Slashdot Mirror
Lenovo Banned by U.S. State Department
chrplace writes "The BBC is reporting that the Chinese-made Lenovo PCs are not allowed inside secure US networks." From the article: "Assistant Secretary of State Richard Griffin said the department would also alter its procurement process to ensure US information security was guaranteed. His comments came after Rep Frank Wolf expressed national security concerns. The company Lenovo insisted such concerns were unwarranted and said the computers posed no security risk."
Remember, the PC division was sold, lock, stock, and smoking employees, to Lenovo. The people responsible for the design of the systems are still the same people who designed them for IBM. Most of them are here in the US. And you can be certain that SOMEONE would bitch if Lenovo was slapping spychips onto the system in defiance of the design parameters of the designers.
Sorry, but this is just brain-dead protection with a thick layer of xenophobic scaremongering.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
By the same token, any US citizens who value their privacy should definitely avoid purchasing any hardware that was assembled in the USA. You just can't be sure that the NSA hasn't secretly installed keyloggers in every Dell laptop. At least if you buy Chinese, you can be sure that any government that's listening in on your activities is physically several thousand miles away and unlikely to be able to leverage whatever information it gathers against you.
I have one of these Lenovos and I'm not too worried.
But with all the latest NSA spying crap we are hearing about, I'm not so sure I can trust US manufacturers, who could leave a nice little backdoor for their NSA friends. If they will illegally spy on our phone calls, why not illegally spy on our PCs?
Somehow the latter scenario seems a more valid conspiracy theory than Rep. Wolf's concerns.
Hey, when it really comes down to it, the problem is that we're racist and paranoid. But then again, shouldn't all the trade deficitists out there be rejoicing that the Chinese have lost such a big customer? Hmmm . . . it's weird how people only think about things in the way that is convenient at the moment, not recognizing the inherent conflicts between the things they say at one time and the things they say at another.