Keysight Scary Letter

[Miti]

I never heard of such thing in Germany.
And I buy used German military equipment all the time on eBay Germany.

Welcome to America! Population - 327M.

[JonM]

...

Now the depressing thing you tend to see in these scenarios is that perfectly fine kit is destroyed for no good reason. The worst thing I saw was a 9 month old fully stacked Sun 1000E worth £400,000 at purchase time get chucked in a grinder. Then a couple of storage arrays of unknown value (£300k+) join it. No one gave a fuck even if you could buy three big houses with that money at the time. Sickens me.

...

Back in the early 1980's my thesis adviser and I would go to a Naval Research location (oddly located in the midwest of the US) to acquire surplus equipment for our university lab. We got a lot of good stuff including a very large Faraday cage / shielded room that is still in use. On one trip we spotted a Spectra-Physics Krypton ion laser in an outdoor pile. When we asked if we could have it we were informed that it had been used in classified research and would have to be crushed. It's unlikely that it had been modified, it probably just shot a beam into a classified experiment. It was an off the shelf commercial laser that looked just like an Argon ion laser that we already had in the lab.

[Neomys Sapiens]

How old is this HP 8562A spectrum analyzer?
Probably more than 20 years!

This all seems to be very ridicules !
What if the eBay buyer would have sold it again, without knowing about the "specialty" of this equipment.

I never heard of such thing in Germany.
And I buy used German military equipment all the time on eBay Germany.

Same for me. But I have experienced an interesting HP story with a device that I bought.
It is an optical detector with a fast and  a precision channel. I found absolutely no information about it.
When I called Böblingen, they did not agree that it's theirs, until I spoke to their calibration lab.
Then they suddenly were like 'where did you buy that? You are not allowed to have that blah blah...
Turns out it is internal T&M gear which should never have been on the open market.
They can't do much, although. They were content with me telling them that it will stay here.

[bernie79]

I never heard of such thing in Germany.
And I buy used German military equipment all the time on eBay Germany.

Welcome to America! Population - 327M.

If you find this cazy, imagine this:
until around 2008 there where many repair service partners across europe. Every radioshack, every electronics store, even mobile phone dealers could be repair partner, if they comply to some things. Okay, in most cases they got an authorisation for changing nothing more that the customer can (and will be paid by the manufacturer with a small fee). More advanced partners could do more, but usual have to put up an "end test device" which was a  BTS-simulator together with a small antenna, to test basic phone functionality.
Even "ghost town, popl 5" had such store somewhere.

As Siemens, Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson closed their repair service "franchise" program, all these test devices where on sale. On ebay. And still are.
You can read about this even here in the EEV-Forum, talking about R+S CMU200, or CMD55, Wavetek 4202,... everyone of them can be modded into an fakeBTS or even an IMSI-Cachter (yes the famous device agencies use to track down or intercept your phone from nearby).
Not that I ever heard of such modding, but there is not even the reciever to recieve celluar phone signals, but also the sending side, Moreover: all neccessary decoding stuff is also there - all in one package - with a nice handle to carry around
And what happens?Nothing. No police is hunting this devices, no agencies take a closer look, no government shouts "alarm!"
Because all of the owners use them as intended, does no harm to the networks, and nobody gets spied. And yes its a licensed band.
But I havent heard  of a case of trouble, no police swat team raid, no agency alerts, no national security
Maybe its because the cell phone signal is encrypted and none of the owners has a real working key (despite the test SIMcard in the 00101 network for test repair purposes).

I don't know why the yankees are making such a fuss. On the other side, they sell guns to everyone who can't run away fast enough.. strange people.     But this can discussed best with some beer.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Sort-of related story in the Times today - storage company used by a defence contractor folds, contents to be auctioned

Paywalled link : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/security-fears-over-auction-of-sensitive-military-tech-k25v0vwpc

Clip from paper in attatched image
This is the auction - annoyingly light on detail
https://auction.hazell.co.uk/lots/auction/ues-and-s-ltd-in-liquidation

[Stray Electron]

   We got the same letter today regarding an HP 54540C scope that we bought from Outback.  Has anyone figured out if this is a SCAM or not?  I find it very peculiar that no one was contacted directly by Outback, Ebay or PayPal about this and also that the letter itself never says what the item was or when it was purchased.  Yes, I know it's in the attachment, but I would expect that any professional business person, lawyer, clerk or typist would include that rather important detail in the original letter and not on a separate page.  Even a modest text editor like WordStar/DataStar could insert that into a letter automatically.   

    FWIW, the scope that we bought obviously came almost directly from HP and included all of the original probes, manuals, accessories, most of them still factory sealed, and also included a letter showing where it had been send from one division of HP to another division for repair and recalibration. There are no property stickers from anyone else on it so I'm reasonably certain that it was never owned or used outside of HP.

   My opinion at this point is that someone got into Outback's sale records and are now trying to con the buyers out of their purchases. 

[EEVblog]

MOD NOTE: All gun related talk removed.

[IDEngineer]

On one trip we spotted a Spectra-Physics Krypton ion laser in an outdoor pile. When we asked if we could have it we were informed that it had been used in classified research and would have to be crushed.

Wow, what a loss. I used those exact ion lasers, with both krypton and argon, to put on laser light shows in the 70's. The power supply had this enormous heat sink panel with (IIRC) seven rows of seven columns of 2N3055's, and the panel was water cooled. Needless to say, ion lasers are very inefficient... for all that energy in, we got about 1W optical power from krypton and about 5W optical power out of argon. That's still very formidable, enough to ignite plywood (don't ask how we learned that).

[Mr. Scram]

I accidentally deleted my previous message instead of quoting it, but it seems more and more people are reporting equipment being recovered. What on Earth is going on here?

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/ebays-outback6-lawyered-up-and-is-attempting-to-claw-back-equipment-they-sold/

[HighVoltage]

So, it is not an isolated case of one special item?

Then may be Keysight should explain here, what is going on with this strange behavior.

[Brumby]

Depending on the specific reason, you might find them guarded or reluctant to give much detail.  Even some cursory information such as: Is it a genuine action? (which it seems to be).  Is it a one-off or does this sort of thing occur frequently? ... would be helpful.

While we are rather curious, I don't think we really expect any disclosure of classified or privileged information, but it would be nice to get a feel for what's going on, so we can get an idea of actions that may come our way or sources of equipment that we might be well to tread around carefully.


 - but I agree, it is a curiosity.

[Mr. Scram]

Depending on the specific reason, you might find them guarded or reluctant to give much detail.  Even some cursory information such as: Is it a genuine action? (which it seems to be).  Is it a one-off or does this sort of thing occur frequently?

While we are rather curious, I don't think we really expect any disclosure of classified or privileged information, but it would be nice to get a feel for what's going on, so we can get an idea of actions that may come our way or sources of equipment that we might be well to tread around carefully.


 - but I agree, it is a curiosity.

The problem for Keysight is that the more vague they are, the more they're hurting the chances of people cooperating. Right now they're causing trouble for people and the IP story doesn't seem to hold up, as they're apparently recalling bog standard equipment. It's only fair people want a real and somewhat decent reason if Keysight is going to cost them time and effort.

The long story short is that if you want something from people, you'd do best not to belittle them with vague or nonsensical stories.

[EEVblog]

I've heard from someone who supposedly knows what's going that Keysight isn't bad actor here. But I don't know the details myself.

[gnavigator1007]

Has anybody been keeping count how many forum members have posted about receiving one of these letters? Figure I may have missed some other threads. This many this close together originating from same ebay seller, I kinda expect all kit from the same facility. Anybody get one of these letters that didn't buy from Outback?

[Brumby]

This many this close together originating from same ebay seller, I kinda expect all kit from the same facility.

I am inclined to agree.

This may be one detail that Keysight might be able to confirm - probably without identifying the facility.

[Brumby]

The problem for Keysight is that the more vague they are, the more they're hurting the chances of people cooperating. Right now they're causing trouble for people and the IP story doesn't seem to hold up, as they're apparently recalling bog standard equipment. It's only fair people want a real and somewhat decent reason if Keysight is going to cost them time and effort.

The long story short is that if you want something from people, you'd do best not to belittle them with vague or nonsensical stories.

There may well be a bigger problem than that.  I could easily imagine a scenario where the one facility involved (which seems likely) operated under some rather strict secrecy requirements and that even obfuscation of the facts was inadequate, which might require an invented reason.  I know this doesn't sit well with a lot of people - which I can understand - but there comes a point where security needs can be more important.

Further, it may well be that the equipment involved is not special in any way, nor was used for any super secret stuff - but that it was used by an organisation that does get into such work and has a blanket policy for decommissioned equipment to make sure there is NO way for ANY device to legitimately find its way out into the public arena.  If there were to be any exceptions made to such a rule, then the security would have a hole in it you could driver a Hummer through.

[ataradov]

but there comes a point where security needs can be more important.

In that case, just eat the cost and offer everyone a new replacement. People will be happy instead of scared, and who knows how many would even share this information.

And after that send scary legal letters to distributors that screwed up, not the customers.

[openloop]

I've heard from someone who supposedly knows what's going that Keysight isn't bad actor here. But I don't know the details myself.

That settles it. Not too many entities can lean on Keysight... 

In my case - all items they "ask" back were purchased only from Outback and only in January 2018.

Somebody, who's not as lazy as me, probably can go through eBay's history and enumerate all the things Outback sold around that time.   

[Mr. Scram]

There may well be a bigger problem than that.  I could easily imagine a scenario where the one facility involved (which seems likely) operated under some rather strict secrecy requirements and that even obfuscation of the facts was inadequate, which might require an invented reason.  I know this doesn't sit well with a lot of people - which I can understand - but there comes a point where security needs can be more important.

Further, it may well be that the equipment involved is not special in any way, nor was used for any super secret stuff - but that it was used by an organisation that does get into such work and has a blanket policy for decommissioned equipment to make sure there is NO way for ANY device to legitimately find its way out into the public arena.  If there were to be any exceptions made to such a rule, then the security would have a hole in it you could driver a Hummer through.

The problem with that story is that by being vague the equipment is less likely to return, which makes the hole bigger and not smaller. It's also a case of the Streisand Effect, where not wanting to draw attention to something draws it even more. If such a policy is indeed the reason for this whole endeavour, it has already failed. Things which shouldn't be in the real world are in the real world. By going on a hunt which raises all sorts of questions you're not going to put that genie back into the bottle. You suck at being super secret, and super secret stuff is no backsies.

[0culus]

Yeah, no one is putting the cat back into this bag. Enterprising people will probably be able to figure out where the stuff came from originally via OSINT. Not a hard thing to do if you know what you're doing.

[GlowingGhoul]

I never heard of such thing in Germany.
And I buy used German military equipment all the time on eBay Germany.

Welcome to America! Population - 327M.

In Germany they just seize apartments instead: https://www.abendblatt.de/hamburg/article210438879/Bezirk-Mitte-fuehrt-erstmals-Zwangsvermietung-durch.html

"In an unprecedented move, Hamburg authorities recently confiscated six residential units in the Hamm district near the city center. The units, which are owned by a private landlord, are in need of repair and have been vacant since 2012. A trustee appointed by the city is now renovating the properties and will rent them — against the will of the owner — to tenants chosen by the city. District spokeswoman Sorina Weiland said that all renovation costs will be billed to the owner of the properties.
The expropriation is authorized by the Hamburg Housing Protection Act (Hamburger Wohnraumschutzgesetz), a 1982 law that was updated by the city's Socialist government in May 2013 to enable the city to seize any residential property unit that has been vacant for more than four months."

[Brumby]

I understand the effects this approach has brought into play - but there may be no other option than the super secret approach.

If equipment is governed by contract and that contract has super secret conditions included, then whoever is involved in the chasing down may have no choice but to obfuscate.  Keysight might have said to the powers that be that the approach that has been taken wouldn't fly very well, but I can imagine a bureaucrat just pointing to a line in a contract and standing firm.

but there comes a point where security needs can be more important.

In that case, just eat the cost and offer everyone a new replacement. People will be happy instead of scared, and who knows how many would even share this information.

That would be ideal - but then you could come up against some who would see this as an admission of fault and try to push for something more than "make whole".  The intimidation element might be "required" phrasing and/or a means to temper any haggling.

And after that send scary legal letters to distributors that screwed up, not the customers.

How do you know that hasn't happened already - and that the customers' letters are round 2?

[mikeselectricstuff]

IMO they would have had a much better chance of getting kit back quietly by saying that they want some specific versions of some gear to keep a big customer's test system running, and making an above-market offer, or replacement newer kit for it.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Another interesting approach might be to relist the gear on ebay and invite KS to bid on it.
Get a friend to bid against them to see how badly they want it.

[HighVoltage]

May be it is not a conspiracy and they just want the old HP instruments for a new museum.

Did not one of their old buildings burned down in the California fires last year?