Ah, the newly popular "let's make the policy unusually broad and treat all foreign production as presumptively dangerous, regardless of country, manufacturer or security practices, this way we're more transparent about prioritizing a bribe rather than our stated concerns".
> Advanced robotic devices are inherently networked systems which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates.
Good thing this isn't a concern in ones produced locally.
>Good thing this isn't a concern in ones produced locally.
It's not difficult to understand the folly of sharing data and control with your biggest adversary. It's so basic, but people chronically keep tripping on it, intentionally or not.
This isn't even something new either, it comes from the cold war where the KGB was excellent at espionage particularly because of their smart leverage of regular people with access to the right things. China isn't dumb either.
So sorry you aren't going to get blackmailed instead of shown Toyota ads, but it's a pretty smart move that most with a geopolitical IQ above room temperature can easily grasp.
I think this policy is another case of projection: "we" are doing this to other countries and we are afraid someone will do it back to us - which is both unfair and illegal.
The irony is this will harm US manufacturing, not help it. Manufacturing is the sector that most depends on robotics. Companies will now have to sue the administration so they can continue operations without this new regulatory hindrance. I thought this president was supposed to eliminate regulations, not impose newer and stupider ones.
I read somebody point out that the cold war roles have reversed. Now the US is protectionist and isolationist, and the likely eventual outcome will be the same for the US as it was for the USSR.
In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry".
They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smuggled some.
The IT industry in Brazil became a cartel dominated by few companies. They'd pirate everything from the Americans, even DOS and all BIOS and firmware. Their computers' mainboards were ugly, hacked and defect prone. But they would give buckets of money to the military controlling the government and the corrupt politicians in Congress. The 80s became known as the "lost decade" because of the low growth induced by this policy.
I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.
Yeah, they still have high tariffs. But back them it was just illegal to import computers. You'd need to request special authorization from the government to do so, and it would take months to get an authorization. And only a few reasons would be accepted (research, high-performance industrial automation, etc).
Oh, Intel is way ahead of the curve there, friend.
See: broken cablemodem chipsets, poor performing cellular modems, multiple generations of desktop ethernet adapters that don't work properly, uncompetitive processors in all but some very specific markets, CPUs that literally fry themselves to death because they couldn't keep up with AMD's advances so the just just kept cranking the voltage and clock speeds...Intel has been a bucket of Fail for a decade and a half.
And now the US government owns a not-too-shabby chunk of said Winning company thanks to a Very Stable Genius...
This is just a false-flag campaign planted by the UAW to ensure the slovenly can keep their jobs another couple years instead of actually be held to task for poor American manufacturing build quality. ;)
> In response to this threat, the White House convened an executive branch interagency body with
appropriate national security expertise, see 47 U.S.C. § 1601(c)(1), comprising agencies that
included appropriate national security agencies, id. § 1601(c)(4), which determined jointly and
severally that: All foreign-produced advanced robotic devices pose an unacceptable risk to the
national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons and should be
included on the FCC’s Covered List, unless the Department of War (DOW) transmits to the FCC
a specific determination that a given foreign-produced advanced robotic device, or a class of
such devices, does not pose such risks. The interagency group and the agencies comprising it
determined that foreign-produced advanced robotic devices presented the specific unacceptable
risks of (a) posing a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt U.S. economic and national
security, and (b) creating a cybersecurity risk that threatens the security of critical infrastructure
and thus the safety and security of U.S. persons.
>
> To facilitate this transition period, entities that produce advanced robotic devices in a foreign
country are encouraged to apply for Conditional Approvals (Annex A) which, if approved, will
allow such producers to continue to receive FCC authorization for their products while they work
to onshore manufacturing and address the U.S. government’s national security concerns
described above.
Amazingly ironic that the administration most deeply in bed to the finance sector's bidding is now identifying the result of the finance sector's 50 year push to offshore everything a problem for National security
I remember a big push by business journals back in the 2000s with claims that "executives who offshore work get 18% greater bonuses than executives who don't".
Why doesn't the U.S. simply ban all Chinese products that have an internet-connected computer in them? That would solve almost all security problems in one strike and force Chinese manufacturers to communicate via Bluetooth and update software through USB sticks or memory cards.
The apps communicating with said devices through Bluetooth obviously can't connect to the internet either otherwise there'd still be an avenue for subversion.
Just banning one Chinese product category at a time willy nilly doesn't help as there are a zillion other product categories of Chinese stuff with internet connections. From toys (with camera's in them), to refrigerators, power converters, microwaves, televisions to smartphones.
There's a box being sold called "SuperBox". It claims to be able to stream any movie/video. The claim is "just pay $300 and you won't need to subscribe to any streaming service anymore." However, part of what it does is hacks your home network and tries to take over every thing on that network. And it sends this all back to China. The vast majority of people buying & installing these are just ordinary people but some will be executives, or people working for the feds. Did they bring their work laptop home and plug it in to their network? So it can get attacked outside the office firewall? Remember how stuxnet was spread?
Removing an internet connection doesn't really solve much when you're talking about autonomous AI-driven robots with vision and hearing. It's a whole different category to toys, refrigerators, etc. My refrigerator isn't going to suddenly pick up a weapon and start attacking things on command. Nor does it have an easy way to receive instructions through side channels. I'm not saying I agree with Trump's policy - but removing internet isn't a solution either.
You have to realize that in a war China will use everything they can against us, including power converters (force a blackout), cars (drive-by-wire car will drive into a tree to kill a high ranking official), routers (disconnect the internet to make command and control difficult for our military). And a zillion other things.
A refrigerator could be forced to overheat and burn you house down killing you and your family. It may sound far fetched but if they believe it will help their cause they won't hesitate one second.
This issue needs to be solved once and for all NOW. Not piecemeal.
There is a threat, but they are exaggerating it. Most of the advanced legged robots are glorified cameras and pack animals and are still in the research phases of implementation. Still, as someone who owns one of these, the amount of black-box software inside them is concerning. It's easy to chalk this up to intellectual property guarding, but who knows... I'd love to purchase *quality* domestically produced legged robots for research, but they are generally nonexistent. All this policy is going to do is hamper our efforts in research, which is a terrible idea if we want to produce a domestic supply chain. I'm sure they had absolutely 0% input from anyone who knows anything about robotics. Rather than this policy, why not simply require a full open source software stack?
i got a better solution. make open firmware and user flashing mandatory. if anyone can inspect the code for backdoors and replace it with brand new software then any security issues go out the window.
should apply to domestic products too for good measure.
The true intention of all of these seems to mostly be to give the government justification to pick winners and losers. Anyone that bends the knee gets their carveout or special exception, anyone that doesn't gets hit with all sorts of restrictions on top of the randomly applied tariffs.
It seems the way to get Americans to embrace a centrally planned economy was to combine unashamed xenophobia with blatant corruption while calling it capitalism.
Why does department of defense, excuse me I mean the illegally named department of war aka cosplayer Hegseth’s wet dream, get put in charge of this? They are properly staffed to review thousands of robots? Hahaha.
England created the Industrial Revolution but barely has any manufacturing these days.
The U.S. created several industries (mass car manufacturing, electronics, clothing, etc) but today China produces more than them. They had more than half the worlds' GDP in 1944, they have less than 16% today. They're slowly following England's path.
This makes me wonder if we've ever had any evidence that "onshore manufacturing" prevents or even lessens foreign backdoors or security vulnerabilities. Honestly, to me it seems like onshore manufacturers are generally far more clueless than they have any right to be, so it's highly unlikely that they could both write materially better code and act as any meaningful barrier to internal compromise.
Apple is a case in point. It designs and engineers everything and stringently checks that its Chinese ODMs aren't quietly swapping in cheaper inferior parts or alter its software. I therefore assume Apple products are safe even though they're manufactured in China.
But the fact is that most Western manufacturers are too lazy to develop things themselves and merely slap their label on a Chinese designed and manufactured product. This means that the Chinese could slip in anything in the hard/software which creates a huge security liability.
I'm sure most people who've ever said it were not talking about actual cases, only decoy reasons to get people worried about it and justify actions about it. But both things do exist: foreign backdoors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8WuXDXfcI) and security vulnerabilities (too many router, smart TV, streaming box etc. botnets to count). Not to mention the backdoors and security vulnerabilities that aren't foreign (e.g. Tesla vehicles).
But I think both such things talked about in this announcement are complete bullshit, yes
An administration filled with people who read books that don't have pictures might, for example, consider the chilling effects this anti-free market, anto-competitive nonsense will have on our economy and the economies of our allies.
They might even consider two steps into the very near future and realize that the last nations to automate will become the poorest nations almost overnight, and be forced to watch as the price of good declines for the entire world except their shifty, isolated, tariffed, backwater.
Heck, such and administration might even have a few scientists and economists left employed who could advise them, having not just forced many of the best and brightest to flee to more enlightened parts of the world just to stay employed or live in a places that don't treat inconvenient truths as blasphemy.
That video clearly states that they have always placed great emphasis on product safety and information security, and that they kindly request that all users refrain from making dangerous modifications or using the robot in a hazardous manner.
Ah, the newly popular "let's make the policy unusually broad and treat all foreign production as presumptively dangerous, regardless of country, manufacturer or security practices, this way we're more transparent about prioritizing a bribe rather than our stated concerns".
> Advanced robotic devices are inherently networked systems which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates.
Good thing this isn't a concern in ones produced locally.
>Good thing this isn't a concern in ones produced locally.
It's not difficult to understand the folly of sharing data and control with your biggest adversary. It's so basic, but people chronically keep tripping on it, intentionally or not.
This isn't even something new either, it comes from the cold war where the KGB was excellent at espionage particularly because of their smart leverage of regular people with access to the right things. China isn't dumb either.
So sorry you aren't going to get blackmailed instead of shown Toyota ads, but it's a pretty smart move that most with a geopolitical IQ above room temperature can easily grasp.
I think this policy is another case of projection: "we" are doing this to other countries and we are afraid someone will do it back to us - which is both unfair and illegal.
> Good thing this isn't a concern in ones produced locally.
Local ones when not in use are doing the Pledge of Allegiance on a loop.
The irony is this will harm US manufacturing, not help it. Manufacturing is the sector that most depends on robotics. Companies will now have to sue the administration so they can continue operations without this new regulatory hindrance. I thought this president was supposed to eliminate regulations, not impose newer and stupider ones.
I read somebody point out that the cold war roles have reversed. Now the US is protectionist and isolationist, and the likely eventual outcome will be the same for the US as it was for the USSR.
By sue you mean bribe to get an exception, correct?
In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry".
They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smuggled some.
The IT industry in Brazil became a cartel dominated by few companies. They'd pirate everything from the Americans, even DOS and all BIOS and firmware. Their computers' mainboards were ugly, hacked and defect prone. But they would give buckets of money to the military controlling the government and the corrupt politicians in Congress. The 80s became known as the "lost decade" because of the low growth induced by this policy.
This dumb idea expired in 1992.
I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.
Are phones an exception? I've heard Brazil is a very mobile-first market.
Yeah, they still have high tariffs. But back them it was just illegal to import computers. You'd need to request special authorization from the government to do so, and it would take months to get an authorization. And only a few reasons would be accepted (research, high-performance industrial automation, etc).
What is Brazil's computer hardware industry like now? Are there any companies manufacturing in Brazil?
They're mostly assemblers of parts. They buy most parts from China and assemble the computers in the country.
It will harm it even more by not subjecting it to competition, so it becomes bloated and uncompetitive like the US car and shipbuilding industries.
Sure, our technology is worse, but at least it's expensive.
Oh, Intel is way ahead of the curve there, friend.
See: broken cablemodem chipsets, poor performing cellular modems, multiple generations of desktop ethernet adapters that don't work properly, uncompetitive processors in all but some very specific markets, CPUs that literally fry themselves to death because they couldn't keep up with AMD's advances so the just just kept cranking the voltage and clock speeds...Intel has been a bucket of Fail for a decade and a half.
And now the US government owns a not-too-shabby chunk of said Winning company thanks to a Very Stable Genius...
This is just a false-flag campaign planted by the UAW to ensure the slovenly can keep their jobs another couple years instead of actually be held to task for poor American manufacturing build quality. ;)
When you can't blame the machines, pretend the workers on the lowest rungs are machines and blame them instead.
America doesn’t know how to do anything well aside from manipulate imaginary numbers.
Companies buying themselves over and over again.
How much of our so called economy is just moving money back and forth…
> In response to this threat, the White House convened an executive branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise, see 47 U.S.C. § 1601(c)(1), comprising agencies that included appropriate national security agencies, id. § 1601(c)(4), which determined jointly and severally that: All foreign-produced advanced robotic devices pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons and should be included on the FCC’s Covered List, unless the Department of War (DOW) transmits to the FCC a specific determination that a given foreign-produced advanced robotic device, or a class of such devices, does not pose such risks. The interagency group and the agencies comprising it determined that foreign-produced advanced robotic devices presented the specific unacceptable risks of (a) posing a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt U.S. economic and national security, and (b) creating a cybersecurity risk that threatens the security of critical infrastructure and thus the safety and security of U.S. persons.
>
> To facilitate this transition period, entities that produce advanced robotic devices in a foreign country are encouraged to apply for Conditional Approvals (Annex A) which, if approved, will allow such producers to continue to receive FCC authorization for their products while they work to onshore manufacturing and address the U.S. government’s national security concerns described above.
Amazingly ironic that the administration most deeply in bed to the finance sector's bidding is now identifying the result of the finance sector's 50 year push to offshore everything a problem for National security
I remember a big push by business journals back in the 2000s with claims that "executives who offshore work get 18% greater bonuses than executives who don't".
Is your definition of "finance sector" "everyone who likes money"?
Why doesn't the U.S. simply ban all Chinese products that have an internet-connected computer in them? That would solve almost all security problems in one strike and force Chinese manufacturers to communicate via Bluetooth and update software through USB sticks or memory cards.
The apps communicating with said devices through Bluetooth obviously can't connect to the internet either otherwise there'd still be an avenue for subversion.
Just banning one Chinese product category at a time willy nilly doesn't help as there are a zillion other product categories of Chinese stuff with internet connections. From toys (with camera's in them), to refrigerators, power converters, microwaves, televisions to smartphones.
Going one at a time, in small apparently myopic focus is how a politician shakes the lobbyist money tree. "You could be next!"
There's a box being sold called "SuperBox". It claims to be able to stream any movie/video. The claim is "just pay $300 and you won't need to subscribe to any streaming service anymore." However, part of what it does is hacks your home network and tries to take over every thing on that network. And it sends this all back to China. The vast majority of people buying & installing these are just ordinary people but some will be executives, or people working for the feds. Did they bring their work laptop home and plug it in to their network? So it can get attacked outside the office firewall? Remember how stuxnet was spread?
This is a podcast about it: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/
Probably why you couldn't ban all at once...there'd be not much left.
While that seems helpful it would not be enough. Consider this as a counter example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games
Why does Ross, the largest Friend, not simply eat the other five?
Removing an internet connection doesn't really solve much when you're talking about autonomous AI-driven robots with vision and hearing. It's a whole different category to toys, refrigerators, etc. My refrigerator isn't going to suddenly pick up a weapon and start attacking things on command. Nor does it have an easy way to receive instructions through side channels. I'm not saying I agree with Trump's policy - but removing internet isn't a solution either.
You have to realize that in a war China will use everything they can against us, including power converters (force a blackout), cars (drive-by-wire car will drive into a tree to kill a high ranking official), routers (disconnect the internet to make command and control difficult for our military). And a zillion other things.
A refrigerator could be forced to overheat and burn you house down killing you and your family. It may sound far fetched but if they believe it will help their cause they won't hesitate one second.
This issue needs to be solved once and for all NOW. Not piecemeal.
There is a threat, but they are exaggerating it. Most of the advanced legged robots are glorified cameras and pack animals and are still in the research phases of implementation. Still, as someone who owns one of these, the amount of black-box software inside them is concerning. It's easy to chalk this up to intellectual property guarding, but who knows... I'd love to purchase *quality* domestically produced legged robots for research, but they are generally nonexistent. All this policy is going to do is hamper our efforts in research, which is a terrible idea if we want to produce a domestic supply chain. I'm sure they had absolutely 0% input from anyone who knows anything about robotics. Rather than this policy, why not simply require a full open source software stack?
i got a better solution. make open firmware and user flashing mandatory. if anyone can inspect the code for backdoors and replace it with brand new software then any security issues go out the window.
should apply to domestic products too for good measure.
yea but they don't wanna do that
I hope there's a plan for local production in the US with all the banning of stuff right, left and center.
Soon they'll ban Colombian coffee for being too good and making people want more of it. Or who knows whatever else.
No plan would be a better alternative to than the plan the current craptocracy would come up with
The true intention of all of these seems to mostly be to give the government justification to pick winners and losers. Anyone that bends the knee gets their carveout or special exception, anyone that doesn't gets hit with all sorts of restrictions on top of the randomly applied tariffs.
It seems the way to get Americans to embrace a centrally planned economy was to combine unashamed xenophobia with blatant corruption while calling it capitalism.
Why does department of defense, excuse me I mean the illegally named department of war aka cosplayer Hegseth’s wet dream, get put in charge of this? They are properly staffed to review thousands of robots? Hahaha.
They can take bribes as effectively as any other department. Actual review of robots is presumably out of scope.
I see a funny pattern here.
England created the Industrial Revolution but barely has any manufacturing these days.
The U.S. created several industries (mass car manufacturing, electronics, clothing, etc) but today China produces more than them. They had more than half the worlds' GDP in 1944, they have less than 16% today. They're slowly following England's path.
China has 4x the population of the US, so it's not exactly odd that they would produce more than the US.
This makes me wonder if we've ever had any evidence that "onshore manufacturing" prevents or even lessens foreign backdoors or security vulnerabilities. Honestly, to me it seems like onshore manufacturers are generally far more clueless than they have any right to be, so it's highly unlikely that they could both write materially better code and act as any meaningful barrier to internal compromise.
Apple is a case in point. It designs and engineers everything and stringently checks that its Chinese ODMs aren't quietly swapping in cheaper inferior parts or alter its software. I therefore assume Apple products are safe even though they're manufactured in China.
But the fact is that most Western manufacturers are too lazy to develop things themselves and merely slap their label on a Chinese designed and manufactured product. This means that the Chinese could slip in anything in the hard/software which creates a huge security liability.
"foreign backdoors" and "security vulnerabilities". Both are an worn-out excuse, not some real concern.
Gaslighting as a policy.
I'm sure most people who've ever said it were not talking about actual cases, only decoy reasons to get people worried about it and justify actions about it. But both things do exist: foreign backdoors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8WuXDXfcI) and security vulnerabilities (too many router, smart TV, streaming box etc. botnets to count). Not to mention the backdoors and security vulnerabilities that aren't foreign (e.g. Tesla vehicles).
But I think both such things talked about in this announcement are complete bullshit, yes
I have to point out how deeply unserious it is that the following line...
> As the technology matures, advanced robotic devices have growing use cases in monitoring and securing critical infrastructure.
...cites:
'Secret Service uses robot dogs to guard Trump's Mar-a-Lago in FL' as reported in the Palm Beach Daily News
Say goodbye to robots just like EVs
Thanks Trump
How do you think a responsible administration, members of your party of choice, would differ on this matter? Or EVs?
Perhaps by thinking more than zero steps ahead.
An administration filled with people who read books that don't have pictures might, for example, consider the chilling effects this anti-free market, anto-competitive nonsense will have on our economy and the economies of our allies.
They might even consider two steps into the very near future and realize that the last nations to automate will become the poorest nations almost overnight, and be forced to watch as the price of good declines for the entire world except their shifty, isolated, tariffed, backwater.
Heck, such and administration might even have a few scientists and economists left employed who could advise them, having not just forced many of the best and brightest to flee to more enlightened parts of the world just to stay employed or live in a places that don't treat inconvenient truths as blasphemy.
Maybe by not being the most blatantly corrupt assholes of all time?
it is a real threat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xha2TJ_1C6Q
Very cool, but video looks accelerated and something about the robot shading/lighting gives it a rendered feel.
The video looks fake or at least enhanced. A net or a bucket of oily sand would disable that annoyance.
That video clearly states that they have always placed great emphasis on product safety and information security, and that they kindly request that all users refrain from making dangerous modifications or using the robot in a hazardous manner.