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I think the public reason to ban them is totally fine but there’s a lot of more stuff in play here. Think about the presence of Android in China, they worry ab

by mtrovo 8y ago

I think the public reason to ban them is totally fine but there’s a lot of more stuff in play here. Think about the presence of Android in China, they worry about Android phones having Play services calling home with more data than it’s needed to work properly. This is not theory, it was shown in the past and we never know how much data we’re sending back to Google or even Facebook just by owning an Android device. So they block Google Play services, in the name of its citizens right to privacy or whatever. Now the same due diligence is not taken into account for the same kind of services provided by local companies. They can operate without a lot of backslash over data collection or backdoors. But for them (Chinese government) this is still a better alternative. Because the data is not siting on a data center in US waiting to be mined by some agency that happen to have three letters and no need for a mandate to look at data from non citizens. So the reason to ban them is right, but it’s not just banning them to spy on us. This is also saying that if somebody is going to spy on our communications it better be on our side of the fence. Maybe Cisco could win without a lot of fuss about “possible threats that we don’t understand right now”. Maybe Cisco also have code with dubious quality, or even straight malicious, but at least the data exfiltration is not sitting on a data center in China.

guitarbill 8y ago
Is it though? A much simpler explaination is that China - like any nation - can compel it's citizens quite easily to do something (carrot or stick). And tapping into/backdooring infrastructure a very effective approach. How do the Five Eyes governments know this? Because they were doing the exact same thing, with help from e.g. telcos. But most foreign telcos are somewhat well monitored, so attacking the hardware is the next logical step. There's no mystery here, it's just they can't come right out and say "this is how we would have done it", because they probably did.

by mtrovo 8y ago

guitarbill 8y ago

Is it though? A much simpler explaination is that China - like any nation - can compel it's citizens quite easily to do something (carrot or stick). And tapping into/backdooring infrastructure a very effective approach. How do the Five Eyes governments know this? Because they were doing the exact same thing, with help from e.g. telcos. But most foreign telcos are somewhat well monitored, so attacking the hardware is the next logical step. There's no mystery here, it's just they can't come right out and say "this is how we would have done it", because they probably did.