Comment by raw_anon_1111

Any car company. Uber.

All tech companies offering free services.

> I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.

All the clouds compete on price. Do you really think it is that differentiated? Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer special deals to sign big companies up and globally too.

I spent three years working in consulting mostly in public sector and education and the last two working with startups to mid size commercial interest and a couple of financial institutions.

Before that I spent 6 years working between 3 companies in health care in a tech lead role. I’m 100% sure that any of those companies would I have immediately questioned my judgment for suggesting DeepSeek if had been a thing.

Absolutely none of them would ever have touched DeepSeek.

The xenaphobia is still very much there. Chinese tech is sanitized through Taiwanese middlemen (Foxconn, Asus, Acer etc). If you try to use Chinese tech or funding directly you will have a lot of pushback from VCs, financial institutions and business partners. China is the boogieman

What Chinese built infrastructure tech where information can be exfiltrated or cause any real damage are American companies buying? Chinese communication tech is for the most part not allowed in any American technology.

Enterprise hardware isn’t the issue. It’s the software. How much enterprise hardware is running with Chinese software? The US basically bans any hardware with Chinese software that can disrupt infrastructure.

> I don't know that it's actually prohibited.

Chinese models generally aren't but DeepSeek specifically is at this point.

There’s nuance and debate about the 110 level 2 controls without bringing Chinese tech in to the picture. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting lol.

Moralizing through whataboutism does not logically follow in disproving the China threat narrative, it is axiomatic that what matters is what they are doing to us, not what we are doing to them from that vantage.

Rather, I'd say it speaks more about how deranged the post-snowden/anti-neocon figures have become, from critiquing creeping authoritarianism to functionality acting at the behest of an even more authoritarian regime. The funny thing is that behavior of deflection, moralizing and whataboutism is exactly the kind of behavior nationalists employ, not addressing arguments head on like the so-called "American nationalists".

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The hardware can always contain undetectable sub-devices that can magically intercept anything with no possibility for the software to detect this.

You should remember that all iPhones had for several years an undetected hardware backdoor, until a couple of years ago, when independent researchers have found it and reported the Apple bugs as CVEs, so Apple was forced to fix the vulnerabilities.

The hardware backdoor consisted in the fact that writing some magic values to some supposedly unused addresses allowed the bypassing of all memory protections. The backdoor is likely to have consisted in some memory test registers, which are used during manufacturing, but which should be disabled before shipping the phone to customers, which Apple had not done.

This hardware backdoor, coupled with some bugs in a few Apple system libraries, allowed the knowledgeable attackers to send remotely an invisible message to the iPhone, which was able to take complete control over the iPhone, allowing the attacker to read any file and to record from cameras and microphones. A reboot of the iPhone removed the remote control, but then the attacker would immediately send another invisible message, regaining control.

There was no way to detect that the iPhone was remotely controlled. The backdoor was discovered only externally in the firewalls of a company, because the iPhones generated a suspiciously high amount of Internet traffic, without apparent causes.

This has been widely reported at the time and discussed on HN, but some people continue to be not aware about how little you can trust even major companies like Apple to deliver the right hardware.

The identity of the attackers who exploited this Apple hardware backdoor has not been revealed, but it is likely that they had needed the cooperation of Apple insiders, at least for access to secret Apple documentation, if not for intentionally ensuring that the hardware backdoor remained open.

Thus the fact that Apple publishes only incomplete technical documentation has helped only the attackers, allowing them to remain undiscovered for many years, against the interests of the Apple customers. Had the specifications of the test registers been public, someone would have quickly discovered that they had remained unprotected after production.

Therefore, for many years the iPhones of certain valuable targets had magically intercepted all their communications and they have sent them to an unknown country (due to the nature of some of the identified targets and the amount of resources required to carry the attacks, it has been speculated that the country could have been Israel, but no public evidence exists; a US TLA is the main plausible alternative, as some targets were Russians).

the mechanism of action for that attack appears to be reading from poisoned snippets on stackoverflow or a similar site, which to my mind is an excellent example of why it seems like it would be difficult to retroactively pin "insecure code came out of my model" on the evil communist base weights of the model in question

sorry, is your contention here "spurious accusations don't require evidence when aimed at designated state enemies"? because it feels uncharitably rude to infer that's what you meant to say here, but i struggle to parse this in a different way where you say something more reasonable.

Competitor != adversary. It is US warmongering ideology that tries to equate these concepts.

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