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Sunday Not-So-Funnies

by Vanderleun on November 24, 2019

Manufacturing In Elbonia – Dilbert Comic Strip on 2019-11-24 | Dilbert by Scott Adams

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Rob November 25, 2019, 5:23 AM

And that is why the company I worked for never ever would have circuit cards fabricated or assembled in China. It’s a horrible regime, true, and they just end up stealing your IP. Don’t make it easier for them by sending them your design files.

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John the River November 25, 2019, 2:05 PM

My former position was as a telecom engineer, my primary product line was Nortel Networks. This is what China did to them.
Whenever us mere users or customers wanted to log in to get updates or new software; we had to use a user/password combination that had to be changed every thirty days. The new password had to be 12 digits and could not contain any sequence from the old password. Last, it took an hour or two for the new password to be active on the system. That was us ground pounders.

The executives of Nortel (we came to find out) didn’t put up with that. This was discovered many years after that company went belly up. Thanks to China! The Nortel exec’s traveled often to the Middle Kingdom and were wined and dined, leaving their laptop computers in their rooms. Chinese government agents entered those rooms, found them embarrassingly easy to hack having either only four digit passwords or being left open and unlocked on the desk. With the information on the laptops their got entry into the home office mainframes and then loaded spyware and worms that would spread throughout the entire companies computer network.
This is how China got access to all of Nortel Networks crown jewels and subsequently the market in China for Nortels products dried up. The Chinese could make their own Nortel tech and in fact took over much of Nortels worldwide business.

After bankruptcy the mainframes and other computers were sold off and many of the new owners (on the whole a lot smarter than the equipments former owners) discovered all the systems were hopelessly compromised by spyware and worms. They junked a lot of it.

Give them hell, Donald!

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Vanderleun November 25, 2019, 5:35 PM

That’s a chilling tale, John. Not just for the rapaciousness of the Chinese but for the cluelessness of the execs. Heads for pikes.

Link

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Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020

My Back Pages

Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host

“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”

A Wicker Basket

Comes the time when it’s later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter—

Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes—

So that’s you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know—

Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz—

And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we’re gone.
She turns me on—

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it—

Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it

in my wicker basket.

— BY ROBERT CREELEY