Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

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You know, as this is a tech forum, I'll reply via a tech business, re: branding angle.

Yes Gold Apollo, they were yours. That's because you licensed your name, and your name is your business.

(EG your mark(name) of trade)

I've seen this in everything from hotels to frying pans. License that name! We made 1% more this quarter. Yeehaw!

Holiday in has corporate owned hotels, franchised hotels, and of course licensed hotels. Franchised ones have more control from corporate, licensed far less. And it shows.

Same as t-fal, which in Canada is just the cheapest junk you can get, with Canadian Tire owning and manufacturing under the name:

https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/t-fal-viva-aluminum-fryin...

Anyone buyong t-fal pans there will think t-fal is the cheapest junk ever. Because it is.

This worked well pre-Internet, but now people see reviews for Canadian Tire t-fal when researching pans in Europe. Way to trash your local name.

Licensing your name doesn't work the same in 2024 as 1994. Don't do it.

More concisely, why should anyone who, due to these explosions, does not trust devices branded as Gold Apollo care about a distinction between a product using a licensed trademark vs a product that has been contracted out for production of products using the brand name they own?

Or to really drive the point home, the only reason we give companies exclusive control over certain names (trademarks) is so that they can build a reputation. If companies are going to just license out the names to whoever gives them money anyway then we might as well get rid of trademarks entirely and let anybody produce crap knock off products without having to pay a trademark owner.

I think thats already happening in major ways due to online shopping where reviews mean more than brand for some imported goods. Brand names for consumer goods on my Amazon search results are often completely made up and often temporary.

What is the point of building a reputation if you can’t sell it later? /s

I suspect from a company perspective, it is all just different degree of relying on a supply chain. Any company that outsource production that goes directly to customers are relying on reputation and contracts, and the assumption that they can apologize to customers and change supplier when/if something goes wrong. I seem to hear that a common practice is to do random sampling in order to do quality control, but in terms of supply chain attacks it wouldn't do much good if the attacker is a state actor with the ability to create non-tampered version.

It's difficult enough to secure the supply chain towards the OEM as it is. It's nigh impossible for a vendor/OEM to secure the supply chain towards retail and distribution, not relative to nation-state attackers of great sophistication and with huge budgets. This sort of thing could happen with any smartphone, any feature phone, laptops, etc. Though it was a lot easier to mount this attack given an order for thousands of units from one company.

> This sort of thing could happen with any smartphone

The amount of intelligence services that could pull this off if you ordered iphones directly from apple is very very low.

A man in the middle redirecting to a fake web page could be enough to create an opportunity. I assume that in some countries hacking the internet could be still possible.

Or a terrorist could sell phones on the street for months, use them as sleeping devices, and wait until a big holiday or the super-bowl to spread chaos massively with minimum risk for him/her. So now we everybody need a way to be able to scan our devices and detect that risk ASAP. The Mossad still don't understand the mess that had created for every westerner by opening this door.

How would you man in the middle a website or “hack the internet”? Every modern browser uses TLS.

I wouldn't, but I assume that somebody with knowledge and motivation could. Phishing is still a problem. Do every country use modern browsers?

(UPDATED: I really wrote Fishing? LOL)

You only need to do that if you're targeting someone. If your goal is terror, you just sell as a 3rd party on Amazon.

TIL Canadians call Tefal t-fal

Ironically this appears to be because another company wanted to protect its trademark.

> In the United States, Tefal is marketed as T-fal. This is to comply with DuPont's objection that the name "Tefal" was too close to DuPont's trademark "Teflon". The T-fal brand is also used in Canada and Japan.

The alphabet T is pronounced "teh" in French. So insofar as the French company is concerned, T-fal sounds close enough to Tefal.

It sounds more like "tay" (as pronounced in English).

https://forvo.com/word/t/#fr

And it would hardly make sense to make a name for US market based on how it sounds in French.

It's unreasonable to expect a small companies to have rogue nation states in their threat model. Apple, Microsoft, ... yeah but not a smaller business.

Correct, but the country hosting those companies should. Of course since this is Israel, I doubt the EU is going to demand an answer.

It’s okay. CTC bought Paderno, a Prince Edward Island perennial, to juice out more brand value after they’re done sucking T-Fal dry.

I don’t think they’ve started including explosives in their product yet.

CTC bought Paderno, a Prince Edward Island perennial, to juice out more brand value after they’re done sucking T-Fal dry.

It's worse than that.

Panerno, a high quality manufacturer of stainless steel cookware, using North American steel, was indeed bought by Canadian Tire.

Immediately after purchase, the factory was sold to a Chinese firm, who wanted to import crappy Chinese steel, but still label cookware "Made in Canada".

It is their ingress into the North American market.

And as Paderno's plant is gone, it means that Paderno of Canadian Tire is now made with Chinese steel, not North American steel, and built to lowest quality standards.

But of course it still says "Made in Canada".

Canadian Tire has boasted in earning reports that more than 60% of its profits now come from its own brands. Often like this, quality brands bought and turned into junk.

This is one pf the reasons why many jurisdictions in Canada have warranty laws that say the retailer is liable too.

Just one quibble: Made in China doesn't automatically mean junk. Case in point: The iPhone. When it comes to Chinese manufacturing, they cater to all price points in the marketplace.

Apple's size and scope, along with direct control of production to force a high quality product helps.

Including knowledge transfer, tooling assistance, trade secrets at the start.

But the truth is, even if you can find a rare product such as this, which is really Chinese assembly with US know how, direct control, and methods, 99.999% if the stuff you buy when Made ib China will be... junk.

The exception to the rule is not relevant. Made in China means "junk".

If I could maintain a worldview that simple my life would be so much easier.

Manufacturing in the PRC defaults to “cheap-as-possible” mode if the specs aren’t explicitly laid out. Think stinky black plastic and sharp metal edges.

Most of the time, the default is compatible with what the free-market MBA crowd wants.

This is just wrong. You can buy junk in China and you can buy very quality products in China. They launch rovers to the literal Moon. They produce 7nm chips. This is not junk, this is state of art.

This is just wrong. You can buy junk in China and you can buy very quality products in China

Even if true, irrelevant, because for the rest of the wotld, my statements stand true.

Put another way, let's say I put all Made in China products I can buy in Canada, into a room. Millions of them, surely.

Now I am to pick a product at random. Will it be junk? Yes. Out of those millions and millions of products, maybe 10 or 20 wouldn't be junk.

Everyone knows this, because it's true. It doesn't matter why, for what reason, all that matters is that it's true.

That's your own personal experience. I don't buy junk and if I would repeat that experiment, it's very likely that I'd pick up, e.g. Fluke multimeter or some old iPhone I'm keeping around.

My example has nothing to do with what you personally buy, and instead with "what is Made in China" in a local market. I am referring to both reality, and perception.

If you have millions upon millions of products, and only a tiny, tiny, tiny number are of OK quality, then it's entirely fair to say "Made in China" is junk. That's how it works. Exceptions to the rule are simply that, and not relevant.

If a company makes fridges, and 1 model out of 100 are OK, the other 99 crap that breaks in 2 to 3 years, everyone would say "That company makes junk!". Referencing "But they made one good fridge once!" is not something anyone need care about, and is the exception to the rule.

Yet with Made in China, we're talking about a million junky, sub-par products, compared to 1 that may be acceptable. And even then, quality control is still an issue.

Made in China is junk, an entirely fair, reasonable, logical statement, predicated upon the reality of the situation for most people.

It's not just Apple. You can buy a forged spanner (and other tools) from China that can beat the pants off of any domestically made version. It's all about what the distributor/brand will pay for.

How about BYD EV's?

Oh wow!

I never understood why I felt that t-fal was garbage in Canada but mediocre in the US. Now it makes sense: they're totally different products.

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