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Huawei Accused of Technology Theft
- s09dfhks 7y agoColor me shocked
- dang 7y agoCan you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- mymindstorm 7y ago> Huawei Accused Of Technology Theft In other news, water is wet.
- prateeekm 7y agodebatable
- outside1234 7y agoYou are right water being wet is debatable
- umvi 7y agoDepends on the temperature and pressure of the water I suppose.
- lwansbrough 7y agoAnd more importantly, are things that exist primarily in water wet? https://youtu.be/TPDdRrMVEnA https://youtu.be/TPDdRrMVEnA
- m3kw9 7y agoAnything ever existed is debatable.
- comboy 7y agoThat's debatable.
- manfredo 7y agoGood point. Water is not wet in its frozen state. One could easily make the argument that the majority of water in the universe is not wet.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chlee 7y agoWall Street Journal has recently published an article [1] detailing some of the most high profile technology thefts and espionage related to Huawei. According to the article, here's a list of thefts and espionage attributed to Huawei, employees of Huawei, or people related to Huawei. 1. Stealing tech at tradeshows: On a summer evening in 2004, as the Supercomm tech conference in Chicago wound down, a middle-aged Chinese visitor began wending his way through the nearly abandoned booths, popping open million-dollar networking equipment to photograph the circuit boards inside, according to people who were there. A security guard stopped him and confiscated memory sticks with the photos, a notebook with diagrams and data belonging to AT&T Corp. , and a list of six companies including Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. 2. Secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices : Alarm bells included the discovery around 2012 of secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices, akin to facilities in intelligence stations around the world, American security officials say. 3. Former staff admits stealing : “They spent all their resources stealing technology,” said Robert Read, a former contract engineer from 2002 to 2003 in Huawei’s Sweden office. “You’d steal a motherboard and bring it back and they’d reverse-engineer it.” 4. Stealing tech from Cisco : Eighteen months before the Supercomm imbroglio erupted, Cisco accused Huawei in January 2003 of copying its software and manuals—the first time Huawei had to fight a major international allegation of its theft. “They have made verbatim copies of whole portions of Cisco’s user manuals,” Cisco said in its lawsuit. Cisco manuals accompany its routers, and its software is visible during the router’s operation; both are easily copied, Cisco said. The copying was so extensive that Huawei inadvertently copied bugs in Cisco’s software, according to the lawsuit. 5. Stealing tech from Motorola : Email fragments recovered from Mr. Pan’s laptop and included in Motorola’s complaint show Mr. Pan wrote to Mr. Ren after the meeting, “Attached please find those document [sic] about SC300 specification you asked.” Huawei later made a similarly small device, weighing half the SC300, which it marketed to rural communities in developing markets. 5. 5G related tech theft: Mr. Barker had never heard of “user specific tilt,” which could multiply the number of signals from an antenna and tilt them to provide greater accuracy in communicating with mobile phones. Mr. Barker had, however, heard of a conceptually identical technology, ”per user tilt." He coined it seven years earlier, according to a Quintel lawsuit alleging misappropriation of trade secrets by Huawei. Quintel said it had shared the technology with Huawei in September 2009 after Huawei proposed a business partnership. The partnership never came through. Huawei filed papers to secure a patent for the concept a month after their first meeting, using a document still emblazoned with Quintel’s name and the words “commercial in confidence.” 6. Camera theft : Rui Oliveira, a 45-year-old Portuguese multimedia producer, told the Journal he flew to Huawei’s Plano offices in May 2014 to meet Huawei executives, who were interested in his patents for a camera attachment to smartphones. In a conference room, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs, Mr. Oliveira recalls, two Huawei executives listened as he shared data on his product which he hoped to license manufacturing to Huawei. He recommended pricing it at $99.95. “We’ll talk later,” he says Huawei told him. Three years later, a friend in Portugal asked him why Huawei was selling “his camera.” “Huawei? That’s impossible! What?” he remembers saying. 7. Stealing songs : Paul Cheever, a bespectacled preschool teacher who records music as The Cheebacabra, said his life has become overrun with paperwork and costs since he sued Huawei in California last year for taking his song “A Casual Encounter” and pre-loading it on Huawei smartphones and tablets for free distribution to its customers. Mr. Cheever said in his court filing that he discovered the alleged theft after noticing user comments on YouTube that associated Huawei devices with his song. 8. Stealing Tappy, the mobile phone testing robot, from T-Mobile : In the U.S., Huawei engineer Xiong Xinfu had endured a nine-month fusillade of demands from Huawei’s China-based engineers for information on how to replicate a robot called Tappy developed by T-Mobile to mimic an ultra-fast human finger and test a smartphone’s responsiveness. In May 2013, Mr. Xiong eventually stole part of Tappy at Huawei’s behest, U.S. prosecutors say. 9. Stealing Solid State Drive technology from Silicon Valley : In October last year, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a longtime Silicon Valley engineer and co-founder of San Jose’s CNEX Labs Inc., accused Huawei in a lawsuit of stealing his firm’s solid-state disk storage technology, used for managing data generated by artificial intelligence. CNEX said at a hearing in April that Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu issued a directive that led to a Huawei engineer in June 2016 posing as a customer to steal CNEX secrets; Huawei denied wrongdoing. The suit is ongoing. 10. finally, forcing employees to be dishonest : Jesse Hong, a software architect at Huawei’s California unit, said in a lawsuit that his bosses ordered him in November 2017 to use fake company names to register himself for an industry conference organized by Facebook Inc. The social-media giant had invited other companies to a Telecom Infra Project meeting, a collaboration on network design, but excluded Huawei. The suit was confidentially settled in April. Mr. Hong said he refused to carry out the directive, leading his supervisor to unleash a stream of abuse and a threat: “If you don’t agree on this, then you quit right now.” After Mr. Hong declined, Huawei fired him. The company says it acted in good faith. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-littered-with-accusations-of-theft-and-dubious-ethics-11558756858 https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...
- JCStr 7y agoI find the far more interesting question/issue that this is somehow news or surprising or at all in any way not totally expected. I sometimes feel like I am in the movie They Live or maybe Mars Attacks, where I know what the alien invaders are up to, but everyone is totally oblivious or they just don't want to see it because, e.g., they're so enthralled by aliens existing that they can't see, or they are just utterly naive and totally unable to apply the most basic risk assessment. How is it at all a matter of "accused" when literally for the last 30 years, China has been raping, pillaging, sacking, and plundering the whole western world without abandon and with, essentially, unfettered impunity and even with the utterly blind with greed treason of our own corporations who could simply not resist the illusion and glistening cheese of the "Chinese market of a billion people" as they stupidly wandered right into the Chinese trap of handing over ALL their secrets and technologies, while on top of it, in the case of the USA, even totally gutting our own society and industrial capacity and therefore our very ability to defend ourselves and supply ourselves, and therefore making us totally and utterly dependent on China. It's like a mass psychosis has gripped our society, so blind with greed and personal enrichment that it has totally blinded our "smartest" and most "educated" and most vaunted "experts" who were all busy throwing open the gates to the enemy.
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- ape4 7y agoWould like to see Nortel given their assets.
- walrus01 7y agoThe shambling corpse of the Nortel DWDM/optical transport/carrier transport product line was acquired by Ciena.
- swang 7y agowasn't samsung's foldable tech stolen as well? makes sense considering how fast huawei was able to get it.
- bazooka_penguin 7y agoIirc there were reports that a Samsung manufacturing partner stole their oled tech in China. There wasnt any follow up stories on for whom it was stolen. Although I have a feeling if the Xiaomi folding oled screens were really stolen Samsung would accuse them and stir up a storm. That Xiaomi phone got mainstream press coverage in the west, it wasnt just some small thing made only for China and importable via aliexpress
- djsumdog 7y agoI dunno. The Huawei foldable looked considerably different as far as the tech, and it fold the other direction. I think it's going to have even worse issues than the Samsung if it ever actually gets released.
- tooltalk 7y agoIt was the foldable display OLED, not the folding mechanism that was stolen IIRC. Also note it was widely speculated that Huawei's display supplier, BOE, was behind the theft.
- eBombzor 7y agoSeems almost too fast? Reports of the leak were published in November last year [1]. It doesn't say when the leaks took place so unless they were leaked at least year before would it even be possible to construct a foldable phone in that short of a time frame (Feb when Mate X was showcased)? [1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft...
- threeseed 7y agoI posted this a while back about why Samsung rushed the release of their foldable phone: a) Samsung spent a ton of money and research in building foldable OLED screens. b) This technology is allegedly stolen by a supplier and sold to BOE Display: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-supplier-.. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-supplier-.... c) Huawei uses the foldable BOE Display technology in its Mate X smartphone and is on track to be the first to release it. d) Samsung panics as it learns that the technology it built might be released by a competitor earlier than them and consumers might think of them as less of an innovator. May sound silly but the Chinese companies have been getting a lot of traction recently e.g. P30 Pro. e) In addition Samsung goes into lock down as it fears there might be more leaks to other companies. f) Combination of d) and e) means that there is less real world testing of the device than for other phones. And hence how we got to this point.
- jxramos 7y agoDo these companies ever actually innovate and build social/intellectual capital beyond reverse engineering skills or are they gaming to pollute the waters so much that they risk sacrificing the golden goose to whom they steal ideas? This all sort of reminds me of the quip communism or socialism only works until those in charge spend all the money of those who are productive. If IP and the R&D expenses never become profitable and companies go under what then?
- barry-cotter 7y ago> Do these companies ever actually innovate and build social/intellectual capital beyond reverse engineering skills Yes. See the industrial history of the US, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and everywhere else that ignored patents and trade secrets for more details. Cisco would be highly profitable if it could only sell to the US market and if you’re the market leader your stuff is just better for years to minimum, a year. People want the best, they want quality, so they pay a premium for it. That’s why brands exist, otherwise people would have to do their own quality control for each individual thing they bought.
- pravda 7y agoWell, in the USA, American industry got its start by stealing British technology. At this point, China copying foreign technology is just the path of least resistance. Eventually, China will be doing the innovating.
- spectramax 7y agoI really despise this kind of reasoning. You’re literally comparing 200 year old history and justifying modern IP theft, and projecting forward.
- pravda 7y agoI am not justifying, just describing. As far as the other issue goes, Chinese not being creative due to [insert reason here], I think that is just silly. I am sure the British said, "those dumb Yanks, they can only copy, can't create anything."
- walrus01 7y agoIt's well known in the telecom/internet infrastructure business that Huawei: a) bugged the hell out of Nortel's ottawa area offices, both physically, by rootkit, and by getting their own people hired to physically smuggle out documents and design data b) Copied the entire DWDM / optical transport product line c) Released a nearly identical product a few years later, and sold it at a ridiculously low price, effectively killing Nortel. Many years later the vacant ex-Nortel office buildings came up for lease. One of the candidate tenants for that large of an office space were parts of the Canadian federal government, ministry of defence, etc. Every serious tenant passed on the space because it's so riddled with bugs. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the-mystery-of-the-listening-devices-at-dnds-nortel-campus https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the-my... https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-former-nortel-site-because-of-surveillance-bugs-1.1477766 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-for... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/department-of-national-defences-new-1-billion-facility-falls-short-on-security/article31685234/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/department-of-...
- aswanson 7y agoBut, I mean, other than that, what do you have on them?
- deroisas2y 7y agoFunny, because the articles OP posted suggest they don’t even have that.
- intended 7y agoThe article by the wsj seems to be more than sufficient.
- m463 7y agoInteresting - in silicon valley Huawei has a building just a short distance from both Intel and Nvidia's main headquarters.
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- Whatarethese 7y agoI'd be throwing my phone in the trash right about now. I would venture to guess all Huawei data is going to China.
- jessaustin 7y agoWhy would I care about someone in China knowing about my doctor's appointment or recent sports browsing? Why would anyone in China care to know about it?
- shrewduser 7y agoI certainly would if I were to employ you.
- jessaustin 7y agoWow, a political test for employment. I appreciate your honesty, at least.
- Youcandothis 7y agoDo you really own a Huawei phone? I think anyone that do trust them to the same degree now as when they bought it.
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- _ph_ 7y agoI assume, you have no Facebook or Google account? Just to name some companies whose business principle is built on aquiring as much data about you as possible. With Facebook we even have documented and publicly admitted cases where they shared the data with third parties.
- choonway 7y agoIt's built into their culture. There was one time when the lecturer left the classroom during a break in the lecture, the china exchange students swarmed over his laptop, which he did not lock down, inserted USB drives, copied files had lookouts posted at the door etc. It was so shockingly spontaneous. They did not know I was not a student but another lecturer auditing his class. Later I told him that his laptop was raided and left it up to him to decide whether to pursue it. He just said they have an integrity problem. Later I heard they made it non-examinable for them so they did not feel a need to cheat. I think it's just built into PRC Chinese culture. Maybe for them repercussions aren't that bad. But Singaporean Chinese stick to the rules pretty much (google no U-turn syndrome)
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- Leary 7y agoShocking this kind of stereotyping is not only allowed but upvoted to first place on HN.
- walrus01 7y agoHere's Bunnie Huang's explanation of cavalier disregard for copyright/trademark and IP law: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 I'm sure he's biased, right?
- _ph_ 7y agoNot sure how I should understand your comment, but the link you posted is great. It clearly shows what a great place Shenzen is. If Silicon Valley is be the place for software startups, Shenzen is its equivalent in hardware. So much ingenuity combined with an extremely short manufacturing pipeline as described in the article. And as long as we are not talking about actual counterfeit products, I can't blame them for being inspired by known brands products. But unless we are talking acutally patented or copyrighted things, the concept of "IP" isn't as clear-cut as some company lawyers like to make it.
- jarfil 7y agoIt's kind of funny to speak of "stealing tech" when it's the foreign companies themselves who give Chinese manufacturers all that's needed to set up production lines to make the tech. Like, what did you expect, that they wouldn't run third shifts or sell the stuff to whoever paid them for it?
- wybiral 7y ago> Like, what did you expect, that they wouldn't run third shifts or sell the stuff to whoever paid them for it? Yes. Because of those pesky things called "laws" and "trade agreements". It's still theft even if it wasn't always difficult to do.
- axaxs 7y agoI mean, you have a point, but it's inevitable. If a person pays you to do something, then you find out they are selling your work for an order of magnitude more than you're making, it's human nature to at least question this, at best mimic it, laws be damned.
- wybiral 7y agoYou seem to be justifying crime because it was so easy to commit that you might as well. Yard ornaments might be easy to steal, I mean, heck, people just leave them in their front yard over night. But it's still theft, it's still illegal, and even though the people made it easy there should still be a penalty for the theft.
- axaxs 7y agoI think most people would agree that idealogical theft is far different than physical theft. Not saying I agree with said theft, but when making deals with known questionable actors, it's a bit of a given.
- mfatica 7y agoJust because someone is a better salesman than you doesn't give you the right to break the law what kind of insane rational is that
- bstar77 7y agoI'm curious of the political implications of this situation. You have one side (the anti Huawei side) that is aided by a very unpopular US president and US government institutions that are highly mistrusted. You also have the narrative that companies like Google and nations like Canada have been coerced into supporting this "assault" on Chinese interests. It also doesn't help that there is a "trade war" in effect where many people believe collateral damage is going to happen, just or not... that it's simply a reality of a (proxy) war. Finally, you have the Huawei customers/supporters (from all over the world) that feel strongly these accusations are fabricated and entirely self serving to the US. How do we navigate this mess and get to the core facts in an age where expert opinions and fact checking is undervalued? And, as it relates to China, where is the line between xenophobia and justified concern?
- rgbrenner 7y agoThere's bipartisan support in the US Congress for confronting Huawei and China. It's one of the few things Democrats and Republicans agree on. Also it's very unlikely Canada and other countries are being forced on Huawei or Chinese trade. EU and other western countries have the same concerns on both issues. It isn't like China and Huawei's behavior has been confined to US borders.
- threeseed 7y agoIntelligence agencies from other governments e.g. Australia are also wary of Huawei equipment. This isn't about Trump or his trade war.
- mabbo 7y agoThe US didn't chose Canada as an ally in this fight arbitrarily. One of the top other comments on this thread will tell you all you need to know about why Canadians are 100% down with going after Huawei: they killed off Nortel via IP theft. I watched as friends' parents lost their jobs, as one of the leading telecom companies in the world was undercut by a competitor who has stolen their source code, IP, products, everything. Trump doesn't like Huawei? Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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- proy24 7y agoUnrelated but in their Bangalore office, they had sleeping bunks and showers in office premises and managers were routinely setting impossible deadlines and employees encouraged to work all day and night and sleep/shower in office if needed.
- gloflo 7y agoSounds like the typical working conditions of an Apple Inc satellite. Also unrelated.
- rexarex 7y agoCisco was a rip off of The Stanford Blue Box. AFAIK the deans of the biz school and CS school founded Cisco with tech created by Stanford and were almost sued. Stanford decided that it wasn’t worth the potential bad press to be sueing faculty.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago"Someone else does it too" isn't a very strong argument. We may be approaching a world where all critical infrastructure must be open hardware and software, or face a Balkenizd patchwork of suppliers local to each market. (Not a Cisco or Huawei fan myself.)
- spectramax 7y agoI love how people are trying to justify Huawei’s practices through asinine ways. Huawei needs to be criticized, banned, ostracized and condemned in the strongest way possible. China is lost its credibility a long time ago - the rest of the world cannot blindly trust any Chinese company. The Chinese has mismanaged their “brand” to reap short term benefits. It can only go so far. Doing business with honesty, integrity and following appropriate laws is crucial for long term partnerships. Trust is one of the most important aspects in business.
- _ph_ 7y agothe rest of the world cannot blindly trust any Chinese company The world cannot blindly trust any company. Companies are not persons. Companies try to make a profit, so at a whim they might change their business practises. With some luck you can trust a sitting CEO, but not even that is a given.
- antipropaganda 7y agoI love how people are trying to justify the West's practices in asinine ways. The west needs to be criticized, ostracised and banned in the strongest way possible. West lost its credibility long time ago. They have mismanaged their brand to reap short term benefits. Blah blah blah....
- jhabdas 7y agoAccording to the interview with NPR the product was sent to the US and returned via mail, presumably a US carrier.
- scoot_718 7y agoAgain?
- Causality1 7y agoI think most people who follow the smartphone space will recall when Samsung accused Huawei of stealing their foldable screen technology and sure enough a few months later Huawei is demonstrating folding phone prototypes. I know the row with the US government is more about security threats, but I like to think of Huawei's implosion as the consequences of refusing to respect the rest of the world.
- fc373745 7y agoSeems like a lot of accusations against the Chinese and their tech is being force fed down our throats lately. Not surprising, since we are currently within a trade war and any opportunity to drive out Chinese competition would be taken - especially since Huawei would have been a huge competitor in the smartphone market (I heard their camera quality is currently the best). I"m skeptical, as some of these accusations are not that far-fetched. What I'm more concerned of, is whether or not this is driven by some higher entity so that mass-hatred for the Chinese and their tech is accumulated, which would mean state driven media. Despite all of these accusations of being one step behind, Huawei seems to be on the forefront of a lot of things - especially in the field of 5G, so it would seem possible that the US would pull some propaganda antics to make us reconsider Huawei and Chinese Tech Its tough trying to read and discern for yourself anything on the web nowadays - as for this matter, I'm putting my thoughts on Huawei and Chinese tech on hold since I think both cases are true - That there are some concerns with tech theft against the chinese, but its also being extremely exaggerated.
- rayiner 7y agoIf you look at the reports, it’s been out there for a long time. It’s not some new thing. I heard the anecdote I recounted below (about copying routers down to the silk screening) more than a decade ago. If you’ve worked in telecom/networking, this is common knowledge.
- briandear 7y agoThere is no evidence of “mass hatred.” There is plenty of evidence that steals IP. If there is some evidence that Huawei doesn’t steal IP, then let’s hear it. Corporate espionage is a real thing, suggesting that Huawei never engages in it is ridiculous. Suggesting this is propaganda has no basis in fact, considering that they do steal IP, they do engage in corporate espionage and they are affiliated closely with the Chinese MSS — an agency that makes the Stasi look like Boy Scouts.
- dang 7y agoWould you please stop posting political, ideological, and nationalistic flamewar comments to HN? We've cut you a ton of slack about this over the years, but you're repeatedly violating the spirit of this site as well as its guidelines. This comment is bad even by the low standards of this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cherioo 7y agoWhat I had hoped to see discussed about these IP thief story is, what is our IP protection system doing. The patent and copyright system that has been the bane of every IP court case, are those system simplify disfunctional is the one use case that they're suppose to address? Are huge corporation like Nortel/Samsung/Cisco suddenly too small to defend for themselves, in the US and EU, where I would assumed to be the biggest market? Is the Samsung that got sued for rounded-corner phone not thought of to patent their technique to put oled onto curved glass? (which sounds extremely patent worthy) edit: grammar
- jhanschoo 7y agoThese IP policies only work nationally, and internationally among friendly countries that respect IP treaties (Hint: China isn't one of them). Next, these countries still get to export goods containing the stolen technology back to countries where the IP was stolen (perhaps via third-party distributors), since there is typically no provision barring that.
- wangii 7y agosurprised? I don't think so, after all Huawei had admitted in video: 'We lie, we cheat, we steal!', and Chinese applauded! shame on them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OifY3sqrmXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OifY3sqrmXQ
- sschueller 7y ago"Good artists copy great artists steal" [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU