A Chinese Hacker's Identity Unmasked
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The article quotes Stewart as saying: If they did it fair and square, more power to them. But to cheat at it is wrong.
This seems really problematic to me: it's not like all US companies do it "fair and square," and as a sovereign country, it seems like China has every right to summarily ignore IP, or to establish morals that don't care about protecting foreign IP.
IP is just a made up way for incumbent producers to squash competition.
Do you feel that stealing source code is justifiable too?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/google-hack-attack/
If so, then where do you draw the line?
One should also note that China is not some innocent bystander in this since Chinese companies have sought and obtained patents to stifle competition as well. I also think the distinction made between "developed" and "developing" countries is not useful in this case. China has the second largest economy in the world and is very modern by many standards. They have gained great wealth from the "developed" countries least of all because the developed countries are their largest market for trade. China has a net trade surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars. They are not an underdog in this.
But that "right" is a "moral right", that us perhaps want to impose on it. Not sure if it is an enforceable law.
If we stick to the moral approach. China might see it as hypocrisy as well. From their point of view they can say "well you stole to improve your industry, you burned coal like it was nobody's business to ramp up your steel mills, now you tell us we have to be green, and waste all this money duplicating R&D effort -- that's not fair, and it is our _right_ to do however we please".
Now practically I don't agree with that, but from a more rational position, I could see their point, as well.
It also seemed rather silly when we make fun of Chinese for stealing our high tech technology (stealth, radar, etc). It would seem pretty irrational and wasteful from their point of view _not_ to spend $100k to bribe some spy and instead do spend $10b developing stuff from scratch.
No one has a problem with China emulating the things the US did to grow its economy that were good, such as allowing women to work and developing a highly educated workforce. However, we would not want them to use slavery or ignore the environmental impact of coal use because we now know that those were bad things. Repeating our mistakes is bad for the world and bad for China, as the Chinese are seeing for themselves the pollution derived from over-reliance on coal.
What encompasses IP is not just technology though.
The concern is that there are foreign actors attacking businesses and doing much more than looking at technology. They are looking through financials for current accounts, revenue streams, customer lists, and pending contracts. They are taking the source code from software companies and schematics from hardware companies. They are effectively acquiring all the information necessary to replace those businesses, often without knowing what they have, and selling it higher up the food chain.
This particular actor in the article looks like really low hanging fruit compared to what other companies are warning they are being attacked by.
I'm pointing this out because you're in for a highly anti-climactic read.
Basically, the thing I took away from the article is that it's so wide at this point that no matter the hacker there that you cast your net toward, it probably leads back to the government. In most other countries I imagine that most of the hackers are either third-party actors (selling what they got for cash or simply stealing cash), or random 'kids' hacking for fun/profit.
Though with the "economic reform" and the unstoppable information flow with internet, China has become something really weird unlike anyone else in the history. Nobody believes in communism and everybody knows the government is lying all the time and yet just lives with it. Every activity by the government is for money and mostly quick money (for the officials).
I don't even think the hackers in this matter care much for the information. They may just try to get more funds from the government. Sometimes they even frame somebody or fake a threats to get the money. The funds will always be granted in such a situation because "if you don't grant you put the country in danger" and "if you grant you can take the commissions".
Most of the time every bit of it is simply dirty corrupted business. Many of the officials' children are permanent residents in the US. Some of them are even already citizens.
Let's say this hypothesis is true; we should then deduce that the Chinese government is years (decades?) ahead of "developed" countries in terms of information warfare. It's quite a worrying thought.
Let's say that your hypothesis is actually false: this would mean that there is an ongoing similarly-sized info-warfare effort waged by the US government (at least), but we rarely hear about it. Again quite a worrying thought.
It's called the NSA.
And the US will certainly won't start the war either, because you can hardly find someone else who keep lending you money almost unconditionally.
Web version (3 pgs): http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-14/a-chinese-ha...
OT sidenote: why are so many mobile versions so unreadable on web?
Edit: Trolling troll is a troll. I 'knew' it was a troll account, but looked just now to be sure... created 34 minutes ago :P.
Well, going by common sense identifying where a hacker is based, if he is not working for the government, is of no use. Do I care if the hacker, who hacked my gmail account on his accord was Indian or Chinese or even American? No I don't.
But, alternatively, I would only want to know if they are state sponsored. So it is assumed always, not just in terms of hacking, but also other criminal acts, like say terrorism.
Saying " A Muslim Terrorist " is of no use, and create un-necessary delusion and association between the words 'muslim' and 'terrorist'. Which could have been avoided otherwise by saying 'a Terrorist', because the fact is that a terrorist is a terrorist.
But the thing is, we have been hotwired like this for years, we want such unnecessary associations, which we can see through 'most' of the times (but not always, say when we experience something similar nearby).
In simple words you can say, we are used to letting journalist screw with our mind with.
'American Fraudster''Muslim Terrorist' 'Chinese Hacker' 'Japanese Pedophile' 'Hindu Extremist'
Pick a newspaper up some odd day, and you will find a lot of them.
PS: Indeed my reasons to call such articles 'slightly racist' are perhaps different for why the original poster said it was 'racist'.
Though, one thing caught me in the article: Working on behalf of the state, and working in the state machinery is two different things.
If you are skilled, and suppose, you can really do stuff, he did in this case, and as it is, for a minute if we give him the benefit of doubt, that no he is not hacking on behalf of the state, its clear, that since to the chinese govt, itself, he is innocent. And the only thing that can be proven is his skill, through our validation. Which makes him all the very suitable to teach at a chinese IT related institute. so yeah, that might be a good reason to say that, we should introspect, that how should such articles shape our perception of the chinese.
Seriously, lets stop looking at who is building more weapons! Instead, lets compete in who is making more jobs!
More over, if the Chinese wanted a US citizen extradited for hacking a Chinese computer, do you think the US would hand him or her over to the Chinese? Heh, I even doubt the US would hand a suspected hacker over to an ally like the Brits. Maybe Im wrong. If so, please cite a case.
And of course, equally I dont see the Chinese offering up its citizens for US "justice" any time soon. A justice system that many in the US think of as fundamentally broken.
All I read here is Chinese bad, West good, while forgetting that none of us have clean hands. If the Chinese had some technology we wanted or needed we'd be hacking their backsides off looking for it. And called patriots for doing so.
Lets just stop the moralising and finger pointing, and just get on and play the game. That's all it is. I suppose it fills the space left by the end of the cold war.
I don't disagree with you about the moralizing, fingerpointing and games to fill the Cold War void.
If the NSA or CIA were doing this, people would be just as interested in reading about one of them being sloppy and getting unmasked.