China Is Jumping at Digital Shadows
“Survival is an infinite capacity for suspicion,” goes the line from John Le Carre's classic Cold War-era novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And right now, in the technology realm, China is fighting hard just to stay in the game.
Three brief paragraphs posted by the Cyberspace Administration of China to its website on Sunday night outlined the latest round of digital paranoia between Beijing and Washington, with Boise-based Micron Technology Inc. the most-recent victim.
“Micron products have relatively serious potential network security issues,” the CAC said without elaborating. “Operators of national critical information infrastructure should stop purchasing Micron products.”
We ought not to make too much of Beijing's decision to keep details of its security review under wraps; China in March announced it was coming, but never pledged to reveal the process by which it would come to a conclusion. Governments don't serve their own national interests by giving away intelligence methods or analyses. Suffice to say some people within the political machinery felt it wise to halt purchases from the largest US maker of memory chips.
What's important now is to divine whether this was a decision based on security considerations or political ones. To get there, we should take a closer look at the practical implications of the move.
Micron is the world's third-largest supplier of dynamic random-access memory chips, DRAM, an $81 billion slice of the global semiconductor market. It's also fifth in the $60 billion NAND Flash memory business, according to Taipei-based market researcher TrendForce.
Flash memory is the component within electronics that saves information. It stores the photos on your iPhone and all those Word docs sitting on
Read more on tech.hindustantimes.com
