Chinese Seek to Buy an American Maker of Disk Drives

[jk]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/bu...5drive.html?hp

August 25, 2007
Chinese Seek to Buy an American Maker of Disk Drives

By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24 — A Chinese technology company has expressed interest in buying a maker of computer disk drives in the United States, raising concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China.
The overture, which was disclosed by the chief executive of one of the two remaining drive makers in the United States, William D. Watkins of Seagate Technology, has resurrected the issues of economic competitiveness and national security raised three years ago when Lenovo, a Chinese computer maker, bought I.B.M.’s personal computer business.
Tensions have been increasing lately between the countries over China’s ambitions in developing its military abilities and advanced technologies for industrial and consumer uses.
Although disk drives do not fall under a list of export-controlled technologies, the attempted purchase of an American disk drive company would require a security review by the federal government, according to several government officials.
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.
That could raise the prospect of secret tampering with hardware or software to make it possible to pilfer information via computer networks, intelligence officials have warned.
Seagate has recently begun selling drives with hardware encryption abilities.
Mr. Watkins did not identify the Chinese company. But he said that the possibility of an acquisition had sent alarm bells ringing at some government agencies.
“The U.S. government is freaking out,” Mr. Watkins said during an interview on Thursday.

etc

[Tet]

Re: Chinese Seek to Buy an American Maker of Disk Drives

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/bu...5drive.html?hp

August 25, 2007
Chinese Seek to Buy an American Maker of Disk Drives

By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24 — A Chinese technology company has expressed interest in buying a maker of computer disk drives in the United States, raising concerns among American government officials about the risks to national security in transferring high technology to China.
The overture, which was disclosed by the chief executive of one of the two remaining drive makers in the United States, William D. Watkins of Seagate Technology, has resurrected the issues of economic competitiveness and national security raised three years ago when Lenovo, a Chinese computer maker, bought I.B.M.’s personal computer business.
Tensions have been increasing lately between the countries over China’s ambitions in developing its military abilities and advanced technologies for industrial and consumer uses.
Although disk drives do not fall under a list of export-controlled technologies, the attempted purchase of an American disk drive company would require a security review by the federal government, according to several government officials.
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.
That could raise the prospect of secret tampering with hardware or software to make it possible to pilfer information via computer networks, intelligence officials have warned.
Seagate has recently begun selling drives with hardware encryption abilities.
Mr. Watkins did not identify the Chinese company. But he said that the possibility of an acquisition had sent alarm bells ringing at some government agencies.
“The U.S. government is freaking out,” Mr. Watkins said during an interview on Thursday.

etc

I think this states the case that flash memory has overtaken disk drives as a medium of storage. US military has started to use flash memory over disk drive storage. Might as well unload disk drives onto the Chinese while the price is still good and act like disk drives are still important to keep the price as high as possible.

[metalman]

Re: Chinese Seek to Buy an American Maker of Disk Drives

I think this states the case that flash memory has overtaken disk drives as a medium of storage. US military has started to use flash memory over disk drive storage. Might as well unload disk drives onto the Chinese while the price is still good and act like disk drives are still important to keep the price as high as possible.

can't use flash for mass storage... too slow and expensive. definitely sell them the tech for the little drives, tho... only useful in consumer doo dahs. i'm happy to buy china's consumer doo dahs with our drives in them with borrowed chinese money.

[Spartacus]

much ado about less than nothing ?

Seagate corporation is headquartered in the US, but where are the drives and components made?

Besides, if the Chinese can buy Widows, despite the persistent rumors of NSA back doors (and I doubt the Chinese can ensure the code MS gave them to audit is the same code that's compiled onto every Windows CD that gets into China), why is the US so concerned - the Chinese appear to be nowhere near as aggressive as the US.

[zoog]

Re: much ado about less than nothing ?

...why is the US so concerned - the Chinese appear to be nowhere near as aggressive as the US.

That could raise the prospect of secret tampering with hardware or software to make it possible to pilfer information via computer networks, intelligence officials have warned. ... “The U.S. government is freaking out,” Mr. Watkins said during an interview on Thursday.

If the reported worries from the US Government are sincere, the thought that crossed my mind was that the US government has already engaged in such "secret tampering", and is concerned that a) the Chinese would discover this and/or b) that might become public knowledge throughout the world.

However, as Spartacus pointed out, the drives are already manufactured in China. I doubt they could be entirely ignorant of something like a hardwired back door in the drives.

Uh oh... I think I see black helicopters coming... I hope it's just Bernanke?:eek:

[c1ue]

Re: Chinese Seek to Buy an American Maker of Disk Drives

The disk drive deal is not a big one - keep in mind the drives are just the buckets.

The big deal is in information management and retrieval.

Any and all hard drives at the commercial/military level are ultimately not able to do much unless they are part of a storage solution.

Were I to be concerned about back doors, it would be at that level.

Secondly any serious data retrieval from individual hard disks would ramp up both hardware usage (power) and I/O (bandwidth) - this is impossible to conceal.

As far as I'm concerned, this is all just the usual political crap.

For those of you who are interested: flash memories are good because they are stable due to usage of quantum (technically Fowler-Nordham) tunneling.

However, there are some serious issues with the larger sizes.

Basically the tunnelling effect occurs with the placement of a large enough voltage over a specialized transistor. The voltages are getting to the point where the wires simply cannot handle them; this is a much more fundamental problem which may prevent the creation of the 100Gb flash memory as a single chip.

To give you an idea: the original 1 Megabyte flash used 5V; the 8 Megabyte ones go up to 12V and the newest ones may go up to 20V internally.

You can play games to just write one or two bits, but generally this makes the already slow flash even slower.

I haven't looked at the newest 'low voltage' flash chips - it is possible something fundamental changed but more likely they now have better internal circuitry to provide the necessary voltages from the lower outer power supply.

Flash is thus different than the other memories or processors; the internal operations require voltage different than supply while normal memories/processors have a more or less equal to supply voltage.

[Spartacus]

Re: Chinese Seek to Buy an American Maker of Disk Drives

just echoing what you wrote, one can't take the security pronouncements at face value. People at Oak Ridge had p2p software on "secure" computers

Just because they're making noise about security doesn't mean the reasons they're against the Chinese buyout have anything to do with security.

I don't know where the fire is, but this looks like nothing but smoke

The disk drive deal is not a big one - keep in mind the drives are just the buckets.

Secondly any serious data retrieval from individual hard disks would ramp up both hardware usage (power) and I/O (bandwidth) - this is impossible to conceal.

As far as I'm concerned, this is all just the usual political crap.