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>According to Air Force Research Laboratory slides dated Aug. 3, 2020, however, the service suspected that several transistors and microchips inside the sequencer were fake

>The lab also found signs that Teledyne had destroyed evidence related to the case, the lawsuit said. Teledyne appeared to have replaced five microchips on the sequencer before sending it to the lab

3rd world tier corruption and fraud. Based on the number of failed and severely cost overrun military projects I'd say it applies to way more than just this situation

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> 3rd world tier corruption and fraud.

The use of "3rd world" term makes me cringe a little even in this context. Isn't it more comparable to Boeing Conspiracy and Corruption [1] or even the Fat Leornard US Navy corruption [2] - which are indeed first-world corruptions?

Definition of 3rd world has changed overtime - but overall we can agree that; it now means developing countries with (1) high rates of poverty, (2) economic and/or political instability, and (3) high mortality rates.

Yes, above factors are indeed very conducive for corruption and fraud, but does it imply there's no corruption in "First-world"? I think the difference is it’s hidden (not as consequential) and some accountability come about sometimes... e.g MDHS Welfare fraud [3] [4], not to mention Covid related frauds.

To me the term has aged and similar to saying to someone "that is so ghetto"... which its use has declined considerably as a regular American vernacular. Another intersting term often used wily-nily with negative connotation of otherness is "Banana Republic" - which is very interesting when you consider the origin and who brought such conditions that led to the term being coined.

I didn't mean to inject "wokeness" to the discussion; for one I was born is so called 3rd world country (so perhaps a little sensitive?), and more importantly I'm obsessed with origin and use of words and phrases overtime as contemporary vernacular.

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...

[2] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal

[3] - https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803399172/mississippis-ex-wel...

[4] - https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/14/us/brett-favre-mississippi-go...

I’ve always found the evolution of third world very odd. How does something go from countries that are not Cold War participants to developing countries? I tend to thinking it in the original context and often find myself misunderstanding people when they use the term. I know definitions change, but it seems like an odd transition.

I considered this for a while, being from Uruguay (a member of that great category of countries) and for me, it generally means geopolitically and even economically weightless countries.

It might be pessimistic but it -feels- like whatever happens here, be it coups, economics experiments, great innovations and the like - does not impact or even reach the rest of the world. One (mildly) rich Californian has more potential impact on the world than all of Latin America could ever have in the best of days.

How did the word "villain" go from meaning "peasant" to meaning "main antagonist of the story"?

This is a very natural kind of transition for words with negative connotations.

Huh, TIL. It's related to the word "villa": From Medieval Latin villanus "farmhand," from Latin villa "country house, farm".

Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/villain

While I agree that the term is outdated and should just be replaced with "developing", "third world" always had the economic side to it. "First World" countries not only were the major Western powers in the Cold War, they also had the best standards of living. "Second World" countries, despite meaning the Soviet side, also meant countries with a lesser quality of life, where store shelves were constantly empty and people often had to wait hours in line to buy even basic staples like bread and meat. And yet for the most part people weren't starving (except for the Soviet famines in the 1930s or the Chinese one in the late 1950s). This wasn't the case for the "third world" countries not part of either bloc (mostly countries just achieving independence from colonialism) which often had the worst standards of living (largely because their economies, developed under colonialism, never developed a consumer economy as they were primarily geared towards export to the country that colonized them)

Thrid world didn't always have an economic side to it. Third world was coined as a delineation of cold war participation status - it had nothing to do with economics. Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, and Finland were all included in the original definition of third world, but now no longer fit the modern definition of developing nation.

There always was the notion that first-world countries tended to be economically liberal with market economies, whilst second-world ones had controlled economies. High living standards were associated with the first group, for good and bad reasons (and propaganda). And then there are always outliers. Though your example all have moved firmly to the first world since the 1950s.

I always kind of assumed thats why they weren't Cold War participants.

If you don't have a "developed" economy you're not as useful of a trade/etc partner than a country with a developed economy. Or your country is basically semi-colonizable then it'll just be semi-colonized instead (i.e. parts of your country become a gated community for the oil field employees).

Countries not participating in Cold war? Then ie Switzerland or Monaco and so on were 3rd world, top of the world when it comes to wealth per capita. Not a definition that most people would agree with

This is a common refrain of the American exceptionalism narrative. The implication is pretty clear: anything bad must necessarily be un-American, and the solution is to be more American (whatever that means).

The phrase "3rd world" was invented to continue the status quo of Western colonization of said "3rd world" countries.

Teledyne the name even sounds like the prototypical evil 1980s movie super corp

It was co-founded by Henry Singleton.

  After the Academy, Singleton elected to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and graduated in 1940, receiving both bachelor's (Sc.B.) and master's (Sc.M.) degrees in this field. During his first year there, he was a member of a three-man team that won the Putnam Prize in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered annually by the Mathematical Association of America. Another member of the team was Richard P. Feynman, a future Nobel Prize Laureate.

And yet, since Singleton stepped down in 1986 Teledyne has had trouble with reputation. It may be that the only time they make the news is when they've committed Fraud.

For me, the sour taste comes from one of their engineers discreetly taking photos at an interoperability test event I was helping host many years ago. The NDA was clear. They knew what they were doing.

It could be! The company was from the 60s and made a lot of electronics. *dyne names were not unusual, so a movie director in the 80s who had been a kid in the 50s and 60s would have been quite comfortable with such a name.

To add to the examples of the name is the 1950s Fairey Rotodyne[1], a hybrid aircraft-helicopter-gyrocopter with jet exhausts in the tips of the rotor blades.

There is a 1954 prototype[2] at the fabulous but small Museum of Berkshire Aviation near Reading, about 30 miles west of London.

[1] http://www.hmfriends.org.uk/faireyrotodyne.htm

[2] https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/html/exhibits/gyrody...

I think you’re spot on. Another really good example which lampshades this is Nordyne Defense Dynamics, Kwik-E-Mart’s corporate owner in The Simpsons.

Or Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems “The future begins tomorrow” from Buckaroo Banzai. Based on Yoyodyne from the Pynchon novel V.

Yes! I immediately thought of T2's Cyberdyne Systems and Alien's Weyland-Yutani.

Real question: Does anyone know the meaning of suffix "-dyne"?

“the force required to accelerate a mass of one gram at a rate of one centimetre per second squared”

Probably why a lot of aerospace companies used it in their name.

I believe stockbrokers also are interested in the kinematics of a gram.

Cocadyne Industries

> The name is reminiscent of several real high-tech companies, including the Gyrodyne Company of America, Teledyne and Teradyne, all of which were founded a few years before Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49, and Rocketdyne, an aerospace company that manufactured, among other things, propulsion systems.

> The "dyne" is the standard unit of force in the centimetre–gram–second (CGS) system of units, derived from the Greek word dynamis, meaning "power" or "force".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyodyne

I think it’s short for “dynamic” given the vintage of the names, like ”ola” was popular in the early decades of the 20th century, hence “Shinola” shoeshine or “Motorola” car radios.

It is also a non-SI unit, but that might be too obscure — or might motivate nerds like the teledyne founders!

Right here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyne

I feel silly reading your reply. I didn't think dyne was a standalone word!

“Weyland” is because they wanted to use Leyland-Toyota but we’re sure they’d be sued, so they changed the first letter. I don’t how “Toyota” became “Yutani”.

The resulting name is better than Leyland-Toyota anyway.

Wasn't it supposed to have been Leyland Honda and we got the Austin Allegro instead?

Ha! I've always thought of Tessier-Ashpool every time I saw "Thyssen Krupp" brand on some piece of machinery. Eventually I found out that Krupp supported Nazi regime and used slave labor. Guess they have a fitting name for evil corporation with members of the clan behind it convicted as a criminals against humanity?

Aaaaah, good ol' TA.

Datadyne wouldn't even do something this evil, and they made a floating laptop AI to control an alien ship.

You can't make accusations like that without evidence. I asshume that you have some?

Weird, I always think of them as an innocent toothbrush manufacturer because of Teledyne Waterpik.

I wonder if they were the inspiration for Datadyne - the evil defense corp in my favorite N64 game, Perfect Dark.

Like Yoyodyne?

May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I am sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly enshrined.

> The 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension used the name Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems for a defense contractor whose corporate offices feature the sign, "The future begins tomorrow". Yoyodyne is a front for a group of red Lectroid aliens, all with the first name John, that landed in New Jersey in 1938, using the panic created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio play as cover.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyodyne#Other_fictional_uses

I'm a big fan of Buckaroo Banzai but it seems odd that you credit BB when the linked Wikipedia article is about the original source of "Yoyodyne"

> Yoyodyne was introduced as a fictional defense contractor in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).

Btw, Lot 49 is a wonderful book and chock full of little cultural memes like Yoyodyne.

I assumed OP was probably remembering the 1984 film, and Buckaroo's Yoyodyne doesn't have its own wiki page. That is it. Plus the other uses are interesting even if trivial. Star Trek used the same exact form as the Buckaroo Bonzai film, "Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems," which probably isn't coincidence. I think that's neat, and that everyone should have the opportunity to stroke their chin and ponder this.

> Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems for a defense contractor whose corporate offices feature the sign, "The future begins tomorrow"

That’s an interesting slogan, as I’d have thought that “the future begins today” seems more innovative. The future beginning tomorrow seems a bit of a tautology and procrastination.

It reflects poorly on the company, but if it was really third world tier corruption, we wouldn't find out about it until the parts started screwing up during a war.

I'm sure Russia would love to be worrying about specific transistor models in their ejection seats, at this point! (note, I'm aware of the pedantic point that Russia is definitionally not third world, they are just another point of comparison in this case).

> ... note, I'm aware of the pedantic point that Russia is definitionally not third world

This is true, and if you wish to be pedantic, or at least true to the original definitions, Russia is a 'second world' nation state.

Whether that aligns to what you thought you were qualifying, I do not know.

Refer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

Pretty sure a transistor-level of accident analysis would be only possible in peace-time? But the 1st LT was parabellum, so maybe it counts. (Forgive my grammar)

Ukrainians are sending Russian hardware to US and other allies for analysis - immediately. But if your only ally is Iran and North Korea, perhaps you really don't have so many options...

Maybe the best source for Russian military tech since the German reunification when the BRD inherited the not too badly maintained frontline stuff from the NVA. Which was not, as opposed to most other Warsaw pact nations, export variants of Russian hardware. As a frontline state in the Cold War East Germany gear was close to Red Army/Air Force/Navy specs.

A one known military corruption case was exactly about the airforce being sold black painted toilet paper rolls as ejection seat charges.

My first thought was that someone stole components. There is no reason for this kind of fraud. The government pays whether stuff is on time or not.

What? You replace real working parts with fake/non-working stuff, and you pocket the diff in cost. You cut all QA b/c you know it's fake, no need to test.

The government pays, but, you have a much higher profit margin if you just fake everything.

Is it worth the risk though? I suspect deliberate fraud like this will be caught by the military, it will lead to scandal, and not only will it cost money but will likely lead to prison times for the people involved.

Boeing's lies and conspiracies around the 737 MAX directly led to the deaths of hundreds. Their ultimate penalty was a settlement involving a fine equal to about 2 days of revenue, and compensation to the families of those they killed equaling to about 12 more days of revenue. [1] The release did not specify, but settlements of this sort generally require the victims to waive their right to further civil or other legal measures, so that's the end.

The people ultimately responsible for these things not only don't go to jail, they tend to make substantial profit from it after all is said and done. In a a matter of weeks everybody had forgotten (except I'm sure those related to the victims), a slap on the wrist was given, and we're straight back to giving Boeing billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to do the only thing they're good at: killing people.

On the off chance somebody doesn't understand the reference - Boeing is the 2nd largest defense contractor in the US, scoring upwards of $22 billion in contracts las year, after that settlement.

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...

Things would have been a bit harder for Boeing if they'd killed more US citizens instead of mostly Ethiopians and Indonesians.

> it worth the risk though?

Can speak from the perspective of a finance professional constantly rolling his eyes at insider traders. Many people assume enforcement is far weaker than it is. That leads them to make stupid choices. For a period of time, during the Iraq War, enforcement was weak around military procurement. But the wheels of justice grind slowly, and I guess every generation needs its examples.

> But the wheels of justice grind slowly, and I guess every generation needs its examples

All the covid relief and stimulus fraud that's slowly being investigated is another example of this. All you have to do to disabuse yourself of the idea that law enforcement is weak is go to justice.gov and click news.

https://www.justice.gov/usao/find-your-united-states-attorne...

Click on any of the states, click news. Tons of covid fraud being prosecuted already in all of these places where small fry's thought they could get away with this. Medical fraud is another example.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdms/pr?keys=covid&items_per_pa...

Okay, and that's great and all, but the DOJ basically doesn't go after big fish anymore. As the commenter above you points out, lot's of these kinds of things still end up being revenue positive

I don't know of any big fish where's there's sufficient evidence that they have committed crimes and where the DOJ has decided to not charge. What are some examples?

I've been with a few separate orgs that had this exact thing happening. When you flag it, they come down from on high saying "oh, it's been waived", trusting that no one will actually ask to see the waiver. Two of those orgs ended up paying fines, nothing compared to the profit, but eh, better than nothing.

I'd say it's far more likely that Teledyne let an unauthorized, or improperly cleared, technician touch the production line, who then stole the parts for intelligence purposes and replaced them with stuff he acquired by other means (desoldered them from home stereos, purchased on eBay, whatever). That would motivate a cover-up. No American, particularly someone working in the defense industry, wants fighter pilots to die. Unless of course they have other allegiances.

This is so hilariously naive I almost don't know what to say. If anything it's the other way around nobody cares about the soldiers as long as the bottom line is met. I mean just look how the US treats their veterans, to proof the point.

This is such a naive view.

Optimism bias is also a thing, they don't necessarily need to "want fighter pilots to die", but it won't stop some people trying to pocket some money ("it may never be used anyway").

Greed is much more common than sabotage. Everyone at every level of production uses 3rd party materials and counterfeit has the potential to be cheaper than non-countfit.

That seems maybe plausible if the components are worth a lot or you steal a lot of them. Is either of those things true here?

Defense contractors generally pay about 10% less than market for any given service, so I don't discount the possibility that my hypothetical technician may have stolen the goods in order to get some extra money. A poor financial situation is easily the most common motive for the direct perpetrators of espionage.

There's definitely reasons: profit = revenue - costs.

If revenue is fixed, the only way to make more money is to reduce costs. Using cheaper parts with less/nonexistent quality control is one way to do that. Or even just straight up laziness. The "trust but verify" approach is more work than just trusting your suppliers to never make mistakes.

Just at the start of the chip shortage. Add in the problem that many military designs ware qualified decades ago and are based on what was available then, which are now obsolete.

There has been problems with counterfeit chips and parts infiltrating the market for decades. The margins are also very good.

This exposes a major vulnerability in our military tech that can be (has been ?) exploited by our adversaries - likely the ones actually building the chips!

The big push from the top to make chips in the US makes a lot more sense now.

It didn't make sense already? I don't know if you need this as a separate justification—the global chip shortage and Chinese saber-rattling over Taiwan should be justification enough.

It already made a lot of sense. And it made sense decades ago. But now that we have evidence that it has already impacted operations I can see why leadership across multiple organizations is taking it more seriously.

There’s a lot of potential problems in the world, but leadership doesn’t always take them seriously.

This immediately made me think of Boeing and VW tier corruption, not a third-world country.

This is because we don't find out about 3rd world corruption because they happen in a framework of lower accountability and transparency.

How long would the world have gone on thinking Putin had a world class military if he never failed to invade Ukraine?

I remember bad capacitors being quite a problem a few years ago for laptops and other systems. They would blow a year into service.

Only a few years ago, very recently? Or could it have been throughout the naughts?[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

The last time I got a new computer with bad caps was 2010-11. Between that and ROHS solder, the mid 00s were a Bad Time

If you are going to use naught, you must refer to the time period as "The Naughties".

I prefer the "Turn of the Millennium" myself.

My friend who does electronics repair says he's been shotgunning (replacing all of a part, without testing them) Electrolytic caps in transistor radios since the late 1950s. He said it almost always worked.

So, obviously, it's a long standing problem.

It was particularly bad for a few years due to supply chain issues. I worked at BestBuy at that time and it was easily 30% of our workload, computer comes in acting weird, take the side panel off and see a bunch of blown caps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Electrolytics have a limited lifespan, that's not due to poor quality like the PCs with caps blowing out. Almost any old electronics will need caps replaced if they haven't already been.

I worked for my uncle who had arcade games then for a lottery with slot machines. Capacitors always leak I've never seen a device over 40 years where there wasn't a bad cap.

At the lottery I had a $5,000 3D multilayered monitor fail. All it needed were 3 SMD caps at maybe 1 cent total parts cost plus labour to fix. the lottery just trashed the monitor instead.

> 3rd world tier corruption and fraud.

USA corporations trying their hand at vertical integration. Normally they stick to 1st world tier corruption (directly buying off politicians) which is a scale far greater than anything the third world can imagine.

This raises some interesting questions about "unit testing" hardware. I would assume one would design a board with some regular self testing. (This coukd of course be the problem).

And it would be moderately hard to cheaply fake a chips that met the requirements of form factor, power and so on - and still was able to respond to some basic interrogation but also was flawed in some way (ie the way that cuts out the expensive bit)

Inwoukd love to know the specifics here of how fake chips walk that line. Cos otherwise it feels like "OMG any electronics could fail at any moment and there is nothing we can do"

Self-testing most analog and sensing hardware is next to impossible in a circuit. Even testing them via specially designed test points can just not be possible at times.

A complex microchip can be easily caught. Simple one... Not necessarily.

would you be able to explain why? Is there some minimum chip complexity that we should just accept in order to do such testing?

> 3rd world tier corruption and fraud

Yeah, 1st world tier corruption doesn't take just one life, it fakes Weapons of Mass Destruction photos in the 3rd world to falsely justify the killing of hundreds of thousands and the disruption of the lives of millions.

If you're talking about the Iraq war, this was one of the most disapointing things the west ever did... i mean... I totally expected them to "accidentaly" find something with a CNN crew just randomly being there.. like one of those "we just 'liberated' this iraqi building, here camera crews, you can go inside with us, so we all look in the basement together, who knows what's in there, might be barrels of radioactive fuel, that we totally didn't put there ourselves, promise!", and not even that...

But somehow, american still speak about "fighting for freedom" and act as if they're the "good guys", while they go and destroy another middle eastern country.

> When the president ultimately decided that the Iraqi regime must be ousted by force, he was influenced by five key factors:

> 1) Saddam was a threat to U.S. interests before 9/11....He had developed WMD and used chemical weapons fatally against Iran and Iraqi Kurds. Iraq's official press issued statements praising the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

> 2) The threat of renewed aggression by Saddam was more troubling and urgent after 9/11.

> 3) To contain the threat from Saddam, all reasonable means short of war had been tried unsuccessfully for a dozen years.

> 4) While there were large risks involved in a war, the risks of leaving Saddam in power were even larger. The U.S. and British pilots patrolling the no-fly zones were routinely under enemy fire, and a larger confrontation – over Kuwait again or some other issue – appeared virtually certain to arise

And probably the biggest factor:

> 5) America after 9/11 had a lower tolerance for such dangers.

But let's just ignore history and claim that there was no other impetus for war other than making accusations that turned out to be false.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121504452359324921

Provide a real source. WSJ has no credibility.

> 3rd world tier corruption and fraud.

I dunno, that's the intended interpretation from the headline, but the article doesn't really substantiate it. The way you'd see "fraud" in a never-used item like an ejection seat is that it just wouldn't have its components. The expensive stuff would be missing, which to my eyes would be the explosives/rockets, absolutely not the electronics.

What they found was that the electronics looked "shoddy", which isn't (again, to my eyes) the same as "fraud"[1]. More like "we can't get the original parts anymore for this order, just use this off-the-shelf transistor instead", or "crap, we stuffed the wrong parts, pull them out and rework them by hand".

[1] In the way you mean it. Obviously if it's not the specified part then it's not delivering the item ordered. But not really "3rd world tier corruption".

It's a military fighter jet. EVERYTHING is spec'ed out to the MAX. "We can't get the original parts, just use this off-the-shelf transistor" IS fraud.

I would assume that everything is speced out to low weight, high G-force tolerance, and robustness under vibration. In those cases, even changing the solder formulation could be catastrophic.

The allegation of fraud refers to Teledyne destroying evidence by replacing potentially faulty chips before sending a unit to the investigation lab.

How does a manufacturer of some defective part get ahold of that piece of evidence from a plane crash? NTSB investigates civilian aircraft accidents, and this kind of thing couldn't ever happen. But someone(s) on the DoD or Air Force investigative teams collected this evidence, and at some point someone sent evidence back to the manufacturer, allowing their opportunity to tamper with it? And they weren't even careful enough to not make it blatantly obvious? It's as upsetting as it is crazy.

Possibly the investigators wanted to examine some spare parts that were still in the manufacturer's possession? After all the parts that had crashed might have been too damaged to answer all their questions...

> I dunno, that's the intended interpretation from the headline

My only intentions when writing the headline were to avoid the click-bait format of the original and to communicate that it is suspected that counterfeit electronic components somehow ended up in an F-16. That is supported by this sentence from the article:

> Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit transistors, memory chips and accelerometer chip, according to the Air Force slides.

I have no idea how it would have happened and I hope I didn't phrase the title in a way that suggested any particular possibility.

> just use this off-the-shelf transistor instead"

I don't know if it meets the legal definition of fraud, but it will certainly get you in trouble.

I imagine Aviation is similar to Medical Devices and in that (my) environment, to build a device using a component with a different part than specified in the design, you need at a minimum an evaluation from an EE to see if the suggested replacement is suitable. That's considered a Design Change and the evaluation, criteria to be met, and outcome (possibly including Test Data), along with the peer review will all be documented to create an Engineering Change Order (ECO). Only when that ECO is approved and released, can you then start building the assembly with the new part. Anything else would be Non-Conforming and could cause you to have to recall all the devices that were built incorrectly.

Basically, changing a part is not a trivial undertaking. For non-critical parts, the process will be quicker but nothing can be changed without documented justification.

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