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What is behind the spying indictment?

The United States indicted five Chinese military officers on May 19, playing a "thief crying stop thief" farce again.

The fact that the United States, with the world's most advanced cyberspace technology, its high-profile commitment to set up a cyber army, its notorious Prism programs and its long-term wiretapping into Chinese enterprises such as Huawei, should present itself as a victim of cyber attacks, is beyond absurdity.

READ: The United States' Global Surveillance Record

But what is behind the farce is not simple as the Chinese saying "those who are ignorant are the boldest", nor is it simply gangster logic. As I myself have participated for a dozen or so times in the dialogues between China and the United States on cyber security, I am able to see the rationale the United States holds on this issue.

At the end of the last century, the United States took a completely different position on the issue of cyber security than it does today. When Russia submitted the draft resolution "Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security" to the UN in 1998, the United States refused to talk about the issue on international occasions, and was indifferent to international cooperation in cyber security. When it came to October 2006, a 169 "yes" and 1 "no" vote eventually passed the resolution, the "no" vote was cast by the United States. The veto, by a nation that now flaunts its responsibility for cyber security, should never be forgotten.

The United States turned down international cooperation because of its own interest. It has set its eyes on military and economic interests in cyberspace from day one, and has been committed to developing its prowess in cyberspace in order to maintain its dominance in the new century. Thus it comes as no surprise that it would not allow its hands to be tied by letting the resolution pass. And since it was not prepared at that time, it chose to stay silent on the issue.

But when the United States is geared up, it begins to restrain other countries in their development of cyber technology and spearhead the formulation of international rules -- just as it did after it armed itself with nuclear weapons. Were the restrictions intended to prevent other nations from developing cyber attack capabilities, they might as well be counted as a peaceful move. But as a matter of fact, the ultimate aim of the United States is to hype the cyber threat theory and create an unfriendly environment for other nations to develop independent and innovative information technology. For its part, the United States could maintain its own advantage in information technology, infiltrate into other countries' cyberspace, continue to build its cyber army and eventually, impair other nations' capabilities in the new revolution of information.

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But strategies like these require a theory to back them up. A distinction was therefore invented by the brain trust to differentiate military and intelligence uses of cyberspace from other uses. Just like conventional military and intelligence operations, any cyber attack that serves military and intelligence uses is deemed by the United States as legitimate; other cyber attacks, however, are attributed to the civilian field and deemed industrial spying or commercial theft activity that are illegal, with the national interest often used as a trump card.

Armed with this theory, the United States has undertaken a wave of actions. In its dialogues with China, the United States has argued that militarization has become an intrinsic demand for cyberspace. But when confronted with accusations such as the Stuxnet virus that attacks Iran's nuclear capabilities and the Prism program that monitors heads of states, Uncle Sam understated it as avoiding regional military conflicts or conducting anti-terrorism activities. Even the NSA's infiltration into Huawei, exposed by the former agency contractor Edward Snowden, was mentioned lightly as looking for evidence of threats against U.S. national security.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said last Monday that China would suspend activities in the China-U.S. Cyber Working Group following the indictment. When the working group was first set up, the United States highlighted its intention to resolve the alleged Chinese industrial espionage. The United States keeps saying that actions would be taken if the bottom line was crossed. And if we look at the assessment reports issued by the U.S. government or Washington-backed companies, we find that all of them follow the theory.

We have seen one action after another taken by the United States -- the Congressional investigation into Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei, the company Mandiant's report on "Chinese cyber espionage units," the Department of Defense's report on "industrial espionage," and FireEye's report "Understanding Nation-State Motives Behind Today's Advanced Cyber Attacks." And now, action has been pushed to the court.

The United States has staged an indictment farce when it is still embroiled in the aftermath of the notorious Prism program. What hangs over our head is the sword of Damocles: we should alert ourselves to the risks in national cyber security. For those on the other side of the Pacific who still harbor a Cold War mentality and bear a grudge against China's achievements, I say to a them a catchphrase that is popular now in China -- "No zuo no die" (if you don't do stupid things, they won't come back to bite you).

The author is from the China Information Security Research Institute.

This article was translated by Zhang Lulu. Its original unabridged version was published in Chinese.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
 
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all thanks to murika. the europeans are planing to do the same thing. the more they talk the more their tech companies loss:lol:


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Chinese server makers take a bite out of U.S. vendors' Q1 sales

Server shipments in Q1 for Chinese companies Huawei and Inspur went up, while HP, Dell and IBM shipments declined
By Agam Shah
May 28, 2014 01:50 PM ET

IDG News Service - Shipments of servers from Chinese vendors grew at a fast clip while the top server vendors in the U.S. tumbled during the first quarter of this year.

Worldwide server shipments were 2.3 million units during the first quarter, growing by just 1.4 percent compared to the same quarter last year, according to Gartner.

Growth was driven by Chinese server vendors Huawei and Inspur Electronics, which were ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, behind the declining Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM.

Huawei has been in the top five for server shipments for more than a year, but Inspur Electronics is a new entrant. Inspur builds blade servers, rack servers and supercomputers, and is best known for being involved in the construction of China's Tianhe-2, which is currently the world's fastest supercomputer, according to Top500.org.

Chinese servers partly benefitted from the 18 percent shipment growth in the Asia-Pacific region, while shipments in other regions declined, Gartner said in a statement.

Server buying trends have changed in recent years. Companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, which buy servers by the thousands, are bypassing established server makers and purchasing hardware directly from manufacturers like Quanta and Inventec. That trend in part led to the establishment of the Open Compute Project, a Facebook-led organization that provides server reference designs so companies can design data-center hardware in-house.

Similarly, Chinese cloud providers are building mega data centers and buying servers from local vendors instead of going to the big name brands, said Patrick Moorhead, analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy.

The trend of buying locally is partly due to the security tension between the U.S. and China, but servers from Chinese companies are also cheaper, Moorhead said.

The enterprise infrastructure is also being built out in China, resulting in a big demand for servers. There is also a growing demand for servers from little-known vendors based in Asia -- also known as "white box" vendors -- in other regions, Moorhead said.

But the top server companies are making moves to expand in the low-cost server market. HP last month signed a deal with Foxconn to make low-cost cloud servers for scale-out environments, while Dell is attacking the market through its Data Center Solutions division. IBM has signed Chinese companies to use its Power architecture in chips and servers, and Lenovo earlier this year agreed to acquire IBM's x86 server business for $2.3 billion.

Inspur's shipments totaled 80,929 units, growing by a whopping 288.7 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year, while Huawei shipped 85,919 units, growing by 61 percent. Top server maker HP shipped 534,652 units, declining by 7.9 percent, while second-placed Dell shipped 464,141 units, declining by 10.1 percent. IBM suffered the worst decline, with shipments falling by 27.8 percent to 166,311 units.

Worldwide server revenue declined by 4.1 percent during the first quarter to $11.3 billion compared to the same quarter the previous year. HP, IBM and Dell were the top three server makers by revenue, and all recorded quarterly declines.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is
 
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Good move by China. US companies better prepared to move to other locations. Without going into whodunit, it is loose-loose for China and US. China will loose US market and US will loose any little leverage they had to pressurize China.
 
Huawei finds favor at CERN: researchers sign up for more UDS cloud storage — Tech News and Analysis

Summary: Huawei has become an official partner of CERN openlab, with the physics research facility giving the thumbs-up to the Chinese firm’s exascale-targeting, mass object-based storage infrastructure


Good move by China. US companies better prepared to move to other locations. Without going into whodunit, it is loose-loose for China and US. China will loose US market and US will loose any little leverage they had to pressurize China.

lose-lose for the yanks, not china. those chinese companies has very little market share in the US, because of american paranoia. it's understandable, because nobody knows better than thieves themselves:D
 
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