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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.'"
Quick! Where's McCarthy when we need him?
Honestly, they're raising the same fuss as when IBM sold off their PC and laptop divisions to Lenovo. There's no reason why we should be paranoid about stuff this. It's business.
The article says nobody will say WHICH Chinese tech company wants to buy.
So a Chinese Company wants to buy a Canadian (?!?!?) company that makes hard drives. Fine. Stop buying Seagate for the NSA, and move on with our lives.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think the horse has not only left the barn, it's off the planet by now. What were those "government officials" thinking for last decades? And this process is not [easily] reversible - China has all the factories now, and rephrasing Mao, "Power comes out of the gates of the factory." This much we see already.
the statement that, "the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China" referring to hard drive technology just sounds a bit silly. I'd bet dollars to donuts that any technology latent in a commercial hard drive that the Chinese might be after can be reverse engineered right off the shelf. The only exception might be the encryption component, but - someone correct me here if I'm completely wrong - as I understand it 128-bit encryption is no longer restricted by the US government, presumably because they can break it, and that is why 128-bit is also the current 'limit' or whatever on commercial encryption products.
A-Bomb
The US Government will gladly take/steal technology however they can, but they always have this hissy fit when when another country is trying to advance their own technology, directly, or indirectly.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Isn't that the job of the OS? If not, wouldn't dban, et al, take care of it?
This government, the same one who has no problem allowing China to take hundreds of thousands of jobs away from Americans simply by our failed international trade policies, wants us to worry about national security issues related to 1 corporation. What about all the other national security issues that are caused by trade w. China, or any other socialist/communist country for that matter? What about all the (60%+) staff @ Los Alamos?? Lenovo is the least of my concerns, at this point.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
At least the government seems to realize there is a potential risk before they buy Chinese hardware. It was rather silly when they bought Lenovo's laptops then spent thousands auditing them.
But, then again, how else could they manage to waste money on bulk purchases of computer hardware?
China buys blocks and blocks of our national debt, and they're concerned about the Seagate purchase? pfft
With their ownership of US debt, China is probably as concerned about our national security as we are.
Hope is the currency of fools
We (the US) have long had a ban on the export of 'strong' (>40 bit, now >64 bit key) technology to foreign governments / citizens. I've long wondered about this.
;) -- now a foreign government controls this. Legitimately scary.
It seems to me that:
- All concerns regarding exporting of technology that is not guarded as a trade secret is ineffective. If China wants a technology that is freely available over here (USA), just have one of their numerous graduate students download the technology and send it over there. AFAIK, no American internet provider actively prohibits strong encryption connections to Chinese IPs (their "great firewall" may be different).
However, my second immediate thought is:
- Seagate likely has numerous trade secrets that are *not* public domain, and thus can now be exclusively owned and operated by the Chinese. Imagine if DES had a backdoor (or Seagate's equivalent), and my organization uses Seagate's out of box encryption (not likely
As for the 'manufacturing techniques' -- as long as there is an oligopoly of storage makers, I'm not concerned. We have bright minds here coming out of graduate school and going to work at Seagate as well as Western Digital, IBM, Intel, etc.
All the more reason to use published cryptographic standards, and not rely on any proprietary solutions -- they can never fall exclusively into the "wrong hands."
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Seagate have given me years of rock-solid hard drivers. Own many, but never lost one due to failure.
Now Lenovo wants to buy them out? For all that is holy, stop them. China just doesn't get quality, and the hard drive is one place more than anything else in a PC where quality counts.
Wasnt Seagate the company that bought Maxtor not too long ago? And will the buyout end there or will we see the great consolidation in the hard drive business as well, so that in the end it may look like the CPU market, especially for x86 processors?
I mean, there are not that many hard drive companies left anyway, the big players are Seagate/Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung and thats about it. Let Seagate be bought and maybe merge another company or two and the hard dirve market looks an awfully lot like AMD/Intel or ATI(AMD)/NVIDIA, which may not be as beneficial as we think....
In recent years, modern disk drives, used to store vast quantities of digital information securely
I don't know of ANY hard drive that natively stores information securely.
A far stretching thought: "They" don't want Lenovo to make hard drives because Lenovo would probably make a hard drive that does store information securely through cryptographic means. Then "they" could no longer read your HDD. Yes, yes, I know there are full hard drive encryption programs out there but you pay a larger performance hit than you would if it was implemented in the HD's hardware.
I've had very mixed experiences with WD drives. I know people who have always had good experiences with them, but I've noticed that some don't work with certain drive controllers.
Twice I have had WD drives that were functional stop working, randomly or when connected to a different motherboard/controller. Through testing on other motherboards/controllers, in both cases, I found that the drive was not recognized at all by some controllers (major brand names, that detected other Seagate, Maxtor, and WD drives with no problems). I was eventually able to find a PCI card that did recognize the drive.
Based on my first experience I stopped buying them, but helped a friend several years later with his drive that had randomly failed. It was SATA instead of PATA and had the same weird incompatibility. It worked on a Silicon Image based controller that is known to have a slight deviation from the SATA spec. (and it cost him an extra $35).
[Insert country name here]'s products are hit or miss to. That's why most people judge product quality on reviews and the reputation of the individual maker rather than the region in which they are manufactured.
Now if you have political reasons for not giving business to a particular country or government, that's another story, and is perfectly respectable.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US &name=chinaworkculture&vgnextoid=8196c24cf3dad010V gnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
The politicians are about 15 years too late.
Seagate is pretty much the only computer componets company that hasn't wavered much in quality over the years. IBM, Western Digital, and Maxtor have all gone through phases ranging from good quality to absolute crap, while Seagate has continued to put out consistently good products.
I understand that theory that larger companies can decrease overhead and thus be more efficient, but that never seems to happen. The success rate on mergers looks almost as bad as on startups. But this stupid economic model that is the stockmarket rewards growth (even artificial growth) over all else - quality, efficiency you name it. We created this system, and the laws that govern it, and then we act shocked, just shocked, when the market consolidates to the point of a monopoly. What is the point of even having anti-trust laws when we not only allow but encourage consolidation at every turn.
Sorry, I'm just so tired of seeing all these mergers that decrease the amount of competition in the field and end up destroying everything that was good about the company to begin with.
Question: These people allowed all of our technology such as computers...etc....out of the country and NOW they have a problem with simple storage devices?
Whats wrong with this picture?
China already owns Taiwan all nice and legal like.
The Chinese already HAVE everything they need to build anything they want.
The Chinese OWN the United States. China has been buying our treasury bills to float the home mortgages everyone has for christ sake, along with those credit cards everyone on average owes like $5K on!
NOW they have a problem with moving a relatively simple technology like drive storage out of the country?
Gimme a beak!
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
On-disk encryption is why the U.S. government would be nervous about Chinese ownership of Seagate. They'd be afraid of a back door in their "secure" hard drives.
things like this is inevitable. grow big or be bought.
...just because you aren't paranoid doesn't mean the whole would ISN'T out to get you.
> Imagine if DES had a backdoor (or Seagate's equivalent), and my organization uses Seagate's ;) -- now a foreign government controls this. Legitimately scary.
> out of box encryption (not likely
So you are saying that currently every state besides the U.S. should be scared?
From Wikipedia:
The US has every right to be concerned.
You know, Custer had a plan.
This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China.
Why start now?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Americans like to buy Chinese stuff with their greenbacks, but refuse to honor them when the Chinese attempt to purchase anything of value.
So Americans are British?
Sorry, no. We used to be British, then we told them to fuck off, and now we're independent. That's how it works. It doesn't matter what happened in the past; the people's current desires are what's important. If the people in a geographic region want to be an independent country, that's the way it should be. Otherwise, most of Europe would still belong to Italy.
being cautious as to a corporation which is under a strictly tight government's rule buying out the biggest, most important hard drive maker in the WORLD, is what it is - cautious.
its not a european country or a japanese company or american or canadian or even brazilian - its a COMMUNIST country's company. which will do whatever they are told, without excuses if government orders.
curious though, despite im not afraid to say what i mean to say without hiding my identity, some people like you post as anonymous cowards. why is that ?
Read radical news here
The time when this could have been done was in the 1970's. now, with Globalization, the technical 'secrets' are spread out all over the world.
Quick, somebody lock the door, the horse just go out of the barn!
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
In both cases, the US Government is looking out for the interests of the US - as it should. It's good for the US if it can steal others' technology; it's bad for the US if others steal its technology. Any successful country will do the same; unsuccessful ones will end up like Russia in the 90s - making others richer while it gets poorer.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I thought the Chinese already owned Cisco, or am I misinformed?
You do know a large amount of drives are made in Taiwan. Which is within arms reach of Chinese technology spies. I can't imagine sea gate has much technology that China hasn't already stolen.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Perhaps they should buy Hitachi Global Storage instead, and then pick up Lexmark as well. Do that, and they've basically rebuilt a Chinese version IBM's former hardware division!
Most Taiwanese are *ethnically* Chinese. You sound like another mainlander who has never been to Taiwan. Taiwan has a seperate government, military, currency.. This adds up to a *de facto* independent Taiwan. The Mainlander military will have a hard time invading Taiwan with their Audi A6s, I bet.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Just how many slashdotters went "yawn" another attept at politicians to hide how they sold us out?...
I mean, the next door neighbour might be fooled, but the average slashdotter might know it's been owmed and manufactured in china for years...
I'm not saying it's bad, just that in no fucking way is it news...
Export of "Strong crypto" (which includes symmetric cipher using 128 bit keys) is still regulated by the US government. Its not as bad as it was, but its still a very complicated mess of regulations and you do have to get products reviewed. Exporting crypto to "the bad guys" is totally forbidden, like selling any device that contains a web browser capable of TLS to someone in Iran would get you into trouble for instance.
And there is no limit on commercial encryption products key size, you can get 256 bit AES support in lots of stuff.
And the idea that they can just universally break any 128 bit cipher is pretty dumb. They don't have the resources to make brute forcing 128 bit keys reasonable. Its very unlikely that they are aware of significant weaknesses in every symmetric cipher that exists.
How many more years will we be using rotating magnetic media for storage? Flash disks are just around the corner. A generation or three of development, and this kind of disk media will likely be dead.
Not a certainty, but something to think about...
If owning harddrive manufacturing (the actual process which, note, is already taking place in Asia) is "national security" worthy, then pretty much everything is.
For instance, Japan and Europe could - and perhaps should - argue that food production certainly is "national security", both in terms of being self-sufficient so nobody can choke off the country, and in terms of risking evil foreigners secretly poisoning the food supply, and promptly choke off any import of any food that is also produced in country. OMG! GM crops could secretly have been made to spread and disable homegrown varieties!
You could just as plausibly argue that spreading ideas and framing issues is national security, and restrict import and distribution of foreign tv-programs, movies and other media. And how about those foreign-built airplanes and cars, operating systems and essential software - how do we know there isn't a secret function in the software to disable it in case of a conflict?
Silly? no more so than this.
I'd wish for a tit-for-tat arrangement, frankly. If foreigners, Swedes, say, are restricted from owning stuff in the US, US individuals and corporations would be similarly restricted in Sweden. If foreginers need to register fingerprints and risk body cavity searches coming to the US, so should Americans when going abroad. The expense, the inconvenience and the lost business would soon make sure that only those restrictions which really are important will remain while a lot of the pointless theatrics would disappear.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Seems like they are trying to create a couple of generations in our country that have no idea how to design or manufacture anything, by undercutting us and removing any incentive to learn.
If they can keep this going, the US will eventually become a nation of realtors and barristas. Could be they aren't interested in the paper we give them at all.
This will go over like a lead balloon.
What?
Seagate already does a ton of manufacturing in China but they are ultimately held accountable to their American overlords when it comes to quality and cost. Once it goes to China, I bet their quality will approach Maxtor's or even that of Excelstor. Throw a billion cheap low cost drives at the market and they will continue to have buyers.
No industrial production should remain in the USA, except MBA's blueshirt bullshit.
China already makes those drives, so they already have the tech.
;).
As for "data encryption" maybe they're afraid that China will no longer put US backdoors in Seagate crypto (and perhaps put their own backdoors)
Because if you do it right, the US Gov should be holding the private keys and not Seagate. A partial/full copy of the symmetric key(s) used to encrypt the data would be encrypted to the public key and stored so that whoever has private key can get them. Lookup Lotus Notes for such an example.
Anyway, what do the US leaders actually care about? It's obviously not the security of the USA, otherwise they'd be catching whoever it is who did 9/11 instead of wasting lives and resources in Iraq. They scare their citizens about the evil terrorists/China, make laws and take actions that undermine what makes the USA the USA.
They're the ones destroying/endangering the USA.
The free market solution would be that if the US government values Seagate as such resource,
they should just buy Seagate. It wouldn't be the dumbest investment our government could make.
The other issue with that though is what company would trust Seagate Drives after that?
I don't know about you guys but I think maybe IBM should get in to the disk market again...
Money is the root of all evil?
Are hard drives even made in the USA anymore? Hell I am sure most drives are made in china. my seagate says product of Singapore. any real difference? Its like the difference of item made in canada vs the US.
SimonTek
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!
.
- aqk
F U
Get real. If such things was doable or was done, then the U.S. military already did it and this is the only reason they protest. Which means for the rest of the world it is the choice between the "red scare" and the "cow boy scare". And seeing how many country the US invaded recently under spurious reason, I would rather chose the red scare.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Don't be naive in thinking that the threat is China adding spy stuff.. I think it's a lot more realistic that Seagate will need to clean up their firmware base before a sell to remove the routines that are *already* there 'on request of certain agencies'. I would not be surprized at all if today's drives accept specific undocumented command sequences that can either disable the drive and/or disable any encryption in place.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Do you want to know the truth? Your problem is that the US dollar is the world reserve currency. This means that there's huge demand for it from other countries to buy stuff like oil. It makes you lazy because all you've got to do is print some and you can buy what you like. It makes you expensive because you gave yourselves massive pay raises compared to the rest of the world using the free money. You (Nixon) did this to yourselves.
The outsourcing of manufacturing, the apathy, is all American.
Deleted
Deleted
China is an authoritarian capitalist country and they're eating your lunch.
Deleted
So what will change? Perhaps some manager will move but for the rest it's exactly the same as before.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'd rather just take the route of starving that country out - or remove the problem altogether.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This sounds to me as if the Chinese had wanted to buy Kodak's film business in 1998.
Sheesh. Hey Lords of Slashdot: Anyone who uses Slashdot for a while without a -ve karma becomes a moderator, right? Well it's not working. We're seeing more and more tin mods who don't understand the different between disagreeing or modding someone down. How about actually enforcing the moderator guidelines? Meta-moderating doesn't work.
...all made in Taiwan!
I'm a 2000 man.
I'm just concerned here with what's right and just. If the people want to be independent, then the right thing is for them to be independent. It's not right to force people to be part of a country they don't want to be in. It might be the way much of history has happened, but that doesn't make it right.
By THEY, I meant their government, not their people. Yes, their government has set their currency artificially cheap, which gives their people an advantage over ours in pretty much anything that can be manufactured and exported. Yes, the dollar is, (for now at least) the world reserve currency, and has had its value propped up by the fact that it was the only currency used to purchase oil for the past 30 years, which is adding to the problem.
Does that prove that the Chinese government does not have a long term plan to hollow out the United States industrial and technical base that supports our military superiority and propensity to invade other countries? No.
right here in the US - or even put spies in Seagate's tech development department - and get the stuff anyway.
This is just stupid shit intended to talk up the "huge threat" China is to the US economically and militarily.
Sure, you don't want to give China our tiny nuclear warhead plans. That's about it for "technology transfer" as a security threat.
The rest is bullshit. You don't become a strategic threat to somebody by having the same technology they do.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I think you might be thinking of COSCO - China Ocean Shipping COmpany.
As for this thing about objections to lenovo wanting to buy seagate: nothing like closing the barn door after the horses have all left. Whoops. Should've thought about these things when our government was printing money to bomb the vietnamese back in the 60's and 70's, or when Reagan was printing money to beat the soviets in the cold war, or when Clinton let the Fed cut loose the money hose to spark the tech bubble circa 1995, or when GWB let the Feral Reserve Bank turn up the money hose even higher to spark the housing bubble of 2003-2006.
Probably should have turned the fan off before the shit hit it. Now We the People have a big mess to clean up, and some politicians to turn into Neo-Convicts.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
What an amazing coincidence ... Seagate pres. Watkins mentions that the Chinese have not made an offer to buy the company, which the media morons translate as the Chinese may have made an offer, or might be thinking about it. Then motormouth Jim Cramer climbs on the bandwagon. All this serves as a bump in the price of the stock (cost - nothing). Three days later, chairman Steve Luzco (and presumably the other vulture capitalists, like Texas Pacific & Silver Lake, that own much of the stock) have prearranged stock sale dates. Could the two events possibly be connected? Certainly not. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.