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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
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.
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?
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....
[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.
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.
You're kidding, right? My last Seagate ('Cuda.10 - 320GB) was made in China.
The revolution will be mocked
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?
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.
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
So what will change? Perhaps some manager will move but for the rest it's exactly the same as before.
...all made in Taiwan!
"The US economy in free fall grows at a rate of 4%/yr. China will have to grow at 10% for the next 100 years to equal it in size."
Your calculation is incorrect.
US GDP in 2006 was 5 times of China.
With your assumption that US economy grows 4%/yr, and Chinese 10%/yr.
5 * (1.04)^n = (1.1)^n
n = number of years = 29
Therefore with those grow rates it would take China 29 years to overtake US economy.
In reality the difference in their GDP grow rates is greater, so it should happen much sooner.