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National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

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41–50 of 77 posts

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#41
post #8

The irony is this will harm US manufacturing, not help it. Manufacturing is the sector that most depends on robotics. Companies will now have to sue the administration so they can continue operations without this new regulatory hindrance. I thought this president was supposed to eliminate regulations, not impose newer and stupider ones.

In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry". They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smug…

What is Brazil's computer hardware industry like now? Are there any companies manufacturing in Brazil?

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#42

I see a funny pattern here. England created the Industrial Revolution but barely has any manufacturing these days. The U.S. created several industries (mass car manufacturing, electronics, clothing, etc) but today China produces more than them. They had more than half the worlds' GDP in 1944, they have less than 16% today. They're slowly following England's path.

China has 4x the population of the US, so it's not exactly odd that they would produce more than the US.

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#44
post #10

This makes me wonder if we've ever had any evidence that "onshore manufacturing" prevents or even lessens foreign backdoors or security vulnerabilities. Honestly, to me it seems like onshore manufacturers are generally far more clueless than they have any right to be, so it's highly unlikely that they could both write materially better code and act as any meaningful barrier to internal compromise.

"foreign backdoors" and "security vulnerabilities". Both are an worn-out excuse, not some real concern. Gaslighting as a policy.

[dead]

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#45
There is a threat, but they are exaggerating it. Most of the advanced legged robots are glorified cameras and pack animals and are still in the research phases of implementation. Still, as someone who owns one of these, the amount of black-box software inside them is concerning. It's easy to chalk this up to intellectual property guarding, but who knows... I'd love to purchase *quality* domestically produced legged robots for research, but they are generally nonexistent. All this policy is going to do is hamper our efforts in research, which is a terrible idea if we want to produce a domestic supply chain. I'm sure they had absolutely 0% input from anyone who knows anything about robotics. Rather than this policy, why not simply require a full open source software stack?

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#46

Why doesn't the U.S. simply ban all Chinese products that have an internet-connected computer in them? That would solve almost all security problems in one strike and force Chinese manufacturers to communicate via Bluetooth and update software through USB sticks or memory cards. The apps communicating with said devices through Bluetooth obviously can't connect to the internet either otherwise there'd still be an aven…

There's a box being sold called "SuperBox". It claims to be able to stream any movie/video. The claim is "just pay $300 and you won't need to subscribe to any streaming service anymore." However, part of what it does is hacks your home network and tries to take over every thing on that network. And it sends this all back to China. The vast majority of people buying & installing these are just ordinary people but some will be executives, or people working for the feds. Did they bring their work laptop home and plug it in to their network? So it can get attacked outside the office firewall? Remember how stuxnet was spread?

This is a podcast about it: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#47

Amazingly ironic that the administration most deeply in bed to the finance sector's bidding is now identifying the result of the finance sector's 50 year push to offshore everything a problem for National security

I remember a big push by business journals back in the 2000s with claims that "executives who offshore work get 18% greater bonuses than executives who don't".

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#48
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry". They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smug…

I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.

Are phones an exception? I've heard Brazil is a very mobile-first market.

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#49
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry". They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smug…

I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.

Yeah, they still have high tariffs. But back them it was just illegal to import computers. You'd need to request special authorization from the government to do so, and it would take months to get an authorization. And only a few reasons would be accepted (research, high-performance industrial automation, etc).

Re: National Security Determination Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Robotic Devices [pdf]

#50
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry". They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smug…

What is Brazil's computer hardware industry like now? Are there any companies manufacturing in Brazil?

They're mostly assemblers of parts. They buy most parts from China and assemble the computers in the country.
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