The GP comment was lazy and provocative, but please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. These are all the same, therefore tedious, therefore off topic here. Also, they get nasty, which breaks the container.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you suggesting that China isn't responsible for repeated, massive state-sponsored hacks? That they aren't actively committing industrial espionage primarily through said state-sponsored hacking?

If you're not saying that, then why are you pretending the fact that Zoom is sending keys THROUGH CHINA and developing the product IN CHINA is not a big deal?

> Are you suggesting that China isn't responsible for repeated, massive state-sponsored hacks? That they aren't actively committing industrial espionage primarily through said state-sponsored hacking?

Nope, not at all. They're guilty of all of it and probably more.

> If you're not saying that, then why are you pretending the fact that Zoom is sending keys THROUGH CHINA and developing the product IN CHINA is not a big deal?

Because for me, as an European, it doesn't really make much difference does it? Both countries are currently led by lying dishonest governments which are spying on anything and everything that moves. If anything, it disappoints me that Americans are wasting so much time complaining about China while the worst parts of the Chinese regime are growing and thriving on their own backyard and affecting their own wellbeing.

Why do you think it doesn't make a difference? At a minimum, one country shares a mutual defense pact with most of Europe. The other doesn't (to say the least).

After agressive sanctions from US government for EU, the targeted EU travel ban and current presidents rhetoric, I have zero trust in any kind of mutual defense or military assistance coming from US in the time of crisis.

Remember, people of Italy are currently being helped by Chinese doctors while US president ignores and belittles the problem.

The talks between France and Germany about creating an independent defense pact also reflect the complete lack of trust into what NATO has become. So much was lost in so few years.

And that also ignores all the nasty surveillance stuff they've been doing these last few years - where the Five Eyes pact was used to surveil our own citizens by our own government by piping data through US. If there's one thing I'm sure of is that China won't share their spying data with my own government ;P

I think I'd be the first to admit that NATO has probably outlived it's useful life as a Cold War construction, but there's still a lot of history there. None of that exists with China, and China seems to be using the crisis in Europe as a means to exert its influence abroad (hello 5G rollout). Does Europe really want to trade that history for a new relationship with a country like China where the structure of that relationship is yet unknown?

Perhaps it's better to actually ask some hard hitting questions about fairness between US-EU trade relations (and admittedly since I am an American, it seems a bit unfair that the EU gets to essentially freeload on US defense in the western hemisphere and we get some stiff tariffs in return). So it seems perfectly reasonable, and probably a good thing, that France and Germany are creating an independent defense pact.

>If there's one thing I'm sure of is that China won't share their spying data with my own government ;P

And? Consider for a moment that sharing of this data between defense partners actually provides a useful signal of mutual capabilities and for what's being collected.

Its been my understanding that what we get in return for having our military everywhere is the continuation of the petro dollar and the usage of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

I'd be totally open to arguments that we see a negative ROI on this, but I dont think it's necessarily fair to say that we don't get anything out of it.

I've heard this argument before, and after reading a lot about it (and breaking out some of my old economics textbooks) I'm not really sure what to make of it. I'm undecided on if the dollar as the "world" reserve currency is actually a good thing for regular Americans. It certainly gives the American government a lever of power that other countries do not have, but where I part ways with the prevailing wisdom on this (the wisdom that insists this is a worthwhile arrangement) is when we talk about what the United States uses this power for. Folks who've lost their jobs because of crappy trade deals, or see their towns evaporate because of global capital movement, feel no comfort from the fact that foreign banks and governments "seek safety in holding US dollars".

One would expect that this power would be used to enrich America. This isn't what's happening, so I'm frankly willing to part with the whole deal.

> If there's one thing I'm sure of is that China won't share their spying data with my own government.

They'll just share it with their allies; Chinese-state hackers, Russia, Iran, and North Korea so you'll have blackhats after you instead of your government.

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

Posting like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of problems with other comments. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. Please don't do it again—it's obviously destructive of the values of the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

can't reply to remarkEon directly, so here it goes.

America bugged the phone of our chancellor (germany). Trust is at an all time low. nuf said.

It's the industrial espionage angle that is probably more concerning. The Chinese government certainly can get attendee lists and keys for Zoom meetings; want to listen to meetings the cxx folks are in?

Or worse, steal prospects for domestic companies? I'd be pretty enthused about getting the list of people my competitors are doing sales calls with.

There's many reasons not to trust the CPC. (ip theft, surveillance, etc.)

There's also many humanitarian concerns as well:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/10/asia/xinjiang-china-reeducati...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-e...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/7570898...

> There's many reasons not to trust the CPC. (ip theft, surveillance, etc.)

That's pretty much the summary of US attacks on our EU government as well (remember the backdoor direct attack on Belgacom?), soo... why does it make a difference? If anything, routing things through China denies our data to NSA and makes it less concentrated and useful. Similarly how spreading data over multiple cloud providers gives less power to Google et. al.

You ignored the humanitarian issues.

Also, please give me examples of a US or European country stealing IP, because that's the main threat w/ Zoom (spying on businesses & stealing tech)

Yes, most countries spy, China goes much much further and has no accountability because it's an authoritarian regime, not a democracy.

You can talk shit about Trump all you want, but try to call Xi Jinping a cartoon bear.

Ask Hong Kong, they'd love to have the freedoms that they once had as UK citizens.

I just told you a few days ago that if you keep taking HN threads further into political, nationalistic, or ideological flamewar, we are going to have to ban you. You're still doing it.

This sort of tedious boilerplate gets certain juices flowing but it has nothing at all to do with intellectual curiosity, the purpose of this site. In fact, it drowns it out. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart? We want curious conversation here, not demon-fighting.

Understood, could you delete my account and all of my comments please as I no longer wish to participate here.