6 ms·

Critical entities targeted in suspected Chinese cyber spying

121 points by shivbhatt 5y ago

echelon 5y ago
The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the rhetoric is going to continue to escalate. Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible. Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time unthinkable. Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone. Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains and critical components). One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the G7 as The Last Supper. Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US. Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue escalating into more than just words?
- president 5y ago
  Is it though? You don't hear about any of the Chinese malign activities on the mainstream media outside of the lab leak theory. On most social media you get deranked or chastised for bringing them up.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Well, right here in the article we're discussing, we hear about Chinese hacking (from AP, which is very much mainstream media). Also today, on mainstream media, I saw an article about Chinese jet fighters and bombers encroaching (yet again) on Taiwan's airspace. So I think that, yes, you do hear about Chinese malign activities on mainstream media, and not just the lab leak theory.
    - president 5y ago
      Well, if you took my words in good faith it should be obvious I'm not literally saying there are no other stories reported other than lab leak. Have you seen the stories of Chinese overfishing in Philippine waters? Have you seen stories of the Chinese militarization of islands in the South China sea or in the Bahamas? I've seen thousands of other stories on independent media that are not reported in the mainstream media. And maybe some of them have but they but the reporting is minimal and if you ask the average US citizen, they have no idea about any of these things. Honestly ask yourself in the last decade what percentage of world news reporting has been devoted to negative Chinese content. The answer is not much. And here I am getting downvoted for pedantry. This is what is wrong with the state of discourse online.
m3kw9 5y ago
At this point, can we safely suspect every important system is compromised at one point or another?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I'm not sure there was ever a time when every important system wasn't compromised in some way.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  By at least one hostile power. Don't assume that it's only one...
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Certainly seems every Intel CPU has been compromised for decades, right? I’ve not followed it super closely so maybe I’m missing something. We don’t necessarily have exploits “in the wild” but someone in secret partnership with Intel could have gotten access to all kinds of things, it seems.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Why only hostile ? Im French and I sure hope we keep tabs on our american friends to prevent too wide a gap in technology that we'd turn into even more of a vassal satelite.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      "Keep tabs on our American friends" is a bit different from "break into their electrical grid, water plants, and air traffic control systems". At least, I hope it is...
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      I can't remember which book I read it in, probably Dark Territory or Cyberspies, but the French were actually able to hack into the computers of the war room for the joint chiefs and POTUS. They were so freaked out that they were able to do it (and worried that other foreign actors like the Chinese could do the same) that they informed the Americans, including how they did it. This was around twenty years ago, if I recall correctly. I think people underestimate European countries. Their less hostile, so people conclude that they lack capability, but they have 0days and cyberwarfare capabilities.
fsflover 5y ago
Not sure why the commment by echelon is flagged. I think it's a reasonable observation: The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the rhetoric is going to continue to escalate. Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible. Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time unthinkable. Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone. Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains and critical components). One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the G7 as The Last Supper. Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US. Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue escalating into more than just words?
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't copy-paste comments on HN, and certainly not to circumvent flagging. That's abusive. If you think a flagged comment shouldn't be flagged, you can vouch for it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch) or email us at hn@ycombinator.com. In this case the comment was obviously a step into generic political and nationalistic flamewar and so was correctly flagged.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ourlordcaffeine 5y ago
  Well, I think not all his observations are correct. >Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Fanboying of the CCP is usually downvoted. Useful or positive discussions about the country and culture aren't. Americans being overtly patriotic is still often controversial. >Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. Sure is surprising that people don't want to buy stuff from a country that is throwing Uighurs in concentration camps, from a company that I recall was caught red handed putting spyware on devices they sold. Although I think the main reason the comment got flagged is that it isn't a HN style discussion, but looks more like someone from reddit getting lost and posting here
mads 5y ago
Not sure why the commment by fsflower quoting echelon is downvoted. I think he points to reasonable observations by echelon: The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the rhetoric is going to continue to escalate. Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible. Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time unthinkable. Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone. Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains and critical components). One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the G7 as The Last Supper. Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US. Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue escalating into more than just words?
- lazyeye 5y ago
  Lab leak isnt plausible? Why is a rare virus appearing in the population, just down the road from a research facility which holds these kind of viruses, not plausible?
- dang 5y ago
  Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521255. Copy/pasting a copy/pasted comment is beyond abusive. Please don't do anything like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/D3fgS https://archive.is/D3fgS
dang 5y ago
All: if you're going to comment on this story please make sure you're up on the site guidelines and that you're not about to take the thread into generic political or nationalistic flamewar. Those things are beyond tedious, inevitably turn ugly, and are not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
atarian 5y ago
I wonder if we'll start to see a transition back to analog/physical access.
- breadzeppelin__ 5y ago
  I've lost enough digital photos and access to music that I've started doing this in my personal life with polaroids and a record collection. maybe I'm an early adopter of this backwards philosophy!
  - jxramos 5y ago
    same here, I lost a trove of writings accidentally deleting my storage folder on Android. It transitioned me back to writing things on paper.
ilamont 5y ago
The New York City subway hack referenced in the article is interesting. Unlike the many ransomware attacks targeting public infrastructure, The New York Times reported that economic espionage was a possible goal: It is unclear why the M.T.A. was a target of the campaign, but investigators have several theories. One focuses on China’s push to dominate the multibillion-dollar market for rail cars — an effort that could benefit from knowing more about the inner workings of a transit system that awards lucrative contracts. However, the article also said it's possible "hackers mistakenly entered the M.T.A.’s system and discovered it was of little interest, which cybersecurity experts say is not unusual." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/nyregion/mta-cyber-attack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/nyregion/mta-cyber-attack...
- azurezyq 5y ago
  I feel MTA is pretty badly managed and under-budgeted, absolutely not ideal for a case study even.
- mc32 5y ago
  I think the MTA and port authority are so corrupt that there is nothing the Chinese could do to unseat the current incumbents.
  - Goety 5y ago
    While funny, sad, and true foreign actors will target industries and create corruption to enter these markets as good guys.
- ezconnect 5y ago
  China operate the most used rail system in the world. They probably have the most knowledge just like Japan on the economics of operating a rail system.
bmmayer1 5y ago
The long-term operational strategy of the CCP (and probably every other foreign hostile power) is clear. Backdoor all critical and vital systems. Keep finger on button. Presumably, our folks at the NSA are doing the same. This becomes the new MAD doctrine.
- magicsmoke 5y ago
  It's not exactly like MAD because with MAD everyone has an accurate idea of how many nukes they have and the resulting destruction if they're exchanged. With cyberattacks you can't get an accurate idea of how backdoored your systems are, because if you did you would patch it. As a result, countries underestimate the damage they would take from retaliation and are more willing to use their collection of backdoors to create chaos at key moments. If nuclear MAD leans towards deterrence, cyberattacks lean towards escalation.
  - drak0n1c 5y ago
    There's also the question of attribution. Proxies and manipulated metadata can misdirect the retaliation onto a different actor.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    Well, kinda. The actors have different playbooks. America's is "get in as quietly and as targeted as possible, and make the damage look like random equipment failing." Which makes sense. If they wanted to do value targeting at a wide scale they'd use a nuke or what have you. The mobility the domain of cyber gives them is deniability and operational security, not capability since they can basically bomb anywhere on the planet in under an hour. The dragnet stuff is done via MITM attacks or with friendlies like telcom and tech companies. With the DPRK it's completely different. They don't have multiple points of access on the global internet. They don't have the worlds best military jets or satellites. Sure they have a few nukes, but they can be intercepted, so getting access to critical infrastructure is something they would value in the first minutes of a war with America. But I agree with your overall premiss. In cyber you can't get a completely accurate idea of how backdoored your systems are. There is more observability here than people give credit for, because we hack the hackers to figure out their access levels then monitor the intruded on systems, but ultimately it's unknowable just what percentage of our systems are compromised and even if we could somehow know the degree of compromization, it wouldn't matter because a previously unused, wormable 0day could infect whole classes of systems we thought were secure.
randomopining 5y ago
China, Russia, Iran, NK, maybe Turkey. Pact to chip away at the US sphere and take what they can. Classic zero sum. We should set this straight while we still have a chance.
falseprofit 5y ago
I can forgive them trying to steal IP from companies developing the vaccine, given how many people have been dying.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  What the parent is talking about is that the various SinoVac* vaccines have questionable efficacy. Recipients do get fever after the first dose, so it's not pure water.
Gustomaximus 5y ago
From a corporate perspective (an my general belief) I wonder if making IP protections shorter in time would help this. We lengthen IP protections, but todays world technology is moving faster than ever so you'd think it makes sense to reduce them. Originally patents were 14 years. Shorter patent length would encourage companies to focus further on innovation and logically you'd think things like industrial espionage would be somewhat reduced, at least at consumer levels, as the window/incentive to steal reduces based on the lower need. Plus this would make things fairer to companies that dont steal IP vs those that do.
- lovecg 5y ago
  I think this confuses patents with trade secrets. You only patent something that’s easy to observe and copy, and the patent is a public record that you have some temporary exclusive rights to the invention (well at least in theory. The world of software patents is warped to the point where the motivation to hold patents is mostly defensive against litigation). If another country doesn’t respect your patents, they do nothing. If you can keep something secret, you don’t need or want a patent (which creates a public record). There’s no patent for the Coca-Cola recipe. And this is also a situation where espionage is useful.
jxramos 5y ago
So I'm curious are Chinese hackers allowed past the great firewall and allowed to roam freely on the internet? I wonder how that sort of freedom is managed, like I'm imagining a hacker stumbling across a hard drive full of Tianamen Square coverage or Uighur documentation or whatever the suppressed story is. Is that class of individuals given free license online and basically trusted not to go snooping around or cover their eyes when they find stuff they shouldn't be seeing?
- Renaud 5y ago
  The great firewall is not an impenetrable fortress. People in China routinely access the external world and most websites are not blocked at all until they are found to contain 'anti-nationalist' material. Even then, people use a variety of VPNs to access sites not otherwise accessible. As to your second point, people of all countries are easily blinded by their own nationalistic rethoric. I mean how many in the US had access to the same information as Snowden and said nothing? People acting in these circles are vetted for their patriotism and checks are in place to make sure they don't deviate. People who are into these secret clubs -whether they are government agencies, hacking groups, terrorists, etc- tend to not want to lose their privileges, because it gives them power an insight- and also because they know the consequences to themselves -and possibly on their families- of violating their masters' trust. It takes real courage to give that up and the outcome is probably often pretty bleak.
- magicsmoke 5y ago
  It seems like what's implied behind this question is that any Chinese hacker that's exposed to uncensored material would immediately turn against their evil regime, so the regime must constantly be on guard against ideological infiltration. I think that's a really simplistic view of human motivations and a reflection of how China is viewed in the West onto how any "reasonable" Chinese hacker must also view China. When in fact, how this hacker might view about the situation could range anywhere from feeling that the government was justified in their actions from a realpolitik point of view to an acceptance that it's just one of those complicated problems in Chinese society that can't be solved overnight, like systemic racism or economic inequality in the US. I doubt Americans live every minute of their lives thinking of all the minor tragedies that occur in their country at any given moment, and is motivated by them to overthrow the American system. Rather, it's more of a shrug and carry on while trying to do a little better within the system they have.
detect_things 5y ago
Hackers will only come from abroad, hackers must come from countries that need to be hostile, small countries, weak countries, no qualifications.

121 points by shivbhatt 5y ago

The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the rhetoric is going to continue to escalate. Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible. Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time unthinkable. Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone. Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains and critical components). One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the G7 as The Last Supper. Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US. Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue escalating into more than just words?

president 5y ago
Is it though? You don't hear about any of the Chinese malign activities on the mainstream media outside of the lab leak theory. On most social media you get deranked or chastised for bringing them up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Well, right here in the article we're discussing, we hear about Chinese hacking (from AP, which is very much mainstream media). Also today, on mainstream media, I saw an article about Chinese jet fighters and bombers encroaching (yet again) on Taiwan's airspace. So I think that, yes, you do hear about Chinese malign activities on mainstream media, and not just the lab leak theory.
  - president 5y ago
    Well, if you took my words in good faith it should be obvious I'm not literally saying there are no other stories reported other than lab leak. Have you seen the stories of Chinese overfishing in Philippine waters? Have you seen stories of the Chinese militarization of islands in the South China sea or in the Bahamas? I've seen thousands of other stories on independent media that are not reported in the mainstream media. And maybe some of them have but they but the reporting is minimal and if you ask the average US citizen, they have no idea about any of these things. Honestly ask yourself in the last decade what percentage of world news reporting has been devoted to negative Chinese content. The answer is not much. And here I am getting downvoted for pedantry. This is what is wrong with the state of discourse online.

m3kw9 5y ago

At this point, can we safely suspect every important system is compromised at one point or another?

sillysaurusx 5y ago
I'm not sure there was ever a time when every important system wasn't compromised in some way.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
By at least one hostile power. Don't assume that it's only one...
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Certainly seems every Intel CPU has been compromised for decades, right? I’ve not followed it super closely so maybe I’m missing something. We don’t necessarily have exploits “in the wild” but someone in secret partnership with Intel could have gotten access to all kinds of things, it seems.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Why only hostile ? Im French and I sure hope we keep tabs on our american friends to prevent too wide a gap in technology that we'd turn into even more of a vassal satelite.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    "Keep tabs on our American friends" is a bit different from "break into their electrical grid, water plants, and air traffic control systems". At least, I hope it is...
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    I can't remember which book I read it in, probably Dark Territory or Cyberspies, but the French were actually able to hack into the computers of the war room for the joint chiefs and POTUS. They were so freaked out that they were able to do it (and worried that other foreign actors like the Chinese could do the same) that they informed the Americans, including how they did it. This was around twenty years ago, if I recall correctly. I think people underestimate European countries. Their less hostile, so people conclude that they lack capability, but they have 0days and cyberwarfare capabilities.

fsflover 5y ago

Not sure why the commment by echelon is flagged. I think it's a reasonable observation: The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the rhetoric is going to continue to escalate. Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible. Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time unthinkable. Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone. Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains and critical components). One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the G7 as The Last Supper. Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US. Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue escalating into more than just words?

dang 5y ago
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN, and certainly not to circumvent flagging. That's abusive. If you think a flagged comment shouldn't be flagged, you can vouch for it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch) or email us at hn@ycombinator.com. In this case the comment was obviously a step into generic political and nationalistic flamewar and so was correctly flagged.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ourlordcaffeine 5y ago
Well, I think not all his observations are correct. >Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Fanboying of the CCP is usually downvoted. Useful or positive discussions about the country and culture aren't. Americans being overtly patriotic is still often controversial. >Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. Sure is surprising that people don't want to buy stuff from a country that is throwing Uighurs in concentration camps, from a company that I recall was caught red handed putting spyware on devices they sold. Although I think the main reason the comment got flagged is that it isn't a HN style discussion, but looks more like someone from reddit getting lost and posting here

mads 5y ago

Not sure why the commment by fsflower quoting echelon is downvoted. I think he points to reasonable observations by echelon: The new cold war is here. The narratives everywhere are starting to change in support of it, and I wager that the rhetoric is going to continue to escalate. Suddenly "lab leak" isn't racist and isn't implausible. Biden is going to go cozy up with Putin, which was at one time unthinkable. Reddit and other social media has drastically shifted tone. Patriotic voices are upvoted, positive opinions on China downvoted. Supply chains are moving (especially semiconductor supply chains and critical components). One of the things I'm surprised by: Thinkpads are getting criticism. I was looking to buy a new one the other day and there was hostility in the forums over China. On the other side of the ocean, Chinese propaganda has heated up too. Yesterday state media supposedly published an image of the G7 as The Last Supper. Those UFO drones are probably either China or the US. Where will we be in five years? Is this going to continue escalating into more than just words?

lazyeye 5y ago
Lab leak isnt plausible? Why is a rare virus appearing in the population, just down the road from a research facility which holds these kind of viruses, not plausible?
dang 5y ago
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521255. Copy/pasting a copy/pasted comment is beyond abusive. Please don't do anything like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/D3fgS https://archive.is/D3fgS

dang 5y ago

All: if you're going to comment on this story please make sure you're up on the site guidelines and that you're not about to take the thread into generic political or nationalistic flamewar. Those things are beyond tedious, inevitably turn ugly, and are not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

atarian 5y ago

I wonder if we'll start to see a transition back to analog/physical access.

breadzeppelin__ 5y ago
I've lost enough digital photos and access to music that I've started doing this in my personal life with polaroids and a record collection. maybe I'm an early adopter of this backwards philosophy!
- jxramos 5y ago
  same here, I lost a trove of writings accidentally deleting my storage folder on Android. It transitioned me back to writing things on paper.

ilamont 5y ago

The New York City subway hack referenced in the article is interesting. Unlike the many ransomware attacks targeting public infrastructure, The New York Times reported that economic espionage was a possible goal: It is unclear why the M.T.A. was a target of the campaign, but investigators have several theories. One focuses on China’s push to dominate the multibillion-dollar market for rail cars — an effort that could benefit from knowing more about the inner workings of a transit system that awards lucrative contracts. However, the article also said it's possible "hackers mistakenly entered the M.T.A.’s system and discovered it was of little interest, which cybersecurity experts say is not unusual." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/nyregion/mta-cyber-attack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/nyregion/mta-cyber-attack...

azurezyq 5y ago
I feel MTA is pretty badly managed and under-budgeted, absolutely not ideal for a case study even.
mc32 5y ago
I think the MTA and port authority are so corrupt that there is nothing the Chinese could do to unseat the current incumbents.
- Goety 5y ago
  While funny, sad, and true foreign actors will target industries and create corruption to enter these markets as good guys.
ezconnect 5y ago
China operate the most used rail system in the world. They probably have the most knowledge just like Japan on the economics of operating a rail system.

bmmayer1 5y ago

The long-term operational strategy of the CCP (and probably every other foreign hostile power) is clear. Backdoor all critical and vital systems. Keep finger on button. Presumably, our folks at the NSA are doing the same. This becomes the new MAD doctrine.

magicsmoke 5y ago
It's not exactly like MAD because with MAD everyone has an accurate idea of how many nukes they have and the resulting destruction if they're exchanged. With cyberattacks you can't get an accurate idea of how backdoored your systems are, because if you did you would patch it. As a result, countries underestimate the damage they would take from retaliation and are more willing to use their collection of backdoors to create chaos at key moments. If nuclear MAD leans towards deterrence, cyberattacks lean towards escalation.
- drak0n1c 5y ago
  There's also the question of attribution. Proxies and manipulated metadata can misdirect the retaliation onto a different actor.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Well, kinda. The actors have different playbooks. America's is "get in as quietly and as targeted as possible, and make the damage look like random equipment failing." Which makes sense. If they wanted to do value targeting at a wide scale they'd use a nuke or what have you. The mobility the domain of cyber gives them is deniability and operational security, not capability since they can basically bomb anywhere on the planet in under an hour. The dragnet stuff is done via MITM attacks or with friendlies like telcom and tech companies. With the DPRK it's completely different. They don't have multiple points of access on the global internet. They don't have the worlds best military jets or satellites. Sure they have a few nukes, but they can be intercepted, so getting access to critical infrastructure is something they would value in the first minutes of a war with America. But I agree with your overall premiss. In cyber you can't get a completely accurate idea of how backdoored your systems are. There is more observability here than people give credit for, because we hack the hackers to figure out their access levels then monitor the intruded on systems, but ultimately it's unknowable just what percentage of our systems are compromised and even if we could somehow know the degree of compromization, it wouldn't matter because a previously unused, wormable 0day could infect whole classes of systems we thought were secure.

randomopining 5y ago

China, Russia, Iran, NK, maybe Turkey. Pact to chip away at the US sphere and take what they can. Classic zero sum. We should set this straight while we still have a chance.

falseprofit 5y ago

I can forgive them trying to steal IP from companies developing the vaccine, given how many people have been dying.

redis_mlc 5y ago
What the parent is talking about is that the various SinoVac* vaccines have questionable efficacy. Recipients do get fever after the first dose, so it's not pure water.

Gustomaximus 5y ago

From a corporate perspective (an my general belief) I wonder if making IP protections shorter in time would help this. We lengthen IP protections, but todays world technology is moving faster than ever so you'd think it makes sense to reduce them. Originally patents were 14 years. Shorter patent length would encourage companies to focus further on innovation and logically you'd think things like industrial espionage would be somewhat reduced, at least at consumer levels, as the window/incentive to steal reduces based on the lower need. Plus this would make things fairer to companies that dont steal IP vs those that do.

lovecg 5y ago
I think this confuses patents with trade secrets. You only patent something that’s easy to observe and copy, and the patent is a public record that you have some temporary exclusive rights to the invention (well at least in theory. The world of software patents is warped to the point where the motivation to hold patents is mostly defensive against litigation). If another country doesn’t respect your patents, they do nothing. If you can keep something secret, you don’t need or want a patent (which creates a public record). There’s no patent for the Coca-Cola recipe. And this is also a situation where espionage is useful.

jxramos 5y ago

So I'm curious are Chinese hackers allowed past the great firewall and allowed to roam freely on the internet? I wonder how that sort of freedom is managed, like I'm imagining a hacker stumbling across a hard drive full of Tianamen Square coverage or Uighur documentation or whatever the suppressed story is. Is that class of individuals given free license online and basically trusted not to go snooping around or cover their eyes when they find stuff they shouldn't be seeing?

Renaud 5y ago
The great firewall is not an impenetrable fortress. People in China routinely access the external world and most websites are not blocked at all until they are found to contain 'anti-nationalist' material. Even then, people use a variety of VPNs to access sites not otherwise accessible. As to your second point, people of all countries are easily blinded by their own nationalistic rethoric. I mean how many in the US had access to the same information as Snowden and said nothing? People acting in these circles are vetted for their patriotism and checks are in place to make sure they don't deviate. People who are into these secret clubs -whether they are government agencies, hacking groups, terrorists, etc- tend to not want to lose their privileges, because it gives them power an insight- and also because they know the consequences to themselves -and possibly on their families- of violating their masters' trust. It takes real courage to give that up and the outcome is probably often pretty bleak.
magicsmoke 5y ago
It seems like what's implied behind this question is that any Chinese hacker that's exposed to uncensored material would immediately turn against their evil regime, so the regime must constantly be on guard against ideological infiltration. I think that's a really simplistic view of human motivations and a reflection of how China is viewed in the West onto how any "reasonable" Chinese hacker must also view China. When in fact, how this hacker might view about the situation could range anywhere from feeling that the government was justified in their actions from a realpolitik point of view to an acceptance that it's just one of those complicated problems in Chinese society that can't be solved overnight, like systemic racism or economic inequality in the US. I doubt Americans live every minute of their lives thinking of all the minor tragedies that occur in their country at any given moment, and is motivated by them to overthrow the American system. Rather, it's more of a shrug and carry on while trying to do a little better within the system they have.

detect_things 5y ago

Hackers will only come from abroad, hackers must come from countries that need to be hostile, small countries, weak countries, no qualifications.