The fact is, doing any kind of hardware production in China, you have to be aware Chineese have different value system and you would not be suited doing any business if you throw tantrum at any sign of apparent dishonesty (assuming the company was involved which they could not have been as they have been the ones damaged the most).
If the company does screw you (like replacing components for something cheaper) they typically will not be thinking they are doing anything wrong. They are just testing if you notice and if you do not they will say it makes no difference for you but saves them costs.
The way to work is then verify everything and politely point it out. If you notice they will correct apparent mistake.
And that sounds really reasonable, until you realize that pretty much all contract manufacturers in the Far East will source cheaper or off-spec components than those on the BOM if they can get away with it.
One of my friends supplied small widgets for a well known consumer electronics maker. He routinely gets widgets returned to him as defect for inspection, which then inevitably turn out to be clones of his widgets.
The only way to make sure that your product rolls of the product line as expected, is to have people on-site with continuous inspection (and pray that they're not the cousin of somebody who's on the other side.)
If you want the benefit of dirt cheap manufacturing, you need to have a system in place to deal with these practices.
Edit: But let’s not get away from the matter at hand. The issue wasn’t cheap components, it was full-on credit skimmers installed in yor hardware (IIRC). Should be easier to incentivize the conpany into halting those before they get shipped to you, no?
All of these things are extremely cost sensitive. Your suggestion that people don't consider using economics is simply wrong. If you can manufacture a million pieces for a few cent less per piece, and the only negative is having to paying a bunch of inspectors who are fixed cost, it's an easy choice.
Say their profit margin is 1%. If you offer to pay them a 1% higher price, you're offering to nearly double their profits on whatever they sell to you.
Admittedly, that only works if you are a sufficiently large portion of their business. If you're a tiny percentage, then it may take a lot more to motivate them if their other customers aren't willing to pay more.
Madness if you ask me but there we are.
IMO this is not indignation, it's supplier sourcing 101.
> If you want the benefit of dirt cheap manufacturing, you need to have a system in place to deal with these practices.
I will definitely agree that holding suppliers to standards regarding consistent output, unadulterated products, and conducting audits all make production much more expensive.
But if you're a device manufacturer, these sourcing controls are key to shipping quality products.
Sounds like the solution is not doing business with them and pushing for a ban on others doing business with them (since this largely has a socialized cost when things go wrong, such as individual people having their credit cards stolen).
So, realising they could copy our hardware, but didn't have our software, they responded by trying to hack my servers, multiple times, from the same IP they sent manufacturing data from. A quiet word with their management would stop it, and it'd start again a couple of days later.
These people have no shame, and if we are going to go for lowest cost at all times it is what manufacturers should expect to happen.
How about a compromise? If any of your customers are a victim of a crime because you continued to use a shady but cheap vendor after seeing them trying to slip past tampered hardware, your company is held fiscally and criminally responsible.
Again, I don't see why that matters. I understand the latter part, but if this is one employee without the knowledge of the company, then pushing it on them forces them to add checks, not you.
It's their responsibility to police for that. From the perspective of their business arrangement with you, it doesn't matter whether their left hand or right hand is evil; it's not your problem either way.
Is it really hard to find alternatives? Are they really cheaper than non-Chinese sources when you account for these inspection costs?
after the 1st device found, you should have contacted the manufacturer and said that you will start a department that has the capability of opening the device, inspecting and re-sealing in a way that it won't impact any guarantee the factory provides. If they denied this very sensible request, you had proof that it wasn't a isolated employee doing the hack.
I think that's the case. The EEV Blog guy did a teardown of and old one once and pointed out the numerous tamper-detection features that would clear the device if opened.
However, if I were the customer here, I'd tell the supplier that from that point forward they need to supply me free extra product with my orders, so I can do my own random destructive testing to look for implants. I order 100, they send me 105 for the price of 100.
Thinking about it more, what you are doing make sense also because tampering can happen with any supplier, irrespective of factory location, given how aggressively states are pushing for spying on each other and their people.
They don't pass the savings to you so they know very well what they're doing, just playing fool to see if it slips.
Two thoughts:
> they typically will not be thinking they are doing anything wrong. They are just testing if you notice and if you do not they will say it makes no difference for you but saves them costs.
This is how children behave. Still feels like you’re rewarding bad behavior. You’re enabling them.
I think it’s more that you’ve valued the low per unit price over having a healthy contract. Your vendor is incentivized to make all of their money off of externalities and your company think it’s cheaper to outwit them than to demand QC on their end. Whose brand will be sullied if you miss some of these units and a customer finds the spyware? Not theirs.
And second thought, shouldn’t serial numbers be coming off the line in ascending order? The kind of work they are doing would require taking parts off the line and putting them back later so odd lots of SNs are the ones you need to verify.
You could also be mandating how many boards are allowed or that the SNs go on early in the build process.
When you can't even trust that food is real, and when you have to bribe even low level provincial government employees (can you imagine needing to bribe DMW workers or even police?) - what else is an average person to do except to treat it as the norm in order to survive? Unless you're an elite, the only other option is to leave, and not everyone has that choice. Very little is considered wrong over there, aside from criticizing the powers that be; as long as it helps your clan. It doesn't help when Western companies and governments look the other way, as we see in past news stories and even the comments here.
I'm not condoning the behavior; just explaining.
From a naive Finnish perspective you could see American business culture as dishonest. People lie all the time and promise things that are false and you need massive amount of legalese or they fuck you over. When they say something, you can't trust it as much as you can trust a Finn (or Swede). American way is to lie to your face in pre-negotiation but then be truthful to the legally binding agreement. Germans or Belgians are more truthful beforehand and they stick to deals better without legal enforcement looming over them, but require more detailed written deals than Finns. Who is right? Should we punish Americans for their behavior or adopt their culture?
Of course not. You must understand that that the level of acceptable exaggeration, overpromise and bullshit and trickery is strictly culture dependent and relative. Someone is dishonest if they "lie this amount above average" in their cultural context. After you make an adjustment, you know how to get the truth.
Chinese manufacturers have the capability to stick to standards, take responsibility and deliver high quality stuff. It's just more dependent on personal relationship. Just placing an order has less trust as default. Either you develop "quanxi" with your suppliers or work trough some third party that understands both worlds. Third party understands what you need and knows how to get it from the Chinese suppliers because they have a relationship.
Chinese pay the cost that comes with their business culture. They can't network as fast as you can in open western cultures with more default trust between strangers.
Contrary to the impression your post gives, the EU has much more "sanctions" against food (esp. imports) than the US does, and is generally taxing much heavier and restricting many more things. Importing essentially any milk product into the EU is only possible on an exception basis. Trump has a LOT more work before extra sanctions in the US will become comparable to the EU ones.
What is often not said is that the EU not only has sanctions on its borders against food products, it actually has internal sanctions and regulations that are purely political in nature.
For example "champagne" in the EU can only be made within a particular region in France. Which leads to funny, in a sad way, consequences:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/15/eu-fears-in...
This applies to many products. Wines, cheeses, cakes, fruit, meat, potatoes, candy ... and is generally absolutely ridiculous:
https://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/Article/2014/11/13/Interac...
For your other part of your comment, I am unwilling to give a real answer. Obviously the US checks it's food quality. It's made different choices than the EU, famously the US allows hormone "enhanced" meat, but it does check food quality and safety. There are heavy penalties for breaking them.
Did you look at the map? It's nearly all things with a place name in the product name. For example, "Welsh Beef". Why is it reasonable for a consumer to buy Welsh Beef and for it to possibly have come from somewhere other than Wales?
It seems to me, more like generalising the concept of trademarks to place names rather than just company names and brand name.
Not all cultures are great. If you are claiming “all cultures are great”, then perhaps “great” has lost any useful meaning.
Discrimination, as the ability to discriminate features to identify useful pattens, is not *-ist; it’s a critical skill that is being sullied by some neo-intellectual BS that passes for “equality” or something.
The ability to identify patterns of behaviour prevalent to a class of suppliers and avoid them, rewarding other supplies — even from the same area of the world — who are better; even “great” perhaps, is a valuable skill...
But perhaps I’m wrong. They’re all great. Carry on.
It's the norm in the west to not conflate culture with race. But to think that this is the norm in the rest of the world is to project your value system on others.
If we define "a culture" as set of sociological customs, value systems, expected behaviours and stimuli/response criteria; and if we define "culture greatness" as such sociological customs, value systems, and behaviours that lead to specified and asserted goals;
than one can reasonably compare and contrast cultures in meeting (or even striving) to these goals, and thus discuss their greatness.
If forced at gunpoint to trust one person in my supply chain, I would instantly choose the Taiwanese-American in San Jose over the mainland-Chinese in Shenzhen, every time. Likewise, I think exactly the same Indian employee will be more productive if physically transplanted to Silicon Valley and surrounded by assimilated Indian-Americans than if set up in an office in Bangalore surrounded at all times by other Indians and Indian businesses. And equally likewise, I have noted a large difference in my own work productivity doing similar tasks under different employers, or even in different work groups under the same employer.
So it isn't even national culture, racial culture, or regional culture, but also corporate culture. Breaking news on the Obvious Channel: social apes found to be heavily influenced by their peers.
Ancestor post was obliquely referring to the oft-reported tendency of mainland-Chinese manufacturers to try to cheat their customers. They have been caught copying protected or trade-secret IP, counterfeiting, substituting cheaper out-of-spec parts, and inserting hidden hardware backdoors. Outside of China, engineering/construction companies tend to import Chinese subcontractors rather than use any local labor. That's all just PRC-Chinese business culture. If you pluck individual employees out of a Chinese firm, and hire them into a multinational based out of another country, they will be perfectly fine, aside from the slightly elevated possibility that PRC intelligence will aggressively recruit them as an asset to steal exploitable business secrets. If you can manage to pull everyone they care about out of the reach of the PRC, they will likely be a great investment for you.
Clearly, the national-political-business culture of mainland PRC China is hostile to businesses that have significant interests outside of China. The government there is racist, controlling, and mercantilist-protectionist, and the businesses with a physical presence have to fit in to that culture in order to exist, along with the traditional system of guanxi social capital. It makes them difficult to work with, but as long as the price is right, it's still worth it to try. You just don't give them access to any secrets, and make sure your QA department is full of no-nonsense hardasses. And as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, that means you may have to measure total mass and moment of inertia around multiple rotational axes in order to find any unauthorized modifications that might expose you to company-bankrupting liability in your business culture. You can't "trust, but verify"; you might just have to check every unit of every shipment.
As for culture culture--wushu martial arts, the action movies including it, silk, noodles, jadeite carvings, fine porcelain, traditional architecture, religions, herbalism, the woo-woo pseudo-religion attached to the medicine traditions, etc.--Chinese culture is indisputably great, especially considering that it's what's left after the PRC government tried to annihilate most of it as part of their revolution.
What measures a culture's greatness? How can this value be empirically deduced?
That's not to say that there is a such thing as single-dimension "greatness" metric. However, outlawing value judgments is going too far in the other direction. Of course, such things can be quite sensitive, and should be done thoughtfully.
the value of civic participation and honesty
trust
Whether you like what your supplier does or does not is of no concern. If couple of units can be detected and written off it is treated as cost and you move on to decide if it is still profitable and whether you can get better deal somewhere else.
You let you emotions rule and it just means you are not fit for the job.
I fail to see how that has anything to do with it. The company is responsible for the product, full stop. If they can't stop their employees from tampering with the product, that's entirely their fault.
I can't believe the parent comment is so brazen. It makes me physically sick.
https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-sec...
But it doesn't stop with the cards. ATMs, Tax Fraud, ... almost all businesses within banks have to deal with fraud and there is some threshold that they just allow to happen.
Now show me alternatives when most consumer grade electronic parts are fully or partially made in China.
The product is different, but the problems are the same.
* They drop changes and problems at the last minute, so you're over a barrel with your customers.
* Relationships take months, maybe years to build. Switching suppliers is a long and costly exercise.
* Often suppliers themselves are in communication, so your attempt to build a new relationship is scuppered by your current (corrupted) supplier before you've got far.
* The new supplier will 100% play the same games.
* Suppliers/factories are often expert at these games - they're not idiots, their bread and butter is manipulating managers and big companies into corners and fleecing them along the way.
* Large suppliers often have strong local/regional government connections. Once you start causing serious problems, they'll have no trouble causing massive, massive problems for your business.
* Are you going to admit to your customers and bosses that your products were faulty and you knew?
It's a poisoned chalice. Companies want low cost manufacturing, and sometimes China is the only place a product can be manufactured competitively. But this kind of behavior is standard for Chinese companies.
If you can't answer that with a yes, maybe you don't have the backbone to work in anything critical.
When you discover a fault in something, particularly a fault that might hurt someone, you have a moral obligation to speak up. To do otherwise is cowardice.
Failure to speak up when we see shit is how stuff like the VW emissions gate happen, and also why security professionals can make a career out of ferreting out your mistakes and engaging in responsible disclosure.
All this tells me is that Made in the USA is more valuable than I once believed.
The book I referenced included a number of instances where factories actively undermined individuals so that they had very little choice than to either go along with the situation, or press the ‘nuclear’ button and scupper the entire arrangement, including their own livelihood and career. That’s a tough choice for people to make.
Some amount of financial theft happens to random consumers who don't know where it came from and this stolen money is paid in bribes to employees as a subsidy to their low wage.
As a result this immoral company externalizes aspects of their cost structure to greater society.
So now he needs to make a new test. Ow that that is out of the bag
No wonder China keeps screwing with you guys. You aren't supposed to eat that cost! Write a PO with tons of fine print that says "We will disassembly units at random for compliance inspection. Non compliant products will be returned at the suppliers expense." And then add a clause that says ">3 non-compliance events in under # months will result in the entire PO (10 or 20 units) being returned and all contracts cancelled."
I cannot believe you are getting screwed by a company you choose to do business with and yet you eat cost to ensure they aren't screwing you. Just get a new supplier! Do on-site inspections at their facility. This is nuts.