THE inventor Sir James Dyson has warned that Chinese students are infiltrating British universities to steal technological and scientific secrets and even planting software bugs to relay the information to China.
Dyson, best known for inventing the bagless vacuum cleaner, said he had evidence that the bugs were left by postgraduates to ensure the thefts continued after they had returned home.
He said the extent to which foreign students dominated many science, technology and engineering research posts, often paid for by the British taxpayer, was “madness”.
[…]
“I’ve seen frightening examples. Bugs are even left in computers so that the information continues to be transmitted after the researchers have returned home.”
A number of such cases have been uncovered at British universities, with leading research institutions the most heavily targeted.
Or in the US. China ‘to overtake US on science’ in two years
this happens here in Canada too.
A latent effect is examined in the Macleans article “is uoft too asian?”.
Basically the long term effect of this is depriving Canadians with a university education and lowering the standards of the institution itself. Here’s how it works…
Canadian kid with C+ average (with our standards) is denied university spot.
Spot is given to PRC or ROC Chinese student with C+ average (with drastically lowered standards) and no English testing is given the spot. They are charged 3 times what a Canadian can be charged, so foreign students = $$$.
Chinese student arrives at university with little or no English training, local ethnic student associations help the student along, passing on previously used assignments and tests. Ethnic enclaves form, students make little attempts to learn English and practice phonetic memorization.
Chinese student either flunks out or barely graduates, either way, returns home.
This doesn’t bode well for Canada.
I’ve worked for some prominent Canadian software and hardware companies, and I can assure you: if the Chinese are stealing our material, we are sabotaging them. Perhaps we’re not doing it deliberately, but if they just steal-and-play our products, then they are doomed.
Kate: your first article link links to SDA.
Of course, considering my earlier comment, that might be intentional and part of the joke!
It’s the same thing as UofT’s scenario here in upper Michigan. Walking around here at our (highly subsidized) technological university, 60-70% of the students are of Asian origin.
Latest “saying” making the rounds: If you are really good at something, there are ten chinese who can do it better.
China can push ahead on technology because there are no environmental reviews and processes to push through, and no opposition party to delay it.
The typical Chinese graduate student here is hard-working and strongly motivated.
They read English well, though there are problems with their speaking of it.
Most of them don’t plan to go back to China. It’s full of Communists, you know!
I have always presumed that most have family in China,
and need to keep on the good side of the Chinese authorities for that reason.
But I would be doubtful that they send back high quality information.
Wow, are you like, hinting that outsourcing is not that all nice and kosher?
Chinese steal secrets from the West. I’ve been telling this to those Canadians who right after my arrival here told me they thought that I was a Russian spy. I countered ‘But your boss is Chinese, not Russian, and he has a business in Honk Kong while all I have resides in my apartment in Canada’.
In Canada it is virtually impossible to establish a halvanics business for regulations. In China you dump into waterways and no body cares. Level playing field my ass – this is NIMBY doctrine, stupid blind kittens!
I need a better keyboard than this laptop: galvanics.
” … but if they just steal-and-play our products, then they are doomed.” – Lickmuffin at 12:08 pm
Which ties in with another truism of communist-ruled societies. They may be able to copy or steal, but the have no talent for real innovation.
China may or may not become “the” economic power in the next few decades (and they do have their structural problems), but they are very unlikely to generate anything new. All the real R&D will still be done elsewhere.
Shades of Operation Sidewinder!
http://tinyurl.com/4zdbleb
I would not underestimate the Chinese.
I was a member of the BC Inventors Society. In the early 2000s a couple of mainland Chinese started attending our monthly meetings. At the meetings, members would discuss their inventions and innovations. Usually nothing too amazing or high tech, just useful consumer products. These new attendees never said or contributed anything themselves. I suppose they were just wanted a place to get out of the rain and enjoy the free coffee and doughnuts.
OMG! Assuming our foreign enemies are foreign is so racist.
Remember the Japanese dentist in Pearl Harbour.
its less than a phone call away now.
the price of freedom has many facets.
I’m going to buy a Dyson!!
I’m running a tiny technology start-up in Ottawa, and I have had no less than three amateurish, but determined attempts made to gather any information that wasn’t nailed down by Chinese graduate students posing as job applicants. They were like hyperactive tourists: “Can I see your servers?”, “Do you have any patents?”, “Can I borrow a computer here for a minute?”, “Can I borrow your computer for a minute?”, “Do you have anything about your new product in writing?” …
Their methods weren’t sophisticated, but they didn’t have to be; I presume they work on the principle of just gathering anything they can and sorting it out later.
Encouraging less than friendly foreign powers to send boatloads of post-graduate students to your universities is a really bad idea. In the case of China, they have reason to be communist party loyalists, and, naturally, they’re well positioned to get RA and internship positions at surprisingly sensitive research and development facilities.
Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit has linked to this story today from Oz…
“Chinese hackers are suspected of having penetrated the defenses of the parliamentary computers of at least 10 federal ministers in Australia and exfiltrated thousands of emails.
News of the major security breach emerged at around midnight local time on March 28, but attacks took place over more than a month, government officials told The Daily Telegraph.”
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/australian-government-computers-hacked-chinese-intelligence-suspected-53707.html
… so it does seem that all those english lessons were put to good use, some people in Ottawa speak english?
Those violated email accounts in Oz, are not the Ministry of Funny Walks, but include Defense, the Foreign MInistry, and Prime Minister Gillard.
A while back a chinese scientist at Alamagordo (US Nuclear Research—the guys who make the bombs) was caught stealing US nuclear weapon secrets…..and the usual suspects yelled racism…
It may have been racism but the Manhatten Project had NO Japanese….period….less enlightened times…(/sarc)
Russian illegals (spies) during the COLD WAR would collect un-secured intel from such things as newspapers and commercial publications. We were astounded that they went to the trouble. It was industrial espionage on a national scale.
You have to wonder why they bother. America gave away all its goodies to China under Clinton.
Now China wants an Asian Empire. It wants Russia Siberia as lebensraum.
It will get nasty when the fight By of China to control Taiwan. If Taiwan was smart, or we where . By now we would have our own nukes. America has already shown it leaves its friends in the mud under Obama. It cares only for butt kissing Islam.
JMO
I’m not a doom and gloom type but I think the West is in near terminal decline and that Asia will be tops rather quickly.
I have educated my kids in schools in Asia and here in Canada. The difference is shocking. There, it’s maths, science and the instilling of strong work habits; here, it’s social justice, social justice and ever shorter time at school thanks to extended spring break, PD days etc.
Quite a society we have here. Tripping over ourselves to buy cheap (in every sense) products from a country that tramples human rights and despises everything we stand for.
And there’ll be an outcry in our lefty press over these spying accusations – just like there was when that CSIS fellow said that a few of our MPs were being used by China.
Jeez. We’d bring a rope to our own hangin’.
I partially call shenanigans.
I’ve been hearing “China/India are gonna destroy the West on Science Real Soon Now” for 15 years or more.
Remember “India makes ten times* as many Engineers as we do!!!”? Yeah – and it turns out almost none of them are really what we call “engineers”.
(* Number pulled out of my ass but roughly equivalent to the real pseudo-factoid.)
If they’re measuring number of publications and pretending that’s a measure of quality, they’re out of their minds, especially since China is one of the hotbeds of publication fraud these days…
I wouldn’t lose sleep over China’s Impending Dominance, myself. At least, not on this kind of hysterical evidence.
The Chinese government rewards this behavior. The Canadian government encourages this behavior AND dissenters are branded racists.
> I’ve been hearing “China/India are gonna destroy
> the West on Science Real Soon Now” for 15 years or more.
What’s 15 years?! You are suffering from the same syndrome as our CEOs: you are all short-termers.
For all those 15 years, and 15 years preceding those, Chicom/Indians have been embedding themselves here and positioning their emissars to bribe our government bureaucrats into establishing prohibitive environment for the local business.
The outsourcing is happening not because there is shortage of labor or it is poor quality, no! It is happening because outsourcing looks good on the books. In the accounting. The accounting rules are set by the government. If government did not want, hiring locals would have made more monetary sense, but it does not. Outsourcing is happening because our society allowed green hysteria to overtake reason and dictate environmental policy. I mentioned galvanics above, but virtually any industry is choked with environmental regulations, as if Earth was not round and countries did not share same water and air. Worst of that all is that once industry goes overseas, skills are lost. Once skills are lost, it’s a point of no return – we won’t be able to repatriate the industry when push comes to shove.
By the way, I am in the process of buying equipment from another textile factory which just went bankrupt due to pressure from China. Just saying.
Oh no! The Chinese are stealing information that gets published in scientific journals! The horror! They’re not even paying for a subscription!
Alex at March 29, 2011 4:02 PM
Jeeez. Not again! You forgot the word ‘eventually’, alix.
They’re not even eventually paying for a subscription!
“China to overtake US on science… “:
Lex takes a look at the BBC’s numeracy here:
“Always follow the money.
Most R&D in America is privately funded, with the government kicking in 29% in 2007 (pdf). The same is true in the UK: 2007 showed a government expenditure of 31%. This is just a two percentage point difference, but using the BBC’s methodology it represents a 6.5% difference.
Round it up to ten.”
http://www.neptunuslex.com/2011/03/29/overtaken/
After all, rounding up (or down?) is something the BBC excels at. Perhaps when the US market figures out what to do with its 12 year supply of already built houses, they’ll re-enter the R&D field.
Although I remain alarmed at the government leakage of documents in all of the NATO countries.
I’m reminded, not sure if this is all fact, but when a Chinese delegation came to Calgary, we white hatted them, showed them our directional drilling techniques in the hope to land contracts over there. The delegation asked questions, took pictures, and our Alberta hosts tripped over themselves barfing everything they knew to impress.
Come to find out the delegation went back and built their own.
Yeah, just like they overtook America in steel production, in 1960. If I’m not mistaken, that little venture ended up starving about 10 million people to death. They came and took the metal hinges off my girlfriend’s grandmother’s door, along with every piece of metal they could find. They took the farmers out of the fields, and tried to turn them into factory workers. No crops that year!
In my opinion, China under commie rule will experience a disaster of that same scale, in due time. The problem is, this time there might be a nuclear response to their domestic calamities. That is, if they managed to steal enough US technology to get one of their missiles launched.
Toronto Sun, Sunday, March 27, Mercedes Stephenson.
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/mercedes_stephenson/2011/03/25/17758791.html
MS: “In any other country, a spy chief revealing concerns that members of government are believed to be under ‘at least the general influence’ of foreign powers would have been a wakeup call.
Last week, opposition MPs on the Commons public safety committee tabled a report demanding CSIS Director Richard Fadden be fired for comments he made last summer.
In an interview with CBC, Fadden said CSIS was concerned politicians and political figures at various levels of government were being influenced by foreign governments.
In response to a followup question, Fadden went on to say media reports suggesting China may be one of the countries spying on Canada are not far from the truth.”
If this doesn’t prove that the opposition parties are unfit to run Canada, nothing does.
From http://www.liberal.ca, “What we stand for -Canada in the world”:
“A Liberal Government will propose a new kind of economic partnership, Global Network Agreements, first with China and India. They will boost trade, but also go beyond exports and imports, building on people-to-people connections in strategic sectors such as higher education, clean technologies, culture, tourism, financial services, trade logistics, public health and food.”
What could possibly go wrong?