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Lenovo Looking to Buy Seagate, May Raise Political Concerns
andy1307 writes "According to an article in the New York Times, Lenovo has expressed an interest in buying Seagate. This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China. From the article: 'In recent years, modern disk drives, used to store vast quantities of digital information securely, have become complex computing systems, complete with hundreds of thousands of lines of software that are used to ensure the integrity of data and to offer data encryption.'"
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>So stop buying from Seagate and put a few tax dollars back into manufacturing hard drives here. You provide jobs for Americans *and* data security for the federal government. Win-win to me.
Sure, that's better than selling our secrets to the Chinese, but where's the win to the American hard drive user?
Geek: Have you got anything without added backdoors?
NSA: Try that Hitachi Deathstar, it doesn't have that many backdoors in it since the Japanese bought IBM's hard drive division.
Geek: I don't want any government's backdoors!
CIA: Can't hd have the Western Digital? Hasn't got as many backdoors in it as the Hitachi Deathstar!
Yankees (Singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! For Homeland and more!
Geek: How about this old IDE drive and this 8-bit ISA-bus IDE controller?
Everyone: Eeeew!
Geek: What do you mean 'Eeeww'? I don't like backdoors!
Yankees: Lovely backdoors! Wonderful backdoors!
DHS: Shut up! Bloody Yankees! You can't have an IDE without the controller card, and you can't have the controller card without the backdoor! Unless he wants to go back to MFM/RLL, and then we can recover everything even after a low-level format! The very first backdoor!
Geek: I don't like backdoors!
DHS: Sshh, citizen, don't cause a fuss, or we'll have your backdoor! We love it. Mmm, backdoors, CALEA for the telephone switches, backdoors, the Clipper Chip for the phones, backdoors in newfangled BIOSes, TPMs, DRMs, backdoors into the backdoors, it's backdoors into everything!
Yankees (singing): Back-door-back-door! Back-DOOOR! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! Safety galore! For homeland and more! Backdoor! Lovely backdoor! Backity door! For the children and more...
I didn't know the US government trusted Seagate with their military systems and classified data. What "certain things" are you talking about here? What private information gets stored on a hard disk? Like the US government aren't going to bother with encryption.
And since when can hard disk manufacturers send out messages to specific hard disks?
Chief! We're intercepting a message from the Chinese! It's coming through now: "This is Red Dragon to SEAGTE-#1938-391283-2934; the US government's warranty has just run out. Crash Crash Crash! Over."
Dear God! It'll be like Pearl Harbor all over again, except with hard disk drives instead of our navy!
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
heh heh... Dont worry about him... He still thinks Good ol' boy GM cars are made in America, while those crappy little Toyotas and Hondas are made in Japan. ;-)
He probably also thinks that the world's best golfer is still a white man...
But at least Budweiser is still the world's best beer and the best racing drivers in the world are in NASCAR, where, thank goodness they don't let in that cheap inferior Toyota and Honda junk!
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- aqk
F U
...all made in Taiwan!