Hong Kong authorities halt alleged smuggler shifting 596 'high-end' CPUs to China

Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department on Monday revealed it intercepted 596 CPUs that an alleged smuggler was trying to ship into China. The agency announced that on June 11 its staff spotted a suspect vehicle attempting to pass through the Shenzhen Bay Control Point – one of the checkpoints between Hong Kong and mainland …

[PhilipN]

Those are the ones they wanted you to find

Tip of the iceberg.

By the way the suspected crime was for an unmanifested cargo. Tch! Tch!

[Conundrum1885]

Thanks for the memories

I heard some useful intel.

A certain manufacturer of high end (1TB) microSDs accidentally screwed up, labeled a bunch of them and then set up

incorrectly as 64GB even sending out an entire batch of these cards thus losing over $500,000+ worth of hardware.

Now I am not calling customs evasion because the price of these is so high that they behaved *exactly* like the specification

bar having very high speed and substantially higher power use.

So it isn't a simple matter to repair this, as the firmware is baked in at the factory and typically can't be changed.

Likely they got sent back under warranty or better still, repaired and used for some embedded application where label didn't matter.

Fortunately the marking on the back was correct and it also showed up on a weight test when customer checked

to see if the cards were as specified due to some incompatibility, and correct cards were then

sent out by overnight mail from a closer location.

[Dabooka]

Re: Thanks for the memories

Okay...?

[IGotOut]

Re: Thanks for the memories

What?

[mark l 2]

Now they have been seized by Hong Kong customs the they will go for 'destruction' and in no way will then end up getting sequestered by the CCP.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Of course. Why would CCP pay for stuff when they can claim it as proceeds of crime and get it for free. Sanctions evasion at zero cost.

[martinusher]

>no way will then end up getting sequestered by the CCP.

Just a reminder.....

Honk Kong is part of the PRC.

[MiguelC]

Those people were stopped because they were trying to dodge import taxes, not because of any forbidden import status. If the chips reached Hong Kong (or Macau), they've reached China.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, the VAT in China is 13%, while it's 0 in Hong Kong. Also, Chinese customs can be a pain to work with. At least they were when I had to work with them more than a decade ago, and I don't think they changed much. Avoiding them can mean weeks or months saved.

[myhandler]

All your chip are belong to us.

[Conundrum1885]

CPUS

GPUs and other "high value" goods likely get used by alphabet agencies for "black ops".

Supposedly diamonds seized by Customs got used for DACs thus "destroyed" is a relative term if scientific research is done at the same time.

No doubt the same applies to other high tech items.

[IGotOut]

Re: CPUS

You do know you can often buy customs seizures unless illegal?

No need for cloak and dagger conspiracy shit.

[Conundrum1885]

Re: CPUS

https://physics.anu.edu.au/news_events/?NewsID=243

Also worth noting that Bitcoin miners are also sometimes used for other projects.

It is said that SHA256 is similar enough that a large enough rainbow table can be used as a way to define

a database search as a hashing problem.

I actually looked into this a while back and there are ways to use a very powerful computer for this, in actual

fact this is why WPA2 is deprecated because captured traffic might be hackable if some crucial information

one day emerges.

[trindflo]

Greed

They probably would have gotten away with it if they were moving smaller quantities. Whoever is running the operation got greedy and didn't want to pay for the number of mules it would take to just move them a few at a time.

[Chronos]

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