An old friend writes:
My Mother recently bought a new Dell PC. Its paperwork states that national security laws prohibit the export of either the PC or its OS to a list of proscribed countries, including China. Both the PC and the CD with the OS on it are labeled “made in China.”
Footnote Yes, it’s conceivable that this isn’t as stupid as it looks. Maybe the PC is assembled in China, and the CD that carries the OS is made in China, but the OS is actually written on to the CD here, and it’s the OS that’s sensitive. On the other hand, it’s also possible that this is precisely as stupid as it looks.
Mass-produced CDs are made more like records than tapes, i.e. they’re mechanically stamped rather than recorded to. So apparently it’s as stupid as it looks.
The paperwork is outdated. You may have heard of Levono, the company that currently makes IBM ThinkPads under license. Levono is partially owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (that is, the Chinese government). They assemble the laptop and preinstall the OS in China and ship the laptop directly to customers via UPS.
The Chinese (and everybody else) have gazillions of pirated copies of the un-named OS (Windows) so this export restriction is just rubbish.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that this is precisely as stupid as it looks.
It’s Dell. Precision is what they do.
You don’t understand. By “forbidding” export of Windoze, the Chinese are fooled into pirating and running that OS, rather than, say, the freely available (and much more secure) Linux, giving the US government an easily exploited trojan horse into the chinese economy. I nominate Michael Dell and Bill Gates for the Medal of Freedom. It’s brilliant.
There’s nothing stupid about Dell here. They are just being a typical cheap manufacturer, like most other American manufacturing.
The stupidity is in the US export control system, which is still based on the geopolitics and the computer technology levels of the 1970s and early 1980s. Most cell phones and cameras today have more computing power than the computers we originally refused to export.
It is as stupid as it looks. If you import controlled technology, you are prohibited from re-exporting it, even to the country of origin.
Adding voice, not info: it’s as stupid as it looks–but it is a legal stupidity, not Dell’s stupidity.