Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China.
Wired reports the chips weren’t only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a “back-door” and could have been remotely shut down at any time.
If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it’s friend or foe.
China came that close to ruling the world and finally ending this Chimerical business.
yr link’s broke, pal.
Serious errors that were introduced as the article made its way from Wired to Business Insider to Charles “foggy thinking” Mudede:
1) The Wired article states that the military bought 59,000 defective chips. Not that the military bought a total of 59,000 chips and “all of them” were defective.
2) The Wired article explicitly says the chips were merely defective, and DID NOT have a back door. Serious reading comprehension problems at BI.
3) Even if it had been every chip that the U.S. bought, and even if there had been a back door, this in no way leads to China “ruling the world.” There are about a million steps in between “get trojan chips in” and “rule the world”, and it’s unlikely it would have played out that way.
But it sure is a good masturbatory fantasy, if you like to think you understand geopolitics but are too lazy to actually read.
The bigger story is the waste/fraud that is the S.O.P. for military procurement. I doubt that the person(s) who signed off on the purchase(s) ever saw the salesrep, product, or checked on provenance. It’s just a feeding frenzy for fraudsters.
Here is the right link.
For just a second I thought it said “…for use in everything from missiles to transgenders.”
And here’s the Wired story link that “Also”, above @3 is referencing.
oops. meant @2.
Have some self-respect, pigeon. Don’t you know you can fly?
@7 Damn straight you meant #2. I was referencing the boogie man, and there ain’t no link to that!
@5 you’re not cleared to know about that one.
The buyer should have been able to tell they weren’t real Fairchild chips just from the lousy printing job and the sleazy package finish atop the chip.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/danger…
That’s what “we” get for outsourcing.
If their greatest weapon is the vast quantity of cheap crap they spew out, I don’t think they’re much of a threat for the nonce. And once they’ve chewed up all their genuinely valuable natural resources and exported them in the form of cheap crap, they’ll become aggressive, but they’ll also be unable to compete with nations that use scarce resources to produce quality goods.
Much of the catastrophic environmental destruction unfolding in China can be traced to the fact that they overproduce everything. The state-owned banks keep lending to unprofitable businesses that keep people employed, but at the cost of using scarce resources to produce cheap crap that nobody needs or even really wants. This model isn’t going to work in the 21st century, when it’s inevitable that resource prices will soar as supply constricts and demand expands.