Impressive choice of words!
When Germany was trying to catch up to the industrialised UK, they send business people to the UK to copy the layout of factory floors to reimplement them at home. For the longest time, Japan only allowed trade under restrictive conditions to maximise exposure to foreign technologies while minimising the impact of foreigners in Japan. It's a story as old as history and I honestly don't get why people are upset about it.
It's even beneficial for the ecosystem overall because it helps transmitting knowledge and technology from advanced to disadvantaged regions, which in turn accelerates production and development.
Source: http://freakonomics.com/2012/04/02/copying-is-not-theft/
If I buy a candy bar at the store for $0.99 and then you steal it, now you have it and I don't. I'm out $0.99 of value and you stole $0.99 of value.
But what if you steal the candy bar directly from the store? You got $0.99 of value, but the store didn't pay $0.99 for that candy bar; they may have only paid $0.40. What you actually stole from them was two things: $0.40 of inventory and $0.59 of foregone revenue.
Even if you drop $0.40 on the counter as you walk out the door, it would still be considered a theft because the store gets to decide what their retail prices are, not you. You're still stealing $0.59 of foregone revenue.
IP products essentially have an "inventory" cost near zero. Yet, if you take a song or a trade secret without paying for it, you're still taking their foregone revenue. Just like dropping $0.40 on the counter for a $0.99 candy bar, you're dropping $0.00 on the counter for a $0.99 song or $1 million trade secret. Reimbursing someone's inventory cost (even if it's $0.00) does not mean there is no theft occurring.
While the IP itself is non-rival, the revenue from each sale is rival; that is, if you acquire my IP via a pirated copy then I still have my IP, but I don't have the revenue from selling you my IP.
Yes, by leaving $0.40, I would be stealing $0.59 of foregone revenue, but that is because the shop doesn't have that candy bar anymore and can't sell it. In case of IP, even if I pirate it, you can still sell it to other people.
Of course you probably can't sell it to me anymore and that may be lost revenue, but it depends if I would be actually willing and able to buy that IP otherwise. And of course it may cause more competition to appear, which will negatively affect your business.
Yes, this is the point.
> but it depends if I would be actually willing and able to buy that IP otherwise
I'm not entitled to your money, of course, but in exactly the same way, you're not entitled to my IP (or my candy bar).
> In case of IP, even if I pirate it, you can still sell it to other people.
If everyone followed your logic, no I couldn't.
Additionally it's not inventory because it is not finite. There is a distinction made by GAAP regarding valuation of tangible vs intangible assets because it is much more complex process to valuate intangible assets such as ip.
> it is much more complex process to valuate intangible assets such as ip.
Please note that my argument above assigns a value of $0.00 to the IP itself.
Even at that valuation, you can still commit theft by robbing me of the opportunity to use that IP to generate revenue. By analogy: when you steal a TV, you are charged on the retail price of the TV (the amount you should have paid for it), not the wholesale price (the amount the store paid for it).
Any competitor could limit your opportunity by releasing a functionally similar non infringing product. Would you choose the word 'robbing' in that circumstance?
One would have to use your ip to create a competing product before it would even be copyright infringement, and it still wouldn't be theft since you cannot steal somthing intangible since by definition it only exists as an abstraction which is not the same as zero valued tangible inventory.
As an exercise: walk into Best Buy and pick up a $1,000 TV. On the way out, hand the cashier a check for the wholesale price of that TV. Have you just committed theft? And if so, what specifically have you stolen? You haven't deprived them of the TV itself, since you reimbursed them fully for that.
I guess my point is that my point is that ip is a liscense to manufacture and/or distribute rather than a total monopoly on the idea or demand for the product.
As far as taking externalities into account: If someone doesn't behave to be "carbon-neutral" are they stealing from everyone?
Furthermore, the position you are defending is presupposing the ontological position that IP is Property. (Which might not hold in other cultures/countries, specially a Socialist Country with Chinese Characteristics™)
Patent infringement isn't theft and winging it and saying otherwise without a good basis won't convince anyone.
And the key point may be that the ones being 'stolen from' even allow it because the benefit they get from opening up to new markets usually exceeds the risk of having some of your IP copied.
It's not like the traders who ventured to Japan turned around just because they knew that the Japanese would try to catch up by any means, or that the British stopped trading with Germany. (Or that Apple stops to sell or build things in China)
How are they planning to use new laptops that are powered via usb-c?
Secrets are kept tight for any company with any tech relating to the latest nodes <10nm. It just so happens that IBM has been working on sub-10nm processes for a long time, so they have a lot of secrets to keep, hence I am not surprised by the article heading.
The keyboard and mouse were connected to a dock.
On the OS level only HID devices were allowed via USB you could bypass this if you had admin rights but it would leave a trail.
The idea behind these like most other security controls is to prevent accidental leakage and to make it difficult enough that intentional leakage would likely be detecte on time.
A move I've seen being put in place at several locations, is removing local admin rights from all users. Those with advanced needs, like developers, gets a VM which is limited to a specific VLAN, with no access to the production environments.
The principle is sound, implementation is ... difficult, to say the least.
With a few exceptions it's much easier to either poach your competitors or simply buy them outright which is why "corporate espionage" is mainly employed by nation states these days that need to catch up. It's also important to note that stealing a design isn't that useful these days since you are too far gone what would be more important especially in the semi industry is to know the characteristics of a specific design or process in order to be able to preemptively position your offerings to compete without giving up any unnecessary ground.
In a restricted environment you will have several monitoring agents that track and enforce system integrity.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/sec...
Example of an actual implementation in the wild: https://uit.stanford.edu/service/paw
The only machines that can actually SSH into prod at least have screen-session-recording software, perhaps are kept in a separate room, with a policy of two staff present at all times. The general idea is that the closer you actually get to being able to bypass the checks and controls, the more attention you bring to yourself and your errand.
Yes, it can't be Git and Puppet all the way down, at some point someone will necessarily have access to do something as root on the server that hosts the Git repo that Puppet runs from. But instead of that being every dev on every laptop anywhere in the world, you can make sure it's a very small group of people, from a small number of workstations.
This is difficult and requires a substantial and very competent team to implement correctly.
Of course that's enough to run malware. Just inject Win+R, cmd, enter, <your shell code here>
On restricted workstations even if you can run command prompt which isn’t guaranteed it won’t lead to anything.
The usb port restriction is absolutely true for laptops, but colo desktops probably do not have this restriction, or just a more lax restriction. Also, its not true for all laptops of the company, but usb access does require explicit permissions and a new-issue laptop, so they do have a list of people who have riskier laptops, and may need to be issued a different travel laptop vs engineering laptop.
The laptop's epoxied ports likely prevent distracted traveling workers from having their laptops hacked with usb-keys inserted when they aren't looking.
You cannot access anything besides the power button.
(Edit: Haven't --> Can't)
A docking station usually has a lot more than just USB ports. Mine has three monitor connections, more USB ports than the laptop itself, a power connection, and an RJ-45 jack. One of the benefits is the expanded number of connectors. Another benefit is that I don't have to unplug half a dozen items to take the laptop with me; I just hit the eject button and pick the laptop up. In the same way, reconnecting all that stuff is achieved by just plopping the laptop onto the dock.
Best of both worlds: Portability of the laptop itself, and the easy expansion of the laptop's capabilities in situations where the expansion is useful (e.g. somewhere that I can keep a bunch of big monitors, and would benefit from a non-mobile work area).
You could unlock it, plug in USB, monitors, ethernet, etc. route the cables out through a slot and then lock it. You couldn't reach the the different ports and sockets when it was locked. It was all relatively stout too.
Interestingly, they did have internet in the building but you had to have management permission and go to the security office to access it. If you wanted to download something, it was a fairly involved procedure. They were paranoid about people stealing their stuff and then also very paranoid about misappropriating something they shouldn't and creating legal problems in Europe or North America. They didn't seem to be all that concerned about stealing other people's IT but they wanted to control everything such that it didn't contaminate anything they wanted to sell where it mattered.
I nearly created a situation when I pulled out my phone to take a picture of an "engrish" sign they had on the wall.
It'll be interesting to see how the security culture in the US changes or doesn't, a lot of younger developers would be put off if you attempted to somehow restrict their access to the internet from work computers or restricted your ability to plug a phone or some arbitrary device in for charging of whatever. At every job I've had this century it has been fairly trivial to download nearly all of their source code and take it home if you wanted to. Trying to take the politics out of it, we're very much engaged in a cyber cold war with a number of nations that absolutely want to take our secrets; I won't speculate on the real impact but the Russians did meddle in our election.
Well sure. I think the idea is to prevent mistakes and people just randomly plugging usb sticks they get from conferences as gifts or when they work from home. People will forget and do that anyway even if it is the rule.
When someone start disassembling the laptop or runs around with a screw driver trying to get the epoxy out of the ports, it would a bit hard to claim it was an accidental mistake. In that case, those people can probably find a way to exfiltrate data or to infect the system without the aid of USB keys.
Or just monitor connected USB devices and shutdown if something unapproved is installed, a la USBKill.
USB disconnect disabling whole USB host is trivial to code. You would disable on disconnect instead of whitelisting as there can be USB host bugs. Add a boot password so that only admin can start the machine...
Plus the are solutions where drivers are also put in a VM to further reduce attack surface.
The Renminbi is very difficult to convert.
Yes.
I live and work in China and move far than that a year. Also the NZ / Australian property markets are both in a bubble caused by Chinese cash investment by wealthy individuals, 100k CNY won't buy anything.
100k CNY is only 15k USD.
That means many current day laptops can't be charged.
Semiconductor technology is one of the areas of global-technological competition which surely benefit from secrecy. For example, several years ago one of the c-level executives at this specific OEM was caught taking pictures inside of one of their customer's facility. Only the engineering staff from that oem is allowed inside those facilities now, and only for maintenence activity.
It's a very secret industry, and getting even tighter now since China has been blocked from acquiring the latest semiconductor technology. China has so far invested over $40 billion in boosting their chip-making abilities, to acquire capital, IP, and knowledge-workers. Given their history of borrowing technology from other countries without attribution, if I were at the head of a semiconductor related company, I would clamp down on the secrets ahead of the danger.