U.S.: We Have No Evidence Or Credibility On This Whatsoever, But Don't Use Huawei Because China Might Spy On You
from the inconsistent-standards dept
Even before the NSA scandal broke, I've been endlessly entertained watching the blistering hypocrisy toward Chinese network hardware vendor Huawei. For years Huawei has been accused of being a Chinese spy, even if investigations seem to repeatedly show no actual evidence of Chinese spying. We're not talking about superficial inquiries, we're talking about eighteen month, in-depth reviews by people with every interest in exposing them. Despite no evidence, every few months or so somebody in the government trots out Huawei as a bogeyman they can toss about for one political reason or another.Never mind that almost all network gear is made in China (whether the company is Chinese or not). Never mind that obviously NSA allegations show the United States spies on almost everyone, constantly. Never mind that reports have emerged that a lot of the spy allegations are originating with their competitor Cisco. Huawei is a spy. We're sure of it. And covert network snooping is bad. When China does it.
The constant allegations ultimately scuttled Huawei's attempt to bring more gear competition to the United States market, blocked Huawei's potential bid on a nationwide U.S. first responder network, and the United States has since been working hard to ensure that other countries don't use Huawei gear either. According to the Wall Street Journal, after convincing Australia to ditch Huawei gear, the United States is also warning South Korea that Huawei might just be a spy, apparently citing all of the non-existent evidence already mentioned:
"In meetings with their South Korean counterparts in recent months, senior U.S. officials pointed to what Washington sees as a risk that Huawei's equipment could be used for spying on communications among the close partners, as well as compromise secure networks used by American military personnel and intelligence officers in South Korea, U.S. officials said."The idea that somebody would indiscriminately spy using network gear sure sounds terrifying. Fortunately, United States to South Korea communications will instead rely on gear from any number of network hardware vendors, whose equipment is also built in China -- in many instances in the exact same factories by the exact same workers. Not to say China is an angel or doesn't spy (though I should note their gear is considered good enough to filter UK porn), but at this juncture the United States giving lectures on network privacy is like Lindsay Lohan giving advice on balanced and healthy living. Gosh, one would hate to think that years of trotting Huawei out as a political bogeyman pinata was all just an elaborate song and dance put on simply to sell more Cisco and Juniper routers.
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Just a thought but...
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Re: Just a thought but...
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Re: Just a thought but...
Basically, by modern standards Huawai gear is crap. The NSA and china don't need backdoors, the security is so bad that almost anyone could gain full control.
The other takeaway is that all the advanced debugging features, which network administrators use when things inevitable don't work right, are only in Chinese. Not that big of a deal if your network administrators speak the language, but if they don't the only option is to pay Huawai to manage your network for you.
I'm not saying Cisco is good, just that it's not utter garbage.
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Huwei Doesn't Need To Be Limited By Its Software Ability (Reply to Arthur Moore, #19)
A hardware manufacturing corporation which is otherwise non-viable, and has nothing much to lose, can make itself viable by engaging open source.
(*) This last is what Limor Fried did with her "Onion Pi" do-it-yourself project.
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/06/14/new-product-pack-onion-pi-pack-make-a-raspberry-pi-t or-proxy/
(**) Google is a special case. It tends to function more like a national laboratory (Brookhaven, Argonne, Los Alamos, Livermore, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, etc.) than like a conventional corporation, or perhaps a better analogy would be AT&T Bell Labs and IBM Yorktown Heights during those corporations' monopoly periods. In any case, Google may not be economically sustainable, and jobs such as launching Android may revert back to the national laboratories.
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Re: Just a thought but...
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Incorrect. They have plenty of experience with big governments throwing civil rights out the window and watching every single website you click on.
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It's pretty simple
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But, But,
Actually I was thinking Pot, Kettle, Black...
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Later I learned that Cisco was pushing this story to win several large telecom contracts. Simultaneously they were secretly in the process of shutting down most of their US production, having gear designed and built in China, and outright reselling Chinese products.
Every time I think I'm cynical, something like this happens to show me I'm not cynical enough.
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Either way reads that it might be better to have Huawei hardware. If it has better security, why would you turn that down? If China is indeed spying through routers, how is that any worse than the US doing it?
One thing I do reflect on, is that the US security outfits have absolutely no creditability. There is nothing you hear coming out from them in the line of public communications that you can believe. At this point I discard everything coming out by the administration, by these security agencies, and by their supporters claiming to bolster their stance. What I have gotten from all this Snowden stuff, is that our government is hopelessly corrupt.
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Huawei didn't infringe. They stole the entire hardware and software set and rebranded. I have heard they are making strides on removing these marks and making their equipment and documentation their own.
I've worked on Nortel/Ericsson equipment for 15 years (telecomm). I was exposed to Huawei when a colleague asked for help when he went to work for a start-up.
I don't have any sympathy for this company, even if what happens to them is BS. I'm not excusing poor behavior but it's like trying to feel sympathy for a rapist who got beat up in prison. Sure, convicts should not fear for their safety - fix that issue. I feel bad for the situation but not the victim.
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I don't know, but I rather spend my money on the chinese on this one...
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It seems like they just want their precious easy access and huawei refuses to let them have it.
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Economic Autarchy and Native Sons.
It is feasible to eliminate essentially all of the hand labor in electronics assembly. That being the case, a sufficiently highly automated manufacturing plant in Texas or Ohio has no significant cost penalty as against a plant in China which uses cheap labor. The United States already has a strong position in chip wafer etching, which has never depended much on cheap labor. The government will exert pressure, by means available to it, notably government contracts, to get people to built highly automated electronics assembly plants in Texas or Ohio. This, again, is basic economic nationalism, or, as it was called in the 1930's, during the Great Depression, "autarchy."As long as the cost to the consumer does not go up significantly, there will be no push-back.
We went through something like this business back in the 1980's, with automobiles, and the end result was that Toyota and Honda built factories here, and became "more American than the Americans." They became notoriously fanatical about the use of robots, because obviously, American workers could not work up to the standard of a Japanese worker. The robots themselves were likely to be made by Japanese companies, in Japan, and imported to the United States. Of course, Toyota and Honda still didn't get the de-luxe government contracts, things like Humvees. The Japanese had to content themselves with the American consumer market.
The difference between electronics and automobiles is that electronics are much more amenable than automobiles to being produced by robots. In terms of post-etching manufacturing complexity, electronics are trivial compared to automobiles. Huwei will wind up with factories in both Texas and Ohio, probably using robots manufactured in China.
Of course, Europe will do the same thing, and so will Japan, the same way that just about everyone subsidizes agriculture, and pays farmers not to grow alfalfa. In the end, even New Zealand will have its own autonomous electronics manufacturing capacity.
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"..But Don't Use Huawei Because China Might Spy On You"
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Hello, pot? This is Kettle...
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There, fixed that for you.
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Damn Chinese. And they spy with pv solar panels too.
http://grist.org/news/u-s-tries-to-have-it-both-ways-with-solar-trade-policy/?utm_source=news letter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business%2520%2526%2520Tech%2520Feb%252019&utm_campaign =business
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boycott Cisco
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China's Electronic Spying
Are China using inbuilt technology to capture data in production built network appliances and mobile phones. MOST DEFINETLY.
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