Is Your Antivirus Made By the Chinese Government? 196
guanxi writes "Huawei, a large Chinese telecom and IT company with close ties to the Chinese military has faced obstacles doing business in other countries, because governments are concerned about giving them access to critical infrastructure. Huawei Symantec is a joint venture with one of the world's largest IT security companies which sells security products in the US. Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?"
Re:ClamAV, Open Source Antivirus (Score:5, Informative)
But ClamAV is one of the worst engines out there. If one need's an antivirus tool (it would be a fair point to call all of them snake oil) use a package with a higher detection rate.
Re:We'd never do such a thing (Score:3, Informative)
Except that, well, the government has COMPLETE and total control over every industry. The fact that they let SOME companies operate without direct everyday oversight in no way changes the fact that the government can, at any time, tell them to do something and they will do it. So, schmucky mcmoron, try not to convince people that the Chinese Government does not have control over these companies, when, in fact, they have complete control.
Re:Witch-hunt (Score:2, Informative)
Hate to say it, but you'll need to check some facts.
China is an autocratic state- as a result they have hands in the corporate boardroom of any business that operates there- which results in a scenario where the possibility of "sabotaged" gear not only possible, but likely. False Us vs Them mentality?? I can point to a scary number of hacks against American and South Korean interests which have been traced roughly to China and North Korea. Hell, China has an entire military division that devotes itself to web-warfare- just check out the most recent Janes edition....
So- hate to burst your bubble- but they are infact out to get us. They just deny it with a smile.
Re:We'd never do such a thing (Score:4, Informative)
Bzzt wrong. China is still capital-C Communist. They just released their new Five-Year Plan [chinalawblog.com], for Pete's sake. The difference is that after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road [internatio...wpoint.org]. For those of you who didn't go to university and hence weren't exposed to Marxism, "capitalist roaders" [nytimes.com] are a heresy of Communism. They still want to achieve socialism, but by the wrong methods. According to Mao, the Soviet Union suffered this fate after Stalin died.
The Chinese government still directly controls huge swathes of the Chinese economy. Companies are owned by the state and operate for its benefit. Americans having trouble with this unfamiliar idea could perhaps think of Amtrak, or the conversion of General Motors into an arm of the federal government a few years ago. The baby milk scandals are due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms [chinalawblog.com]. In so many words, there are few laws and fewer inspectors. Moreover, Chinese culture places no value on people you don't know - they might as well not exist, so who cares if you poison them or not? This is how you get crowds of people standing around gawking at accident victims instead of rendering aid (first one to help has to pay the victim's hospital bills).
Unfortunately, there are those out there to whom socialism is an unassailable holy concept, and when a communist country takes the capitalist road, an attempt is made to classify the whole shebang as EEEVIL in order to make capitalism look bad. It's like old Soviet documentaries about the United States that focused on the poor and homeless, in order reinforce the conclusion that was preordained anyway.