The trade war -- if done right -- would supposedly force China to make some real concessions if they want the trade war to end. For instance, they almost agreed to end the forced tech transfers from US to Chinese companies, but then they changed their minds, which seems to be what actually prompted the recent tariff raise to 25%.

I understand not "making the economic situation worse", but sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. Obama had "good relationship with China" and China trampled all over American companies because of it, pretty much making up whatever demands they wanted if those companies wanted to do business there. Plus, even before the trade war, car imports had 25% tariffs in China, and I think 0-5% in the U.S. for the reverse.

It reminds me of when Google was "open" with the Gmail and GChat APIs, and then Facebook abused it to get all of Gmail's contacts through the mass-invite feature, while Google couldn't do the same with Facebook contacts.

Similarly, Microsoft was working on adding GChat support to Skype - but the reverse (Skype in GChat) wasn't possible. This example illustrates pretty well why you can't always be "open to everyone, no matter what", when some can become hyper-aggressive in exploiting what you have to offer when being so open, but not paying it back in any form.

I believe I also read a recent comment about RISC-V developers giving the Chinese the could shoulder in collaborations, because Chinese developers tend to "take take take" and not contribute anything back, ever.

I even see it all the time with people praising Samsung, etc for "innovating more than Google", forgetting the fact that 95% of the OS is Google's work.

Nonsense! If a deal hasn't been made, each side could change their mind, right? If we want to make a deal and I take great advantages on you, is it right for me to accuse you if you regrete before the deal is made?

"because Chinese developers tend to "take take take" and not contribute anything back, ever." It's not ture. For example, Siggraph is the best conference in the computer graphics field. In 2018, the number of papers that contain Chinese or ethnic Chinese is 45%.

Besides, many Chines and ethnic Chinese reasearchers are active in many frontier technology filed such as AI and Computer Vision field.

The acadimic and industry status and constribution of Chines reashers/company are increasing rapidlly.

> the number of papers that contain Chinese or ethnic Chinese is

Nobody cares about any "ethnic Chinese" fraction. We're discussing a trade war between US and PRC, not some racial struggle between Chinese and Caucasians or whatever.

my Chinese friends feel all very similarly. While I don't agree with them, it's not productive to be insensitive to their concerns. That's not how you solve conflict.

It doesn't even make any sense. Do they think America is similarly engaged in a trade war with our own ethnic Chinese citizens? One of our most strident anti-China hawks is named Gordon Chang. And we aren't in any struggle against Taiwan.

No, I don't have to be sensitive to such delusions.

Yes, they are Chinese Americans and they feel this country discriminates heavily against them (for example in college admissions).

Your economic facts(though some of them don't sound real) are of topic in the security discussion. If a real war starts between A and B the fact that A and B respected all the trade agreements is irrelevant. Ex: US spies on their allies, so you can respect all trades, be allies and still have espionage. The solution would be to have security features, like open source the code, firewall critical components etc.

The trade war won't fix issues with OTA as a vulnerability. It is useful for the US to point it out to tip things in their favor so it gets a lot of coverage.

I also agree with you that the solution to OTA updates is tight control, but that isn't realistic either. They are talking about drones in the article. These are devices bought and run by companies that build infrastructure in the US but are not directly related to the government. They want OTA because it has legitimate benefits in worker time and cost savings and helps keep their "fleet" running with all the latest features.

Now, an example attack might be an OTA update for the drone controller to shunt mapping data back to home base in China to give them high quality military maps of infrastructure for attack planning. The attack might be unrealistic, but the spying threat isn't. Alternatively, if car autopilot takes off, imagine the economic damage an OTA attack could do that causes 30% of the traffic in the US to just stop. To prevent this sort of attack, you would have to review ALL code coming out of China since you can't directly hold them responsible after the fact when they are out of your sovereign jurisdiction. The kind of dedicated and educated workforce required to code check all firmware/software updates for such huge classes of consumer products is just not going to happen and it can only get worse.

Intel ME is an abomination, but it's also well known and gets a lot of coverage. It's just not in the mainstream news right this minute.

>Intel ME is an abomination, but it's also well known and gets a lot of coverage. It's just not in the mainstream news right this minute.

It was probably only a topic on technical forums.

Technical question, can't you build a drone that does not need OTA updates from manufacturer ? You have it connect only to your trusted IPs.

Also sending the high definition photos to China won't appear on anybody network traffic? You just need 1 person to detect it and you have the some kind of proof(though when a similar thing happened with Amazon Alexa it was blamed as a bug and not espionage).

>Technical Question

Of course you can, but even then you're still trusting the firmware that is being put out by the potentially hostile company even if you gate keep it. To check it would require a software team at least as large as the potentially hostile one for any serious attack. That's a big economic incentive to trust the manufacturer.

>sending the high definition photos

Or you could just send metadata, telemetry, and flight diagnostics that can be used to build up sensitive information under the guise of metrics. Remember that the NSA was mostly just using metadata too.

>it was blamed as a bug and not espionage

In these cases, the two look exactly the same in software, so proving one or the other is very difficult.

So from your points all Chinese products should be made illegal until China will not be a threat to US, this means until China collapses or kisses US butt.

> You have it connect only to your trusted IPs.

Wi-Fi makes that pretty damn hard to verify. In theory, malicious firmware could even opportunistically link up with other malicious firmware acting as a bridge via some undocumented protocol that would only be detectable by looking at the raw spectrum.

yeah, but we should think and implement security measures in all systems indifferent of politics and economics. Imagine some terrorists hacks Tesla server and sends a command for all cars to crash. We would need all important systems to be designed in the assumption that something bad will eventually happened(hackers, company goes out of business, stupidly(see Firefox addons issue) ) etc