Trump Administration Drafting Ban On Chinese Data Center Devices (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0184851740
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/08/04/1729250/trump-administration-drafting-ban-on-chinese-data-center-devices
- Source link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/exclusive-trump-administration-drafting-ban-100549845.html
> The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the U.S. telecom industry, is [2]working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers , which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centers. Officials hope to publish it this year, when it would take effect. The move, not previously reported, aims to prevent Chinese firms from stealing data, installing malware or disrupting service at U.S. data centers, which house the chips to train and run AI models.
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> The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. [...] A U.S. ban on new models of Chinese data center devices would likely hit China's Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added to the Pentagon's list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~schwit1
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/exclusive-trump-administration-drafting-ban-100549845.html
They will just route them (Score:3)
Through India and Vietnam. This is probably more another solicitation for a bribe. Either that or trying to get a cold war going with China since Russia's a bust
The power paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
The FCC is powerless to regulate net neutrality yet powerful enough to ban random products over unfounded claims.
Re: (Score:1)
Well, right... what the hell do fiber optic interlink transceivers have to with sending data to China? I'm sure the SFP module could snoop that traffic, though it'd need to store it someplace, then need a connection to the outside 'net to dial home.
And, the transceivers aren't the problem, far from it... it's the whole machine's parts. Even if the actual rack-mount server is built in the US (or your car, or anything else you buy), realize that the parts (CPU, RAM, harddrive, GPU/NPU, motherboard, power su
Build the data center in Europe (Score:3)
Where they probably don't have this ban.
At this point, China doesn't need to steal data from the US, our tech companies already sell it to them. And much of China's AI tech is ahead of the US. This is like the Space Race, except this time most of us don't realize we've lost. We won't be getting a Sputnik style wake up call, we'll just wake up one day and realize that China is effectively running everything and there is nothing we can do about it anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
They're both quite different from the US, but saying they're about the same is both weird and wrong. The Chinese are rebuilding the imperium, which was sometimes good and sometimes quite bad. The Russians...they seem to be in the process of destroying their country. The reports I have heard are now a couple of decades old, but they indicated that they country was largely run by non-government-based gangs.
Re: (Score:2)
Places to build datacentres aren't fungible. You build them where you can, where power is available, and where fibre connections are best co-located to your customers. Currently there's 2.6GW (these days we measure datacentres by power consumed for some reason) of datacentres mid-construction in Europe. There's already 2269 datacentres in Europe many of which owned by American tech companies.
Having a datacentre in Europe really helps if you have European customers. For others it just creates a lagfest.
at the speed of light within data centers (Score:2)
Its the ones that go faster than light that they need to ban.
"At the speed of light" (Score:2)
This is a lot like saying: "the car goes as fast as a car" (or with a nod to The Simpsons: "Fun toys are fun!").
The data is not moving at the speed of light in a vacuum, because the light is not in a vacuum.
The data, transmitted on light, moves at the speed of light through a fiber optic cable.
Which won't leave you any wiser.
Too much hand-waving.
Re: (Score:2)
True, but it's almost always faster than the flow of electrons...well, if it goes at all.
Stick but no carrot (Score:3)
They sure do talk about banning things, but so far I've seen very little done to actually get businesses to BUILD that stuff here. Seems all it will do is cut out choice and raise prices.
Re: (Score:2)
The MAGA morons believe everything is already made better and cheaper in the US, just that the Chinese artificially keep prices low (with what money???) so that the US industry suffers. Obviously, that has zero basis in actual reality, but these people are as dumb as bread and have absolutely no fact-checking ability.
Re: (Score:2)
Manufacturing didn't move to China because the Chinese were cheating and undercutting American companies. Rather it was a deliberate decision on the part of American companies to kill local manufacturing and eliminate jobs (employees are simply costs to reduce), in order to maximize short-term quarterly gains. No amount of tariff and government banning will fix that.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. This is 100% self-inflicted. But admitting fault is another thing the MAGAs are completely incapable of. And hence they blame everybody else and never do anything to fix the actual problem.
Re: (Score:1)
It's not artificially... the price on a Chinese-designed and owned company that makes a Chinese-built car being cheaper than an identical US-built car is because they don't have to pay the workers as much (pennies and rice) (but, the company still makes the same profit).
Whoever gets the most votes is generally the lesser of two evils ("lesser of two weevils" from 'Master and Commander), but that's the most votes... the Electoral College, not The People, decides the Butt In Chair (still don't understand why
Re: (Score:2)
You do know that you essentially advocate continuing the collapse, right?
Re: (Score:1)
What collapse?
I don't seem to remember any big/huge stock point drop in the last 10+ years, are you talking about the collapse of "the old way of American life"? That's been gone for over 30+ years.
If you go outside these days to water the lawn and casually wave to the neighbor, you might get shot (because they see that as a terroristic threat) or you might be seen as a 'pedophile' trying to "entice" their 5 kids.
And, the collapse has been happening longer than the current "Butt In Chair" has had said chai
Re: (Score:1)
Well, that's because those big businesses don't want to pay the American $18/hr wage to have an American watch a monitor on the chip fab machine... they'd rather pay someone in China pennies and a handful of rice (and a little dog meat) to do the same job.
I don't see them bring stuff back to the US until they can have nothing but an ocean of robot arms building the car without a human in the building.
The speed of light? (Score:3)
Data-signals travel in fiber-optic cables at the speed of light ... in optical fibers. That's about 67% of the speed of light in vacuum.
Electrical signals in wires travel somewhere between 50% and 99% of the speed of light in vacuum, depending on wire thickness and geometry, and insulation.
Fiber-optic cables have many advantages over electrical wires, but speed of the signal is not really one of them. There are others, such as higher bandwidth, easier multiplexing, longer travel distances without boosting, no electrical interference, and incresed security (harder to wiretap.)
Re: (Score:2)
> incresed security (harder to wiretap.)
That's an interesting observation. Yet, apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.
Re: (Score:2)
> apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.
To be fair, any place where cables are joined by a device is a potential attack-point. But it seems to me that it ought to be easy to detect a malicious device. After all, doesn't it have to "phone home" or output suspicious data that wasn't fed into it (e.g., viruses?)
Re: (Score:1)
Not so... it can 'phone home' and send whatever data over a normally used port (say, 80 (HTTP) or 443 (SSL)), and you'd never know unless you weren't watching a movie or YouTube or something. If you block 80 and 443, you basically can't do crap online... you can use a VPN, but if the site you go to expects your traffic on one of those ports, you might be screwed.
Anything that's connected to the internet (whether it's cellular, WiFi, ethernet, cable modem, a direct connection to the local trunk lines, a las
Transceivers are not a security risk (Score:2)
I've seen various things people have played around with, trying to cram some additional useful bits into a transceiver (like micro Linux systems). They're bulky, use way more power, and thus more heat. I don't believe that anybody is sneaking anything extra into actual regularly-used transceivers; there's barely enough space and power budget to do the primary job of the transceiver.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I mean, how would any packets they are able to see passing through them be routed to an attacker anyway?
Even if you could fit a tiny busybox on one of these thing, once they try to enter a L3, routable state, they would be detected immediately. Imagine hundreds of these inside an org all trying to get a DHCP address. Even the most unobservant admin is going to see something like that.
Re: Transceivers are not a security risk (Score:2)
You don't request an address, you use an address already in use and remove the traffic that is part of your session from the return traffic. You have to monitor both sides of the connection to detect that.
Re: (Score:1)
Just dead-bug a chip in there, long as you know the OS and it's file-sharing habits, store a copy of the traffic and have the machine phone home when possible to upload.
And, what lie are they using this time? (Score:2)
Because even claiming that an optical transceiver is a security risk is totally insane and has no basis in reality whatsoever. Or are they doubling down of the dumb, because it continues to work nicely on their cult members?
Re: (Score:1)
You haven't seen what people are capable of soldering, have you?
Say you order a hundred SFP fiber transceivers, and I'm the guy who packs the order... with a bit of time, I dead-bug in another processor that'll copy me all of your traffic, over a port that's open that it can find.
How would you know that the CPU in your desktop/laptop/tower (whatever you have) had an extra CPU core that was sending data back to some bad actors in China or Iran or anyplace? If you have some program that tells you about that,
scare wording (Score:4, Funny)
"is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centers" Oooh, scary. These are so high tech that they have been used in data centers for 30 years now. Maybe they should ban capacitors from China because these alternating plates of ceramic have the ability to cripple data centers when they fail.
Maybe stop Microsoft first? (Score:2)
Before they try to stop routers from China intercepting data, perhaps they should stop Microsoft from just GIVING it to China.
[1]https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-china-defense-department-cloud-computing-security
Re: (Score:2)
Any CCP product is a security risk ... from cat-rubbers to routers. Clever devils aren't they, pushing so many sock-puppets onto < /. > to defend interests of heavens-gateway. I advise dumping all of their shite into the Pacific and make and end of it. Chinese military takes a hit, lots more jobs for American workers and pure-play American sociopath investors get screwed. bWhat's not to love ?
That is one way to stop AI DC builds (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the largest buyers of Chinese manufactured transceivers are the hyperscalers. The hyperscalers represent more than half of Zhongji Innolight's total revenue. While there may be other sources, blocking the purchase of Chinese manufactured transceivers may have a significant impact on the AI data center builds.
Re:That is one way to stop AI DC builds (Score:5, Insightful)
> Some of the largest buyers of Chinese manufactured transceivers are the hyperscalers. The hyperscalers represent more than half of Zhongji Innolight's total revenue. While there may be other sources, blocking the purchase of Chinese manufactured transceivers may have a significant impact on the AI data center builds.
So, it's just another trump shakedown dressed up as national security then. He shakes this stick, mysteriously and completely coincidentally Anthropic and OpenAI and all the others pony up a few million in donations to his campaign or buy his crypto or gold shoes or whatever and all of a sudden the issue goes away ... until the next round of bullying begins.
Re: (Score:1)
Remember when Republicans spent 8 straight years accusing Democrats of being Commies because they were "picking winners and losers", and it's all Fox News would talk about day in and day out for months on end because using the Government to intervene in free markets was the worst thing that could possibly happen to the Country? Good times... Good times...