Huawei Accused of Technology Theft
npr.org
npr.org
a) bugged the hell out of Nortel's ottawa area offices, both physically, by rootkit, and by getting their own people hired to physically smuggle out documents and design data
b) Copied the entire DWDM / optical transport product line
c) Released a nearly identical product a few years later, and sold it at a ridiculously low price, effectively killing Nortel.
Many years later the vacant ex-Nortel office buildings came up for lease. One of the candidate tenants for that large of an office space were parts of the Canadian federal government, ministry of defence, etc. Every serious tenant passed on the space because it's so riddled with bugs.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the-my...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-for...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/department-of-...
https://www.afr.com/technology/web/security/how-chinese-hack...
https://business.financialpost.com/technology/nortel-hacked-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-ag...
Yet I don't see any accusations against Microsoft, Apple, Android or Intel.
I don’t think you can really compare the companies.
I don't think Kim Dotcom would have a military style raid on his house in NZ done on behalf of the Chinese government.
perhaps not, but in Thailand, yes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/03/activist-li-xi...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/05/hong-kong-acti...
It is rapidly scaling its military technology and reach, threatening neighbors over competing claims in the South China Sea, re-creating its own version of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere via the Belt and Road initiative and China 2025, interning its own citizens by the millions into re-education camps, forcing spying by its own citizens overseas by threatening family members, introducing a 'social credit' system to force not only self-censorship, but active promotion of its policies by its citizenry in order to not lose 'privileges' like taking the train.
I understand that the Trumpian version of the US is annoying in many ways, but the idea that we let China and Chinese companies dominated by it's government (they literally have to pay Party minders to keep them in line) have unconstrained access to its geopolitical foes infrastructure beggars belief.
Microsoft's telemetry data is like sending the teacher a note that you viewed the material. Huawei hides a camera in your home steals your homework and beats you out of that college placement with your own material.
Microsoft hasn't added telemetry to linux through a backdoor.
A WTO case would have been easier.
This is exactly as useful and trustworthy as saying "A wizard did it".
A quick google search turns up a CBC article from 2012 where a former Nortel exec alleges Huawei hacking, and also, amusingly, this HN story.
The modern Chinese legal system isn't nearly as predicable as other jurisdictions.
If it violates the patents, then why did the company not sue Huawei and get a compensation? If it doesn't violate the patents then what's the problem?
The company just can't quit copying.
You can get a whiff of the company culture from this guy. https://m.weibo.cn/u/3626485974?uid=3626485974&luicode=10000...
Also if you Google a bit, you can see that there are similar lawsuits against US companies. For example, a Korean company believes (and had win in courts in some countries) that Apple has stolen their intellectual property: [1]
Also it is noteworthy how some countries' courts agree that Apple has infringed the patents while other countries' courts disagree.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....
Theft of trade secrets is a crime.
1. None of those links provide anything like evidence or support of your accusations.
2. It's absolutely remarkable that Huawei had somehow committed all these crimes and yet nobody has ever managed to prove anything significant in a court of law.
All we get are wild accusations and law suits that get thrown out.
Here's the really remarkable aspect here: the US government doesn't need to actually force propaganda on its citizens. If there's one thing we can learn very clearly from this entire ridiculous episode it is that American citizens and the American media will happily propagandize themselves. They will eagerly believe the most far fetched claims without a shred of proof, despite all actual evidence to the contrary, and they will spread those claims to each other in a kind of extremely intense decentralized disinformation machine. There's nothing else like this in the planet. You would think after Iraq Americans would learn even the tiniest bit of skepticism... But no.
I won't even bother pointing out any more how HN has devolved into a 24/7 racist anti-China Two Minute Hate system. At this point it's beyond clear that the community has abandoned any kind integrity. I don't think there's anything to be done which is why I'I've left and had to go through the embarrassing exercise if unrecommending the site to people I've previously recommended it to. People will say this is just a phase but I doubt it. When a community abandons any kind of Truth standard and just embraces bullshit I don't think it recovers.
Not everyone who has a differing view from the common consensus is a "paid propaganda spreader" and a differing view does not make someone any less worthy of engaging or taking seriously.
I would not classify the OP's post as unsubstantial. He makes an effort to type fully formed opinions and many of his comments are backed by citations. If you want to see an example of objectively unsubstantive posts, please see [1]. You will only find one-liners and unsubstantiated, inflammatory statements.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=scoot_718
By the way, your comment also break HN's rules on accusing others of astroturfing:
> Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data.
Internet commenters are a million times too likely to assume that someone they disagree with is posting in bad faith. This is probably the biggest poison we see on HN, and it's growing. When it comes to minorities of any kind (such as nationality), the effect is to gang up on others and hound them. If that sounds odd, imagine how you'd feel if expressing your personal view on something led people to accuse you of being a spy or a paid agent. That's happening commonly now. For an example from a few months ago, see the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19401961.
This comes from a cognitive bias rather than malice—the bias that, because my views are so obviously bright and light to me, anyone disagreeing must be coming from a dark place—but it's no less poisonous for being unintentional.
The Department of National Defence keeps changing its story on that issue.
>But after the Citizen article was published, Julie Di Mambro, spokeswoman for then Conservative Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, noted in a statement that, “security officials have assured us that they have not discovered any bugs or listening devices.”
The first article seems to heavily imply that there is no definite conclusion to this matter.
If people just went public with this earlier we could have ended the "Huawei isn't hacking people and stealing their data" charade. Everyone get's to act so outraged publicly today but that Nortel case started in the early 2000s:
> An internal security study by Nortel suggested that hackers had also been able to download research and development studies and business plans as far back as 2000.
It's good enough for intel agencies to quietly warn the big businesses when it's seems 'necessary' which seems like the new modus operandi, at least in the US.
> a) bugged the hell out of Nortel's ottawa area offices, both physically, by rootkit, and by getting their own people hired to physically smuggle out documents and design data
The links you provide do not mention Huawei.
> b) Copied the entire DWDM / optical transport product line
> c) Released a nearly identical product a few years later, and sold it at a ridiculously low price, effectively killing Nortel.
Why is this two bullet points? It's the same issue, no? The links you provide are not related to this issue. Could you provide proof or evidence of some kind to back up your claims?
> Many years later the vacant ex-Nortel office buildings came up for lease. One of the candidate tenants for that large of an office space were parts of the Canadian federal government, ministry of defence, etc. Every serious tenant passed on the space because it's so riddled with bugs.
bugged the hell out, riddled with bugs
« But after the Citizen article was published, Julie Di Mambro, spokeswoman for then Conservative Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, noted in a statement that, “security officials have assured us that they have not discovered any bugs or listening devices.” »
« Again, a DND official dismissed concerns that listening devices could be hidden in the sprawling complex, noting that none had ever been found. »
« Five days later in another statement to the Citizen – and contrary to what Norman had said earlier – the DND was once again claiming that no bugs, surveillance equipment or listening devices had ever been found. »
---
So to sum up … You have made two (though you made it look like three) claims of criminal activity by a specific Chinese company. You provide three links giving the appearance of supporting your claims. After following the links I discover that the links only address your first claim and direct quoutes from government officials counter the narrative of suspicions in the article. Not only that, the company your are making the claims against is not mentioned in any of the articles. When I Google huawei DWDM / optical transport product line to try to find proof or evidence for your second claim the only allegation I find is your post on HN. Your first claim makes three separate allegations: (1) bugged the hell out of Nortel's ottawa area offices, both physically, (2) by rootkit, (3) and by getting their own people hired to physically smuggle out documents and design data. The article only talks about the suspicion of "legacy bit and pieces" meaning (1) but no mention of rootkits (2) and nothing about planting moles (3).
Come to think of it you're really only making one claim – that Huawei engaged in industrial espionage against Nortel to such a degree that they put Nortel out of business. And nothing in the links you provide substantiate that claim.
Where is your proof or evidence that Huawei directly put Nortel out of business by engaging in industrial espionage?
I"m skeptical, as some of these accusations are not that far-fetched. What I'm more concerned of, is whether or not this is driven by some higher entity so that mass-hatred for the Chinese and their tech is accumulated, which would mean state driven media.
Despite all of these accusations of being one step behind, Huawei seems to be on the forefront of a lot of things - especially in the field of 5G, so it would seem possible that the US would pull some propaganda antics to make us reconsider Huawei and Chinese Tech
Its tough trying to read and discern for yourself anything on the web nowadays - as for this matter, I'm putting my thoughts on Huawei and Chinese tech on hold since I think both cases are true - That there are some concerns with tech theft against the chinese, but its also being extremely exaggerated.
Who is accusing them? AKHAN Semiconductor (and the FBI), a small company in Illinois whose primary product is these diamond-coated screens. Past their founder, the second person on their about page is their "Vice President of Government Affairs;" the third person listed on their about page is their "Global Security and Intelligence Advisor," a former senior CIA officer who joined the company in May.
If the roles were reversed - a small display-tech company in China that recently got a senior Party member and intelligence officer to join made accusations about America with the help of the Chinese national police organization, and Xinhua was reporting on it - I think we would be very skeptical!
Knowing this, I personally give quite a bit of weight to any accusation against the company. I have a hard time justifying in my mind that a company operating legitimately in the US would prep their employees on how to respond during an FBI raid.
"At least two dozen times, the San Francisco headquarters locked down equipment in foreign offices to shield files from police raids."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/uber-s-se...
They didn't provide any details beyond that. It's possible that the individual had just never experienced any legal compliance training, but based on their role I certainly expect they had.
It makes perfect sense to me that Huawei would prep its employees on how to deal with a raid, and being prepared for the police is not solely the action of the guilty. It tells us that Huawei is afraid of the FBI. It does not tell is that Huawei is afraid of the FBI because Huawei are bad guys.
For comparison, Corning got Gorilla Glass onto multiple companies' phones within a year of announcement in 2008. I've said before that Corning is a juggernaut in glass with a longstanding reputation, but I still don't see how those partners could agree to just buy the glass without multiple rounds of testing, and even trying to break samples, given a major selling point is durability. Huawei can't have been the only phone maker to have received AKHAN glass for testing, and it would be interesting to know what the other companies did to it before turning them down.
To use a less biased source [2], SCMP (which is a HK newspaper now owned by Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba) mentioned:
John Demers, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s national security division, said that by stealing trade secrets through computer intrusions and the co-opting of company insiders, China had “turned the tradecraft of its intelligence services against American companies”.
Between 2011 and 2018, Demers said, more than 90 per cent of his department’s cases alleging “economic espionage on behalf of a state” involved China. Among such cases are the recent prosecutions of Chinese national Xu Yanjun, suspected of trying to steal trade secrets from US and European aerospace companies, and 10 other Chinese intelligence agents suspected of similar offences.
“The playbook is simple,” Demers said. “Rob, replicate and replace.”
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/china-involved-90-percent-economic-...
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2177727/fb...
If 70% of robbery cases handled are by black people, is it because the black robs more, or is it because the DoJ is racist?
If 70% of espionage case handled are related to China, it must be China's bad. Huh.
I read that out of 35 close European and Asian allies of the USA who have been pressured to not do business with Huawei, only 3 of them are cooperating with us. I am all for having secure infrastructure but the flip side is that we seem to be conditioning our allies to not cooperate with us. Long term, this is not good.
Are huge corporation like Nortel/Samsung/Cisco suddenly too small to defend for themselves, in the US and EU, where I would assumed to be the biggest market? Is the Samsung that got sued for rounded-corner phone not thought of to patent their technique to put oled onto curved glass? (which sounds extremely patent worthy)
edit: grammar
Next, these countries still get to export goods containing the stolen technology back to countries where the IP was stolen (perhaps via third-party distributors), since there is typically no provision barring that.
We may be approaching a world where all critical infrastructure must be open hardware and software, or face a Balkenizd patchwork of suppliers local to each market.
(Not a Cisco or Huawei fan myself.)
According to the article, here's a list of thefts and espionage attributed to Huawei, employees of Huawei, or people related to Huawei.
1. Stealing tech at tradeshows:
On a summer evening in 2004, as the Supercomm tech conference in Chicago wound down, a middle-aged Chinese visitor began wending his way through the nearly abandoned booths, popping open million-dollar networking equipment to photograph the circuit boards inside, according to people who were there.
A security guard stopped him and confiscated memory sticks with the photos, a notebook with diagrams and data belonging to AT&T Corp. , and a list of six companies including Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp.
2. Secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices :
Alarm bells included the discovery around 2012 of secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices, akin to facilities in intelligence stations around the world, American security officials say.
3. Former staff admits stealing :
“They spent all their resources stealing technology,” said Robert Read, a former contract engineer from 2002 to 2003 in Huawei’s Sweden office. “You’d steal a motherboard and bring it back and they’d reverse-engineer it.”
4. Stealing tech from Cisco :
Eighteen months before the Supercomm imbroglio erupted, Cisco accused Huawei in January 2003 of copying its software and manuals—the first time Huawei had to fight a major international allegation of its theft.
“They have made verbatim copies of whole portions of Cisco’s user manuals,” Cisco said in its lawsuit. Cisco manuals accompany its routers, and its software is visible during the router’s operation; both are easily copied, Cisco said.
The copying was so extensive that Huawei inadvertently copied bugs in Cisco’s software, according to the lawsuit.
5. Stealing tech from Motorola :
Email fragments recovered from Mr. Pan’s laptop and included in Motorola’s complaint show Mr. Pan wrote to Mr. Ren after the meeting, “Attached please find those document [sic] about SC300 specification you asked.” Huawei later made a similarly small device, weighing half the SC300, which it marketed to rural communities in developing markets.
5. 5G related tech theft:
Mr. Barker had never heard of “user specific tilt,” which could multiply the number of signals from an antenna and tilt them to provide greater accuracy in communicating with mobile phones.
Mr. Barker had, however, heard of a conceptually identical technology, ”per user tilt." He coined it seven years earlier, according to a Quintel lawsuit alleging misappropriation of trade secrets by Huawei. Quintel said it had shared the technology with Huawei in September 2009 after Huawei proposed a business partnership.
The partnership never came through. Huawei filed papers to secure a patent for the concept a month after their first meeting, using a document still emblazoned with Quintel’s name and the words “commercial in confidence.”
6. Camera theft :
Rui Oliveira, a 45-year-old Portuguese multimedia producer, told the Journal he flew to Huawei’s Plano offices in May 2014 to meet Huawei executives, who were interested in his patents for a camera attachment to smartphones.
In a conference room, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs, Mr. Oliveira recalls, two Huawei executives listened as he shared data on his product which he hoped to license manufacturing to Huawei. He recommended pricing it at $99.95.
“We’ll talk later,” he says Huawei told him.
Three years later, a friend in Portugal asked him why Huawei was selling “his camera.”
“Huawei? That’s impossible! What?” he remembers saying.
7. Stealing songs :
Paul Cheever, a bespectacled preschool teacher who records music as The Cheebacabra, said his life has become overrun with paperwork and costs since he sued Huawei in California last year for taking his song “A Casual Encounter” and pre-loading it on Huawei smartphones and tablets for free distribution to its customers.
Mr. Cheever said in his court filing that he discovered the alleged theft after noticing user comments on YouTube that associated Huawei devices with his song.
8. Stealing Tappy, the mobile phone testing robot, from T-Mobile :
In the U.S., Huawei engineer Xiong Xinfu had endured a nine-month fusillade of demands from Huawei’s China-based engineers for information on how to replicate a robot called Tappy developed by T-Mobile to mimic an ultra-fast human finger and test a smartphone’s responsiveness. In May 2013, Mr. Xiong eventually stole part of Tappy at Huawei’s behest, U.S. prosecutors say.
9. Stealing Solid State Drive technology from Silicon Valley :
In October last year, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a longtime Silicon Valley engineer and co-founder of San Jose’s CNEX Labs Inc., accused Huawei in a lawsuit of stealing his firm’s solid-state disk storage technology, used for managing data generated by artificial intelligence. CNEX said at a hearing in April that Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu issued a directive that led to a Huawei engineer in June 2016 posing as a customer to steal CNEX secrets; Huawei denied wrongdoing. The suit is ongoing.
10. finally, forcing employees to be dishonest :
Jesse Hong, a software architect at Huawei’s California unit, said in a lawsuit that his bosses ordered him in November 2017 to use fake company names to register himself for an industry conference organized by Facebook Inc. The social-media giant had invited other companies to a Telecom Infra Project meeting, a collaboration on network design, but excluded Huawei. The suit was confidentially settled in April.
Mr. Hong said he refused to carry out the directive, leading his supervisor to unleash a stream of abuse and a threat: “If you don’t agree on this, then you quit right now.”
After Mr. Hong declined, Huawei fired him. The company says it acted in good faith.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...
Friend of mine also does contracting work for them. They never pay their bills on time apparently.
Apparently a very common practice in China, companies were selling masksets of their discontinued ICs to companies lower on the ladder for them to manufacture relabelled/repackaged chips.
I wonder if it's just different people reading or if the community itself views it differently.
After all, "it's not stealing if you have your copy" does mean parent is right.
https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...
It's a Cisco reaction to the following statement by Huawei's chief US representative:
"Huawei provided our source code of our products to Cisco for review and the results were that there was not any infringement found and in the end Cisco withdrew the case ... the source code of the issues was actually from a 3rd party partner that was already available and open on the internet."
The blog post goes on to say that this is not a permissible statement and Huawei are misstating facts. Finally it provides some evidence for the copying, such as similar whitespace and comments in the source code. It also mentions the name of the "routine": STRCMP :-D. They should have run this post by an engineer before publishing...
Decide for yourself, but in my opinion there is quite limited value in a specific strcmp and likely they both copied it from the same free-software codebase.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft...
a) Samsung spent a ton of money and research in building foldable OLED screens.
b) This technology is allegedly stolen by a supplier and sold to BOE Display: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-supplier-....
c) Huawei uses the foldable BOE Display technology in its Mate X smartphone and is on track to be the first to release it.
d) Samsung panics as it learns that the technology it built might be released by a competitor earlier than them and consumers might think of them as less of an innovator. May sound silly but the Chinese companies have been getting a lot of traction recently e.g. P30 Pro.
e) In addition Samsung goes into lock down as it fears there might be more leaks to other companies.
f) Combination of d) and e) means that there is less real world testing of the device than for other phones. And hence how we got to this point.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-supplier-...
> They are accused of passing on Samsung technologies related to curved-edge smartphone panels that use organic light-emitting diodes, or OLED, to four companies.
If you want to play the finger pointing game at least play it straight.
It also doesn't help that there is a "trade war" in effect where many people believe collateral damage is going to happen, just or not... that it's simply a reality of a (proxy) war. Finally, you have the Huawei customers/supporters (from all over the world) that feel strongly these accusations are fabricated and entirely self serving to the US.
How do we navigate this mess and get to the core facts in an age where expert opinions and fact checking is undervalued? And, as it relates to China, where is the line between xenophobia and justified concern?
Also it's very unlikely Canada and other countries are being forced on Huawei or Chinese trade. EU and other western countries have the same concerns on both issues. It isn't like China and Huawei's behavior has been confined to US borders.
This isn't about Trump or his trade war.
I watched as friends' parents lost their jobs, as one of the leading telecom companies in the world was undercut by a competitor who has stolen their source code, IP, products, everything.
Trump doesn't like Huawei? Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Yes. See the industrial history of the US, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and everywhere else that ignored patents and trade secrets for more details. Cisco would be highly profitable if it could only sell to the US market and if you’re the market leader your stuff is just better for years to minimum, a year. People want the best, they want quality, so they pay a premium for it. That’s why brands exist, otherwise people would have to do their own quality control for each individual thing they bought.
At this point, China copying foreign technology is just the path of least resistance.
Eventually, China will be doing the innovating.
As far as the other issue goes, Chinese not being creative due to [insert reason here], I think that is just silly.
I am sure the British said, "those dumb Yanks, they can only copy, can't create anything."
In the 90s, Korea stole Japanese IP, and now innovates. 20 years ago.
I’m sure we need not argue this obvious fact. Are you really condoning that stealing OK if it works? I’m speechless.
Depending on the context, yes. Murder, for example, if I'm in a remote island and someone is going to kill me and they are weaker than me, then yes murdering them first works, the benefit > risk.
Likewise,in the context of Huawei, stealing works.
Note that I'm not saying the US shouldn't do anything to prevent/retaliate.
I wonder firstly about the extent to which creativity can exist to a societally significant extent under an increasingly authoritarian government.
I also wonder about the extent to which the Chinese creative class was purged in the cultural revolution, and what impact that may have had on the societal capacity for creativity.
Without deeper investigation, I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that modern China has (or does not have) a capacity for creativity that will allow them to outpace a genuinely liberal and freely educated society.
Imagine a pair of overlapping normal distributions (https://www.google.com/search?q=overlapping+normal+distribut...), the ratio between the two is far from fixed, and the further of centre you go, the greater the discrepancy.
My suspicion is that an authoritarian regime is likely to offset the centre of the creativity distribution.
But that's not the full extent of what I suspect of the Chinese population's distribution in terms of creativity.
My thoughts are that it's more likely to be a partially truncated normal distribution, with a rapid and significant drop off at the high end of the creativity spectrum.
This is all pure conjecture, but if either possibility is true it would be significantly restricting to Chinese creativity, and if both are true it would be devastating (especially in terms of their ability to compete).
What about the Japanese?
I'm not saying that the possible factors that I'm talking about are the only ones at play, I'm arguing that their potential for impact is significant enough that they cannot simply be discounted.
Also, regarding Soviet success, they had a tendency to throw shit at the wall to see what would stick (https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/c...) to an extent well in excess of what would be acceptable in a less callous society.
(Not that America was innocent in this regard - https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_...)
Technology are always developed this way: learn (sometimes not so nicely), catch up, and then innovate. An random country can't innovate itself to a 5G/technology super power immediately.
What I never get from this accusations is, why aren't these company suing to ban Huawei sales if the copying is so blatant. Have they not heard of the patent system? Is Cisco/Nortel suddenly a small company that cannot afford to sue and/or have a vast arsenel of patents?
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/02/china-dusts-the-u-s-finla...
First, Huawei's sales in the US already is quite limited to have any impact. Second, you can't win any sales or import injunction on 5G SEP violation.
Just to name some companies whose business principle is built on aquiring as much data about you as possible. With Facebook we even have documented and publicly admitted cases where they shared the data with third parties.
In other news, water is wet.
Yes. Because of those pesky things called "laws" and "trade agreements". It's still theft even if it wasn't always difficult to do.
Yard ornaments might be easy to steal, I mean, heck, people just leave them in their front yard over night. But it's still theft, it's still illegal, and even though the people made it easy there should still be a penalty for the theft.
Not saying I agree with said theft, but when making deals with known questionable actors, it's a bit of a given.
But in this particular case with Samsung's OLED, Chinese companies are not only accused of poaching their former/retired employees or stealing (or learning) know-how's or IP, but also smuggling their high-tech manufacturing machinaries out of Samsung suppliers' plants in South Korea to China outright.
Samsung doesn't have any OLED manufacturing in China and never agreed to such terms before. In this particular case, we aren't just talking about Chinese companies poaching Samsung's former/retired engineers or shamelessly copying their IP. The Korean authorities in a sting operation stopped a bunch of Samsung suppliers from smuggling Samsung's advanced OLED manufacturing machineries to some unnamed Chinese company (wink wink you know who) in China at the port of departure in South Korea.