Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
>Khan was casually dressed in a dark peacoat, black button-up shirt, gray pants, and sneakers. Shurboff’s attire was more businesslike: a light blue dress shirt, gray sports jacket, black trousers, and brand-new leather shoes.
It always makes me think me of a kid padding an essay to reach the teacher's limit though I'm pretty sure that's not actually the case.
DLC is a complicated class of materials, generally composed of amorphous carbon (no long-range order - kind of like glass) with the same kind of interatomic bonds you see in diamond (sp3 bonds). It's often applied by sputtering or ion beam deposition.
Diamond is sp3-bonded carbon with long-range crystalline order. It's most often made by chemical vapor deposition, which is slow and expensive compared to DLC deposition methods.
The DLC coating described in the article won't do much to reduce glass breakage. But it will greatly increase scratch resistance because it's nearly as hard as diamond.
Diamond doesn't melt unless you're heating it while it's also under enormous pressure to keep it from turning to graphite. It does ablate, or vaporize when hit with laser pulses. This is used to remove small graphite inclusions in diamond.
I would release the design as open source after it's completed. Sounds like you have some knowledge in this area so let me know if you'd be interested in collaborating!
Is this common practice for criminal investigations?
I think that's the part that parent thought was unusual
In what alternative universe this is happening?!
Do you have any evidence of this?
This sounds made up?
FTA: We asked Bloomberg about the practice. A company spokesperson acknowledged it.
"It isn't news unless it's true. At Bloomberg News, the most important news is actionable. That means we strive to be first to report surprises in markets that change behavior and we put a premium on reporting that reveals the biggest changes in relative value across all assets."
I was surprised to learn this is true!
https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
It doesn't provide any proof that they encourage bogus reporting for the purpose of manipulating the market. There's a difference.
What? how can you determine that from a piece of broke glass?
> an FBI expert in forensic gemology
and I can only presume they know what kind of power is required to melt diamond, and how it looks afterwards..
If one delivers enough energy to a material in a small-enough space (eg with short-pulse from a focused laser), the material "vaporizes" down to a certain depth and the process starts all over again at the bottom of the void that was ablated away. You can drill through any film this way.
Further tangent: "a piece of broke glass" can exhibit interesting morphology... "mirror", "mist", and "hackle" are distinctive signatures of different fracture conditions.
It is about the extent of the Huawei scandal.
>“We have very specific policy that applies to us as law enforcement agencies to neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation,”
Why are they now seeming to break that policy by confirming this investigation?
Basically, same as when 60 Minutes showed US bombers against protocol a short bit after Russia started waxing ISIS in Syria.
Especially a sample of glass?
Surely the buyer would want to bend it, scratch it, coat it, paint it, etc. to determine if it's suitable for their usecases?
In my experience, it's typical for samples to be provided free (or for a nominal cost), with no strings attached. If there was anything 'secret' in them, they would be protected by copyright, trademarks and patents.
"The sample looked like an ordinary piece of glass, 4 inches square and transparent on both sides. It’d been packed like the precious specimen its inventor, Adam Khan, believed it to be—placed on wax paper, nestled in a tray lined with silicon gel, enclosed in a plastic case, surrounded by air bags, sealed in a cardboard box—and then sent for testing to a laboratory in San Diego"
An initial evaluation would be measuring things like how much light energy of what frequencies is able to penetrate the coating. Is the viewing angle acceptable for a consumer device, etc.
Hitting it with a hammer can always come later when they determine that it is a good display glass first.
Breaking it into a number of a pieces with a laser is beyond the scope of testing its ability to resist scratches.
Breaking it, of course, would be something that any device designer would do in the course of characterizing or evaluating it as a component for a new product.
Whether that would have been done on the first sample is something that's strictly between the AKhan and the evaluator.
It's all fine and good if your device can survive a drop from 1m onto a hard floor without cracking or chipping, but if a fall from 2m then results in a cloud of razor-sharp glass flechettes, that shred all flesh in a 5m radius, you're probably not going to want that particular screen treatment in a consumer product.
But this test material was not supposed to be used for that, I guess. I'm not sure how they were supposed to evaluate it.
Personally, I'd want to do all of the following:
Put it in a rock tumbler with a bunch of keys and coins.
Scratch it with a steel razor blade.
Drive a galvanized deck nail through it with a claw hammer.
Drill a hole through it with a SiC drill bit.
Heat it up with a propane torch.
Put it in a freezer.
Drop it from 2m onto a hard floor.
Bend it in multiple directions.
Pinch it until it cracks.
Try to find a resonance frequency with ultrasound.
Perhaps this one was more for optical properties? Refractive index, absorption spectra?
We actually broke low quality diamonds with a hammer. They are also very easy to burn.
What is very hard is scratching diamond. If you combine the properties of different materials like diamond on the surface, and something that absorbs impacts inside it could be a wonderful material.
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20140917/BLOGS11/140...
Also, how does a startup without any sales dollars afford the services of Thompson Coburn LLP? And just LOL at Adam's final claim around disclosing the FBI investigation to help with landing a customer: do you think federal agents would have allowed him to break his non-disclosure agreements if this investigation had merit? Whole thing is pretty fishy
I find that hard to believe.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/business/google-sues-uber-over...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43010348
For any older person this is no news. Didn't we something like this with Hitachi in the 80s?
Of course the authorities try to ban purchases from foreign companies that steal American company's secrets, but they don't apply the same rule to American companies that steal other American companies secrets.
They also don't seem so eager to launch sting operations against American companies who aim to steal other American companies secrets.