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Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

nytimes.com

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Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#91

Post by gumby »

fspeech wrote: post #35

While there couldn't be a better case than ZTE for the Chinese government to muster domestic support for its "Made in China 2025" policy, the Sputnik analogy is actually wrong for China. Sputnik was a national security matter and ZTE is a case about commerce. China can actually supply most what ZTE needs to build functional telecom products (for example when the Obama administration cut off Intel sales to Chinese sup…

> China can actually supply most what ZTE needs to build functional telecom products ... it is just that they won't be competitive enough commercially. If both Huawei and ZTE were denied access to US products the pair could probably survive nicely in a closed Chinese market with somewhat inferior but perfectly functional offerings to Chinese telecoms.

There are other markets than the USA. SE Asia is flooded with phones from Oppo, Ding-ding etc which never sell in the USA anyway. And if China's RF chips are slightly out of standards compliance, as long as they work with Chinese base stations all will be fine in most markets.

The US has overplayed its hand.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#92

Post by dnomad »

kinsomo wrote: post #81
dnomad wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's certainly no need to write custom operating systems. China already happily customizes Android and Linux extensively across a wide range of devices. You can see this today just by walking down the street where there are street lights running linux. As for silicon China doesn't have much choice in the matter. Their dependence on American silicon may in fact be their greatest security risk. It's clear that the U…

> Their dependence on American silicon may in fact be their greatest security risk. It's clear that the US and its allies will weaponize this advantage (see Stuxnet) Please elaborate on this point, my understanding is Stuxnet relied purely on software vulnerabilities (to spread and to take control of the centrifuges). I don't think it used any hardware backdoors or anything. If it did, I'd have expected the roar to b…

The actual attack vector relies upon drivers signed by Taiwanese chip makers. (Taiwan happens yup be a country whose continued existence depends entirely upon the US.) If you depend upon say a Realtek card reader you're vulnerable.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#93

Post by obelix_ »

merpnderp wrote: post #82
obelix_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk I think US has bigger problems than whether it's semiconductor tech gets stolen. Social media and the news media have created such a dysfunctional environment that I am finding it increasingly hard to believe constructive debate/solutions on anything are possible until the underlying environment producing the dysfunction is cleaned up. If not we are just going to get more and more leaders from both sides propped…

Everyone always says things are dysfunctional or bad but never says how. Manipulating people through social media has been a thing since there's been social media. Only today more people are aware of it than ever. Same with news agencies with axe's to grind. Journalists have been using their barrels of ink to push their angles since there has been newspapers. Today more people are aware of it than ever.

Agree but there are two new issues today that I can think of -

1. Targeting is much more sophisticated. Today you can round up every lunatic who hates squirrels or whatever by tomorrow morning and influence what people need to focus on.

2. Messed up social signals i.e. like counts/views/retweets/upvotes etc are just misguiding people left and right. If I don't know what to make of something/too busy/too distracted etc I fall back on these highly inaccurate proxies to make decisions. This is happening all the time and not just to the poor or semi-literate but too highly educated folks. Everyone is unconsiously nudged to support X or Y cause, org or person purely based on these numbers. Take those numbers away and it would be a very different world.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#94

Post by monocasa »

rasz wrote: post #85
monocasa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're at 28nm and building 8 core x86 chips that don't look terrible. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/microarchitectures/wuda...

No they arent, those are all on paper, also "The architecture and SKUs were officially unveiled at a conference on December 28, 2018" looks like they also make time machines.

Or, you know, it's a typo.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#95

Post by monocasa »

wslh wrote: post #68
monocasa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're at 28nm and building 8 core x86 chips that don't look terrible. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/microarchitectures/wuda...

While the article was insightful we cannot think linearly where two superpowers clash. So I think we are lefting out the chance for a breakthrough. I imagine China could do their own Manhattan project for semiconductors and catch up faster.

I mean, they pretty clearly are doing their own Manhattan project for semiconductors, and are currently catching up.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#96

Post by merpnderp »

obelix_ wrote: post #93
merpnderp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone always says things are dysfunctional or bad but never says how. Manipulating people through social media has been a thing since there's been social media. Only today more people are aware of it than ever. Same with news agencies with axe's to grind. Journalists have been using their barrels of ink to push their angles since there has been newspapers. Today more people are aware of it than ever.

Agree but there are two new issues today that I can think of - 1. Targeting is much more sophisticated. Today you can round up every lunatic who hates squirrels or whatever by tomorrow morning and influence what people need to focus on. 2. Messed up social signals i.e. like counts/views/retweets/upvotes etc are just misguiding people left and right. If I don't know what to make of something/too busy/too distracted et…

I know this is just person experience, but many of the people/organizations I follow on Facebook have posts that are often quite filled with people who disagree with them, explained in rational and professional courtesy. I don't personally experience this mob of group think, but I see popular/unpopular ideas espoused and their weakinessness explored in the comments (not without the internet's normal levels of trolling and batshittery of course).

Of course I curate who I follow often based on the courteousness of their followers - so self-selection and all that.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#97

Post by merpnderp »

vetinari wrote: post #89
merpnderp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you just don't disagree with people and can't imagine that they'd disagree with you because you're so obviously right, so they must secretly agree you're correct, but continue with a charade? Otherwise you need to provide some clear citations to how millions of people could know they are wrong but continue with their positions out of spite.

It's not only in politics, but also in business, sales, at job, etc. Have you ever witnessed a bubble in opinions in some company, group, etc? Job's RDF was a harmless form of this :) Many have internalized their position and they won't secretly agree. They won't even realize why they disagree, and won't consider objective facts. Some tiny minority may be aware of that, but many have economic incentive to continue th…

Oh, I completely get what you're saying about the irrational obtuseness of our species. My only point of contention was that it is worse instead of simply more obvious. And my point was that since it is more obvious, things are very likely better. And maybe it just feels worse because all of a sudden, all of our differences are out in the open and we're going through this cathartic jolt of confronting the faults in our long held opinions in a messy, public contentious debate. But actually, issues such as racism, bigotry of gay people, attitudes towards poverty and early access to education, unequal access to justice, have never been more positive. And they've also never been this publicly debated by so many.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#98

Post by paulie_a »

dnomad wrote: post #78
gkanai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expect the Chinese to go through the expensive and long process of owning the entire stack, micro chips, and up. None of America's allies have chosen to "go through the expensive and long process of owning the entire stack" - America's allies use Windows, Android, Qualcomm, Intel, etc. If China really does want it's own home-built silicon running it's own written-at-home operating systems, they need decades and t…

There's certainly no need to write custom operating systems. China already happily customizes Android and Linux extensively across a wide range of devices. You can see this today just by walking down the street where there are street lights running linux. As for silicon China doesn't have much choice in the matter. Their dependence on American silicon may in fact be their greatest security risk. It's clear that the U…

China happily poorly customizes Android and Linux. It's complete shit.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#99

Post by kinsomo »

dnomad wrote: post #92
kinsomo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their dependence on American silicon may in fact be their greatest security risk. It's clear that the US and its allies will weaponize this advantage (see Stuxnet) Please elaborate on this point, my understanding is Stuxnet relied purely on software vulnerabilities (to spread and to take control of the centrifuges). I don't think it used any hardware backdoors or anything. If it did, I'd have expected the roar to b…

The actual attack vector relies upon drivers signed by Taiwanese chip makers. (Taiwan happens yup be a country whose continued existence depends entirely upon the US.) If you depend upon say a Realtek card reader you're vulnerable.

> The actual attack vector relies upon drivers signed by Taiwanese chip makers.

But that's not a hardware attack. IIRC, Stuxnet used driver signing certificates to bypass some OS-level safeguards. It's quite possible that the needed certificates were stolen from a manufacturer that poorly protected them.

When you said:

>> Their dependence on American silicon may in fact be their greatest security risk. [emphasis mine]

The implication is that American silicon itself is backdoored. That may be true, but I don't think Stuxnet is in any way an example.

Re: Near-Collapse of ZTE May Be China’s Sputnik Moment

#100

Post by mda »

ptaipale wrote: post #56
Angostura wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I also believe that the Western policy of hoping that welcoming in China would lead to greater democratic freedoms was one of arrogance. I'd probably go with 'naivety' or 'over-optimism' rather than arrogance.

I guess it depends on whether one thinks that democracy and freedom are good things as such. They are not necessarily universal values, even if many in the West tend to think so.

I always thought freedom is kinda a universal value nowadays.
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