Because the CCP has no qualms about threatening an employee’s family to insert a backdoor or exfiltrate information, for one.
The decoupling has begun. Sentiment in the US toward China has never been as negative as it is now, from both sides of the aisle. I wouldn’t be surprised if we even see sanctions against China after the dust settles on this COVID fiasco.
The US is no white knight. But it is not doing anything close to what the CCP does on a regular basis. When was the last time a Trump protestor or Obama protestor disappeared and was never heard from again? Or disappeared and show up again months later, 30 lbs lighter and apologetic about how wrong they were about the government?
"Starting a war to deflect from problems at home", what the heck would you call the invasion of Tibet then?
And while not literally a war, what purpose do you think the bellicose suppression of the fact of Taiwanese independence both domestically and abroad serves?
Some people seem so obsessed with the country they live in, they can't see the rest of the world properly. An over focus on domestic politics distorts everything with parochialism.
Not exactly, Tibet is a different type
of thing, it’s more like chinas’s expansion rather than Xi wanting to deflect attention from his own problems. American wars weren’t for any purpose or even any benefit for the US and lots of money was wasted and stolen through military industrial complex.
The US does not start wars to distract from problems at home. That’s conspiracy horse manure. Whether you want to believe it or not, every president that has ever started a conflict or US involvement in an existing conflict has felt the action justified on foreign policy reasons.
Those reasons might be something you object with, or even downright stupid in hindsight. But only in Hollywood is it ever a smoke screen for domestic issues.
USA, Russia, Turkey, China do exactly that throughout history. It is also an indicator of a failed/non functioning democracy, this is what surprises me about the USA (it IS a functioning democracy). I understand Russia and Turkey (been to both countries) are democracy-challenged and instead of solving their internal problems they create new external to divert the attention and seek "greatness" (one of the things that Trump* also proclaims).
Humanity needs to be great together.
Together we stand, divided we fall (said the poet).
*I don't vote in the USA so I don't care who they/you elect. If it would be Clinton or Bush (Sr/Jr) or Obama saying "screw the world we should care only about ourselves" I would be equally judgemental (you should hear me discuss politics with Russians (they can't see why their dictator is bad for them) (and now I will get downvoted by both Americans AND Russians :)
Enforcing US IP protections isn't a partisan issue. I think it's crazy that people are trusting zoom for their critical communications (like design review meetings and screen sharing schematics/process diagrams!) when there's a non-zero chance that the CCP/PLA has the infrastructure to:
inb4 the whataboutism: yes, the US Government has (and might continue to) participated in state sponsored industrial espionage. But if I'm an American company, I'm not going to care about that.
I've worked for at least one company that outright refused to do business in China or with certain companies that had oversized presence in mainland China because of experiences with this kind of problem. I know of some engineers that were arrested upon entry to the USA because they stole company IP and founded a company in China that used it. I know of another company that had network hardware compromised by an employee over there and was used to attempt to penetrate US networks (and if you wanna get spooked, they weren't alerted by their stateside infosec team, but federal authorities). I don't know why people treat me like a conspiracy theorist for bringing this up about Zoom routing data through China and using less-than-best-practice security.
But if Microsoft has teams in China, Russia work on MS Teams, I will be very concerned. The same goes with Slack, that many companies now rely on to keep business going.
I'm very sure that Microsoft (and plenty of other companies including Apple) has teams in China, Russia and other countries to develop and update proper localizations for those apps.
If you have eng in US, having a decent chunk of it in China is much less threatening. For example, your internal controls can specify code review by american employees. Your key servers can remain in America or EU with stronger privacy protection regimes (not necessarily strong; just stronger than China).
This isn't perfect, but it makes subversion (1) more difficult, (2) probably more targeted (see eg Saudi Arabia using Saudi nationals employed by Twitter to steal identities of critics on Twitter), (3) more likely to be discovered.
My company's security model doesn't include the Chinese government / national security / military, but it could include the Chinese government giving our sales leads (which are evident if you can see our Zoom calls) to a domestic competitor. Broad exfiltration of data like that is much much harder if the engineering core is in the US or EU.
What alerted me at that time was the discrepancy between their HR site at U.S of the Chinese opening (only one), and their job postings in Chinese job sites.
I doubt it is a complicated conspiracy. Someone probably pushed the wrong button on the HR site.
I’d guess the one opening you saw was coming out of a US manager’s budget, and the manager wanted some physical presence in China to help work with teams that are based there.
It’s not surprising that they wouldn’t target China-based positions in fluent Chinese language offices at their US based English language site.
Also, I’ve been using Zoom at work for years. They’re more popular with younger firms (“anything but Cisco”, maybe?).
I think OP was alluding to Zoom not showcasing the reqs on the US careers site. Most companies including Microsoft do display open positions in all countries including China on their US page.
I very much doubt Microsoft does any serious development of their core products in China. Localisation,some local support and other,less sensitive stuff.
Anti-China sentiment is being stoked heavily in the US right now. Anything China-related is widely seen as evil and/or untrustworthy. Usually these opinions are expressed on China-sourced hardware.
The decoupling has begun. Sentiment in the US toward China has never been as negative as it is now, from both sides of the aisle. I wouldn’t be surprised if we even see sanctions against China after the dust settles on this COVID fiasco.