I used to work on the server-side stuff for telecom devices. We designed hardware that went into customer homes, but only downloaded the (encrypted) firmware upon home activation as otherwise the Chinese manufacturers would have ripped us off and sold them to telecom companies without our cut.

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.

OMG, that is so so so so brilliant! I'm going to go tell my boss right now that the suppliers better suite up, otherwise we are going right to their more expensive, less experienced vendor and will delay our product launch for a year....and likely still suffer the same problem. Those Chinese vendors better shape up or we're going to really teach them a lesson by driving ourself out of business right quick!

Just imagine for a second if someone was advocating on HN for the use of a web framework that has knowingly allowed itself to be compromised to steal passwords because it was cheaper to use.

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.

You mean like couple of well known platforms that let you reach their users and in the meantime steal, mine and monetize user information?

So no more using Intel?

Leaving an abusive relationship tends to be scary, especially if the victim is convinced that the abuser is the least bad. Doesn't mean the thought of ending that relationship should be dismissed out of hand.

You can be as sarcastic as you want, but these stories are absolutely indicative of a much larger problem. It might be beyond the capacity of one company to fix, but in the aggregate they represent a serious political and economic threat and need to be dealt with one way or another. Preferably by literally anyone other than Donald Trump.

Speaking as someone who is _not_ a citizen of the USA and is well aware of his issues, he seems to be first US President who actually appears to have the guts to do something about it. I doubt an establishment politician would ever have imposed tariffs on 200 billion dollars of China imports.

If he stuck to just China I would agree. But by trying to change up numerous different agreements, he lost the goodwill needed to have a collective crackdown on China. Even if he is the first to be willing to pick these sort of battles in a long while, he has a new issue of picking too many battles. Seems like a Goldilocks problem.

The tariffs aren’t the problem, it’s the stupidity of going it alone and alienating allies that could have turned the thumbscrews with you on China to get them to really capitulate.