China launched into orbit a quantum computer on a satellite, in what was one of the most advanced computing events of modern time. Quantum computers are as mystical as bits of 1's and 0's floating in the silicon of a computer chip, and more advanced than any of those. Josh Chin, in his Wall Street Journal article yesterday, described it as a "hacker proof" satellite. We can dream about hacker proof things and hope, but I have seen a succession of them come and go. What we should be concerned about here is not that it was hacker proof, but how the Chinese got the technology to begin with.
The story being sold to the press is the leap was a research project heavily invested by the Chinese government. Not exactly, though partially. They did it the way the have been doing it for years, by putting some of their best researchers in schools and labs where the technology is being developed, then bringing them back to China to put all that information together. If you look at Universities today, a good number of the grad students in the sciences are Chinese and Indian. That has been true for a long time. What they are doing is bypassing the export laws of countries by pretending it is "just university research". Only those University students graduate, set up their own companies, or go to work for US companies and continue that research. They bring those people back to China too.
We see example after example of corporate thefts of data that start with Chinese national's who were educated and employed in the best research institutions and labs that are available. What disturbed me most is I investigated this the first time in 1979.
No comments:
Post a Comment