On the North River

In stock made useless and my professional association with an entire product line that withered away; I personally lost about $20,000 in stock, benefits and future career prospects (would be worth about 75K today) from the fatal attacks by the Chinese government through hackers and Intellectual Property theft.

Instapundit: Huawei isn’t merely a Communist front corporation — it was built on the bones of Nortel (Networks), picked clean by Huawei in what amounted to state-sanctioned intellectual theft and espionage.

On Monday the Commerce Department expanded its foreign-produced direct product rule to include situations “where U.S. software or technology is the basis for a foreign-produced item” that will be used by Huawei, or where the company is party to such a transaction, such as being an intermediary supplier.

There are dozens of steps in developing, manufacturing and installing chips in a device, with U.S. technology an integral part throughout. Synopsys Inc. and Cadence Design Systems Inc. make software used to design semiconductors; Lam Research Corp. and Applied Materials Inc. are major suppliers of manufacturing equipment — all four companies are based in Silicon Valley.

There are many more American technology providers crucial to the process. Remove just one, and any chip company will struggle to keep up. Removing them all would be akin to cutting off the oxygen. And if the new rule is to be strictly interpreted, then even the use of generalist technologies like PCs running on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows and Intel Corp. processors could be prohibited.

I’ve written about this before.

What “Made in China” really means.