Is Your Antivirus Made By the Chinese Government?

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?"

Yet another reason

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT to have anything to do with Symantec. Besides the products being over-bloated and under-performing now consumers need to worry about being part of the Chinese anti-American fight?

No thank you.

Probably

[Moderator]

"Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?"

Yeah, but it's probably happening at layer 2 and 3, since a lot of American networks are being offshored to Japan who in turn hires the cheapest third country nationals (Chinese CCNA's) to administrate. Add this to the fact that there is a lot of counterfeiting of Cisco hardware anyway, and there's no reason to hide a backdoor in plain site within an AntiVirus program.

Re:We'd never do such a thing

[qpqp]

Would people continue to be stupid enough to install Symantec software to allow them to?

Prejudice

[RyanFenton]

Presumed dishonorability = prejudice.

In know we tend to always paint our current perceived rivals as THE MOST EVIL THING EVAR, but China is pretty much the same thing as most groups of people - some corrupt, some fairly virtuous and kind to their fellow human beings, and a whole lot of mix in between.

China has had a lot of revolutions and shifts - and as their demographics continue to change, they're in the middle of several now, and they'll have more. Pretending that they're just bogey-men isn't going to help anything, or improve those shifts in anyone's favor.

Judgements with reason and evidence can be fair... but conjecture and prejudice aren't helpful.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Witch-hunt

[KnownIssues]

Cold War II. Now that we can't rely on the Soviet Union to instill fear and hate and competition in us, we've had to find the next imaginary (or at least, self-created) threat. If the Chinese are a "threat" to anything it's our imagined political and economic importance in the world. In that sense, the threat might be real. Rather than convince ourselves that we will maintain our position by virtue of being more ethically pure than them, perhaps we should focus on improving our own economic and political position.