<story><title>Did a Chinese hack kill Nortel? (2020)</title><url>http://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/did-a-chinese-hack-kill-canada-s-greatest-tech-company-1.1459269</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>I grew up in the Ottawa area. I remember watching so many friends&amp;#x27; and classmates&amp;#x27; parents suddenly go from successful to unemployed. What&amp;#x27;s worse, their pension plan was mostly invested in Nortel stock. They lost their jobs and their retirement. Most of these people were in their late 40s already.&lt;p&gt;There weren&amp;#x27;t other companies to hire them all. Ottawa&amp;#x27;s tech scene was mostly Nortel. Without it, what could they all do with the skillsets they had? One close friend of mine, his dad became a cabinet maker. Just started over entirely.&lt;p&gt;Was it Huawei? Hard to say. But whoever hacked Nortel attacked my community, in my mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VWWHFSfQ</author><text>I think the biggest travesty was that the Canadian government was unwilling (or unable) to go after Huawei (and China) for the damages that this attack caused.  At this point, USA has almost completely destroyed Huawei&amp;#x27;s global consumer electronics business in retaliation for similar attacks on American companies[0][1].  There is no more such thing as a Huawei mobile phone, at least in western civilization.&lt;p&gt;That is the kind of response that I would expect.  But I never heard about anything even close to that from the Canadian government.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.justice.gov&amp;#x2F;usao-wdwa&amp;#x2F;pr&amp;#x2F;chinese-telecommunications-device-manufacturer-and-its-us-affiliate-indicted-theft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.justice.gov&amp;#x2F;usao-wdwa&amp;#x2F;pr&amp;#x2F;chinese-telecommunicati...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.justice.gov&amp;#x2F;opa&amp;#x2F;pr&amp;#x2F;chinese-telecommunications-conglomerate-huawei-and-huawei-cfo-wanzhou-meng-charged-financial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.justice.gov&amp;#x2F;opa&amp;#x2F;pr&amp;#x2F;chinese-telecommunications-co...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Did a Chinese hack kill Nortel? (2020)</title><url>http://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/did-a-chinese-hack-kill-canada-s-greatest-tech-company-1.1459269</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>I grew up in the Ottawa area. I remember watching so many friends&amp;#x27; and classmates&amp;#x27; parents suddenly go from successful to unemployed. What&amp;#x27;s worse, their pension plan was mostly invested in Nortel stock. They lost their jobs and their retirement. Most of these people were in their late 40s already.&lt;p&gt;There weren&amp;#x27;t other companies to hire them all. Ottawa&amp;#x27;s tech scene was mostly Nortel. Without it, what could they all do with the skillsets they had? One close friend of mine, his dad became a cabinet maker. Just started over entirely.&lt;p&gt;Was it Huawei? Hard to say. But whoever hacked Nortel attacked my community, in my mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sas224dbm</author><text>I moved to Ottawa in 2000 to one of the few defense companies there. The boom was happening and folks were being given 10-15% pay rises, just to try and stop the bleeding to Nortel, as they were paying huge salaries for software engineers back then. Needless to say, when Nortel imploded, we were hiring for a new development program (C++, VxWorks, real-time, DO178B etc etc)and I interviewed dozens of ex-Nortel folks, of all kinds of levels and skill-sets. Now, telecoms isn&amp;#x27;t airborne software, but we found some absolute gems of engineers that were cast-aside by Nortel. Nortel&amp;#x27;s loss was our gain in some respects, and another upside was bringing their development best-practices and Nortel engineering experiences with them. My god, we even got to know their product structures after doing so may interviews, e.g. OC-192 architecture always seemed to be particularly good interview rabbit-hole.</text></comment>