21 ms·

Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

154 points by chvid 7y ago

lowdose 7y ago
We are reading a lot about Huawei lately and it almost all seems to boil down to how "evil" their business practices are. Is this WSJ in the Overton window spinning a manufactured consent?
- Theodores 7y ago
  Did you read the comments for the article? This has the width of the Overton Window laid bare for you. The consent has already been manufactured! Nobody dare cross the line and say how cool they are with Huawei products. We have short memories, not so recently the Koreans were the ones doing all the IP theft, but nowadays Samsung is legit. Or you can go further back to when everything except and IBM PC (or Apple) was a clone. Going further back, in the world of automotive, when a special product comes out, e.g. the MINI in the UK, the first thing Ford does is to buy one and take it to pieces, cost the whole package and work out how it is done. There are places I have worked where there have been cupboards full of rival products, tested to destruction. It is called research. What is quite interesting with the narrative is that Huawei have got there in the execution of 5G and they are allegedly ahead. Imagine if Huawei got to setup a colony on Mars first, we could complain that they stole Elon Musk's ideas and throw toys out of prams, to ignore accomplishments and execution. Clearly the Overton Window is defined on this, and woe betide anyone that ignores it. So how does one avoid flamewar? Humour always helps. IS there any original IP in this WSJ article? Is it actually novel? Have they stolen content from other articles? Have they nicked content from the Washington Post? Their Huawei trolling is far from investigative journalism.
  - jcims 7y ago
    I just have a meta question. Was there a recent article or something that brought the term 'Overton window' into common use? I did a little digging and it seems like it's been a term for a few decades, but I don't recall ever seeing it before this year. Now I see it used all the time.
    - chvid 7y ago
      The TV Show "Billions".
      - jcims 7y ago
        That’s definitely it, timing is dead on. Thanks!
        Bootvis 7y ago
        It was commonly used on Slashdot before (where I learned the concept).
        jcims 7y ago
        Interesting. Used to love slashdot, have an account at the bottom end of the five digit range, but i cant do it any more.
    - newen 7y ago
      I've seen it used in the internet for a few years now. Maybe there is a recent surge but people do use it relatively often when discussing politics.
    - liability 7y ago
      More likely hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effec I learned about this years ago, so I've not noticed a recent uptick in usage, but when I learned about it I did.
    - messick 7y ago
      Because it helps explain why events that would have ended any previous US Presidential administration can happen multiple times a day, but not even move the needle in the public discourse. Obama saluted a Marine with a Starbucks cup in his hand and it was national news. Trump sided with a murderous dictator against a former Vice President yesterday, and nothing. Anyone who pays attention to American politics lately has been experienced the Overton Window shifting a lot.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    > Going further back, in the world of automotive, when a special product comes out, e.g. the MINI in the UK, the first thing Ford does is to buy one and take it to pieces, cost the whole package and work out how it is done. Everyone does this, here's an article from 2006 detailing this: https://www.wired.com/2006/02/teardown/ https://www.wired.com/2006/02/teardown/ The point is, this kind of behavior - taking a stock product and disassembling it to its pieces - is not theft. The real theft that mainly originates from China (no matter if via the "legal" route of buying up Western companies or force "technology transfer" via joint ventures or via hacking) that does real damage is stealing the know-how in manufacturing which the original manufacturer has spent most of the R&D budget for. I can go ahead, do a 360° photography of my toaster and its innards, but will I be able to construct one of my own based on this? Probably not, as I will need to figure out lots of stuff that are not visible/measurable in the final product: temperature/cooling cycles for plastic and metals, the precise construction for the injection molds that does not leave me with uneven colors in the plastic, ... Same is valid for automotive parts or aeronautic/astronautic parts. Sure, I can buy a SpaceX engine and take it apart - but that won't help me to get the precise 3D print pattern they use for their chamber.
    - chvid 7y ago
      > The real theft that mainly originates from China (no matter if via the "legal" route of buying up Western companies or force "technology transfer" via joint ventures or via hacking) Honestly; how can you call it "theft" if it is done via buying or a joint venture?
      - mschuster91 7y ago
        > Honestly; how can you call it "theft" if it is done via buying or a joint venture? Joint ventures are compulsory. What China does is extorting market access. As for buying: Systematically undermining them by price-dumping and then buying up the carcasses isn't exactly fine business practices either. China is definitely going to be the enemy of the next 20-30 years, pitting a ruthless dictatorship against whatever freedom and democracy will be left in the Western world.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Call me suspicious, but there's a very common theme and phrasing in a lot of those comments. Manufacturing consent? You may very well think that. The Indians and others were buying British looms and disassembling them way back. Standard practice seems to be buy a few extra to rip apart and understand. The cliche has it: We don't learn from history.
xtAj 7y ago
The Boomers are finally reaping the fruits of selling out the West to the entire world. Now they double down and engage in SJW instead of focusing on retaining manufacturing capabilities.
chvid 7y ago
I am amazed on how weak the accusations are. A ringtone? Some guy who thinks he can patent the idea of a camera attached to a smartphone? A hitpiece like this could have been written about just about any big tech company. And it is leaving out the story of how Huawei committed its true crime: That within some fields (5G notably) it is today a lot more advanced and cheaper than its competitors.
- Hasknewbie 7y ago
  Ladies and gentlemen: products/firmware cloned so brazenly they have the same bugs, patents filed using documents from their rivals, operatives caught with thousands of confidential documents... "weak accusations". Huawei's baggage regarding IP theft is notorious, this article is nothing new, you can easily find others all the way back to 2003 when the Cisco/Huawei feud started getting coverage. What would be more productive is finding out if this is a case of chickens coming home to roust (now that Huawei has gone from B-grade/discount vendor to A-lister and a different level of accountability is expected), or if they're just yet another chip in the US-China trade war, as ZTE were last year.
- nova22033 7y ago
  Why is the camera attachment not a patentable idea> Huawei also holds patents for seemingly obvious things. https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190155499 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190155499 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190158530 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190158530
- dspwizard 7y ago
  The most amusing part is that Huawei developed 5G tech on its own - nokia has shit and e/// is not better. Even in regards of 4G massive MIMO tech - Huawei is years ahead of other, they couldn't steal this tech from anyone - because one one had it.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    It's rather more trivial to leapfrog an existing technology when you're able to steal & learn from all of the IP it's based on and then target your R&D efforts accordingly. You don't have to suffer the organizational difficulties of sunk costs, path dependency, legacy systems, etc. So even if their equipment is more advanced, they still got there on the back of massive IP theft.
nailer 7y ago
Anecdote. May be untrue. Don't trust everything you read online, etc. A friend was a 7 year Ericsson employee (ending in 2012). In his opinion, Ericsson's networking equipment was universally acknowledged as having slow deployment times. Nokia's stuff was much faster to deploy. When Huawei hired the ex-Nokia engineers at 2.5x their previous salary, they asked them how Nokia did particular tasks. The engineer would say 'The best way of doing this is...' and get cut off: 'we want to know exactly how Nokia does this, not anything different'. All the Nokia customers moved to Huawei's kit. After a couple of years of extraction Huawei would fire the ex-Nokia engineer saying 'we have everything we need from you'. Again, might be bullshit.
- alexro 7y ago
  If we follow this logic rigorously, how then to explain that Huawei is actually got some of the best smartphones and other products not found across the competitors?
  - nailer 7y ago
    - Weird sudden downward moderation of a previously highly voted comment that is mildly critical of a Chinese company. - Response which doesn't seem to understand the post it is responding to. - Response is in broken English. I think I know what's going on here.
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  I remember reading an article about how a Chinese company would hire European bakers to demonstrate how they bake breads ad nauseum until they could reproduce and automate each steps perfectly. The thinking was "they [chinese] have no imagination so they stick to known processes and don't deviate". Don't really know what to make of that.
  - late2part 7y ago
    Which is why this trope about China ruling the world is crap. Generally speaking they are good at copying, reverse engineering, and cheap labor. The country's MO is to steal designs and process and implement better. When the west finally figures out how to stop letting China steal/copy - then the West will continue innovating, and China won't have anything to make.
vneumanarc 7y ago
Just huawei? Isn't that the case for china's rise overall? Wasn't the basis of US-China relations the past 50 years a simple transfer of technology/capital for cheap labor/lax environmental regulations? We looked the other way while china took our technology and money. And they looked away as we exploited cheap labor and lax environmental law. It was a wage, technology, capital and environmental law arbitrage. It terribly skewed the wealth/income inequality in both countries, it destroyed large segments of the US ( rust belt ), it has been an environmental disaster and it's significantly altered the global power balance. But at least the elites got ridiculously wealthy. For 50 years, the wsj and the ny times defended this. Bloomberg defended this since their inception in the early 80s. It's odd to see the entire establishment media shift from supporting it to now suddenly attacking it. Also, you would think independent media would offer differing opinions rather than speaking with the same voice. But it's always complete support or complete rejection as if someone flips a switch on and off. "Theft and dubious ethics" has been the basis of the US-China relationship from the very beginning and it went both ways. This is something everyone and their mother knew from the very beginning. Why did it take 50 years for the wsj and the rest of the media to figure it out. If the wsj is concerned with "theft and dubious ethics", are they planning on an expose' of the US-Saudi relation and US-Israeli relation? Maybe in another 50 years?
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  Trade has made it possible to have fewer wars, I personally wonder if the fracturing of globalisation by automation technologies will lead to harder borders, a less open world, less trade and more wars. America is always looking for an enemy to win against.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    I think America is less interested in an enemy to win against and simply one to dangle out in front. It's less about winning and more about continually justifying the military industrial complex. It's also probably why the conservative spectrum of political thought is has a sharp split with respect to foreign policy at the moment, with one side leaning towards isolationism and the other towards a more hawkish stance. That's not intended as a knock on conservatism, just a fairly surface-level observation.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
whooshee 7y ago
As an aside, Huawei poured a lot of funds in R&D, and those scientists and mathematicians they hired from Russia/France etc,. helped significantly to their breakthroughs.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
What's the big deal here? Couldn't other countries just steal technology back? e.g. couldn't a 5-eyes country consortium just rip off Huawei's 5G technology and run with it in their own markets?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jmull 7y ago
  Stealing stuff is OK because other people could also steal stuff? I don’t think that’s a valid point.
  - HillaryBriss 7y ago
    ok. but it might be a path to profitability. i mean, what is all this rhetorical heat and drama really about? it's about making money. it's not truly about ethics. US business is not exactly a lofty ethical model to hold up for global admiration. if accusing a big company of theft and security breaches can get them locked out of your market, that's one less competitor.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    Morality follows money. If the US would be better off copying I have no doubt we would quickly shift our narratives to align to the new economic realities.
jvanderbot 7y ago
My friends in telcom from years ago would regularly tell us about H techs who would come install equipment. And while doing so would disassemble every rack and switch in the room and photograph everything. Thats an unprovable allegation, but I know these folks to be reliable sources of information. Having read about the internal incentives for techs providing IP intel and outright rewarding of theft, I'm convinced.
- woah 7y ago
  Why wouldn’t Huawei just buy a switch? Why would the customer tolerate someone spending 10x longer on an install and taking apart all their other crap? For that matter why were they able to take apart the other switches at all? Wouldn’t that have taken the system down? Were they storing inactive equipment in their live rack? None of this makes a lot of sense.
  - xenospn 7y ago
    Yeah, the only way I can see that happening is if there's a bunch of unused equipment in the room that you can take apart without unplugging - but since when do you let a bunch of foreign techs hang out in one of your server rooms by themselves? Not likely.
    - jvanderbot 7y ago
      According to these guys, they'd come in to do an installation at 2-3AM (standard time for maintaining a cell network), but security was lax and they would be left to do their own thing mostly unsupervised. These were smaller shops that were later bought out by the big handful recognize today. They were dumb. Maybe they let it happen, but it takes two to tango. According to the particular story that I might be foggy on, the engineer responsible for the station and surrounding stations came in to check in on the installation unannounced, and the people on site were not really aware or concerned that they were in back working. The engineer found out what was going on, and everyone shrugged, saying that what harm could they do, etc etc.
  - jvanderbot 7y ago
adultSwim 7y ago
Apple's Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics Fixed it.
codedokode 7y ago
Wikipedia article [1] says that US has been also involved in industrial espionage: > In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech Also, other article [2] mentions that West had earlier stolen a secret of porcelain manufacturing from China. Are those the examples of proper, not dubious "ethics" that we should learn from? Did Europeans returned the stolen secret? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins
mensetmanusman 7y ago
Accusations? They sold networking equipment with accompanying Cisco manuals. Ha. Big picture, is the world better off with Huawei’s rise? It depends on your perspective. If you care about the global environment, Huawei’s costs are so low because they do not have to satisfy environmental standards as they do in the west... That is the basis of most cost differentials outside of labor supply/demand.

154 points by chvid 7y ago

We are reading a lot about Huawei lately and it almost all seems to boil down to how "evil" their business practices are. Is this WSJ in the Overton window spinning a manufactured consent?

Theodores 7y ago
Did you read the comments for the article? This has the width of the Overton Window laid bare for you. The consent has already been manufactured! Nobody dare cross the line and say how cool they are with Huawei products. We have short memories, not so recently the Koreans were the ones doing all the IP theft, but nowadays Samsung is legit. Or you can go further back to when everything except and IBM PC (or Apple) was a clone. Going further back, in the world of automotive, when a special product comes out, e.g. the MINI in the UK, the first thing Ford does is to buy one and take it to pieces, cost the whole package and work out how it is done. There are places I have worked where there have been cupboards full of rival products, tested to destruction. It is called research. What is quite interesting with the narrative is that Huawei have got there in the execution of 5G and they are allegedly ahead. Imagine if Huawei got to setup a colony on Mars first, we could complain that they stole Elon Musk's ideas and throw toys out of prams, to ignore accomplishments and execution. Clearly the Overton Window is defined on this, and woe betide anyone that ignores it. So how does one avoid flamewar? Humour always helps. IS there any original IP in this WSJ article? Is it actually novel? Have they stolen content from other articles? Have they nicked content from the Washington Post? Their Huawei trolling is far from investigative journalism.
- jcims 7y ago
  I just have a meta question. Was there a recent article or something that brought the term 'Overton window' into common use? I did a little digging and it seems like it's been a term for a few decades, but I don't recall ever seeing it before this year. Now I see it used all the time.
  - chvid 7y ago
    The TV Show "Billions".
    - jcims 7y ago
      That’s definitely it, timing is dead on. Thanks!
      - Bootvis 7y ago
        It was commonly used on Slashdot before (where I learned the concept).
        jcims 7y ago
        Interesting. Used to love slashdot, have an account at the bottom end of the five digit range, but i cant do it any more.
  - newen 7y ago
    I've seen it used in the internet for a few years now. Maybe there is a recent surge but people do use it relatively often when discussing politics.
  - liability 7y ago
    More likely hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader–Meinhof_effec I learned about this years ago, so I've not noticed a recent uptick in usage, but when I learned about it I did.
  - messick 7y ago
    Because it helps explain why events that would have ended any previous US Presidential administration can happen multiple times a day, but not even move the needle in the public discourse. Obama saluted a Marine with a Starbucks cup in his hand and it was national news. Trump sided with a murderous dictator against a former Vice President yesterday, and nothing. Anyone who pays attention to American politics lately has been experienced the Overton Window shifting a lot.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > Going further back, in the world of automotive, when a special product comes out, e.g. the MINI in the UK, the first thing Ford does is to buy one and take it to pieces, cost the whole package and work out how it is done. Everyone does this, here's an article from 2006 detailing this: https://www.wired.com/2006/02/teardown/ https://www.wired.com/2006/02/teardown/ The point is, this kind of behavior - taking a stock product and disassembling it to its pieces - is not theft. The real theft that mainly originates from China (no matter if via the "legal" route of buying up Western companies or force "technology transfer" via joint ventures or via hacking) that does real damage is stealing the know-how in manufacturing which the original manufacturer has spent most of the R&D budget for. I can go ahead, do a 360° photography of my toaster and its innards, but will I be able to construct one of my own based on this? Probably not, as I will need to figure out lots of stuff that are not visible/measurable in the final product: temperature/cooling cycles for plastic and metals, the precise construction for the injection molds that does not leave me with uneven colors in the plastic, ... Same is valid for automotive parts or aeronautic/astronautic parts. Sure, I can buy a SpaceX engine and take it apart - but that won't help me to get the precise 3D print pattern they use for their chamber.
  - chvid 7y ago
    > The real theft that mainly originates from China (no matter if via the "legal" route of buying up Western companies or force "technology transfer" via joint ventures or via hacking) Honestly; how can you call it "theft" if it is done via buying or a joint venture?
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      > Honestly; how can you call it "theft" if it is done via buying or a joint venture? Joint ventures are compulsory. What China does is extorting market access. As for buying: Systematically undermining them by price-dumping and then buying up the carcasses isn't exactly fine business practices either. China is definitely going to be the enemy of the next 20-30 years, pitting a ruthless dictatorship against whatever freedom and democracy will be left in the Western world.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Call me suspicious, but there's a very common theme and phrasing in a lot of those comments. Manufacturing consent? You may very well think that. The Indians and others were buying British looms and disassembling them way back. Standard practice seems to be buy a few extra to rip apart and understand. The cliche has it: We don't learn from history.

xtAj 7y ago

The Boomers are finally reaping the fruits of selling out the West to the entire world. Now they double down and engage in SJW instead of focusing on retaining manufacturing capabilities.

chvid 7y ago

I am amazed on how weak the accusations are. A ringtone? Some guy who thinks he can patent the idea of a camera attached to a smartphone? A hitpiece like this could have been written about just about any big tech company. And it is leaving out the story of how Huawei committed its true crime: That within some fields (5G notably) it is today a lot more advanced and cheaper than its competitors.

Hasknewbie 7y ago
Ladies and gentlemen: products/firmware cloned so brazenly they have the same bugs, patents filed using documents from their rivals, operatives caught with thousands of confidential documents... "weak accusations". Huawei's baggage regarding IP theft is notorious, this article is nothing new, you can easily find others all the way back to 2003 when the Cisco/Huawei feud started getting coverage. What would be more productive is finding out if this is a case of chickens coming home to roust (now that Huawei has gone from B-grade/discount vendor to A-lister and a different level of accountability is expected), or if they're just yet another chip in the US-China trade war, as ZTE were last year.
nova22033 7y ago
Why is the camera attachment not a patentable idea> Huawei also holds patents for seemingly obvious things. https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190155499 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190155499 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190158530 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190158530
dspwizard 7y ago
The most amusing part is that Huawei developed 5G tech on its own - nokia has shit and e/// is not better. Even in regards of 4G massive MIMO tech - Huawei is years ahead of other, they couldn't steal this tech from anyone - because one one had it.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  It's rather more trivial to leapfrog an existing technology when you're able to steal & learn from all of the IP it's based on and then target your R&D efforts accordingly. You don't have to suffer the organizational difficulties of sunk costs, path dependency, legacy systems, etc. So even if their equipment is more advanced, they still got there on the back of massive IP theft.

nailer 7y ago

Anecdote. May be untrue. Don't trust everything you read online, etc. A friend was a 7 year Ericsson employee (ending in 2012). In his opinion, Ericsson's networking equipment was universally acknowledged as having slow deployment times. Nokia's stuff was much faster to deploy. When Huawei hired the ex-Nokia engineers at 2.5x their previous salary, they asked them how Nokia did particular tasks. The engineer would say 'The best way of doing this is...' and get cut off: 'we want to know exactly how Nokia does this, not anything different'. All the Nokia customers moved to Huawei's kit. After a couple of years of extraction Huawei would fire the ex-Nokia engineer saying 'we have everything we need from you'. Again, might be bullshit.

alexro 7y ago
If we follow this logic rigorously, how then to explain that Huawei is actually got some of the best smartphones and other products not found across the competitors?
- nailer 7y ago
  - Weird sudden downward moderation of a previously highly voted comment that is mildly critical of a Chinese company. - Response which doesn't seem to understand the post it is responding to. - Response is in broken English. I think I know what's going on here.
johnchristopher 7y ago
I remember reading an article about how a Chinese company would hire European bakers to demonstrate how they bake breads ad nauseum until they could reproduce and automate each steps perfectly. The thinking was "they [chinese] have no imagination so they stick to known processes and don't deviate". Don't really know what to make of that.
- late2part 7y ago
  Which is why this trope about China ruling the world is crap. Generally speaking they are good at copying, reverse engineering, and cheap labor. The country's MO is to steal designs and process and implement better. When the west finally figures out how to stop letting China steal/copy - then the West will continue innovating, and China won't have anything to make.

vneumanarc 7y ago

Just huawei? Isn't that the case for china's rise overall? Wasn't the basis of US-China relations the past 50 years a simple transfer of technology/capital for cheap labor/lax environmental regulations? We looked the other way while china took our technology and money. And they looked away as we exploited cheap labor and lax environmental law. It was a wage, technology, capital and environmental law arbitrage. It terribly skewed the wealth/income inequality in both countries, it destroyed large segments of the US ( rust belt ), it has been an environmental disaster and it's significantly altered the global power balance. But at least the elites got ridiculously wealthy. For 50 years, the wsj and the ny times defended this. Bloomberg defended this since their inception in the early 80s. It's odd to see the entire establishment media shift from supporting it to now suddenly attacking it. Also, you would think independent media would offer differing opinions rather than speaking with the same voice. But it's always complete support or complete rejection as if someone flips a switch on and off. "Theft and dubious ethics" has been the basis of the US-China relationship from the very beginning and it went both ways. This is something everyone and their mother knew from the very beginning. Why did it take 50 years for the wsj and the rest of the media to figure it out. If the wsj is concerned with "theft and dubious ethics", are they planning on an expose' of the US-Saudi relation and US-Israeli relation? Maybe in another 50 years?

andy_ppp 7y ago
Trade has made it possible to have fewer wars, I personally wonder if the fracturing of globalisation by automation technologies will lead to harder borders, a less open world, less trade and more wars. America is always looking for an enemy to win against.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  I think America is less interested in an enemy to win against and simply one to dangle out in front. It's less about winning and more about continually justifying the military industrial complex. It's also probably why the conservative spectrum of political thought is has a sharp split with respect to foreign policy at the moment, with one side leaning towards isolationism and the other towards a more hawkish stance. That's not intended as a knock on conservatism, just a fairly surface-level observation.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

whooshee 7y ago

As an aside, Huawei poured a lot of funds in R&D, and those scientists and mathematicians they hired from Russia/France etc,. helped significantly to their breakthroughs.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

What's the big deal here? Couldn't other countries just steal technology back? e.g. couldn't a 5-eyes country consortium just rip off Huawei's 5G technology and run with it in their own markets?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jmull 7y ago
Stealing stuff is OK because other people could also steal stuff? I don’t think that’s a valid point.
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  ok. but it might be a path to profitability. i mean, what is all this rhetorical heat and drama really about? it's about making money. it's not truly about ethics. US business is not exactly a lofty ethical model to hold up for global admiration. if accusing a big company of theft and security breaches can get them locked out of your market, that's one less competitor.
- chillacy 7y ago
  Morality follows money. If the US would be better off copying I have no doubt we would quickly shift our narratives to align to the new economic realities.

jvanderbot 7y ago

My friends in telcom from years ago would regularly tell us about H techs who would come install equipment. And while doing so would disassemble every rack and switch in the room and photograph everything. Thats an unprovable allegation, but I know these folks to be reliable sources of information. Having read about the internal incentives for techs providing IP intel and outright rewarding of theft, I'm convinced.

woah 7y ago
Why wouldn’t Huawei just buy a switch? Why would the customer tolerate someone spending 10x longer on an install and taking apart all their other crap? For that matter why were they able to take apart the other switches at all? Wouldn’t that have taken the system down? Were they storing inactive equipment in their live rack? None of this makes a lot of sense.
- xenospn 7y ago
  Yeah, the only way I can see that happening is if there's a bunch of unused equipment in the room that you can take apart without unplugging - but since when do you let a bunch of foreign techs hang out in one of your server rooms by themselves? Not likely.
  - jvanderbot 7y ago
    According to these guys, they'd come in to do an installation at 2-3AM (standard time for maintaining a cell network), but security was lax and they would be left to do their own thing mostly unsupervised. These were smaller shops that were later bought out by the big handful recognize today. They were dumb. Maybe they let it happen, but it takes two to tango. According to the particular story that I might be foggy on, the engineer responsible for the station and surrounding stations came in to check in on the installation unannounced, and the people on site were not really aware or concerned that they were in back working. The engineer found out what was going on, and everyone shrugged, saying that what harm could they do, etc etc.
- jvanderbot 7y ago

adultSwim 7y ago

Apple's Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics Fixed it.

codedokode 7y ago

Wikipedia article [1] says that US has been also involved in industrial espionage: > In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech Also, other article [2] mentions that West had earlier stolen a secret of porcelain manufacturing from China. Are those the examples of proper, not dubious "ethics" that we should learn from? Did Europeans returned the stolen secret? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial_espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins

mensetmanusman 7y ago

Accusations? They sold networking equipment with accompanying Cisco manuals. Ha. Big picture, is the world better off with Huawei’s rise? It depends on your perspective. If you care about the global environment, Huawei’s costs are so low because they do not have to satisfy environmental standards as they do in the west... That is the basis of most cost differentials outside of labor supply/demand.