Comment by resouer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by resouer | Hacker News Reader

> China’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower, and they’re using illegal methods to get there. China’s state-sponsored actors are the most active perpetrators of state-sponsored espionage against us.

The goal is absolutely true, thanks for pointing out, as China has to raise its huge population.

But ... illegal? WTF ... China has been ranked as the 2nd country after US by Nature Index [1] for years, which presents research outputs by institution and country. Is it illegal??

I believe there're tons of engineers in HN. I do think that if a private enterprise in China can inject a spy program on the chip without being discovered by the most developed countries in the world for years, that should be the concern.

But the question is, why do a country with such ability still want to spy United States? That ability should be more advanced than the current US technology for decades ...

[1] https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2018/country/all

>But the question is, why do a country with such ability still want to spy United States? That ability should be more advanced than the current US technology for decades ...

Mainly because it's cheaper to let somebody else do the research and find the problems.

If you were interested in stealth aircraft technology, you might be glad to read about another country's research into Schiff base salts for paint. Or somebody else's modeling for multistatic radar aircraft detection.

It costs tons to do these sorts of things. If by spying, you could just eliminate half of the tech dev blind alleys, you've saved a lot of money and maybe time as well.

My point is, developing such spy tech, cost tons tons more, which is almost impossible. This is not some kind of movie, it’s about software and chip!

Spying is cheap: software and hardware cadets in a military academy learning to exploit specific systems. The main cost is wages, which are lower in China. For military tech, you need materials and engineering specialists. Often multimillion dollar prototypes just to find out where the problems with the techniques are. Specialized facilities for testing prototypes. De novo techniques for testing those facilities. Compare spywork, where it might be enough to bribe a single person in a chip fab to add a backdoor circuit.

Spying is not cheap, and the main cost is technology & science, not wages. Even in WWII the technology spies are definitely top tier geniuses with brilliant minds, not to mention now it's 2019 already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com