This is stupid.
13 years ago I was consulting for a telecom company. They would rent out their equipment. Some customers would not pay the rent on time. They wanted a way to remotely disable the equipment in the event of non payment. But the equipment wasn't remotely accessible. What could they do?
They built a timer into the equipment. Every month the equipment would stop working at a certain date. A service engineer would have to visit in order to reactivate the equipment. The technician would of course not visit of there were dues.
If customers paid on time, they wouldn't even know that such a timer exists. They'd pay on time, the technician would visit in the first week of the month and just reset the timer.
Anyway. You don't need to know this anecdote to understand that the Chinese can build all kinds of kill switches into their equipment. Even a full audit of the source code wouldn't bring the issues up, because Trojans are found even in open source code after years of scrutiny.
Anyone who programs had used downward counters for all kinds of resets. We also know that it isn't enough to audit the initial system, if you aren't going to audit every single update. And can each update to mission critical systems like power distribution really wait for months of audit?
The government speaks of Make in India on the one hand. On the other hand it wants cheap Chinese equipment to balance it's books. Before liberalisation we used to build everything right here, using BHEL etc. We didn't build enough, and we weren't world class. But there is no reason why ISRO can be world class and BHEL can't. All we need is commitment.
13 years ago I was consulting for a telecom company. They would rent out their equipment. Some customers would not pay the rent on time. They wanted a way to remotely disable the equipment in the event of non payment. But the equipment wasn't remotely accessible. What could they do?
They built a timer into the equipment. Every month the equipment would stop working at a certain date. A service engineer would have to visit in order to reactivate the equipment. The technician would of course not visit of there were dues.
If customers paid on time, they wouldn't even know that such a timer exists. They'd pay on time, the technician would visit in the first week of the month and just reset the timer.
Anyway. You don't need to know this anecdote to understand that the Chinese can build all kinds of kill switches into their equipment. Even a full audit of the source code wouldn't bring the issues up, because Trojans are found even in open source code after years of scrutiny.
Anyone who programs had used downward counters for all kinds of resets. We also know that it isn't enough to audit the initial system, if you aren't going to audit every single update. And can each update to mission critical systems like power distribution really wait for months of audit?
The government speaks of Make in India on the one hand. On the other hand it wants cheap Chinese equipment to balance it's books. Before liberalisation we used to build everything right here, using BHEL etc. We didn't build enough, and we weren't world class. But there is no reason why ISRO can be world class and BHEL can't. All we need is commitment.