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Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

zdnet.com

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Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#61

Post by yourbandsucks »

deogeo wrote: post #34
yourbandsucks wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe sports teams are a horrible way to think about it.

Sports teams is putting things lightly. It's a bad idea to let your industries fail, while your rival's grow at your expense. You can already see what happens to those over whom China gains influence - economic power is a large part of that.

If a Chinese family goes from a 3rd-world life to a modern one, is that a relative loss for America? In sports, it would be.

Yes, we should be firm about our interests. No, we shouldn't be obsessed with some 'score' -- or if we are, maybe channel it towards fixing our own house.

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#62

Post by adventured »

Aperocky wrote: post #43
president wrote: post #33

> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives. I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so ma…

Moles are not unique to China, it just happens that China currently happens to be the enemy. Most people whether immigrant or not just want to get the work done and go home.

> Moles are not unique to China, it just happens that China currently happens to be the enemy.

The special position of China goes dramatically beyond that. I'm not sure you could downplay China's position more than what you just did. I'd almost confuse them for being Cuba by that description.

For all but a few countries, stealing data on how to build the next great airplane, does not enable them to actually build it.

The unique position of China is the combination of: vast resources and a very determined, centrally orchestrated, national will to pursue hegemony (now almost universally culturally regarded as their natural right).

Pretending a mole from China is similar to a mole from most any other nation, is pretty absurd. No other nation other than the US has the capabilities that China now possesses.

They have: extraordinary national wealth ($50x trillion in household wealth); extraordinary annual economic output; rather openly flaunted mercantilism; global leading manufacturing capabilities spanning nearly anything as needed and supply networks to match; a strong cohesive nationalism, supported by both the people (culture) and the leadership; very large, very potent tech capabilities, spanning everything from software to hardware, unrivaled by any nation other than the US; military spending that pretty well matches the US when you adjust for either PPP or just merely adjust for the difference in salaries; extremely large land & water territory, and all the benefits that go with it; nuclear weapons and military technology that by the day is getting close to parity with other elite militaries; an authoritarian system that is willing to entirely disregard human rights whenever it suits their national purpose at the time and a culture that heavily tolerates it; the ability to rapidly pursue epic scale, unmatched (eg Three Gorges) national construction and or engineering challenges at the snap of a CPC finger; and 18% of the world's population, for practical purposes an endless supply of relatively cheap labor of all types.

Show me a bunch of other nations like that. In all of human history you can count on one hand the number of nations even remotely comparable to where China is now at, their general position and capability vs peers in the world order. And they're not quite done rising in power yet.

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#63

Post by TkTech »

president wrote: post #55
z2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by your main point. Do you mean, as opposed to other foreign workers and students on temporary work/student visas, who can somehow migrate their friends and family over and therefore be subject to less coercion?

No, I was pointing out that China is unique in that they would have no moral qualms in coercing their citizens abroad using violence. I'm sure my coworkers from the EU probably don't ever have to worry about being in a situation where they would have to choose between spying or hurting their family.

I agree with you (Someone from France doesn't have to worry about the modern version of China's 9 generation purge[1]), but as a Canadian it's very common to see the Chinese students here wildly supportive of the CCP, including harassing and attacking Hong Kong protesters. I imagine the ones that are outspoken against the CCP have a much harder time going abroad in the first place.

With a billion and a half citizens it's unlikely they lack for fanatics to exploit.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#64

Post by choonway »

luba02 wrote: post #56
choonway wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing that you learn when you go into the aviation industry, is that the shortcut is the longest way to get from A to B.

stealing jet engine/materials science data and software data are different kettle of fish. different kinds of bottlenecks. I’m assuming one set is more easily transferrable than the other.

For material science, replication is an issue because of differences in machines etc. Very little standardization.

It's like back in those days where HP/SGI/IBM had their own version of 'C' compilers and it was a nightmare to port from one platform to another. Especially when they used non standard behavior (e.g. dereferencing null returns 0) and use it as part of their core logic.

You REALLY need to know your stuff to make things work. Source code alone isn't enough.

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#65

Post by nopzor »

khuey wrote: post #53
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These sorts of comments are what make most online discussions about China seem so out of touch. If I told you that most people in China generally support the government and don't feel oppressed by it, how would that affect your worldview? Most people in China are primarily concerned with improving their standard of living. For hundreds of millions of people, that standard has improved more than you can probably imagi…

For fairly obvious reasons, "look the other way at the government's indiscretions in exchange for raising per-capita GDP to ~10k USD" isn't an appealing bargain for anyone in the developed world.

it is an appealing bargain, sadly, if you replace 10k with a more reasonable number

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#66

Post by segfaultbuserr »

incompatible wrote: post #21
socialist_coder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's trying to say that there could be an argument made for catching China up to the rest of the world, so that they can spend their resources innovating on new things, not just trying to get caught up. It's not hard to see how that would be a net benefit for the world (except of course for the Western IP holders). Please don't think I'm supporting this, just trying to see this side of the argument.

I think we'd be better off with a system that promotes free flow of information, but local production of goods and services. Products shouldn't be available without full specifications and fabrication methods. Web services shouldn't exist without interoperability protocols and source code. I think this would be a hackers' paradise, and this is "Hacker News", after all.

Upvote. This is a very interesting alternative take on globalization vs protectionism I'd love to hear from Hacker News, even if it may be impractical.

Perhaps something close to what you've described is LibreSilicon [0], a free and open source semiconductor manufacturing process (only 1 micrometer though) currently in development.

[0] https://libresilicon.com/

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#67

Post by nopzor »

ucha wrote: post #22
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #14

Ah yes, the Comac C919, 8 years late and counting, and brought to you by the company whose sole previous model still has trouble landing on wet runways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_ARJ21

China managed to quite quickly absorb the technology transfer from Alstom/Siemens to build high-speed trains. Now their trains are better than anyone else's and they have more high-speed rails than any other country. They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina... I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.

i don’t disagree with your point, but the level of difficulty in building an airliner and a (even high speed) train is much higher than most people realize.

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#68

Post by jonathanyc »

president wrote: post #33

> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives. I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so ma…

If history and the other comments here give any indication, we’ll deal with it by shooting ourselves in the foot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#69

Post by thinkcontext »

president wrote: post #33

> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives. I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so ma…

There's a crackdown underway.

"Is it police work or racial profiling? U.S. crackdown puts Chinese scholars on edge"

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-21/trump-ch...

Re: Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says

#70

Post by deogeo »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #61
deogeo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports teams is putting things lightly. It's a bad idea to let your industries fail, while your rival's grow at your expense. You can already see what happens to those over whom China gains influence - economic power is a large part of that.

If a Chinese family goes from a 3rd-world life to a modern one, is that a relative loss for America? In sports, it would be. Yes, we should be firm about our interests. No, we shouldn't be obsessed with some 'score' -- or if we are, maybe channel it towards fixing our own house.

And if a Chinese airplane manufacturer out-competes a US one, causing it to fail, its workers go unemployed, weakening the US economy, and making it more dependent on China?

How long does an average company last, if it gives away all its IP and know-how? Why should the result differ on the scale of countries? I assumed these dynamics are obvious to everyone.

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