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Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM
- runarb 13y agoSo each time a UK residents visits a webpage his ISP will send the url to Huawei to ask for permission? Good to see that Cameron don’t waste the opportunity and get the UK to use the same hardware platform as the Chinese. The Chinese are already one of the leaders in technology for censorship, with the great firewall and all, so it could be a lot of opportunities for synergy and cross border cooperation her…
- iwwr 13y agoMore like, they bring a great deal of expertise from the Great Firewall.
- runarb 13y agoMaybe Mr. Cameron can ask for the url list used by the great firewall also? The authorities could save a lot of time if they had an initial list to start with. What are we nicknaming this? Maybe "he Great Hadrian Firewall" after the Hadrian's wall?[0] 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian's_Wall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian's_Wall
- jimworm 13y agoThe Chinese list would lead to instant political death, because that'll block Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and some Google+ services. A large number of businesses in the UK that rely on those services will soon follow Mr Cameron to the grave. On the plus side, the message that the Internet is not a toy to be taken away at will would swiftly and surely be delivered, via the medium of being dragged out into the streets by an angry mob.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoOr just "The Hadrian's Firewall" ("Great Firewall" comes from "Great Wall"). Anyway, nice nickname; I'll start using it on social media :).
- lvturner 13y agoI've always preferred 'bamboo curtain' it's also more technically accurate.
- thenomad 13y agoNo, Hadrian's Firewall will be what they deploy to block pro-Scottish Independence sites next year :) (I don't actually think they'll do this. Probably.)
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoThat's what they're trying to make it look like - in practice it seems more likely that Huawei are just providing a managed service in TT's server farms that filters a given list of sites. Could Huawei maliciously use that data? Yes, like how the French/Russians can cut off our power. Or USA can poison all our coffee drinkers and fast-food eaters.
- mseebach 13y ago> So each time a UK residents visits a webpage his ISP will send the url to Huawei to ask for permission? No, each time a UK resident visits a webpage, his ISP will send the URL to a server in the ISP's network running software made by Huawei (which could be backdoored), loaded with watchlists maintained by a UK entity. It's unclear how that software will redirect the request, but it's probably just a DNS hi-jack.
- dijit 13y agoit wasn't a DNS hi-jack with thepiratebay
- piqufoh 13y agoMaybe this is all a clever government ruse. If DC wants more of Britain's youth interested in technology, what better way than to force them to find ingenious technological solutions to get hold of their porn?
- squidi 13y agoOr some bizarre way to strengthen trading links with China perhaps. Cameron is not popular is Beijing since he met the Dalai Lama
- jwr 13y agoI find two things incredibly ironic: 1) The UK willingly submits all of its net traffic to monitoring, snooping and supervision by a Chinese firm. This is mindboggling. Why worry about NSA's ECHELON or PRISM now, when the government has just passed a law requiring every packet to be inspected by a Chinese system. 2) Let's learn from those who are best at censorship. Obviously China has significant experience in that area. UK has a lot to catch up, but they're working on it. Think about it -- if somebody told you 10 years ago that the United Kingdom will outsource country-wide Internet traffic monitoring, policing and censoring to Chinese companies, you'd call them a nutjob.
- mtgx 13y agoI find it extremely unfortunate that more of the "democratic" countries are now starting to see China's model of censorship and surveillance of its population as something to aspire to. This is not just a one-off. It's a trend. They all seem to want what the Chinese government has (full control over its population), while still "pretending" it's a democracy and everyone's rights are unharmed.
- smackay 13y agoThere's an unfortunate view in the learned press that business-like governments such as Singapore and China are able to work efficiently and generally get things done and are generally to be admired (though not always publicly). Combine that with the UK Government's Big Sister approach to managing the population and the worst effects of political correctness and you can see where this is all heading - a country safely protected from itself under the watchful gaze of those that know what's best for us - Downton Abbey on a grand scale.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y agoIt's unfortunate but it's true - China has the advantage that without those pesky elections to worry about it can take a longer term view of things and be planning over a 10 year period, not a 5 year period with re-election and all the populist stuff that requires. Obviously that's only part of the story but the discussion certainly becomes more "interesting" than it did in the 80s when democracy seemed to give better results across the board having the moral and economic high ground. Not for a moment endorsing the Chinese approach, just saying that there is a more interesting debate than there used to be.
- dlitz 13y ago"Customers who do not want filtering still have their traffic routed through the system, but matches to Huawei's database are dismissed rather than acted upon." In other words, when they screw up the implementation and it breaks something about your network connection (e.g. IPv6, TCP options, or dozens of other subtle things), there's nothing you'll be able to do to just get raw packets routed over the Internet. This is going to break the network.
- EwanToo 13y agoIt's been in place on TalkTalk's network for 2 years now, it really doesn't break things. It's not particularly aggressive, and only looks for HTTP and HTTPS traffic, not VPNs etc. Whether you agree with it, like it, or want it, is an entirely different question (I don't want it), but it hasn't caused significant issues yet.
- omh 13y agoAre you a TalkTalk customer? I'm genuinely surprised that it isn't causing at least minor problems with some sites for more technical users. I manage a virus-scanning web proxy for our company and this is enough to throw up regular little glitches with all sorts of sites which "just work" when going direct.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoCan you give more details. Presumably the filter is just dropping traffic sent to/from any of the IP addresses or domain names in the blacklist. What are the glitches you're seeing?
- omh 13y agoThe corporate systems for this (usually) operate by proxying all HTTP traffic, so any sites which don't play nicely with a HTTP proxy are affected. I've seen "interesting" problems with some more esoteric HTTP 1.1 features and all sorts of things with streaming sites. You're probably right that this system isn't proxying everything, so its impact would be a lot lower. It all depends on what layer it tries to operate, which we don't really know. I'd love to see an investigation from someone on TalkTalk.
- flexie 13y agoThis Summer of Surveillance get's better and better :-)
- eksith 13y ago"Summer of Surveillance" This should be on a T-shirt. Maybe borrowing the backdrop to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album and cross it with the digital rain form The Matrix. ;)
- est 13y agoThis is not surveillance, it's out right censorship. Technically, censoring porn is no different from censoring anything else. It's only a matter of time for politicians to abuse this power.
- nly 13y ago> This is not surveillance, it's out right censorship. Of course it's surveillance, you think this system doesn't log hits? At this point you have to expect a database query can return what porn sites you're visiting and when.
- alexchamberlain 13y agoSurveillance works better as a saying though.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoThey're blacklisting sites but you don't have to have the filter on your connection. Doesn't censorship require that someone prevent you, or indeed impede you from seeing something. TalkTalk just ask you [ie the person who pays the ISP] if you want to be filtered or not. Perhaps they also filter illegal sites, use of a list from the IWF was mentioned, but who's going to know.
- est 13y agoPorn site 101: every site will constantly change its IP and provide alternative domains to avoid been blocked. Thus if UK need to cut out porn sites completely, they have to implement some kind of keywords based system, which is 100% what a censorship firewall is.
- dfgsfgsd 13y agoUK -> China 2.0
- tomhschmidt 13y agoNah, China is relevant.
- cclogg 13y agoI sit here in Canada on my moose, watching with my binoculars at the craziness unfolding below me (USA) and across from me (UK). I whisper to the other 5 people that live in Canada, "Do you think they see us?" One person responds, "No... not yet..." DUH DUH DUH - to be continued.
- andybak 13y agoI seem to recall Canada has it's share of tech-ignorant, pro-censorship legislators?
- mhurron 13y agoNaive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- HelloMcFly 13y agoThey don't see you, but you see them. http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/07/internet-porn-opt-in-is-censorship-say-canadians.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/07/internet-porn-o...
- jimworm 13y agoIn 2011, Huawei offered to give roughly 50MM GBP's worth of mobile equipment to the London Underground as a gift, which the UK declined due to "national security" reasons. In 2013, the UK is going to pay Huawei to filter all its Internet traffic.
- switch007 13y agoSo now we must use a VPN for everything? of course that instantly means you're guilty of ... something.
- me2i81 13y agoYes, like having a job...
- switch007 13y agoSo now we must use a VPN for everything? of course that instantly means you're guilty of ... something.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoThis is very much about literacy - do we expect firewalls on books children read, on radio they listen to? No. We expect parental supervision Lets get back to blaming the parents please
- adestefan 13y agoThere are people that demand libraries and schools remove books they find inappropriate. This is nothing new and will continue forever.
- rmc 13y agoWell, the UK did have a country wide ban on "promoting homosexuality" in schools ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 ). They don't believe in parental supervision for some things.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoDo books and radio that children have ready access to have hardcore and/or illegal pornography. Schools purchase from book catalogues that are "censored" in this sense and [legal] FTA radio is equally censored. So why shouldn't we allow people to get their internet equally censored. Parental supervision includes using commercial services that censor hardcore pornography.
- ihsw 13y agoWhy didn't we know about this beforehand? I wonder how much China bribed the UK to get them to use Huawei.
- HowardMei 13y agoCisco helped China government build the Great Firewall 10 years ago. It's very advanced and powerful. I don't think Huawei can beat Cisco in the 'net filtering' business at GFW level. I guess it's just a budget limited version :)
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoSeriously, this incredibly misleading headline should get this post removed from HN. Ever since the NSA story broke there seems to be a constant effort to post overly alarming headlines in the style of "look how much worse things are in places outside the US".
- mcintyre1994 13y agoCan you explain why the headline is miseading? The UK is at least as bad as the US because GCHQ and NSA have a special relationship, there's no plot here to make America look good.
- qwyck 13y agoFor me the headline, whilst technically true, was slightly misleading because "Chinese firm Huawei controls UK net filter" suggests a UK-wide net filter that Huawei controls. Whereas the BBC article headline of "Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM" does not suggest that.
- mcintyre1994 13y agoHmm that's true, "Chinese firm Huawei to control proposed UK net filter" would probably be best if it fits. I think this is more of a proposal (albeit one he sees as de facto happening) by the PM than something he's praising.
- kmfrk 13y agoMust be great fun to be a start-up in the UK.
- harrytuttle 13y agoAs an established enterprise company in the UK, we have our "own internet" which we run between our clients. It goes over encrypted point to point IPsec channels over leased POTS and LSE lines. This is because we can't rely on the Internet as a business...
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoHuawei is a UK registered company isn't it, certainly appears to be on Companies House WebCheck database. It also used to be called Huawei Symantec FWIW. It's not a Chinese system, it's using Chinese technology, but then the PM uses Chinese technology, along with the entire government, every day. As do the US President and government presumably. Yes there should be due diligence to ensure that data is not being collected and off-shored. The BBC seem to be going to pains to suggest that this is a massive Chinese espionage coup without actually stating as much. What're the facts here. Chinese made technology is part of the UK internet. ZOMG! If the tech was from Cisco would it really make a difference. >both Huawei and TalkTalk employees are able to add or remove sites independently // Right so TT employ a UK company whose UK employees are able to do their job. I'm not saying oversight isn't necessary but this seems so overplayed unless the BBC have more facts they're choosing not to disclose.
- Peroni 13y agoHuawei is a UK registered company isn't it Yes but that doesn't make them a UK company. Facebook & Google are UK registered companies but you'd never class them as a UK company.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoBut under the same token we should be stopping Facebook or Google from routing our internet traffic as "they're going to be working for the US Government". Indeed there's more evidence that FB and Google are maliciously colluding than there is for Huawei having done anything wrong here. I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilent just that this story has a measure of "Starbucks could be poisoning monarchists to further the aims of USA".
- harrytuttle 13y agoI'd worry if it was Cisco too. They have been caught putting back doors into their kit.
- edent 13y agoOh, it's worse than that. Every house which uses Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) has to have Huawei equipment installed on the premises. http://huaweihg612hacking.wordpress.com/about/ http://huaweihg612hacking.wordpress.com/about/ BT own the monopoly on the copper infrastructure and they are the only company providing high speed ADSL. If you want 80Mbps broadband, you have no choice but to use the Huawei modem. The device is reasonably hackable (and, in fairness, complies with its open source obligations http://www.huaweidevice.com/worldwide/technicaIndex.do?method=gotoProductSupport&productId=3019 http://www.huaweidevice.com/worldwide/technicaIndex.do?metho...) - but there's no real way of knowing what secrets the silicon holds. So, the UK has sold off the line equipment, monitoring filters, and mobile infrastructure to one company. What could possibly go wrong?
- bnc38 13y agoYou're right, we should go with US manufactured silicon. They are far more trustworthy.
- criley2 13y agoYou're being facetious, but the UK and the USA are in some of the tightest relationships of any countries ever. The Anglosphere runs deep with the "Five Eyes". The UK absolutely and fundamentally should trust the US over China -- after all, the UK and the USA have no-holds-barred sharing of intelligence and spying, while the UK and China have literally no pact at all and are adversarial in that regard. USA equipment would be orders of magnitude more safe for the British people, as by forming a pact with the US, the US has responsibility to the British government for the intelligence gathered (and vice versa on the mass amounts they collect on us through GCHQ!) But to pretend that the US is guilty and the UK innocent is absolutely, egregious biased and false. They dragnet over 200 fiber interconnects and literally copy all internet traffic for analysis. They are not our victims, they are our brothers in arms. Don't forget that!
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agobrothers in arms in what? Destroying the Bill of Rights?
- runn1ng 13y agoWell... chinese firm Huawei also made my cellphone should I stop using it and start using US-made or North Korea-made phone instead? ...nah, it's not that much better over there.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agoHow hard would it be to have a script creating millions of email accounts sending billions of random emails including words like "bomb", "attack", "taliban" among others rendering PRISM useless?
- takluyver 13y agoWork on the assumption that PRISM has spam filters at least as good as GMail, so it wouldn't be trivial to overload it with automatically generated content.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agodoesnt this mean that as long as terrorists use software to make their emails like spam the prism is useless?
- riceonmars 13y agoThis is some of the most racist trash I've seen on Hacker News.
- walshemj 13y agoReally compared to the comments about Obama on many sites all that people have commented hear is you cant trust Huawei not to do what MSS says.
- vidarh 13y agoIt has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the concern of having a company that there are concerns might be influenced by the government of a dictatorship that are renowned for using net censorship to maintain its political control, potentially be in control of a network filter that most UK network traffic will end up going through. I don't see anything in the article that complains about Huawei because it is Chinese in itself, as opposed to because of concerns there might be political connections at play, or the generic issue of having such filtering under control of a commercial actor in general.
- tomphoolery 13y agoDoesn't Huawei have components in many of the major phone & laptop manufacturers' products? Or am I thinking of another company?
- dfox 13y agoHuawei is sort of "Chinese Cisco", ie. while they probably have some custom silicon in their products they don't market silicon directly instead focusing on complete devices. So, you are probably thinking of another company.
- da_n 13y agoAs an aside, I find it very interesting that the BBC website is so selective about which articles they allow (moderated) comments on, for example here is an article with a comment form http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23465992 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23465992 It would be good to hear them explain what the process is for deciding which articles are allowed.
- chrischen 13y agoAt least in this case of outsourcing to China, they're outsourcing to the experts!
- ttflee 13y agoWhat irony it would be! The Green Dam project [1] which was advertised by the department of industry and information technology of P.R. China as protection of children from online pornography had been defeated after media exposure year ago. Now the authority in Britain wants to introduce essentially the same stuff! 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort