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

zdnet.com

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

#31

Post by majormajor »

socialist_coder wrote: post #17
xoa wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The US famously did the "catch up and then leap fast" thing, which worked out great for the US, and probably less bad for the rest of the world than if Germany had won WWII or the Soviet Union had been more dominant.

Hard for me to feel that all that influence over the next century going to the particular flavor of country that is modern China is gonna be good for the rest of the world, though.

But, interestingly, that's not an IP-related argument, that's a political system one.

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

#32

Post by mattnewton »

nicoburns wrote: post #7

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 problem is that it does affect the free market systems that China trades with. If China didn't trade with other countries I would agree, however Chinese companies do trade in massive amounts, and the government has signed on as a member of the WTO. They agreed to certain rules of the road when dealing with foreign market economies and have benefit greatly from selling goods and services abroad. And in those market economies, expensive R&D that is cheaply replicatable is disincentivized without IP- the dominant strategy is to just wait for a competitor to innovate and then clone them. IP is a hack that balances out this strategy with licensing costs. If you remove the licensing costs, the free market most likely won't incentivize expensive R&D, and there will be a net loss to everyone in the market system. So of course people in the capitalist market system are kvetching about how they are competing with someone who doesn't pay licensing fees to balance out R&D costs.

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

#33

Post by president »

> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives.

I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so many industries.

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

#34

Post by deogeo »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #23
hnaccy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should you care about net benefit when you're dealing with a geopolitical rival? Sports teams aren't happy when scored on because the total score went up.

Maybe sports teams are a horrible way to think about it.

Sports teams is putting things lightly. It's a bad idea to let your industries fail, while your rival's grow at your expense. You can already see what happens to those over whom China gains influence - economic power is a large part of that.

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

#35

Post by GhettoMaestro »

president wrote: post #33

> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives. I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so ma…

Lol come on. You know what will happen. You just don’t want to say it out loud.

Edit: To be clear.... less Chinese will be allowed into the United States given the threat. Light the comments up my lads.

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

#36

Post by kwizzt »

hnaccy wrote: post #10
nicoburns wrote: post #7

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…

Why should you care about net benefit when you're dealing with a geopolitical rival? Sports teams aren't happy when scored on because the total score went up.

Maybe bad if you look from the perspective of a single team. However, if the overall techniques and qualities of sports teams went up, it can lead to more interesting matches and innovation.

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

#37

Post by baybal2 »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #14

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

I can remember a horror story of Chinese copy of R179 engine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17677936

Repost:

> Funny thing to mention, I think 95% of industrial espionage effort yields zero if not negative benefit. The problem is that you are always stealing a "cat in a bag" For machinery, rarely there is anything like a "secret sauce:" Soon after the fall of USSR, Chinese defence companies flocked to Russia buying every defence tech possible. Russian companies had a funny way to troll Chicoms: they will not sell them a simple, mid-tier equipment, but only the top notch, and most complicated one, with which even they themselves had problem dealing.

> For example, Soyuz transferred tech for their super expensive, small volume manufactured R179 engine. Yes, that was Soviet response to F135 class engines. The showstopper was its very high temperature turbine made with monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.

> Even with all blueprints, tooling, documentation of manufacturing processes, and working samples on their hands, Chinese only made like 10 working engines. That state program to copy R179 continues to this day as I know.

> And I think they spent way more money on it in 25 years, than if they were to create a thing from scratch. That is something obvious to every experienced engineer, but not to bureaucrats from Chinese three letter agencies who are convinced that they are just an inch away from some "secret trick" that will magically make everything work.

My main point is that such big, state bureaucracy driven initiatives to make a Chinese analogue of some expensive widget often end up spending many times more resources that developing it from scratch in China with Chinese engineers, and often end up with inferior final product, than if it was an own original development.

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

#38

Post by president »

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #35
president wrote: post #33

> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives. I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so ma…

Lol come on. You know what will happen. You just don’t want to say it out loud. Edit: To be clear.... less Chinese will be allowed into the United States given the threat. Light the comments up my lads.

Internment like in WW2? Probably not. Pretty sure the only viable way would be to enact laws to enforce extremely stringent eligibility requirements on foreign students/workers.

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

#39

Post by quotz »

president wrote: post #33

> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives. I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so ma…

we should do to spies what we have always done

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

#40

Post by luba02 »

As expected. But from reading the article I think the current plane probably had very little IP theft in the final design. Just your usual clusterfuck of inexperience and poor management.

What they’re after ultimately is the ability to replace foreign components in future planes. Software, Hardware, the whole lot. Along with stealing all the management processes for systems integration.

So in this sense, the hacking might have shaved a few years off their efforts.

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