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posted by Cactus on Wednesday February 26 2014, @03:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-list-and-checking-it-twice dept.

c0lo writes:

An Australian blogger shares his personal experience with orders put on hold by the Australian subsidiary of Element 14 (the former Farnell shop), reportedly based on a watch list maintained by US govt.

From the blog:

The counter person wasn't sure, so checked with someone else who came and wasn't 100% sure, but knew that the system does automatically flag orders based on various identifiers. It could have possibly been one of those stupid US government trade restriction things, because, you know capacitors and opamps can be used by evil terrorists and the like... (International customers have to fill out silly forms with US distributors and manufacturers saying we won't use the parts in nuclear weapons - seriously)

But they enquired further with someone else and the word came back that it wasn't the parts that had been flagged, it was my NAME that was flagged. And they said it was a US government watch list of some description. I was stunned, and it seemed like they didn't quite understand why I was so shocked at this. Because, you know, the whole world has to just sit by and let the US government dictate everything at will.

...

  So lets see if I have this straight - An Australian subsidiary, owned by a UK parent company, listed on the UK stock exchange, has an ordering system that automatically matches generic names against some secret US Government watch list, and flags those orders and puts them on hold, for parts that are already stocked in Australia, are likely not made in the US, and likely have come from the main UK warehouse. Call me stupid, but something doesn't seem right with that...

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:15PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:15PM (#7373)

    Silicon?

    Actually I was confused too. I thought "What, do they sell microchips or something?"

    Clicked on link... yes... yes they do. Though I am kind of confused if it is a store that has community pages, or a forum that is supported by a store. Is it an American company or an Australian one? (if it's American this would explain why it was using an American watch list... even if it is a stupid one that blocks by name with no overrides)

    au.element14.com [element14.com] is a store.
    Where www.element14.com [element14.com] redirects to http://www.element14.com/community/welcome [element14.com] and does not appear to be a store.

    Some info would be helpful.

    --
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:29PM

    by VLM (445) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:29PM (#7386)

    "Though I am kind of confused if it is a store that has community pages, or a forum that is supported by a store."

    So is everyone else, including people who've been involved for a couple decades. Over the past ten years or so, as a value add to encourage sales, distributors have been adding more forums / wikis / download sites every year, while communities have been adding stores to generate revenue. Both from the bottom up with startups expanding, and from the top down with giant multinational distributors trying to generate PR community buzz. Widely varying levels of success, of course.

    There really aren't any pure electronic hardware distributors left. Even Digikey and Mouser have vast download archives of datasheets and CAD drawings to convince you to shop there. And on the other side there are still plenty of communities without stores, but cafepress and amazon affiliate links make it less and less likely.

    There seems to be a stereotype that mfgr websites still offer datasheets but want to hide them behind various ways to develop a "sales relationship" with big customers. Like mandatory creation of logins, weird organization behind industry categorizations, stuff like that. On the other hand the distributors will give away free datasheets to anyone who looks up the product, of course they may or may not be entirely up to date and often if there's 9 manuals you'll only get one datasheet. Meanwhile SEO spammers are trying to adword or driveby install or spam you to death if you try to search for various product datasheets. Sometimes its almost impossible to find the actual mfgr because they're so buried under SEO spammers.

    So yeah its a weird and quickly changing market.

  • (Score: 1) by tomp on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:15PM

    by tomp (996) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @06:15PM (#7441)

    I've always known them as Newark as in http://www.newark.com/ [newark.com]