The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

Re:The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-a... by tehjoker on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:33PM (#23314025)

Point to nearly anything that has dramatically changed modern life and you will see the arm of the state involved: GPS, internet, the airplane, etc. The best argument I'm aware of for private enterprise producing really novel products is Bell Research, however they were a regulated monopoly, not a competitive industry and the state authorized 10% additional charges for investment.

You can make some arguments about things like iPhones but that device depended on a huge state funded or regulated infrastructure to be useful (e.g. cell towers, internet), and it was essentially a very polished cobbling together of different components (microchips, batteries) that were developed from many decades of state supported / regulated monopoly research.

Business is very good at taking something off the shelf and making money with it. It's very bad at sustained investment that might not be profitable more than a few years away.

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Re:The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-a... by natechols on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:45PM (#23314170)

If you think Apple simply "took something off the shelf" and sold us iPhones at huge markups, you clearly know even less about R&D than I assumed. Cherry-picking examples like the Internet doesn't really prove your point: try comparing the amount of taxpayer-funded R&D that went into the early (pre-1994) Internet with the amount of private investment since then. (I have no idea what the actual numbers are but I'd guess at least two orders of magnitude difference based on what I've seen elsewhere.)

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Re:The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-a... by morsch on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @04:33AM (#23320794)

I don't disagree, but research money spent may be a poor proxy for technical progress if it's spent to research ever better ways of showing ads to consumers.

I mean, it'd make sense if the government research spending aligned with public interest more closely than private investment did, the government is spending the public's money after all.

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Re:The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-a... by natechols on Thursday May 28, 2020 @07:39PM (#23344452)

Totally valid points - but this is why oversimplifying the entire issue into "Private sector bad! Public sector good!" (or vice-versa) is a terrible idea. However, oversimplifying what big companies like Apple do as pushing ads is just as bad. Think about the supply chains involved in building an iPhone, and how the individual components are manufactured - it's decades beyond the roots in government (and remember, projects like the Internet still depended on private companies to actually build most of the hardware).

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