cyber monday lcd monitors made in china

Samsung Display will stop producing LCD panels by the end of the year. The display maker currently runs two LCD production lines in South Korea and two in China, according to Reuters. Samsung tells The Verge that the decision will accelerate the company’s move towards quantum dot displays, while ZDNetreports that its future quantum dot TVs will use OLED rather than LCD panels.

The decision comes as LCD panel prices are said to be falling worldwide. Last year, Nikkei reported that Chinese competitors are ramping up production of LCD screens, even as demand for TVs weakens globally. Samsung Display isn’t the only manufacturer to have closed down LCD production lines. LG Display announced it would be ending LCD production in South Korea by the end of the 2020 as well.

Last October Samsung Display announced a five-year 13.1 trillion won (around $10.7 billion) investment in quantum dot technology for its upcoming TVs, as it shifts production away from LCDs. However, Samsung’s existing quantum dot or QLED TVs still use LCD panels behind their quantum dot layer. Samsung is also working on developing self-emissive quantum-dot diodes, which would remove the need for a separate layer.

Although Samsung Display says that it will be able to continue supplying its existing LCD orders through the end of the year, there are questions about what Samsung Electronics, the largest TV manufacturer in the world, will use in its LCD TVs going forward. Samsung told The Vergethat it does not expect the shutdown to affect its LCD-based QLED TV lineup. So for the near-term, nothing changes.

One alternative is that Samsung buys its LCD panels from suppliers like TCL-owned CSOT and AUO, which already supply panels for Samsung TVs. Last year The Elec reported that Samsung could close all its South Korean LCD production lines, and make up the difference with panels bought from Chinese manufacturers like CSOT, which Samsung Display has invested in.

SHANGHAI, March 11 (Reuters) - Flat-screen maker LG Displayexpects a more than 50 percent rise in shipments of LCD TV panels in China in 2009, Gyo-Young Song, sales chief in charge of south China, said on Wednesday.

Chinese cyber researchers are effectively banned from attending international hacking events and competitions, tournaments they once dominated. A hacking contest pits some of the world’s best security researchers against one another in a race to find and exploit powerful vulnerabilities in the world’s most popular tech, like iPhones, Teslas, or even the kind of human-machine interfaces that help run modern factories. Prizes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars incentivize people to identify security flaws so that they can be fixed.

“All of the vulnerability research goes through an equities process where the Chinese government gets right of first refusal,” says Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. “They get to choose what they’ll do with this, really increasing the visibility they have into the research being conducted and their ability to find utility in all of it.”

The aggressive move, announced last month, will help set the tone for President Joe Biden’s upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Asia. It’s evidence of Biden’s determination to “manage” the U.S. competition with China, whose officials were quick to condemn the export ban.

“We’re going to do whatever it takes to protect Americans from the threat of China,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in an interview. “China is crystal clear. They will use this technology for surveillance. They will use this technology for cyber attacks. They will use this technology to, in any number of ways, harm us and our allies, or our ability to protect ourselves.”

The US and China have significant differences on the legitimate uses and preferred shape of cyberspace. The 2011 White House International Strategy for Cyberspace, for example, states that the US will work toward an “open, interoperable, secure, and reliable information and communications infrastructure.”

In contrast, Beijing has argued for a norm of cybersovereignty, the idea that states have the right to control their own cyberspace much like they do any other domain or territory.

While China has become increasingly more vocal and assertive about how cyberspace should be governed, it has yet to offer any justifications on how and why a state may conduct computer network attacks or espionage. Still, even in the absence of any official Chinese policies, it is possible to identify the motivations of state-backed hackers. Chinese leaders view cyberspace as essential to fostering economic growth, protecting and preserving the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, and maintaining domestic stability and national security.

Given these overarching interests, computer network operations are conducted to achieve three goals: To strengthen the competitiveness of the Chinese economy by acquiring foreign technology by cyber espionage; weaken opponents of the regime and resist international pressures and foreign ideologies; and offset US dominance in conventional military capabilities.

Confronted by China-based hacking, the US has had some success in shaping Chinese cyber economic espionage, and in identifying a few norms that may limit cyberconflict. These agreements have emerged in part because the US has been able both to threaten and appeal to Chinese interests. Washington, however, is much less likely to get Beijing to exercise restraint in espionage directed at political and military targets because they remain tied to regime survival and national security.

Chinese cyberoperations are scattered across services and ministries. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department Third Department is responsible for many cyberespionage operations and manages at least 12 operational bureaus and three research institutes. Joe McReynolds argues that there are two other types of forces: PLA-authorized forces which are teams of specialists in the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Public Security authorized to carry out network warfare operations; and nongovernmental forces that spontaneously engage in network attack and defense, but can be organized and mobilized for network warfare operations by the PLA if necessary.

CrowdStrike, FireEye, ThreatConnect, Defense Group, and other cybersecurity firms have used IP addresses, domain names, malware, shared techniques, and other technical measures to identify Chinese hacking groups tied to the PLA as being behind the economic espionage. The Department of Justicereleased similar evidence when it indicted five PLA hackers for stealing the business plans, internal deliberations, and other intellectual property of Westinghouse Electric, United States Steel Corporation, and other companies. The attacks are not solely on US companies. Security firms have identified victims in Germany, Australia, Japan, India, and the United Kingdom.

State-supported hackers also use cyberattacks to gather information on agencies, institutions, and individuals who might influence international debates on topics of importance to Beijing or threaten domestic stability. The embassies, foreign ministries, and other government offices of Germany, India, Indonesia, Romania, South Korea, Taiwan, and others have been targeted. China-based actors allegedly hacked the computers of the 2008 Barack Obama and John McCain presidential campaigns, State Department, White House; the UK Foreign Office, House of Commons, and Ministry of Defense; and the computers of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and ten federal ministers, including the foreign minister and defense minister.

Two PLA groups, Units 61938 and 61486, have reportedly stolen information from over two dozen Defense Department weapons programs, including the Patriot missile system and the US Navy’s new littoral combat ship. The most high-profile case has been the hacking of defense contractors involved in the F-35, which have forced the redesign of specialized communications and antenna arrays for the stealth aircraft. Department of Defense officials say that the most sensitive flight control data were not taken because they were stored offline, but the fuselage of China’s second stealth fighter jet, the J-31, is very similar to that of the F-35. In response to a question about attacks on defense contractors, Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,told a congressional hearing, “I do not believe we are at this point losing our technological edge, but it is at risk based on some of their cyberactivities,” referring to China.

Chinese hackers also break into US networks in preparation for a potential military conflict. Chinese military analysts often write of the PLA’s need to seize information dominance at the beginning stages of a conflict with a technologically advanced adversary through cyber attacks against command and control computers as well as satellite and communication networks. The PLA would also attempt to disrupt US forces in the Western Pacific through attacks on transportation and logistics systems. Preparing for these attacks requires cyber espionage.

Chinese military writings also suggest that cyberattacks can have a deterrent effect, given American dependence on banking, telecommunication, and other critical networks. A highly disruptive or destructive attack on these networks might reduce the chances that the United States might get involved in a regional conflict. Some Chinese intrusions into critical infrastructure may intentionally leave evidence behind to act as a warning that the US homeland may not be immune to attack in the case of a conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

In addition to improving government and private sector network defenses through efforts such as information sharing and President Obama’s Cybersecurity National Action Plan, the US has responded to state-sponsored Chinese cyberattacks in two ways.

First, Washington has tried to create a distinction between legitimate espionage for political and military interests and the cyber enabled theft of intellectual property. As President Obama framed it, “Every country in the world, large and small, engages in intelligence gathering. There is a big difference between China wanting to figure out how can they find out what my talking points are when I’m meeting with the Japanese which is standard and a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple’s software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product. That’s theft. And we can’t tolerate that.”

Beginning in April 2013, US officials adopted a strategy of naming and shaming, publicly calling out China for economic espionage. This provoked denials and counterclaims from Beijing, especially after disclosures from the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the US was engaged in surveillance and cyber espionage. After the US indicted five PLA hackers in May 2014, the Chinese government suspended a bilateral working group on cybersecurity established the previous July.

What finally seems to have gotten Beijing’s attention was the threat of sanctions and the possible disruption of the planned September 2015 summit meeting between presidents Xi and Obama. In the weeks before the meeting, officials suggested that the US would sanction Chinese individuals or entities that benefited from cybertheft. Beijing dispatched Meng Jianzhu, a member of the politburo responsible for state security, to negotiate, and during the summit the US and China announced an accord in which “neither country’s government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sectors.” Washington and Beijing also agreed to identify and endorse norms of behavior in cyberspace and establish two high-level working groups and a hotline between the two sides.

China and Britain reached a similar agreement a month later, and in November 2015, China, Brazil, Russia, the US, and other members of the Group of Twenty accepted the norm against conducting or supporting the cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property. The cybersecurity firm FireEye has reported a decline in the number, a trend confirmed by Assistant Attorney General John Carlin. In fact, FireEye argues the decline may predate the agreement, motivated by China’s desire to modernize the PLA and bring cyber operations under more centralized control as well as a side effect of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign and efforts to clamp down on criminal use of state resources. The decline in number of attacks may be accompanied, however, by a rise in the sophistication of attacks.

As a complement to the effort to create a prohibition against economic espionage, Washington has engaged Beijing in discussion about some of the norms of behavior for cyberconflict. Chinese hackers have reportedly broken into industrial control systems, and Adm. Mike Rogers, head of US Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, told a congressional panel that China and “one or two” other countries would be capable of mounting a cyberattack that could shut down the power grid or other critical infrastructure. It must be assumed that the US conducts similar spying against Chinese networks, and the two sides have a shared interest in preventing escalatory cyber operations — attacks that one side sees as legitimate espionage but the other views as prepping the battlefield — that could lead to kinetic assaults.

In 2015, a group of government experts at the United Nations that included representatives from China, the US, Russia, and other countries, published a report arguing for a number of peacetime norms, including that states should not conduct activity that intentionally damages critical infrastructure or interferes with another country’s cyber emergency responders. China and the US reaffirmed their commitment to these norm in the September 2015 accords, and at the June 2016 Strategic and Economic Dialogue.

While China may in the future exercise restraint in the areas of economic espionage and attacks designed to prepare for conflict, there is no reason to expect similar limitations with cyberespionage on foreign political and military targets. These attacks will continue not only because they are tightly tied to domestic stability and national security, but also because no state has publicly repudiated espionage as a legitimate tool of statecraft, including the US.

Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.