8 ms·

China Said to Exclude Apple From Procurement List

58 points by wfjackson 12y ago

_djo_ 12y ago
I wonder if this isn't also an attempt to force Apple to give China access to the iOS and OS X source code. Similar tactics were used in the past to force Microsoft to give the Chinese government access to Windows source code through the China Information Technology Security Certification Center (CNITSEC) Source Code Review Lab. The US government has accused China of abusing CNITSEC's access to Windows to develop zero-day exploits for offensive use, so if that's true there's an ulterior motive there as well. That's over and above the article's claim that the Chinese government wants to reduce the number of American tech firms' products in official Chinese government use.
- iqihs 12y ago
  Not very familiar with OS programming, but what's stopping them from accessing the source code right now?
  - pmjordan 12y ago
    Large parts of OSX userspace (Frameworks, daemons and pretty much all the system applications) and some of the kernel are closed source. Almost all of iOS is closed.
  - smoorman1024 12y ago
    The iOS/OSX source code is proprietary to Apple. You wouldn't be able to see it unless you worked at Apple and had proper access.
  - Telomer 12y ago
    It's the difference between open source and closed source. Closed source programs, like osx and windows only release their compiled versions.
  - izzydata 12y ago
    Because like any program it is already compiled and they only have the executable to run. In its current state it is a bunch of machine code. They would have to reverse engineer it which is basically impossible across an entire operating system.
taylodl 12y ago
A country the size of China with the technical expertise available to them can create an open stack that they can manage and control. They already have several hardware manufacturers in their territory to make any hardware they may need. I honestly don't see why they would ever have been buying Apple and Microsoft products in the first place, and I'm an American.
- edpichler 12y ago
  Apple is good, and it's already being assembled in China.
- JonFish85 12y ago
  Couple thoughts.... An open stack would be a nightmare for any bureaucratic government to design and control/manage. And essentially they'd be playing catch-up to Apple/Google/whatever designs in the first place. On top of that, at least in my experience, products made in China by Chinese companies are either knock-offs of western products, made cheaply, or they are just crappy products in general. Sure, the parts can be fabricated, but it's the product design that is sorely lacking. Again, this is anecdotal, so your mileage may vary.
  - vetinari 12y ago
    China can provide goods at many quality levels. But if Wallmart or other company purchases cheap crap, they get cheap crap, no wonders about it. That does not mean that you cannot purchase quality Chinese goods. It is in no way limited to China - entire Asia works like this.
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      This is exactly right, and I don't think enough businesses appreciate it. The notion that you can 'save money by going to China' is somewhat of a misnomer, you can get a product built at a lower price but if that cost is lower than what it costs to build in the acceptable level of quality, you will get a low quality part. What I found interesting in the one time I was part of a negotiation with a Chinese manufacturer (Quanta at the time) they really would build the gadget we needed for what ever price we asked for, except they knew that building it for less than $X would mean (probably unacceptable) corners would be cut. And perhaps more interestingly they knew many of the corners they would cut to get to the price, so when contract language was added/proposed that cut off that shortcut it forced a revisit to the price negotiations. It really was you get exactly what you pay for, but more importantly if you didn't understand what you were paying for then you ran the risk of being surprised at what you got. One of those times where I saw how little I would be able to really know about the ins and outs of that process without dedicating a lot of time and running a lot of projects through that channel.
drderidder 12y ago
Not too surprising. I'd expect the fallout and economic impact of mass surveillance to unfold over several years, with a gradual move away from US-based technology companies, including SaaS & PaaS, in favour of open source software and self-hosted solutions.
- pkorzeniewski 12y ago
  I wonder if there will be a comeback of self-hosted software in the near future just for the security and surveillance reasons, especially in business environment. There was the whole Cloud craze not so long ago, where many companies were pushing all their data outside local infrastructure, but I wonder if this is a good move in the long-term. SaaS has many advantages over "classic" solutions, but security and reliability was always a weak point and it may be a major factor against it in the future.
Glide 12y ago
Can anyone chime in and help the rest of us understand the relationship between business and government in China? I can't help but think this is more of a move to help China's internal industries, but it's hard to say without understanding the political climate.
- threeseed 12y ago
  It's not dissimilar to every country really. Critical or large businesses e.g. energy, telecommunications always have an unusually close and unfettered relationship with government. In China it would likely be closer similar to say Russia. Australia recently banned the use of Chinese equipment from our national broadband rollout for national security reasons so this isn't an unprecedented move.
  - RockyMcNuts 12y ago
    Well, top government officials have big ownership interests in national champions; companies have party secretaries on site who can pull rank on management; trying to compete against companies with ties to government is generally going to be quite difficult...not exactly like every country. The iPhone is a luxury product in big demand, and being out of favor with the government will make it in even greater demand. The people targeted by Apple like their bling, people buy the foreign product because it's higher status and more trusted than the local product; in fact they'll go to Hong Kong to buy foreign products because they're afraid the one they buy locally will be counterfeit or crappy localized version. People trust Apple more than they trust the government or the Xiaomi knockoff.
- eliteraspberrie 12y ago
  In China, strategic industries like energy, steel, and telecommunications are state controlled. Huawei, for example, is a "national champion," which means it receives subsidies, foreign employees cannot own shares, the Party appoints an anonymous board to manage the company's management, and so on.
venomsnake 12y ago
Not unexpected. Apple have more control over unrooted iphone (or even rooted) than the owner.
- threeseed 12y ago
  And how is that different from every piece of electronic equipment ever made ? The creators of the OS always have more control over how the phone works than the owner. iOS is more locked down than Android (no access to root FS) but I would argue that 99% of users don't know the difference and just blindly install software from third parties.
  - lmm 12y ago
    99% of users? Maybe. But government employees with employer-provided devices often find those devices a bit locked-down by their employer.
quackerhacker 12y ago
This isn't surprising at all considering our government seeked to block Huawei routers from being used in telecom infrastructure back in 2012 [1], over some of the same national security concerns. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-usa-china-huawei-zte-idUSBRE8960NH20121008 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-usa-china-huawe...
- tomp 12y ago
  The difference being, of course, that US can in no way block the use of Chinese equipment, given that most of the hardware is actually manufactured in China (or neighboring countries).
jasonjei 12y ago
I wonder what operating system they'll use on their mobile devices. Can't use Android--made in the USA.
- jonathansizz 12y ago
  They can use a fork of AOSP, with all Google code removed. Which is what several large Chinese hardware companies are already doing.
cbhl 12y ago
I wonder what operating system they'll use on their desktop devices. Both Apple and Microsoft are excluded from the list. Does that mean everyone will be using Linux?
s_q_b 12y ago
More protectionism is not the answer. Restraints on global trade are probably the most harmful thing we do to ourselves as a species. Now I understand that national defense is paramount. Some restrictions for national defense may be necessary (and neither China nor the US has helped promote trust in each other's products for defense uses lately), but trade restrictions should only be used as a last resort. We often forget that we have been down this road before. The world on the eve of World War I looked far more like the world of today than the world of our parents. The entire globe was experiencing massively interconnected rapid economic growth, not just from industrialization, but from the speed and ease of global trade which the new technologies enabled. American ice was sold in India, India tea in Russia, German farm implements in Britain, and British everything everywhere. Then came first the Great War, and then the Great Depression. And with the Depression came every politician's favorite way to fight economic woes: keep out the foreigners. One restraint led to immediate retaliation by other nations, creating a frenetic negative feedback loop, until finally the open system collapsed in its entirety. And in its place we created a hidebound monstrosity, an incomprehensible series of trade regulations that were nearly impossible to navigate. Of course this protectionism only drove us deeper into the Depression, caused global output to plummet to historic lows, made the global economic engine seize like an un-oiled V8, and threw lit thermite into the already smoldering tinderbox of militant nationalism. It took two World Wars, a global standoff that threatened to consume all of civilization in nuclear holocaust, and most of a century to get back to where we started. Let's not throw away those hard-won gains over international intrigue. Trillions of dollars, and the lives they support, are at stake here. Free trade is good. Full stop. It builds massive wealth through compounding growth. It pulls people out of dire poverty. And it stops wars. To step away from it now, just as we enter a truly globalized world, would be the single largest self-inflicted wound to the global economy since the collapse of Rome.
- electic 12y ago
  Honestly, I think their concerns are legitimate. They want to make sure the components and software they use won't spy on them. Welcome to 2014 and beyond.
  - s_q_b 12y ago
xkiwi 12y ago
#1>Obama bans wind-farm purchases by Chinese company http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/28/news/economy/obama-china-wind-farm/ http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/28/news/economy/obama-china-win... #2>Huawei, ZTE Banned From Selling to U.S. Government http://techonomy.com/2013/04/huawei-zte-banned-from-selling-to-u-s-government/ http://techonomy.com/2013/04/huawei-zte-banned-from-selling-... #3>Obama Imposes Tariffs On Chinese Tires http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/obama-imposes-tariffs-on-_n_284271.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/obama-imposes-tarif... #4>Chinese exclusion policy of NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exclusion_policy_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exclusion_policy_of_NAS... #5>Obama BANS U.S. government from buying Chinese-made computer technology over cyber-attack fears http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300518/Obama-BANS-U-S-government-buying-Chinese-technology-cyber-attack-fears.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300518/Obama-BANS-U... What was the news again?
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  The news is that China is imposing additional import restrictions on US technology. The fact that the US also does this – something we're all aware of – doesn't change the fact that this is interesting news!

58 points by wfjackson 12y ago

_djo_ 12y ago

I wonder if this isn't also an attempt to force Apple to give China access to the iOS and OS X source code. Similar tactics were used in the past to force Microsoft to give the Chinese government access to Windows source code through the China Information Technology Security Certification Center (CNITSEC) Source Code Review Lab. The US government has accused China of abusing CNITSEC's access to Windows to develop zero-day exploits for offensive use, so if that's true there's an ulterior motive there as well. That's over and above the article's claim that the Chinese government wants to reduce the number of American tech firms' products in official Chinese government use.

iqihs 12y ago
Not very familiar with OS programming, but what's stopping them from accessing the source code right now?
- pmjordan 12y ago
  Large parts of OSX userspace (Frameworks, daemons and pretty much all the system applications) and some of the kernel are closed source. Almost all of iOS is closed.
- smoorman1024 12y ago
  The iOS/OSX source code is proprietary to Apple. You wouldn't be able to see it unless you worked at Apple and had proper access.
- Telomer 12y ago
  It's the difference between open source and closed source. Closed source programs, like osx and windows only release their compiled versions.
- izzydata 12y ago
  Because like any program it is already compiled and they only have the executable to run. In its current state it is a bunch of machine code. They would have to reverse engineer it which is basically impossible across an entire operating system.

taylodl 12y ago

A country the size of China with the technical expertise available to them can create an open stack that they can manage and control. They already have several hardware manufacturers in their territory to make any hardware they may need. I honestly don't see why they would ever have been buying Apple and Microsoft products in the first place, and I'm an American.

edpichler 12y ago
Apple is good, and it's already being assembled in China.
JonFish85 12y ago
Couple thoughts.... An open stack would be a nightmare for any bureaucratic government to design and control/manage. And essentially they'd be playing catch-up to Apple/Google/whatever designs in the first place. On top of that, at least in my experience, products made in China by Chinese companies are either knock-offs of western products, made cheaply, or they are just crappy products in general. Sure, the parts can be fabricated, but it's the product design that is sorely lacking. Again, this is anecdotal, so your mileage may vary.
- vetinari 12y ago
  China can provide goods at many quality levels. But if Wallmart or other company purchases cheap crap, they get cheap crap, no wonders about it. That does not mean that you cannot purchase quality Chinese goods. It is in no way limited to China - entire Asia works like this.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    This is exactly right, and I don't think enough businesses appreciate it. The notion that you can 'save money by going to China' is somewhat of a misnomer, you can get a product built at a lower price but if that cost is lower than what it costs to build in the acceptable level of quality, you will get a low quality part. What I found interesting in the one time I was part of a negotiation with a Chinese manufacturer (Quanta at the time) they really would build the gadget we needed for what ever price we asked for, except they knew that building it for less than $X would mean (probably unacceptable) corners would be cut. And perhaps more interestingly they knew many of the corners they would cut to get to the price, so when contract language was added/proposed that cut off that shortcut it forced a revisit to the price negotiations. It really was you get exactly what you pay for, but more importantly if you didn't understand what you were paying for then you ran the risk of being surprised at what you got. One of those times where I saw how little I would be able to really know about the ins and outs of that process without dedicating a lot of time and running a lot of projects through that channel.

drderidder 12y ago

Not too surprising. I'd expect the fallout and economic impact of mass surveillance to unfold over several years, with a gradual move away from US-based technology companies, including SaaS & PaaS, in favour of open source software and self-hosted solutions.

pkorzeniewski 12y ago
I wonder if there will be a comeback of self-hosted software in the near future just for the security and surveillance reasons, especially in business environment. There was the whole Cloud craze not so long ago, where many companies were pushing all their data outside local infrastructure, but I wonder if this is a good move in the long-term. SaaS has many advantages over "classic" solutions, but security and reliability was always a weak point and it may be a major factor against it in the future.

Glide 12y ago

Can anyone chime in and help the rest of us understand the relationship between business and government in China? I can't help but think this is more of a move to help China's internal industries, but it's hard to say without understanding the political climate.

threeseed 12y ago
It's not dissimilar to every country really. Critical or large businesses e.g. energy, telecommunications always have an unusually close and unfettered relationship with government. In China it would likely be closer similar to say Russia. Australia recently banned the use of Chinese equipment from our national broadband rollout for national security reasons so this isn't an unprecedented move.
- RockyMcNuts 12y ago
  Well, top government officials have big ownership interests in national champions; companies have party secretaries on site who can pull rank on management; trying to compete against companies with ties to government is generally going to be quite difficult...not exactly like every country. The iPhone is a luxury product in big demand, and being out of favor with the government will make it in even greater demand. The people targeted by Apple like their bling, people buy the foreign product because it's higher status and more trusted than the local product; in fact they'll go to Hong Kong to buy foreign products because they're afraid the one they buy locally will be counterfeit or crappy localized version. People trust Apple more than they trust the government or the Xiaomi knockoff.
eliteraspberrie 12y ago
In China, strategic industries like energy, steel, and telecommunications are state controlled. Huawei, for example, is a "national champion," which means it receives subsidies, foreign employees cannot own shares, the Party appoints an anonymous board to manage the company's management, and so on.

venomsnake 12y ago

Not unexpected. Apple have more control over unrooted iphone (or even rooted) than the owner.

threeseed 12y ago
And how is that different from every piece of electronic equipment ever made ? The creators of the OS always have more control over how the phone works than the owner. iOS is more locked down than Android (no access to root FS) but I would argue that 99% of users don't know the difference and just blindly install software from third parties.
- lmm 12y ago
  99% of users? Maybe. But government employees with employer-provided devices often find those devices a bit locked-down by their employer.

quackerhacker 12y ago

This isn't surprising at all considering our government seeked to block Huawei routers from being used in telecom infrastructure back in 2012 [1], over some of the same national security concerns. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-usa-china-huawei-zte-idUSBRE8960NH20121008 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-usa-china-huawe...

tomp 12y ago
The difference being, of course, that US can in no way block the use of Chinese equipment, given that most of the hardware is actually manufactured in China (or neighboring countries).

jasonjei 12y ago

I wonder what operating system they'll use on their mobile devices. Can't use Android--made in the USA.

jonathansizz 12y ago
They can use a fork of AOSP, with all Google code removed. Which is what several large Chinese hardware companies are already doing.

cbhl 12y ago

I wonder what operating system they'll use on their desktop devices. Both Apple and Microsoft are excluded from the list. Does that mean everyone will be using Linux?

s_q_b 12y ago

More protectionism is not the answer. Restraints on global trade are probably the most harmful thing we do to ourselves as a species. Now I understand that national defense is paramount. Some restrictions for national defense may be necessary (and neither China nor the US has helped promote trust in each other's products for defense uses lately), but trade restrictions should only be used as a last resort. We often forget that we have been down this road before. The world on the eve of World War I looked far more like the world of today than the world of our parents. The entire globe was experiencing massively interconnected rapid economic growth, not just from industrialization, but from the speed and ease of global trade which the new technologies enabled. American ice was sold in India, India tea in Russia, German farm implements in Britain, and British everything everywhere. Then came first the Great War, and then the Great Depression. And with the Depression came every politician's favorite way to fight economic woes: keep out the foreigners. One restraint led to immediate retaliation by other nations, creating a frenetic negative feedback loop, until finally the open system collapsed in its entirety. And in its place we created a hidebound monstrosity, an incomprehensible series of trade regulations that were nearly impossible to navigate. Of course this protectionism only drove us deeper into the Depression, caused global output to plummet to historic lows, made the global economic engine seize like an un-oiled V8, and threw lit thermite into the already smoldering tinderbox of militant nationalism. It took two World Wars, a global standoff that threatened to consume all of civilization in nuclear holocaust, and most of a century to get back to where we started. Let's not throw away those hard-won gains over international intrigue. Trillions of dollars, and the lives they support, are at stake here. Free trade is good. Full stop. It builds massive wealth through compounding growth. It pulls people out of dire poverty. And it stops wars. To step away from it now, just as we enter a truly globalized world, would be the single largest self-inflicted wound to the global economy since the collapse of Rome.

electic 12y ago
Honestly, I think their concerns are legitimate. They want to make sure the components and software they use won't spy on them. Welcome to 2014 and beyond.
- s_q_b 12y ago

xkiwi 12y ago

#1>Obama bans wind-farm purchases by Chinese company http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/28/news/economy/obama-china-wind-farm/ http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/28/news/economy/obama-china-win... #2>Huawei, ZTE Banned From Selling to U.S. Government http://techonomy.com/2013/04/huawei-zte-banned-from-selling-to-u-s-government/ http://techonomy.com/2013/04/huawei-zte-banned-from-selling-... #3>Obama Imposes Tariffs On Chinese Tires http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/obama-imposes-tariffs-on-_n_284271.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/obama-imposes-tarif... #4>Chinese exclusion policy of NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exclusion_policy_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exclusion_policy_of_NAS... #5>Obama BANS U.S. government from buying Chinese-made computer technology over cyber-attack fears http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300518/Obama-BANS-U-S-government-buying-Chinese-technology-cyber-attack-fears.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300518/Obama-BANS-U... What was the news again?

matthewmacleod 12y ago
The news is that China is imposing additional import restrictions on US technology. The fact that the US also does this – something we're all aware of – doesn't change the fact that this is interesting news!