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US has underestimated Huawei, says founder
- ycombonator 7y agoConflict meaning they are going to unleash hacking attacks in coordination with the communist regime ?
- sctb 7y agoCould you please review the guidelines and make an effort to post more informatively and thoughtfully? We're here to have a discussion and to learn things. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ycombonator 7y agoOkay. I thing I snuck in the snark with a fact that they are backed by a Communist Regime. Will reread the guidelines and keep it clean.
- peteretep 7y agoWell that sounds like a good way to calm any national security concerns tho
- NDizzle 7y agoYep. Good luck, buddy.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoThis doesn’t make any sense. It’s kind of funny. His statements imply that he’ll show the US by still being a powerful business... but I don’t see how that changes anything about it’s relationship with the US? I think he’s just putting on a strongman face because otherwise this is going to substantially weaken Huawei as a company.
- StreamBright 7y agoNot to mention that Cisco and other networking equipment vendors benefit from the Huawei ban.
- the_seraphim 7y agobut micron would suffer, and other chip manufacturers
- close04 7y agoMake our backdoors great again... For the eager downvoters out there, consider that (to my knowledge) no actual case for Huawei backdoors was made so far (although we can all be pretty sure they exist). At the same time Cisco routers giving root access with a specific private key is considered a simple "could happen to anyone" bug. So yes, it's what I said above: someone will have backdoors in the infrastructure. From US perspective it better be the home team.
- StreamBright 7y agoActually there were several cases of Huawei backdoors, more recently found by Vodafone in Italy. I am a big fan of China but I think the problem is two fold regarding Huawei. China makes it very hard for foreign companies to enter the Chinese market and they often ignore IP. Having backdoors in networking equipment is a issue and you rightfully point out that the Chinese are not the only ones implementing such things.
- close04 7y agoWhat I meant was a case for a "backdoor" rather than the typical "it's a bug" that you see with every other manufacturer. I didn't want to go into the way China does business. Just wanted to point out the hypocrisy of the justification used here.
- StreamBright 7y ago
- ddoolin 7y agoHuawei and China will have a hard time finding any sympathy here, considering the companies they outright ban or block, or even just cut the legs off. Have any such US companies responded like this? It feels childish/immature to me, particularly given the circumstances & context.
- impostir 7y agoI may be misinformed, but I have never heard of China specifically targeting 1 company like this. Sure, China blocks Facebook and Amazon, but its not a targeted hit. China blocks everyone. I am not claiming that this makes it fine, merely that it seems different.
- k__ 7y agoDoesn't it make China worse? US bans a company because it's problematic, not because "It's part of the evil west"
- honeybee93 7y agoChina limits all foreign companies from accessing it's market. The true reason is to provide a safe heaven to allow local companies develop it's own technology and capability before killed off by foreign companies. During 80s when China is start to open up the market, China has literally no private enterprises with good capability on it's own. Foreign companies from US and Europe have too advanced of technology and scale simply because they have been developing much longer while China was being war ravaged. These companies would easily take over the china market and kill any local enterprises. Look at the affect of the ban, China now as pretty good technology on it's own and local companies with the scale that can compete with foreign companies. Foreign companies now entering China find difficulty partly because of the regulatory environment but also because of local competition is much stronger. I would argue that Apple sales decrease in China is not mainly from regulation but competition from Huawei xiaomi and oppo. Now contrast this with Europe and Canada, especially in the tech market, no one has home grown technology companies that are big enough to compete with the US. Many homegrown companies went away because of it cannot compete with the US. Is would surely damage local economy right? I think the advantages and disadvantages to free market must be carefully balanced.
- strooper 7y agoSometimes it feels like the conflict is partially about the 5G technology implementation. What does 5G technology have that is making everyone so sensitive? Will it require complete overhaul of the existing hardware (so big business opportunity)? Will it enable something extraordinary, apart from the data speed, that can not be done with the existing network technologies? I am curious...
- bravo22 7y agoHuawei sells 5G equipment. Think the equivalent of routers, switches but for cellular network. If they have backdoors then China can intercept and disrupt communication across many countries. That's the concern in a nutshell.
- aiCeivi9 7y agoThey did the same with 3G/4G, they totally outpriced Nokia Siemens Networks. Why ban it now?
- WillPostForFood 7y agoThe current administration sees China as a huge threat, the previous several administrations (republican and democrat) did not. Or if they did, they thought the way to deal with the threat was through economic cooperation.
- Para2016 7y agoChina has been a threat to US interests in the Pacific for decades. Now China is the regional hegemonic power which dwarfs the weak US Pacific partnership. China's international influence will continue to grow and they will likely achieve their 100 year plan. That's not really fearmongering, China has plenty of problems but they will eventually succeed.
- pishpash 7y ago
- mnl 7y agoI don't understand why everybody is dismissing any chance of retaliation against for instance Apple. With this they're killing a major player outside China, that's about half of their smartphone sales ($52B revenue). I don't think China is going to take it just like that.
- freeflight 7y agoBecause this is already framed as retaliation for "China being evil and stealing our jobs and IP". So once the actual Chinese retaliation is gonna hit, it can be played up for full effect as "Look at what they are doing now! They never stop attacking us!" to further rile up the sentiments.
- close04 7y agoIt probably won't be "retaliation" as people imagine it: the government stepping in and taking aim at Apple. Chinese consumers might decide (be encouraged) to buy more Huawei and less Apple. It can be something as indirect as making the US the devil on every possible channel or as direct as including a "patriotic" point in their scoring systems. There's a myriad of ways China could hit at Apple or other US companies without the government directly executing them.
- panpanna 7y agoThis had already happened. When US blocked use of Huawei network equipment they started a major PR campaign on China. In China Huawei numbers are up, Apple is down so I guess it worked.
- westiseast 7y agoI for one feel like there’s actually limited play in this - America already is and has been the boogeyman for years. Whipping up nationalistic sentiment and expecting consumers to fall in line is a transparent tactic and younger, affluent consumers are fairly cynical. It rarely has any long term effect either (see previous nationalistic anti-Japan and anti-Korea consumer boycotts). Also don’t underestimate the power of Apple brand - it’s not like banning Google or Facebook which had very limited presence in Chinese minds. Moves to limit access to Apple products, tax them, ban them etc would not go down well. The government could offer more subsidies to domestic companies, better credit terms or financial incentives, but then that’s just China paying for the cost of Trumps tariffs - Trump wins. That said, Huawei and other phone makers have been taking chunks out of Apple by making better phones at competitive prices - that’s what actually moves consumers.
- sjg007 7y agoYou can reverse the situation. Would China hypothetically allow Qualcomm, Cisco deployments for their 5g networks? Even with encryption there is a lot to learn from the metadata and as we really accelerate to IoTs potential for major economic disruption.
- sureaboutthis 7y agoI'm pretty sure they did in the past. Not as sure now.
- jorblumesea 7y agoSure, after turning over any IP and source code and being installed in a few token places. Hardly any kind of real adoption, more like a forced IP transfer.
- Merkur 7y agoIt would be ok if America would ban Huawei from building national infrastructure - it wouldn’t be very capitalistic tho. But it is down right evil to impose extraterritorial sanctions against a company and preventing other to do business with them.
- sjg007 7y agoI think it is a national security argument which basically means the 5 eyes countries have to follow suit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chirau 7y agoChina has a club of rich and powerful people. This guy is one of them, he is in it and obviously has friends in high places. I wouldn't be surprised if China decides to either ban or raise taxes on companies like Apple. At the end of the day, China does have some leverage on US manufacturing. This is no longer just Huawei. It's pretty much China versus USA. The challenger versus the incumbent.
- siffland 7y ago“We can also make the same chips as the US chips, but it doesn’t mean we won’t buy them.” Does that mean they are going to steal IP and pirate it? Yes a silly question because i don't know what chips they are and who holds the IP for them, but did he just say we don't care we will just steal your stuff and make it ourselves?
- majia 7y agoThis is really a misleading interpretation. In the original context, he meant Huawei will buy products regardless if they are made by Chinese or US suppliers. One doesn’t need to trust everything Huawei claims, but taking quotes without proper context doesn’t help the discussion.
- bertomartin 7y agoI can understand why the US wouldn't want them to build out the 5G network in the US, but it's kinda overstepping to push other countries to deny them that access. That's for other countries to decide on their own. In addition, deeming the company a national security risk is kinda ridiculous. and blocking companies in the US from selling to them or doing business with them is simply anti-competitive obviously. I feel like the result will be huawei developing their own homegrown technology and bringing even more competition to US companies. It's obviou s they're capable of developing advanced tech w/o simply copying (I mean they're ahead in 5G). And once they go down that route there's no coming back because they wouldn't wanna make the same mistake twice. can't understand the strategy by this admin., seems kinda dumb to me
- EastToWest 7y agoGood job on picking one sentence in a 150-minute interview to serve an agenda. No wonder people here say "This doesn't make any sense" -- because it doesn't. The actual interview contains a lot more information. For example, Ren urged people to not go overly nationalistic, thanked companies in the US for working together, urged people to not blame US companies, explained his thought in detail on recent events, how to attract talents etc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- EastToWest 7y agoFound a transcript (in Chinese) if people are interested. Warning: very long text -- 20,000 characters in length. https://m.huxiu.com/article/300415.html https://m.huxiu.com/article/300415.html
- pnathan 7y agoIs there a decent translation in English available?
- EastToWest 7y agoI don't think there is a decently translated version. You can try Google translate. Its result is probably good enough for understanding the most important bits.
- A2017U1 7y agoTongue-in-cheek: Isn't Google the exact company meant to bring Huawei down? Is there some sort of checksum for translations?
- OJFord 7y ago> Is there some sort of checksum for translations? Obviously not, no translator would have a job! You only get matching output if you get a matching input, that's a defining property of a checksum. If you could get matching input, i.e. translated texts from different sources, that would mean that not only is translation a completely solved problem, but also that the source and target language were equivalently expressive and neither ambiguous, every word having a 1:1 mapping. That is, they must be the same language, just at most differently different represented.
- impostir 7y agoIsn't this just the ZTE ban all over again? Trump seems to completely believe that China owns these companies, so targeting the companies becomes a legitimate strategy in his trade war. I would be surprised if any Chinese company was completely free from Party control, but that doesn't intrinsically justify the ban. I would also be surprised if any American tech company was completely free from NSA influence. I will be surprised if the ban lasts, but it has already hurt US credibility as a reasonable trade partner.
- magwa101 7y agoblerg
- fspeech 7y agoNot sure why the Guardian only picked parts to make him sound as inflammatory as possible. What about honestly reporting that his saying that his daughter uses Apple and he wants her to have the choice and people should not be too nationalistic about it. What about his profusely praising his US suppliers and consultants for helping him succeed. His overall tone is fairly noncombatative given the circumstances. Here is a transcript https://m.huxiu.com/article/300415.html https://m.huxiu.com/article/300415.html
- fspeech 7y agoHe said at one time they signed the deal to sell Huawei to a US company (Motorola, I believe) and were waiting for the buyer’s board to approve the deal. He said they wanted to succeed as a US company (“wearing cowboy hats” in his words). After the deal fell through, his younger colleagues voted to not try to find another buyer. He warned his younger colleagues then that there would be conflict with US if they succeeded too well. Interesting tidbits.
- jiveturkey 7y ago> Not sure why really?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Animats 7y agoIt's like being hit with "national security letters" in the US. You can't talk about them and may have to spy on your customers. Huawei gets no benefit from putting surveillance features in their gear. It's something they're required to do. It's been a long time since US telcos could build or buy switches with no surveillance features. All the way through 1ESS, no Western Electric switch had built-in surveillance. People had to go into the central office and hook up wires to listen in.
- dirkg 7y agoThe US is doing what it does so well, acting as a bully and using its economic/military status to abuse its power. The whole thing is total hypocrisy - the US spies/steals from other countries as a matter of policy and we spend trillions on it, but its ok because we're the 'good' guys. China is becoming a threat so any means must be used to suppress them, since we can't very well invade China like we do weaker countries. what exactly has Huawei done which is so bad anyway? Any why should anyone trust the US govt, esp this govt?
- mizchief2 7y agoI wasn't really on board with banning Huawei until I read this article.