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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.
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.
Yep,
:)
But soon this will be over.
The new lenovo pc will automagicly connect through the great firewall of China and deliver the chinese the coordinates to nuke slashdot dupe posters.
Just making the internet a safer place
Wrap your laptop in foil, it will protect it from Chinese bugs and boost your wifi signal by 40%!
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?
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
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.
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.
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.
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
Typing with insect legs is no fun—believe me.
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.
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
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