NYT covers China cyberthreat

Thu Feb 21 11:35:26 UTC 2013

On 21-Feb-13 04:25, Kyle Creyts wrote:
> For another example of this, an acquaintance once told me about the process of getting internationally standardized technologies approved for deployment in China; the process that was described to me involved giving China the standards-based spec that had been drafted and approved, being told that for deployment, they would have to improve upon it in a laundry list of ways to bring it some 5-10 years ahead of the spec, and THEN it would be allowed to be deployed.

My recent experience doing exactly this at $EMPLOYER doesn't match this
story at all.

The main problem, as with several other "second world" countries, is
that the standards you must comply with are only in the local language
and you must make your submission in the local language as well. 
However, if you have a local technical presence, you can often get
software approval (or a formal notice of exemption--even for products
that contain "dangerous" features like encryption) in a matter of days
or even hours.  If you don't, it can drag on for months.  Hardware
testing can be even worse because it must be performed in their labs and
can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but at least that doesn't have to
be repeated each time you publish a new version of code.

In contrast, "first world" countries generally publish their standards
in, and accept submissions in, English.  They also tend not to care
about software features, just hardware.  The standards tend to be shared
across countries (eg. EU/EFTA and US/Canada), or at least they accept
test results from third-party labs that can test for all such countries
at the same time.  As a result, many vendors simply don't bother going
past that group--or do it so infrequently that they don't gain the
institutional knowledge of how to navigate the approval processes in the
other group successfully and with minimal effort/cost.

S

-- 
Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking

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