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

zdnet.com

11–20 of 188 posts

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

#11
post #5
post #2

The full report can be found here in pdf form: https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/wp-content/brochures/r...

"Forward" lmao.

Yeah, with all the effort CrowdStrike took to divide and preface each section of the doc, mark footnotes, and all the formatting junk....it's a very visually "noisy" document, and I really don't want to read it. Whatever happened to double-spacing? Simply godawful UX.

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

#12

I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here. Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed. It's a very capitalis…

>It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive.

But isn't your entire argument self-contradictory with the story? This isn't a case of them developing them same thing and then, say, ignoring being sued over patent infringement or something. This is them just taking it instead. If your argument was right that IP wasn't useful for innovation, then they wouldn't need to take it from others, they could create it themselves. They've certainly got enough of a unified population, and can even see where others have gone first.

More fundamentally, IP is not at the core about "motivation", it's a hack to deal with a limited resource problem. Replicating information is essentially free, but generating it is not. R&D, particularly in areas where iteration requires enormous capital expenditure and there is a lot of finding paths in the dark, takes significant resources. And since we don't have unlimited amounts of those, decisions have to be made about how and where to spend them. The market, properly used, has proven to be one of our most effective tools for dealing with efficient resource allocation. Markets though normally are based around the specific resources and replication. IP attempts to graft that. IP also is intended to encourage sharing and decrease inefficient efforts to hide valuable information through technical and personnel based means.

As I said it's a hack, because information isn't the same as real world materials. There are different costs to society in maintaining it, and it requires societal cooperation in a way that defending limited physical property does not. It's more than reasonable to debate the frameworks for IP, such as how long it should last (be it fixed term or dynamic terms with ever increasing renewals required), what exceptions should be made, etc. But if you've got a steep hill to climb if you want to claim IP should be done away with. It'd help if you could even posit a better way to direct resources, keeping in mind the failures of the past. It'd help even more if you could point to anyone developing valuable information better without IP, which right now you cannot. China hacking into places to take it vs developing itself certainly doesn't help you there.

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

#13

I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here. Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed. It's a very capitalis…

I agree, it's quite possibly a huge mistake to treat information as though it was property.

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

#15

I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here. Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed. It's a very capitalis…

By "different principles", you presumably mean totally in the service of an autocratic, hegemonistic nation bent on the brutal oppression its own citizens and its rise to become an unchallengeable global power able to curtail the social, political and human rights of anybody, anywhere on Earth, who it deems an enemy?

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

#16

I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here. Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed. It's a very capitalis…

The difference between patent trolls and protecting capital intensive IP for a "head start" to get to market are so hugely different. It's not a difference in perspective. It's a harmful act of laziness.

I've heard that what was stolen was mainly internal documentation on how the engines comply with the various regulatory frameworks, which were designed around the specific Western families of engines that existed and evolved with them. If that's all true and China was more than capable of building an engine with the same performance and safety as their Western counterparts, but simply wouldn't have been certified due to not being a slight variation of an existing design, would that change your judgment?

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

#17
post #12

I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here. Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed. It's a very capitalis…

> It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive. But isn't your entire argument self-contradictory with the story? This isn't a case of them developing them same thing and then, say, ignoring being sued over patent infringement or something. This is them just taking it instead. If your argument was right that IP wasn't useful for innovation, then they wouldn't need t…

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.

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

#19
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Forward" lmao.

Yeah, with all the effort CrowdStrike took to divide and preface each section of the doc, mark footnotes, and all the formatting junk....it's a very visually "noisy" document, and I really don't want to read it. Whatever happened to double-spacing? Simply godawful UX.

They're padding the document heavily is why. That's also why they have a whole section on "we spent time tracking down the Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS's buildings", with the conclusion that they're the buildings with "Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS" written in big letters on the side.

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

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between patent trolls and protecting capital intensive IP for a "head start" to get to market are so hugely different. It's not a difference in perspective. It's a harmful act of laziness.

I've heard that what was stolen was mainly internal documentation on how the engines comply with the various regulatory frameworks, which were designed around the specific Western families of engines that existed and evolved with them. If that's all true and China was more than capable of building an engine with the same performance and safety as their Western counterparts, but simply wouldn't have been certified due…

Given that China has struggled to produce a jet engine even for _military_ uses, which is in no way hindered by western regulatory frameworks, I think the burden of proof is on your side:

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-air-force-has-...

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