Trump Administration Drafting Ban On Chinese Data Center Devices (yahoo.com) 59
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the U.S. telecom industry, is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centers. Officials hope to publish it this year, when it would take effect. The move, not previously reported, aims to prevent Chinese firms from stealing data, installing malware or disrupting service at U.S. data centers, which house the chips to train and run AI models.
The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. [...] A U.S. ban on new models of Chinese data center devices would likely hit China's Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added to the Pentagon's list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.
The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. [...] A U.S. ban on new models of Chinese data center devices would likely hit China's Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added to the Pentagon's list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.
That is one way to stop AI DC builds (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That is one way to stop AI DC builds (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the largest buyers of Chinese manufactured transceivers are the hyperscalers. The hyperscalers represent more than half of Zhongji Innolight's total revenue. While there may be other sources, blocking the purchase of Chinese manufactured transceivers may have a significant impact on the AI data center builds.
So, it's just another trump shakedown dressed up as national security then. He shakes this stick, mysteriously and completely coincidentally Anthropic and OpenAI and all the others pony up a few million in donations to his campaign or buy his crypto or gold shoes or whatever and all of a sudden the issue goes away ... until the next round of bullying begins.
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Remember when Republicans spent 8 straight years accusing Democrats of being Commies because they were "picking winners and losers", and it's all Fox News would talk about day in and day out for months on end because using the Government to intervene in free markets was the worst thing that could possibly happen to the Country? Good times... Good times...
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I think you may have it halfway. His idea is probably not to kill datacenters, but he may still think about what you're mentioning, but think that the hyperscalers will buy in domestic markets if they cannot buy in China.
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It's a significant impact on everyone. Everyone I know uses Chinese-OEM'd transceivers because they're about 1/5th to 1/10th the price of the same thing when it has a Cisco sticker on it.
Also, in terms of a device that converts electrical to optical signalling being a means for CCP bogeymen to exfiltrate data, I know you have to be a special grade of idiot to work in the Trump administration but do these guys have any idea how these devices work? Although it could be a blessing in disguise, they could th
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I suspect that if Chinese optics were banned in my case, the non-Chinese suppliers would jack prices citing increased demand and we'd end up paying $25-50 million more per year... This would genuinely harm national security in our case. We would ask the bureaucrats for the extra money, they would tells us to make due
They will just route them (Score:3)
The power paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
The FCC is powerless to regulate net neutrality yet powerful enough to ban random products over unfounded claims.
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Well, right... what the hell do fiber optic interlink transceivers have to with sending data to China? I'm sure the SFP module could snoop that traffic, though it'd need to store it someplace, then need a connection to the outside 'net to dial home.
And, the transceivers aren't the problem, far from it... it's the whole machine's parts. Even if the actual rack-mount server is built in the US (or your car, or anything else you buy), realize that the parts (CPU, RAM, harddrive, GPU/NPU, motherboard, power su
Re: The power paradox (Score:2)
Mark my words, the banning is for preventing you from running something they havent pre-hacked with a national security letter. Currently one can just set up the edge of a network such that different countries devices that hate each other wall off the perimeter with the assumption that each likely contains a built-in back door, but the operators of each back door will not be able to bypass the next device in the series if by a hated country.
These bans really just prevent THAT.
Build the data center in Europe (Score:3)
Where they probably don't have this ban.
At this point, China doesn't need to steal data from the US, our tech companies already sell it to them. And much of China's AI tech is ahead of the US. This is like the Space Race, except this time most of us don't realize we've lost. We won't be getting a Sputnik style wake up call, we'll just wake up one day and realize that China is effectively running everything and there is nothing we can do about it anymore.
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We won't be getting a Sputnik style wake up call, we'll just wake up one day and realize that China is effectively running everything and there is nothing we can do about it anymore.
It's already happening because way too many Americans listen to Chinese troll propagandists like rsilvergun, China has been very successful at brainwashing Americans. They learned how to do it from their Russian buddies and it's puzzling people listening and cheering Chinese propaganda hate Russia but are just in love with China. Go figure why since they are basically the same.
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They're both quite different from the US, but saying they're about the same is both weird and wrong. The Chinese are rebuilding the imperium, which was sometimes good and sometimes quite bad. The Russians...they seem to be in the process of destroying their country. The reports I have heard are now a couple of decades old, but they indicated that they country was largely run by non-government-based gangs.
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Places to build datacentres aren't fungible. You build them where you can, where power is available, and where fibre connections are best co-located to your customers. Currently there's 2.6GW (these days we measure datacentres by power consumed for some reason) of datacentres mid-construction in Europe. There's already 2269 datacentres in Europe many of which owned by American tech companies.
Having a datacentre in Europe really helps if you have European customers. For others it just creates a lagfest.
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Having a datacentre in Europe really helps if you have European customers. For others it just creates a lagfest.
We're talking about AI data centers here. The network latency is trivial compared to the processing latency, so it's irrelevant for most use cases.
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I wouldn't want to build an AI data center in a hostile country. Regardless of how well it is located to users and power. And power is fungible in the first world. Nuclear power and HVDC is endemic in the EU.
at the speed of light within data centers (Score:2)
Its the ones that go faster than light that they need to ban.
"At the speed of light" (Score:2)
This is a lot like saying: "the car goes as fast as a car" (or with a nod to The Simpsons: "Fun toys are fun!").
The data is not moving at the speed of light in a vacuum, because the light is not in a vacuum.
The data, transmitted on light, moves at the speed of light through a fiber optic cable.
Which won't leave you any wiser.
Too much hand-waving.
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True, but it's almost always faster than the flow of electrons...well, if it goes at all.
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True, but it's almost always faster than the flow of electrons...well, if it goes at all.
Only over longer distances. Direct Attach Copper (DAC) is faster for runs less than ~10m.
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Typical single mode fiber runs around 0.68 c (function of refractive index of the fiber).
I'm not clear on how optical transceivers are supposed to be phoning home. They are in a metal case, sliding into a metal sleeve at chassis ground potential.
Realtime traders were said to be using free-space laser or microwave links to outrun fiber latency, but you need to be able to operate without the delays of interleaved coding.
Stick but no carrot (Score:3)
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The MAGA morons believe everything is already made better and cheaper in the US, just that the Chinese artificially keep prices low (with what money???) so that the US industry suffers. Obviously, that has zero basis in actual reality, but these people are as dumb as bread and have absolutely no fact-checking ability.
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Manufacturing didn't move to China because the Chinese were cheating and undercutting American companies. Rather it was a deliberate decision on the part of American companies to kill local manufacturing and eliminate jobs (employees are simply costs to reduce), in order to maximize short-term quarterly gains. No amount of tariff and government banning will fix that.
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Exactly. This is 100% self-inflicted. But admitting fault is another thing the MAGAs are completely incapable of. And hence they blame everybody else and never do anything to fix the actual problem.
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Only it was done in bush-clinton-obanma era, when there was no maga.
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The admitting would have to be done now.
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But China's government absolutely, positively, one hundred percent actively works to undercut American (and anyone else) competition in markets they want to control. Their government can prop up Chinese companies dumping X on the market longer than any private enterprise company mining
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It's not artificially... the price on a Chinese-designed and owned company that makes a Chinese-built car being cheaper than an identical US-built car is because they don't have to pay the workers as much (pennies and rice) (but, the company still makes the same profit).
Whoever gets the most votes is generally the lesser of two evils ("lesser of two weevils" from 'Master and Commander), but that's the most votes... the Electoral College, not The People, decides the Butt In Chair (still don't understand why
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You do know that you essentially advocate continuing the collapse, right?
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What collapse?
I don't seem to remember any big/huge stock point drop in the last 10+ years, are you talking about the collapse of "the old way of American life"? That's been gone for over 30+ years.
If you go outside these days to water the lawn and casually wave to the neighbor, you might get shot (because they see that as a terroristic threat) or you might be seen as a 'pedophile' trying to "entice" their 5 kids.
And, the collapse has been happening longer than the current "Butt In Chair" has had said chai
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At least one of the "Butts In Chair" did something about illegal immigration
Explain why something had to be done to reject a population that produces more revenue than it costs to support them and commits crimes at a rate lower than both the general population (slightly lower) and than the people hired to police them (FAR lower.)
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Perhaps you don't need a job that they'll take, must be nice... sure... let's let all of Mexico in, and while we're at it... let's let all of Africa in, too.
'Cause America has an unlimited supply of jobs and housing, right? Alongside all the foodstamps and insurance and cash assistance that we have such a surplus of!
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Well, that's because those big businesses don't want to pay the American $18/hr wage to have an American watch a monitor on the chip fab machine... they'd rather pay someone in China pennies and a handful of rice (and a little dog meat) to do the same job.
I don't see them bring stuff back to the US until they can have nothing but an ocean of robot arms building the car without a human in the building.
The speed of light? (Score:3)
Data-signals travel in fiber-optic cables at the speed of light ... in optical fibers. That's about 67% of the speed of light in vacuum.
Electrical signals in wires travel somewhere between 50% and 99% of the speed of light in vacuum, depending on wire thickness and geometry, and insulation.
Fiber-optic cables have many advantages over electrical wires, but speed of the signal is not really one of them. There are others, such as higher bandwidth, easier multiplexing, longer travel distances without boosting, no electrical interference, and incresed security (harder to wiretap.)
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incresed security (harder to wiretap.)
That's an interesting observation. Yet, apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.
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apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.
To be fair, any place where cables are joined by a device is a potential attack-point. But it seems to me that it ought to be easy to detect a malicious device. After all, doesn't it have to "phone home" or output suspicious data that wasn't fed into it (e.g., viruses?)
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Not so... it can 'phone home' and send whatever data over a normally used port (say, 80 (HTTP) or 443 (SSL)), and you'd never know unless you weren't watching a movie or YouTube or something. If you block 80 and 443, you basically can't do crap online... you can use a VPN, but if the site you go to expects your traffic on one of those ports, you might be screwed.
Anything that's connected to the internet (whether it's cellular, WiFi, ethernet, cable modem, a direct connection to the local trunk lines, a las
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Transceivers are not a security risk (Score:2)
I've seen various things people have played around with, trying to cram some additional useful bits into a transceiver (like micro Linux systems). They're bulky, use way more power, and thus more heat. I don't believe that anybody is sneaking anything extra into actual regularly-used transceivers; there's barely enough space and power budget to do the primary job of the transceiver.
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Yeah, I mean, how would any packets they are able to see passing through them be routed to an attacker anyway?
Even if you could fit a tiny busybox on one of these thing, once they try to enter a L3, routable state, they would be detected immediately. Imagine hundreds of these inside an org all trying to get a DHCP address. Even the most unobservant admin is going to see something like that.
Re: Transceivers are not a security risk (Score:2)
You don't request an address, you use an address already in use and remove the traffic that is part of your session from the return traffic. You have to monitor both sides of the connection to detect that.
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And do all of this, with the 1-2 watts of power yo
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Nope. I think the other objections made in this article are valid. I just don't think "they will catch that with DHCP" is.
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Just dead-bug a chip in there, long as you know the OS and it's file-sharing habits, store a copy of the traffic and have the machine phone home when possible to upload.
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"how would any packets they are able to see passing through them be routed to an attacker anyway"
You suck the bits up with a Roomba. That's why they were banned first.
And, what lie are they using this time? (Score:2)
Because even claiming that an optical transceiver is a security risk is totally insane and has no basis in reality whatsoever. Or are they doubling down of the dumb, because it continues to work nicely on their cult members?
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Au contraire. I have actual, hands on-experience with it. You are the clueless one here.
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scare wording (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe stop Microsoft first? (Score:2)
Before they try to stop routers from China intercepting data, perhaps they should stop Microsoft from just GIVING it to China.
https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]
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Travel at the speed of light (Score:2)
It's not like electrons in copper aren't traveling at the speed of light as well ... the difference is not the speed of the physical effect used, but how fast it can be send/read.
Of all the ways and places... (Score:3)
The idea that a stick with half the volume of a finger is going to both do its job as assigned (and that is not an easy job - it's really quite a miracle that they're able to pack all those optics and electronics into those things) AND contain a processor capable of decoding, processing, and stealing information from an absolute firehose of data capable of overwhelming a powerful CPU, all without compromising the sub-15W power and cooling envelope of a QSFP transceiver (and that's being really generous), AND on top of that then be able to *inject* data into the outbound stream (whichever one -that- is, could be either set of lanes because you have no idea if the transceiver is in host or switch) in order to exfiltrate the stolen information,
You're not stealing information from the switch either, because nothing in the switch is capable of it. The ASICs in the switches now burn several hundred watts of power. It's mind boggling it's so little because they're capable of receiving and forwarding sixty billion packets a second. There's no splitting streams, no spying, just an ASIC designed for pure, raw, insane speed, handling over a thousand DVDs a second of data running in and out of five hundred data lines. The single-board x86 computer in it that does the setup has a handful of Celeron-level cores, maybe 4G of ram and a tiny little SSD with less storage than your last phone.
APTs may use that switch computer to achieve persistent access to your network, but that's a whole different can of worms.