13 ms·

Google reportedly arguing cutting Huawei off from Android threatens US security

144 points by cpeterso 7y ago

simplecomplex 7y ago
Huawei isn’t a threat to national security. Consumer computer software is not a threat to national security. This is a justification for a trade war the president and his advisors want to engage in.
- archgoon 7y ago
  I would say that consumer computer software is the biggest threat to any security. Turns out that if you can compromise someone's phone, you have a window into everything that person does, sees, and hears; both online and off.
- outworlder 7y ago
  They are not solely a consumer, or even cell phone manufacturer. This is not about phones, as much as Google would want us to think otherwise.
- threeseed 7y ago
  It is a threat to national security if the device is constantly recording surroundings and sending data back to Huawei who in turn hands it over to Chinese intelligence. That's obviously far fetched but it's technically possible. And other countries have security concerns with Huawei besides US so this isn't just about the trade war.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    Do you think there's a phone (model) that's immune to Chinese intelligence once they set they are interested in recording your surroundings? I'll accepts the 5G security arguments, but the handset angle is a absurd as all phones have porous security. NSA hasn't suddenly shifted it's offensive/defensive posture to my knowledge.
Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
In terms of legal precedent this is pretty shaky ground. In any other context this would sound pretty far fetched. Would we allow a US company to circumvent sanctions on selling technology to refine nuclear material to Iran on the grounds that they might blow themselves up and poison US allies or Americans abroad? That's the legal context I'd view this argument in.
- deepVoid 7y ago
  This is different from selling nuclear technology to Iran. Android is open source (albeit not in the "real open source" way) and available to everyone. Anyone can fork it at its own will. Forking Android by a non-US company would give up the control of the OS on phones, which would threaten the US security.
  - rubbingalcohol 7y ago
    It will give up control of the OS on phones that won't be sold in the US anyway. I'm not clear on how that will threaten the US security? Though it will no doubt threaten Google's profits and ability to benefit from their surveillance- and censorship-enabled search engine for the Chinese market. Our tech companies should not be lining up to lick the boots of a hostile economic power. I can't even believe this is socially acceptable and am relieved it's starting to become legally unacceptable.
    - deepVoid 7y ago
      If it would give up control of the OS on phones anyway and it would not threaten the US security, why did the US ban Google from providing Android updates to Huawei? It is the same logic why the US government bans Huawei, unless the US government ban Huawei for other reasons.
      - rubbingalcohol 7y ago
        Huawei does not play by the rules of other companies in the U.S. market. They steal our tech and sell it back to us for pennies on the dollar. China has been allowed to get away with this shit for decades and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them? Huawei needs to be completely shut out of the U.S. market and Google should be ashamed for working with China. This is a net benefit to U.S. security.
sschueller 7y ago
It threatens Google's domination. Huawei will bring their own OS and Android will loose market share because of it.
- calyth2018 7y ago
  Also, data on Google's server is subject to US laws. When you Balkanize android, so that part of the market uses Huawei's AOSP fork, you've got less data that's could be compelled on the grounds of US national security. That would be a more convincing national security argument.
  - orwin 7y ago
    And this is probably their real argument to Trump administration.
- pvelagal 7y ago
  Samsung tizen or amazon fire phone are not great successes.
cs702 7y ago
The probability that Google will argue for preventing major fragmentation of the Android ecosystem is exactly 100%.
BryantD 7y ago
That seems like it’s also an argument for blocking competition. If you think that Google is more able to secure phones than any other entity, and you think that any compromise to phone security is a national security threat, that implies that nobody but Google should be allowed to make phone operating systems. I’m a bit dubious that Google is actually making that argument, given how obvious the consequences are.
- la_barba 7y ago
  I think their claim might be a bit more nuanced. They are the original vendor of the Software, and have a special status that allows them to have an expertise on the OS that other third parties do not.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    They're also a U.S. company and subject to U.S. laws. A large portion of Google's implicit argument (that they'll never make to the public, but are probably making to the Trump administration) is that it's better for the dominant mobile phone operating system to be written by an American company with American values, subject to U.S. laws, than have Huawei fork it and potentially end up with the dominant mobile operating system controlled by a Chinese company with Chinese values and subject to Chinese laws.
    - BryantD 7y ago
      This seems very plausible to me.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      > that they'll never make to the public, but are probably making to the Trump administration I would love to be a fly on the wall where the actual trade negotiation strategies are being considered. There is a very popular and simplistic notion that this trade war is nothing more than uninformed and random actions on behalf of the whims of a delusional, unintelligent President, that there are no "adults" involved whatsoever. I suspect the reality is very much different than that. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/22/china-japan-lighthizer-trump-602657 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/22/china-japan-lighth... As China figures out how to deal with Robert Lighthizer, US President Donald Trump’s top trade negotiator, Beijing has turned to an unexpected rival for advice – Japan. A diplomatic source who has dealt with Lighthizer said Chinese officials and academics have reached out in recent months to foreign diplomats and former officials of American trading partners for wisdom on handling the US trade representative. The irony of China looking to its neighbor and rival Japan for insight has been brought about by the pivotal role Lighthizer played in the US-Japan trade battles of more than three decades ago, with severe consequences for Japan. “Lighthizer is tough and relentless in negotiations,” the source said. “Some Chinese officials and experts are looking for advice on how to deal with [him].” As former US President Ronald Reagan’s deputy trade chief in the 1980s, Lighthizer negotiated two dozen trade agreements with foreign nations on a range of commodities, from steel to farm products. When Japan’s trade surplus with the US was sparking a confrontation between the two countries, the former international trade lawyer pressured Japan to reduce steel and auto exports to the US by restricting its shipments of electronic and agricultural products with punitive tariffs and quotas. Washington also launched a series of trade investigations against Japan, leading to the US dollar’s depreciation against the Japanese yen. Japan’s economy went into a decade-long decline after an attempt to boost domestic consumption through the lowering of interest rates triggered a bubble economy built on inflated real estate and stock market prices that ultimately collapsed.
hello_1234 7y ago
Is there anything that US gains from cutting off Huawei?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- merpnderp 7y ago
  The US and China are ramping military purchases with each other in mind. So I’m sure the US at least partially made this decision based on the likelihood of a future war, or the higher probability of much more tense relations.
- mistermann 7y ago
  Leverage in trade negotiations would be the main benefit I see.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Looking "tough on China" ahead of what will be another very bitter election.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Do you believe it is only for looks? No genuine and valid motives?
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      I'd definitely call that ("only for looks") the single most likely possibility by a good margin.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    It has nothing to do with this. There is a lot of pressure on Huawei also coming from Australia and New Zealand as well which given our proximity to China are not trying to be tough on them at all. I work in telco and can assure you that Huawei is a security concern especially given the changing landscape of technology (more complex, more containerised architectures) which allows for more attack vectors. People keep forgetting that China is a dictatorship, has no independent judiciary/media and a long pattern of IP theft, hacking etc.
baoha 7y ago
I think it's too late, they already have planned to fork from Android for years, this (potentially permanent) ban just motivated them to speed up the process. I second this is not about US security but about Google losing their mobile market share.
- devoply 7y ago
  Huawei is not an advertising company. They could use a completely different approach to openness and privacy and eat Google's lunch in the current climate... if they were wise and not trying to be authoritarian or controlling. And considering Google basically privatized Linux, I would not see this as being a bad outcome... to make Android a Linux based system open source and community driven again. As over time Google is planning on abandoning its Linux roots and moving it to what was called Fuschia.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players? I would argue that everyone after the top two is such a huge way behind that they really only serve niche markets. Look at Windows Phone, which eventually ended up being a pretty nice OS. MS couldn't pay people enough, quite literally, to get developers to build for it. Any "non-Google Android" clone is going to have to deal with the way developers are deep into Google Play Services, at least in the West, and that will be extremely difficult to displace.
    - devoply 7y ago
      Maybe. But really displacing any of those services is maybe 10,000 developers away... we already have F-droid what if you co-opted it to publish commercial apps for no fees. What if you set 10,000-20,000 developers to work on an open source fork that was run by the Linux foundation? What if you made a real effort to make it truly open source and free? Would people jump ship? It's possible. No one has tried or had the resources to try. And Google becomes more and more entrenched.
fyoving 7y ago
"Although the Financial Times’ sources don’t explicitly lay out Google’s argument, it’s not difficult to imagine how it would go." That's hilarious, a fourth party in speculating about what might have been said in private as reported by a paywalled publication, you know: journalism!
- awakeasleep 7y ago
  FT doesn't generally play as loose with the rules as media for general consumption tends to. They've got a lot of credibility.
rolph 7y ago
This looks like a case in point for providing greater control of the OS by the user. If users were allowed to block or kill processes and lockdown data away from apps, a lot of the threat [and google business model] would be mitigated. Im wondering when we will move from ad block software to APP block software. In other threads- the "linux phone" seems to be coming along nicely, isnt that an android fork already, or a distro? https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-smartphone-operating-systems/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-smartphone-operating-sys... https://itsfoss.com/librem-linux-phone/ https://itsfoss.com/librem-linux-phone/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-android-the-linux-fork/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-android-the-... [2011]
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  Phones are substantially more complicated than desktops. Linux doesn't even work decently enough on Laptops for a lot of developers. It's not going to be a pleasant experience on a phone for a normal user in the foreseeable future.
  - rolph 7y ago
    They [mobiles] dont have to be more complex than desktops, and that is what is being solved here with linux based phones. a non baseband CPU solution removes a layer of complexity that is not required for the intended function of a phone [communicating with other people] I might add, if linux doesnt work well for you then you can submit a ticket or write your own solution.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    That's not the real issue though. A PC is standard. Back in the 90s, you could always put in a Linux boot disk or CD and it would always boot. You may not have any driver support and your display might be stuck in VESA mode, but it would at least boot. ARM is not an architecture. Images have to be customized for every single device. Google has the power with the OHA to force all phones to use standard drivers, devicetree or UEFI (like Microsoft did), but they don't. Now we have 100s of forked kernels and no way to boot a mainline kernel on ARM devices (although PostmarketOS is trying to work on fixing this). I wrote about this a while back: https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/
behringer 7y ago
Nice story, but in reality google is afraid of a company making competing services using the Android OS.
- AimForTheBushes 7y ago
  That was my first thought when all these shenanigans went down. I think there is still an argument for security- we're currently well versed in android but that isn't the case for whatever closed source Huawei OS that comes out.
  - behringer 7y ago
    Huawei can still use Android. Android is open source software. What Huawei will need to design is their own app store and replacement for google services. Of course this would be very damaging to google.
la_barba 7y ago
The argument on the face of it appears to be rather flimsy. If Google is doing this on Huawei's behalf, I wonder if we're seeing a new Google emerge, one who is willing to go to bat for their partners.
codedokode 7y ago
If a Chinese vendor is a threat to US national security, does it mean that American vendors are threats to all other countries' security? It is easy to imagine how American company gives out important data from a phone of Chinese or Iranian government employee for example.
- duxup 7y ago
  Considering the layers of software and hardware I think any product of some level of complexity is a risk, period.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Every country is a national security threat for every other country. The only thing that changes is how severe that threat is.
- Wheaties466 7y ago
  the chinese government has a different kind of relationship with most of the big companies in china than the US companies have with the US government. gonna drop this here. https://blog.erratasec.com/2014/03/we-may-have-witnessed-nsa-shotgiant-tao.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2014/03/we-may-have-witnessed-nsa...
- ninth_ant 7y ago
  You don’t have to imagine, The Cloud Act directly passed this into law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act It’s extremely hypocritical of the US to panic when other countries act the same, and sets up a direct and prominent precedent for all counties to ban American tech.
  - xvector 7y ago
    > It’s extremely hypocritical of the US to panic when other countries act the same, This is pretty disingenuous. You are ignoring a ton of history behind China, its authoritarian nature, and how Chinese companies are far more an extension of the PRC than US companies are of the US Government. All companies are a threat to the national security of other countries so long as they are beholden to the government they are in. But as others have said, the severity of the threat changes drastically. You can be almost certain that Huawei, via the PRC, would compromise US 5G infrastructure given the chance. You might be reasonably more skeptical of a US company doing the same to another country. Finally, your Wikipedia link contradicts your own post: > [The CLOUD Act] provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in. In fact, there is nothing here that would lead one to believe that the companies can be forced to hand over data on citizens from other countries. The legislation here pertains to the data of US citizens.
duxup 7y ago
If Huawei forks Android and gets a "hybrid" of bad security phones.... don't let them sell phones there then. This seems like a weird argument, I get the gist but it kinda focuses on an after effect that i'm not sure should wag the dog.
- tabs_masterrace 7y ago
  This argument is stupid, self-centered, and entirely made up the author... "Without Google, Huawei's are more likely to have malware, and therefore important things might get leaked, and leaks are the most essential threat to national security as we all know." No, common.. the reason Google thinks its a bad idea to block Android it's because the Chinese don't care. They just fork Android yes, and that's it. Congratulations, you brexited yourself out of the Smartphone-OS market in China. Where you once had integration and some influence, you are now removing yourself as a dependency.
  - duxup 7y ago
    It feels like such a tenuous argument you could argue the government should hand Google over to Apple to improve security ...
    - mtgx 7y ago
      Besides, Huawei's phones were already banned in federal agencies and Pentagon since last year. So I'm really not sure what Google is trying to say with this "national security threat" at all.
      - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
        The entire "national security" argument that the administration is making fails on this observation. Trump is effectively banning Huawei from selling Chinese people phones that contain American parts ... in order to protect American national security? The whole argument doesn't add up. It's obviously a tactic to force the Chinese government to yield in the trade talks, as Trump himself has openly stated.
cat199 7y ago
many problems here: a) why exactly is google qualified to comment on national security? this either means they are verbally overstepping their bounds, know more than they should about secret+ programs, or are processing their vast data in a security-relevant way on the scope of a nation state b) phones being hacked != compromised telecom infrastructure c) if android fragmentation leads to less security on a national level, then by extension, google has monopoly or at least cartel level influence probably more..
clopez 7y ago
> Step two: those Huawei phones with a forked version of Android are sold globally. They are less secure and get hacked. Why those phones will be less secure and therefore easily hacked? Which kind of argument is that? How a huawei phone with a forked android is any less secure than any 2-year old android phone from $randomanufacturer (not longer receiving any OS update at all)?
- ddebernardy 7y ago
  Might this answer your question? > Huawei must raise 'shoddy' standards, says senior UK cybersecurity official > GCHQ technical director says he hasn’t seen anything that reassures him company is taking necessary security steps https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/huawei-must-raise-shoddy-standards-gchq-senior-uk-cybersecurity-official https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/huawei-mu...
  - ebg13 7y ago
    Android isn't exactly known for being a paragon of security. The number of unpatched critical CVEs in the wild at any given moment is staggering. At worst this is a step sideways.
    - ddebernardy 7y ago
      Sure thing, but at least Android is open source. Huawei's drivers, which is what led GCHQ to probe into Huawei's code and write a rather uncharitable report on what their coding practices look like [1], are not. Admittedly, as members of the public we can only take their word for it that they found shoddy code by any reasonable standard. But if the latter is true and any indicator of how they'll maintain their own fork of Android, it's doesn't inspire much confidence. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversight_board_savaging_annual_report/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversi...
      - ebg13 7y ago
        > Sure thing, but at least Android is open source. Some of it. Certainly not many of the hardware drivers. There's a reason that updates are dependent on hardware vendors and mobile network operators and that most phones don't have fully functional Lineage builds.
williesleg 7y ago
Google is busy being evil and making their own government.
dgregd 7y ago
Why is nobody talking about Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo? They have majority of Indian market. Together with Huawei they might create an alliance and create a Chinese fork of Android. If they give access to intel data to other countries then it can be a competitive offer compared to Google Android.
nullwasamistake 7y ago
Google is terrified of anyone forking Android. Some malicious actor might remove all their tracking code. Maybe even disable background location permission and app ads. A true national security risk of the highest caliber
- tech_tuna 7y ago
  What are you talking about? I don't find it all creepy when Google Maps Timeline sends me my month in review without me asking for it. They just like to keep track of all the wonderful places I visit. Google can probably tell me how many bowel movements I had last week although I haven't gotten any such emails from Google Toilet Timeline. Yet.
dustinmoris 7y ago
I am currently in China on holiday and saw a Windows 7 screen on one of the monitors in a train station which reminded me that the world's entire IT infrastructure is mostly powered by Windows, Apple or Linux, which is all entirely in the hands of the US. Android and iOS are the most wide spread mobile operating systems, so basically the US being in control of the world's entire software in an ever growing digital world. This plus the revelations of the NSA spying on everyone in the world, trying to introduce secret backdoors in US vendors software and having a huge impact on which cryptographic algorithms are being NIST approved and therefore distributed and implemented across most programming languages makes the US a MUCH MUCH larger threat to any other country's national security. Particularly when the US is also known to fabricate news like countries having secret mass destruction weapons which somehow can never be found after a complete destruction of a country through unprovoked war. Yet the news headlines are somehow worried about Huawei? I'm not saying it's unjustified, but I like to put things into perspective when observing geopolitical developments, their impact and what really is going on.. The truth is that China will inevitably overtake the US as the largest economy in the world soon and that pisses the Americas off.. so now they want to stall the Chinese economy as much as possible, but being in China right now and seeing how they are literally not dependent on anyone but themselves I can promise that all efforts are wasted. I'm not a huge fan of the totalitarian communist government in China, but so far I have not felt threatened by them, whereas I feel my personal freedom and privacy has been violated constantly by the US and US companies.
- elamje 7y ago
  China is dependent on exports to keep the economy moving along.

144 points by cpeterso 7y ago

Huawei isn’t a threat to national security. Consumer computer software is not a threat to national security. This is a justification for a trade war the president and his advisors want to engage in.

archgoon 7y ago
I would say that consumer computer software is the biggest threat to any security. Turns out that if you can compromise someone's phone, you have a window into everything that person does, sees, and hears; both online and off.
outworlder 7y ago
They are not solely a consumer, or even cell phone manufacturer. This is not about phones, as much as Google would want us to think otherwise.
threeseed 7y ago
It is a threat to national security if the device is constantly recording surroundings and sending data back to Huawei who in turn hands it over to Chinese intelligence. That's obviously far fetched but it's technically possible. And other countries have security concerns with Huawei besides US so this isn't just about the trade war.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  Do you think there's a phone (model) that's immune to Chinese intelligence once they set they are interested in recording your surroundings? I'll accepts the 5G security arguments, but the handset angle is a absurd as all phones have porous security. NSA hasn't suddenly shifted it's offensive/defensive posture to my knowledge.

Ill_ban_myself 7y ago

In terms of legal precedent this is pretty shaky ground. In any other context this would sound pretty far fetched. Would we allow a US company to circumvent sanctions on selling technology to refine nuclear material to Iran on the grounds that they might blow themselves up and poison US allies or Americans abroad? That's the legal context I'd view this argument in.

deepVoid 7y ago
This is different from selling nuclear technology to Iran. Android is open source (albeit not in the "real open source" way) and available to everyone. Anyone can fork it at its own will. Forking Android by a non-US company would give up the control of the OS on phones, which would threaten the US security.
- rubbingalcohol 7y ago
  It will give up control of the OS on phones that won't be sold in the US anyway. I'm not clear on how that will threaten the US security? Though it will no doubt threaten Google's profits and ability to benefit from their surveillance- and censorship-enabled search engine for the Chinese market. Our tech companies should not be lining up to lick the boots of a hostile economic power. I can't even believe this is socially acceptable and am relieved it's starting to become legally unacceptable.
  - deepVoid 7y ago
    If it would give up control of the OS on phones anyway and it would not threaten the US security, why did the US ban Google from providing Android updates to Huawei? It is the same logic why the US government bans Huawei, unless the US government ban Huawei for other reasons.
    - rubbingalcohol 7y ago
      Huawei does not play by the rules of other companies in the U.S. market. They steal our tech and sell it back to us for pennies on the dollar. China has been allowed to get away with this shit for decades and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them? Huawei needs to be completely shut out of the U.S. market and Google should be ashamed for working with China. This is a net benefit to U.S. security.

sschueller 7y ago

It threatens Google's domination. Huawei will bring their own OS and Android will loose market share because of it.

calyth2018 7y ago
Also, data on Google's server is subject to US laws. When you Balkanize android, so that part of the market uses Huawei's AOSP fork, you've got less data that's could be compelled on the grounds of US national security. That would be a more convincing national security argument.
- orwin 7y ago
  And this is probably their real argument to Trump administration.
pvelagal 7y ago
Samsung tizen or amazon fire phone are not great successes.

cs702 7y ago

The probability that Google will argue for preventing major fragmentation of the Android ecosystem is exactly 100%.

BryantD 7y ago

That seems like it’s also an argument for blocking competition. If you think that Google is more able to secure phones than any other entity, and you think that any compromise to phone security is a national security threat, that implies that nobody but Google should be allowed to make phone operating systems. I’m a bit dubious that Google is actually making that argument, given how obvious the consequences are.

la_barba 7y ago
I think their claim might be a bit more nuanced. They are the original vendor of the Software, and have a special status that allows them to have an expertise on the OS that other third parties do not.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  They're also a U.S. company and subject to U.S. laws. A large portion of Google's implicit argument (that they'll never make to the public, but are probably making to the Trump administration) is that it's better for the dominant mobile phone operating system to be written by an American company with American values, subject to U.S. laws, than have Huawei fork it and potentially end up with the dominant mobile operating system controlled by a Chinese company with Chinese values and subject to Chinese laws.
  - BryantD 7y ago
    This seems very plausible to me.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    > that they'll never make to the public, but are probably making to the Trump administration I would love to be a fly on the wall where the actual trade negotiation strategies are being considered. There is a very popular and simplistic notion that this trade war is nothing more than uninformed and random actions on behalf of the whims of a delusional, unintelligent President, that there are no "adults" involved whatsoever. I suspect the reality is very much different than that. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/22/china-japan-lighthizer-trump-602657 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/22/china-japan-lighth... As China figures out how to deal with Robert Lighthizer, US President Donald Trump’s top trade negotiator, Beijing has turned to an unexpected rival for advice – Japan. A diplomatic source who has dealt with Lighthizer said Chinese officials and academics have reached out in recent months to foreign diplomats and former officials of American trading partners for wisdom on handling the US trade representative. The irony of China looking to its neighbor and rival Japan for insight has been brought about by the pivotal role Lighthizer played in the US-Japan trade battles of more than three decades ago, with severe consequences for Japan. “Lighthizer is tough and relentless in negotiations,” the source said. “Some Chinese officials and experts are looking for advice on how to deal with [him].” As former US President Ronald Reagan’s deputy trade chief in the 1980s, Lighthizer negotiated two dozen trade agreements with foreign nations on a range of commodities, from steel to farm products. When Japan’s trade surplus with the US was sparking a confrontation between the two countries, the former international trade lawyer pressured Japan to reduce steel and auto exports to the US by restricting its shipments of electronic and agricultural products with punitive tariffs and quotas. Washington also launched a series of trade investigations against Japan, leading to the US dollar’s depreciation against the Japanese yen. Japan’s economy went into a decade-long decline after an attempt to boost domestic consumption through the lowering of interest rates triggered a bubble economy built on inflated real estate and stock market prices that ultimately collapsed.

hello_1234 7y ago

Is there anything that US gains from cutting off Huawei?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
merpnderp 7y ago
The US and China are ramping military purchases with each other in mind. So I’m sure the US at least partially made this decision based on the likelihood of a future war, or the higher probability of much more tense relations.
mistermann 7y ago
Leverage in trade negotiations would be the main benefit I see.
rchaud 7y ago
Looking "tough on China" ahead of what will be another very bitter election.
- mistermann 7y ago
  Do you believe it is only for looks? No genuine and valid motives?
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    I'd definitely call that ("only for looks") the single most likely possibility by a good margin.
- threeseed 7y ago
  It has nothing to do with this. There is a lot of pressure on Huawei also coming from Australia and New Zealand as well which given our proximity to China are not trying to be tough on them at all. I work in telco and can assure you that Huawei is a security concern especially given the changing landscape of technology (more complex, more containerised architectures) which allows for more attack vectors. People keep forgetting that China is a dictatorship, has no independent judiciary/media and a long pattern of IP theft, hacking etc.

baoha 7y ago

I think it's too late, they already have planned to fork from Android for years, this (potentially permanent) ban just motivated them to speed up the process. I second this is not about US security but about Google losing their mobile market share.

devoply 7y ago
Huawei is not an advertising company. They could use a completely different approach to openness and privacy and eat Google's lunch in the current climate... if they were wise and not trying to be authoritarian or controlling. And considering Google basically privatized Linux, I would not see this as being a bad outcome... to make Android a Linux based system open source and community driven again. As over time Google is planning on abandoning its Linux roots and moving it to what was called Fuschia.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players? I would argue that everyone after the top two is such a huge way behind that they really only serve niche markets. Look at Windows Phone, which eventually ended up being a pretty nice OS. MS couldn't pay people enough, quite literally, to get developers to build for it. Any "non-Google Android" clone is going to have to deal with the way developers are deep into Google Play Services, at least in the West, and that will be extremely difficult to displace.
  - devoply 7y ago
    Maybe. But really displacing any of those services is maybe 10,000 developers away... we already have F-droid what if you co-opted it to publish commercial apps for no fees. What if you set 10,000-20,000 developers to work on an open source fork that was run by the Linux foundation? What if you made a real effort to make it truly open source and free? Would people jump ship? It's possible. No one has tried or had the resources to try. And Google becomes more and more entrenched.

fyoving 7y ago

"Although the Financial Times’ sources don’t explicitly lay out Google’s argument, it’s not difficult to imagine how it would go." That's hilarious, a fourth party in speculating about what might have been said in private as reported by a paywalled publication, you know: journalism!

awakeasleep 7y ago
FT doesn't generally play as loose with the rules as media for general consumption tends to. They've got a lot of credibility.

rolph 7y ago

This looks like a case in point for providing greater control of the OS by the user. If users were allowed to block or kill processes and lockdown data away from apps, a lot of the threat [and google business model] would be mitigated. Im wondering when we will move from ad block software to APP block software. In other threads- the "linux phone" seems to be coming along nicely, isnt that an android fork already, or a distro? https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-smartphone-operating-systems/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-smartphone-operating-sys... https://itsfoss.com/librem-linux-phone/ https://itsfoss.com/librem-linux-phone/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-android-the-linux-fork/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-android-the-... [2011]

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
Phones are substantially more complicated than desktops. Linux doesn't even work decently enough on Laptops for a lot of developers. It's not going to be a pleasant experience on a phone for a normal user in the foreseeable future.
- rolph 7y ago
  They [mobiles] dont have to be more complex than desktops, and that is what is being solved here with linux based phones. a non baseband CPU solution removes a layer of complexity that is not required for the intended function of a phone [communicating with other people] I might add, if linux doesnt work well for you then you can submit a ticket or write your own solution.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  That's not the real issue though. A PC is standard. Back in the 90s, you could always put in a Linux boot disk or CD and it would always boot. You may not have any driver support and your display might be stuck in VESA mode, but it would at least boot. ARM is not an architecture. Images have to be customized for every single device. Google has the power with the OHA to force all phones to use standard drivers, devicetree or UEFI (like Microsoft did), but they don't. Now we have 100s of forked kernels and no way to boot a mainline kernel on ARM devices (although PostmarketOS is trying to work on fixing this). I wrote about this a while back: https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

behringer 7y ago

Nice story, but in reality google is afraid of a company making competing services using the Android OS.

AimForTheBushes 7y ago
That was my first thought when all these shenanigans went down. I think there is still an argument for security- we're currently well versed in android but that isn't the case for whatever closed source Huawei OS that comes out.
- behringer 7y ago
  Huawei can still use Android. Android is open source software. What Huawei will need to design is their own app store and replacement for google services. Of course this would be very damaging to google.

la_barba 7y ago

The argument on the face of it appears to be rather flimsy. If Google is doing this on Huawei's behalf, I wonder if we're seeing a new Google emerge, one who is willing to go to bat for their partners.

codedokode 7y ago

If a Chinese vendor is a threat to US national security, does it mean that American vendors are threats to all other countries' security? It is easy to imagine how American company gives out important data from a phone of Chinese or Iranian government employee for example.

duxup 7y ago
Considering the layers of software and hardware I think any product of some level of complexity is a risk, period.
freehunter 7y ago
Every country is a national security threat for every other country. The only thing that changes is how severe that threat is.
Wheaties466 7y ago
the chinese government has a different kind of relationship with most of the big companies in china than the US companies have with the US government. gonna drop this here. https://blog.erratasec.com/2014/03/we-may-have-witnessed-nsa-shotgiant-tao.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2014/03/we-may-have-witnessed-nsa...
ninth_ant 7y ago
You don’t have to imagine, The Cloud Act directly passed this into law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act It’s extremely hypocritical of the US to panic when other countries act the same, and sets up a direct and prominent precedent for all counties to ban American tech.
- xvector 7y ago
  > It’s extremely hypocritical of the US to panic when other countries act the same, This is pretty disingenuous. You are ignoring a ton of history behind China, its authoritarian nature, and how Chinese companies are far more an extension of the PRC than US companies are of the US Government. All companies are a threat to the national security of other countries so long as they are beholden to the government they are in. But as others have said, the severity of the threat changes drastically. You can be almost certain that Huawei, via the PRC, would compromise US 5G infrastructure given the chance. You might be reasonably more skeptical of a US company doing the same to another country. Finally, your Wikipedia link contradicts your own post: > [The CLOUD Act] provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in. In fact, there is nothing here that would lead one to believe that the companies can be forced to hand over data on citizens from other countries. The legislation here pertains to the data of US citizens.

duxup 7y ago

If Huawei forks Android and gets a "hybrid" of bad security phones.... don't let them sell phones there then. This seems like a weird argument, I get the gist but it kinda focuses on an after effect that i'm not sure should wag the dog.

tabs_masterrace 7y ago
This argument is stupid, self-centered, and entirely made up the author... "Without Google, Huawei's are more likely to have malware, and therefore important things might get leaked, and leaks are the most essential threat to national security as we all know." No, common.. the reason Google thinks its a bad idea to block Android it's because the Chinese don't care. They just fork Android yes, and that's it. Congratulations, you brexited yourself out of the Smartphone-OS market in China. Where you once had integration and some influence, you are now removing yourself as a dependency.
- duxup 7y ago
  It feels like such a tenuous argument you could argue the government should hand Google over to Apple to improve security ...
  - mtgx 7y ago
    Besides, Huawei's phones were already banned in federal agencies and Pentagon since last year. So I'm really not sure what Google is trying to say with this "national security threat" at all.
    - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
      The entire "national security" argument that the administration is making fails on this observation. Trump is effectively banning Huawei from selling Chinese people phones that contain American parts ... in order to protect American national security? The whole argument doesn't add up. It's obviously a tactic to force the Chinese government to yield in the trade talks, as Trump himself has openly stated.

cat199 7y ago

many problems here: a) why exactly is google qualified to comment on national security? this either means they are verbally overstepping their bounds, know more than they should about secret+ programs, or are processing their vast data in a security-relevant way on the scope of a nation state b) phones being hacked != compromised telecom infrastructure c) if android fragmentation leads to less security on a national level, then by extension, google has monopoly or at least cartel level influence probably more..

clopez 7y ago

> Step two: those Huawei phones with a forked version of Android are sold globally. They are less secure and get hacked. Why those phones will be less secure and therefore easily hacked? Which kind of argument is that? How a huawei phone with a forked android is any less secure than any 2-year old android phone from $randomanufacturer (not longer receiving any OS update at all)?

ddebernardy 7y ago
Might this answer your question? > Huawei must raise 'shoddy' standards, says senior UK cybersecurity official > GCHQ technical director says he hasn’t seen anything that reassures him company is taking necessary security steps https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/huawei-must-raise-shoddy-standards-gchq-senior-uk-cybersecurity-official https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/huawei-mu...
- ebg13 7y ago
  Android isn't exactly known for being a paragon of security. The number of unpatched critical CVEs in the wild at any given moment is staggering. At worst this is a step sideways.
  - ddebernardy 7y ago
    Sure thing, but at least Android is open source. Huawei's drivers, which is what led GCHQ to probe into Huawei's code and write a rather uncharitable report on what their coding practices look like [1], are not. Admittedly, as members of the public we can only take their word for it that they found shoddy code by any reasonable standard. But if the latter is true and any indicator of how they'll maintain their own fork of Android, it's doesn't inspire much confidence. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversight_board_savaging_annual_report/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversi...
    - ebg13 7y ago
      > Sure thing, but at least Android is open source. Some of it. Certainly not many of the hardware drivers. There's a reason that updates are dependent on hardware vendors and mobile network operators and that most phones don't have fully functional Lineage builds.

williesleg 7y ago

Google is busy being evil and making their own government.

dgregd 7y ago

Why is nobody talking about Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo? They have majority of Indian market. Together with Huawei they might create an alliance and create a Chinese fork of Android. If they give access to intel data to other countries then it can be a competitive offer compared to Google Android.

nullwasamistake 7y ago

Google is terrified of anyone forking Android. Some malicious actor might remove all their tracking code. Maybe even disable background location permission and app ads. A true national security risk of the highest caliber

tech_tuna 7y ago
What are you talking about? I don't find it all creepy when Google Maps Timeline sends me my month in review without me asking for it. They just like to keep track of all the wonderful places I visit. Google can probably tell me how many bowel movements I had last week although I haven't gotten any such emails from Google Toilet Timeline. Yet.

dustinmoris 7y ago

I am currently in China on holiday and saw a Windows 7 screen on one of the monitors in a train station which reminded me that the world's entire IT infrastructure is mostly powered by Windows, Apple or Linux, which is all entirely in the hands of the US. Android and iOS are the most wide spread mobile operating systems, so basically the US being in control of the world's entire software in an ever growing digital world. This plus the revelations of the NSA spying on everyone in the world, trying to introduce secret backdoors in US vendors software and having a huge impact on which cryptographic algorithms are being NIST approved and therefore distributed and implemented across most programming languages makes the US a MUCH MUCH larger threat to any other country's national security. Particularly when the US is also known to fabricate news like countries having secret mass destruction weapons which somehow can never be found after a complete destruction of a country through unprovoked war. Yet the news headlines are somehow worried about Huawei? I'm not saying it's unjustified, but I like to put things into perspective when observing geopolitical developments, their impact and what really is going on.. The truth is that China will inevitably overtake the US as the largest economy in the world soon and that pisses the Americas off.. so now they want to stall the Chinese economy as much as possible, but being in China right now and seeing how they are literally not dependent on anyone but themselves I can promise that all efforts are wasted. I'm not a huge fan of the totalitarian communist government in China, but so far I have not felt threatened by them, whereas I feel my personal freedom and privacy has been violated constantly by the US and US companies.

elamje 7y ago
China is dependent on exports to keep the economy moving along.