Sunday Not-So-Funnies

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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.

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