US asks allies to avoid Huawei | Hacker News Reader

US asks allies to avoid Huawei

cnet.com

85 pointsBender71 comments

Other coverage that made it to the top of HN a few days ago: US asks allies to drop Huawei - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513249

I openly wonder and worry if China will ever reach a point where it has the influence to extend its social credit system beyond its borders? Imagine you can't do business with China unless you agree to be spied on and data collected? Perhaps if you've ever criticized China you suffer further consequences?

There is an interesting battle going on right now with airlines and hotels that list Taiwan as a country. I can see them extending their worldview when they have leverage first.

Don't recognise the spratly islands as china on a map at immigration? Turn around.

You mean in a manner similar to the united states at the moment? :^)

China has some serious issues, but people acting like this is out of the norm is ridiculous. The US is afraid of Chinas rising influence/power and these sorts of articles attacking it are a common tactic.

Like, great - there's no explicit social credit system in the US on an app where you're barred from leaving the country because of who you're friends with. Instead, there's an implicit one where the NSA gets to spy on all your shit (similar to what happens in China), where you're arbitrarily put on a watch list or no-fly list (similar to China), and depending on your ethnicity and/or family you may get unjustly targeted by the state with no real way of defending yourself (again, similar to China).

I'd almost prefer it be done the Chinese way, because at least then the problem is obvious. As it is in the states, like half the country can't even fucking agree that maybe there might be a problem with women & minority rights, immigration, police brutality, etc.

At least in the US you have constitutional rights and somewhat efficient check & balances to limit abuses.

On the other hand, I still agree that the phenomenon of rating people based on data is something that happens in the West too. Whenever you buy insurance, be assured that your whole life is scanned before you get a price.

The US being "afraid of China's rising influence/power" is the perfect cocktail for war. All it needs is a 3rd party to ignite it... Let's hope we can work together.

Another word: The Thucydides Trap

Look I totally agree the U.S and The West has plenty of problems that certainly to a degree match the Chinese issues. I could bang on about the prison industrial complex for hours.

However I think a key difference is that on your issues "women & minority rights, immigration, police brutality" there is actually a huge number of people who disagree with you. I know it's messed up and they are deluded or afraid etc. but the fact is they get to vote too and they would rather women be subjugated, the country be white, Mexicans are rapists. This is (subjectively) "bad people" and lawmakers using democratic institutions to create these systems and enact change, which is fundamentally different IMO.

Ah that fresh whataboutism I’m always sure to see on any HN thread discussing Chinese human rights violations.

No in the U.S. a handful out of a million cops are bad apples. Some legitimately find themselves in difficult-to-interpret life-or-death snap decisions on a daily or weekly basis and they get paid 1/4 or less of what some privileged engineer on HN does. And then a few bad apples plus a few legitimate accidents are over-analyzed as some proof of systemic racism in one of the most diverse countries on earth.

Meanwhile, you want to talk about abuse of minority rights, take a look at China's treatment of its muslim population:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-m... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-m...

> No in the U.S. a handful out of a million cops are bad apples

“One bad apple spoils the whole bunch”.

It may be a small number are directly-acting abusers of minorities.

A much larger number, however, are active defenders of that small number against any accountability.

How so? Look at all the body cam and dash cam legislation.

ACAB.

The entire police system is inherently corrupt and racist and needs to be torn down. Also, regardless of whether or not its a few bad apples (hint: given how extremely fucking common these problems are, it absolutely is not just a few) the point still stands that the "not bad" cops are still guilty of supporting their coworkers and enabling their unacceptable behavior.

No it's not. You have no idea how to build a better criminal justice system. Your armchair HN comment about it is absolutely worthless. It lacks insight, research, balance, and depth of any kind, not to mention practical experience in the system itself. You want to remake a complex system? Go and learn the pros and cons of it, spend a few years in it, then come back and tell people how it can be improved.

Yes, it's better to be obvious - so at least you know you're in for systematic torture by police in order to obtain a confession and everyone is SURE women and minorities don't deserve equal rights.

Joseph Stalin: "This war in not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise."

Substitute "army" "crushing economic leverage"

It seems the top voted comment on every single China story on HN just lately is about the social credit system rather than the linked story. Strange.

The most dangerous thing China export is oppression. Digital&AI surveillance, social credit system, 50 cents online army, and a CCP twisted dogma that authoritarianism + capitalism works (hint: it doesn't. It required blind beliefs from other countries to invest trillions of dollars and give up IPs in order to enter a market that would never be as big as they think)

I don't want to be that guy but as scary and threatening as this all sounds if you just flip the script you can gain some empathy for citizens of every country the NSA spied on. For once, Americans and Europeans are starting to fear the same "invasion" that the rest of the world has been feeling for a while now. I just hope my countries team wins I guess?

That's kind of a weird point to make since the NSA spies on Americans and Europeans too.

Ah that would be illegal. The NSA asks Australia to spy on Americans and report back and visa versa. Which is not against the spirit of the law at all /s.

Just so people out of the loop understand: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d... The british government actually encouraged and even paid 100 million dollars for the nsa(cia) to spy on their citizens.

While china's surveillance system is scary because it's in public, what might actually be more dangerous is the massive surveillance campaigns the US is carrying out. The US is more than happy to provide surveillance to all 5 eye countries.

What? No, not weird at all, the spying on Americans is in behalf of America, e.g. the NSA never gonna help with intel about how to attack America itself but they do so for enemy countries, or maybe just report about it for allies territories -in case allies stop being so in the near future-

I think OP is referring to the spying / invasion of privacy itself as the aggression, not anything subsequent.

People have been using this line of reasoning in the last few years of tensions with Russia. I personally find it very irritating. NSA and CIA have some very bad points on their track records, so that means we need to excuse every other bad actor regardless of frequency and degree? Even if due process in the US is flawed or has slipped up in the past, it's still better than a lot of people get.

The implication is that our own shit has to be 100% spotless before we ask others to improve. Perfection doesn't exist, so that ends up being an excuse for nobody to improve.

I don't think many expect perfection. But instead think of the NSA and CIA as VERY far from perfection.

Makes sense. The NSA can't backdoor the kit if China already have, right?

I understand it's oft more nuanced than this, but the comment about glass houses comes to mind.

I wonder if the financial incentives (i.e. bribes) to avoid China also stipulate buying Cisco or Motorola. If not, I wonder if this will backfire and create a great opportunity for Fujitsu/Ericsson/Nokia to advertise their relative safety and independence.

Is it hard to imagine that this is truly 100% backdoored by China's secret services? Nope. Avoiding it is the smart thing to do. Yes, NSA will try to do the same but China will also ask it's citizens to avoid known NSA backdoored devices.

Yes, they are all bad, but at some point you will have to choose the lesser evil.

What is the "lesser evil" though? It highly depends on how you perceive things and issues.

The lesser evil is the non American or Chinese alternatives. Namely Nokia and Ericsson.

Yes, because the CCP deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to state sponsored spying.

It feels like the NSA has the slightest bit of shame compared to China, culturally, about spying and how it's used. I don't like it, I fight it, and I support the EFF, but I still think the US is unequivocally better than the Chinese government.

And why aren't there other sources of the highest tech networking gear? As someone said, what about the Japanese or the Swedes with their telecom?

Or even open source hardware... it will be years before there is FOSS hardware for ISP routing, but oh well.

Hmmmm, protectionism much? Apple recently issued forecast warnings due to weakened demand. Meanwhile HuaWei is killing it [1]

This nonsense has been going on for a while. It's also happening in banking [huge fines for foreign banks], in car manufacturing [diesel scandal, airbag recall] etc. etc.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/01/technology/huawei-apple-iph...

One has to wonder how much the lobbying arms of US telecom equipment manufacturers have a say in this decision. Companies like Cisco and Juniper must be loving this news. They effectively no longer have to compete with Huawei in numerous markets.

In the UK, Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) Oversight Board exists solely to oversee Huawei’s activities in the UK. You can read the latest report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Huawei’s processes continue to fall short of industry good practice and make it difficult to provide long term assurance. The lack of progress in remediating these is disappointing. NCSC and Huawei are working with the network operators to develop a long-term solution, regarding the lack of lifecycle management around third party components, a new strategic risk to the UK telecommunications networks. Significant work will be required to remediate this issue and provide interim risk management.

A pity. If you're looking for a 8-inch android tablet then the Huawei is a good offer - reasonable price, recent OS version, usb-c connector. I don't know of another to match it.

This is about ISP equipment (routers and such), not consumer stuff.

For now...

You can get the aforementioned Huawei 8-inch tablet in Europe. You can't in the USA. So there does seem to be an impact on Huawei consumer stuff.

Does this extend to devices made by Huawei? Wasn't Google using them as a manufacturer for their phones?

Google devices are now produced by HTC as they bought their smartphone division. In the past, LG, Samsung, HTC and Huawei all produced Google (Nexus/Pixel) phones.

Google bought HTCs smartphone design team (finalized earlier his year), but as far as I've seen there is no reported exclusive manufacturing arrangement tied to that.

Gotcha. In that case probably just built by Foxconn like everything else.

All the 10,000 arguments about "the US does this". Yeah but the US is a democracy, and criticize it all you like but that means something. It means that Trump is there because the average American (accounting for the broken electoral college, voter suppression etc) wanted him to be. And that there are real limits on his power, and a term limit.

Feels like the critics of western democracies who rightfully want to improve them have forgotten that there is a worse level and a distinction between a capitalistic system that is very rigged and one in which the average guy has absolutely no power and no recourse to injustice. Random NSA people knowing stuff they shouldn't isn't the same as 1984 on machine-learning steroids tracking your every thought.

That makes a big difference if you're an American citizen, in America.

Outside its own territory, the US has a long history of being far more aggressive than China, so for someone who is outside both the US and China, it's not at all a given that it's better being spied on by the US than China.

Aggressive than China with countries or individuals? Which country would you feel safer taking a vacation in, having insulted the premier in a viral tweet?

Hard to say, but if you have no interest in visiting either, so it's renditions and extraditions that you have to worry about, then ...

I think OP was asking in regard to individuals from anywhere else in the world visiting countries anywhere else in the world besides US (or NATO). The question you could ask is which country would bomb people with drones based on cellphone metadata? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d738aq/us-drones-...

I get the whole point of we at least have the freedom to discuss this but it doesn't work without its hiccups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras#Government_surve...

> Random NSA people knowing stuff they shouldn't isn't the same as 1984 on machine-learning steroids tracking your every thought.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese government has some sort of "1984 on machine-learning steroids" type stuff as well, so they might not be as different as you think.

Sorry I haven't written clearly so you've missed what I was saying. I mean that the privacy violations of the US are of a lower order than the industrialised scale of the Chinese, and not just collecting and filtering for terrorist flags but plugging into eg. citizen scores.

You realize that automated credit scores are a thing in the US right? China is taking the concept a step further, but it's not unique to them

US credit scores are subject to many laws, including the length of time that data records can affect scores and processes for disputing data records. Individual businesses have the option of ignoring credit scores, e.g. by charging a premium for high-risk customers, or implementing their own proprietary scoring mechanism tailored to specific markets and risk profiles.

This is a world of difference from opaque centralized scores without due process.

> You realize that automated credit scores are a thing in the US right? China is taking the concept a step further, but it's not unique to them

That's a disingenuous and misleading comparison. Your American credit score isn't going to drop if you criticize the president on twitter, or do investigative journalism that makes a government official look bad.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese-blacklist...

I dislike using “democracy” as an excuse to blame the oppressed for their own oppression. Even if democracy is working and there is a strong correlation between policy and the policy preferences of the population (which is a separate but worthwhile debate), it’s simply not an excuse for the government to do oppressive things.

What about ZTE?

Can I ask, who exactly is an ally of the USA at this point?

Up here in Canada, and from talking to my friends in the UK, nobody is a fan of that country, for reasons like:

- It's corrupt-at-best[1], ignorant[2], contradictory[3] and racist[4]-at-best leadership, not to mention the fact that the general populace was ignorant enough to vote for that leadership, even if the popular vote[7] showed someone else won, the corrupt voting system of the states, which allows anyone to be bribed, essentially, means that this turd keeps his office.

- It's constant placement of self-importance above all other countries ('America is the greatest country in the world!'),

- Its tendency for meaningless war[5] - to the point where it actually made an attack on it's own country in the form of 9/11, something (I will pull up the source for this to validate) the majority of people outside the USA know/believe to be true.

- The consistent denial of climate change, and the instance on making it worse - check out the climate change report the US govt. cleverly hid by releasing on Black Friday, for example.[6]

Are there any other countries who, right now, especially under Trump's 'leadership', actually think the USA is OK? The fact that I've been able to pull up 5 sources confirming these things is...disturbing at best.

No offence to anyone who lives in the states, I'm just expressing what I've seen the rest of the world express, and backing it up with references, so I don't get a slew of downvotes.

I imagine my opinion won't be popular to those who live there, but it is quite a real thing, especially the climate change stuff. That's just awful.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/opinion/trump-administrat... [2] https://www.vox.com/2018/10/14/17975644/trump-60-minutes-int... [3] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump... [4] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/05/media/nbc-trump-immigration-a... [5] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-us-militarys-streng... [6] https://globalnews.ca/news/4695268/al-gore-trump-climate-cha... [7] https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary...

I'm from the UK and I'm extremely grateful that the USA is an ally. All politicians are self-interested and every now and again they'll do something I shake my head at but as a general rule the US people are good people and over the years have sacrificed their loved ones and spent breathtakingly large amounts of money to keep my little island (amongst others) in peace during my lifetime for very little in return.

So basically strongarming everyone into using hardware that the US government has a backdoor into.

Not going to lie, simply based on historical US international interventions, I'd rather be spyed on by the Chinese. They're less likely to start a war or overthrow governments.

Really? Do you think the US government would use your information in a more or less restricted way than the Chinese? Would your answer change if you were: a) a citizen of the US, b) a citizen in China, c) a citizen of a country where china has massive influence, d) a citizen of a country where the US has massive influence, e) a citizen of a strongly independent country?

Your answer is so baffling to me that I checked whether you're a real person, and you seem to be. I'd be surprised if either China or the US launched a war because of your personal communications so the question seems to come more down to who you trust to abuse the information more/screw you in an unaccountable way.

Well I live in the UK and am more concerned with Five Eyes monitoring me than China.

China might be able to hack my servers or steal from my PayPal account, if they cared. Five Eyes can ruin my life and leave me destitute, or imprisoned. Or just have me SWATted if I am particularly troublesome.

So that's a fair point, you're more concerned re UK/US because you are citizen/in a controlled country. I think that might be how a lot of people feel, and I agree. But can you see how for the equivalent guy living in someone firmly under China's influence they would be more scared of Chinese surveillance than you are of Five-Eyes? And that it would be further reaching in terms of what sort of actions might lead to repercussions?

Canada. Well, the US is using national security as a reason to urge people to drop Huawei. Meanwhile it's an obvious economic as well as soft power play.

In recent years we've had several trade disputes with the US, illegal immigrants pour in to our borders from the US, and US sponsored environmental activists have disrupted many of our natural resource industries.

So can't say I'm too keen on the US attempting to restrict our trade with China who, for all their faults, haven't been a bad partner.

Well, they aren't exactly an equal partner, but it isn't bad. Your PM signed a mutual extradition treaty with them and you accept any investment they want to make while they don't need to make any concessions to you so they have no reason to be.

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