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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.
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....
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.
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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
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.
...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.