China used Huawei to hack network, says report
theaustralian.com.au
theaustralian.com.au
Instead of a total ban based on how friendly we feel towards certain countries, a trust but verified approach should be adopted. Establish comprehensive, robust and transparent security requirements and regulations for foreign tech firms to comply and allow them to compete on a level field. Review source code and hardware design for critical components, like what UK and Canada are doing.
A competent government should be able to achieve security without imposing unnecssary costs on consumers and companies using foreign suppliers.
Precisely.
People have short memories and don't seem to see the pot calling the kettle black. I expect better on HN. We have hard evidence that GCHQ/NSA have hacked pretty much everything yet far too often people ignore this to jump on the weakest of speculative hearsay to accuse without hard evidence our Chinese and Russian friends of stooping to our GCHQ/NSA levels of evil-wrong-doing.
Is this what they call xenophobia once you get to the facts?
The foreign hostile government can't legally do anything to me based on the information it gains. At worst it can blackmail me or abuse access to accounts, at which point I'll have the protection of my government.
The domestic government can do a lot of damage with the information it gains and importantly, I have little to no recourse. If it makes up an excuse to seize my funds, I can't really do anything. If a three-letter agency blackmails me into doing something, who's going to protect me?
They're both bad but a foreign government spying on me is less bad than a domestic one.
A bit off topic but it sounded like you were implying that domestic was less bad. I believe the reverse.
It may not be xenophobia, it might just be plain paranoia, either way there is some public diplomacy going on that is carefully crafted to get people to fear the 'enemy' hacking everything. Why attribute everything to malice? Ultimately there is good money to be made in selling routers particularly if you can get a municipality to spend proper money on providing connectivity for a city sized area. Huawei might not be a front for the Chinese army, they could be wanting to make profit from a legitimate product. They know full too well that any backdoor specials could compromise their entire business model to lose all of their contracts to put themselves out of business. Why would they run that risk?
Cui bono applies, by making accusations NSA/GCHQ can get them out of the market so that the only option for customers is to buy equipment that is hackable by them.
As neither a US nor Chinese citizen I don't see the big deal. Who cares if the US or Chinese government steals all your secrets
-Me, 3 weeks ago on this website
Don't buy Huawei hardware. Their incentives to help their customers is far less than their incentives to help their government.
Hard to make a genuine privacy comparison with a straight face.
People saying "but PRISM" have missed the past five years of US politics. Even Obama was getting mad at US tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei
Evan Osnos has some interesting pieces about China and Ai Weiwei:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/ai-weiwei-at-home-...
The scale in which the Chinese Government is bad dwarfs the bad things the US Government may do. No Government is perfect, but there are orders of magnitudes in difference between the badness of the US and that of the Chinese Government.
And ~22% of those are unsentenced detainees.
Doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow easily to break a leg.
Americans have been watching too much TV stating how great their country is, they now repeat it again and again without thinking about it. I've never seen any other free country population doing that anywhere in the world, and I travel a lot. It's even weirder when I come in the Valley and see that from the inside. Boy are you delusional.
As much as I detest America and their government, I'd rather a American hegemony than a Chinese one.
EDIT: typo
It's ridiculous to assert otherwise.
Did the Chinese government spend the last century toppling democratically elected governments and subjecting the populations to the horrors that followed purely for economic gain?
I guess not.
Or the "humanitarian" invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia and Syria without UN Security Council mandate. Especially Lybya, which is much more democratic now with it's slave markets.
Or the protectionism that goes against the WTO treaties.
Or by weaponizing the dollar, which is supposed to be the world's reserve currency, by the means of sanctions.
Should I mentions the use of nuclear weapons and napalm against targets with dense civilian population close by?
China, Russia and the US are all draconian regimes. Some target it's own people, other target people overseas and others target both.
The difference is that one has holywood at it's side to show them saving the world time and time again from aliens, metheors and vile russians / nazis. And people just treat the US government as the good heart kid that makes a few mistakes.
I find China a bit chaotic and Russia too conservative for me (although St. Petersbourg seemed a really cool place).
I'm very critic of the US government, especially regarding foreign policy, but that does not mean I have a problem with regular Americans at all.
On the contrary there are lots o very important initiatives started by Americans. I just wish the focus of the government would shift to them.
To disprove that claim: try to come up with an ethical framework which makes no mention of a higher power as justification, and tell us why it is better than all others. Most land on some variant of utilitarianism and then disagree what the objective function should be.
Maybe it's like a C and a program stack, they just don't teach it in college anymore, because it's not important and you don't need to know about it.
There is a reason the statue of Lin Zexu is in Chatham Square, NYC.
I choose America. At least they don't harvest organs out of dissidents for liking Winnie the Pooh.
You judge a culture by how they treat the bottom rung.
We will see what this answer will be in 50-100 years.
But let's be honest, iphones and android parts are manufactured in china. There are most probably a lot of spying hardware we don't know about that call the mother land.
The idea that there is a lot of spying hardware in an iPhone that Apple doesn't know about is an extraordinary claim.
Should you blindly trust Apple's process?
I don't have to blindly trust anything to know the burden of that proof is on the person making that claim. If you're going to accuse that company of mismanaging their supply chain and compromising the security of their users and their products while crowing publicly otherwise, you'd better come with some evidence.
In this case I don't think it's warranted to try and minimize the rate of error of accidentally not trusting even if you have had some trust before. It's because security is a hard, induction-based problem. You counter it with vigilance in the long-run. Ignoring local rumors with high potential impact adds up.
Additionally unless you truly believe you can't be impacted by privacy theft or think your actions are so petty that they would never be useful to analyze by a bad actor; or, you additionally have Apple stock or some equivalent stake, I don't know why you wouldn't be willing to distrust vehemently. To me it seems like accidentally being wrong about Apple is not worse than any of those things.
Currently the opposite is happening.
It must be true, because some random person said it on the Internet. If you want to assume Apple is doing awful things based on laughably improbable rumors with absolutely no proof, you must believe this is true. Every soldier is actually a genetic clone of an Apple Watch wearer, and you must explicitly accept this as true because I said it's true. I don't have to prove it's right, and you can't prove it's wrong, which by your logic means it must be true with no exceptions.
Unless you truly believe you can't be impacted by DNA theft or your genes are so petty that they would never be useful to the US Army, or you own Apple stock or some other stake, you must believe that Apple is creating an army of clones that will replace you and integrate into society as sleeper agents until the revolution is upon us.
You see how ridiculous that sounds? That is your argument.
Try browsing this 2018 report: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/Section%20301%20FINAL.P...
Most of the indicting evidence is mainly cyber-security related, which is not always the same as exploiting a hardware backdoor. But hardware backdoors are a solid vector for penetrating digital systems and this strategy has been exploited by state actors and corporate actors in domestic and foreign operations before. Like NSA plus Intel chips or their Google data-center taps as revealed through the PRISM leaks. Or Google with their microphones bypassing the recording lights.
So even if the evidence currently falls in Apple's favor, which is fine, there's still no good reason to believe that this will always be true and it's still good security hygiene to go through a cycle of paranoia to ensure that it stays true. China is just the most recent bad actor to add to the pile of institutions to defend against.
I agree that the rumor itself could be weak. But I would also be curious under what conditions you would be willing to take on the possibility of compromised hardware. Would it have to be Apple's CEO taking the issue public, risking their stock price? Would it have to be a verified Apple insider putting their reputation on the line for leaking trade secrets about their pipeline without confronting their superiors first?
Ever wonder why the security model is weakened to a central trust which can reset all device passwords from central Apple command?
Ever wonder why folks are encouraged to trade security (convenience)?
Remember when Edward Snowden put his hoodie over his computer before he typed in his password?
But even if you somehow managed to check it once, nothing proves it's going to be unchanged for years and years you order it.
Now add on top of that you have so many of them in one devices, and there are so many devices, and suddenly you can see how many wooden horses cross the border avec seconds.
Every company in every country is going to jump if their government says them so. I wouldn't expect any telcos or phone manufacturers to act differently if they were paid or gag ordered to act against their customers.
Its getting kind of like I wonder if the world will respond to these things by bringing the tech local. Could I grow my own products closer to the border, where inspection and compliance is much more trustworthy? Well, its a European question .. perhaps it would happen. Perhaps also, the balkanisation of technological manufacturing prowess in the European states, counter to this, might just blow the whole thing out of proportion, too.
NSA would have done the same, that's what countries do. There I said it. But the story, for me, is more about Huawei doing whatever their owner wants. Stay away from them
I can't see what they'd want with my info. If I was working on stuff to be patented or something then maybe ...
If I use an Apple device the Chinese or USAmericans could be surveilling me; Samsung/LG, perhaps the Koreans; Sony/Fujitsu maybe the Japanese ... I wouldn't know either way, nor ever need to care AFAICT.
As the parent suggests, perhaps if you have a lot to lose then paranoia about this might pay off.
You might say, if it pays off then it's not paranoia -- never cross a road and you can't be run over crossing the road, but I'd still consider it paranoid.
So, yeah, ...
The original exploiters of Africa are mad that China is investing and building infrastructure on that continent, which will raise historically low prices.
In the end, more money will be made by the people who actually live and work there, not the international arbitraguers (if no shenanigans are added to the process).
FYI, the majority of work is not done by local workers.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2009-08/05/content_853264...
NSA, if they haven't bugged them already, they already bought the IT staff with money. Third world countries are NSA's dream countries.
At the end of the day, the roads, high-speed rail, bridges, harbors, etc... the Chinese build can't be removed from the continent even if the individual countries do reneg on debt. This could create the kind of stable environment required to attract both Chinese and non-Chinese investors and talent in the future.
China has 10,000 years of documented history and this is a long game, they don't seem as interested in get rich quick schemes as some other civilizations.
Time will tell.
This is an absurd comparison. A normal comparison of hypotheticals would be Europeans today vs. Chinese investments today.
"China has 10,000 years of documented history"
That's an even more absurd claim, wow! Actually it's LESS than half of your claimed period.
"and this is a long game, they don't seem as interested in get rich quick schemes as some other civilizations."
We're not discussing "civilizations" here, but governments. More specifically, the government of a dictatorship.
- China has 10,000+ years of history (adding documented was a mistake)
- Chinese culture plays too big of a role in decision making to ignore it in my opinion, you may disagree.
Loans are rarely ever used for the intended projects. Only, a minuscule part of the loaned funds are used to start the projects. The rest are split to offshore accounts, buy votes and grab more political power.
Do the loaners know that loan will go to waste? Yes and they hope it does. Why? Neo-colonization & Neo-slavery - illusion of independence.
Direct force is old fashioned and too costly. Subtle economic sabotage and puppetry is much better.
With loans, you can threaten debtor countries to depreciate their currencies. Use your multinationals to evaporate domestic competition, stunting their competitiveness. Extract their raw materials and dictate the price. Place of corrupt individuals in key offices and more.
Is China exploiting African countries? Absolutely. Ghanaian gold mining is basically Chinese.
Yet, conventional loans are like carrots placed in front of a horse, pulling it just before it bites. Think Charlie brown.
Chinese will build roads, bridges, airports, power plants instead of giving loans. Yes they'll give jobs to Chinese engineers but the project will be completed. - on time too.
Sure Chinese milk the cow dry but it will eat and grow fatter, instead of leaner.
It's a smart move, but even an elephant can fall when the ground isn't stable ( don't know the appropriate saying in English)
May not be the best model, but sounds better than the "bomb our way to profits" approach we've seen employed elsewhere.
Sure. And US also tried to, more or less, exterminate the natives. Or should go back to Greek /Persian wars? Things change at logarithmic pace and China /Russia are wayyy behind. Russia and the uncle that pays for the niece's college with a catch. China is even more brazen and flush with cash....You Sri Lanka can't pay the $11 BILLION in yearly interest only that a leader signed at one point? We'll just take a major port for 99 years and essentially own you since we can enforce the agreement you signed by sending 300k soldiers in a week's time.
For all their faults, US and EU today actually believe that a free world--within the local limitations--is best for all. US companies didn't get the major Iraq's oil contracts, but at least the oil is on the free market.
I understand how frustrating it can be when common criticisms feel one-sided and unfair. But this isn't the way to defend against them. It only makes the threads even worse.
HN's audience is mostly Western, so whatever biases Western populations have are going to be reflected here. If you want to respond to these with a contrary, minority view, that's great, but you need to do it thoughtfully and substantively, instead of breaking the site guidelines by lashing out and flaming.
In my experience, to argue contrarian positions well requires accepting in advance that you're not going to be able to change the bulk of opinion; the forces determining it are beyond the power of an internet forum to change. There are still plenty of people who agree with you or are willing to listen, if you post thoughtful, substantive comments as HN users should. When you know something that other users are unwilling to take in, the temptation to lash out at them becomes hard to resist–but if you succumb to it, you only discredit the truth, and that helps neither you nor them. It just makes everyone double down on what they already believe.