Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown
8 replies, posted
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-china-trade.html
WASHINGTON — The cyberattack on the Marriott hotel chain that collected passport information or other personal details of roughly 500 million guests was part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering effort that hacked health insurers, other hotels and the security clearance files of millions more Americans, according to two people briefed on the preliminary results of the investigation.
The hackers are suspected of working on behalf of the Ministry of State Security. The discovery comes as the Trump administration plans a series of actions targeting China’s trade, cyber and economic policies.
The Justice Department is preparing to announce new indictments against Chinese hackers working for the intelligence and military services, according to four government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Trump administration also plans to declassify intelligence to reveal concerted efforts by Chinese agents, dating to 2014 or earlier, to build a database containing names of executives and American government officials with security clearances.
See, state sponsored cyber attacks are a perfectly legitimate reason to embargo China, compared to, lets say, a perceived lack of quality of your own country's "greatness."
Also a good reason to keep chuncks of high-tech manufacturing (silicon fab, packaging, PnP) in the western world.
Unfortunately people won’t be willing to pay the cost for such manufacturing at western labor rates. Electronic devices would be so much more expensive if manufactured here.
Ehh, they would be more expensive, but with the rising cost of living in China, at this point I honestly don’t think the difference would be that great. Just look at Motorola’s stint at American manufacturing, it wasn’t like there prices skyrocketed. At this point I would say the reason why Chinese manufacturing is strong is because they have the expertise and quick access to everything you need, and the plants are already there. If the only thing that really mattered were the hourly wages, China would be losing to India at this point.
Basically all Intel, and AMD processors are fabbed in the US (or a US "friendly" country, Germany, Isreal, Ireland) - the issue is test/packaging/assembly.
PnP and packaging could be done in the US with machinery, (PnP is basically totally automated) for really not a particular added cost (at least not long-term, and especially considering shipping and duties).
I'd also like to see more assembly brought over, totally automated of course. I'd like to see this be done in areas with high usage of green energy (solar, wind, nuclear) as a bonus, to offset the coal power China still uses for this production.
Overall, I'd really like to see manufacturing brought back to the US, but clean, and automated production, not the tantamount to slavery shit going on in China. This is the country that went to the fucking moon, if anybody can do it, we can.
There's a huge amount of behind the scenes evidence making the case for a large government incentivised program to bring a lot of these industries back, not just in silicone manufacturing. China and Asia in general only got them through cheap labor (not nearly as big a requirement now) and massive subsidies
Aren't a sizeable amount of semiconductor fabs and assemblies manufactured more in Taiwan instead of mainland China? Someone correct me, but generally speaking Taiwan is leagues friendlier to the US and mostly immune to the PRC's influence.
