Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers

Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by dv_dt on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:54PM (#21129198)

This is really similar to criticisms of Taiwan and Japan as they climbed up the tech advancement scale. Both of them now have for example in one HN related field, silicon foundries that rival the best of what's in the US. In terms of scale, China probably has far more PV capacity than the US (not sure where it sits relative to Japan).

I think it's an odd mix of self superiority/discrimination that actually lets the US sit back too relaxed and not competing on difficult and often costly, but fundamental investments (not just in silicon, but other industrial areas too). And too often there is too little coercion needed for US companies when they do make investments, siting manufacturing capacity in other nations while chasing lowest cost labor.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by heavenlyblue on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:16PM (#21128772)

It's hard to judge. If you compare China to the old days of USSR - I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale).

But USSR also maintained multiple closed cities which would contain the smartest people they had in the whole of the union. I am certain if you picked a few people from there they would be of a completely different opinion of what USSR was at the time as well.

So I am wondering if modern-day China has those, too. They might not be bringing huge industries to fruition based on their research - but on the other hand they might be working on strategic projects such as submarines, etc that are hard to clearly see behind the usual commercial noise.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by TeMPOraL on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:42PM (#21129077)

USSR had a lot of bright people; mathematicians and people involved in military air and space endeavors come to mind.

I don't like a certain conflation of terms in discussions like these - merging together creative thinking and business. The two things are only vaguely related. To overuse a tired term, inventing a better mousetrap spring != designing a better mousetrap != being able to make that better mousetrap a commercial success. The last part involves a lot of work that isn't creative, and that benefits from business-friendly conditions, which are not necessary for the creative work itself.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by rauchp on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:23PM (#21128873)

That's an interesting point. Who knows what could actually be going behind closed doors in China? A lot of what we hear from China comes from second hand sources. If the Chinese are doing big things, their government seems pretty tight lipped on revealing breakthroughs and their progress (unlike the USSR.)

> I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale).

True, especially in the later years of the USSR. But they did launch a satellite into space before anyone else. At some point they were creative thinkers, at least.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by dabeeeenster on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:30PM (#21128941)

The USSR was the first to reach every major milestone in the race to land on the moon, apart from the final one.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by scarejunba on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:41PM (#21129068)

And they did win the race to space, something we often forget.

We underestimate China to our own peril.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by KoftaBob on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:38PM (#21129034)

USSR had a much stronger engineering apparatus than China does. They beat the US to launching a human in space, then beat them again with the first artificial satellite. Sure they stole nuclear weapons technology from the US/UK teams, but that was more-so a matter of self preservation.

I want to emphasize that there are tons of incredibly brilliant minds in China working on amazing things. It's their government system that makes it so that rather than incentivizing innovation, they've focused on building the most efficient IP theft system the world has ever seen.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by TeMPOraL on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:46PM (#21129121)

There's also the internal versus external market. Chinese are not stealing IP for the sake of making the same stuff but with cheaper labor. Whether you get the IP by buying or stealing, building something new on top of that IP is still creative innovation, and they do a lot of that. In fact, not respecting western IP with all its associated innovation-stopping practices lets them iterate at a pace not seen in the West.

See e.g. some of the stuff Bunnie wrote here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20, starting with: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by kingkawn on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @03:56PM (#21129863)

I know the Chinese government has made a concerted effort to steal IP. Still I also find the descriptions of Chinese culture, and Asian culture in general, that demean it as imitative and incapable of creative thought not as rational descriptions of the world, but instead bizarre holdovers of old racist ideologies repackaged in more palatable contemporary business-lingo.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by KoftaBob on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @04:45PM (#21130421)

What other Asian countries in the present day are frequently accused of stealing IP? I don't get how you're arriving at it being a broadly Asian thing, when it's quite specifically a Chinese phenomenon. Conflating China to mean "all Asians" is pretty racist in and of itself.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by zachguo on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @05:37PM (#21130973)

https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...

Just a replay of history with the country name replaced.

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by kingkawn on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @08:06PM (#21132226)

There are broad stereotypes about Asians and conformity that are at play in the parent comments assumptions about what China’s weaknesses are

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Re:Airbus hit by series of cyber attacks on suppliers by rdlecler1 on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:46PM (#21129119)

There’s a lot of IP theft but they can make a lot of progress by simply catching up. Chinese culture is very capitalistic and innovation is not going to be a problem.

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