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Huawei man!

Started by biggytitbo, May 16, 2019, 12:39:59 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Fambo Number Mive

I don't know if Huawei does have links with the Chinese government  but I don't think it's racist to be concerned. If people were concerned about the firm just because it was Chinese, that would be racist.

Mister Six

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 18, 2019, 10:55:06 AM
The topology of the proposed 5g networks means these switches should only be passing encrypted traffic; eavesdropping isn't the real concern here, it's that China could potentially disable all or part of the network at will and grind the country to a halt.

This is how cyber warfare will work. People used to use technology to guide missiles to things like power plants to disable their enemies, but why bother building a missile and risk killing civilians when you can simply do it remotely with code?

Yes, this. The ambition with 5G isn't just to let you watch YouTube on the bus faster, it's to connect everything in a city, from all those Fitbits right up to entire city transportation grids. Self-driving cars will communicate remotely with offboard AIs for improved performance and to help plan routes efficiently, for example. Traffic lights and LED signs will be able to automatically redirect traffic away from crashes, while ambulance trackers will be given the best route based on traffic density and movement.

If any rival state got access to even the "off switch", it would fuck up everything - if they got access to the controls themselves, it could allow for more sophisticated subversion.

That said....

Quote from: biggytitbo on May 18, 2019, 10:19:57 AM
Stuff they might be interested in at state level like intellegence and military would use their own secure channels presumably, so they're spying on people Snapchatting their genitals

That kind of thing is exactly what spies look for. If you've got evidence of a politician or intelligence agent sending photos of their bits to an underage teen, or to their mistress or whatever, you have great blackmail material. And you don't even have to set up a honeytrap!

This is why China-based gay Tinder clone Grindr is selling up to an independent, non-Chinese company - because the US was going to block it on the grounds that it's a liability (what happens when some US general gets caught by the CPC hunting for a Shanghai twink? Blackmail!).

Thanks to encryption within apps this is less of a fear with 5G specifically, but you don't win intelligence wars by hoping for the best.

buzby

#92
Quote from: Mrs Wogans lemon drizzle on May 18, 2019, 09:46:52 AM
Very interesting post.  thanks for this.  Do you still work in telecoms?  I'm intresting in what BT are using these days in terms of core IP routing kit.
Yes, I still work in telecoms, but don't have much contact with BT outside their legacy network support staff these days. I believe there is still some Huawei optical transmission kit in their network, but the core switching and routing kit is all Cisco and Lucent/Juniper, I believe. They do have some Huawei Access Hub/MSAN kit in the street cabinets as well as the Fujitsu and ECI kit. When BT took over EE in 2016, they began the process of removing Huawei equipment from EE's core network as well.

Regarding the Huawei-Cisco lawsuit in 2004, Huawei admitted it had copied Cisco's EIGRP routing protocol and had to remove it from it's products as part of the out-of-court settlement, the rest of the details of the settlement were not disclosed due to a confidentiality agreement. However, in 2012 Huawei made comments to the press regarding the lawsuit, denying it had copied Cisco's source code. This prompted a response from the Cisco CEO, who decided to rescind the confidentiality clause and quoted from the report of the neutral expert appointed by the court to analyse the source code of both parties software.

Huawei and ZTE were also successfully taken to court in Germany by the MPEG Group for using unlicenced copies of it's AVC/H.264 codec in their smartphones and tablets

kngen

A familiar name popped up when I was reacquainting myself with the Promis case (probably one of the first back doors that the US used to spy on other countries), and probably a very early case of silicon-age IP theft, too. Unsurprisingly, he was in charge of a total whitewash that exonerated the government despite huge evidence to the contrary.

Just ridiculously murky, now, then and forever.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: buzby on May 18, 2019, 11:29:28 PM


Huawei and ZTE were also successfully taken to court in Germany by the MPEG Group for using unlicenced copies of it's AVC/H.264 codec in their smartphones and tablets

I'm not sure this is equivalent, most smartphone manufacturers are IP (urgh) theives.

buzby

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 19, 2019, 12:01:56 AM
I'm not sure this is equivalent, most smartphone manufacturers are IP (urgh) theives.
Every other major smartphone manufacturer (even others based in China) have managed to pay the MPEG LA for a licence though, despite thieving each other's patents for other parts of their systems. Huawei and ZTE only took out licences in March this year after their appeals against the lawsuit failed.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: buzby on May 19, 2019, 12:28:26 AM
Every other major smartphone manufacturer (even others based in China) have managed to pay the MPEG LA for a licence though, despite thieving each other's patents for other parts of their systems. Huawei and ZTE only took out licences in March this year after their appeals against the lawsuit failed.

That says it all though doesn't it? They didn't pay it because they thought they would get away with it; that doesn't just sum up a Chinese attitude to software engineering, it's been an attitude towards software for decades, one that we hope will die off (although it looks like it'll be replaced with saas which isn't much better).

buzby

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 19, 2019, 12:37:11 AM
That says it all though doesn't it? They didn't pay it because they thought they would get away with it; that doesn't just sum up a Chinese attitude to software engineering, it's been an attitude towards software for decades, one that we hope will die off (although it looks like it'll be replaced with saas which isn't much better).

I agree that software theft isn't just a Chinese problem (some posts in this thread have attempted to link suspicion of Huawei to racsim against Chinese suppliers). The fact that other Chinese manufacturers had paid MPEG LA for licences upfront without having to be chased through the courts says more about Huawei and ZTE's corporate attitude to others' software specifically than about Chinese manufacturers in general. In fact, if you look through the MPEG LA's list of press statements regarding licence disputes, it's primarily Western manufacturers and brands that have been the problem (including both Aldis and Lidl)

Zetetic

The problem there is that the idea that you should have licence anything to produce a decoder or encoder of a file format (even a moderately involved one such a lossily compressed video) is fucking stupid.

Sebastian Cobb

#99
Indeed, software patents can do one as well.

When CGI bought out Logica the North American concept of 'IP' started getting bandied about. It was grim. I'm not even sure the senior management fully grasped the fact that software patents weren't a thing in Europe.

But then both companies were quite similar in that their biggest successes in their marketing guff were usually developed by other companies they purchased (for their viable ip and working systems). Although they did actually make one of the incarnations of ERNIE, the premium bond generator.

shh

I'm fairly sure there must be genuine security concerns, we'd already started removing huawei gear from the core of the existing 4g network last year hadn't we? No doubt it's part of a wider trade war though, but let's be honest would China allow a western equivalent to provide their own 5g?

On the broader point of china vs western competition, there were a few pieces in the latest NLR, victor shih below:

QuoteGlobally, this has caused major dislocations because banks in capitalist countries wouldn't support too many money-losing firms in sectors with over-capacity. Because intensive investment allowed China to build up its production capacity so rapidly, many firms in advanced countries, especially the United States, couldn't adapt—or could only adapt by moving production to China. Their creditors, unlike Chinese banks, wouldn't carry on providing credit to firms that could not compete with the 'China price', so thousands of firms either shuttered or relocated, leaving millions of workers unemployed, or employed in marginal jobs, in the space of less than a decade. Although much of the rhetoric about the incompatibility of capitalism and socialism reflects a Manichean construct of the Cold War, there are some deep incompatibilities between private capital and China's system of state-controlled capital.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/II115/articles/victor-shih-china-s-credit-conundrum

steveh

Huawei's new fake European campus in Dongguan is quite something: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/05/photos-of-huaweis-european-themed-campus-in-china/589342/

The amount of money sloshing about in big Chinese companies...

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: steveh on May 19, 2019, 04:49:30 PM
Huawei's new fake European campus in Dongguan is quite something: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/05/photos-of-huaweis-european-themed-campus-in-china/589342/

The amount of money sloshing about in big Chinese companies...

Makes a change from them buying London properties noone will ever live in I guess.

That campus is something else. Like a virtual creation in Westworld or something. I'm impressed and horrified.

mothman

It's like one of those recreations of a typical US town but in Russia...

shh

Ye gods. What does 'Europe' mean to a Chinese person (out of curiosity)? I suppose at least the faux-classical capitol buildings in US were meant to suggest some legal inspiration from Rome and Greece. Is this just the brighton pavilion writ large - an aesthetic borrowing from an unthreatening and obsolescent client culture?.....

Anyway, from the same interview linked to above

QuoteThere has been such a heavy focus on fixed capital investment in manufacturing industries for so long, with worsening over-capacity, that the rate of return has been driven low enough to discourage further investment. That has provoked a search for alternative investments outside industry, leading to a huge concentration on real estate, making for bubbles, as well as infrastructure. Should real estate and infrastructure also suffer a reduction in their rate of return, the pressure to invest overseas will soar and capital controls will be further tested.

Blumf

I think China takes a similar position to their own architectural history. Putting up plasticy replacements to older buildings and neighbourhoods that have been redeveloped.

Dex Sawash

Quote from: steveh on May 19, 2019, 04:49:30 PM
Huawei's new fake European campus in Dongguan is quite something: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/05/photos-of-huaweis-european-themed-campus-in-china/589342/

The amount of money sloshing about in big Chinese companies...

China #cancelled

Sebastian Cobb


imitationleather

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 19, 2019, 08:07:59 PM
Google's pulled Huawei's Android licence after Trump's blacklist.
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1SP0NB?__twitter_impression=true

Huawei users potentially soon losing access to all the Google services would have me piiiiissed off if I had one of their phones.

They're apparently working on their own OS, but it surely will only get any traction in China. Over here it's probably destined to be another Windows Mobile.

a duncandisorderly

"who are we? who are we?"

like the ironic terrace chant of the losing side. that's how I hear it now.

so what was behind the earlier removals of their kit from BT infrastructure? that seems pre-emptive, if it goes back that far, not to say clairvoyant. something murky.

Pinball

Backdoor chips began in 2001 after the Patriot Act. Much more recently Huawei are muscling in. Their backdoor chip was publicised in Oct 2018 in a Business Week article. That stated that Amazon had discovered the chip in 2015 and started removing Huawei boards from its server farms then, as did many other companies:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies


Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Pinball on May 20, 2019, 10:01:17 PM
Backdoor chips began in 2001 after the Patriot Act. Much more recently Huawei are muscling in. Their backdoor chip was publicised in Oct 2018 in a Business Week article. That stated that Amazon had discovered the chip in 2015 and started removing Huawei boards from its server farms then, as did many other companies:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies



That Bloomberg article is questionable.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qv9npv/bloomberg-china-supermicro-apple-hack

buzby

Quote from: a duncandisorderly on May 20, 2019, 06:49:41 PM
so what was behind the earlier removals of their kit from BT infrastructure? that seems pre-emptive, if it goes back that far, not to say clairvoyant. something murky.
It wasn't BT's infrastructure, it was EE's after BT took them over in 2016. As I posted earlier in the thread, although Huawei do supply kit to BT, none of it is used in the core switcihng and routing part of it's IP network. Huawei have a much larger market penetration in the mobile sector (basically as a 'one-stop shop', from the cell transceivers up to the core routing and switching) and EE hadn't been as concerned as BT when selecting suppliers of it's core network. After they took them over, BT started removing Huawei kit from EE's core switching network

The security concerns expressed by 'them' over Huawei  prevented their proposed takeover of Marconi after it went bankrupt in 2004. I posted the full story here.


Fambo Number Mive

QuoteA top Chinese diplomat has warned that there could be "substantial" repercussions for her country's investment in the UK, if Huawei were to be banned from Britain's 5G network.

Chen Wen also told the BBC that Beijing had already "witnessed some conscious moves" in that direction...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48377235