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U.S., Japan Ask Sony To Not Outsource PS2 To Taiwan
Payp points to this Digitimes story which says: "Japanese and U.S. governments have asked Sony to stop outsourcing Playstation 2 manufacturing to 2 Taiwanese companies, Asustek and Acer, in fear that they would do the manufacturing in factories in China, which would give the Chinese government opportunies to gain access to the DVD techonology. (I thought some DVD players are already manufactured in China.) Sony originally planned to use the Taiwanese companies to manufacture PS2 to prepare for Microsoft XBox's arrival, the manufacturing of which is also outsourced to some Taiwanese companies."
There are tons of articles all over the place on the web DVD technology - I doubt thats what they are trying to protect. What I think they really fear is access to the PS2's emotion chip technology, which the Japanese said is powerful enough to control weapons such as guided missles.
Cheap ruse, try again.
I accept that the emotion engine may have sufficient mflops for scientific application, but it's hardwired into a device that can do nothing but play games and its interface is a custom-built gamepad. How does one turn this into a weapon or weapons research device? Can anyone outline how, in theory, one would use a PS2 to do this?
Hmm.. If China doesn't have DVD hardware and software, how did my Chinese brand (Konka) DVD player get produced?
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Do not anger the worm.
It appears the "DVD Club" has a new member: China.
I'm afraid the Chinese now have the DVD. This means that they can natively produce and watch pr0n, totally bypassing the Japo-American Pr0n Syndicate. Although details are sketchy, it appears China stole this technology via Sony manufacting plants in Taiwan.
China now has access to the world's most potent encrypting scheme: CSS. We have our cryto boys working around the clock to break that cypher, but it could take years.
Our only option is to flood the Chinese market with Barney and Raffy DVDs. With luck, the Chinese consumer will be so disgusted with those shows that they'll abandon DVD altogether.
A world in which China has DVD tech isn't a world I want to live in.
Which is not to say that this is or isn't a reasonable concern, but I'd be surprised if Sony hadn't already considered that, being a media giant and all.....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
that churns out millions of bootleg DVDs and VCDs? I don't really understand what technology they are missing, it seams like they have pretty much streamlined the process of making fake DVDs. My neighborhood video store has all four Star Wars movies on DVD (not VCD).
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Sweet Christ, two years ago, the US government sold the Chinese MISSILE GUIDANCE SOFTWARE...and we're worried about a fucking game console?
Stop the world. I want to get off.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
One small nit: right-wingers do not have a monopoly on fearing that which they do not understand.
Unfortunately, it's human nature and happens in any country, race, religious group, social group, ethnicity, or caste, you can come up with.
When people don't know how to deal with something, they try not to. They ignore it if they can. If they can't, they try to get rid of it by ridiculing it. If that doesn't work, they attempt to destroy it. Of course, the sensible and responsible thing to do is learn to understand what they fear. Perhaps there is no reason to fear it after all, or perhaps there is a way to fix it without destroying it.
Don't fall into this trap. Before writing your right-wing classmates off as a group about to fuck up the US, try to understand them instead of ridiculing them. As long as you are ridiculing them without understanding them, you are no better than them.
Sweet Christ, two years ago, the US government sold the Chinese MISSILE GUIDANCE SOFTWARE...and we're worried about a fucking game console?
>This kind of thing is just nonsensical with a consumer product. If the Chinese government wants to get them they can simply buy them. What next Sony demand that anywhere selling this console must first expell any Chinese diplomats.
Tracking a target also usually means that you're telling the aircraft 'Here I am, and I'm looking at you' which also means that the target will do some countermeasures.
Worst it can easily mean that you are telling your enemy an awful lot about your radar system. Rather useful for anti-radar missile systems or aircraft with a lower RCS than the one being tracked.
Not meant to be a troll or anything, but it seems to me that this high-tech hysteria is pretty meaningless when they (especially the Arab nations) have millions upon millions of fanatics that would gladly become a martyr in the never-ending battle against Truth, Justice and Freedom (aka The Great Satan)
Much the same applies to missile defence systems.
When a kamikazi bomber can get to a target far more effectivily. The most recent successful attack against a US warship used an infaltable boat...
China already manufactures rockets which are almost carbon copies of American Titan II boosters.
You can't simply buy a Titan II rocket, nor will one fit in a diplomatic bag even if you could.
There is simply no way to control distribution of a consumer product.
If China gets a hold of our DVD technology, they might find even more illeagal uses for it. The nerve of people thinking they have the right to *watch* the movies they buy! Dang commies! God bless America!
Ignoring the absurd idea that they can't already copy dvds in China, what's to keep the evil Chinese pirating triad from flying to the US, buying 5 or 6 PS2 units, and flying them back to China to analyze them. Or even just going to Hong Kong and buying them off the street.
I can just imagine what U.S. customs might say: "Uh no sir, you may not export these video game systems, they are weapons of mass destruction. Here, why don't you take this used Pong machine instead."
...that they are worried that China may gain access to the CSS encryption technology that the MPAA relies on to protect its profits. They probably figure that piracy will run rampant if China gets a hold of this. To address your point about Acer, I guess the DVD-ROM drives themselves don't do the decryption, otherwise DeCSS wouldn't have any significance whatsoever.
Of course, if they think that no one in China has managed to get his/her hands on DeCSS by now, they're kidding themselves.
(This is probably waaay off-topic :)
You said "Admittedly, part of their success may be attributed to a willingness to detonate an explosive near the target - rather than just trying to hit it, but their systems are very advanced."
In case you didn't know, this is how all air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles work. Hey, even flak from WW2 didn't need a direct hit. Some even had proximity fuses which made the shells go off when an aircraft was nearby instead of using a timer.
But Russia do have some kick-ass long range air defence systems, but the problem such systems is target identification. What's the point in shooting down a target far away if you don't know if it's a friend or foe? Another problems is detection vs tracking. To be able to detect an aircraft at a long range doesn't mean that you can track it, and tracking is needed to be able get a good shot. I'm not sure if the double-digit russian SA-systems (NATO classification) uses active or semi-active radar in the missiles (semi-active requires an illumination radar to paint the target, active means that the missile got a radar of it's own), but in either case you have to get reliable targeting data when you're shooting. Unless the missile got some kind of mid-course update (the missile get updated target info from the radar while flying towards the target (the AMRAAM-missile (by Raytheon) got this), shooting at a long range means that the target has plenty of time doing some countermeasures, like turning in another direction. Tracking a target also usually means that you're telling the aircraft 'Here I am, and I'm looking at you' which also means that the target will do some countermeasures. However, the russian military doctrine may allow shooting down targets which just may be hostile. This may work when defending Mother Russia from bombers coming from all directions, but todays battlefield is much more complex.
There's more to DVDs than layers - most DVDs are single-layered anyway.
At first glance, I read this as "There's more to DVDs than lawyers..."And why is the govenment only focusing on Sony then? Or is the XBox not going to support DVD anymore, as it was originally spec'ed to do?
The motherboard isn't where most of the technology lies, it's in the processor itself. And those aren't being made in Taiwan, that's for sure.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Perhaps if Sony wanted China/Taiwan to actually fab the chips, then there might be danger of intellectual property being stolen.
To assemble stuff requires far less advanced technology (soldering, etc) than actually making the raw components. So, in order to get any useful technology, the Chinese would have to take the chip apart or use other methods of reverse engineering, and I don't see how not letting China/Taiwan handle the assembly would stop this anyways.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Sure, they can have their little encrypted communications, and develop their misiles with an athlon, but DVD technology will give them access to something even worse: illegal DVD copies!! (wich I'm sure they are alredy producing anyway). We can't allow that.
Remember: When you buy a Play Station 2, you are buying COMUNISM !!!
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Hasn't anyone considered the possibility that this is a hoax? I've read four or five articles saying this exact same thing for the past few weeks, and not one has been more specific than "according to our sources".
"According to our sources"? What, like our government would make a silly request like this and then refuse to talk to the press about it? Which branch of the government or military made the request? Which committee debated doing this? Who was ultimately responsible for the decision? What experts solemnly related their opinions that DVD technology is somehow dangerous? Are DVD-ROM drives banned in China? How about DVD players?
The complete lack of such details in any of these articles makes me very, very suspicious of their veracity. Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of people were actually dumb enough to think that Saddam Hussein was somehow interested in PS2 technology for military use -- haven't we heard this story before?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Well, perhaps they want that Emotion chip that Saddam was after. Thing is, Iraq is subject to trade restrictions and doesn't really have the industry to make it's own high-end processors. Taiwan, though, has the resources to make it's own processors if it really wanted, and it has access to Pentiums, Athlons etc as freely as most of us do - so what's the point blocking this one chip in the PS2?
There's been plenty of media coverage about these issues, so the government should be aware. So what's the real danger here (other than giving jobs to people in other countries)? I can't see how the PS2 will provide China with any technology that isn't already freely available to them.
Um, they have more than enough techno know-how to build a missile control system, or any weapon of mass destruction they choose. And any other nation can simply buy it, or send some students to universities here to learn it.
What is this American obsession with "secret" missle and nuke tech? It isn't secret. Everyone has it. Knowledge, no matter what the Intellectual Property groupies want to believe, breaks free and roams in the wild fairly quickly. The whole point of the Internet was to distribute information!
Point: this fear of killer missiles is a holdover from the '50's. Let the fear go. It's dumb. We have over 10,000 warheads - no sane nation will ever launch a nuke on a missile at us. They'd be destroyed in days. Game over.
A nuke, should it come, will be in a U-Haul parked in front of the Smithsonian Institution. It may happen. We'll survive it. Terrorists can't detonate hundreds of nukes to get all of our assets, and no matter what they do, we and the rest of the world would hunt the mad dogs down in REALLY short order. It's self-preservation!
The commies got the bomb, the Iranians (probably) have the bomb, the South Africans have the bomb -- think about it. The bloody bomb is useless! What the hell can you do with it, other than promise to use it if someone bombs you?
The Eighties reconstituted the Bomb scare of the Fifties, and we will be a long time getting rid of the notion of commie nukes raining from the sky.
Wanna be scared? Think of HIV-like genetic material inserted into a common cold virus. Think of the "fleshing-eating" bacteria's code installed into some innocuous bacterium. Think of plagues keyed to common genetic markers, say, like those females may possess (think Herbert's "White Plague"). THOSE are weapons of mass destruction. They make nukes look like annoying sunburn agents.
End of Pleasant Thought For Today.
about the fact that the U.S. is trying to deny China high technology, which seems to be the PRC's only hope for democracy.
I've been in Beijing on an exchange program for four months. Every media source is controlled. When a provincial paper accidentally printed a joke about a high level official, it was shut down, and the editor was driven into hiding.
The only unrestricted method of communication, the only outlet for the REAL political opinions of the Chinese people is, no surprise, the Internet (and piracy...the government has no way to restrict pirated media...Red Alert is prohibited because it portrays Communism as 'bad', but you can get it pirated).
I think the U.S. should be promoting the distribution of high tech throughout the world, not suppressing it. Especially for something has harmless as DVD.
If Uncle Sam wants to keep military tech out of the PRC's hands, then it should worry about more important things, like keeping state-of-the-art spyplanes from falling into China.
My Mustuk V300 with region-code busting loophole menu :) says "Made in China" plain as day on the back of the unit, so it seems the US and Japanese Govs are up to something that they don't want made public.
So, um, what technology might they obtain? The DVD cryptosystem? Remind me again why anyone should care?
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In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
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In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
On the other hand, it's pretty much the same technology, just implemented with current methods and techniques, and after ~20 years of experience making CDs and CD players. The only remarkable thing about DVD players is the content control, and that's not especially impressive.
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In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
I would think that the emotion engine processor would be more of a liability than would the MPEG-2 decoding chip.
They come up, blank look.
Ask dumb question about disk drive.
Told, they will return.
"We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold."
-- Hunter S. Tolkien
I believe they are worried about pirates and generic dvd players. I know this sounds a little illogical but remember Japan and the US are the most corrupt nations in terms ff campaign finiancing on Earth. I bet a few ignorant hollywood executives and shareholders would be afriad that some cheap chinese electronics company could produce a player without giving them royalities! Ohh the horror!
Or that somehow a pirate would reverse engineer the ps2 and make another decss to steal movies. Ohhh bad ( picture an executive at hollywood freaking out at the moment). The taiwanese company would produce them would have the blue prints and specs and a chinese company would go nuts for this. I am sure they are worth gold in the black market. Think about. The dvd constorium makes money for each unit and each disc sold. A chinese one would always have a competitive advantage. Perhaps they may make one without region encoding so hollywood's css would go down the tubes. The military could also produce these and sell them oversea's for funding.
Its all about greed and ignorance. Of course it would be easier for a pirate to find a warez site and take decss and write an extenstion to write discs but perhaps a few lobbyists don't know this or even care. They just want to tell other people what to do with the power of allmightly uncle sam so they can make more money. I love corporate america.
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They are just hyping the Playstation, by suggesting its sooooo powerful that should be prevented from obtaining the technology in it.
Sony's PR people did the same thing when they said Iraq were trying to buy up PS2s for use as Supercomputers.
Same hype, different enemy of the day.
the DVD application of the console's chip could be used for military purposes
Must be the extremely complex encryption code used in DVD players that the government's so worried about. What's the worst the Chinese military could use the DVD app for, showing training videos?
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Developers: We can use your help.
..as the Chinese populace finds out how freakin' good a golfer the Dalai Lama is.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
I'm still trying to figgure out how this matters.... I mean, these are Tiawanese companies right? I wasn't aware that the PRC and the ROC were on speaking terms. Tiawan is the place we were considering selling the new AEGIS cruisers to right? The 7th fleet is parked off their coast right? It is there to defend Tiawan from the PRC? This is confusing.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
China was also unimpressed by the British who fought the opium wars against China to keep the opium trade going... The Brits do mention the Opium wars in their schoolbooks, mainly because they won them.
Taiwan is a much more complex situation that the US press gives credit for. Not only does mainland China claim sovereignty over Taiwan, Taiwan claims sovereignty over mainland China! That is why they used to call themselves the Republic of China.
The US is upset about China for the simple reason that at current rates of growth China will be the largest world economy by about 2015.
Stoping them from getting playstations is not going to keep the US in place as world superpower. In fact if the US govt had any brains they would give the Chineese as many playstations as they want. The more time they spend playing games the less time they will have to outbuild the US economy.
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Yeah like you can fit the entire history of China in one Slashdot post.
You are also somewhat selective. The US 'Open Door' policy began in the nineteenth century under Teddy Roosevelt. The name is misleading, the policy essentially meant that the US would demand the 'right' to trade on its own terms and back the demand with guns.
Your dates for the Japaneese occupation are misleading. Japan had reduced large areas of china to subordinate status long before. US sources prefer to present the overthrow of the puppet regime as a major event since it co-incides with the rise of the rivalry between the US and Japan.
Looking at the US/China relationship from the China side is very different from that popular amongst right wing kooks in the US.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The funny part of this is that there are several military areas in which Russia - and friends (China, in particular) have always done better than the West. In particular, missile defence, SAM systems and similar. Admittedly, part of their success may be attributed to a willingness to detonate an explosive near the target - rather than just trying to hit it, but their systems are very advanced. The really funny part is that old Macs (68k and some early PowerPC), old PCs (386s, 486s) are readily available in so-called "rogue states" - in fact, the United States has led the way in giving old PCs to Russia! 3/486s may be a little slow, but they are still significantly more advanced than the chips that guided the original MX missile. They are also a well-established, well-understood technology - and therefore attractive to militaries. (What do you think they are using in Internet Cafes in Iran?)
Personally, I always thought that the "Iraq wants PS2s" argument was a subtle ad-campaign for Sony. While the Emotion Engine is powerful, it is focussed pretty heavily on 3D rendering. While I can think of some uses for it, I'd much rather develop systems on readily available PC parts!
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
You're oversimplifying many of your facts.
Taiwan, (which still is officially) the Republic of China, renounced sovereignty over Mainland China in the late 80s (can't recall the actual date of the law). It also renounced its provincial status in the late 90s by doing away with the provincial government structure (which always had implied that it was part of China, just like Rhode Island has the same political status as California, but both belong to the United States).
I can't say whether or not the Opium Wars are written on Mainland Chinese textbooks, but the historical experience is written on Chinese history books in Taiwan, and many historians consider it as what brought about China's relative decline to the West. This war and many other wars fought with western nations at the time, lead to the growth of Chinese nationalism as well as anti-West sentiments.
China and Japan have traditionally been rivals with one another. Much of the Chinese resentment began after the Sino-Japanese War in which China under the Qing Dynasty lost decisively and had to cede territory (for instance, Taiwan). However, Japan was also host to thousands of Chinese overseas students during the early part of the 1900s, because intellectuals and revolutionaries who overthrew the Qing Dynasty believed that China could learn from the Japanese on how to modernize.
Chinese resentment against Japan turned into national hatred as the result of the atrocities caused during the Japanese occupation from 1937 to 1945. Japanese troops massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, used Chinese POWs and entire villages for chemical and biological weapons research, enslaved women for use as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. To this day, the Japanese government never formally apologized for the actions, which furthers much of the Chinese resentment.
I can't recall the U.S. helping Japan with the occupation of China, but U.S. did help the KMT government re-establish control of major Chinese cities after Japan's defeat and withdrawal by airlifting nearly a million Chinese troops from southwestern China. This was done to prevent the Chinese Communists from taking control.
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Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
That said, this may have bigger implications if the ban is against higher-end computers (P4's, Athlons, G3's) but I've never heard of such a thing. Does anyone know if there are export restrictions/tarrifs against China/Taiwan for strong computers (I guess similar to the restrictions in place for encryption?)
Japanese and US governments have asked Circuit City, Best Buy, and Sony not to sell any PS2 units or DVD players to Chinese citizens, as this would give the dangerous technology of DVD to China. QUEL HORRUER! The Chinese will now be able to watch the Caddyshack double DVD set! This must be stopped at all expense!
Last time I checked, the ~25 year old Tomahawk cruise missile ran on a 512khz microproccessor that would operate its terrain-following radar setup and also fly the missile at treetop level for hundreds of miles to its target.
Not to mention that my dinky little wristwatch has more computing power than the entire Apollo Command Module, but that's a different story altogether.
So why should we care about these stupid little PS2 boxes getting into Chinese, Indian, Pakistani or Iraqi hands, when they could easliy totally wipe us out by loading a briefcase nuke into a child's backpack, and have him just hop off of a boat, wander into the center of one of our big coastal cities and then have it remote detonated via internation cell phone call or something?
We don't need to worry about the Chinese reverse engineering a stupid little playstation to build a delivery device, they already have a billion of 'em.
Not meant to be a troll or anything, but it seems to me that this high-tech hysteria is pretty meaningless when they (especially the Arab nations) have millions upon millions of fanatics that would gladly become a martyr in the never-ending battle against Truth, Justice and Freedom (aka The Great Satan)
Or have I missed the point entirely, and should be shaking my fist at the MPAA and their Fascistic ways. You're wily ones, you MPAA bastards, wily indeed!
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
And Asus? Huh? They're not worried about the dangers of K7 motherboards, but an MPEG-2 decoder chip is dangerous? But an Athlon can merrily perform all the same functions, if not a bit more!
I think these "sources" sound like a couple teenage kids with a little too much [favorite drug here] on their brains.
Wouldn't it be more dangerous if China got ahold of just one or two well-trained EE's from around here?
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
For those of you not up on your Chinese/Taiwanese history, this comes from the fact that Taiwan is where the remaining Chinese government officials fled to when Mao and his army kicked their butts out of Beijing. Technically, the government in Taipei is China. However, technicalities mean squat when you're dealing with things on this kind of level. Might makes right, and the PRC is certainly the mightier of the two, so they're "China."
As far as I know, the Taipei government doesn't claim sovereignty over the PRC. They'd be hideously stupid if they actually said anything to that effect, and you can't afford to be stupid when you're in the position Taiwan is in.
This article made me chuckle. Living in Beijing for four years now, I've owned a DVD player for two. They've been on the market for as long as they've been in most other countries and became popular before the US market did. Previous to that, I owned a VCD player (be careful the miliatry apps for this device are so dangerous that the Chinese government is making sure it doesn't get produced on American soil, thus many of you American mainlanders may have never seen/heard of this secret Chinese technology)
I have no idea of the potential 'military applications' for the PS2's, but at minimum Sony has other problems to worry about than this. Once they start producing in Southern China, you can bet the black market versions of the PS2 will be spread throughout the major cities on the mainland in short order.
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