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Report Says China Will Demand Source Code
An anonymous reader alerts us to a two-week-old story that hasn't gotten much traction in the press to date. A Japanese newspaper and the AP report that China plans to demand source code from hardware manufacturers, and ban the sale of products from companies that don't comply. China is calling this an "obligatory accreditation system for IT security products." The plan is to go into effect next May, according to sources. "Products expected to be subject to the system are those equipped with secret coding, such as [a] contactless smart card system developed by Sony Corp., digital copiers, and computer servers. The Chinese government said it needs the source code to prevent computer viruses taking advantage of software vulnerabilities and to shut out hackers. However, this explanation is unlikely to satisfy concerns that disclosed information might be handed from the Chinese government to Chinese companies. There also are fears that Chinese intelligence services could exploit such confidential information by making it easier to break codes used in... digital devices."
Just use open source. ;-)
My guess is that this is to check the hardware for backdoors. Probably figures that they have put out so many backdoors in products like Cisco, Dell, Acer, HP, Apple, etc and now wants to check to make sure that nobody is doing the same to them.
that disclosed information might be handed from the Chinese government to Chinese companies
It might. And then they have a massive re-engineering problem on their hands. It would usually be easier for them to reimplement the functionality than try to start with undocumented, unsupported source code.
Doing security audits on software is a legitimate request by a governmental agency. Of course, they should just request that vendors provide open source software.
Do companies think that the market in China is big enough to justify giving them the source code?
It doesn't really matter what foreign governments think of this. The can scream all they want. If a company thinks the Chinese market is big enough and they want a piece of it. Then they will cough up the code.
Privacy, security and IP rites are second tier considerations when it comes to product sales.
So again. Do companies think that the market in China is big enough to justify giving them the source code?
China is out of control. How can anyone compete if they have cheaper labor and can demand everyone hand over technologies. They can pirate the hardware but reverse engineering the rest is harder. What's next them demanding chip manufacturers hand over chip templates to "make sure they meet China's standards".
I thought source should be free?
I know American are scared, losing world leader status, economy going down the drain, hockey mom for vp and everything but seriously it's a great move on the Chinese government that you should be applauding. You should be hoping it will be replicated by ALL other governments and that distributing the source becomes an habit for HW manufacturer.
China has its issue (police state, freedom of the press...), but they seem sometime to have the balls to go where no other lobbyist sponsored government in the "free world" would go and when it's a good move at least have the intellectual honesty to recognize it.
It's the Prisoner's Dilemma. Unless you want to make it illegal to give source code to the Chinese, there will be some companies who will comply because it is better for their bottom line to do so.
They are doing by legal fiat what the open source community has failed to do through voluntary cooperation, namely, boycotting products that don't provide their source code. Ironically, this autocratic move could be a boon to open source.
Don't worry about the voting software, the Chinese government will check the results for you and they'll tell you who has won.
I used to work in a CE firm that manufactured in China and sold across the world - reverse engineering was a particular problem and IP protection was the talk of the day.
And now they demand source code? Well I can assure you that it will *not* happen.
I hear Hungary and eastern Europe are offering particularly cheap factory sites - and this might persuade some firms to relocate.
Honestly you cannot make this stuff up. I suspect they will allow manufacturing in china of export goods with no access to source code (to protect their national growth and wealth), but only "approved" population control devices will be allowed to be sold inside China (to spy on their own citizens) - it's control freakery gone mad. This would allow them the best of both worlds, after all its no secret that China has various special economic zones (and they are huge) to allow export factorys to undercut everywhere else in the world - so they just make export rules different.
We really are a joke to them, I remember the hilarious conversations we used to have about IP in Shenzhen with the local engineers, they have no concept of it at all. Its all fair game if they can work out how we did it. Of course, that never stopped them abusing our own system by buying as many patents as they could and hitting us over the head with them on one side, whilst copying everything we did on the other. And now they will try and demand the source code as well? No matter what safeguards they pretend to employ corruption is a business tactic out there and the information will be just another market to exploit. I remember sitting at a conference table with out local contact (who we found out was also employed by the client) taking both sides of the argument as well as two pay checks, literally forwarding out confidential information to competitors because they paid him to do so. NDAs, contracts and so are meaningless.
Yes I am rather bitter and annoyed about it years later, and I accept that they are probably not all like that and things *might* of improved.
If you live in a world where you believe everyone has the same motives, well then I hope when you get burned by that view it is in a way that doesn't hurt you too much. People are perfectly justified in calling in to question the motives of various entities. For example if your family doctor tells you to remove your clothes because he needs to perform a complete medical check, I think it is reasonable to trust him. His motives are most likely pure. However if a random guy in an alley with unkempt hair and a crazy expression asks you to do the same thing, I'd say you should probably question his motives, lest you end up getting hurt.
You are also mistaken that various governments haven't seen the source to commercial products. Microsoft, would be an example. The Windows source code isn't secret. It isn't public, but it isn't secret. Many organizations, including universities, have it.
The reason people find China's proposition scary is because of their track record. For example if you search around on the web you'll find that counterfeit Cisco gear form China is fairly common (often called 'Chisco'). It looks similar to real Cisco gear, but it of inferior production quality, and is of course unsupported. China has a very poor track record with regards to ownership laws and thus it is reasonable to call their motives in to question.
There's also a big difference between believing in open source, and believing in ripping people off. Let's not pretend that it doesn't take a lot of work to write good code. If you want people to be able to do that work as a job, they need to get paid. However if what you support is for company A to spend lots of money writing it, and then company B to just rip it off and give nothing back, well you'll find that doesn't work. Open source works only when everyone contributes. If you have a bunch of people/companies that spend a lot of time and money to make something, only to have it ripped off, well they can't afford to keep doing it.
So the problem isn't with a government wanting to see source code. I think you'll find that the US government verifies the code for anything used in critical systems. The problem is that the Chinese government does not have a good track record on this kind of thing. Thus I (and others) question their motives. I don't believe it is really about openness. I do not question RMS's motives. I believe he really just wanted openness.
The Chinese government is well within it's rights to make decisions regarding what goes on within it's borders. Infact, the whole purpose of a government is to put the interest of it's own country first above the interest of any foreign power.
In this case, seeing the source code of electronic devices being sold in China is very much in their interest, why should the chinese government trust foreign corporations to supply black box equipment when they have no idea how it works? There are many people who boycott products, at least in certain areas, where they don't have source code... I wouldn't run an internet facing server on anything for which i didn't have the source for many reasons.
If you don't like it, noone is forcing you to sell or manufacture your products in china. If you don't like their rules, go somewhere else... If you want to take advantage of the large customer base in china, as well as the cheap labour costs then you have to play by chinese rules.
Ofcourse, this policy is also beneficial for those companies who already release their source code, since they're already compliant.
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It just doesn't work like this because those "western devices" are probably already made in Asia.
I was visiting a Chinese factory that made widgets, and member of staff showed me a widget branded by a "famous western company" to impress upon me that the widgets made in their factory were of a high standard. "Here's a sample to take home, but don't tell anyone *wink* *wink*".
Their agreement may not exclude selling the widget in part, or in whole on the domestic market, so the brands are in fact a complete myth. Those fake Sony goods that have been re-badged as a Chinese brand could be close to functionally identical, albeit with a much lower price tag.
Another experience I had, was with a certain widget that had interchangeable parts. The product as a whole would be sold on the domestic market with Chinese branded parts, or swapped out for a brand that would know for export.
It's all bullshit but very interesting to observe, and as an audience you are really overestimating the Chinese government's intervention which is close to none. This is just companies chasing profits with as much regard for ethics as our own companies.
"Expect to see more Sorny goods if this goes ahead!"
Maybe not. Maybe: "Expect to see a lot of counterfeit products labeled Sony, in the same kind of packaging Sony uses."
Ever since the days of the DOS operating system, when it was only the Taiwanese who supplied computer parts, the Chinese have been extremely dishonest. They would deliver computer parts until a distributor got established. They would get paid when a load was delivered to a ship in Taiwan. But, the would eventually deliver a huge load of junk, stuff that had failed testing but had been saved for that purpose. That would put the U.S. distributor out of business.
At the same time, there would be a Chinese distributor in town that just began doing business, selling the same items.
Now that everyone has paid to build factories and complicated procedures in China, they are very vulnerable to Chinese control.
Here are a few stories, chosen from thousands. The Chinese governments, in Taiwan and mainland China, have always pretended to be interested in stopping counterfeiting:
FBI and Chinese seize $500 million of counterfeit software.
Dangerous Fakes: How counterfeit, defective computer components from China are getting into U.S. warplanes and ships.
YouTube videos about Chinese counterfeiting
The World's Greatest Fakes: Chinese Copies Are Making Their Way Back To U.S.
Heparin Find May Point to Chinese Counterfeiting
Chinese Product Counterfeiting Causes US Job Layoffs
Hey, a Sorny would complement my Panaphonics and Magnetbox quite nicely
A hacker worth his salt should be able to exploit any kind of technology. All the rest of us demand is openness on the part of technology makers that are already protected by patents. Typically the path of least resistance is the easiest to exploit. China, as an outsider in to the rest of the world, is suspicious of the rest of the world so why shouldn't they demand transparency. As a positive side effect it benefits the rest of us and the FOSS movement.
They might manufacture the physical widget there but they didn't program the driver or firmware - it came on a master rom or was bundled in a cd already compiled.
Brought to you by the two-wrongs-make-a-right department.
One other thing. Extort doesn't normally take a person or people as its direct object.
At the bottom of the
That would be a meaningful response if the West was currently a good global citizen engaging in fair trade and not still engaging in military campaigns with the thinly veiled purpose of usurping economic resources. But as it stands, the west is still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for control of petroleum, De Beers is still financing wars in Africa to ensure the continuance of its diamond monopoly, South East Asian nations are still used as a source of cheap de facto slave labour, the IMF is still used as the G8's stick to ensure sovereignty of the third world governments is a purchasable commodity and companies like Bechtel are still pulling this sort of rubbish.
So, sorry, your moral high horse has no legs.
I hate printers.
But Sony is as American as apple pie.
Is William Shatner posting on Slashdot now?
>>Their agreement may not exclude selling the widget in part, or in whole on the domestic market, so the brands are in fact a complete myth.
It also assumes they hold up their end of an agreement, which is laughable. After Qualcomm got a bunch of Chinese factories up and running with their Q-phone, China Telecom started selling their C-phone, which was an exact duplicate of the Q-phone, made by the same people that Qualcomm had trained in making their phones. They're so dishonest, it's fucking scary that so much of our technical manufacturing is being done over there - we're paying for their postgraduate education, and giving them free blueprints to rip us off with.