FBI and MI5 bosses: China cheats and steals at massive scale The directors of the UK Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5) and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday shared a public platform for the first time and warned of China's increased espionage activity on UK and US intellectual property. Speaking to an audience of business and academic leaders, MI5 director general …
How many firms have you heard of, that have invested into setting up businesses in the US, only to turn around to find that the busyness (and the IP) suddenly does not belong to them anymore?
I have heard about at least 2 companies that we deal with having this happen to them in China.
Please drop the false equivalences. The US has some serious problems, but here we are talking about orders of magnitude worse.
I will start the bidding with Maksym Polyakov's investment in Firefly Aerospace and the demands from the US Committee on Foreign Investment.
(For the time being I see China as a bigger problem than the US but if Trump wins the mid-terms Roe v. Wade will look like a mild introduction to what will happen next.)
I agree with the false equivalence but believe I provided a valid example as requested. "Asked" with big quotes is about right. Firefly were effectively locked out of US government launch contracts and their launch facilities at Vandenberg. Firefly were effectively dead until they did as they were "asked". If holding that stick had not been sufficient, the US government would have found a bigger stick to shake at Firefly while politely asking Polyakov to sell.
Yep.
The only mitigating issue is that this was a business that was on the sharp end of strategic military importance, open to the same type of misuse as when a russian owned company emptied German gas reserves just before the invasion of Ukraine. (An ownership which should never have been allowed to happen in the first place)
What happens in China is much more widespread.
I think that it is wrong to declare the US innocent, but immediately stating that the US is worse than China is simply wrong.
Agreed, which is why I didn't do that. Mitigating circumstances although certainly valid were not required in the request for an example. At the moment, this is a case of a spider calling an aardvark an insectivore. Although the US has not gone any near as bad as China they have made real efforts to catch up and have a significant opportunity to close the gap further.
The actual litigation was Apple accusing Samsung of copying glass to the edge of the device (which only Samsung could manufacture at the time), four columns of icons and the colour black. Not an example as requested and doubly so because Apple lost and were required to publish an apology on their website (had javascript to size the image above to hide the apology to where scrolling would be required to see it) and in newspapers (so unobtrusive and badly worded that they got a scolding from the judge).
Just because the US not acting /exactly/ now as China does isn't evidence they're better.
As a matter of fact, I've heard often enough about the US spying on its allies, both on political leaders and to steal technology, and applying pressure on foreign companies so they do ("voluntarily", as someone like you would say), what the US government wants.
Looking back at history, you'll notice that the US did in fact /exactly/ what they're complaining China is doing now, during the 19th century, when it was convenient for them. So see, this really is "do as we say, not as we did ourselves".
https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/
So because the USA had slavery at one point in its history, we should not criticize nations which employ slavery today?
The topic is the CCP's current behaviour, not who else is guilty or innocent now or in the past.
Don't partake in whataboutism. CCP shills get paid to do that, you don't have to do it for them for free.
> Don't partake in whataboutism
I really can't stand that stupid, self entitled neologism.
Why on Earth shouldn't I criticise your one sided view of things? What exactly makes you think that your case is somehow special?
This is the 21st century equivalent of covering your ears with the palm of your hands and going tra-la-la-can't-hear-you.
> Why on Earth shouldn't I criticise your one sided view of things?
You're not criticizing anyone's view though, because you haven't said anything to defend China's actions or refute the claims. You're just bringing up different views, about a different country, that was not the subject of the conversation.
If the article were about the US doing something, bringing up China's actions would be equally off-topic. Nobody's saying that others haven't been guilty of things in the past or present. What we're saying is that the issue at hand is China's behaviour.
However you feel about the word, "whataboutism" is a well documented disinformation strategy of distraction and deflection. It's the equivalent of going to a protest with a megaphone and shouting about a different issue. "Yeah, British nurses should be paid better, but look at how nurses are treated in Sudan!" It just muddies the message. If you want to protest something else, find a suitable venue, don't hijack someone else's.
Whataboutism is an even more egregious form of the tu quoque fallacy. ( ... neologism) It has been known for a very long time as a sophistic trick. The name fits, is memorable and in my experience people immediately understand it. What more do you want?
It is right criticize all wrongs.
But it is wrong to criticize them where it prevents understanding of or measures against the wrong currently discussed. Where would this lead?
How many firms have you heard of, that have invested into setting up businesses in the US, only to turn around to find that the busyness (and the IP) suddenly does not belong to them anymore?
Just about every company that partnered with Microsoft.* Novell for example.
* Other greedy/evil US tech companies are available
Just about every company that partnered with Microsoft.* Novell for example.
I was thinking of Nokia. Bayer and Monsanto would be good examples also. Or Huawei. Or many small businesses I know that don't want to sell in the US for fear of stupid litigation (like the dog in the microwave oven story).
Does the NSA spying on Airbus to give that information to Boeing count ? or NSA providing Thomson-CSF information to Raytheon on a Brazilian radar project? (Sorry I don't have links to hand for the second one)
By the 1980s, ISC's business primarily consisted of illegal arms sales started at the behest of various US clandestine organizations. On paper the company looked to be extremely profitable on sales of high-priced "above board" items, but in fact these profits were essentially non-existent. After the sale of the company to Ferranti in 1987 all illegal sales ended immediately, leaving the company with no obvious cash flow, and the merger led to the ultimate collapse of Ferranti in 1991.[1]
Clear enough?
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> How many firms have you heard of…
TikTok?
> I have heard about at least 2 companies that we deal with having this happen to them in China.
Which ones?
There's the 51% rule, in common with many other countries, and a fairly aggressive spying programme, yes, but I'm not aware of any straight stealing since they joined the WTO.
Well - that's simple to say. Way less simple to implement.
Even considerably locked down systems, such as some Federal Court electronic filing and case management system were breached via the monitoring tools used to maintain its uptime. [0] These are systems designed to handle court sealed documents, which is just about as close to "Top Secret" as you can get in the civilian side of the world.
I'm sure they did their due diligence. However, security is always a cat and mouse game and the crims only have to get lucky once and the company (or court) has to always get it right.
[0] - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/01/sealed-u-s-court-records-exposed-in-solarwinds-breach/
Patents weren't intended to protect secrets, they were intended to protect exclusivity (for a period) in return for publiction.
Remember Coca-Cola's and KFC's recipes are business secrets not patents.
What is perhaps noteworthy is, unlike copyright, there is not a well-funded group lobbying to extend the life of patents to 70+ years.
For that matter, copyright was intended to give the same limited protection for creativity and has been abused out of all recognition from the original grants to become a serious impediment on creativity and the arts rather than an encouragement
The influence that music and movie industries have had on lawmaking is wildly out of all proportion to their actual value and economic turnover
What is perhaps noteworthy is, unlike copyright, there is not a well-funded group lobbying to extend the life of patents to 70+ years. .... Roland6
Do patents presently have a shelf life/half life? What is it? Who here knows and wants to share what is known and/or imagined?
Yes, though it varies by jurisdiction — for example, signatory countries to the European Patent Convention have patents with a term of 20 years from filing, and the US has two varieties: utility patents have a term of 20 years from the earliest filing in either the US or a signatory country of the Patent Coöperation Treaty, and design patents have a term of 15 years from issuance. Note that patents generally have associated maintenance fees, so not paying those fees by their due dates can end patent protection before the patent term expires.
The fundamental issue with patents is, and has always been, the strength of them depends on your ability to defend them.
This comes down to one simple fact, especially when the USA is involved - how deep are your pockets.
The deeper your pockets (or someone else's pockets who is willing to help), the better the lawyers you can afford to keep the other side in court and/or buried in legal stuff until they run out of money.
If your business relies on keeping something secret, you need to reconsider your business model. It's possible to be profitable without being clandestine.
Corporate secrets are a vulnerability in and of themselves.
Let's be real here, if your business relies upon secrets, it is always a matter of time until someone else figures out how to do roughly what it is that you're keeping secret, certainly enough to be competitive in some regard, whether it's stolen or not. On a planet with 7.7 billion people, if you have a 1 in a million concept then there are approximately 7,700 other 1 in a million people that can figure it out too.
There is also performance improvements in tech to take into account. A shonky written rip off of a tool written now that mimics what a tool did 10 years ago will have a mostly imperceptible performance penalty for most garden variety computer users...all you have to do to compete for the most part is be cheaper and slap a nicer UI on it.
Look at Jira as an example...the UI is fucking terrible, the workflow is god awful and everyone hates it...people that hate Jira (most of the organisms that require oxygen to survive) tend to use something like Basecamp. Basecamp offers way less in terms of features than Jira, so on paper seems inferior...however, Basecamp is a lot more user friendly (so I'm told) and as a much slicker user experience. Ergo, they didn't have to compete directly with Jira feature for feature to convert Jira users into Basecamp users...they just had to cherry pick the bits people like, make the user experience slicker and off they went. Meanwhile, Jira can't do this because they probably have users all over the place that rely on niche features in the package...so they can't retract functionality because they will automatically lose subscribers...but if they don't try and retract things, make things slicker and so on, they will lose customers anyway and they are. Fucked if they do, fucked if they don't. Doesn't matter if they have corporate secrets or not. It also doesn't matter if those corporate secrets became public because it wouldn't give their competition any advantage they don't already have.
I would also go as far to say that most businesses probably couldn't care less if their competitions secrets landed in their laps somehow...as has been demonstrated time and time again...most notably when someone tried to leak a Coca Cola recipe to Pepsi. Pepsi immediately notified authorities, handed it back and did nothing with it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/07/marketingandpr.drink
This is just one example of how competing businesses don't give a shit about the competitions product.
The money and success is out there...
*points out of the window where the customers holding money are*
Not over there...
*points at the company safe filled with "secrets" and bullshit*
The ability to acquire customers is linked to the quality of your product and your ability to listen to customer demands and requirements...not matching the competition and re-boxing their product. If you mirror the products your competition makes almost identically, the only ground you can really compete on is price...which puts you in a position where you can never be as profitable / cash rich as your competition. In which case you will always be seen as the cheap knock off not the industry leader.
Of course, this doesn't exclude the reality that people that want to steal corporate secrets actually exist...but it does highlight how stupid it is to try and steal "secrets" in the first place and how rediculous it is to consider that something should be held as a "secret".
"Look at Jira as an example..."
Microsoft did the same to the existing market. It was "good enough" - and cheap. Only when it had established itself as THE dominant entity did it start strangling the market
This is one of the reasons Linux terrified them in the late 90s/early 00s
I disagree with your oversimplification of the problem. Much (but not all) of this data isn't "on the internet". It is protected by firewalls. However, if an employee (or other account with appropriate access) is breached, then data can be 'exfiltrated' via the internet.
I'm sure that companies like Boeing aren't hanging QNAP's on the internet...
And that exception "but not all" has to deal with email. There is a lot of sensitive data that we pass through email and is stored in our inbox and sent box that's hanging off the internet for any opportunistic hacker.
No, sure...companies like Boeing though have more than just the "secret plans for new aircraft" to rely upon. If the plans for aircraft leaked, it wouldn't offer the competition much advantage over Boeing as their manufacturing processes might be completely different and any stolen plans might be impossible for someone else to implement whilst remaining competitive.
As demonstrated by the 737-MAX and the takeover of Boeing...Boeing was more than just a business that had great designs...they were great because of their internal culture, the leadership and so on...when they were taken over by fuckwits that thought they were just another manufacturing production line, it went to shit because they didn't focus on the important parts...they thought they'd bought a goose that lays golden eggs without any consideration for how to keep that goose laying golden eggs.
If I somehow stole the "secret recipe" for KFC chicken, and I managed to replicate it perfectly, everytime, there is no way on earth I could expect to compete with KFC and make the profits they do even if my product is exactly the same. Everything else I sell at "A bit like KFC but not really" might be nowhere near the same standard. Hell, my restaurants might be not be in similar convenient locations, I might sell only cheap cash and carry knock off soft drinks to go with that stolen chicken recipe. The buckets might be actual fucking buckets I got cheap from Wilko. What I'm trying to say is, there is usually more than just the "secret recipe" involved in the success of a product. Therefore, if you rely solely on a specific secret to be competitive, you're already fucked. Even your kids will tell you that after a Spongebob Squarepants viewing marathon.
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