The Undeclared "Cyber Cold War" With China 260
First time accepted submitter lacaprup writes "Chinese-based hacking of 760 different corporations reflects a growing, undeclared cyber war. From giants like Intel and Google to unknowns like iBahn, the Chinese hackers are accused of stealing everything isn't nailed down. Simply put, it is easier and cheaper to steal rather than develop the legal way. China has consistently denied it has any responsibility for hacking that originated from servers on its soil, but — based on what is known of attacks from China, Russia and other countries — a declassified estimate of the value of the blueprints, chemical formulas and other material stolen from U.S. corporate computers in the last year reached almost $500 billion"
Didn't the chinese adapt cracking from the States (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep pretty sure us Yankees invented the concept, along w the personal computer and the internet, shame some of us are getting schooled on it, a glimpse into American decay? Or the start of a security renaissance?
Re:Didn't the chinese adapt cracking from the Stat (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, patent violations were an American concept back in the day (see Hollywood). Countries (and companies) on the way up view patents as a hindrance, shackling their energy and creativity. Countries on the way down view them as a benefit, holding on to their accumulated wealth and power even once they're no longer earning it.
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I don't know how the mix-up of patents with copyright in the first sentence didn't trigger mods' troll alarms. Add to that the fact that Chinese patents applications have grown massively in recent years to nearly equal US patent filing rates, making parent's premise entirely wrong.
No, countries on the way up don't view patents as hindrance -- they view patents by established competitors as a hindrance, while patents by them are advantageous and pursued emphatically.
Only responding because 1) conflating Hol
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Those who create new things have no fear of copying, because they have confidence in their ability to do better than people who can do nothing but copy.
Those who continue to profit from innnovation long-since departed fear copying, because they know that's all they've got.
Perhaps you missed the reference, but Hollywood became the mecca of film precisely because they were ignoring the draconian restrictions imposed on them by Edison's patent enforcement group. In fact, the very reason film-makers congregated
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Do you inhabit the minds of all those who create new things thus that you can declare, for all of them, that they have no fear of copying? I have heard plenty of creative people express concern about whether they will be able to get the rewards for their work or whether someone else will. Where unfettered, free copying is allowed, it is not the most creative people who will succeed, it is the people with the biggest marketing budgets. A few rare individuals will come up with brand new things and hit the jac
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Yeah right, those Hollywood movies (which are all remakes of decades-old movies or poor adaptations of novels) are real paragons of "creative work".
Where do you get your kool-aid?
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Re:Didn't the chinese adapt cracking from the Stat (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, and this is probably the biggest one imho, the government has privatized everything. All other considerations aside, if you have digital and classified documents in a lot of third parties' hands, you're going to open yourself up to a lot of attack vectors. All in all, it's a nightmare thinking about keeping a network that includes every military contractor secure.
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Yeah, because Europe is just a thriving example of greatness right now.
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Not to be picky, but there are a number of places other than Europe right now that aren't really suffering during this global depression.
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Germany is indeed a thriving example of greatness right now; their economy is strong and they export all kinds of high-value, high quality stuff. If it weren't for Greece and Portugal, the place would make us look pathetic (which isn't hard, honestly). The way it's looking now, they might just kick Greece out of the EU (or Greece might leave on its own), which will probably be a lot better for Germany.
Re:Didn't the chinese adapt cracking from the Stat (Score:5, Insightful)
Though the strange thing with "financial experts" seems to be that you will allways find another "expert" who tells you the exact opposite of what the previous guy said.
I have the feeling those finance gurus are more close to fortune-tellers than to scientists.
I'm sure you're correct about that feeling. "Economics" simply isn't a real science, it's pseudoscience as it doesn't produce any theories that can actually be tested. Unfortunately, our societies depend greatly on economics, so even though it's really not much different than shamans trying to cure diseases with chants and incantations and potions, it's the best we've got.
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Salma Hayek is hot, but what does she have to do with economics, aside from marrying a billionaire?
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I just wish giving up your citizenship meant giving up the right to sell anything to the American citizens that are left.
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It does.
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Whereas the number of chinese and european expats in the US is so small?
It's not a cyber cold war (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a hot trade war, with one side believing the rules don't apply to them, and the other side letting them get away with it.
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It would be pretty damn interesting if the US turned around and told China, here's a bill for piracy, if you don't pay, we don't repay our debt. And what can you do, that we haven't already done to ourselves? Check and mate, and possibly nuclear holocaust in one easy move.
But as long as Americans don't understand why they shouldn't be shopping at Walmart, consistently vote against their own interests, and are too focused on
Re:It's not a cyber cold war (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't ever happen. If we tried that, Britain would come tapping us on the shoulder, and presenting a bill for all the trade secrets we lifted during the Industrial Revolution from them.
What China is doing to us is the same thing we've been done to other nations, albeit when this country was younger.
Re:It's not a cyber cold war (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not a cyber cold war (Score:5, Insightful)
What?
That's the exact same thing as saying, because your safe can be cracked, then your trade secrets that you held in it are in plain site. In other words, because someone was able to steal them, then they are not covered.
Requiring a spy to steal your details, or for you entire computer system to be hacked in certainly a reasonable-enough effort at protecting your trade secrets.
People should be stopped from illegal downloads as it is stealing, but the level of focus definitely makes no sense in comparison to other issues facing the nation. The entire entertainment industry has a nonsensical amount of power, but that does not change the lunacy of the rest of your--hopefully--sarcastic point.
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Do you work for my insurance company?
Re:It's not a cyber cold war (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been that way for a very long time, long before computers were penetrated to gather trade secrets. For a long time the two major Communist nations in this world, the USSR and the People's Republic of China, did not have the resources to develop many advanced things. The Russians cloned our bombers that landed in Soviet territory, with the only differences being switching to metric units for things like sheetmetal gauge as opposed to SAE units. The US government tried very hard to keep particularly sensitive, new weapons out of Russia's hands during World War II, and out of China's hands during Korea and Vietnam.
Unfortunately now, we've decided to send our processes themselves to China. Since they're not interested in maintaining respect for intellectual property, we're giving them the very tools they need to best us.
In short, or own short-sighted greed is actively leading to our downfall as we speak.
Where are you getting your facts, please? (Score:3)
Are you seriously comparing USSR to what China was 30 years ago? I'm asking because it's like comparing South and North Korea.
USSR couldn't develop... bombers on its own?
Dear God, how did they fight in WWII, may I ask?
Why did they say no to the glorious "Shermans" and used their own T-34 instead (34 stands for year, mind you).
How come they were the first to send Sputnik then Gagarin into space, despite US having German rocket genie, von Braun?
Where did they get "Mig"s that caused so much trouble in Vietnam
Re:Where are you getting your facts, please? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because of the myth that Communism wasn't able to function at all. It did function but it didn't lead to a lot of happy people, nor a lot of variety or quality in products (I recall seeing an ad for "The Fridge" on Soviet TV, so advertised because it was the only fridge they made and it was in surplus at the time), The USSR managed to rebuild the Soviet Union from its decimated state after WWII back to being an industrial powerhouse, world power, etc. It did so at a massive human cost of course (measured in millions of people), and I am not saying it was a good thing but dismissing them and their version of the communist system casually out of hand is a mistake.
The US basically outspent the USSR and active sought to destroy its economy, leading to the failure of Communism in the end. Some of the economic problems you face today in the US likely stem from that massive overspending in fact as it no doubt contributed heavily to your national debt.
I think its a mistake to dismiss China in the same way. They are huge, they have a growing economy, they have massive manufacturing capabilities, and they are capable of independent research and discovery. The fact that they are playing catchup to the US at the moment, doesn't mean they might not surpass you at some point. Imagine how the US citizenry's morale is going to crash when the leading innovations in science and technology start coming from China instead of the US. What if the first mission to Mars comes from China instead of the US?
Complacency and Hubris come at a cost.
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Serve them right if they harm the US economy and all those bonds held by Chinese banks become worthless. China isn't much without trading partners. Seems they'd recognise this and lay off.
Adds a whole new meaning... (Score:2)
... to Chinese Gold Farmer.
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Probably better than mining for fish.
The "Chinese Hacker" myth is overblown (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure the Chinese government has their crack team of hackers, just like we do. Having said that...
I run a honeypot at work. 70% of the attacks do come from Chinese machines, but I suspect that's because the Chinese buy those $2 pre-hacked warez'd Windows CD's at the market and don't install security updates.
Of the actual living, breathing hackers that log into my honeypot, 1/3 of them come from Romanian IP's, and another 1/3 come from other eastern European countries, but the text files/strings in their utilities are Romanian. Wired has a good article which partly corroborates this.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/all/1 [wired.com]
I see two modes of attack. 98% are single machines launching 100's of attacks. 70% of those are in China. The other 2% are distributed attacks. These are more likely to be major power intelligence agencies, and don't have anywhere near the geographic concentration as the single-machine attacks (Chinese IP's are 15% of distributed attacks, same as Brazil).
Re:The "Chinese Hacker" myth is overblown (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a little write-up about some of the hacking I've seen.
http://binkley.accre.vanderbilt.edu/documents/hack-stats.txt [vanderbilt.edu]
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Yep one day it's gonna leak that the Chinese government's cyberwarfare team consists of 30 script kiddies who spend their time DDoS'ing Taiwanese websites.
It's impossible to blame China (Score:5, Insightful)
Every black hat is probably running their operations through proxies in China these days so that the Western companies they break into will just say "damn dirty Chinese!" and never suspect someone in Europe or maybe just a few blocks away. China is a jurisdictional black hole.
Re:It's impossible to blame China (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean technologies that China is already producing for the USA? No R and D needed when you are already doing the manufacturing.
Re:It's impossible to blame China (Score:4, Interesting)
Undeclared? (Score:5, Insightful)
Undeclared my ass. It's in the media, it's widely known, and pretty much the only rule is not to do something to the other side's infrastructure that kills people directly or gets too much of the population upset. That's like calling the intelligence war undeclared because the sides don't admit that they try to get plans of the other side's military hardware--only more so. We don't declare war, and this isn't a physical war, and there are certain proportionality requirements--and we argue for a pretension of deniability, but not plausible deniability.
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Besides how do you declare a cold war? By definition you cannot declare one.
Re:Undeclared? (Score:5, Funny)
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Besides how do you declare a cold war?
The fact that it's "cold" means the declaration is implicit, not that no declaration exists. Dropping two atomic bombs next to the USSR was all the declaration needed.
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Just because everybody knows about it doesn't mean that an official declaration was issued or had to be issued.
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Bingo.
Been there, seen that. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is probably going to sound racist, when I don't really intend it to. It's more "culturist" than anything else.
I work for a post-secondary institution with a large international student program. Most of our international students come from China, and when we break down the stats, the Chinese students are the most likely students to plagiarize others work, both in our online learning management system and in our face to face classroom environments.
What's more, they make no effort to hide their "enhanced group work" skills from their instructors. We've asked several of the students about this behaviour and have been told "that's how things work in China. It's commonplace there."
So it doesn't surprise me that Chinese hackers are trying to steal information from western companies.
Does this surprise you? (Score:3, Informative)
TLDR: English-speaking nations around the world have conspired to use their signals intelligence capability (ECHELON) to engage in industrial espionage and pass trade secrets on to their own corporations.
Re:Been there, seen that. (Score:5, Interesting)
What's more, they make no effort to hide their "enhanced group work" skills from their instructors. We've asked several of the students about this behaviour and have been told "that's how things work in China. It's commonplace there."
In regards with intellectual creation: a culture of sharing in clash with a culture of artificial scarcity?
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Well, there is a silver lining to all this.
It means that the Chinese are less apt to call in their debt and bring our economy the rest of the way to hell.
It'd be killing their golden goose.
America is at "war", you say? (Score:2)
So where is the physical retaliation you were speaking of?
$500 billion? Reality check! (Score:4, Interesting)
Stole informational assets worth $500 billion over the past year? Um, does anyone bother to do basic reality checks?
$500 billion is about 1/3 of the US's GDP for all of 2010 [cia.gov].
So ... no, just ... just no.
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You're an order of magnitude off. US GDP is $15 trillion so that's only 3.3%. Learn2maths.
Re:$500 billion? Reality check! (Score:4, Funny)
It's RIAA/MPAA math.
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I don't believe the $500 billion estimate either but refuting it based upon how much money was made in the US in 2010 doesn't sound right to me.
Like say Google's source code for their search index was stolen how much is that valued at? Does the value only count for parts that were developed in the past year or could it have just been made MORE valuable in th
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True, the IP's value isn't based on the sales it generates this year. It's at the very least spread over the number of years of a patent.
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No, you did your maths wrong. $500 billion is 1/30th of the US's annual GDP (that is, about 3%).
From your own link:
GDP (official exchange rate):
$14.66 trillion (2010 est.)
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Stole informational assets worth $500 billion over the past year? Um, does anyone bother to do basic reality checks?
The reality check is it's impossible to put a monetary value on "stolen" data, because data only has value if it contains useful information. If I stole the production plans for the Boeing 747, it wouldn't be of value because I do not have the means to build 747s. Or in the '90s, the RIAA claiming that everyone who illegally downloaded an mp3 would have bought the album it it weren't available on Napster.
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Stole informational assets worth $500 billion over the past year? Um, does anyone bother to do basic reality checks?
$500 billion is about 1/3 of the US's GDP for all of 2010 [cia.gov].
So ... no, just ... just no.
These are "assets", not revenue so aren't tied to GDP. If someone stole all of the gold out of Ft Knox, they'd have $200B worth of assets that would have no relation to GDP. Likewise, if they steal a secret chemical formula valued at $1B, that has no relation to GDP. (though the valuation is related to how much revenue it could earn).
In any case, the numbers are very suspect. No one knows who exactly is stealing the data, what data is stolen, or what they are doing with it, yet somehow they came up with a s
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Aww ... that's so adorable! Another genius that thinks he's the hottest thing because he can make a "stocks vs flow" argument!
It still doesn't change the fact that 3% of one year's entire GDP is way too high, it just means the supposed assets came from different times.
Thanks, I think you're cute too. We should have sex.
Why is 3% too high? Is there some law in finance that says that stolen information assets must be less than 3% of GDP?
At least you no longer think that the USA GDP is only $1.5T.
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$500 billion is about 1/3 of the US's GDP for all of 2010.
Damn. The US should just download 8 million chinese-produced songs to even all that out!
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Oops, you're right. The source said $15 Trillion. Still, that would make it 3% of GDP, and still way too high to be plausible.
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Because you can't suck out an amount of value equal to the output of several large US states or countries via cyber attacks that no one really notices.
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Maybe , just maybe (Score:2)
outscoring / hireing cs degrees over tech schools (Score:2)
have put lot's of poor security in place now if trained to people to do IT work and not let a theory based class room do the training and payed for the hardware needed to do the job right vs trying to get by with the old stuff for a very long time.
tech people should hack back at china (Score:2)
as what can they do about it?
Well, we wanted it (Score:4, Interesting)
We wanted the "information economy", we got it. We ignored material progress and persisted in keeping an antiquated notion of "work" going for what? The work week was about 100 hours in the 19th century and was closer to 50 by the beginning of the 20th century. Despite all the "progress" I keep hearing about and how "productive" we all are sitting at our computers, the work week hasn't reduced, and it still takes 25 years to pay for a house built out of standard parts in six weeks.
We insist on performing theater for each other while farmers feed us, instead of really analyzing what gets done by who and FOR who.
Not stolen, shared (Score:3, Insightful)
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Microsoft COULD give us security (Score:2)
And that's just unacceptable.
This war is hundreds of years old. (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's perpetrated by every nation on the planet.
It's no secret that the Industrial Revolution got a kickstart in the US via "stolen IP." The legend is that Samuel Slater memorized drawings across the pond in Blighty and came here with them in his head.
Another example would be dumpster diving at your competitor's company. Cutting up start strips from stamping operations is not because you want them to fit in the recycling dumpster better. The same for shredding code printouts and printed spreadsheets.
To suddenly be surprised that this is being done electronically on a systematic scale is to be utterly ignorant of history. And frankly, singling out China smells of hypocrisy, especially after two decades of US manufacturing companies willingly transferring their core manufacturing to China completely oblivious to the long term effects.
Why reinvent the wheel from scratch when you can simply snag the wheel.dwg from your competitor's computer?
--
BMO
Outsource to there and educate them here... (Score:3)
What exactly did you expect? It's not just China, of course. We outsource to India, China, the Middle East and even Pakistan. We also educate foreigners here, and not in ethnomusicology or interpretive dance either. Do you think no theft will occur? No backdoors in hardware or software? No designs, models or code will be resold to competitors for a profit without your knowledge?
First we sold our security to the Arabs for cheap oil. Then we sold our minds to China and India for some cost savings. Our children will be selling their bodies, I expect.
Have they been stealing open source software? (Score:2)
If there's one thing I've learned about IT security, it's that it's almost impossible to secure data anyway. Maybe it would make more sense to follow development models in which there's no such thing as stealing.
secure your stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that hard to find a balance between security and usability. At least try. When I read about:
* un-encrypted data on portable devices getting lost[1]
* tapes being swiped in people's cars[2]
* servers with egregiously unsecured login portals[3]
I'm not sure why people aren't just allowing google to index their entire infrastructure. Really. It would be cheap backup and really easy to find your stuff. Sure, 0-days happen, mistakes are made, admins are not infallible but I can't blame the Chinese (or whoever) for picking the low-hanging fruit when it's been places so close to the ground.
[1] - http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=6572 [phiprivacy.net]
[2] - http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/military/article/Tricare-patient-data-lost-in-car-burglary-2195822.php [mysanantonio.com]
[3] - www.dataprotectioncenter.com/antivirus/sophos/second-dutch-security-firm-hacked-unsecured-phpmyadmin-implicated/
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue Samuel L. Jackson voice.... (Score:2)
"Air Gap, motherfuckers! DO YOU SPEAK IT?"
EDITORS Do your Job! (Score:4)
I mean come on guys, how hard is it to proof-read a submission before you post it to the front page?
Is it really that hard to read it and see that the grammar needs fixing? Is it that hard to insert the missing word "that" in the second sentence?
This reflects poorly on the quality of the people who work for Slashdot. This is 2011, basic spelling and grammar checks are just a few mouse clicks away.
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We have editors? I thought items with enough votes in the firehose were auto-promoted to the front page.
So OWS is Patriotism! (Score:3)
Recently they blocked ports from shipping in goods on the US West Coast. Most of those imports probably originated in China. So their actions were a blow against China, a repressive Communist regime.
This is weird. The Republicans are supporting a Communist regime in China while left wingers are taking part in protests protecting the US from Chinese imports. We're through the looking glass people....
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Did you read TFA?
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U.S. propaganda (Score:2, Insightful)
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China is the Han race. They used to have a lot more diversity, but the Han have been genociding and absorbing the other races of china for a few thousand years.
Re:Welcom to Shitty Wok (Score:5, Funny)
China is the Han race.
The Han shot first!
Re:Welcom to Shitty Wok (Score:5, Insightful)
Am usually right there with y'all in demanding a complete redo on IP law, but not here.
Take anything we do well in America. Trace it down to materials science or some other obscure technological detail.
Now, *GIVE* that info to another country. Whoosh, there go a billion dollars of competitive advantage, or whatever the equivalent engineering/prototyping cost is.
In the cases of media, biology and pharm, it's a cost that some corp won't recoup. Bad juju. But in the case of weapons, armor and nuclear reactor designs, it's a cost that keeps china from marching on another nation. It doesn't take a huge amount of paranoia to suspect that Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and Japan remain sovereign partly because China isn't capable of our level of weaponry, submarine reactor longevity, space-based intelligence, etc.
There's no easy answer, and I'm not buying the cyberwarfare jingoism rants, but taking cybersecurity more seriously is important.
Re:Welcom to Shitty Wok (Score:4, Interesting)
And the Han social construct has spent the last few thousand years killing off all other social constructs in china. China is a racist mono cultural xenophobic nation that would nazi germany a run for its money.
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Citation needed. "Race" is obviously a simplification, but to deny there's no genetic difference between someone from China, someone from Africa, an aborigine from Australia, and someone from Germany is not only wrong but ridiculous. Furthermore, people from those different groups of people absolutely have recognizable genetic trends: i.e., two people from Germany will be much more similar genetically than a person from Germany and a person from China. Now of course, this is all relative; I've read once
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"Race" is just a convenient term to try to place people into one of these various groups, although obviously it doesn't work for everyone (like someone who has parents from very different places), but then again the scientific concept of "species" isn't really black-and-white either and there's a lot of controversy about that too.
In other words, race is more or less a social construct, as opposed to one with a great deal of accuracy or usefulness in science. The genetic variation within African blacks is greater than the genetic variation of all other people combined, which means that people of the "black race" are actually in many cases far less closely related to one another than, say, European whites and south Asians. To say that differently, people of different races are often more similar genetically than people of the same rac
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If my anthropology textbook is correct, "Chinese" is a specific subgroup of the "mongoloid" or "yellow" race, actually.
I'll need to verify at the library, though; I'm a bit poor so I haven't been able to update my textbook since the 1883 edition.
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If my anthropology textbook is correct, "Chinese" is a specific subgroup of the "mongoloid" or "yellow" race, actually.
I'll need to verify at the library, though; I'm a bit poor so I haven't been able to update my textbook since the 1883 edition.
You sure that isn't the 1983 edition? When I was in grade school, I clearly remember in 5th/6th grade (about 1984) being taught that there were three main races of people: "Caucasoid", "Negroid", and "Mongoloid".
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Re:Welcom to Shitty Wok (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure US businesses would be just as happy to substitute melamine to make an extra buck too. They've been substituting trans fats in our foods for ages, after all, even though those are proven to cause all kinds of health problems, but hydrolyzed vegetable oil is much cheaper than butter so corporations can improve their profits by using it.
The only way you're not going to have companies feeding you poison to make a buck is if there's a strong government that prohibits the practice and hold offenders accountable when caught. Pretty soon, when the Republicans take over the government, they'll eliminate the FDA (they're talking a lot about it already), so we'll get to enjoy melamine in our food too before long. (Of course, if the Democrats could help in the process and spin it somehow to blame the Republicans, the Dems will happily go right along with them.)
Another True Story (Score:2)
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More likely we'll see cheap knockoffs here, (with cute little FDA disclaimers for the drugs) and people making pennies per hour to produce them over there.
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Yeah! Damn those evil corporations that invest billions into developing technology, and hoping to recoup that cost.
Me, representing China, one of the most totalitarian regimes around with its Great Firewall, should totally go steal that information because it's, like, totally for the goodness of the people, dude.
Grow up and get a clue. China could have licensed or bought the non-defense technology that they are stealing. They are not going to help the "little guy" in any country--not even their own--with th