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Chinese Men Indicted in Theft of Code from U.S. Tech Companies
- companyhen 11y agoWas this a "brain rape"?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- shit_parade2 11y agoI wonder if the Chinese will begin arresting American citizens who visit for conferences.
- greeneggs 11y agoLike these cases? "An American geologist who was imprisoned for more than seven years on a vague charge of “illegally procuring state secrets” has been deported by China and arrived home in Houston on Friday..." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/world/asia/china-deports-american-jailed-on-spy-charges.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/world/asia/china-deports-a... "An American automotive engineer has been detained by the Chinese police for more than a year on charges of violating trade secrets, according to United States officials..." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/world/asia/18detain.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/world/asia/18detain.html
- justicezyx 11y agoHow the words manipulate the perception: "Chinese Men Indicted in Theft of Code from U.S. Tech Companies" vs "An American geologist who was imprisoned for more than seven years on a vague charge of “illegally procuring state secrets” "An American automotive engineer has been detained by the Chinese police for more than a year on charges of violating trade secrets, according to United States officials..."
- virtuabhi 11y agoThis is just a group of people deciding to steal intellectual property. Here is the more organized attack, originating in China, in which intellectual property of multiple companies (including Google) was stolen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
- wavefunction 11y agoProbably, but then these people should face punitive action, further infringement prohibited, and restitution made to the owners of the intellectual property then? If that's all this is...
- pquerna 11y agoIt seems this is pretty clear case of attributable theft -- it's good that it is being prosecuted. The challenges are with attribution though, in many electronic-only attacks, it "could be" anyone. Companies like CrowdStrike have done some work to attribute PLA & China in some attacks: http://blog.crowdstrike.com/hat-tribution-pla-unit-61486/ http://blog.crowdstrike.com/hat-tribution-pla-unit-61486/ http://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/assets/4589853/crowdstrike-intelligence-report-putter-panda.original.pdf http://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/assets/4589853/crowdstrike-intellige... But largely APT attacks are happening without repercussion, probably by many countries, including the US, and as a "defender" against many of these, it is terrible. The worst part is, I don't see it changing: Nothing right now is driving State-Actors to stop doing whatever they want against corporations.
- nshung 11y agoI think China needs to stop these activities if she wants to be respected internationally. In January this year, two Chinese professors in Norway got kicked out from a Norwegian university because Norway was also concerned with spying activities from China. [1] I think China economy has come to a point that it needs innovation to move forward. Obviously, stealing intellectual properties from other countries is not the best way to go here. 1. http://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/forskere-ved-uia-utvist-av-norge-1.12177709 http://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/forskere-ved-uia-utvist-av-norge...
- therobot24 11y agoWas this sponsored by the chinese government though? >> They took the technology back to Tianjin University, created a joint venture company with the university to produce the chips, and soon were selling them to both the Chinese military and to commercial customers. They sold chips to the government, but for all we know the gov is just another customer.
- nshung 11y agoPST(Norwegian M15) seems to believe so! But, as in any other case like this, they rarely comment.
- Zikes 11y agoIf the Chinese government knew it could get the same vital technologies at greatly reduced costs while growing its own economy, don't you think they would sponsor this sort of activity?
- meatysnapper 11y agoI pity the fool who steals the software written anywhere I've worked. It's hard enough to maintain for those of us who wrote it or rebuilt it. The only thing this would be good for is breaking into systems! EDIT: Also, one of the suspicions is that the next big revelation with the NSA surveillance fiasco is mass spying on foreign businesses for the benefit of our business. Who would look silly then?
- gertef 11y agothat revelation is decades late: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI see the Times playing up the nationalistic components but the truth is that people go to companies, learn stuff, and start new companies doing the same thing only better all the time. It is perhaps even more rampant in California with its employee protection laws but it isn't unusual anywhere in the US. The question I have is that if several students of a prominent professor at Harvard go to work at Intel and AMD as electrical engineers, and then later get together to form their own company, still in the US, to make a really energy efficient x86 equivalent processor, is that economic espionage or innovation? Generally we've held it to be the latter. And then there is the number of students getting advanced degrees in the US from really bright professors, but are unable to get a Visa to actually work in the US? It is hard for me to be outraged here.
- snissn 11y agoThanks for very eloquently expressing my reaction to the article!
- spcoll 11y agoIt does sound like witch hunting with a McCarthyist nationalistic vibe. Overall the brain drain from China to the US has been working to the benefit of the US, for years. I expect we will more and more such propaganda pieces in the NYT and elsewhere, as China is being increasingly positioned as "the Adversary".
- jtzhou 11y agoYes. Chinese Americans earn on average 30% more than other U.S. adults. http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/asian-americans-lead-all-others-in-household-income/ http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/asian-americans-lead... While regrettable, the loss of some technology does not compensate for all of the advantages to the States of highly skilled immigrants from China. The top ranked comments on NYTimes are ignorant and do not describe the full picture.
- meric 11y agoParents of Chinese Americans would have had to have been well-off almost by definition to afford sending their children to the U.S. It is true a lot of that wealth would have been spent or deflated due to living standard differences by the time they arrived, however the education they've previously attained as well as the mindset of trying to achieve a better future stays with them. The Chinese who bum around unemployed rorting government benefits and/or family generosity would not have come to the U.S. looking for a better future.
- aswanson 11y agoChina will never be ever to compete with the US in its current configuration. All it can do is copy and follow, as it's governmental central authority mandates. That continent will never be a significant threat...it will always be several steps behind...mimicking what has already worked.
- vardump 11y ago30 years ago they used to say exactly same about Japanese.
- brianobush 11y agoMaybe to some, but in my eyes they had an amazing amount of contribution to basic science and technology in EE - especially during the 80s.
- hebdo 11y agoYes. Also, people tend to forget that out world is actually a pretty old place. The history of the economic scene of the last 2000 years teaches us that there is plenty of space for changes. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_AD_to_2003_AD_Historical_Trends_in_global_distribution_of_GDP_China_India_Western_Europe_USA_Middle_East.png http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_AD_to_2003_AD_Histo...
- ken47 11y ago"According to the indictment, two of the professors began to apply for patents on some of the technology in the United States, beginning in 2010." It would seem difficult to steal and simultaneously patent an idea in the US. Am I misunderstanding the title or the article? Is the crime that they invented a patentable concept and then they tried to then take it back to another country that happens to have some tension with the US?
- intrasight 11y agoA lot of the comments here are more apt to the China of 10 years ago. Things have changed folks. China is now making huge investments in innovation science and engineering. Not yet on par with US in terms of quantity, and certainly not quality. But great progress is being made. We should take IP theft very seriously, but we should likewise recognize those Chinese researchers who are working diligently to improve things.
- dba7dba 11y agohuge investments in innovation science and engineering It takes YEARS for any meaningful return, no matter how huge the investments may be. Just my 2 cents. There's no denying rampant theft of IP by Chinese companies, even between the Chinese companies.
- lazaroclapp 11y agoSure, China has less strict IP laws and less strict enforcement, as well as possibly a government policy of looking the other way when they can acquire tech from abroad. But there is a huge difference between that and labeling those activities as state sponsored economic espionage in all cases. Morris Cohen giving the U.S.S.R the plans for the atomic bomb? Espionage. Two professors doing a startup in China with tech that was probably under NDA/copyright/patents of their former employer? Not espionage. Really, if this was all happening internally inside the U.S. it would probably be a civil lawsuit at most... and only news in Techcrunch, not NYT.
- o0-0o 11y agoThat sounds a lot like minimizing the issue here. I can't recall a single case where U.S. citizens stole Chinese high technology, brought it back to the U.S., started a company, and then sold it the U.S. government. That is what this is about - cut and dried.
- dba7dba 11y ago@ lazaroclapp I never mentioned state sanctioned theft of IP. You brought it up first.
- trhway 11y ago>According to the indictment, two of the professors began to apply for patents on some of the technology in the United States, beginning in 2010. pretty strange form of theft.
- tete 11y agoI also don't think that China can keep up with the advanced industrial espionage conducted by the US. http://www.bbc.com/news/25907502 http://www.bbc.com/news/25907502 https://news.vice.com/article/germany-accused-of-spying-on-france-and-engaging-in-industrial-espionage-on-behalf-of-nsa https://news.vice.com/article/germany-accused-of-spying-on-f... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...
- lstyls 11y agoI'm surprised nobody has pointed out yet that the headline is mistaken - no code was stolen in this incident. It was hardware designs that were stolen, as the first line of the article states: >> "The Obama administration on Tuesday announced the arrest of a Chinese professor and the indictment of five other Chinese citizens in what it contended was a decade-long scheme to steal microelectronics designs from Silicon Valley companies."
- gwern 11y agoHow do you know? Software is intimately involved in all parts of chip design - what are hardware description languages like Verilog or VHDL, and the chips written in them, but code? If they didn't steal code what did they steal?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rasz_pl 11y ago>The chip is popularly known as a filter, which is used for acoustics in mobile telephones; clueless NYT. Article is about microwave circuits, parts of PA. > while the parts are small, the market for them worldwide is worth well more than $1 billion a year. According to the charges, the men took the firms’ technology back to Tianjin University, created a joint venture company with the university to produce the chips and soon were selling them both to the Chinese military and to commercial customers. question is did they copy designs verbatim? or simply designed their own? If you want to know more about microwave design/R&D this episode of theamphour featuring Shahriar Shahramian(old bell labs/alcatel-lucent) is excellent http://www.theamphour.com/228-an-interview-with-shahriar-from-the-signal-path-quisquous-quivering-quadripole/ http://www.theamphour.com/228-an-interview-with-shahriar-fro...