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Lenovo Looking to Buy Seagate, May Raise Political Concerns

Posted by Zonk on from the this-is-what-we're-worried-about dept.

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.'"

4 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Who says it's lenovo? by Tragek · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article says nobody will say WHICH Chinese tech company wants to buy.

    1. Re:Who says it's lenovo? by andy1307 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The editors changed my post. I submitted this 2 days ago and no company was named.

  2. Re:Oh my god, it's the Red Scare! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    s/McCarthy/Bush/g
    s/communist/terrorist/g
    Closer than you think
  3. Re:I'm no expert, but by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
    > > The US government is wise not trust a Chinese implementation of those standards for its data, because the US government can't guarentee the absence of Chinese-added backdoors.
    >
    >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...