> Advanced robotic devices are inherently networked systems which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates.
Good thing this isn't a concern in ones produced locally.
IIRC, these policies are backdoor way to ban Chinese products without explicitly banning Chinese products (because the administration is trying to make nice with China). I've read stuff that said very explicitly that the foreign router ban was like that, and this seems similar.
It's not difficult to understand the folly of sharing data and control with your biggest adversary. It's so basic, but people chronically keep tripping on it, intentionally or not.
This isn't even something new either, it comes from the cold war where the KGB was excellent at espionage particularly because of their smart leverage of regular people with access to the right things. China isn't dumb either, and they're not sleeping on their treasure trove of Americans data.
So sorry you aren't going to get blackmailed instead of shown Toyota ads, but it's a pretty smart move that most with a geopolitical IQ above room temperature can easily grasp.
Like those self driving, remotely controllable Teslas that gather data 24/7, the ones I saw everywhere when I was in China?
Local ones when not in use are doing the Pledge of Allegiance on a loop.
They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smuggled some.
The IT industry in Brazil became a cartel dominated by few companies. They'd pirate everything from the Americans, even DOS and all BIOS and firmware. Their computers' mainboards were ugly, hacked and defect prone. But they would give buckets of money to the military controlling the government and the corrupt politicians in Congress. The 80s became known as the "lost decade" because of the low growth induced by this policy.
This dumb idea expired in 1992.
See: broken cablemodem chipsets, poor performing cellular modems, multiple generations of desktop ethernet adapters that don't work properly, uncompetitive processors in all but some very specific markets, CPUs that literally fry themselves to death because they couldn't keep up with AMD's advances so the just just kept cranking the voltage and clock speeds...Intel has been a bucket of Fail for a decade and a half.
And now the US government owns a not-too-shabby chunk of said Winning company thanks to a Very Stable Genius...
Companies buying themselves over and over again.
How much of our so called economy is just moving money back and forth…
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> To facilitate this transition period, entities that produce advanced robotic devices in a foreign country are encouraged to apply for Conditional Approvals (Annex A) which, if approved, will allow such producers to continue to receive FCC authorization for their products while they work to onshore manufacturing and address the U.S. government’s national security concerns described above.
The apps communicating with said devices through Bluetooth obviously can't connect to the internet either otherwise there'd still be an avenue for subversion.
Just banning one Chinese product category at a time willy nilly doesn't help as there are a zillion other product categories of Chinese stuff with internet connections. From toys (with camera's in them), to refrigerators, power converters, microwaves, televisions to smartphones.
This is a podcast about it: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/
And they require it. Without internet connectivity the device simply won't work. This sounds fishy to me.
These devices should only be allowed to access local network addresses and no (internet) gateways.
A refrigerator could be forced to overheat and burn you house down killing you and your family. It may sound far fetched but if they believe it will help their cause they won't hesitate one second.
This issue needs to be solved once and for all NOW. Not piecemeal.
should apply to domestic products too for good measure.
Soon they'll ban Colombian coffee for being too good and making people want more of it. Or who knows whatever else.
It seems the way to get Americans to embrace a centrally planned economy was to combine unashamed xenophobia with blatant corruption while calling it capitalism.
AlwaysHasBeen.jpg
You think the government kicked heavy industry out of the country (to China no less) because they truly believed in short sighted mid 20th century environmentalism? Of course not. They did it because Wall Street stood to make an obscene amount of money piecemeal selling that part of the economy overseas. Environmentalism just provided the excuse and pool of useful idiots from which to build political support.
England created the Industrial Revolution but barely has any manufacturing these days.
The U.S. created several industries (mass car manufacturing, electronics, clothing, etc) but today China produces more than them. They had more than half the worlds' GDP in 1944, they have less than 16% today. They're slowly following England's path.
So once the ambience reaches a level of "advanced degrees and massively leveraged worker impact" it becomes almost impossible to live in that environment on the level of "some school and hand knitting a scarf a day." It's totally intractable when you are competing with someone who generates a scarf of value every 30 seconds.
But the fact is that most Western manufacturers are too lazy to develop things themselves and merely slap their label on a Chinese designed and manufactured product. This means that the Chinese could slip in anything in the hard/software which creates a huge security liability.
Absolutely. I trust Apple a lot more than I trust almost any other company. Maybe Valve is up there as well.
> But the fact is that most Western manufacturers are too lazy to develop things themselves and merely slap their label on a Chinese designed and manufactured product. This means that the Chinese could slip in anything in the hard/software which creates a huge security liability.
Well, the problem here would be a Chinese entity being required to create a US entity, which often just ends up with the US entity inheriting everything, including the slips, from the Chinese entity.
Gaslighting as a policy.
But I think both such things talked about in this announcement are complete bullshit, yes
> As the technology matures, advanced robotic devices have growing use cases in monitoring and securing critical infrastructure.
...cites:
'Secret Service uses robot dogs to guard Trump's Mar-a-Lago in FL' as reported in the Palm Beach Daily News
Thanks Trump
An administration filled with people who read books that don't have pictures might, for example, consider the chilling effects this anti-free market, anto-competitive nonsense will have on our economy and the economies of our allies.
They might even consider two steps into the very near future and realize that the last nations to automate will become the poorest nations almost overnight, and be forced to watch as the price of good declines for the entire world except their shifty, isolated, tariffed, backwater.
Heck, such and administration might even have a few scientists and economists left employed who could advise them, having not just forced many of the best and brightest to flee to more enlightened parts of the world just to stay employed or live in a places that don't treat inconvenient truths as blasphemy.