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US Government Fears China Bugs Lenovo PCs
An anonymous reader writes "After approving the sale of IBM's PC Division to the Chinese Corporation Lenovo, the US Government has realized China could bug Lenovo PCs destined for US Government customers. Would the US have done the same to China? With American businesses so eager for business in China no matter what, where are we headed?"
I find it hard to believe that they don't, so this punishment is not for the computers being manufactured in China, rather for the company not being US owned anymore. In other words, it's fine for the Chinese to do the manufacturing, but it has to be Americans making the real money (and again, this sort of chauvinism is pretty common & not unexpected, but it would be nice for the US to be a little more honest about its motivations).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
My computer's bugged. It keeps regurgitating the same information over and over again.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Isn't this about the third time we've seen this 'story'?
It's not like the US government has exactly been leading the way on demonstrating restraint with respect to bugging. ... at least most other people do ).
They bug everyone calling into and out of the US. They keep aggregate data for the purpose of dragnetting the stuff later for evidence of links to terrorism.
They even bug members of the United Nations ( not that I have a great deal of respect for them, but still
Why wouldn't they bug China. And yes, why wouldn't China bug the US.
It's an insane system. A paranoid, power-hungry system.
Wrap your laptop in foil, it will protect it from Chinese bugs and boost your wifi signal by 40%!
the US Government has realized China could bug Lenovo PCs destined for US Government customers
In other words, the government says "damn, why didn't we think of that first?"
Push Button, Receive Bacon
The USA did it to China indeed.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
what's with all the speculation? With their domestic spying program, wouldn't the NSA know whether the PCs were "phoning home"?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
China may bug US government PCs?
Welcome to the rest of the world!
Everyone else has to keep the same thing in mind when they use Windows in government and industry.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
They say they want free trade, but they won't buy IBM PCs after China bought the brand (no other difference).
They say they want democracy in the Middle East, but when there is democracy in the Middle East, they don't respect the outcome (Hamas).
They say other nations should respect human rights, but they themselves don't (Gitmo, torture flights, numerous examples).
Anyone still wonder why the rest of the world spits on America?
TFA: Word of the State Department order for the desktop PCs was made public in March, 10 months after Lenovo completed its $US1.75 billion acquisition of IBM's PC division.
That speaks for itself surely... Hello, due decision making process?
Also:
After approving the sale of IBM's PC Division to the Chinese Corporation Lenovo, the US Government has realized..
..which to me sounds like they were implicitly involved in the selling of the IBM branch.. is this misleading?
So you get them from a US company which then bugs them to help them secure Government contracts.
He suspects everyone else is a thief... or atleast a potential thief. Why would the US fear Chinese 'bugs' in Lenove PCs? And if indeed the fear is valid, then why was IBM allowed to contract it's manufacturing outside of the US, and in particular, China? If laws could be framed to control export of things like encryption etc, why not h/w manufacturing as well? So many jobs could be kept within the US.....
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Earlier this year the Bush administration was very disappointed as they weren't able to sell your harbours to an Saudi company because of the senate's fear of terrorism but are afraid of computers manufactured and _owned_ by a Chinese company.
Using the chinese as manufacturers on the other hand, that's all right since the money goes to US companies.
where are we headed?
Above the neck?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Doesn't the US Government re-image the machines once they're in-house? If so, then the threat of bugs is somewhere near 0. Maybe they're talking about the normal Windows adware/spyware stuff?
Only Americans may bug Americans! Anything else is just...un-American!
Fucking tree-hugging hippie liberals piss me right off.
Could it be a little revenge for China helping Irans nuclear program and supporting its military in general? More specifically, supplying high grade Uranium gas?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
considering all the electronics the get exported from china, TV. stereos, computers, etc...
now also consider cable TV and phone lines are network aware, and soon BPL will make power lines network aware too...
what if china makes modified televisions and telephones capable of spying on people sending all the juicy data straight back to china via the internet...
china could spy on the usa without even leaving china
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
A huge proportion of computer hardware is manufactured in China and has been for years, not to mention countless other things... What's to stop the Chinese from sending bugged components instead of full machines?
However it raises an interesting point, it's much easier to hide back doors in software, so by this reckoning china should ban the use of american software... If this started happening, i`m sure microsoft would make it's pet government back down.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/176
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/0
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/15/1050172
It's paranoid delusions like this that will bring about the downfall of the US
Will program for karma.
Easy. Debug them machines first!
Having a link in the uber-parent to one of Chomsky's endless rants against the United States strikes a terrible blow to the overall seriousness of the issue at hand. Chomsky is a crackpot, is trained in linguistics, not geo-politics, political theory, et al, and giving airs to this guy who will be completely forgotten in 50 years is not a very good way to build up any crediblity. I'm certain that a link from a reputable person of scholarly merits could have been found focusing on whether the US would have bugged the Chinese given the chance in situations X, Y and Z. Playing to the fringe may excite those who are too young or ignorant to know any better, but it makes Slashdot look very stupid.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I suppose that the governments in other parts of the world will take notice and similarly ban Windows because of the risks of its being bugged.
For years rumors about NSA backdoor in Windows has circulated the Net.
Yet another reason for migrating to GNU/Linux worldwide.
Interestingly Dubai looks like its ruler is consciously aiming at becoming the next Venice, and his relations with the US are going the same way (trying to obtain harbours in the Turkish empire==trying to buy ports in the US).
The parallels are considerable. Venice relied on seapower and built the greatest manufacturing business in the world - the Arsenal, which employed 16000 men and could turn out three ships a day at its peak. But when it tried to rely on dominating trade and took its eye off manufacturing and naval power, it went into decline. The current US emphasis on creating a world of "intellectual property" and slowly de-emphasising manufacturing is not a good long term trend, at least for the US. Look at the UK, which is now a very third class power dependent on managing financial flows.
It looks like Marx was right; US capitalism may be destroyed by the internal contradictions, in that the interests of capitalists are contrary to the security of the country. Meanwhile, China while claiming to be business friendly is using Lenin's approach of using capitalism against itself.
Pining for the fjords
Today, Wired published the full evidence of the AT&T/NSA domestic surveillance program. It is fascinating reading:
m l
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70944-0.ht
Given that the rest of the world has to worry that the US might bug any of Windows, MacOS, and a huge range of hardware we are not sympathetic.
Oh so it's okay when the U.S. Government does it, but not China.
It's always confirmation bias!
In the Netherlands we have a saying that can be translated into English as "The way the innkeeper is himself, he suspects his guests"...
The Chinese dpo no trust Windows unless they have the source code.
Do you really know what Windows is doing? They is this blob of unknown code that is running on 90% of the world's computers, all under the control of one corporation in the US, a corporation that receives special treatment from the US government.
Bullshit. Holding a democratic election does not absolve you of responsibility for the outcome. If "the People" want Hamas to run the P.A., they will have to live with the consequences of that decision. The rest of the world is under no obligation to underwrite the operations of a group of terrorists, whether democratically elected or not.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...or just those ordered by the government.
Wouldn't it be possible for the government to simply buy computers from a "retail" source (like say CDW) instead of direct from Lenovo. Then in order for them to be "bugged" they'd have to bug all the computers (since it wouldn't be known which ones are going to the government).
Of course an argument could be made that it would cause more damage for the bugs to be in Boeing, or Intel, or Scandia Labs, or 100 other places with sensitive data.
Truly, the whole idea is silly. but it would cost very little to buy a bunch of PC and monitor them, take them apart, etc. to verify their security.
This could become a case of chickens coming home to roost with China and other U.S competitors and adversaries using the TCP (Trusted Computing Platform) to have a back door to computers they produce and which are sold to businesses and governments all over the world.
All they need to do is to make note of the keys or signatures from the TPMs(Trusted Platform Module) that are embedded in every modern PC.
In fact this illustrates the greatest challenge of TCP based DRM. Who will be the key escrow / signing authority in a world where China, Russia and India increasingly shun away from U.S centered IT solutions.
Its all about your right to read.
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Maybe they're talking about hardware that, say... logs keystrokes, and can be summoned to retrieve them by a later software infection (or by a low-power radio request -- if these machines make it into an embassy or somesuch, it's entirely reasonable to have a feet-on-the-ground representative carry a piece of hardware that transfers the logs off the box).
Look at some of the ways the US bugged equipment exported to Russia during the cold war -- there's a lot of ingenuity going on there.
You are right, the problem applies to all closed source software. I only used Windows as an example because it is in so widespread use.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
This is WHERE we are headed. It's by design.
Believe it.
Why should that be anymore legitimate?!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
However our friendly old capitalism has increasingly metamorphosed into a new kind of faceless corporate globalism where any remains of social responsibility have given way to pure greed and only the rights of the major shareholders -- themselves increasingly being faceless holding companies -- are catered for. This globalistic corporate might relies upon collaboration with the political elite and since the regimes in both the USA and China feel that they can (ab)use this system to their national benefit, the rest of the world is just trying to hang on for the ride.
The European Union was supposedly founded upon the European ideals of morality and shared social responsibility -- doing the right thing, if you will -- but even there the most powerful national governments (UK, France, Germany etc.) and the executive body of the EU itself are increasingly controlled by corporate interests. Doing the right thing simply doesn't pay in the new globalism-driven market environment.
While Charles Cooper only refers to the USA, the main instigator behind globalization, when he says that "cuddling up to Beijing inevitably will raise discomfiting questions about globalization and the cost U.S. companies must pay to operate in the countries in which they do business", one day the whole world must wake up to the reality of the moral costs of this increasingly non-democratic way of putting corporate interests above the rights of an individual, not forgetting whole nations under modern-day imperial occupation.
Although the destructive US-lead occupation of Iraq is bad enough, the Americans are expected to eventually leave that burned country to Iraqis (or whatever the remaining peoples choose to call themselves and their ethno-religious units). But other increasingly fascist second-rate superpowers like China and (Soviet) Russia are in the process of occupying and swallowing (de facto wiping off the map) their neigbouring nations and peoples as part of a nationalistic neo-imperial drive.
From a moral viewpoint, even that which is encapsulated in the founding principles of the United Nations (peoples rights to self-determination and their own language, freedom of religion, freedom from torture etc.), the Free World really should unite against such expansionist totalitarian regimes until they stop their genocidal aggressions. Choosing not to trade with such criminal regimes would be the morally acceptable course of action, but the current free-for-all business-driven system would appear to actually favour fascist regimes instead of giving their populations incentive to demand reform. US government's decision against buying PCs from the Chinese Lenovo is based on ludicruous reasoning when that same government continues to promote business with the totalitarian and lebensraum-seeking Chinese regime. It is just hypocrisy and money talking nonsense.
Either it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to deal with fascist China and live with the consequences (or die with the consequences as is the case with China's occupied neighbours who depend on world's support and have no choice), or the elected governments should grow some balls and decide not to collaborate with any criminal regimes.
Invest that freely floating money from the West into non-aggressive and democratic developing nations instead and kick the aggressors out of the WTO while slap very significant import, export and investment duties on them. How hard can that be??
The Chinese people won't lift a finger to change their regime for a less criminal one as long as the current dictatorship continues to make them money and the state propaganda continues to hail China's genodical expansionism as something to be jingoistic about.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Well, if that isn't just good old fashioned paranoia. I mean really, ....... *INTERRUPT TRANSMISSION* Need WoW Gold? Go to http://superwowgoldsite.com/ to buy gold now! *RESUMETRANSMISSION* what a load on nonsense.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
Microsoft and other big businesses in the US are constantly under the threat of anti-trust laws and other regulations. Isn't it possible that any one of them might consider it beneficial to bug the computers or operating systems that they sell to various government agencies?
I'm not trying to defend China or slander Microsoft -- I just think it's crazy that someone in Washington would worry about this only now. It seems like the government ought to be doing QA on any computers they buy, if only to spot check them. I'd like to believe that at least the intelligence community is doing this already.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
It reminds me of when the US let the Soviets build their embassy in Moscow. Bugs in the bricks. They couldn't use it.
...the vast majority of PCs (including Apple, dell, hp, gateway, etc) are manufactured (or at least part manufactured) in China?
True enough, the whole suggestion of PC bugging is almost funny. If the Chinese were to bug every single computer that gets assembled in China just on the off chance that it happens to end up in a secret US.Govt facitlity they would leave a footprint so large that the operation would be blown wide open pretty quickly. How many amateurs and computer engineers are there around the world picking their computers apart? One would expect such a scam to be discovered pretty quickly. Besides that how are the Chinese going tell which of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of computers the US.Govt buys end up in secret facilities. Do the computes phone home? Do they have self activating bugging devices that phone home (through how many layers of firewalling and network security?) when they some how automatically detect that they are in a US Govt facility? The whole suggestion of the Chinese bugging computers wholesale is ridiculous. That leaves us with the possibility of a sophisticated Chinese sting operation that uses the Lenovo distribution network to spike only those computers Lenovo and its distributors (distributors which would have to be staffed by the Chinese intelligence) know are likely to be destined for sensetive facilites. That would minimize the likelyhood of the scam being discovered unless US intel started randomly sampling computers and checking them for bugs but it still seems collossally impractical. If I were Chinese intelligence I would stick to working the most vulnerable part of any US.Govt operation. I would, for example, look for that inevitable disappointed, bored out of his skull, stuck in a dead end career pencil pusher and bribe him/her. It has worked in the past and it will work today. There have to be a thousand more practical ways of spying on the US than bugging computers.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Funny that US has bugged a Boeing 767 purchased from the US for use by former President Jiang Zemin.
Didn't hear the Chinese stop buying jumbo jets.
If the Chinese wanted the Windows source code so badly, all they'd have to do is take all the Windows bug reports with the offending code attached, and piece all the code snippets together. Voila, instant Windows source code.
Who really needs a free market anyway?
My thoughts exactly, more so if you notice that his essay is dated 2003 and is about the Middle East situation, it has absolutely nothing to do with the USA government using computers made in China other than stating Chomsky's opinion that the USA has an interventionist foreign policy. In the context of this discussion, that link is 80% off-topic, 20% flamebait.
Chomsky is a crackpot, is trained in linguistics, not geo-politics, political theory, et al,
I wouldn't go that far, things like geopolitics and political theory aren't that much a science to need anyone to have a formal training before discussing them. If it were so, democracy would be impossible.
Noam Chomsky is a person whose mindset was frozen in the 1930s, as shown by the way he quotes "perhaps, enable the administration to accomplish its goal of rolling back the New Deal", a description that was already obsolete when first made in the 1980s.
It's funny how some people defend FDR's New Deal but fail to mention LBJ's Great Society plan, which came 30 years later and has a lot more relation to the current situation. This bias is probably due to something that has absolutely nothing to do with social policy: FDR was involved with WWII and participation in that war was well accepted by the population, differently from LBJ's Vietnam.
they all used thinkpads to run an obscure military strategy software made for vax i had to get working under redhat. i was not allowed to see the software as it was classified so i had to customize the distribution and then mail them the laptop and then step them through installing the software. it was a very long and time consuming process but worked in the end. i wonder if theyll be switching to another brand of laptop now.
you may have noticed that Red China has a government hostile to the United States and Western Europe, whether they trade with us or not. You may have noticed they're backing Iran, a known terrorist state which sponsors Hezbellah and may or may not be seeking a nuclear weapon. China has nuclear weapons. China also has a million infantry and a virtually unlimited capacity to produce more infantry, either through conscription NOW or just demanding people have more sex. They also have thousands of tanks... Al Qaeda lives in caves and rides on camels. Their "terrorist" acts kill pittence of people per attempt when compared with what would happen in a war with China.
Will paranoid dillusions LIKE this one be the down fall of America? Maybe. But I think this fear is more grounded than worrying about a bunch of sandpeople with barely any technology and no ability to field an army. Meanwhile, we keep making ours "lighter and faster" for the "21st century battle field" but World War III against China or Chinese-backed Communist countriese in Latin America (Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and their rappidly growing allies) is going to look a lot more like World War I or II -- that is, until it goes nuclear. China is a VERY REAL THREAT ecnomically and militarily, whether they're bugging ThinkPads or not.
What about the so-called ''Elbit'' "flash chips" which are apparently transmitters allowing for the Mossad to spy on systems installed with these flash chips.. all conspiracy theories? But if it where true its not like the US has not been spying on everyone else for the last 100 years.
Do you guys ever get mad about these dupes? Scuttlemonkey, do you even read /. on your days off?
This guy is way out there
This leaves network traffic. Now I really hope there aren't many machines that stradle classified networks and unclassified networks. Real, physical separation could guarantee no crosstalk between classified and non-classified systems. A while back I recall some discussion that VMWare was being used to virtualize systems of different classifications, so maybe this is not the case anymore. Nevertheless, a firmware bugged system would have to report home, and any self-resperting network admin _should_ be able to notice periodic network connection attempts to its destination, especially in a very controlled enviroment where arbitrary tcp/ip connections just aren't the norm.
This leaves the approach of using stenographic techniques to attempt to hide important data in files that the Chinese would hope to become declassified and published. Talk about hit and miss, not to mention the processing power and overhead such a scheme would take, but this is about the only way out I can think of this morning before my coffee. The firmware could be looking for keyword triggers, record big blocks of text around the keywords found, then embed in numerous other documents in hopes to leak it. Talk about a crapshot, but maybe it is worth adding to a paranoid agency's list of things to watch for.
-Michael
So China is bugging my PC- The US is bugging my phone.
Makes me wonder, is France bugging my toaster oven?
The Chinese dpo no trust Windows unless they have the source code.
Nothing new or unusual here. The security folks have long had one primary rule: If you're at all interested in security, you don't run any software unless you have all the source code and you've compiled it yourself.
If you run a binary from someone else, you have no way of knowing what's hidden in there. It could be doing all sorts of things in addition to what you think it's doing, and you have no way of knowing.
Microsoft does have a bit of a history of delivering software that "calls home" and send information extracted from your computer. But Microsoft is hardly the only one that does this. Any time a vendor refuses access to the source, the first assumption should be that they're hiding something.
Anyone who thinks this is just hypothetical should do a bit of reading on this important case study in which American-supplied software contained an extra "feature".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You have some very interesting points in comparing the decline of Venice with the decline of the USA. But I don't think the problem is in overemphasis of intellectual property. The problem, IMHO, is that IP is being devalued, not over valued. When a patent is granted on "one-click" methods, these are granted the same status as very important discoveries that are the fruit of years of hard labor by scientists and researchers. Let's put the "intellectual" back in IP.
There's a generation of managers who know nothing but management. They have no way of evaluating the true value of intellectual property because they have no knowledge of the underlying technology. The dogma in MBA training is that a manager can manage anything, they think they can take a CEO from a soft drink company and put him in a computer company. But this trend is global, it's not restricted to the USA.
In the end, the current trend in moving manufacturing to the poorer countries is not anything to cause worry at the richest countries. Manufacturing is not a natural resource like oil, it is something that's done where more convenient, that is, where it's cheaper. If the USA wanted its manufacturing back it would be an easy thing to do: just pay American workers the same salaries the Chinese get. As China improves their economy, manufacturing will be moved to other countries just like it's being moved away from the USA.
I will believe the "China century" is here when I see a Chinese CPU competing in the market. That's something even the Japanese haven't managed to do. Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, they all can make chips, they have the manufacturing capacity to do "silicon foundry" work, but they have never managed to compete in the ultimate intellectual dispute, data processing power. They can do fine memory chips, because it's a rather repetitive work, but for creating leading edge CPUs (or GPUs) they still haven't been able to compete against Intel, AMD, nVidia, or ATI.
For that sort of competition, you cannot depend on slave labor. You need free minds, allowed to exchange ideas freely. Intellectual creators cannot be herded, either political or social repression kills creativity.
It's interesting how Japan was seen as dominating the world in the 1980s, but it fizzled away. Japan took over the existing market for audio and video equipment, but they were unable to create the new market for cell phone equipment. That was done by companies like Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, and Motorola.
I doubt the China domination will last longer than the Japanese did. They are limited by similar social values as the Japanese culture has, worsened by the political opression of the communist party. Will the Far East countries change their traditional values of absolute respect of young people for their elders' opinions? I doubt it. But until they do, they will be limited to playing catch up. Sony and Panasonic defeated RCA in the market, as Samsung is trying to defeat Nokia, but it's one thing to improve something that's being done today, it's a different thing to create totally new ideas.
Its' not a bug... it's a feature! It lets them see all of your data so they can verify its integrity. And since we're talking about the American government, they are currently in serious need of integrity!
Yeah, right. From the source you cite: "The neutrality and factual accuracy of this section are disputed. Please view the article's talk page". At least, Wikipedia is honest enough to admit it.
There was a Lenovo desktop ad on top of the page. Do they want to bug /.ers too?
In addition to the hardware bugs, maybe they'll throw in some spyware, adware, and viruses into Windows for good measure. You have to remember that they are competing with Dell.
Chinese Corporation Lenovo release their new and improved "IBM We-know-what-you-are-thinkingPad"
I know this is going to come across as chauvinistic or whatnot. Bear with me. I'm not an American, and don't really like the USA government, but in this case I can't blame them either. For a _government_ I find it normal to try to stimulate domestic economy and not the economy in China. In fact, I find it their duty to.
See, there was this thing called the Great Depression. And there was this guy called John Maynard Keynes who came up with a new economic theory. Best known as Keynesian economics Look it up someday. You might see that a lot of the political bullshit nowadays a la "elect us because the current government has inflation and unemployment" are actually not some national catastrophe, but just the way economy works. (E.g., that all else being equal, there's a curve with unemployment on one axis and inflation on the other one. You lower one, the other automatically rises. So the best _any_ government can do is pick a point on that curve.) But I digress.
At any rate, Keynes came up with the idea that in times of depression the government can help the economy by creating extra demand. This creates jobs and generally helps the economy. Not just jobs at the company receiving the government contract, but also jobs down the line. E.g., the people who get jobs making missiles, then go buy cars (or the company buys trucks), creating employment in that industry too. And so on. This creates a multiplicator effect in which each dollar spent by the government creates X dollars worth of jobs.
And to get back to the case at hand, the _whole_ idea of this exercise was to help the _national_ economy, not the economy of China. Any government using taxpayer money to create jobs in China instead of at home is completely retarded and needs to be voted out of office ASAP.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against China or the fine Chinese people. But it's the Chinese government that should fix that economy, not the USA one. The USA government has to invest in the USA economy, and the Chinese government needs to invest in the Chinese economy. Either one using its taxpayers' money to subsidize the other's economy is plain old stupid.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Typing with insect legs is no fun—believe me.
Obviously forgotten about the alleged NSA backdoor in the Windows Crypto API.
But of course somebody will treat this as a flamebait.
Personnaly, I consider using US created Microsoft software a greater security risk then using chines hardware.
Just because the fact there are more bugs in the soft who could be exploited by anyone.
>> Do you really know what Windows is doing?
Not even Microsoft knows that.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
n/t
I propose a competition for the story for Mission Impossible IV; this shall revolve around PCs which collect data for an evil foreign power; competition is to find best scenario.
My suggestion (based on M. Williamson's great piece):-
* Components which scan for certain types of data, collect them when they do.
* Then send a signal via networks or if that fails via RF.
* If that fails, Evil hack team then physically collect data from components (either dressed as cleaners - Charlie Sheen in Wall Street - or in stretchy black outfits - Tom C in M.I.1).
Once this has been made into M.I.4, expect to be adopted for a real-life remake with your tax dollars by Dept of Homeland Security.
What do you expect from a bunch of guys who started this in their teens, and now think they have the world by the balls because they're finally making more than 20K a year.
Yeah you, Taco, ass-munch.
You'd have to be incredibly naive to believe they don't already have access to it.
Pirates & Emporers is worth watching. It's relevant, and if you liked Schoolhouse Rock, it's just plain funny.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I recently ordered a Lenovo 3000 N100 at work just to see one, and strangely enough it was manufactured in Singapore. That said, its a lot more solid than I expected, though it does have a weak spot at the back/top of the screen between the hinges where it could have used some internal metal reinforcement or whatnot, but other than that its pretty good. I'm not impressed with it, but I'm also not disappointed, so its quite a bit ahead of most inexpensive laptops.
I would say the elections since 2002 are all suspect because of blackbox voting now. 2000 were skewed from judicial intervention of course, another can of worms I see no reason to trust the results, very broadly speaking of course. My state of Georgia in 2002 was the first state to go all electronic, diebold machines primarily AFAIK. The results were..most peculiar, they didn't reflect either pre or post polling, several contests had "unexpected upsets".
I protested the nature of the closed source system with no audit trail and with apparently some strange access features to the devices and so on. Got the run around severely from the officials. They got mad REALLY QUICK because I dared suggest something negative-just the possibility-about the system in place we were supposed to trust. Them-"It's secure" me-"Well, how can a civilian poll watcher count the results if a dispute arises? It used to be all we had were pieces of paper that anyone could count" "The computer gives us the count, and if there's a dispute, we just run it through the computer again" and etc, along those lines. It was worse than talking to a brick wall I tell you. I can't claim the results were skewed with 100% certainty of course (I suspect they *were* skewed), but I can't see where they can claim they were "honest or fair", either, it is impossible with the way it was set up and run.
I pointed out to them I have had the privelege in the past of verifying the ballot box as being "clean and empty" at the start of polling,being first in line that was how it was done previously, something that DOESN'T EXIST anymore. It didn't matter to them, because now it is computerised so it is "better". I said without a transparent source code and lockdown of the machines (no modems attached real time, no one hanging around with "emergency boot software", etc, in other words, but they have all that apparently) that we as the citizen voters have NO WAY of checking the "ballot box" to see if it is empty at the start or has gotten "stuffed" somehow during the process or altered by a few clicks one way or the other, etc. It didn't matter to them because some committee had done that "checking" previous to the election so we got to trust a few politicans and the computer and the private company who designed,built and operated it. Nuts on the surface. A used car at Lemon Motors with the hood welded shut and the salesman saying "trust me, it's got the big V-8 you wanted for towing a trailer, you can even ask my boss, he'll tell you the same thing".
My girfriend bought an Acer notebook and it already had to be repaired 2 times, and next week we are sending it to be repaired for the third time, in less than a year.
What has already been replaced:
- Motherboard
- Memory
- CD/DVD driver
- HDD
The current problem is that if we keep it plugged it to the outlet and turned off for a few hours (like when we are sleeping), it doesn't turn on again. We have to unplug it and take its battery for an hour and so, then we are able to turn it on again.
Guess where it's made? Right, China.
I rest my case.
So say we all
Even if you've got the source code, it won't help you determine if there is remote surveillance embedded in it. That source has to be compiled by a compiler that is controlled by MS. Ok, so lets say you have the source for that. It was compiled by itself, and I'm sure everyone here knows of the paper by Ken Thompson concerning hiding code in a compiler such that it is no longer in the source code.
As Ken Thompson says; "No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code."
Ian Ameline
For more information, please see:
/ 19/1238255
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05
--WooooHoooo--
Maybe we should tell someone that every IBM laptop made in the last 5 years came from lenovo.
Retards.
Don't take it so literally when the U.S. blocks Lenovo out of fear of spying. This move was made out of economic nationalism. Computer hardware is a colossal industry in our country, and companies like Dell have a lot of lobbying power.
It's true that Dells, Macs, etc. are manufactured in China - the difference between them is that their profits go to America, whereas for Lenovo, the profits go to China. That is why the government is blocking Lenovo.
Maybe you could expect him to be a good president the first time, but the second????
I found it interesting to see this link slipped into the article. It seems rather disproportional rhetoric for something as insignificant as the banning of foriegn made PCs for classified data. To the anonymous submitter: If you want to properly rile people up, try choosing subjects people actually care about. If the US government doesn't want to use foreign PCs to store/access classified data, I don't blame them. I wouldn't blame China if they didn't use US made PCs, because I am sure that we would try to "bug" them. All governments do their best to maintain or better their country's position in the world. Of all the deplorable actions that governments have taken to achieve those goals, this is insignificant.
what if china makes modified televisions and telephones capable of spying on people sending all the juicy data straight back to china via the internet...
..."television watches you" can actually be on-topic?!? Ye gods...
Blank until
How could China possibly find out? OTOH if they do, maybe they can send us an explanation.
The US never had a "monopoly" on trade. Even in the financial services field, the US competed for decades with Japan and the EU. The centrality of trade is just a synergistic by-product of being the largest economy in the world.
You're witnessing the decline of US supremacy in the world today. Loss of influence in South America, rising defeciets, loss of respect and trust worldwide, it's armies dispersed fighting shadows, broken as a military power. The US is in decline just as Venice was. The freedoms and luxuries that US citizen once enjoyed are washing away along with their bank notes.
While the US military is overcommitted, being "dispersed" is a stronger claim that really isn't supported IMHO. The financial situation is serious, but that is still retrievable. Doesn't mean it will be fixed, but the US is better off than most OECD countries. Things are actually going surprisingly well given that there's people willing to do US jobs for a fraction of the cost and a number of other endemic flaws in the US system. My take is that the real danger is with public education and certain costs that have exceeded for a long time the rate of inflation, particularly, housing, education, and health care.
Has any of these so called experts produced any evidence that China is placing bugs in Lenovo computers? It's just fear pandering. Besides why would the PRC bother with hardware trojans when it is so easy to use software trojans under Windows? Ask the Department of Homeland Security about their Windows boxes on secure networks with trojans. "Security" is their mission statement and some of their most "secure" boxes were riddled with trojans.
Than why didn't the Chinese government add so-called "spy devices" to, oh, all the parts they make for Dell, HP, Compaq, Apple, etc. etc.?
- Windows backdoor
- Lotus Notes backdoor
If your job description is Counter Intelligence and you need to wear a tinfoil hat for a living then software backdoors should be something you need to be worried about. For security from secret backdoors open source software is a better choice than closed source.Transmitting energy without a license.
That's what they get for signing all those free trade deals. I hope the government enjoys getting fucked by unregulated capitalism the way the working class has been for the last 100+ years.
Transmitting energy without a license.
Got Facts?
... valued customer?
n bow.asp
2 00.28-STD.html
It's been there all along, hardware trumps root.
Recent article with clues:
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/402
This is beyond political.
This is about control.
Get your head out of the sand.
Do you have a DVD player hooked up on a cable pipe? It updates it's firmware all by itself. Did you ever ask yourself why Sony (insert manufacturer) does this
How many hardware techs took this knowledge with them and what did they do with it?
Company or individual?
Is this news?
Maybe to you.
If you wanted to take over the WORLD how would you do it?
Maaawaaahahaha!
Start one fire or many little ones?
http://www.answers.com/topic/orange-book
http://www.palowireless.com/wireless/security_rai
http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/library/rainbow/
http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/library/rainbow/5
~hylas
I really don't how a services economy is going to mobilize for the next big war. How many financial analysts does it take to build F22? How many systems administrator does it take to build a submarine? I am going to mention the lower class who are alcoholic, drug-addicted, or just plain disillioned as their jobs are ship over seas or given to illegal immigrants. I am sure we can round up all the prostitutes, strippers, and drug addicts and train them to build a tank. Computer components are vital part our warfighting ability and exactly how much of that is manufacture in the continental US? I guess we are assuming that in a war with China, we can always have them make our weapons for us so we can in turn drop on them. Seems logical and we don't have top pay for shipping. Spying is the least of our problems. China hasn't asserted itself so far because it still needs to grow some but what about 20 years from now? We can always hope China evolves into a pluralistic democracy but then again we are one and we still invaded Iraq.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
while the HP may be made in China, it is an American company, and you have to assume they have some kind of oversight of their manufacturing plants
Few Americans understand OEM markets and the way they work. There is no such oversight. This is the *very* basic model.
1. HP sends a specification to the one or two OEM builders that can handle their volume.
2. OEM builders submit a price and cajole, bribe and whatever else it takes to close the deal.
3. HP tests one, maybe two pilot versions and makes a decision.
4. Purchase orders flow from there. No one looks at anything.
Please remember that all of the Western business rules do not apply in the developing world. The rule is there are no rules. No litigation, legislation, few requirements other than bribing the right officials. The wild east. Enjoy!
Lenovo has no such interest since it is based in China and is answerable only to the Chinese government in terms of breaking any laws.
Wrong again. You fail to comprehend that the PC business at Lenovo's scale is global. Things get built in China and therefore parts of the business are under local control. Beyond that, your statement is pure hyperbole.
f HP allowed their computers to be bugged, they'd have major legal troubles back home in the states
No they don't. It's a document called a "license agreement." Every HP computer user agrees to it simply by using the PC. It's purpose in life is to eliminate liability.
I'll say it again:
Gov't contracts is a dirty business. This is a story about a once-venerated brand being discredited by it's rivals using FUD. Note not a single peep out of IBM on the matter. They are doing what it takes to remain a trusted software/services provider. They stopped caring about thinkpads as soon as their obligations ended.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
_NSAKEY
Okay, I lied. Here's another one:
!seineewerasreenigneepacsten
my Lenovo Thinkpad (bugged or not!) is an example of quality engineering. I paid for the quality too but it has been a reliable machine with very few problems. Its made in China too.
Note that Phoenix Technologies, and other companies like Dell have moved BIOS development work to mainland China. From Phoenix's Al Sisto: "We're moving more and more of our core development to the region to get access to the fine labor pool and emerging new customers." One can imagine that it would be very easy to have the BIOS install a spy program into the Windows OS. They should have thought about these threats years ago, but like 9/11, were asleep at the switch.
I run a Finnish one every now and then, does that count?
You never catch me alive
They usually run MS Windows on it, the US government should be more suspicious about MS opening their source code to some chinese government than the chinese putting a special chip in it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well, since you opened that topic without a cross-examination tacktic thrown at you, I would like to suggest it goes FAR beyond mere chauvinism
e =UTF-8&defl=en&q=define:chauvinism&sa=X&oi=glossar y_definition&ct=title
Web definitions for chauvinism
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
" unreasoning, over enthusiastic, and aggressive patriotism, an excessive or prejudiced loyalty to a particular gender, group, or cause
137.122.151.29/BIO1120/Includes/Glossary.htm - Definition in context"
Now that I have presented the first definition returned in the Google query, I would suggest it is deeply rooted in racism and imperialism.
If one goes back far enough in the history of West-vs-East diplomacy, it is quite easy to note that Europe
broken-out block here for readability...
(of the past, but I have not studied Europe-v-Asia power dynamics, tho recently I DID read about some rather unctuous and racist remarks made by a former Vodafon exec when his now defunct company (bought recently and is being de-branded in Japan) first entered Japan: either he OR his company seemed to not give a HOOT about developing the phone products FOR the Japanese and Asian markets. They just wanted to DOMINATE and subsume them...)
But, it is QUITE clear the the US attitude of being number one in ALL things military, technological, economic... is going to cause or be a catalyst for major trade wars if not sabotage and interference of banking and shipping activities between China and the US' pliant bottom partners.
Punishment is definitely apparent here. The Asian nations that were opened up by cannon and Jesuit/Christian intrusion turned upside down and corrupted Korea (but, not often told is that the US ship Sherman was thoroughly ravaged and sank by brave, courageous Coreans who defended their right to not be force open), China (opium and other drugs), the Philippines (the US took the islands but conceded to Japan's intent to take China by way of first taking over the Corean Peninsula (yeh, this is heavy on history, but I'll get to the point soon...))
But, East-West trade "pacts" have almost ALWAYS been lopsided in favor the of the US or western powers. Now that China is making significant forays into the territory the US thinks is its own, the US is getting irritated. But why not the same reaction (or a muted one at least) over Japan and Corea? Well, the US has basing rights, military presence, power to manipulate and interfere with the local governments, and historically has been the well-worn udder/surrogate for them, but they have not yet behaved in a manner suggestive of breaking alliances with the US.
You could bet if Toshiba and Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sotec, Sony, and the others ship computers here even after Japan "hops off the tricycle and begins riding a bike not subject US dictates that the US would take the same stance toward those companies.
Maybe after all it is NOT racism in the purist sense, but when you look far back enough at the history and the dynamics, it can seem quite easy to feel the pain and shame of more than a tinge of racism, nationalism, imperialism, hegemony, and continuation of unfair ball play going on.
It's short-sightedness, arrogance, myopia, selfishness,intransigence, and more... all the things a "business without feelings, an impartial system of government" supposedly are devoid of. But, business and government are structured and run by people, usually people who come from a lineage of power, deceit, treachery, wealth, and more than a twinge of willingness to strengthen their positions from the barrel of a gun or paying for a coups or assassination.
Historically, China said, "we go where the wind takes us". Seems the USA, however, says, "WE CONTROL F*CKING THE WEATHER MACHINE!"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Note to self: Be sure to proof-read the messages written before the first cup of coffee is consumed.
Freebee firewall Filseclabs comes from Beijing!
Explains the unusual phraseology, anyway!
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Hardware level bugging sounds like a large bite to chew - with alot of risks. It seems pretty unlikely that a company desiring respect and status within the American market would try to embed surveillance into hardware, where it cannot be easily removed at will when the investigations come. Surveilance is most likely to succeed and go undetected when embedded in software, where there are thousands of DLL's or comparable executable code modules. Plus, when you get caught, you just blame it on the employee and whatever network of people he/she is a part of. Of coruse, the managers of these people are chosen based on their perceived tolerance for the cause. I mean, seriously, this hardware level (at least in the context of a major brand laptop) surveillance seems prety far fetched. It's no accident that only one company is allowed to participate in the market for the segment of IT architecture most suited for widespread surveillance. If you want results from a surveillance effort, just follow the Microsoft model.
While this is true, what if they just product a certain number of "special" bugged units. Since both the selling and producing company is now Chinese, why not just swap in a few "special" computers the next time an order comes from the DOD or another government agency?
When you know who your buyer is, you just need to slip something to that buyer specifically... which is a bit different from a Chinese factory making Dell's independent of whom the recipient is.
This plane that was bugged with twenty some devices may well be the work of MS Sales or Microsoft Customer Surveillance (MCS).
I am pretty sure the poster you replied to was referring to the 500 years of global European imperialism which was far more brutal and oppressive than anything America has done and which resulted in the mess America is now trying to clean up. Basically, Europe screwed the world and left America in the wet spot. -- 1234567890.