If you have a better solution, something that guarantees that ZTE won't be making products for the US market that are designed to spy on Americans, I'm all ears.
This argument gets repeated a lot but I don't get the logic. If you don't like ZTE products don't buy them or even ban their use or import. ZTE doesn't just sell to the US market though. How is forcing ZTE out of business a proper solution to your concern about spying?
Edit: Please note that I am responding specifically to the argument that the ban was "something that guarantees that ZTE won't be making products for the US market that are designed to spy on Americans", which I have seen being used by politicians and other commentators.
The problem isn't selling things in the US or not, the problem is that they were deliberately choosing to sell to Iran and North Korea, despite trade sanctions and export restrictions.
They had been caught, they paid a fine, but then it turned out that they were deliberately planning to continue selling them, despite already being caught, charged, fined, and agreeing to stop.
The /only/ way that they could be made to stop selling restricted components from the US was clearly to prohibit them from using those components at all.
I added a note in my original comment to emphasize that I was responding to the specific argument by the parent comment.
On the factual basis the ban is reinstituted not for the reason you stated that "they were deliberately planning to continue selling them". That was part of the case the led to the original fine. The reimposition of the ban is on a more technical ground.
By the way under the original settlement ZTE is under much stricter supervision and audit. If you kill off ZTE you lose that control as well. The decision to reinstate the ban was apparently done without sufficient deliberation and hurts US interests on many fronts.
"Enforcement" short of the death of the company has not worked before.
In the criminal justice system, if you are out on probation after committing a crime and then commit the same crime, you go right back to prison, for longer this time. They've repeated their crime while on probation, and thus get a stiffer sentence.
Besides the libertarian nonsense of "if you don't like ZTE products don't buy them"... well, one of the things they're doing we don't like is violating export bans to Iran and North Korea. For another, as long as they're manufacturing, their products can just get rebranded through a couple of shell companies and wind up in the US anyway.
I am unclear why you think it's so important to not hurt them.
They will operate in one form or another that is for sure. All 75000 people are not just going to sit idle.
By being overly draconian you generate a ground swell of ill will against US suppliers. Everyone in China will be looking to replace their US components as soon as it is feasible.
For what is its worth, ZTE actually self reported the recent faux pas that led to the reimposition of the sanction. Even if they don't get any credit for self-reporting it shows that the threat of intrusive audits works. ZTE right now is a lot more under the US government thumb than any other Chinese tech company. If anything Chinese government should just let the corporate form die to end the humiliation. US on the other hand, by being the executioner, only ensures that ZTE will be replaced by another Chinese player not subject to the same supervision.
To understand the market better I would recommend learning much more than just about the market. Knowing and understanding what is going on macroeconomically and geopolitically will help you in the market place. E.g.
I don't think so :), we're not that important. So far only 3 comments have been seriously downvoted -- one of them presented seemingly unfounded information, the other one was simply unfunny trolling that should not be on HN, the third one was mostly off-topic.
Because of - to some extent understandable - reasons MS hate is still quite strong among this community but destroying an MS-related thread is unnecessary.
Do you really think a site has to be "important" to be targeted? To influence public opinion it seems like you'd just want to blanket influence as many popular websites as possible. It wouldn't take that large a team to do it given the right software.
I was a part-owner and later a mod on a quite big forum (>500k registered users, etc.). There were many people who always claimed that others who disagree with them are paid shills -- I happened to know that they aren't at all.
Heh, same here. If everyone who accused someone of being a shill was right, then everyone would be a shill, almost. Hilarious stuff, literally insinuating that someone had built up a reputation on a tech magazine forum over half a decade to shill products. In fact, I think in the years I was a mod/admin, we banned maybe one "shill", and even that was debatable and mainly because they didn't post any relevant information for anything else.
I've suspected for a while that the NSA has some kind of software like google alerts that monitors the top 1000 relevant sites and detects when they are being talked about so they can turn the discussion. We know from Snowden leaks that they are attempting to influence public opinion online, so that seems like how I would do it. Also I've noticed that previous threads like this are particularly full of naysayers.
Whilst our opinions are indeed irrelevant, they still try and influence the discussion.
Why? Because the military-industrial complex has invested vast amounts of public money in technology, contractors and employees to allow them to do just that.
Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton are making buckets of cash selling the government this kind of tech and the contract staff to go with it.
The government buyers are being taken on jollies in the Caribbean and receiving nice kickbacks for authorising the public purse. Next year both parties plan on increasing the budget. And so the merry dance goes on getting bigger and bigger every year.
Dutch person here. I operate two 10MB exit relays from my home, where I live with my family. Have been doing this for a year now, never had any real problems. My ISP is SurfNet. Also xs4all said today that they would permit exit relays: https://twitter.com/xs4all/statuses/474514247222067200
Also, Dutch police has never actually raided a private domicile where there was an exit relay.
One advantage to running an exit relay from your home is that there is a lot of garbage traffic coming from your address, which I really like because it hides me a little bit more.
There seem to be anarcho-capitalist, social-green-leftist, pro-state surveillance, anti-state surveillance, pro-(progressive-)tax people, voluntarists, etc.
I am sometimes offended or even horrified by some of the views expressed (like the surveillance apologists, or drone-war fascists), but overall I think HN diversity is a good thing. Only group bias is towards tech.
That last bit is the unusual thing. In real life you meet a lot of people who think Snowden should go to hell, but in Hacker News you are beyond the pale if you think that NSA surveillance is less important than say, homelessness, global warming, the drug war, etc.
People seem to get really angry if you suggest that NSA surveillance is less important than Facebook/Google/etc privacy violation, even though very many people have experienced negative consequences of Facebook/Google/etc privacy violations.
I think that there's a widespread sense (which I intuitively share) that Facebook/Google/etc only get information about us because we or someone we know freely give it to them. NSA surveillance is different in at least two ways: first, we don't voluntarily give them the information, which makes their use of that information inherently antagonistic towards us (hence the fourth amendment to the US Constitution); and second (for Americans), there's an understanding that the NSA was specifically instructed by Congress to not spy domestically (presumably due to that fourth amendment thing, again).
I agree that spying on your citizens should be illegal and any organisations doing it should stop.
But then GCHQ has a big bunch of data that they rarely access under (we're told) strict controls. So, I'm less bothered by the gathering of that data than other people. I would be angry if GCHQ started grepping it for stuff that isn't nationally important.
That's true, and I've never really understood it. Most people get worked up because the NSA is accessing gigantic data-warehouses; they're not upset that these warehouses exist in the first place, or even question the original purpose of the collections.
I think that is your [country you reside in] or social circle perspective. In my country and social circle, suggesting that would simply be outrages, like saying gay people shouldn't be able to get married. I live in the netherlands.
Some of us believe that we should pay taxes and that we need some sort of standard of security, but that the government should just be "better" about it (use tax money more efficiently, balance security with liberty, etc...). But moderation doesn't make for good reading.
Or maybe they did get it, found it heavy-handed and crass and chose to downvote it. I didn't exactly go for subtlety to be quite frank. Doesn't matter anyway, that's why Hacker News has +/- buttons to begin with :)
