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Agree and disagree with you and your parent commentor. > They're going to look for bugs, which they're just as likely to find in competitor's equipment as anyt
by Macuyiko 7y ago
Agree and disagree with you and your parent commentor.
> They're going to look for bugs, which they're just as likely to find in competitor's equipment as anything else.
> [T]he real solution is not to exclude Huawei because they're Chinese, but to make sure engineers fully understand the system from the hardware on up.
> [T]his is a problem with the technical literacy of our politicians [...]
In my simple view [1], we're all thinking from an engineering "global optimum" mindset, as happens often here, but none of these solutions are realistic. Neither now nor going forward.
If you look at it from a political POV, the question should be: "how did Huawei find itself in a position like this?"
The approach, hence, should be a combination of a renewed massive investment in tech (similarly to military spending) on the one hand, and strong state support on the other hand. That sounds crazy and even "socialist" to a US audience, but on the other hand wouldn't be the first time this has been done. A follow up question would be about what's holding us back. I'll leave that to think about.
Similar reasoning for general infrastructure projects, I feel.
[1]: I'm not putting this out as gospel, so feel free to offer counters.
- 3pt14159 7y agoI'm not thinking from a global optimum mindset. I'm reading the actual DNI reports, I've talked with actual people in cyberwarfare (a major, even) and I've talked with people in both the OSINT community and the SIGINT / COMINT community. I have a family member that works on blackers all day long for the government of Canada and I've gone to conferences on both attack (Infiltrate) and defence. China has a competitive advantage on creating tech at lower cost. America is awash in investment dollars, but has burdens that the Chinese do not have (IP, compliance, competition with other market participants like Google / Apple for the same talent) and it isn't realistic to keep our hopes on America or other western countries always matching the lowest cost. Some things need to be prioritized strictly because they're national security interests. Our media companies shouldn't be owned by state backed foreign interests, our defence companies shouldn't be, and our networking gear shouldn't be riddled with gear from a country like China that mass incarcerates people based on religion or ideology. I'm not saying things will be perfect if we keep China out of our 5G space—far from it—but the internet is essentially a nervous system for machines and if we allow their gear all over our networks it's going to be utilised against us. In an ideal world even a country like Canada would have their own networking gear providers, so that if a country like the USA slides into despotism we wouldn't have to worry about getting strong armed, but we're far from that ideal scenario and I'm only hoping for less of a bad bargain than we're likely to find ourselves in 20 years from now.
- solotronics 7y agoImagine this: If networking gear was compromised in the networks involved in stock trading, someone could literally crash the stock market! An order is just a packet travelling from one system to another, the vast majority happening via dark pools and algorithms.