9 ms·

An overview of why the US has problems with Huawei

87 points by rotten 7y ago

rotten 7y ago
A review of Huawei devices by the company I work for, Finite State, found numerous (and some trivial) backdoors in 55% of Huawei projects. It is briefly mentioned in the article above. Here is more information on that report: https://finitestate.io/2019/06/26/report-finds-cybersecurity-vulnerabilities-embedded-within-huawei-devices/ https://finitestate.io/2019/06/26/report-finds-cybersecurity... And here is a video of our CEO talking more about it: https://finitestate.io/2019/10/03/security-weekly-podcast https://finitestate.io/2019/10/03/security-weekly-podcast
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Wow that's a grossly misleading executive summary. Your company should be ashamed of itself. I read the report itself: - Devices came with a default username/password. Called a "backdoor." - Devices used password auth instead of public key cryptography for SSH out of the box. Called a "backdoor." - Default public key cryptography keys for SSH auth instead of password. Called a "backdoor." - Devices contained public certificate authorities. Called a "man in them middle." - Devices contained well known vulnerabilities in common open source software. If I had paid Finite State for this report, I'd fire them on the spot and blacklist them. I particularly love the Schrödinger's cat of public key SSH auth. If the vendor doesn't enable it by default it is a "backdoor" and if they do it is "hard-coded certificates" and thus a "backdoor." According to Finite State's logic I've never used a vendor that didn't contain multiple "backdoors." Particularly as doing so is impossible (since you need to enable public certificate SSH auth AND not provide users any way of actually using it). The thing that surprises me is that they found "backdoors" in only 55% of devices? Shouldn't it be 100%, or did you feel like misleading that much was too unbelievable (and people might e.g. read the report and call you out)? PS - No conflicts or stakes here (don't even run Huawei's stuff that I know of). Just decided to read the report because of the extraordinary claims made, found out there was nothing there.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    >If I had paid Finite State for this report, I'd fire them on the spot and blacklist them. Whoever paid Finite State for that report presumably was happy with the outcome that was arranged for them. Alternatively, they could have written the report on their own in order to drum up business and "reputation" in the cybersecurity industry.
    - HorstG 7y ago
      "Built by a team with backgrounds in the U.S. Intelligence Community, Finite State provides ..." aka. a propaganda outlet of the US deep state and not even shy to mention it...
  - Buge 7y ago
    If something has a default password, default private key, or trusts a default public key, and that isn't clearly documented, that seems like a backdoor to me. It would be an undocumented way of Huawei or random hackers taking over your device. And even if it's documented, although it's not a backdoor, it's still generally bad for security. Any device with non-unique default passwords or default keypairs will generally have hackers scanning the internet to compromise them. The keypair should be randomly generated on first use. The device should prompt for what password to use on first use.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    These are interesting points. It's clear that Huawei is being held to a higher standard than anyone else, but at the same time, the critique is fair. Wouldn't surprise me if this newfound paranoia leads to a golden age for cybersecurity, and a wave of new best practices.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      > Wouldn't surprise me if this newfound paranoia leads to a golden age for cybersecurity, and a wave of new best practices. I'd be shocked if this happened. This requires politicians to both care about and understand cybersecurity enough to enforce it, and for there to be no opportunists looking to cash in on the ignorance of policy makers. People demanded more security after 9/11. We got the Patriot Act and the TSA, so the government spies on its own people and an agency that has proven 95% (!!!) of the time to fail to detect a weapon. https://onemileatatime.com/tsa-fails-tests-95-percent/ https://onemileatatime.com/tsa-fails-tests-95-percent/ Ronald Reagon declared a war on drugs - I've already made this comment too political so I won't delve into that. For anything complicated enough the general public cannot easily understand it, there is no incentive for politicians to actually care about it. They can just give it lip service with a few talking points and then never actually do anything actionable.
- tptacek 7y ago
  This report is pretty weak. I'm not sure I can nail down the "55%" number, but it's counting things like out-of-date OpenSSL, accounts in /etc/shadow, and at one point a survey across whole firmware images counting "memcpy" and "execl".
  - kohtatsu 7y ago
    Might at least be useful if they also applied this "methodology" to the other manufacturers.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Unsafe: memset > Safe: memset_s Yeah, if you’re just counting up occurrences then this is a stupid comparison.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  >by the company I work for, Finite State Do you get paid for misleading people?
- ryacko 7y ago
  Maybe you guys should talk to Congress about it, there might be the political will to prevent the import of badly written code.
  - rotten 7y ago
    My understanding is that we have been.
jorblumesea 7y ago
Is it really that surprising that the US would object to a company with extremely close ties to an authoritarian surveillance state providing the nations' infrastructure? Huawei was founded by a PLA colonel and has deep ties to the Chinese state and power structure. Imagine if a US company was founded by ex-Military officers, stole tech from Chinese companies, and tried to build China's telecom backbone while accepting huge subsidies from the US government. No one would bat an eye if they passed on that deal.
- bronlund 7y ago
  Yeah, because US haven’t been ripping off anybody. And no US company has ever had close ties to the government %]
  - jorblumesea 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
    - bronlund 7y ago
      What do you think all your wars are about? Democracy :D
    - ryacko 7y ago
      No one is required to recite a short history on why the entire world is terrible to comment on a single instance of wrong doing.
      - bronlund 7y ago
        If you are defending the biggest asshole of them all, you kind of are. China is like a zen buddhist temple compared to the shitstorm US has brought to this planet.
        ryacko 7y ago
avocado4 7y ago
As somebody who has lived in Beijing and worked extensively with members of the Party as well as their tech Giants, I can tell you 2 principles you need to understand under which they operate: 1. Han is master race. They have been humiliated for the past century by Western powers but are coming back to their rightful place at the top by all means, which is the overarching goal. 2. You have to be smart. If you outsmart your opponent you win. You can call it cheating, IP stealing, or reneging on contracts, they don't think of it this way. Outmaneuver to win. It's naive to think that they won't be using their networking infrastructure if deployed globally to drive their #1 goal. Anybody who works in high profile network security will take it for granted because they see where most of their malicious traffic is coming from today already.
- spectramax 7y ago
  That's an unintelligent way to become #1 by making enemies with every other race.
  - permatech 7y ago
    Did white people get where they are from being nice?
Synaesthesia 7y ago
It’s hardly surprising that the US is going after Huawei. The US enjoys a commanding lead in technology globally. That overwhelming lead is threatened by a company which is now a leader in 5G technology and becoming a global player. Naturally the US will try to protect its own companies, it’s very telling that they haven’t given evidence of any wrongdoing.
- Retric 7y ago
  Last thing I read was: ‘Hidden backdoors’ were found in Huawei equipment, reports Bloomberg. https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523701/huawei-vodafone-italy-security-backdoors-vulnerabilities-routers-core-network-wide-area-local https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523701/huawei-vodafone-... Was that disproven?
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Reports Bloomberg... certainly gives me pause.
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    > In an official statement, Huawei went on to call Bloomberg’s report “misleading” and said that the story “refers to a maintenance and diagnostic function, common across the industry, as well as vulnerabilities, which were corrected over seven years ago.” It added that “there is absolutely no truth in the suggestion that Huawei conceals backdoors in its equipment.” It was never proven to begin with. Like any good backdoor it "could simply have been a mistake" (deniability).
    - bigj0n 7y ago
      Quoting Huawei doesnt make for great evidence here
      - diffeomorphism 7y ago
        Quoting nobody to claim it was proven makes for even worse one.
upofadown 7y ago
If you pick a Chinese supplier then you might end up with Chinese entities backdooring and/or copying your product. If you pick a supplier from another country, then you are up to twice as bad off as that supplier will get their stuff manufactured in China.
- 3pt14159 7y ago
  Naw. A Chinese company embedding a backdoor in a chip is way more damaging to the reliance as China as a global supplier of electronics manufacturing than a Chinese company that controls the software. With software it is much easier to embed a backdoor because a backdoor can look like an innocent bug. Not that any of this really matters. So many parts of software are broken from a cybersecurity standpoint that it's more a matter of degree than secure versus not secure. I'm sure the Chinese are able to have open source contributors have their patches applied to Linux or Python with innocent bugs in them. Still though, network attacks break a lot of what keeps the internet secure, and I doubt the Americans are making it up when they say that Chinese manufactured network gear is a national security threat.
  - utopian3 7y ago
    Shouldn’t you be able to make a hardware backdoor look like a bug. I mean, imagine if Intel’s predictive branching (meltdown) bugs were intentional... it could stay hidden for years and look like a mistake
vaxman 7y ago
The owner of LA Times is billionaire American/South African surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong.
- dayofthedaleks 7y ago
  I'm sorry, but after skimming his wiki I'm not seeing the relevance of that relationship. Are we to infer that being ethnic Chinese without close ties to the mainland would create a conflict of interest?
rshnotsecure 7y ago
Huawei has extensive ties with not only the Ministry of State Security, which is kind of like a combination of the CIA/FBI, but also the Shanghai State Security Bureau and Organization 610. Regarding 610, it might exist it might not. Supposedly operating as a “CIA within a CIA”, they are kind of like a Praetorian Guard that reports to the highest levels of the CCP. Anyway Ren Zhengfei, the founder, is a former Army Colonel in the PLA. He was a specialist in comm systems, and was “laid off” in 1983. This was the same year the MSS was founded, which wound up kind of “stealing” all the intelligence work and signals stuff that had previously been the domain of the Army. Later the MSS would find it much more advantageous to establish front companies, and it was this wave of front companies with unlimited black budget funding that began in mid 1990s that Ren rode all the way to the top. FUN FACT: The Green Army, one of the original Chinese hacking groups from 1996-1997, eventually all of its first members came together and established Nsfocus.com which still exists today and is quite big.
- mycall 7y ago
  Are they the dark army?)
aritmo 7y ago
Most of the points listed in the article are excuses to attack a successful Chinese company. It looks like the US prefers China to just manufacture for others and not sell directly high tech products.
- mcguire 7y ago
  "Seattle prosecutors alleged in January 2019 that Huawei employees stole T-Mobile trade secrets in 2012. They said that Huawei pressured its U.S. staff to get details about a smart-phone-testing robot named Tappy and that a Huawei employee removed the robot arm and took it home and photographed it. Huawei denies any role. It says employees acted on their own, in “a moment of indiscretion.”" That's perfectly believable. I, myself, am compelled to fiddle about with other people's technology.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    > The Supercomm telecom trade show was winding down and most people had gone home when Zhu Yibin, a China-based employee of Huawei, was caught by security June 23 photographing the circuit boards of an optical networking device owned by Fujitsu Network Communications after removing the casing, according to a report by Light Reading. Zhu also had two pages of proprietary AT&T diagrams and a list of six vendors to visit, with two high-tech products highlighted.
    - nraynaud 7y ago
      The CIA did the same with an entire soviet spacecraft.
      - filoleg 7y ago
        To me, this sounds like you are essentially agreeing that Huawei is acting like a CPP state arm, in the same way that CIA acts like a state arm.
      - pkaye 7y ago
        So you are saying we should assume the same for China and Huawei?
rgbrenner 7y ago
The article mentions the 2012 US House Intel Committee report on Huawei and ZTE but says (incorrectly) it was never released. Here's the report: https://republicans-intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/huawei-zte%20investigative%20report%20(final).pdf https://republicans-intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligenc... This report is why the US government is taking action against Huawei. In it, Huawei refuses to answer some key questions about the structure of their company that strongly indicates they are controlled by the CCP. So what did Huawei think was going to happen after that?
- yummypaint 7y ago
  I think china views the concept of separation of companies, the government, and the military as a western notion. The ecosystem is fundamentally different from in the US, and western observers dont seem to be aware of this.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I don't see any confusion here. Huawei knows what's up, as does the US Government.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    > The ecosystem is fundamentally different from in the US, and western observers dont seem to be aware of this. This comment misses the whole point entirely. Obviously this is not a simple issue about cultural differences. The key point is that a telecom company that is a major player in the telecom infrastructure busines and is desperately trying to control the world's telecom infrastructure is actually surreptitiously controlled by the Chinese government. This fact is not minor cultural nitpicking.
    - yummypaint 7y ago
      We're saying the same thing. My point is that looking at huawei through a western lens causes one to underestimate the threat.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I don’t understand why this story is such a big deal, but it keeps getting covered. There are no US companies that compete with Huawei’s 5G technology, so my government is going after them anyway they can. Seems simple enough to me. That said, there is another factor: Huawei smartphones sort of compete with Apple gear, but at lower prices. This also helps a US company (Apple). It think it is fairly common that governments do back-flips to help domestic industries. The Chinese government certainly helps their industries.
- roenxi 7y ago
  To supplement your comment; all the things in being alleged may well be true, but none of it seems unusual or particularly unexpected. It does seem quite likely that it has only become an issue because Huawei is out-competing US companies. Although I suspect the US will discover their treatment of Meng Wanzhou is crossing a line. The idea that the US can regulate commerce between a Chinese company and an Iranian country is breathtakingly audacious and the idea that the US can go after individuals on this pretext is outrageous. If someone pulled this stunt on them and black-bagged Tim Cook for violating labour laws they might start to realise they've opened a can of worms.
  - neltnerb 7y ago
    Do you think that they wouldn't be taking a hard look at them otherwise? It seems like scrutiny and suspicion goes back over a decade, but it could all be pretext. I assume we both agree that fully open hardware and software is better here, but given that I guess it's just a matter of which country you're most okay with giving a backdoor into your private life. I guess I still trust the US in this regard more than China, even with the NSA leaks. But I definitely think that if I was individually targeted they'd get whatever they want. Well, either country really.
  - JCharante 7y ago
    Isn't it relating to fraud because they lied about the transactions, as in the US is perfectly fine if third parties conduct trade with blacklisted entities, but the third parties have to suffer the consequences of those trades (such as they themselves getting blacklisted).
vaporland 7y ago
NSA hates competition
w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
I would answer if I had a meaningful thing to say, but I'm afraid my social credit score could suffer and I could be banned by chinese government from buying cheap backdoored electronic cigarette gears.

87 points by rotten 7y ago

A review of Huawei devices by the company I work for, Finite State, found numerous (and some trivial) backdoors in 55% of Huawei projects. It is briefly mentioned in the article above. Here is more information on that report: https://finitestate.io/2019/06/26/report-finds-cybersecurity-vulnerabilities-embedded-within-huawei-devices/ https://finitestate.io/2019/06/26/report-finds-cybersecurity... And here is a video of our CEO talking more about it: https://finitestate.io/2019/10/03/security-weekly-podcast https://finitestate.io/2019/10/03/security-weekly-podcast

Someone1234 7y ago
Wow that's a grossly misleading executive summary. Your company should be ashamed of itself. I read the report itself: - Devices came with a default username/password. Called a "backdoor." - Devices used password auth instead of public key cryptography for SSH out of the box. Called a "backdoor." - Default public key cryptography keys for SSH auth instead of password. Called a "backdoor." - Devices contained public certificate authorities. Called a "man in them middle." - Devices contained well known vulnerabilities in common open source software. If I had paid Finite State for this report, I'd fire them on the spot and blacklist them. I particularly love the Schrödinger's cat of public key SSH auth. If the vendor doesn't enable it by default it is a "backdoor" and if they do it is "hard-coded certificates" and thus a "backdoor." According to Finite State's logic I've never used a vendor that didn't contain multiple "backdoors." Particularly as doing so is impossible (since you need to enable public certificate SSH auth AND not provide users any way of actually using it). The thing that surprises me is that they found "backdoors" in only 55% of devices? Shouldn't it be 100%, or did you feel like misleading that much was too unbelievable (and people might e.g. read the report and call you out)? PS - No conflicts or stakes here (don't even run Huawei's stuff that I know of). Just decided to read the report because of the extraordinary claims made, found out there was nothing there.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >If I had paid Finite State for this report, I'd fire them on the spot and blacklist them. Whoever paid Finite State for that report presumably was happy with the outcome that was arranged for them. Alternatively, they could have written the report on their own in order to drum up business and "reputation" in the cybersecurity industry.
  - HorstG 7y ago
    "Built by a team with backgrounds in the U.S. Intelligence Community, Finite State provides ..." aka. a propaganda outlet of the US deep state and not even shy to mention it...
- Buge 7y ago
  If something has a default password, default private key, or trusts a default public key, and that isn't clearly documented, that seems like a backdoor to me. It would be an undocumented way of Huawei or random hackers taking over your device. And even if it's documented, although it's not a backdoor, it's still generally bad for security. Any device with non-unique default passwords or default keypairs will generally have hackers scanning the internet to compromise them. The keypair should be randomly generated on first use. The device should prompt for what password to use on first use.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  These are interesting points. It's clear that Huawei is being held to a higher standard than anyone else, but at the same time, the critique is fair. Wouldn't surprise me if this newfound paranoia leads to a golden age for cybersecurity, and a wave of new best practices.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    > Wouldn't surprise me if this newfound paranoia leads to a golden age for cybersecurity, and a wave of new best practices. I'd be shocked if this happened. This requires politicians to both care about and understand cybersecurity enough to enforce it, and for there to be no opportunists looking to cash in on the ignorance of policy makers. People demanded more security after 9/11. We got the Patriot Act and the TSA, so the government spies on its own people and an agency that has proven 95% (!!!) of the time to fail to detect a weapon. https://onemileatatime.com/tsa-fails-tests-95-percent/ https://onemileatatime.com/tsa-fails-tests-95-percent/ Ronald Reagon declared a war on drugs - I've already made this comment too political so I won't delve into that. For anything complicated enough the general public cannot easily understand it, there is no incentive for politicians to actually care about it. They can just give it lip service with a few talking points and then never actually do anything actionable.
tptacek 7y ago
This report is pretty weak. I'm not sure I can nail down the "55%" number, but it's counting things like out-of-date OpenSSL, accounts in /etc/shadow, and at one point a survey across whole firmware images counting "memcpy" and "execl".
- kohtatsu 7y ago
  Might at least be useful if they also applied this "methodology" to the other manufacturers.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Unsafe: memset > Safe: memset_s Yeah, if you’re just counting up occurrences then this is a stupid comparison.
ryanlol 7y ago
>by the company I work for, Finite State Do you get paid for misleading people?
ryacko 7y ago
Maybe you guys should talk to Congress about it, there might be the political will to prevent the import of badly written code.
- rotten 7y ago
  My understanding is that we have been.

jorblumesea 7y ago

Is it really that surprising that the US would object to a company with extremely close ties to an authoritarian surveillance state providing the nations' infrastructure? Huawei was founded by a PLA colonel and has deep ties to the Chinese state and power structure. Imagine if a US company was founded by ex-Military officers, stole tech from Chinese companies, and tried to build China's telecom backbone while accepting huge subsidies from the US government. No one would bat an eye if they passed on that deal.

bronlund 7y ago
Yeah, because US haven’t been ripping off anybody. And no US company has ever had close ties to the government %]
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
  - bronlund 7y ago
    What do you think all your wars are about? Democracy :D
  - ryacko 7y ago
    No one is required to recite a short history on why the entire world is terrible to comment on a single instance of wrong doing.
    - bronlund 7y ago
      If you are defending the biggest asshole of them all, you kind of are. China is like a zen buddhist temple compared to the shitstorm US has brought to this planet.
      - ryacko 7y ago

avocado4 7y ago

As somebody who has lived in Beijing and worked extensively with members of the Party as well as their tech Giants, I can tell you 2 principles you need to understand under which they operate: 1. Han is master race. They have been humiliated for the past century by Western powers but are coming back to their rightful place at the top by all means, which is the overarching goal. 2. You have to be smart. If you outsmart your opponent you win. You can call it cheating, IP stealing, or reneging on contracts, they don't think of it this way. Outmaneuver to win. It's naive to think that they won't be using their networking infrastructure if deployed globally to drive their #1 goal. Anybody who works in high profile network security will take it for granted because they see where most of their malicious traffic is coming from today already.

spectramax 7y ago
That's an unintelligent way to become #1 by making enemies with every other race.
- permatech 7y ago
  Did white people get where they are from being nice?

Synaesthesia 7y ago

It’s hardly surprising that the US is going after Huawei. The US enjoys a commanding lead in technology globally. That overwhelming lead is threatened by a company which is now a leader in 5G technology and becoming a global player. Naturally the US will try to protect its own companies, it’s very telling that they haven’t given evidence of any wrongdoing.

Retric 7y ago
Last thing I read was: ‘Hidden backdoors’ were found in Huawei equipment, reports Bloomberg. https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523701/huawei-vodafone-italy-security-backdoors-vulnerabilities-routers-core-network-wide-area-local https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523701/huawei-vodafone-... Was that disproven?
- oefrha 7y ago
  Reports Bloomberg... certainly gives me pause.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  > In an official statement, Huawei went on to call Bloomberg’s report “misleading” and said that the story “refers to a maintenance and diagnostic function, common across the industry, as well as vulnerabilities, which were corrected over seven years ago.” It added that “there is absolutely no truth in the suggestion that Huawei conceals backdoors in its equipment.” It was never proven to begin with. Like any good backdoor it "could simply have been a mistake" (deniability).
  - bigj0n 7y ago
    Quoting Huawei doesnt make for great evidence here
    - diffeomorphism 7y ago
      Quoting nobody to claim it was proven makes for even worse one.

upofadown 7y ago

If you pick a Chinese supplier then you might end up with Chinese entities backdooring and/or copying your product. If you pick a supplier from another country, then you are up to twice as bad off as that supplier will get their stuff manufactured in China.

3pt14159 7y ago
Naw. A Chinese company embedding a backdoor in a chip is way more damaging to the reliance as China as a global supplier of electronics manufacturing than a Chinese company that controls the software. With software it is much easier to embed a backdoor because a backdoor can look like an innocent bug. Not that any of this really matters. So many parts of software are broken from a cybersecurity standpoint that it's more a matter of degree than secure versus not secure. I'm sure the Chinese are able to have open source contributors have their patches applied to Linux or Python with innocent bugs in them. Still though, network attacks break a lot of what keeps the internet secure, and I doubt the Americans are making it up when they say that Chinese manufactured network gear is a national security threat.
- utopian3 7y ago
  Shouldn’t you be able to make a hardware backdoor look like a bug. I mean, imagine if Intel’s predictive branching (meltdown) bugs were intentional... it could stay hidden for years and look like a mistake

vaxman 7y ago

The owner of LA Times is billionaire American/South African surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong.

dayofthedaleks 7y ago
I'm sorry, but after skimming his wiki I'm not seeing the relevance of that relationship. Are we to infer that being ethnic Chinese without close ties to the mainland would create a conflict of interest?

rshnotsecure 7y ago

Huawei has extensive ties with not only the Ministry of State Security, which is kind of like a combination of the CIA/FBI, but also the Shanghai State Security Bureau and Organization 610. Regarding 610, it might exist it might not. Supposedly operating as a “CIA within a CIA”, they are kind of like a Praetorian Guard that reports to the highest levels of the CCP. Anyway Ren Zhengfei, the founder, is a former Army Colonel in the PLA. He was a specialist in comm systems, and was “laid off” in 1983. This was the same year the MSS was founded, which wound up kind of “stealing” all the intelligence work and signals stuff that had previously been the domain of the Army. Later the MSS would find it much more advantageous to establish front companies, and it was this wave of front companies with unlimited black budget funding that began in mid 1990s that Ren rode all the way to the top. FUN FACT: The Green Army, one of the original Chinese hacking groups from 1996-1997, eventually all of its first members came together and established Nsfocus.com which still exists today and is quite big.

mycall 7y ago
Are they the dark army?)

aritmo 7y ago

Most of the points listed in the article are excuses to attack a successful Chinese company. It looks like the US prefers China to just manufacture for others and not sell directly high tech products.

mcguire 7y ago
"Seattle prosecutors alleged in January 2019 that Huawei employees stole T-Mobile trade secrets in 2012. They said that Huawei pressured its U.S. staff to get details about a smart-phone-testing robot named Tappy and that a Huawei employee removed the robot arm and took it home and photographed it. Huawei denies any role. It says employees acted on their own, in “a moment of indiscretion.”" That's perfectly believable. I, myself, am compelled to fiddle about with other people's technology.
- pkaye 7y ago
  > The Supercomm telecom trade show was winding down and most people had gone home when Zhu Yibin, a China-based employee of Huawei, was caught by security June 23 photographing the circuit boards of an optical networking device owned by Fujitsu Network Communications after removing the casing, according to a report by Light Reading. Zhu also had two pages of proprietary AT&T diagrams and a list of six vendors to visit, with two high-tech products highlighted.
  - nraynaud 7y ago
    The CIA did the same with an entire soviet spacecraft.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      To me, this sounds like you are essentially agreeing that Huawei is acting like a CPP state arm, in the same way that CIA acts like a state arm.
    - pkaye 7y ago
      So you are saying we should assume the same for China and Huawei?

rgbrenner 7y ago

The article mentions the 2012 US House Intel Committee report on Huawei and ZTE but says (incorrectly) it was never released. Here's the report: https://republicans-intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/huawei-zte%20investigative%20report%20(final).pdf https://republicans-intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligenc... This report is why the US government is taking action against Huawei. In it, Huawei refuses to answer some key questions about the structure of their company that strongly indicates they are controlled by the CCP. So what did Huawei think was going to happen after that?

yummypaint 7y ago
I think china views the concept of separation of companies, the government, and the military as a western notion. The ecosystem is fundamentally different from in the US, and western observers dont seem to be aware of this.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I don't see any confusion here. Huawei knows what's up, as does the US Government.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > The ecosystem is fundamentally different from in the US, and western observers dont seem to be aware of this. This comment misses the whole point entirely. Obviously this is not a simple issue about cultural differences. The key point is that a telecom company that is a major player in the telecom infrastructure busines and is desperately trying to control the world's telecom infrastructure is actually surreptitiously controlled by the Chinese government. This fact is not minor cultural nitpicking.
  - yummypaint 7y ago
    We're saying the same thing. My point is that looking at huawei through a western lens causes one to underestimate the threat.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I don’t understand why this story is such a big deal, but it keeps getting covered. There are no US companies that compete with Huawei’s 5G technology, so my government is going after them anyway they can. Seems simple enough to me. That said, there is another factor: Huawei smartphones sort of compete with Apple gear, but at lower prices. This also helps a US company (Apple). It think it is fairly common that governments do back-flips to help domestic industries. The Chinese government certainly helps their industries.

roenxi 7y ago
To supplement your comment; all the things in being alleged may well be true, but none of it seems unusual or particularly unexpected. It does seem quite likely that it has only become an issue because Huawei is out-competing US companies. Although I suspect the US will discover their treatment of Meng Wanzhou is crossing a line. The idea that the US can regulate commerce between a Chinese company and an Iranian country is breathtakingly audacious and the idea that the US can go after individuals on this pretext is outrageous. If someone pulled this stunt on them and black-bagged Tim Cook for violating labour laws they might start to realise they've opened a can of worms.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  Do you think that they wouldn't be taking a hard look at them otherwise? It seems like scrutiny and suspicion goes back over a decade, but it could all be pretext. I assume we both agree that fully open hardware and software is better here, but given that I guess it's just a matter of which country you're most okay with giving a backdoor into your private life. I guess I still trust the US in this regard more than China, even with the NSA leaks. But I definitely think that if I was individually targeted they'd get whatever they want. Well, either country really.
- JCharante 7y ago
  Isn't it relating to fraud because they lied about the transactions, as in the US is perfectly fine if third parties conduct trade with blacklisted entities, but the third parties have to suffer the consequences of those trades (such as they themselves getting blacklisted).

vaporland 7y ago

NSA hates competition

w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago

I would answer if I had a meaningful thing to say, but I'm afraid my social credit score could suffer and I could be banned by chinese government from buying cheap backdoored electronic cigarette gears.