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Why is having engineers in China cause for suspicion? Lots of tech companies have engineers in China. Eg Microsoft.

by yibg 7y ago

jy2947 7y ago
What alerted me at that time was the discrepancy between their HR site at U.S of the Chinese opening (only one), and their job postings in Chinese job sites.
- hedora 7y ago
  I doubt it is a complicated conspiracy. Someone probably pushed the wrong button on the HR site. I’d guess the one opening you saw was coming out of a US manager’s budget, and the manager wanted some physical presence in China to help work with teams that are based there. It’s not surprising that they wouldn’t target China-based positions in fluent Chinese language offices at their US based English language site. Also, I’ve been using Zoom at work for years. They’re more popular with younger firms (“anything but Cisco”, maybe?).
jy2947 7y ago
But if Microsoft has teams in China, Russia work on MS Teams, I will be very concerned. The same goes with Slack, that many companies now rely on to keep business going.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  Are you certain they don’t?
- izacus 7y ago
  I'm very sure that Microsoft (and plenty of other companies including Apple) has teams in China, Russia and other countries to develop and update proper localizations for those apps.
- x0x0 7y ago
  If you have eng in US, having a decent chunk of it in China is much less threatening. For example, your internal controls can specify code review by american employees. Your key servers can remain in America or EU with stronger privacy protection regimes (not necessarily strong; just stronger than China). This isn't perfect, but it makes subversion (1) more difficult, (2) probably more targeted (see eg Saudi Arabia using Saudi nationals employed by Twitter to steal identities of critics on Twitter), (3) more likely to be discovered. My company's security model doesn't include the Chinese government / national security / military, but it could include the Chinese government giving our sales leads (which are evident if you can see our Zoom calls) to a domestic competitor. Broad exfiltration of data like that is much much harder if the engineering core is in the US or EU.
TechBro8615 7y ago
Because the CCP has no qualms about threatening an employee’s family to insert a backdoor or exfiltrate information, for one. The decoupling has begun. Sentiment in the US toward China has never been as negative as it is now, from both sides of the aisle. I wouldn’t be surprised if we even see sanctions against China after the dust settles on this COVID fiasco.
- president 7y ago
  You would have to start by decoupling investments in China and Wall Street and many politicians will not allow that to happen.
- qppo 7y ago
  Enforcing US IP protections isn't a partisan issue. I think it's crazy that people are trusting zoom for their critical communications (like design review meetings and screen sharing schematics/process diagrams!) when there's a non-zero chance that the CCP/PLA has the infrastructure to: cat '$COMPANY/zoom-chat.log' | grep '$TRADE_SECRET' | local_industry_boost.bash inb4 the whataboutism: yes, the US Government has (and might continue to) participated in state sponsored industrial espionage. But if I'm an American company, I'm not going to care about that. I've worked for at least one company that outright refused to do business in China or with certain companies that had oversized presence in mainland China because of experiences with this kind of problem. I know of some engineers that were arrested upon entry to the USA because they stole company IP and founded a company in China that used it. I know of another company that had network hardware compromised by an employee over there and was used to attempt to penetrate US networks (and if you wanna get spooked, they weren't alerted by their stateside infosec team, but federal authorities). I don't know why people treat me like a conspiracy theorist for bringing this up about Zoom routing data through China and using less-than-best-practice security.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    Please share your grep binary that allows me to search countless hours of boring video for actionable content.
president 7y ago
I think OP was alluding to Zoom not showcasing the reqs on the US careers site. Most companies including Microsoft do display open positions in all countries including China on their US page.
cosmodisk 7y ago
I very much doubt Microsoft does any serious development of their core products in China. Localisation,some local support and other,less sensitive stuff.
- jkaptur 7y ago
  The folks I talked to who worked at Microsoft Research Asia said that they worked on Bing, Office, etc.
sneak 7y ago
Anti-China sentiment is being stoked heavily in the US right now. Anything China-related is widely seen as evil and/or untrustworthy. Usually these opinions are expressed on China-sourced hardware.

Why is having engineers in China cause for suspicion? Lots of tech companies have engineers in China. Eg Microsoft.

by yibg 7y ago

Why is having engineers in China cause for suspicion? Lots of tech companies have engineers in China. Eg Microsoft.

What alerted me at that time was the discrepancy between their HR site at U.S of the Chinese opening (only one), and their job postings in Chinese job sites.

hedora 7y ago
I doubt it is a complicated conspiracy. Someone probably pushed the wrong button on the HR site. I’d guess the one opening you saw was coming out of a US manager’s budget, and the manager wanted some physical presence in China to help work with teams that are based there. It’s not surprising that they wouldn’t target China-based positions in fluent Chinese language offices at their US based English language site. Also, I’ve been using Zoom at work for years. They’re more popular with younger firms (“anything but Cisco”, maybe?).

jy2947 7y ago

But if Microsoft has teams in China, Russia work on MS Teams, I will be very concerned. The same goes with Slack, that many companies now rely on to keep business going.

dvtrn 7y ago
Are you certain they don’t?
izacus 7y ago
I'm very sure that Microsoft (and plenty of other companies including Apple) has teams in China, Russia and other countries to develop and update proper localizations for those apps.
x0x0 7y ago
If you have eng in US, having a decent chunk of it in China is much less threatening. For example, your internal controls can specify code review by american employees. Your key servers can remain in America or EU with stronger privacy protection regimes (not necessarily strong; just stronger than China). This isn't perfect, but it makes subversion (1) more difficult, (2) probably more targeted (see eg Saudi Arabia using Saudi nationals employed by Twitter to steal identities of critics on Twitter), (3) more likely to be discovered. My company's security model doesn't include the Chinese government / national security / military, but it could include the Chinese government giving our sales leads (which are evident if you can see our Zoom calls) to a domestic competitor. Broad exfiltration of data like that is much much harder if the engineering core is in the US or EU.

TechBro8615 7y ago

Because the CCP has no qualms about threatening an employee’s family to insert a backdoor or exfiltrate information, for one. The decoupling has begun. Sentiment in the US toward China has never been as negative as it is now, from both sides of the aisle. I wouldn’t be surprised if we even see sanctions against China after the dust settles on this COVID fiasco.

president 7y ago
You would have to start by decoupling investments in China and Wall Street and many politicians will not allow that to happen.
qppo 7y ago
Enforcing US IP protections isn't a partisan issue. I think it's crazy that people are trusting zoom for their critical communications (like design review meetings and screen sharing schematics/process diagrams!) when there's a non-zero chance that the CCP/PLA has the infrastructure to: cat '$COMPANY/zoom-chat.log' | grep '$TRADE_SECRET' | local_industry_boost.bash inb4 the whataboutism: yes, the US Government has (and might continue to) participated in state sponsored industrial espionage. But if I'm an American company, I'm not going to care about that. I've worked for at least one company that outright refused to do business in China or with certain companies that had oversized presence in mainland China because of experiences with this kind of problem. I know of some engineers that were arrested upon entry to the USA because they stole company IP and founded a company in China that used it. I know of another company that had network hardware compromised by an employee over there and was used to attempt to penetrate US networks (and if you wanna get spooked, they weren't alerted by their stateside infosec team, but federal authorities). I don't know why people treat me like a conspiracy theorist for bringing this up about Zoom routing data through China and using less-than-best-practice security.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Please share your grep binary that allows me to search countless hours of boring video for actionable content.

president 7y ago

I think OP was alluding to Zoom not showcasing the reqs on the US careers site. Most companies including Microsoft do display open positions in all countries including China on their US page.

cosmodisk 7y ago

I very much doubt Microsoft does any serious development of their core products in China. Localisation,some local support and other,less sensitive stuff.

jkaptur 7y ago
The folks I talked to who worked at Microsoft Research Asia said that they worked on Bing, Office, etc.

sneak 7y ago

Anti-China sentiment is being stoked heavily in the US right now. Anything China-related is widely seen as evil and/or untrustworthy. Usually these opinions are expressed on China-sourced hardware.