California Software Maker's Fortunes Track Dispute With Chinese Gov't 94
concealment writes "For three years, a group of hackers from China waged a relentless campaign of cyber harassment against Solid Oak Software Inc., Milburn's family-owned, eight-person firm in Santa Barbara, California. The attack began less than two weeks after Milburn publicly accused China of appropriating his company's parental filtering software, CYBERsitter, for a national Internet censoring project. And it ended shortly after he settled a $2.2 billion lawsuit against the Chinese government and a string of computer companies last April."
China has their own version of reality ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's face it, China has their own version of reality, and it's one in which they're going to do whatever they want, however they want to.
South China sea, Tiananmen Square, human rights, their vision of how trade works, Tibet and the Dalai Lama -- if you read press releases which come out of China, it's clear that either their grip on reality is a little off, or they just bravely put forth whatever their official lie is and expect everyone else to take it at face value like their citizens do.
It's all rhtetoric and bullshit when they make a public statement.
I'm not in the least bit surprised that this kind of attack may have happened if someone pointed out that China was stealing from them. They're generally pretty aggressive about such things. And they're entirely indifferent about IP rights of anybody outside of their country.
Warfare with China is inevitable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Every big country wants to be top dog, or a superpower.
China has wanted this for some time.
They fought a number of proxy wars against the USA, including the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In the former, Chinese troops met American troops in combat. In the latter, China provided weapons, equipment, aid and advisors to the North Vietnamese communist armies.
China is now building F-22 clones [dailytech.com] for its airforce, has a new carrier for its Navy [cnn.com], is waging constant and active cyber warfare against the US [bbc.co.uk], and is expanding its trade strategy to dominate the US [chinadaily.com.cn].
The war is cold now, but eventually it will be hot. Hold onto your hats.
The USSR collapsed halfway through. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mainly because the USSR collapsed from within at the end of that time period. China has privatized, thus is not likely to the type of collapse that afflicted the USSR.