Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#71

Post by throwaway423342 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #61

chvid wrote: post #39

The telecommunications industry goes from a massive bubble in year 2000 to an extreme cost focus just one or two years later. Sending tens of thousands of engineers into unemployment and cutting research and development to the bone. Talk to anyone who had a job in the sector back then, they will you this. All those engineers eventualy were reemployed in other industries such as software and that helped creating the b…

> willing to invest unlike us in the west The article says Huawei was given $10 billion or more in free or almost free loans.

point being?

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#72

Post by throwaway423342 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

smabie wrote: post #34

alynn wrote: post #21

Have any other sources corroborated this story? Bloomberg News lost a ton of credibility with me after their “The Big Hack” cover story [1], claiming Apple and Amazon had been hacked by chips secretly added to their servers in the factory. The picture of the chip on the cover was purely a work of imagination. To my knowledge, no supporting evidence was ever produced, nor were any of the widespread criticisms of the s…

There are direct on the record quotes from different people with knowledge about it in this article. You could pretty easily interview or email them and find out.

who exactly?

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#73

Post by chvid » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

freshhawk wrote: post #50

zyang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interned at Nortel in early 2000's right before it all went down. I can tell you the engineering culture was rotten within. No-one was doing anything useful for years. Many orgs were built around milking the ancient layer 2 passport switch. The layer 3 router meant to compete with Cisco was 3 years late and only sold a few dozen units. There was accounting fraud going on at the highest level - delivery trucks circl…

I was also there as an intern around the same time. It was an insane place to get my first "office job" experience. Entire buildings of hundreds of people all working on powerpoint reports about potential training ideas for future projects to improve the production of the powerpoint presentations made to summarize the reports on internal "sales" numbers that are then filed without anyone reading them because everyone…

We killed our own telecommunications industry by first throwing it into a massive bubble and then starving the shit out of it.

It wasn't killed by spying Chinese communist; if anything it was killed by the flipside of our capitalist system. The "madness of crowds" that drives "hot" industries through periods of massive over-investment followed by massive under-investment.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#74

Post by loraa » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:23 AM UTC

Oh man, lost a small fortune on Nortel stock.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#75

Post by kevin_nisbet » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:23 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #28

Hongwei wrote: post #5

My parents lost a small fortune in 2001 riding the tech crash down (Nortel was a good chunk of that). I've been trying to explain to them (1st gen Chinese immigrants) for the past three years that Nortel was killed partly by focused Chinese spying and IP-theft by Huawei. CSIS has know about this for years. They (my parents) just wouldn't believe it until I showed them this article. Their former university classmates…

I find it hard to believe that the company was so incredibly fragile that it, uniquely among its competitors was killed by Huawei stealing some of its IP. Far more likely, there's no shortage of other reasons that led to its downfall, but it's easier for the people responsible to blame spies.

I agree with the overall sentiment, but I don't necessarily know if Nortel is truly unique amongst it's competitors.

I worked with lots of the big vendors over the years (I worked at a telcecom operator here in Canada), and you'd get to chatting and they were all under financial pressure internally, lots of layoffs. One time I was visiting one of the big vendors in the US, and our team was joking around how it felt like we were visiting a retirement home, it was like there was no one under 50 in the building (this was mid 2010's). Beers with other vendors, and they'd be talking about how there's an entire floor for like 5 employees and more layoffs coming down.

Because the company survived... doesn't mean it's alive and well.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#76

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:30 AM UTC

zyang wrote: post #23

Hongwei wrote: post #5

My parents lost a small fortune in 2001 riding the tech crash down (Nortel was a good chunk of that). I've been trying to explain to them (1st gen Chinese immigrants) for the past three years that Nortel was killed partly by focused Chinese spying and IP-theft by Huawei. CSIS has know about this for years. They (my parents) just wouldn't believe it until I showed them this article. Their former university classmates…

I interned at Nortel in early 2000's right before it all went down. I can tell you the engineering culture was rotten within. No-one was doing anything useful for years. Many orgs were built around milking the ancient layer 2 passport switch. The layer 3 router meant to compete with Cisco was 3 years late and only sold a few dozen units. There was accounting fraud going on at the highest level - delivery trucks circl…

[deleted]

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#77

Post by jaakl » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:30 AM UTC

Can you kill specific competitor by stealing secretly their technical IP at all? You would not make them any weaker. You would get yourself stronger, but that would be general technical advantage, against everyone in the market. Different story if you take commecial secrets, bidding papers etc but that was not the case here?

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#78

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:33 AM UTC

kevin_nisbet wrote: post #75

vkou wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that the company was so incredibly fragile that it, uniquely among its competitors was killed by Huawei stealing some of its IP. Far more likely, there's no shortage of other reasons that led to its downfall, but it's easier for the people responsible to blame spies.

I agree with the overall sentiment, but I don't necessarily know if Nortel is truly unique amongst it's competitors. I worked with lots of the big vendors over the years (I worked at a telcecom operator here in Canada), and you'd get to chatting and they were all under financial pressure internally, lots of layoffs. One time I was visiting one of the big vendors in the US, and our team was joking around how it felt l…

Embedded hardware companies are skewed to an older demographic because you can't hire significant numbers of younger engineers with the necessary knowledge.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#79

Post by vkou » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

artsyca wrote: post #64

vkou wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that the company was so incredibly fragile that it, uniquely among its competitors was killed by Huawei stealing some of its IP. Far more likely, there's no shortage of other reasons that led to its downfall, but it's easier for the people responsible to blame spies.

Too big to fail is a complete myth. It's more likely the other way round.

Too big to fail works when there's a network effect that locks your customers into you.

VISA is an example of that. Reputation-based businesses (Think auditing firms) are another. Facebook is a third.

On the other hand, a vendor like Nortell did not have network lockin on their customers. They could, and did end up switching vendors.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#80

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

I found this quote illustrative. Reminds you of Silicon Valley actually.

Back then, Ottawa, not traditionally (or since) known for its glamour, seemed full of sports cars, corporate jets, and even society scandals featuring tech CEOs. In 1999 the co-founder of Corel Corp., who’d gotten his start at Nortel’s precursor company, threw a gala at which his wife showed up in a C$1 million leather bodysuit with an anatomically correct gold breastplate and a 15-carat-diamond nipple. “You were just surrounded by the most interesting and intelligent people that you could find anywhere in the world,” says Ken Bradley, who spent 30 years at Nortel, including as a chief procurement officer. “Nobody would ever tell me I couldn’t do something.”