Lenovo Looking to Buy Seagate, May Raise Political Concerns

andy1307 writes "According to an article in the New York Times, Lenovo has expressed an interest in buying Seagate. This has raised concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China. From the article: 'In recent years, modern disk drives, used to store vast quantities of digital information securely, have become complex computing systems, complete with hundreds of thousands of lines of software that are used to ensure the integrity of data and to offer data encryption.'"

Who says it's lenovo?

[Tragek]

The article says nobody will say WHICH Chinese tech company wants to buy.

Re:Who says it's lenovo?

[andy1307]

The editors changed my post. I submitted this 2 days ago and no company was named.

Re:War of Quality

[Alex Zepeda]

You're kidding, right? My last Seagate ('Cuda.10 - 320GB) was made in China.

No Double Standard

[chebucto]

In both cases, the US Government is looking out for the interests of the US - as it should. It's good for the US if it can steal others' technology; it's bad for the US if others steal its technology. Any successful country will do the same; unsuccessful ones will end up like Russia in the 90s - making others richer while it gets poorer.

Re:So don't buy Seagate

[WallaceAndGromit]

I don't know if you knew this, but Seagate acquired Maxtor a while ago.

http://www.seagate.com/maxtor/ [seagate.com]

Re:Isn't it a bit late to worry?

[tftp]

I don't believe for a moment that China has no access to the technology that it should not have. That's what spies are for, and it's not that hard to find a spy if every 5th man on the planet is Chinese.

IMO the ITAR restrictions are not always productive. They are like that restriction on export of strong encryption products with keys longer than $n. Can anyone honestly say that those regulations stopped any country in the world from using the latest encryption? There are probably more PhDs in China than americans on the whole planet :-) Surely one of those PhDs could just read a math paper and write 100 lines of simple code that AES, or DES, or any other strong cipher requires. The tables and the proof and the reference implementation are published, and in reality if Chinese government wanted PGP 2.x (which was not allowed for export) it could always ask one of its diplomats to download the code within the USA (and to lie when the server asks if you are a foreigner - the server has no way to check!) and bring it in on a floppy. Big deal, spies do worse things every day. And now a 10-minute download wrecked the whole sector of US software industry, and as a "bonus" you can be sure that Chinese use the clean PGP, without any backdoors or "forgotten" NSA keys.

Ineffective laws like that only prevent US companies from selling what the USA excels in, while not really impeding the progress of the other side. It could be even making things worse. For example, Iran has a lot of american airplanes (F-15 or something.) Pentagon put the stop on selling parts, and the Iran's airforce is suddenly in tatters. But imagine that Iran could not buy those F-15s back then. Iranians would then buy from China, from Russia, from France - or if all else fails they'd make their own, not as good but 10 times as cheap (and plentiful) and now all of a sudden you have no leverage, no spare parts to pull from the market, and no control whatsoever. How would that be better?

Re:No wonder the US$ is in free fall

[red_gnom]

"The US economy in free fall grows at a rate of 4%/yr. China will have to grow at 10% for the next 100 years to equal it in size."

Your calculation is incorrect.
US GDP in 2006 was 5 times of China.
With your assumption that US economy grows 4%/yr, and Chinese 10%/yr.

5 * (1.04)^n = (1.1)^n
n = number of years = 29

Therefore with those grow rates it would take China 29 years to overtake US economy.
In reality the difference in their GDP grow rates is greater, so it should happen much sooner.