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> Chinese cyber organizations openly acknowledge and publicize their partnerships. This openness was particularly interesting to observe and may be influenced b

by quanto 2y ago

> Chinese cyber organizations openly acknowledge and publicize their partnerships. This openness was particularly interesting to observe and may be influenced by cultural factors, such as the Confucian emphasis on shared knowledge and a political framework that encourages collective efforts. I or anyone outside obviously cannot verify the technical details. However, the above statement struck as particularly uninformed. As any engineer in East Asia can tell you, there is nothing especially collaborative about tech in Confucian culture; if anything, the engineers in that region admire the free speech and discussion traditionally prized in the Western culture. Calling Chinese political framework, especially in the context of national security, conducive to open public discussion was quite ironic to see. Edit: the punchline is this. If a friend who is always secretive and deceptive about his personal life is suddenly openly discussing his life, what does that say about the details he just disclosed and/or the situation he is currently in? source: I regularly work with engineers from that culture and studied relevant geopolitics.

sangnoir 2y ago
> As any engineer in East Asia can tell you, there is nothing especially collaborative about tech in Confucian culture IIRC, Bunnie (Huang) mentioned how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers. > source: I regularly work with engineers from that culture and studied relevant geopolitics. (Winces)
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers. That's different though. Shenzhen is where electronics factories are; they get the datasheets from western companies, but because said western companies can't really enforce their IP over there, the locals get to ignore it and use the datasheets however it's convenient for them.
  - tschwimmer 2y ago
    One other question is: how accurate are the data sheets in Shenzhen as opposed to in the US? I can't speak to China, but in the US if you publish a spec for a component and then don't deliver within that spec, you will get sued, and you will lose.
    - chabska 2y ago
      In Shenzhen if your product doesn't perform up to spec, you just lose customers and go bankrupt. Not sure why the court has to be involved here. Isn't a free market capitalism economy supposed to work like that?
      - wakawaka28 2y ago
        Chinese companies violate many of the norms that we take for granted, such as labelling things accurately. If a Chinese company makes things out of spec, it will not put its name on the product. If one of these companies does knowingly make an inferior product, a new brand/company might be formed just for that purpose. Also, free market capitalism works better with a means to enforce contracts such as the contents of spec sheets, because it speeds up accounting for deliberate bad behavior. Court proceedings establish facts that can communicate to the public what the company has been up to, versus possibly misleading rumors. Although the free market can eventually sort out bad information and unreliable actors, it works much better when information standards are enforced. False advertising wastes a lot of resources.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      It really depends on the component. Something complex like a processor or radio will probably have errata in newer datasheets that fix errors in previous versions and those might take longer to make it out (especially if it’s someone like Qualcomm which doesn’t share all errata to all customers grumble grumble). Depending on how bad the error is and what you’re doing, that could be show stopping after you’ve sunk tons of NRE into it (DMA bugs on STM32 in the 2010s come to mind). The provenance of the component is also really important. If it’s a ghost shift at a contract manufacturer producing the parts, they might have skimped on some part of the process (like packaging so that another subcontractor responsible for that step isn’t alerted) and the datasheet might be significantly inaccurate. I don’t know if these manufacturers ever bother to characterize their ghost shift parts enough to release their own datasheet but I assume it happens with especially popular parts. If the contract manufacturer loses the contract but keeps the ghost shift, they might be significantly out of date in revisions so you’d have to be careful to use only the datasheet they provide and not the one your engineers download from the first Google result (good luck!). In short, it’s complicated. The most infamous example is probably the FTDI serial to usb chips that have been counterfeited for many years with varying quality, both by ghost shifts and manufacturers who reverse engineered the design to some degree.
- hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
  I don't think it has anything to do with Confucian though. In the Confucian world, or, rather, the Confucian world crafted by and for the Ancient Chinese scholar-officials, people who have a technical mind were bluntly looked down.
- tw04 2y ago
  > IIRC, Bunnie (Huang) mentioned how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers. That’s like pointing to torrent sites as proof that US media companies are open to sharing their content. Most of the hardware details being shared in shenhzen are stolen from western firms that have no way to enforce their IP. It’s why you can get your iPhone storage upgraded for pennies on the dollar.
  - rfoo 2y ago
    > It’s why you can get your iPhone storage upgraded for pennies on the dollar. ??? How is this related to anything IP? To get your iPhone storage upgraded, you just need to blow off the old NAND Flash and "solder" new ones. Their pinouts are in public standards and every storage vendor in this world uses the same one. And they did this for pennies because, of course, contrary to what Apple wants people to believe, flash storage does not cost much and even with the cost of all the dirty work it's still not much. Or do you mean that they are violating Apple's IP rights by modifying their own devices? That's just... bullshit.
suraci 2y ago
> source: I regularly work with engineers from that culture and studied relevant geopolitics. that's the problem in 1990-2010, >80% chinese influencers are liberals after 2010, it went down to <30% after 2020, <10% and most important, there's a very higher proportion of software engineers are liberals, which is easy to understand since we are followers of western but things are changing now, when you talk with a young chinese developer now, there's a good chance that he/she is a commie there's a simple way to validate this, if a chinese developer willing to discuss abt politics with you and 'admire the free speech and discussion traditionally prized in the Western culture', he/she is a liberal, if he/she avoids talking abt politics with you, it's not because he/she fears to talk abt this, it's because he/she is too polite to share different opinions as yours
- eunos 2y ago
  Considering iPhone sales still sky high kinda doubt for now. Maybe in a few years.
  - throawayonthe 2y ago
    [dead]
  - suraci 2y ago
    There's little correlation here

by quanto 2y ago

sangnoir 2y ago

> As any engineer in East Asia can tell you, there is nothing especially collaborative about tech in Confucian culture IIRC, Bunnie (Huang) mentioned how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers. > source: I regularly work with engineers from that culture and studied relevant geopolitics. (Winces)

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers. That's different though. Shenzhen is where electronics factories are; they get the datasheets from western companies, but because said western companies can't really enforce their IP over there, the locals get to ignore it and use the datasheets however it's convenient for them.
- tschwimmer 2y ago
  One other question is: how accurate are the data sheets in Shenzhen as opposed to in the US? I can't speak to China, but in the US if you publish a spec for a component and then don't deliver within that spec, you will get sued, and you will lose.
  - chabska 2y ago
    In Shenzhen if your product doesn't perform up to spec, you just lose customers and go bankrupt. Not sure why the court has to be involved here. Isn't a free market capitalism economy supposed to work like that?
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      Chinese companies violate many of the norms that we take for granted, such as labelling things accurately. If a Chinese company makes things out of spec, it will not put its name on the product. If one of these companies does knowingly make an inferior product, a new brand/company might be formed just for that purpose. Also, free market capitalism works better with a means to enforce contracts such as the contents of spec sheets, because it speeds up accounting for deliberate bad behavior. Court proceedings establish facts that can communicate to the public what the company has been up to, versus possibly misleading rumors. Although the free market can eventually sort out bad information and unreliable actors, it works much better when information standards are enforced. False advertising wastes a lot of resources.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    It really depends on the component. Something complex like a processor or radio will probably have errata in newer datasheets that fix errors in previous versions and those might take longer to make it out (especially if it’s someone like Qualcomm which doesn’t share all errata to all customers grumble grumble). Depending on how bad the error is and what you’re doing, that could be show stopping after you’ve sunk tons of NRE into it (DMA bugs on STM32 in the 2010s come to mind). The provenance of the component is also really important. If it’s a ghost shift at a contract manufacturer producing the parts, they might have skimped on some part of the process (like packaging so that another subcontractor responsible for that step isn’t alerted) and the datasheet might be significantly inaccurate. I don’t know if these manufacturers ever bother to characterize their ghost shift parts enough to release their own datasheet but I assume it happens with especially popular parts. If the contract manufacturer loses the contract but keeps the ghost shift, they might be significantly out of date in revisions so you’d have to be careful to use only the datasheet they provide and not the one your engineers download from the first Google result (good luck!). In short, it’s complicated. The most infamous example is probably the FTDI serial to usb chips that have been counterfeited for many years with varying quality, both by ghost shifts and manufacturers who reverse engineered the design to some degree.
hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
I don't think it has anything to do with Confucian though. In the Confucian world, or, rather, the Confucian world crafted by and for the Ancient Chinese scholar-officials, people who have a technical mind were bluntly looked down.
tw04 2y ago
> IIRC, Bunnie (Huang) mentioned how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers. That’s like pointing to torrent sites as proof that US media companies are open to sharing their content. Most of the hardware details being shared in shenhzen are stolen from western firms that have no way to enforce their IP. It’s why you can get your iPhone storage upgraded for pennies on the dollar.
- rfoo 2y ago
  > It’s why you can get your iPhone storage upgraded for pennies on the dollar. ??? How is this related to anything IP? To get your iPhone storage upgraded, you just need to blow off the old NAND Flash and "solder" new ones. Their pinouts are in public standards and every storage vendor in this world uses the same one. And they did this for pennies because, of course, contrary to what Apple wants people to believe, flash storage does not cost much and even with the cost of all the dirty work it's still not much. Or do you mean that they are violating Apple's IP rights by modifying their own devices? That's just... bullshit.

suraci 2y ago

> source: I regularly work with engineers from that culture and studied relevant geopolitics. that's the problem in 1990-2010, >80% chinese influencers are liberals after 2010, it went down to <30% after 2020, <10% and most important, there's a very higher proportion of software engineers are liberals, which is easy to understand since we are followers of western but things are changing now, when you talk with a young chinese developer now, there's a good chance that he/she is a commie there's a simple way to validate this, if a chinese developer willing to discuss abt politics with you and 'admire the free speech and discussion traditionally prized in the Western culture', he/she is a liberal, if he/she avoids talking abt politics with you, it's not because he/she fears to talk abt this, it's because he/she is too polite to share different opinions as yours

eunos 2y ago
Considering iPhone sales still sky high kinda doubt for now. Maybe in a few years.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  [dead]
- suraci 2y ago
  There's little correlation here