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UK Blocks Chinese Company From Acquiring Knowledge On Vision Sensing Technology (reuters.com) 17

British business minister Kwasi Kwarteng on Wednesday said he had issued (PDF) an order preventing the acquisition of intellectual property related to vision sensing technology by a Chinese company on national security grounds. Reuters reports: The order, issued under the National Security and Investment Act, prevents Beijing Infinite Vision Technology Co. from buying the intellectual property from the University of Manchester that would have allowed them to develop, test, manufacture, use and sell licensed products. "There is potential that the technology could be used to build defense or technological capabilities which may present national security risk to the United Kingdom," said the order, published by the government. "A SCAMP vision sensor does not output regular images as most sensor do, but rather the results of sensor analysis that provides details of what the senor is seeing," notes Asia Financial.

"This means it can do much more and deliver more valuable information. The technology is used in advanced applications in areas such as robotics, virtual reality, autos and surveillance."
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UK Blocks Chinese Company From Acquiring Knowledge On Vision Sensing Technology

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  • This is a logical idea which is impressive in its nature and design. Consider that CCD started as little more than a static ram chip with its packaging removed. This is in many ways the reverse.

    I expect it will take China a few months to develop their own SCAMP tech to be manufactured at SMIC.

    I think the main achievement of the UK government was to convince China that they will simply need to avoid British tech and make it themselves.

    I am getting bored of countries and people shooting themselves in the foot
    • by Anonymous Coward

      On the other hand, and I'm sure the whataboutism bots will be coming out of the woodwork saying, "US bad! UK bad! China good!", why surrender and them the IP? At least they have to reverse engineer it, and it would be known that SCAMP tech would have been obtained via ways other than legal. Let China make it themselves, rather than letting them have a quite useful military technology handed to them on a silver platter.

      This isn't some toy with dancing anime figures we are discussing. This is something t

      • Well thereâ(TM)s a couple reasons. First, UK loses the money, and gains only a little time.

        More importantly, in a more enlightened time we understood that cross-border collaboration enhances development across all sectors.

        Of course, this produces some short term pain for both well-moneyed, entrnched interests as well for a lot of labor. A failure to take care of the latter, and squelch the former, has led to our current dark age.

        • Well thereâ(TM)s a couple reasons. First, UK loses the money, and gains only a little time.

          "Time is money".

          When playing chess, it's true that at some point you are going to have to sacrifice that bishop or that knight or even that queen, but you still fight hard against it and only give up your pieces when it best suits your long-term position.

          Or consider the classic paradox about the slow tortoise who has a head-start when racing swift Achilles.
          You are probably correct that it "gains only a little time". However, a little gain is still a gain. Time is a barrier between where you are now and wher

        • The time of cross-border collaboration is coming to an end. The world is entering a new phase, marked by the war in Ukraine, in which the West and the rest are becoming adversaries. The US and Western Europe plus Australia and NZ on one side, and Russia, China, India, the Arab world, Soth America and Africa and a handful of oddball countries on the other. The split appears to be not just geographical but ideological as well, and as such it exists within the West itself (and partly among the "rest" although

    • Trying to keep China down is a bit of a losing battle these days. They're comfortably advanced enough that they'll "easily" replicate anything that someone else has come up with. The jury's out on how much they can invent from scratch themselves, but copying what they've seen is within their reach for sure.

      I suspect this is as much posture as it is anything else. As you say, it says "we're not going to hand you things you can use against us", and opens the door for multiple other restrictions to come into p

    • Will you be bored when an armed drone is using that tech to hunt you through the ruins of your city?
    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It's not that impressive. It's somewhere between an FPGA packaged with a CCD and a GPU packaged with a CCD. It's an idea people have played with over the years but nobody has found a really good application for. It's much more convenient just to have a CCD and a GPU, CPU or FPGA. You could maybe get really high frame rates by putting logic on the CCD chip so you didn't have to clock out the actual pixels, but what would you do with it?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 21, 2022 @06:18AM (#62721432)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • FFS like any government they are behind the times... this serves only the investors in the company

    all sensors output this "raw" they have simply added the ISP and output to the pipeline... what is intresting is the UK has blacked a technology transfer and frankly they are too late in doing so llok at the holdings of the PLA/china/state in the infrastructure space... far too little too late much like the russians hold on the money laundering situations in DACH & NL

    situation normal clueless whitehall all

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Thursday July 21, 2022 @09:36AM (#62721854)

    ... is prevent the Chinese from selling their products in the Western commercial markets. If they want this tech for their military or law enforcement applications, they'll build their own. And in doing so, increase their engineering capabilities.

    Chinese manufacturers are perfectly happy supplying only their defense markets. Unlike in the US/UK, where fat profits from civilian markets must be had, or companies will just walk away.

  • Why the fuck would they even think it is a good idea to sell stuff like this to China? Who were the people at the Uni who were on board with this. They should be fired.

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