No 'decoupling' here: Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm sing China's praises Some of Big Tech's top execs have sung China's praises at the 2023 China Development Forum – an annual government-organized event that returned from its COVID hiatus over the weekend. Attendees included senior government officials and over 50 chief and senior executives from around the world. According to the Wall Street …
Money, money, money....
...with these companies surely justifying to themselves that if they don't go kissing China's posterior, other companies who do so will get their slice of the pie.
After all, who cares about the wage slaves being rolled over by oppressive regimes, and the actual literal slaves like the Uyghurs, when you could shave a few dollars off the cost of an iPhone or Galaxy that you're anyway selling for a grand at well-into-double-digit margins????
But from a corporate point of view, slavery is fine.
Case in point : there is no shareholder movement against slavery, and nobody with any Apple sharers is standing up to say "Hey, cut it out with the slavery stuff. I don't mind making shiploads of cash, but no slavery".
Nope, they have the shares, hang on to them for dear life and wait for the money. How that money is made is not a problem. And that's where the problem is.
At some point, all this capitalism is going to have to accept that money does not excuse everything.
I won't hold my breath though.
Both Apple and Samsung have opened large manufacturing facilities outside China in the last few years. If they were planning to abandon China they wouldn't say so until such time as they no longer needed facilities in China. After all it wouldn't make sense to rock up at a conference like this and say "oh, by the way we'll have closed all our chinese factories by 2030". I'm sure Beijing would come up with some entertaining ways of punishing them if they did.
Yep, India is getting a whole lot of love right now. It's really going to be interesting to watch apple maneuver this. How long before everyone realizes their phones were all made in China? The fact that the operating system is made in California doesn't do a whole lot to calm those fears. We know these devices are spying on us 24/7.
>How long before everyone realizes their phones were all made in China?
Everyone already realizes their phones (and pretty much everything else) is made in China. How long till everyone realizes that any spying taking place is from the software on the phone, and questions who is in control of the software is the actual question. (Answer, one would assume, is the company making the operating system and the company making whatever apps are on the phone - who are approved by the company making the operating system...)
We know these devices are spying on us 24/7
How exactly is assembling components into a phone enabling China to spy on anyone? They aren't making the SoCs or the cameras that go into the phone, you think they are adding an additional secret camera inside somewhere and it is magically able to communicate back to Winnie the Pooh? And that Apple would never notice "hey what's this extra stuff inside the phone, that's not on our blueprint for what Foxconn is assembling".
This is the height of ignorance!
Do you think this has become less of a goal for China since 2018? Apple is specifically mentioned as one of the targeted products.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/bloomberg-super-micro-motherboards-used-by-apple-amazon-contained-chinese-spy-chips/
One of the comments on this article:
You're kind of not versed on this subject at all. That's not even how supply chain risks work. You cant reverse engineer a prebuilt FPGA or PCL/SCADA based interface once its already constructed. SoCs that you design can be intercepted in transit and replaced by fraudulent versions of the same SoC based on your very own design except now with a malicious security system as part of the SoC's community of processors. Just because you design something and have a damn CAD file doesnt mean jack if you have someone else build it and arent standing there watching them make it and moving along with the shipment. The whole purpose of Critical Program Information identification on major systems like these in the SCRM process is to identify which components are the most vital and need the most compensatory security across the ENTIRE SUPPLY CHAIN.
You also haven't really accounted for a lot of other factors but i'm not here to give you a lesson on SCRM when you're whole defense is that they "designed it and have CAD files." What are you going to plug it in and see if it works like intended? Do you know how easy it is to spoof and modulate the exact parameters if you have the original blueprint? Do you know how convincing counterfeit chips are? You cant detect adversarial penetration in a FPGA/SoC or subcomponent chip without destroying it for reverse engineering AND using advanced forensic techniques (that usually National Labs specialize in). You gonna destroy 1 out of every a 100 chips to stratify your test lot? They only need access to a few systems to get inside a data center. There is minimal electro-pathway-analysis capability to detect modifications but they can be bypassed by PLC controlled logic gates that were part of the original design! Full program protection and SCRM standards are the best way to avoid these risks from the start.
BTW don't question someone's expertise on a subject if you clearly have no DEPTH in the field yourself. Because your naive answer is the reason company's have such crappy security assumptions in their risk management planning.
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