Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
This is shitty on so many levels, and what is the appropriate response? Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities? Etc. That would be a terrible outcome.
We do need some kind of clear asylum option for any Chinese citizen who gets pressured into this. But that only goes so far when the state back home can punish your family members etc.
If they can be compelled to act as spies by their government, then Yes, they should have restricted access. It is unfair to an honest person to be judged by the actions of a few in power in their country, but such is life globally (even for US citizens... especially lately).
https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...
The same can be said for hiring Australians dealing with software. Australia has a law that forces its citizens to comply with requests by the government to hide backdoors in code. As a consequence, anything contributed to important project by any Australian citizen is a potential risk. If your project is important enough, Australian contributions should not be accepted.
Laws like this make it incredibly risky to hire people from certain nationalities in big companies or for secret projects. Governments are willing to sacrifice the economic value of their citizens for the ability to hack and spy on anyone they like and other countries should respond appropriately. If you show that you're willing to use your citizens to take aggressive action, be prepared to have your citizens refused elsewhere.
They don't need a specific law, quite a few might do it because of patriotism (just because he is is living in USA for 4 years, he's still connected to the motherland.) Simply one that says "all national are required to answer questions from ..." then they make your life miserable until you do so. Imagine having the entire local and state of government on your back: lawn too dirty, you spit on the sidewalk, taxes...not just you, your entire extended family.
In other words, if China and Russia want to make their citizens talk, you will. Or 99% will.
Although there is debate regarding the circumstances under which assistance can be compelled, it appears quite broad:
The Intelligence Law, by contrast, repeatedly obliges individuals, organizations, and institutions to assist Public Security and State Security officials in carrying out a wide array of “intelligence” work. Article Seven stipulates that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law.” Article 14, in turn, grants intelligence agencies authority to insist on this support: “state intelligence work organs, when legally carrying forth intelligence work, may demand that concerned organs, organizations, or citizens provide needed support, assistance, and cooperation.” Organizations and citizens must also protect the secrecy of “any state intelligence work secrets of which they are aware.”
https://www.lawfareblog.com/beijings-new-national-intelligen...
Repost:
> Funny thing to mention, I think 95% of industrial espionage effort yields zero if not negative benefit. The problem is that you are always stealing a "cat in a bag" For machinery, rarely there is anything like a "secret sauce:" Soon after the fall of USSR, Chinese defence companies flocked to Russia buying every defence tech possible. Russian companies had a funny way to troll Chicoms: they will not sell them a simple, mid-tier equipment, but only the top notch, and most complicated one, with which even they themselves had problem dealing.
> For example, Soyuz transferred tech for their super expensive, small volume manufactured R179 engine. Yes, that was Soviet response to F135 class engines. The showstopper was its very high temperature turbine made with monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.
> Even with all blueprints, tooling, documentation of manufacturing processes, and working samples on their hands, Chinese only made like 10 working engines. That state program to copy R179 continues to this day as I know.
> And I think they spent way more money on it in 25 years, than if they were to create a thing from scratch. That is something obvious to every experienced engineer, but not to bureaucrats from Chinese three letter agencies who are convinced that they are just an inch away from some "secret trick" that will magically make everything work.
My main point is that such big, state bureaucracy driven initiatives to make a Chinese analogue of some expensive widget often end up spending many times more resources that developing it from scratch in China with Chinese engineers, and often end up with inferior final product, than if it was an own original development.
different kinds of bottlenecks. I’m assuming one set is more easily transferrable than the other.
It's like back in those days where HP/SGI/IBM had their own version of 'C' compilers and it was a nightmare to port from one platform to another. Especially when they used non standard behavior (e.g. dereferencing null returns 0) and use it as part of their core logic.
You REALLY need to know your stuff to make things work. Source code alone isn't enough.
I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.
Please note that they forced the technology transfer from Siemens. That is one of the key issues with today's China.
What happened with Siemens is tragic because they wanted so hard to get a foothold in the Chinese market, they agreed to the technology transfer. In the long term, they helped start a competitor that now beats them in other foreign markets.
Like the sibling post says, the tragedy is that they got both companies to give up their tech because each thought the winner would get a monopoly over the entire domestic market for at least a decade or so.
get the overall point, but not sure this is a good example.
Samuel Slater had evaded British law against emigration of textile workers in order to seek his fortune in America. Considered the father of the United States textile industry, he eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island."
https://www.thoughtco.com/richard-arkwright-water-frame-1991...
See also Japanese cars from the 1970s versus the 1990s to today.
In the 60 and early 70ies, Made in Japan guitars, specially copies of Gibson and Fender guitars where not well regarded.
But they started to greatly improve, and by the late 70ies and 80ies they were equal if not better than their originals (specially Fender which was not well managed by CBS at the time).
In the copy department you still have brands like Burny/Fernandez or Tokai, and also brands that outgrew the simple copy business with genuine models such as Ibanez, Yamaha or Takamine (a few lawsuits may have helped them develop in that direction).
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...
Answer: yes.
But it seems that for one reason or other, technology theft is attractive enough to be a primary method of "innovating" in some places.
It's really a matter of degrees. People copy anything they see that seems like a good idea (better than the idea they previously had). It's just a matter of how much original effort is put in vs how much detail from the other party's effort is acquired and used to fast-track the development.
In complex projects like this, just seeing provides limited benefit. But in other simpler cases, just see another's working model can convey enough information for the newcomer to quickly come up to speed and compete.
Do you have source for that?
> They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina..
This does not necessary mean their trains are better than anyone's else.
Refactoring other people's code is often harder than coming up with your own, and this is when you have the corresponding ability. Just receiving source code/ design without know-how to actually implement anything might even be worse in the long run.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/wp-content/brochures/r...
I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so many industries.
"Is it police work or racial profiling? U.S. crackdown puts Chinese scholars on edge"
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-21/trump-ch...
At least, we should be monitoring Confucius Institute outposts and scams/blackmail making Chinese nationals vulnerable in the U.S. and Canada.
I would be willing to bet there is precisely zero wailing about “Han supremacy” on Chinese campuses too.
I’ll further bet there are precisely zero “Pooh is not my president-for-life” protests either.
It's fine if you don't want to have a racial bias yourself, but it doesn't mean you need to ignore the fact that (in this hypothetical) the vast majority of Chinese are highly ethnocentric.
...?! Did you really write that?! Do you really believe that? WTF, man! Do you realize how that would sound in any other context? A few steps down this line and you'd use machine learning concepts to justify natzy ideas or stuff like that.
And who are you to say if the machine's output (ie, mindset) is to be trusted?
Machines are much less prone to bias than humans, that's for sure.
(1) pick a set of goals we deem worthy
(2) use machine learning to find patterns of actions that push things towards our goals - that's why I think we should move as much as possible in reinforcement learning, and figure out ways to use RL for data-science too, both supervised learning and time-independent unsupervised learning are really dangerous and biasing tools, and I think they're sort of dead ends on the road to true-AGI
There's no such thing as "seeing the world for how it is". Looking for patterns in data using a tool/machine trained on data (that will be inherently biasedly selected) will just lead you to find the patterns that confirm your f up world view, out of the infinity of patterns that there always are in everything...
We need to figure out how to manipulate the world in order to shape it into the patterns that we'd enjoy more.
There's a sort of "Chinese perspective" in applied machine learning nowadays (which is probably not originating in China, but being associated with "ML empowered surveillance and social scoring" is easier labeled like this) that I think is very wrong and extremely dangerous... we should grow up out of it quickly, because later on properly purging it from our cultures will be a violent endeavor... Heck, I even hope we as species get a Mars base up as a backup if this conflict of world views goes hot because there's a high chance it will be very very hot, like in nuclear hot...
[1] Assuming they don't already, which is a huge assumption.
Presumably this will be harder for them to do.
And would it be wrong for banks or loan programs to optimize on such pattern recognition if it were found that ethnicity could improve their forecasting? Or for software companies to forecast employee effectiveness on similar pattern recognition?
Do you know what will happen with such an optimization? The pattern will be reinforced and you will end up with something like a civil war. At some point, your company will suffer because people will be busy shooting each other.
The movement towards fixing discrimination did not emerge because old folks were bad and the new folks are better people, it emerged because people recognized the issues it creates. It adresses the same issues that anti-competitive practices of the monopolies create: destruction of the market for short term gains of a single company.
What they are is illegal.
Quote Rev. Bayes till you're blue in the face, but profiling amounts to holding a group responsible for the actions of bad individuals.
edit: Here are some studies. I would have put them in a reply but I'm being rate limited. Any one is sufficient on its own, but all are interesting.
http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/
http://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10940-011-9134-...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611...
http://www.jstor.org/stable/591624?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609...
You use technical terms like "sufficient" and "replicated", as though you actually understood how science worked, but then link to a pile of crap scholarship published in third-rate journals by cranks and racists. It's annoying. And dangerous. Worse, you appear to be completely unaware of the distinction between correlation and causation, and what policy implications that has. Kindly get a clue.
HN is not the place for this.
Not for spreading "The Bell Curve" 90s research and unsourced white nationalist propaganda.
They actually do correlate to race, beyond that which income accounts for, but you'd kind of expect that if law enforcement was racist against blacks and was perceived as such: policing is less effective in black communities both because of police attitudes toward blacks and vice versa. (Racial profiling—literally law enforcement targeting people based on race—obviously exacerbates this.)
GP: "What if the data actually shows 95% of Chinese people will break US law when given the chance?"
You: "Did you know there used to be Japanese internment camps?"
I think this is an interesting article that discusses what "racism" means in society today:
I have not studied rationalism or humanism at all and don't have much opinion on anti-discrimination or anti-anti-discrimination. The issue that sometimes boils over on mostly homogeneous countries like China is that people conflate many different things together. A distinction needs to be made, rather than blurred, on ethnic background, nationality, current government, their culture, or something else. (This is an assumption.)
Say what you will about 'The Chinese,' but please make it clear who and what you are talking about. A communist party member is very different from a middle class worker who holds a Chinese passport, or someone who has resided outside of China for decades. or a second generation immigrant with a Chinese-sounding last name. The above people probably have very different views on ethnocentrism or loyalty to 'the motherland' and should never be lumped together by proxy and acted on with uniform policy. This isn't racism because there are many other things at play, and discriminatory outcomes might defined by consequence. But such levels of ambiguous smearing can cause the same kind of prejudice from applying abstract, ill-placed fears more broadly than deserved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeo_Yoshikawa#cite_note-Time...
With a billion and a half citizens it's unlikely they lack for fanatics to exploit.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations
Resistance against the CCP is a very tiny minority since there is a heavy brainwashing about how great everything CCP does since kids go to school at a young age - and they never get any other version of reality.
It's not only about brainwashing.
40 years ago 85% of the chinese population was below the poverty line. Today it's between 10% and 15%. Under the party governance, almost everyone saw their life standards go up substantially. A lot of the people studying abroad saw their family starting from the bottom and they can now afford to study in western universities. They think the Chinese system works because economically it is working very well so far.
Just another example: We have some friends who bought a very expensive new apartment in Beijing (around 4.5M US$). This is a brand new residence founded by Wang Jianlin, the founder of Wanda Group (the most powerful estate developer in China). The government allowed him to run this project under one condition: to build 3 apartment blocks on the same field (sharing the same park) which will be given to families under the poverty line. A lot of the wealthy people complained a lot about this, 1/3 of them got a refund and the price of the apartments dropped.
So to get back to my point, this is not only brainwashing. The party is giving its people a new life, and these people will be thankful and loyal for at least decades.
I'm curious about how a long term economic recession could change people minds though.
How do they rationalise that HK had a far higher standard of living all along, by doing exactly the opposite of what the CCP said?
At what point will be start going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and what more that material / economic satisfaction? Will there come a point when people feel "rich enough" and want other things?
Recently the vlogger laowhy86 and his Chinese wife have moved to the US because things have gotten a bit too 'totalitarian' for him in China:
What is the 'cultural priority' of the Chinese people?
> But, with only very few exceptions, they really conceived of liberalism not as an end in itself but rather as a means to the decidedly nationalist ends of wealth and power. They believed that liberalism was part of the formula that had allowed the U.S. and Great Britain to become so mighty. [...]
> It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.
* https://supchina.com/2019/07/22/why-do-chinese-people-like-t...
Sure in the case of China it is a more crude form of propaganda, but if you don't believe me, just try to find information about what happened in Ecuador just now in your newsmedia. That information was supressed by media conglomerates because of a pro-US president that ended up doing something wildly unpopular. Compare the same exact event happening in a country like Venezuela. You get the idea.
Not really the same. Americans are taught to love an abstract, idealised version of America, an eagle perched atop a flag, and it doesn’t really work, half of Americans hate even that, and that’s fine, no one really cares. Whereas the Chinese are taught to love a specific leader of a specific party operating a specific system, etc. And the consequences for not complying are harsh.
And boy do we have a lot of harsh things to say about all of them.
What Israel is doing to some Palestinians would also qualify as shady behavior, but what I'm saying is that I don't have a personal feud with any of those countries, and I would totally visit them. But I have friends and family that based on the amount of propaganda about China are refusing to buy certain products, use software like Wechat, etc. That is sophisticated propaganda in my opinion.
The special position of China goes dramatically beyond that. I'm not sure you could downplay China's position more than what you just did. I'd almost confuse them for being Cuba by that description.
For all but a few countries, stealing data on how to build the next great airplane, does not enable them to actually build it.
The unique position of China is the combination of: vast resources and a very determined, centrally orchestrated, national will to pursue hegemony (now almost universally culturally regarded as their natural right).
Pretending a mole from China is similar to a mole from most any other nation, is pretty absurd. No other nation other than the US has the capabilities that China now possesses.
They have: extraordinary national wealth ($50x trillion in household wealth); extraordinary annual economic output; rather openly flaunted mercantilism; global leading manufacturing capabilities spanning nearly anything as needed and supply networks to match; a strong cohesive nationalism, supported by both the people (culture) and the leadership; very large, very potent tech capabilities, spanning everything from software to hardware, unrivaled by any nation other than the US; military spending that pretty well matches the US when you adjust for either PPP or just merely adjust for the difference in salaries; extremely large land & water territory, and all the benefits that go with it; nuclear weapons and military technology that by the day is getting close to parity with other elite militaries; an authoritarian system that is willing to entirely disregard human rights whenever it suits their national purpose at the time and a culture that heavily tolerates it; the ability to rapidly pursue epic scale, unmatched (eg Three Gorges) national construction and or engineering challenges at the snap of a CPC finger; and 18% of the world's population, for practical purposes an endless supply of relatively cheap labor of all types.
Show me a bunch of other nations like that. In all of human history you can count on one hand the number of nations even remotely comparable to where China is now at, their general position and capability vs peers in the world order. And they're not quite done rising in power yet.
I can understand that the US feels threatened by the massive competition created on the other side, but this is very rapidly leading to a similar situation like the anti-Japanese mentality that ended up stigmatizing a whole swath of people based on ethnicity alone.
I do recall a couple of countries invading Afghanistan, none of them named "China."
If you're going to call building railroads, highways, power plants and other infrastructure in Africa an "invasion," that's just plain unreasonable. I get that you may find the amount of debt African nations are taking on troubling, but it's dangerous hyperbole to call this sort of thing an "invasion."
China does have a long history of invading other countries, but they try to suppress knowledge of it. That’s why they’re so hypersensitive about the definition of China, because they’re hiding their present and former invasions.
Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, all the islands inside the vague nine-dashed line... Even border disputes with India.
China doesn't invade other countries, it just discovers inseparable parts of China.
What they’re after ultimately is the ability to replace foreign components in future planes. Software, Hardware, the whole lot. Along with stealing all the management processes for systems integration.
So in this sense, the hacking might have shaved a few years off their efforts.
https://www.uschamber.com/series/above-the-fold/the-state-am...
Especially since that is what just happened to another Chinese company with Western suppliers.
Its not a moral problem.
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/10/10/the-asto...
Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed.
It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive. And it surprises me little that an economy which functions on very different principles also takes a very different attitude to knowledge sharing. Even if we don't wish to emulate this way of doing things entirely, perhaps we all have something to learn from this difference in perspective.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-air-force-has-...
What's way more likely given all that is that Chinese companies so contract lots of the commercial engines' components, it's that putting it together and filli g in the gaps in a way that passes cert is the issue. The fighter jets engine components are starting from scratch, and being very very different designs that are much more exotic from a materials science perspective.
Even if that's true, plans will only tell you so much.
Sports teams aren't happy when scored on because the total score went up.
Yes, we should be firm about our interests. No, we shouldn't be obsessed with some 'score' -- or if we are, maybe channel it towards fixing our own house.
How long does an average company last, if it gives away all its IP and know-how? Why should the result differ on the scale of countries? I assumed these dynamics are obvious to everyone.
This won't happen, because despite the US's public insistence that free markets should be enforced everywhere, it is in fact quite protectionist over several of its industries, aerospace being one of them.
If our corporate culture is pathologically short-term-obsessed, that's on us. It's not on the 'bad guys' who lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
But isn't your entire argument self-contradictory with the story? This isn't a case of them developing them same thing and then, say, ignoring being sued over patent infringement or something. This is them just taking it instead. If your argument was right that IP wasn't useful for innovation, then they wouldn't need to take it from others, they could create it themselves. They've certainly got enough of a unified population, and can even see where others have gone first.
More fundamentally, IP is not at the core about "motivation", it's a hack to deal with a limited resource problem. Replicating information is essentially free, but generating it is not. R&D, particularly in areas where iteration requires enormous capital expenditure and there is a lot of finding paths in the dark, takes significant resources. And since we don't have unlimited amounts of those, decisions have to be made about how and where to spend them. The market, properly used, has proven to be one of our most effective tools for dealing with efficient resource allocation. Markets though normally are based around the specific resources and replication. IP attempts to graft that. IP also is intended to encourage sharing and decrease inefficient efforts to hide valuable information through technical and personnel based means.
As I said it's a hack, because information isn't the same as real world materials. There are different costs to society in maintaining it, and it requires societal cooperation in a way that defending limited physical property does not. It's more than reasonable to debate the frameworks for IP, such as how long it should last (be it fixed term or dynamic terms with ever increasing renewals required), what exceptions should be made, etc. But if you've got a steep hill to climb if you want to claim IP should be done away with. It'd help if you could even posit a better way to direct resources, keeping in mind the failures of the past. It'd help even more if you could point to anyone developing valuable information better without IP, which right now you cannot. China hacking into places to take it vs developing itself certainly doesn't help you there.
It's not hard to see how that would be a net benefit for the world (except of course for the Western IP holders).
Please don't think I'm supporting this, just trying to see this side of the argument.
Perhaps something close to what you've described is LibreSilicon [0], a free and open source semiconductor manufacturing process (only 1 micrometer though) currently in development.
Hard for me to feel that all that influence over the next century going to the particular flavor of country that is modern China is gonna be good for the rest of the world, though.
But, interestingly, that's not an IP-related argument, that's a political system one.
FTFY. CCP’s objective here isn’t limited to enemies only.
If I told you that most people in China generally support the government and don't feel oppressed by it, how would that affect your worldview? Most people in China are primarily concerned with improving their standard of living. For hundreds of millions of people, that standard has improved more than you can probably imagine in the last 30 or so years. That's what they care about.
Sure, they get upset when they hear about governmental corruption, or when wages aren't paid, and young people even care about internet censorship (though they all have VPNs). But if you were to go to them and propose overthrowing the government, most people would be horrified. They don't want chaos. They think that would put the enormous gains in social welfare they've achieved at risk. They want a competent government that delivers economic growth, and maybe some day in the future slowly - gradually - opens up political life.
It continually amazes me how little effort people make in Western online discussions to put themselves in the shoes of someone who's seen their country go from utter poverty to relative wealth in one generation. That person might want to gain more political freedoms eventually, but they mainly don't want to destroy everything by plunging the country into chaos.
Keep in mind that the catastrophic experience of the Cultural Revolution soured many Chinese people to politics, and convinced them that stability and steady improvement of living standards are the most important things. Many people who remember those times are allergic to any sort of fanaticism.
Also keep in mind that although many things are restricted in China, the country has opened up a huge amount. In contrast to how things were not so long ago, Chinese people are now able to travel around the world, and largely live their lives without experiencing much government interference. The limits on political activism are clear, but most people just focus on improving their own situation and enjoying the modest luxuries they can now finally afford.
It’s often inconceivable for them to understand because their life experiences are just so different. Ask anyone from a poor nation about China, and while they may dislike the government, they also talk with admiration at how many people were lifted out of poverty.