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

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141–150 of 188 posts

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

#143
post #60

Unfortunately all Chinese citizens must comply under Chinese law with spying requests whenever their intelligence agencies come asking. That makes every Chinese citizen in your company a potential spy. This is shitty on so many levels, and what is the appropriate response? Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities? Etc. That would be a terrible outcome. We do need some kind of clear a…

My best friend is a naval architect, for about a decade he was involved in research at a big UK university. He would joke about how the Chinese students hammered the photocopiers like no one else.

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

#144
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Swiss watchmaking industry was once largely focused on producing cheap copies of English and French watches. Today Swiss watchmakers are renowned for quality and innovation.

And going even farther back, the British industrial revolution was built on producing cheap copies of Indian textiles.

And the label "Made in Germany" was once created by the British to protect their own manufacturing from cheap clones from Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany

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

#145
post #22

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.

Are the trains better e. g. compared to TGV or Shinkansen? I doubt that. Or just cheaper? Sure, cheaper is also a form of "better".

Please note that they forced the technology transfer from Siemens. That is one of the key issues with today's China.

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

#146
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning will find these patterns all on their own. They're not worried about being ostracized for seeing the world for how it is.

Machine learning is based on sample data, which time and time again has been proven to be biased, producing errors due to racism which then get fed back into the system and perpetuate the cycle. It is not infallible and it does not reveal truths that people are 'worried' about seeing, it's a reflection of current mindsets.

> It is not infallible and it does not reveal truths that people are 'worried' about seeing, it's a reflection of current mindsets.

And who are you to say if the machine's output (ie, mindset) is to be trusted?

Machines are much less prone to bias than humans, that's for sure.

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

#147
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racial profiling is just a slur for pattern recognition. If it turns out that 95% of Chinese scholars in the US are more loyal to China than to America, and that when given a chance, will illegally send information back to China, what are you supposed to do? It's fine if you don't want to have a racial bias yourself, but it doesn't mean you need to ignore the fact that (in this hypothetical) the vast majority of Chin…

If recruiting Chinese nationals stops working the Chinese state will just start recruiting other nationalities. Plenty of people would pop a USB drive in their work PC for $100k. The only reason they don't now[1] is that it's more expensive, there's a bigger risk of the person turning themselves in, and if caught it's more politically difficult. [1] Assuming they don't already, which is a huge assumption.

>If recruiting Chinese nationals stops working the Chinese state will just start recruiting other nationalities.

Presumably this will be harder for them to do.

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

#148
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racial profiling is just a slur for pattern recognition. If it turns out that 95% of Chinese scholars in the US are more loyal to China than to America, and that when given a chance, will illegally send information back to China, what are you supposed to do? It's fine if you don't want to have a racial bias yourself, but it doesn't mean you need to ignore the fact that (in this hypothetical) the vast majority of Chin…

If black Americans are more likely to commit local crimes and you are developing software for police to predict hotspots of crime, wouldn't race be another aspect of pattern recognition in this narrative? And would it be wrong for banks or loan programs to optimize on such pattern recognition if it were found that ethnicity could improve their forecasting? Or for software companies to forecast employee effectiveness…

It's not really a dilemma.

Do you know what will happen with such an optimization? The pattern will be reinforced and you will end up with something like a civil war. At some point, your company will suffer because people will be busy shooting each other.

The movement towards fixing discrimination did not emerge because old folks were bad and the new folks are better people, it emerged because people recognized the issues it creates. It adresses the same issues that anti-competitive practices of the monopolies create: destruction of the market for short term gains of a single company.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of similar to North America in a way. Not really the same. Americans are taught to love an abstract, idealised version of America, an eagle perched atop a flag, and it doesn’t really work, half of Americans hate even that, and that’s fine, no one really cares. Whereas the Chinese are taught to love a specific leader of a specific party operating a specific system, etc. And the consequences for not complying are…

As shitty as America is, we are allowed to criticize our government. And boy do we have a lot of harsh things to say about all of them.

Try criticising corporations, especially the one you work for or the one the company you work for works with.

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

#150
post #25
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But will China be able to make the next leap on their own? It's one thing to copy but another to come up with the design on the first place.

If you look at the top computer systems and networking conferences, you'll see an increasing fraction of the research is from the top Chinese universities. The best Chinese students used to go abroad for their PhD studies. In the last five years or so, this has significantly changed, and Chinese home-grown research is just as innovative as US or European research. I've no reason to believe that aerospace will be any different, except that the lead times are probably quite a bit longer.
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