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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."
It's not like the PCs weren't made in China when the division was owned by IBM.
It's not like the Federal Building in Oklahoma wasn't bombed by an American citizen, either. Gotta love the irrational nationalism, especially in the face of corporate greed. Though it's my suspicion that the US government might use the cover of national security as convenient leverage over the Chinese in other areas.
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It is not the software they are worried about. They are worried about a hardware compromise. Now that a Chinese company can control what happens within the computer they can "do" a lot.
The representative is not crying wolf. If you speak with anyone in the intelligence business China has a very aggressive spying program and they will stop at nothing. (I know because I have heard this first hand from the people who do counter-intelligence.) Put it this way, if the Chinese government could put spying ability into Leveno laptops they would.
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Who says the American execs know? I mean, it's good cover, you open plants in the US and Mexico, hire a bunch of American execs, and put in a covert signalling mechanism in the form of, oh say a power management feature on the motherboards that slightly varies the rate at which ethernet packets are sent based on things the computer is doing. That scheme took me all of five seconds to dream up, I'm sure China could come up with better.
I'm guessing this is just paranoia and xenaphobia on the part of our government, but it's not quite as far-fetched as you make it out to be.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Because they have no brains.
Yes, but that market is rising, and as it does so it will pull up everything including the prices they pay for local products.
I know this isn't an issue now, but how we treat them now will be remembered in ten years when they are making their policies. Right now we are teaching them how to behave, in a way (Or more accurately, how badly they may be allowed to behave).
So how are we going to feel when they start to act as we do now:
--When they use their control over our vast debt to, say, influence choice of rulers or busines directions as we often do with other countries that owe us money or want our aid?
--If they tell us that they consider Cigarets a dangerous import and start spraying our tobacco fields like we spray central & south american drug fields?
--If they feel we are dangerous (I think we are currently the most dangerous force in the history of the world, asteroids and volcanos included!) and tell us that we must destroy all our WMDs or face UN sanctions that will cause mass starvation across the US (In the case of Oil sanctions, for instance)?
--What if they send "Communist Missionaries" across america the way we send "Christian Missionaries" to other countries. Is this acceptable? What if their missionaries convince your children to become communist, I'm sure that's no more offensive than one of our christian missionaries convincing children of other religions to switch to christianity.
Americans are so wrapped up in themselves that they can't ever begin to concieve how people outside must percieve us, and most of us seem to think that it's absolutely fine to treat other countries in a way that, if we were treated the same would be horrified (and angered to war which most americans seem to be very anxious to throw out--thinking we are completely safe behind our wall of "Nukes" and not even having to deal with a draft!). We may learn better soon.
You mean "because the BBC is in the grip of anti-American hysteria and wants to portray the US as xenophobic, because they've never had to deal with any kind of racial problems themselves surprisingly racist."