China, which slammed the move as “discriminatory”, banned exports of Nexperia products in retaliation. While most of the company's chips are produced in Europe, around 70 per cent are packaged in China before distribution.
Finally an article that explains why China can ban the export of chips made in Europe. And the reason is as stupid as I expected 😒
This is even worse than I expected 🤦
That would be likely incompatible with WTO agreements and usually leads to local quasi monopolists charging absurd prices to government run service providers. And it wouldn't solve the likely issue of European companies buying the needed software and hardware from abroad anyway.
Ok so you agree that there is a need to make laws here in Europe about it and subject any supplier to them regardless of where their HQ is located? No need to answer that 😅
Accountable based on what laws? The real issue is that these things are perfectly legal regardless of who does it and that there is also almost no way to hold a supplier accountable for software security breaches (besides the fact that it is too late then anyways).
What I don't quite get is how the Chinese owners can block the export now, even though the Dutch intervention was specifically to prevent them from being able to do that, no? The mass-media articles I have read so far on this also seem confused. Anyone got a clearer idea on this? Did the Dutch intervention just come too late or is there some legal technicality?
I don't see how that makes a big difference. As the Polish example clearly shows, the laws right now are inadequate to deal with this and it took 3rd party hackers to reverse-engineer it after the company extorted significant amounts of money from the operator to re-enable the trains. And the icing on the cake is that now these hackers are in court, not the company.
And from an IT security perspective, it doesn't matter much to an attacker if the remote operated backdoor to shut down these busses is put there by a Chinese or European company (which would likely be using Chinese tech for that anyways).
Online updates and remote diagnostics are usually an advertised feature and might even have been a selling argument as it appears to save costs in maintenance... until the Polish vendor turns off their trains because the operator dared to try to repair them themselves (yes that is not a "Chinese" problem).
Repost from 2 days ago.
There have been such attempts, like Nextbox for example. But afaik they have been all commercial failures, IMHO because basically anyone that cares enough about this stuff can build their own for a much lower price, and those that don't...
The same or at least similar increase in real estate prices has happened in non-EU countries around the world, and the primary beneficiaries are the local upper-class not the foreign investors. It is a complex topic, and EU regulation does play a role in it, but overall I would say that the EU isn't the primary driver behind this.
Europe isn't China. It would be pointless to turn Europe into a quasi-China to prevent Chinese influence on Europe. Just like it is pointless to create European tech giants as a counter to US American ones.