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China Files Case Against Intel's Wireless Network
Krishna Dagli writes "China has launched a case against American chipmaker Intel's near-monopoly on encryption standards for wireless local area network (WLAN) equipment, state press reported Monday."
Can we all just ignore this story until xinhua / china decide to release some information on what (specifically), the IEEE is supposed to have done?
-1 Lack of detail.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
*China* is accusing Intel of unethical behavior?!
Hah!
since when does china care about patent law?
Nothing to do with patent law.
Short version. IEEE submitted 80211i, China submitted WAPI to ISO to be international wireless encryption standards. IEEE won, WAPI lost. China is complaining that IEEE did something bad during the lead up to the voting process. No news sources are reporting what that something was as far as I can see.
So we have nebulous claims of interference in the ISO process. No more, no less.
(I'm not sure whether I dislike/distrust Intel or China more)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Yeah, it's about time they grew up and started killing other countries' populace like the grown-ups are.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Whichever one gives them more mad props and foil-wrapped bricks of money.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The thing is - the WAPI standard was a "secret" while the IEEE standard simply isn't. Intel and other multinationals would have to yield their intellectual property to chineese companies to support the WAPI standard. THAT is what the
companies gripped about.
As for the IEEE - it ISN'T just an American body. The truth is that it has an American aspect (that is certainly large and powerful), but IEEE is an INTERNATIONAL organization. How do I know? - I was a member for 15 years. I've even been involved in IEEE standards creation slightly. This is usually done by company representatives. So if Chineese companies were to send representation to IEEE standards efforts, they would have some influence in same.
You're as likely to Siemens or Alcatel, etc involved in these bodies as you are to see Intel, etc. It is more appropriately a mechanism mostly staffed by professional engineers representing their company's interests that create IEEE standards.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Note to slashdot repliers: Enough with the ad hominem attacks. If you don't like what China's doing, talk about what they're doing, not what you like/dislike about China.
We've all got our personal opinions on politics and the politics of technology, but if our words are to mean anything, we've got to appeal to higher standards.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Colin Powell spoke with Chinese trade officials a while back and got them to halt a program that would have required WiFi equipment being sold in China to support WAPI. The program also would have required foreign companies to partner with a Chinese firm before entering the market.
t tochina_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld .com/article/04/04/05/HNbarrettochina_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/05/HNbarre
FTA: "The U.S. government has also weighed in on the issue. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, sent a letter to senior Chinese government officials in March expressing concern over the implementation of China's WLAN standard and that the move created a dangerous precedent for using standards as a barrier to international trade."
Reverse engineer? 802.11i is an open standard, and it seems like Intel was defending that in the face of what would have been a proprietary standard that China would stand to benefit from.
Consider the princelings of China. They and their parents are members of the Chinese communist party. These princelings live, for long stretches, in the West and enjoy its freedoms and prosperity. Yet, the parents of the princelings fully support and enforce the draconian Chinese "laws" that crush human rights in China.
I have personally met some of these princelings.
Do they realize their hypocrisy? Yes. Do they care? No.
Here is another, more damning, example. In 2001 in Northern California, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco sponsored an anti-Falun-Gong meeting conducted in Santa Clara, California. Chinese students from San Jose State University, Stanford University, and other neighboring universities, attended the meeting. The Chinese student associations at the respective universities fully supported the anti-Falun-Gong meeting.
These Chinese students enjoy the freedom and prosperity in the West but, actually, support the draconian Chinese "laws" that crush human rights in China.
Do they realize their hypocrisy? Yes. Do they care? No.
By now, you should realize that the authoritarian government in China exists for one reason: the majority of Chinese either support the authoritarian government or are indifferent to it.
Intel hasn't (to my knowledge) killed anyone protesting against it, in full view of the world's cameras, just because it can.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
As they appear to be suggesting that the IEEE "leant" on ISO to stop the Chinese Wifi standard becoming accepted. Because a large part of this was from Intel, and lets face it suing the IEEE is going to look REAL dumb, they've decided to go after the big bad wolf.
I love the idea of clandestine meetings around ISO and IEEE meetings, more people would go if that was true!
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You know whereof you speak? I call bullshit. I've lived in China for almost half a decade now, I speak Mandarin at a nearly native level, and I can tell you that face means a great deal to the Chinese. You are guilty of the very mistake you accuse the OP of making: conflating Japanese and Chinese culture. The Japanese and the Chinese both have very strong notions of face, but as with so many other things that seem at first glance to be shared by these two wildly different cultures, they are not the same.
To say that you learned "most of your Mandarin in China" to me seems like a clever way of making the Slashdot masses consider you an authority. Clever because it deliberately omits how much Mandarin you know -- and without knowing anything at all about you I would bet a great deal that it's nearly zilch. Why? Because in order to learn to speak a language well, you must do more than take classes and read books -- you must interact on a personal level with speakers of that language. For someone who presumably does not have native prowess in a language closely related to Mandarin, the language is relatively difficult to learn, which would imply that, if you spoke the language well, you must have spent a lot of time interacting with Chinese people. As someone who has been doing this for quite some time now, I think I can state with reasonable certitude that no one open-minded enough to undertake this would come away from the experience with as narrow-minded and unnuanced an understanding as you appear to have.
Mandarin has so many face-related terms and sayings it is absolutely staggering. I can't speak with any authority on the Japanese interpretation, but I did study the Japanese language for five years while in school and I wasn't exposed to anywhere near the same lexical diversity. But I'll freely admit that I never spoke Japanese well, whereas I speak Mandarin very well.
Another poster said that the Chinese "treat each other like shit", or somesuch, but to me this is a classic example of a westerner using western metrics of politeness and propriety to judge the actions of people with a fundamentally different cultural background. Something similar occurs with the Japanese. There is a fascination with all things Japanese in the geek community -- I'll admit I don't understand it well myself -- but I'm frequently told by all sorts of people that the Japanese are exceptionally polite and well mannered. This is a tremendously two dimensional way of looking at an entire population of people.
Let's make one thing clear here: the percentage of assholes in any particular group is relatively constant. What makes a person an asshole is their intent -- their knowing willingness to insult, degrade, or upset others. A westerner not familiar with Chinese social norms observes inter-Chinese interaction and is surprised by their apparent penchant to treat each other like dirt. What he does not understand is that many things not acceptable in western culture (and even here I am generalizing, as neither Chinese nor Western culture as such are homogenous at all) are acceptable in Chinese culture, and vice-versa. In China, a Chinese person says something to someone else and thinks nothing of it -- he does not consider it rude and did not have any malicious intent whatsoever, and in turn the person who hears it thinks little of it. The same situation, but in the West: exactly the same words are exchanged, but the listener becomes tremendously upset, because in the context of western culture, saying such a thing is a violation of accepted social norms and as such only someone with malicious intent would say them. Conversely, the Chinese often say that westerners don't need much face, by which they mean that they are not hao mianzi, that we put up with all sorts of insulting situations that no Chinese person would ever put up with. I've been involved in street fights on several occasions because of face.
To get back to the Japanese, Westerners