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Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

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Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#111

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

Nortel was not killed by Huawei or a hack. It was killed by bad management.

The article tries to paint the picture of a fantastic company but that was not the case. It was mismanaged (and the article provides some glaring examples, including fraud), slow, bloated, it was really struggling in the cellular space.

Even the account of the hack shows how badly Nortel handled it.

There's always the temptation to find an external scapegoat but the buck does stop with Nortel's management.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#112

Post by dctoedt »

vaxman wrote: post #94
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

..and it is illegal to attempt. As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed…

Friendly correction: It's rank and file (not in file).

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rank%20and%20file

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#113

Post by rq1 »

> 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.”

Of course, that was the Russian agent disguised as a Chinese who did it.

I’m not saying that they had nothing to do with it (I don’t know), but it sounds a bit like hubris to me.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#114

Post by politicdone »

Article:

> critics, who point out that Chinese law obligates companies to cooperate with national intelligence work and to keep those requests secret. In other words, if asked, Huawei would have to spy for the state and cover up that spying. (U.S. companies have been accused of similar behavior, most famously following leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.)

If US IC doesn't use it's big tech collaborators for corporate espionage, and loses out to someone who does, US can't blame anyone but itself.

Hiring ex Nortel was part of it, but also the billions of dollars of credit Huawei had thanks to CDB. If G7 states don't help their big tech with huge debt war chests, and lose customers to states that back their big tech...G7 states don't have anyone to blame but themselves.

It seems the article hopes you believe that Western corporate competition is not cut throat...just a bunch of dainty little companies oh so shocked at the aggressive competition from Huawei. Nothing could be further from the truth...How to read this in anyway apart from 1) Interesting history on Nortel and Huawei, and 2) a fine example of the contemporary genre of "China bad literature".

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#115

Post by blueblisters »

vaxman wrote: post #94
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

..and it is illegal to attempt. As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed…

I don't know a lot of this sounds like reverse ageism. Facebook was built entirely on young, talented engineers who could perhaps scale out software better than "experienced" developers. Same goes for a lot of Google products. The barrier of entry for software development is much lower and you can pretty much hit the ground running with a few good math and algorithms courses and good internships. You can become a good software architect with a few years of experience -- even the best are barely 50 years of age (Jeff Dean, for example).

I am not sure why this trend didn't translate towards hardware but if I were to guess - the jobs are fewer, the barriers of entry are higher (no one really teaches hardware design in school) and the cost of mistakes is bigger.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#116

Post by nooneknowswhy »

jaakl wrote: post #77

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?

plus 0 R&D cost, and government compensated all time low price tag.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#117

Post by dig1 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #111
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…

Nortel was not killed by Huawei or a hack. It was killed by bad management. The article tries to paint the picture of a fantastic company but that was not the case. It was mismanaged (and the article provides some glaring examples, including fraud), slow, bloated, it was really struggling in the cellular space. Even the account of the hack shows how badly Nortel handled it. There's always the temptation to find an ex…

The same happened to Nokia. People usually say that Microsoft killed it, but it was already pretty much behind everything when Microsoft took it.

Too much bureaucracy, everything outsourced, management out of touch with anything, meetings after meetings... Hell, I remember two/three weeks of meetings to replace apache proxy with nginx. Actual replacement and configuration update would take a couple of minutes.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#118

Post by treeman79 »

chvid wrote: post #73
freshhawk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like it was badly miss managmed. Better companies outsold it, causing it to file bankruptcy.

This is one of the points of capitalism, Bad / wasteful decisions lead to failure. Better managed companies rise. Consumers get better products cheaper.

Re: Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

#120

Post by phire »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #37
phire wrote: post #14

Julian Assange originally became famous after getting caught hacking Nortel back in the early 90s. I guess Nortel didn't learn from that lesson and secure their network.

Do you have a source for this? Curious to read about it.

Julian Assange helped research a great book called "Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier"

Documents the antics (and downfalls) of various hackers from the late 80s and early 90s, most of them Australian. Assange (aka Mendax) is one of the hackers the book follows.

It's out of print these days, but the author, Suelette Dreyfus made the book available online back in 2001 - http://underground-book.net/

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