal offense) in which one party deprives another party of control over the second party's lawful property. It can involve physically taking the property, but could also involve otherwise depriving the rightful owner of control over it.
Taking someone's proprietary data and passing it to a competitor strikes me as a fair example of conversion, since it deprives the rightful owner of control -- they cannot, once the information has been taken and passed on, exercise control over it by keeping it exclusively to themselves. The value of the information has been destroyed.
It also covers situations in which the property has not actually been removed, but access to it by its rightful owner has been denied. E.g., encrypting files on your employer's computer such that your employer can't access them, but not actually removing them. (This is sort of equivalent to going to a warehouse and putting a lock, that only you have the key to, on a container holding someone else's stuff.)
The intriguing thing about Conversion, which I've always thought was interesting, is that it's independent of intent. Unlike the criminal acts of theft, where there's an issue of mens rea, conversion can occur without any intent -- the deprivation can happen as a consequence of some other action, but you can still be liable for some remedies, under some conditions.
There's centuries of caselaw about conversion and the traditional remedies for it ("trover" and "replevin"), much of it designed expressly to discourage vigilantism in the premodern and early industrial world. I think we could learn something from this, particularly as cyber crime becomes more common.
All countries in the world strive to "steal" tech from those that have it. USA itself "stole" the designs of industrial mills and presses and machine tools from Britain while it was forbidden with capital punishment.
Th USA also "stole" nuclear tech from Germany, that was the first to fission the atom or the first to create semiconductor diodes. They just gave the guys working on that on Europe much better quality of life. The jet engines of Germany (operation Paperclip), their rockets, the chemical industry traveled to the US after the war.
Today the US spy on communications worldwide and the biggest application for it is industrial espionage. With things like Intel ME on every computer or your real name registered on it, it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers when you have control of this hardware(intel is an American company and they are required to "cooperate" with secret services).
If it is so simple, so how does it work? (It might or might not happen, but it is certainly not simple or known)