Google suspends some business with Huawei
reuters.com
reuters.com
So while it's huge Google was told what to do, it's not surprising as this is business as usual. And back to an earlier point... The best place to siphon data in 2019? Your phone. Times have changed, data collection by governments hasn't.
[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/10000/10008/fe...
I can't imagine much useful material comes from wiretapping these days. Maybe once in a while, but the real value largely exists in the application layer, which is obtained in a different way.
Foreign-hosted services seem like they'd be hard to crack, but it's extremely likely their data flows though Cloudflare, Amazon, GCE, or a similar US-based company.
> The surveillance is performed through the use of wiretaps on traditional telecommunications and Internet services in voice, data, and multiservice networks. The LEA delivers a request for a wiretap to the target's service provider, who is responsible for intercepting data communication to and from the individual. The service provider uses the target's IP address or session to determine which of its edge routers handles the target's traffic (data communication). The service provider then intercepts the target's traffic as it passes through the router, and sends a copy of the intercepted traffic to the LEA without the target's knowledge.
Responding to lawful warrants and subpoenas is everyone’s obligation, and has been for hundreds of years under American law, and English law before that. The government is entitled to almost any evidence—it just has to follow the proper process to get it. Lawful intercept just supports that process. That’s also why the FBI having access to US data is fundamentally different than Chinese back doors in US networks. US law enforcement has legal ways to access data flowing in networks to perform their legitimate law enforcement functions. The Chinese have no legitimate reason to access data in US networks.
First of all PRISM was not purely "a system for handling paperwork for lawful intercepts", see [0].
Second your assertion assumes that somehow all requests within these programs abided by "lawful purpose", which we also know is not true. Whether FISA rubber stamps were lawful is subjective and your opinion but not fact. Your answer purports a black and white perspective on the past which I simply don't find appropriately represents all the shades of grey presented by all of the legal angles during this time.
[0] https://dzone.com/articles/nsa-prism-%E2%80%93-mother-all-bi...
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/20/public_advocate_fbi...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surv...
Just because it was never settled that way doesn't change the history of it.
You could have made the argument you were trying to make colorably and defensibly. All you had to do was not try to sound like you'd been "read in" to NSA's SIGINT programs. But, like I said above: you managed to cite one of the few NSA program examples that is in fact totally banal and, ironically, an almost perfect example of lawful intercept.
As I said above: it's not hard to come up with cases where NSA is doing things that appear to contravene US law, but you managed to cite the one instance where all they're managing is paperwork.
Law enforcement still had to go to a judge, get a court order, and take it to the ISP. The ISP could then configure the devices to siphon off traffic from a single customer to a collection device.
The same functionality and process has existed in phone networks basically since they became electronically switched.
Remember the context of my conversation was 2010-2011 which was pre-Snowden. It's likely state, local and national agencies have less of an interest, today, at route/switch infrastructure simply because of the post-Snowden crypto push.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvp8ga/the-fbi-wants-to-w...
It was later discovered the NSA capability was the direct result of tapping fiber optic cables between international data centers, nothing to do with lawful intercept capabilities.
The assertion that there's going to be consequences seems... inevitable? To me at least.
Yes, and these actions are the US finally shooting back after enduring years of industrial espionage, forced technology transfers, and market access restrictions.
But can't you reverse engineer your phone and see what it's doing? And can't you monitor the network data it's sending? With a backdoor in long haul transport gear, academics, researchers, random hackers, watchdog groups, journalists, competitors, etc, don't have the ability to monitor for bad behavior.
I honestly believe that the theoretical DMA backdoor attack (and most other similar attacks) have been mitigated thoroughly. I am much more concerned about secretly held 0days (RCE) and most concerned about warrantless orders against cloud storage.
https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.... p41
Are you citing "To protect the device from vulnerabilities in network processor firmware, network interfaces including Wi-Fi and baseband have limited access to application processor memory. When USB or SDIO is used to interface with the network processor, the network processor can’t initiate Direct Memory Access (DMA) transactions to the application processor. When PCIe is used, each network processor is on its own isolated PCIe bus. An IOMMU on each PCIe bus limits the network processor’s DMA access to pages of memory containing its network packets or control structures."? Correct?
The attention to hardware isolation and separation is appreciated, but I don't hold my breath for iBoot and SEPOS protecting an iPhone from powerful adversaries.
I think that these mechanisms completely frustrate "bulk" in-field collection efforts; for example, scanning all phones at DUI checkpoints.
No technical control is perfect. If you personally piss off a nation state adversary, they are more likely to yeet you off to a black site and hit you with a wrench until you cough up your passcode.
Surely, someone will break iBoot, and surely, someone will break SEPOS. And surely, someone will chain a kernel exploit with a userspace exploit [0]. And surely, someone will leak the signing keys for a widely deployed cheap android phone [1]. And surely, someone will push 777 permissions to a cloud provider [2]. And most surely, powerful government adversaries will hold brutal exploits close to their chest in the service of power and politics [3].
So I guess, if you want to breath freely: host your infrastructure yourself where feasible. Choose providers who respect your privacy. Make a modest but financially fair donation to the EFF. Become politically active. Use better practices - not best - to avoid fatiguing yourself in the windmill chasing effort of being Perfectly Secure. Most importantly, stay awake and aware and ready to fight.
0 https://github.com/Cryptogenic/Exploit-Writeups/blob/master/...
1 https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/16/dji_private_keys_le...
2 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/salesforce-says-a-major-issu...
3 https://www.wired.com/story/eternalblue-leaked-nsa-spy-tool-...
After 9-11, the FBI's mandate was expanded from investigating terrorist attacks to include preventing them from occurring.
Tell me if I am mistaken, but in these specific case it looks more to me like forbidding customers and companies from using foreign made secure vaults because the government can't force them to secretly provide a master key.
Then sure, the argument is also valid that these vault makers could be providing a master key to their respective governments, but that would be a different argument and different enforcement.
However, if I were Apple, I'd be really worried about retaliation. Apple is wholly dependent on manufacturing in China and its supply chain, and even small disruptions could cause huge mounts of pain.
In market share they lead Apple in China, and they ship more units.
Trying to act like they’re a low end bit player is ludicrous. They’re the Samsung of China now, and on track to overtake Samsung globally.
Huawei is #2 or #1 by unit shipment. That doesn't immediately make them a "leading" Premium Smartphone maker. I could sell 200M of $200 Phones and 10M of $700 Phones. Would that make them leading? Would that make them premium?
in China, they are now the most expensive phones, people are willing to pay more $$$ to get the top of the line Huawei than an iPhone which used to be the previous "look am me, I'm rich and trendy" device to own there. It's one reason why iPhone sales in China have declined.
There's no world in which you can't claim they are not a world leading phone manufacturer and that their devices aren't premium. Sure, the heavy modded Android sucks and is probably spyware and you can't get vanilla android on it, but hardware wise, it is premium. The P30 Pro runs for almost $1000.
People who live in the US kind of live in a reality distortion field around Apple, and are somewhat blind to what is happening in Europe and Asia. And this complacence is a pretty bad way to evaluate your competitors.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Huawei-threatening-Samsung-for...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/12/18221598/huawei-apple-chi...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/10/18285123/huawei-p30-pro-r...
>People who live in the US kind of live in a reality distortion field around Apple, and are somewhat blind to what is happening in Europe and Asia. And this complacence is a pretty bad way to evaluate your competitors.
It isn't RDF, it is "leading premium manufacture" does mean what you think it means. It would be more accurate if it was "leading premium Android manufacturers".
Leading premium manufacturer means largest volume of premium smartphones sold. Huawei doesn't sell a lot of P30 (although I agree it's a premium device).
https://www.huaweicentral.com/huawei-p30-series-single-day-s...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/01/huawei-ahead-of-apple-in-q1-...
In 2018, they shipped 16 million P20s in 9 months. And they shipped 100,000 in a single day which could translate to 3 million units a month or 27 million in 9 months, but even if they ship 20 million in 9 months which is 25% more than the P20 you can’t wave you hands and act like no one is buying these phones.
No one, me or the previous one who replied said anything about P20 not selling. Nor the P30. It is simply not leading premium Smartphone, where Smartphone here is inclusive of iOS. Not by commonly used matrix, where the word leading would directly referred to market ASP and not leading as in technically. And I said this again, it would be correct if the sentence was leading premium Android Smartphone. Or Leading Smartphone ( Excluding Android ) or Leading Android would also be correct.
And I am out.
They build them there because all the supply chain is already there. In Shenzhen, the capacitors, resistors, PCBs and most chips are sourced in bulk from around the block. That's something no other country in the West or even East has and it's such a complex interconnected ecosystem that you can't replicate it anywhere else right now.
Most of the CNC, tooling and moulding craftsmen are there as well, the west has far too few left to be able to take over such volumes. Training so many can take years and that's assuming you even find enough people willing to be trained.
It's like their transport latency is so low and reliable that they don't need as much buffering. It's amazing to see what small and large quantity production lines can look like.
Reading this, I begin to scratch head hearing people complaining about factories being squeezed out towards boundaries of Shenzhen municipality.
I remember people thinking of that as some end of the world event.
An iPhone built in the US from domestic components would probably cost more than most peoples' cars.
And Tesla is well behind the major car manufacturers in using automation.
can you recommend any sources for learning more about the state of automated CE/smartphone manufacturing, or this based on personal experience?
Why hasn't any other auto manufacturer thought of this?!
Tesla doesn't have this problem you see.
Vietnam also has hundreds of thousands of CNC, toolings and craftmen to produce in Samsung's volume. This supply chain narrative is something Apple marketing folks invented to justify their outsourcing. Trump's trade war with China, as many contract manufacturer move out of China, will prove none of that supply chain myth is true within a year or two.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-an...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-...
This particular leverage is also why iMessage isn't blocked in China.
If imessages are backed up to icloud, then the govt will have keys to see them. But if a user doesn't back up, I was under the impression not even apple could decrypt iMessages.
China, a country which mandates spyware be installed on phones. Which uses deep packet inspection to block access to foreign websites, that bans VPNs in app stores. China, a country which forces the population of Xinjiang to install Jingwang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi), a spyware app so they can grab your on-device files. Which has deployed facial recognition cameras in many cities. Which blocked access to Wikipedi because it switched to HTTPS.
That China, you think, is going to allow all of that to be circumvented just by buying an iPhone? Right. Chinese Government: "You're not allowed to use VPNs. But if you're in Xinjiang, and you need privacy, we recommend buying an iPhone, since it doesn't work with Jingwang, nor deep packet inspection. Just tell the police you have an iPhone, and we'll wave the usual regulations we impose on Android devices."
Last time I was in Xinjiang, people there had iPhones. No one believes iMessage would be snoop proof.
As far as I can tell, the way iMessage works according to Apple's documentation, is that endpoints generate 1280-bit RSA encryption keys, hold the private keys on the device, but publish the public keys to a centralized IDS Directory Server. Note that their published security documents curiously don't say anything about man-in-the-middle mitigation, and indeed, MITM attacks against iMessage on IOS9 were publicly documented.
Now, what do you know about where the IDS servers are located in China, and who controls them? Because if Apple doesn't control them, and control them in a way that makes them impossible to spoof, then it is easy for the Chinese government to attack iMessage.
Thus, Tim Cook could say "We haven't put any backdoors into iMessage for the Chinese government and it is end to end encrypted" and it would be a true statement, but also Apple engineers could know full well the IDS in China could be subject to a MITM.
A plausible way this could happen, after Apple moved the iCloud keys to China, is that the Chinese government could request to intercept communications from a particular user, and the public keys of every recipient that user communicates with could be replaced with a MITM key so they can rely the messages and see the unencrypted content.
We don't know, but what we do know is that iMessage has been attacked with MITM before, and we know the PRC isn't going to let unbreakable encryption be sold to Uighurs in Xinjiang. It defies logic.
The one exception is apparently Apple's keychain as per https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/01/16/icloud-i.... But, if the hardware used to enforce the security is different in China, even that could be cracked.
As an autocracy, China could easily compensate workers for any loss of work. But another obvious answer is that if Apple were banned in China, Huawei and Xiaomi would pick up the slack.
If China really wanted to, they could shut down all iPhone production for the immediate future.
Nationalism is a play card in every country.
I think this view is too narrow. For the Chinese government, there is something more important than revenge. Why kick that cash machine out of your country if it still paying your people paid and make then happy?
I guess the retaliation will come in a different form, even something out of the trade section maybe, depends on what's on Xi's table.
I predict their own Android fork and China-focused app store will do fine in China, but struggle big time in other markets.
It was the one and only Chinese brand with whom Google made a Nexus phone in the past — at least in part to lessen their enthusiasm in throwing out Google market in Western countries
If one thing the last 50 years has taught us is that whatever the US can do an Asian competitor can do as well.
Generalized, I think it's safe to assume any developed country willing to invest in manufacturing is capable of doing what any other country can do [in manufacturing] as well.
I guess you don't get the relative security of app stores, and there's no widespread culture of free apps on phones like on PCs.
I'd really love, not a new phone or OS, but just an app store that works under a different model. Cheap or free for developers to post, but curated to exclude the most predatory forms of monetization.
How do we solve the trusted app problem on PCs?
We don't install whatever random thing comes up in google. We look for a trusted recommendation.
App stores are just teaching us that it's ok to install any app, which is not necessarily the best security model.
The Chinese market on the other hand will always have users, is huge and I presume most developers won't be willing to give up on it. If they do, someone else will serve their customers and might become a future competitor globally.
China-focused apps will only have to re-implement google services. That sound a lot easier to me than supporting an entirely different OS. If those versions can run on google phones as well, devs have the option to drop the play store version down the line to save cost.
I wouldn't bet a lot on it, but this might be the best chance we ever had to get a real play store competitor.
Palm was a dominant mobile platform until Palm nuked itself with 5 years of clownade with Palm OS 6
Symbian was the biggest, most dominant mobile OS globally until Nokia didn't decide to simply trow it away.
JM2E was the most largely adapted app platform, even into early Android years, until Oracle/Sun simply stopped licensing it...
Now think just how thin is the ice Google is on now with it flirting with idea of "rebooting" Android with Fucsia
I'm not familiar with Palm OS, but Symbian and JM2E both has the iPhone and Android OSs as growing threats. Google hasn't officially stated that it is rebooting Android, and even if they did (and did it right), there isn't a major alternative lurking around the corner...
They have experience on chat and payment software and infrastructure system used by millions of people in their country.
While if Huawei uses the Android open source base, the only thing they have to do is entice developers to submit another copy of their app to their store, which is a much lower barrier than the one MS faced to develop a whole new ecosystem
white people have a way of saying incredibly insulting, demeaning things about non-whites in a way that it is acceptable in common discourse.
statement such as these need to be called out for what they are - biased opinions based on an irrational fear of "the chinese"
How do you even know he or she is white? Why racialize a comment in this manner?
You've assigned a race to another poster based on your own preconceptions of the attitudes and behaviors of members of that race (kicking off your reply to snaky with "white people have a way of [...]") and lumped all members of a race together (accusing all white people of making derogatory statements regarding other races).
The Shenzhen ecosystem has taken the idea of 'Open' and 'Open Source' further than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Huawei the company is built on that kind of information sharing. I highly doubt it's alien to Huawei.
[2] https://convidera.com/article/shenzhen-chinas-ecosystem-for-...
For example, there are a ton of SDKs that provide push notifications, such as Baidu, Tencent, etc...
There are also "super apps", such as WeChat, that offer their own API surface and can be preferable to some app devs.
Then there are some things, such as "advertising id", which none of these SDKs provide (at the moment?).
So yeah, the answer is somewhere between "it's complicated" and "no one".
then, I think they have a chance to attract app developers. Otherwise, I doubt it.
For the rest of the world, it would be completely different story. It is hard to imagine Huawei won't loss huge market share from the EU and rest of the world without Google's Play Store.
Why would they need it to be popular anywhere other than China?
> SCMP is owned by Alibaba, they're far from impartial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post .
And given the PRC's enormous, well-documented investments into perverting the truth and framing the narrative worldwide, more developed than most; even an arm's length relationship is too close for me to put that sort of trust into a a venture like this.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/uk-says-huawei-equip...
Here is a helpful read, http://zeihan.com/my-way-or-the-huawei/
Google Android in no longer a universal platform and moving forward, I doubt I'll ever buy anything again Google or US related again in terms of tech.
This si no longer a China vs US issue, it's the US vs the world.
Europeans are really critical of China and their policies (esp. their human rights record). But they don't like the US that much more (apart from the Brits) and with a struggling economy you really don't want to make them choose between money and ideology.
Anti-US circlejerk is mostly confined in Western europe (sans Brits). Eastern europe has totally different sentiment.
Yeah, wow, it must be completely impossible for someone without decades of US residency or decades of intense interest in the US to understand the US government!
I like to flatter myself that after 58 years of living in the US, I have recently started to be able to predict most of the major decisions of the US government. (Youtube videos of speeches and interviews by Peter Zeihan and George Friedman helped me in my understanding. Most of the senior editors and reporters at, e.g., the New York Times and the Washington Post, although passionately interested in the US government, have only a shallow understanding of it IMO.)
Even if democracy in West (or at home) is far from perfect, it's lightyears ahead of China.
So has the US though, even on it's allies as Snowden showed us.
In addition australia has the same stance as nearly every western country when it comes to Huawei, namely "only we get to spy on our people, so get out"
I'm sure that the EU/australia/the west is breathing a sigh of relief that Trump did this instead of forcing them to make up some more draconian law about foreign device mfg that would have unintended consequences.
[0]:https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Mi-Play-Global-Version-5_84-...
That said, others have only had good experiences. YMMV.
[0]:https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-theft-bonus-program-...
Huawei could sue the Australian government over the ban: https://www.afr.com/business/telecommunications/huawei-won-t...
Now obviously, every country has its own agenda, but there are (arguably) stronger reasons to be concerned about China than most others. They are undemocratic and suppress significant parts of their population (the Uighurs, Tibetans, Christians, ..), don't believe in free speech or freedom of religion, but also have a large economy and military presence. Now of course, other countries are not saints, but the differences with China (and in particular its disregard for human rights) make future disagreement much more likely.
This is just an expansion of official government policy put in place during the Obama administration to the rest of the private sector.
tl;dr: this isn't new territory for Huawei.
Chinese companies, on the other hand, have no such recourse against their government.
Show me the push back to the following:
- NSA backdooring
- The whole Prisma scandal
- The current trade war with China
And tell me how EU governments benefit from US companies avoiding taxes, and repatriating revenues generated in the European market to the US.
The US is a highly unreliable, politicized provider. The US uses technology to steal data and taxes from other countries. And abuses its position to impose its will.
We can not build our digital infrastructure like this anymore.
I assume EU governments are following this very closely.
It's good for me¹. I want a device that does no phone home to its mothership outside my control. This requires Googles Services not to be installed.
I don't doubt that many nevertheless still use Googles Services.
¹ compared to Googles Android. I'm still desperately waiting for a device with mainline Linux support without blobs.
Will never happen.
Apart from that the other options you have, are (in random order): /e/, PureOS, KaiOS, SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, postmarketOS, among others.
That's not going to be good enough for Huawei.
Similarly, all of those alternative OSes aren't going to work if they're not binary, and more importantly API compatible with Android + GMS.
The question is rather: given that it is FOSS is it good enough for them to extend the functionality on the short-term?
> Similarly, all of those alternative OSes aren't going to work if they're not binary, and more importantly API compatible with Android + GMS.
KaiOS has some compatibility (by design not fully compatible).
SailfishOS has an Android emulator. Other OSes could also use one such as Anbox.
/e/ and LineageOS are binary and API compatible with Android.
GMS is an issue, but given that Google is under a magnifying glass concerning monopoly position related to Android in EU I have some hope that alternatives for GMS (or FOSS implementations) could happen.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/huawei-stop-providing-bootloa...
If you do unlock the device and install Lineage OS (which doesn't support more than a few devices), you now basically have a crappy camera app, probably your FreeBuds won't work properly anymore and you really should have bought a different phone.
I love Lineage OS and used it for years (OPO and other phones). It would ruin my P30P though.
This news, if true, will affect the devices made by Huawei and sold worldwide though.
Google is fighting hard to keep their app store on Huawei devices, because they don't want 10Ms of users to force-adopt alternative app stores.
Huawei's products are vulnerable by default, anyone can look up the applicable CVEs and run the proof of concept code for said CVE to pop a shell. China doesn't have exclusive access :)
Remember that Huawei settled out of court to the 'allegation' that they copied Cisco's source code.
So, are Facebook a front for the CIA?
Heck, if you look at where Chinese officials try to stash their money and their families, it's clear they trust Western countries a lot more too.
As an EU citizen, idk, China seems more locally focused, the U.S reaches everywhere. Speaking of NZ, the whole Kim Dotcom situation makes it look like a U.S.vassal state, honestly.
Not only that, the ban encourages a long term move away from US-based tech as alternatives are needed within China. This new tech will ultimately be available worldwide, but no longer owned or controlled by US companies.
As someone from neither China or US, it seems crazy. It’s one thing to ban Huawei from your own markets for security concerns, but by making such a heavy handed ban on working with them, the US government seem to be making the US less secure short term, but also US companies will be less competitive and less influential in the world long term.
China blocked Google play years ago and repeatedly blocks every attempt Google tries to make to relaunch back into china [0] so they did that a long time ago.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/google-misses-out-on-billion...
Like they have no choice with tax laws. Or no choice with cartel laws. Or no choice with data protection laws.
They are agressively trying to circumvent many laws all the times to extend their monopoly and grow their profits. They have multi-billion fines from the EU and several member states pending and no somewhat critical thinking citizen would claim that EU has been particularly tough on their monopoly and tax evasions.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18531350/google-android-q-...
The first is easy to explain. The US likes being number 1, and if anyone else, whether the Chinese or the Japanese or the Indians looks like they're going to be number 1, the US doesn't like it.
The second is this: for the last 40-50 years, the US and China have been in a hugely mutually beneficial relationship, at least on the corporate level. American companies outsourced many of its lower wage lower skilled manufacturing to China and China has saved those companies a ton of money and made their owners a lot more profit. In order for China's economy to keep growing though, the Chinese believed, correctly, that they needed to move up the food chain since their labor is not as cheap as it once was. So they identified 10 "industries of the future" where they want their companies to dominate. American companies are, once again correctly, worried that since these are the industries that we would also like to dominate, that the Chinese, if they are successful, will literally eat our lunch.
There's a bunch of other stuff relating to the South China Sea, Taiwan, forced IP transfer, hacking, trade subsidies, etc. that are also causing tensions, but those two are probably the biggest ones.
They may not state it publicly but I think all the industrialied producer economies Fron the US to Europe and Asia are scared to death of the implications China 2025 has for there own high-tech high-value industries.
Huawei stole secrets from Nortel that eventually caused it to collapse, it only got worse from there. They've stolen IP from many other countries, and at this point the US is accusing them of not just stealing IP actual actually working with Chinese intelligence to make sure all Huawei devices can be hacked by China.
Your being British and out of the loop is pretty bad because your government is just as much of a target.
* Trump has been on at China for a long time.
* US establishment growing increasingly worried about the sophistication of Chinese tech and are viewing Huawei as a strategic threat. Especially since the latest generation of Chinese telecoms tech has arguably leapfrogged western offerings. Free trade works brilliantly until you stop being the top dog.
* NSA doesn't the idea of Chinese being able to use their tech to spy on US. They'd prefer domestic US companies build tech to spy on us for them instead.
* "National security concerns" is kind of a "get of jail free card" when it comes to escaping WTO rules on protectionism, so it fits in pretty well with the rest of the trade war.
They do talk about [17m04+] the possibility of the network being shutdown and the fallout of that, and have a dramatisation.
Nonetheless the NSA is trying to pretend that Huawei is currently installing backdoors.
The US perceives the economic relationship with China to be one way. Prior to the recent trade flair ups, China was given preferential treatment, perhaps as part of a strategy to create a geopolitical ally instead of an enemy through trade. This appeared to be working for several decades with China opening up to the world and giving the appearance of freer markets and more democratization as they became wealthier. As their economy continued to grow and modernize, the trade imbalance between the United States became huge ($539 Billion in imports in 2018, only $120 Billion in exports [0]). This means that each year hundreds of billions of dollars flows directly from the US economy into the Chinese economy. In addition, with President Xi the country appears to be sliding back towards a nationalistic totalitarianism.
While both countries can still benefit from this trade, the US government is taking the stance that China has been benefiting and the US has not. The reasons that are most often cited are that the US was open to almost all Chinese imports, while many US imports were restricted or taxed more heavily than local goods [1]. Worse than that, if a US company wanted to operate in China, they were required to do so through Chinese partners that would own half of a joint venture, and intellectual property would be shared with them. After a short term benefit, all of a sudden the Chinese partner would be running their own factories, and competing against the US company with the US companies own technology. These companies are often state owned and receive funding that is considered to be anti free trade and is generally illegal in most international agreements (see the legal squabbles between Airbus and Boeing for reference). Finally the US company would be squeezed by the Chinese government (national or local), and all sorts of issues that wouldn't impact the local company would mysteriously befall the foreign company. After local Chinese companies were created, funded and protected in China by the Chinese government, they could compete with their former US partners around the world.
Therefore while the US market was open to China, the Chinese market is not really open to the US. Finally, it has been widely known for a long time that China hosts state sponsored industrial espionage units that hack companies around the world and steal intellectual property to provide to Chinese companies[2]. US companies will spend billions of dollars researching how to do something, and then a Chinese company can just start producing it, sometimes even before the US company does. Finally, it seems like laws are not enforced in favor of US victims. If a US company steals and sells Chinese IP, they can be successfully sued in US courts. If a Chinese company steals and sells US IP, no enforcement is taken. This is a huge problem especially for small inventors, the moment they create something they lose the market to cheap Chinese knockoffs, and have no power to protect their brand or invention.
For these reasons and others, China is viewed as having a predatory trade relationship with the United States. I've heard that Huawei in particular is known to have gotten a big jump by outright stealing Cisco's router and selling it[3], and has continued with similar tactics, alongside the accusations that it is essentially an arm of Chinese intelligence services and provides backdoors in their products. I've actually heard from Chinese friends that Huawei was very proud of their ability to steal Cisco's router and it is used as a case study.
And while all this is happening, the US had a special trade relationship with China such that it was cheaper to ship goods to individuals in the US from China, instead of from inside the US itself[4].
So basically a viewpoint that I tend to agree with is that this is all about resetting the trade relationship to a normal one between peers. The US is no longer supporting a third world country, but dealing with a fellow world power that is fully capable of taking care of itself. I am confused myself why it is being portrayed any other way, and what the motivations are for doing so. It seems to me that the US has demands to be treated fairly and have an equal trading relationship (according to their point of view), and if that doesn't happen the US can impose tariffs that will rebalance trade between the two countries.
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-all-the-stuff-the-us... [1] https://www.export.gov/article?id=China-Import-Tariffs [2] (pdf) https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/services/pdf... [3] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...
Fairly sure you're wrong on this, the US now wants an advantageous relationship. Not an even score.
Just returning to even ground would let China keep the advantages it has reaped.
I expect that the tariffs will stay in place permanently because any acceptable deal would require the Chinese publicly harassing their own people on behalf of the US government, and there is no way the US could enforce that. So the easiest solution are tariffs that will rebalance trade naturally, and probably the world polarizing into two main economic zones, US-centric and China-centric. And then we all just try not to kill each other for the forseeable future.
The thing that really annoys me about this is that if China would just be patient and play by the rules, be genuinely friendly to its neighbors, it would take them like 20 or 30 years longer but then the whole world would just place the crown on their head and they would peacefully become the world's only superpower. Naturally, maybe even justly. Now we all get misery because of impatience.
just playing the devils advocate but, couldn’t the same have be said about the us (e.g imf, world bank, regime change wars etc)?
China is an economic threat because it will inevitably be superior to the US economy. India is an economic threat for the same reason.
This is ridiculous. No one thinks it is one way. The spanish sending south american gold back to spain was one way.
What is actually happening, is some people think it is unfairly biased towards China.
Could this nudge an interesting (good/bad) development in open source?
Let's face it, the "app economy" doesn't exist unless you're on iOS and can count on a paying audience. On Android, your only hope for monetization is a free to play Clash of Clans/Candy Crush clone that's jam-packed with ads, tracking and microtransactions.
"Suspends some business" is an understatement.
What I read apps remain supported, but (security) updates to the firmware will stop. So Google continues to sell user data and the NSA has even easier access.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-huaweitech/chin... >>The U.S. Commerce Department said on Wednesday it is adding Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and 70 affiliates to its so-called “Entity List” - a move that bans the telecom giant from buying parts and components from U.S. companies without U.S. government approval.
I hope this triggers a move towards more decentralization of smartphone infrastructure (and the internet in general), hardware to software.
On the other hand, I wonder how Huawei / China will retaliate. Wouldn't be surprised if this kills all Google manufacturing prospects in China which pretty much kills Google hardware.
It's a bit of a reminder that Google is under US jurisdiction and there's a point to be made that, no matter what they promise you, if the US wants their data, they get their data.
More competition can only be good, if this leads to the Chinese creating a third major platform, I welcome it. If they open source it, they may even have success outside of China.
This is a lark?
The only thing the CPC is interested in is total and absolute control of the citizenry.
They'd love to have a platform for which they didn't have to monitor with gazillions of staff, and have police on corners to ensure 'government monitoring' is properly installed.
Imagine if the CPC could ensure total thought control without all the overhead?
That is exactly the objective.
There's nothing stopping 1 billion people from developing a mobile platform - or any kind of platform for that matter in 2019.
They can do it now. Or yesterday.
And the 'whole world' could be using it.
Consider for a moment why it's not happening?
Why isn't the entire world using software or hosted solutions for all of our SaaS needs in India and China?
Given that the existential nature of the Chinese economy is intertwined with the CPC, I don't think any good will come of this.
A lot of the comments and thinking abound 'trade with China' are centered around a view that it's a normal economy, but it isn't, so the regular rules don't quite apply.
In the grand grand scheme of things, Huawei is a small thing, we're seeing a realignment of forces given the new reality of China's competitive powers, irrespective of anything else.
It's hard to say where the new equilibrium will land.
Because the tech has been developed in the US, and the US has lead in it ever since.
> Given that the existential nature of the Chinese economy is intertwined with the CPC, I don't think any good will come of this.
I mean, the article being discussed here shows that US corporations are tools of US foreign policy. Yes, it's a different style of control, but it's control nonetheless.
And before the notorious flaggers run wild: I don't like the Chinese model. I don't particularly like the US model either though. I'm not judging those that profit from it for also liking it. I'm sure I would, too.
I do believe that competition limits the exploits. If there's an alternative, you have to fear losing your customers (and their money), so you limit what you do to them. If there isn't any, why would you? Right now, the competition is basically only Apple vs Google. Both USA, both from California. A bit more diversity would be nice.
I'd love some real competition. Chinese, Russian, European alternatives. I would have a hard time trusting Chinese or Russian systems, maybe rightfully, maybe because decades of Propaganda have taken their toll. I'd still like to see them.
As non-American (and non-Chinese I assume), the Chinese do not care about you, but the Americans very much do.
Neither can be trusted to retain a glass of water, let alone personally identifying information that can spur advertising campaigns and sway elections in countries around the world.
Is this a "force people to buy USA manufactured goods; but blame it on the Chinese" attempt?
Likewise, Google has almost zero consumer exposure in China, so all they can do is interrupt their ability to give Chinese companies money for goods and services, which seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The Chinese government doesn't want the west to grow new supply chains and find new manufacturing centers just because of one trade war, it wouldn't be according to their goals.
Imagine in 2021 the Chinese government mandates that every Chinese smartphone manufacturer needs to switch to ChAndroid for all of their product lines, with a single unified app store, whether they sell the phones inside or outside of China. Well, fully half of the top smartphone companies in the world are Chinese. So all of a sudden Google would lose the ability to monetize on almost half of the ecosystem.
And if it were open and successful, other Android manufacturers could move over. Samsung would LOVE the ability to get a piece of the search and app revenue on every one of their phones. Right now they're locked out because of Google's licensing agreement for Android, but they must look at how much money Google pays Apple every year to be the default search provider very longingly.
An OS mandated by the Chinese government. That’s pretty much the opposite open in multiple ways.
Android is open source, these vendors are free to fork and do whatever.
The lion's haul for Google is not 'app store sales' in China , it's search.
Android is not about App Store, that's just a marginal thing - it's about owning and controlling search everywhere. It's a means to extend their primary product.
Samsung can make it's own app store tomorrow, but they're not going to get 'Google Search' - which is what people want - so they'll have to do for now.
As far as Huawei ... well, open trade can only be had by like economies. If one economy can externalize pollution, labour costs, healthcare, and the other can't - then there cannot be open trade. Same thing for more contentious issues such as IP theft, foreign ownership rules, capital controls, state control of enterprises.
Huawei is the example, the tip of the spear. It hardly even matters what the degree of materiality is, that said, there should be not question that there's existential risk with Huawei. The CCP can require Huawei to do whatever, at any time, and Huawei will happily comply.
China can't enjoy the advantages of a 'developing economy' while trying to put 1st tier industries form advanced economies out of business, it's not going to sit well.
So we saw the big rise of China, now they're slowing down to 'nice growth' instead of crazy growth, they're grabbing land and industry so the West is wary. Meaning the trade rules will change.
This is the new normal.
What do you mean, tomorrow? Go to http://samsungapps.com/ and start to sell all your apps on Samsung Galaxy Store!
It sure seems like the future is more and more walls, more and more reactionary defensive measures. Nobody seems to have any inclination to resist this trend.
For instance gdpr, copyright directive, tax laws (was a story the other day about you having to comply with a lot of local tax laws - consider what happens if you are unable or unwilling to comply with 1000s of special snowflake tax rules, presumably the authority rests on blocking).
These examples are not quite freedom of speech, but will lead to a breaking apart of the internet all the same.
Are any of these stores near the quality levels that Western audiences expect? My experience with software from China was consistently bad. Even the AliExpress web site looks like a cobbled together, barely working mess that people only put up with because of the low prices of the goods you can buy there, which won't work for app stores.
One might be able to stretch this to 'US aids potential cyber attacks in China' since phones in China might no longer receive security updates in Android.
But Huawei has a large marketshare outside China. E.g. in Europe they are currently neck-to-neck with Apple in smartphone sales.
you can get updates through their own app store AppGallery, but your paid apps are paid through Google, so don't expect them in order store, tying your money to Google ecosystem was bad idea in first place
Probably not after Android 8.
It has always annoyed me but I guess events like this proves why they've chosen to do it.
A version of Android/replacement to Android that is used by most Chinese phones but not in the hands of Google seems like the inevitable outcome.
We already know China can produce world class hardware - I wonder how they will fare at operating systems.
It's not an easy task.
And it would be way worse with Huawei/Xiaomi & co. for devs, considering how those companies update the software on their phones...
> U.S. government officials have disputed some aspects of the Guardian and Washington Post stories and have defended the program by asserting it cannot be used >>>on domestic targets<<< without a warrant
I feel way better now, only US citizens get the benefit of warrants and the rest of the world will still get spied on as much as possible. (I am not a US citizen)
When you buy a Cisco router do they provide a "chain of custody" proving it didn't come from or go through hostile countries? I understand these routers have a Secure Boot feature, but I can't imagine that'd defend against physical modifications.
If security was actually the goal, shouldn't we have a process to verify any piece of hardware; instead of just completely trusting some companies and not others?
This just feels like security theater, but I kind of get it. If the US is fighting China economically, this move makes a lot of sense.
Not sure if you have been paying attention to the stock market. Many of the companies which are up are ones who have eliminated their ties with China [0]. Cisco is one such company whose stock rose recently [1] as a result of moving from China [2].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-vck6ebnE
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_uohGLOiK0
[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/312f7b52-7765-11e9-be7d-6d846537a...
>"There should be a wide list of companies to whom this applies now." //
I assumed the "this" was "the USA's trade blacklist". The blacklist applies to all companies AFAICT, though you are right it will probably only affect a small proportion.
Though any USA based company may have bought a Huawei phone, router, or similar, and presumably will not be allowed by law to do so henceforth?
Not sure how things like peering with a company that uses Huawei kit, or something, would work. How deep does it go? Can you buy phone service in countries where the phone supplier has Huawei base stations?
Any country holding a considerable share of the technology market should be considered a single point of failure, and diversification should take place.
The US is currently the 100-pound technology gorilla, and they are highly politicized. Very unreliable, and using its position to force its will into all kind of matters. No country should rely on the US as a single provider, to avoid being target of blackmail. It is actually surprising that we have reached the current status quo without realizing about these simple facts.
Re-decentralization of the Internet (and technology in general) is long overdue.
The same applies to other "industries". A frightening one is nuclear missiles. We are so used to the US (and the Russians) having thousands of nuclear heads that we do not care anymore. And simply because it has worked out in the past, we assume that the worse can be avoided indefinitely.
Nothing is further from the truth: the current situation guarantees that there will be a nuclear war. It is not a question of if, but when. We are a crazy president away from starting it (or maybe we have already hit the jackpot).
Can Huawei survive without these critical components and EDA tools? If Huawei ignores the loss of licenses and uses existing software and libraries to develop future products, will those be banned from US and EU markets?
I never believed it was ever a case of Cadence being warezed given it is an extremely niche product locked down under ridiculous multiple DRMs, but I was shown few FTPs around with multimegabuck EDAs and semiconductor simulation packages that are probably in use by less than 100 companies worldwide being warezed like as it they were MS Word or something.
To me the combination of Android and iOS always was the perfect mold around the business of high-end mobile phones.
Android is given away for free; but to make a truly great end user experience hardware and software needs to be integrated. Like it is for iOS. But that requires an enourmous investment; and there is no "natural" piecemeal way to grow there as your business always would be competing with peers that use the "free" platform.
But this gives Huawei, a massive and capable engineering company, no choice but to build an alternative.
This is an extreme situation; but hopefully there will come some true innovation out of it.
https://www.androidauthority.com/zte-reportedly-will-pay-us-...
Didn't Samsung also create a new mobile OS in recent times? I wonder how that's doing now?
Creating an app ecosystem out of nowhere. This was the same thing that killed all competitors to Apple and Android.
Now I know the counterargument is about Chinese protectionism, but it is the U.S. who has always championed free market capitalism and led interventions in order to forcibly open other markets to its exports.
As this shows however, this belief in the free market is anything but principled.
Also, China does not necessarily claim to be as free-market as the U.S. does and as far as I am aware, has not let interventionist wars in order to open up a foreign market to its companies.
What I am talking here is principle. The U.S. claims to have free speech for example, China does not. But in that instance the U.S. sticks by its principles and maintains its free speech protections, despite China not having them.
Why is this different when it comes to the free market? A concept the U.S. has in recent history definitely fought harder worldwide than the pursuit of free speech.
GMS is bigger issue though WhatsApp or signal work both fine without gapps, not sure about other messengers I don't use and in general it's hard to find app which has really problems without gapps other than ridesharing apps with last devs relying on gmaps
In reality Chinese intelligence likely wasn't stupid enough to try anything there, but I often wonder how many eyes Google had on hardware security for that project considering it was Huawei making their flagship phone at the time.
I also wonder if there were any NSA efforts to tear the thing apart, since they are likely better qualified and have more experience in that realm.
Nowhere did I touch on the probability of the NSA bugging anything. Nor did I state it was likely that the Chinese would have placed a backdoor in the Nexus 6P. On the contrary, I think you misread my comment.
I don't pretend that the Chinese have any better intentions but they're long term greedy enough to not accidentally brick my phone because Google can't ship updates to it any more.
If I actually lose functionality on my phone because the US government pressures Google into doing things that affects European consumers I'll be pretty pissed.
Assume most people commenting here are in the same boat.
Pretty clear cut.
This sounds like it all revolves around Android / Huawei getting booted from the Open Handset Alliance maybe?
We are now discussing US vs. China and who is better to own our data?!
That’s really sad to see how many gave up on privacy.
I bet it has a lot to do with the whole huawei backdoor story.
To be honest outsourcing such sensitive consumer device to a police state has not been a good idea for a long time.
I hope it will give good reasons to consider designing either open smartphones, or minimalist os designs with c++ or webasm apps. If smartphones get bloated, they won't be affordable anymore.
Huawei, ZTE and consorts are literally owned by PRC cadre and are actively involved in infrastructure to spy on and terrorize minority groups in China, as well as getting caught spying and stealing IP abroad.
I think there is no need to answer each post with Whataboutism, especially when the comparision is to tilted against Chinese companies.
The problem is, for me, it's impossible to know if that's true or if that's the external appearance that's been designed. Nearly everyone in Apple wouldn't know either. Legally, it seems, NSA letters could force such a situation.
AIR the much publicised event of 'FBI wanted to open someone's phone and Apple wouldn't' ultimately ended in a third party enabling it. So, this could easily have gone down that Apple said "we can't do that because it will kill our privacy angle in the market" and the FBI say "well just pass on the info to this third party" [eg some key needed to sign updates; or an update that decrypts all internal memories and dumps them to a port on boot, or whatever].
That's entirely undiscoverable and serves the interest of both FBI and Apple, FBI ideally want to have "backdoors" where it's publicly known "there is no backdoor".
No, seriously, AOSP is very far from useful. That's before you consider that to run Android on any sort of recent hardware, you need manufacturer support from the chips you are using, which you can't get if you are barred from trade with them.
Sometimes this isn't a bad thing at all.
Here's a popular gapps distribution: https://opengapps.org/#aboutsection
Google's requirements mainly apply to OEMs bundling gapps into their stock images.
so in the end bakery competition could benefit from this Google push, dev can choose another store not stealing 30% of their money
Trump also named many other countries as threats to national security, such as Canada, Germany, Mexico, and many others. There's no reason one day South Korea enters the list and Samsung will also get blocked by executive order .
https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...
Huawei is also the vast majority of cabinets for VDSL in the UK (the ECI alternative which was deployed has been pulled as was really low quality compared to the Huawei kit). My rough guess there is at least 20,000 DSLAMs on nearly every streeet corner that are built by Huawei.
At least in the UK it is hard to see how the country can run without this kit, and it would be an enormous undertaking to pull it out. I'm sure many other European countries are the same as Huawei's kit is definitely technically the best for this kind of stuff as far as my knowledge goes.
However it’s something else entirely when a ruling given under that premise effectively knocks out that companies other businesses. I have a feeling this is more to do with Trump’s trade war than overall security.
Stopping Huawei getting android licenses effects it’s global business, it has nothing to do with the security of the communication network in the US.
The world supply chains are supposed to avoid Huawei in the coming months / years, local politicians will be painfully explaining their citizens that Huawei is a security risk (we will need to take their word for it, no evidence is being provided) and once the US government (is this just Trump now, is the US a dictatorship?) changes its mind, then the whole world is going to start using Huawei again?
This is not going to fly.
Android security updates are part of AOSP [0]. The article explicitly mentions that Huawei still has access to Google’s OSS stuff. And besides, they couldn’t really block Huawei from accessing open-source stuff without making it closed-source or otherwise heavily restricted.
[0]: https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2019-05-01
When USA ships it’s Muslims into a camp in Nevada desert and starts re-educating them let us know
So how is Geneva convention working on there?
Your list of undesirables is just sad.
I don't believe the whole continent of Africa has 1.5 million Africans in jail, this is a uniquely American outcome.
Or to put it in numbers:
- 80% of the world population is not Chinese, and are not affected by China.
- 95% of the world population is not American, and are very much affected by the US.
No (I sense I need to add), I'm not defending concentration camps, just defending HN against burning itself to a crisp. If you want to participate on HN, please contribute to thoughtful conversation. "Concentration camps [...] give me a break" does not qualify.
Moreover, we've had to warn you about this exact thing before. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? Our hope is not to be one more place on the internet where people bring bags of clubs to bash each other with.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19955289 and marked it off-topic.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china%20muslims&sort=byPopular...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china%20concentration&sort=byP...
I don't see anyone being "warned" about their -submissions- on this very topic. Maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like this "policy" is not evenly enforced. In fact a US political topic in regards to rights is currently on the front page:
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The issue is that your comment was taking the thread further into flamewar. That's not ok here. Is the policy evenly enforced? No, because we don't see everything. That doesn't make it ok to break the rules though.
The reason I say this is unevenly enforced is that people constantly point out US companies aiding the NSA via PRISM from years back...but new reports of the Chinese government doing the same thing, if not worse, are marked as "nationalist" and "flamebait." Either both are, or neither are. It seems like one comes under much more scrutiny than the other. Maybe that's something you and the mod team need to figure out.
There seems value in just taking the reigns, and making whatever you create open-source, so that ZTE and all the other Chinese manufacturers can use it as well.
Its certainly a major blow to the value of Huawei phones.
Three months ago.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-co...
Google Maps is a masterpiece of engineering and it's hard to imagine that Huawei will be able to compete, near term. If I'm reading the situation right, this might mean the end of Huawei in the western phone market unless something changes.
Baidu Maps is very good though, I would even say on par with Google Maps and better in some areas. It does however have more obvious ads which is annoying.
Which is a huge deal for Huawei, imo.
Around the world?
I'm surprised that Huawei is such a threat to USA industry to be honest.
Perhaps Trump's team has shares in their opposition, or was trying to short them?
It's these liberal and western high ethics at work here...
The project is very much European: lots of countries involved.
Why can't the EU buy gas from wherever we want?
Who is the the US to tell us where to buy our gas from?
It only takes the Republican Party winning 1 election to destroy economic freedom.
My political thoughts are going to change drastically if we can resew economic conditions with China after Trump leaves office.