ARM memo tells staff to stop working with Huawei
bbc.com
bbc.com
US is basically terrified of losing control of mobile networks when 5G ends up being implemented by a Chinese company. They're also clearly doing the exact thing they're accusing China of themselves here. I think that this is going to backfire spectacularly in the long run.
US did both of these things. That is, closed markets and protectionism and IP theft. It doesn't matter that, oh, "this was a long time ago, it doesn't count". It does. Advantages add up year after year, century after century. I'm not even trying to defend China, but instead, trying to be clear and honest about how these things work in the real world, regardless of sentiments and your favorite team.
I just did a quick lookup, you can do the same. I'm sure there are more examples out there.
In 1787, American agent Andrew Mitchell was intercepted by British authorities as he was trying to smuggle new technology out of the UK. His trunk was seized after being loaded on board a ship. Inside the trunk were models and drawings of one Britain's great industrial machines. Mitchell himself was able to escape and sought refuge in Denmark. But his mission marks the start of a sustained US campaign to steal technology from the world's hi-tech superpower of the day. [1]
[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...
I think only Panda's out of that small list have their IP still protected and the rest got industrial-theft treatment over the centuries. Though in fairness - they do share Panda's.
But as an isolated example - I'll agree it is a weak one, but worth including for how it is treated as IP by the country.
Or all the knowledge happily taken and used from Mendelesque cruel inhuman 'research' done in concentration camps. AFAIK no researcher was morally above and simply refused to work with those data.
So I've had cause to research this one in the past.
"All the knowledge"--most of the Nazi concentration camp research was absolute garbage. Turns out junk-science sadists create junk-science results and it is generally accepted that the overwhelming bulk Nazi concentration camp research was useless or near-useless as actual scientific research. I am unaware of any value being derived from the Josef Mengele work that you seem to be referring to--Gregor MenDel died sixty years before World War II, but please correct me if you're referring to someone else.
Some research from the Nazi concentration camp experiments is occasionally referred to, low-pressure/high-altitude research out of Dachau being arguably, as I understand it, the most valuable. (The other common cite, Rascher's freezing tests, were on nonrepresentative subjects and indicate that the moderate freezing that is safely and ethically studied is amplified, but does not step change, when freezing becomes extreme.) Where this data is used, it does not generally form the main body of research and mostly confirms what is known from other sources.
"Happily"--in the (rare) cases where Nazi findings are used, it's used with reluctance. There are evolving and hardening ethical codes around the use of this data as well, particularly from the 1980s onward; today, the use of any of this data must be explicitly detailed and the method of its collection is universally condemned.
Most troublingly for the pursuit of truth and some kind of decency, this argument typically is used as an ahistorical tu quoque, as is being done in this case. It's not a particularly good argument, though--even were it more than if-you-squint-and-pick-and-choose true.
Do you have any examples of papers which source such data? I'm curious to read the justification of it.
Edit: Question: In the post they talk about the Japanese taking photos of products. I'm not sure if I'm understanding what happened correctly, but if I am, shouldn't we make a distinction between just clever inference/reverse engineering (which is legal and done all the time) and outright IP theft/industrial espionage? I see IP theft/industrial espionage as being about stealing information not legally available to you, but reverse engineering and imitating a product are about trying to figure out how something works that you legally already have access to, and inferring things based on that. I feel like if a country has done the former, we shouldn't compare it to one that does the latter (currently apparently China)?
"Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party" [1]
“The Spies Who Launched America’s Industrial Revolution” https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
“Among those sniffing out innovations across the Atlantic was Harvard graduate and Boston merchant, Francis Cabot Lowell. As the War of 1812 raged on, Lowell set sail from Great Britain in possession of the enemy’s most precious commercial secret. He carried with him pirated plans for Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, which had made Great Britain the world’s leading industrial power.
Halfway across the Atlantic, a British frigate intercepted Lowell’s ship. Although the British double-searched his luggage and detained him for days, Lowell knew they would never find any evidence of espionage for he had hidden the plans in the one place they would never find them—inside his photographic mind. Unable to find any sign of spy craft, the British allowed Lowell to return to Boston, where he used Cartwright’s design to help propel the Industrial Revolution in the United States.”
But if you do want to run with something as ridiculous, the U.S. holds the largest prison population on the planet and effectively forces them to do labor at a criminal hourly rate, you could say that's not as far from slavery as many would like to think.
Just because somebody's a criminal does not mean they're no longer human and arguably many of these locked up are there for crimes that we're starting to realize perhaps shouldn't be criminalized in the first place.
1 - Stealing technology from one country and using it within your own country to increase your competitiveness.
2 - Stealing technology from one country and using it to build a competitive advantage for your firms in that first country (or any other country not your own).
The first, depending one which treaties your country is a part of, may not even be considered stealing. The second clearly is.
This is demonstrably false https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
We've gotten lazy.. I think we have this coming to us.
Chinese are extremely flexible and in China today you can innovate and just try about anything you want.
Of course there are red lines that are quite obvious, but beyond that it's actually often freer than in the West.
The Chinese system and culture are complex and cannot be brushed in black and white.
If it’s low enough to be recouped while other players are trying to catch up, then IP or not companies will innovate.
And yet mobile payments are integrated into Chinese e-commerce with the frictionlessness that Apple Pay and the others can only dream of.
Who defines what "pioneer" is? Is SV not "pioneering" because the vast majority of its companies are trying to be Salesforce and not Uber?
Unclear how QR has meaningfully less friction than NFC solutions.
QR payment exemplifies the sort of innovation that is powering China's growth and that American companies profoundly fail to understand. It isn't sexy, but it works well enough to become ubiquitous. America is just barely catching up with a two generation old payment technology (chip & pin), while China have leapfrogged them with a worse-is-better solution.
I have worked with anti-fraud teams at Alibaba and other unnamed large Chinese firms. This is extremely far from the truth, and shoulder surfing QR scanning scams have been in the national news in China many times. NFC tags are cheap and already being proposed for scooters, etc.
QR proliferation is again enabled mostly by the fact that there is no incumbency advantage, not because they're better innovations. Even you admit they aren't, and you don't seem to fully understand how bad QR is as a payment media. Imagine Square's uptake in American SMBs and then mentally map that almost every Chinese retailer is or recently was an SMB. That's simply what's happening.
I don't harbor the notion that the US is particularly advanced, especially in standardized infrastructure, but pointing to QR as an example of Chinese innovation is not convincing.
And yes, Japanese mail order magazines came with idea of "offline Internet shopping" back in nineties, in era of flatbed scanners
Just see how long it's taking the US do adopt card chips & PINs while other countries that got their automated banking systems later are almost fully converted.
Mobile payments seem way easier to adopt in China and African countries because what existed before was so bad.
That’s not a technology problem, that’s a political problem.
This is a poor example. You would have been better off going with high-speed rail, although even that is mostly a cultural problem - the cost is not in trains, but land displacement.
China has a different IP culture with some striking similarities to open source culture. Knowledge and expertise is shared through trusted peer networks (guanxi) for mutual benefit. I share what I know with you, on the expectation that you'll share what you know with me. Being particularly smart or innovative has real but intangible value, because it elevates your status within that peer network. Likewise, if you have a reputation as a parasite then you'll quickly find yourself being marginalised.
This culture powers a very rapid cycle of iterative improvement. You can't rest on your laurels, you can't milk one innovation for the duration of a patent, you can't use an IP portfolio to block new entrants to the market. You have to keep innovating to stay relevant, you have to build and maintain a reputation for quality and value with every product, otherwise someone will eat your lunch.
If Western companies can't get past the stereotype of Chinese companies as lazy copycats, they have no long-term future. Shenzhen is full of smart, motivated people who are moving up the value chain at an alarming pace with innovative products and an innovative way of doing business.
The most well-known and common form of "IP theft" is cheaply made Chinese knock-offs that are forgeries. That's trademark infringement. It's not that big of a problem.
What is an actual problematic form of "IP theft" is China appropriating trade-secrets.
The bulk of "IP theft" that is used to fuel the current war of words seems to be patent infringement. Patent infringement sounds problematic, but really isn't. Even though China can produce devices that infringe, they can't sell those goods back to areas of the world where patent enforcement isn't as lax. They can sell them in China and that's a large market, but:
- companies buying cheaply produced local copies weren't likely to buy the real thing in the first place.
- Local copies are of inferior quality. By the time the local copies approach the quality of the original, they will be priced in the same ballpark as the original (and the original will be on the next generation).
So yes, there is "IP theft" going on, but once again the term "IP" is being thrown around to obfuscate matters to support a political end and reality is quite a bit more complex but not as threatening as it's made out to be.
There are rumors that much of Huawei’s network stack was stolen from Cisco and Juniper through government-mandated partnerships.
These rumors may make the U.S. feel good, but the reality is that Huawei has 5G tech that Cisco/Juniper do not. In fact, the U.S. does not even have 5G tech at the level the EU does, so maybe you just simply got out R&D'd?
I can attempt to respond to some of your 5G comments. My outsider perspective is that many countries have the resources to develop this technology, and my guess is differences in timing are dominated by capital efficiency questions and not talent. Differences in cost probably come down to policy and subsidy regimes — and free appropriation of IP is only one of many kinds of subsidies a government can provide domestic firms.
Mathematicians,physicists also do a lot of research and they do not ask you to pay them to use their findings.
Say you find a cure for X, how will you price it as a company? You put some variables into an equation and attempt to get the maximum profit not the maximum health for the society. This could mean letting poor people to die or suffer without a cure.
Yea, this sounds like an awesome idea. Let's do it.
What I am thinking is this, the smart people that want to become scientists do not do it to make money for some company, they do it for passion and help people in the case of people that learned to become doctors and research medical treatments. You need a system that finds this smart people when they graduate and place them in research institution paid by the public. You can have private companies research other stuff but don't put all the core research into private companies that are motivated of making profit. You have for example the military founded by tons of money that some of them go into research, my suggestion is have health research similarly prioritized as the military. You could even pay private research institution but when you pay for research all the results get put in the public domain.
What? of course they do. The moment a physical reaction or process is applied to industry, you can bet someone will file a patent.
At engineering school, it is common for professors, students, etc, to patent technology they invent. Colleges have entire departments.
Software patents in particular shouldn't get 20 years. That made sense in general in the 19th century; it's an eternity today for software. Similarly, the extra exclusivity opportunities drugmakers have (mashups, etc) may be too friendly now.
So you could argue that the west gave China ammunition in the past to go down this route.
Either way - the whole aspect of one country stealing another's secrets in regard to trade and product has a very long history.
What the consumers (the ones affected) really need to be seeing though is a smoking gun. Whilst we are not talking WMD's here, we are talking about the same level of proof being bestowed upon the joe-public. That - does need to change and equally such evidence need to be credible with more than a grain of truth about it.
Sure we have all read and heard and kinda-know what's going on and has gone on, but the public need to be told in a way that is clear cut and removes all doubt.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea...
http://www.chinastudyabroad.org/indepthchina/1039-china-and-...
And no one can argue that the west including the US has given the rest of the world enough ammunition to feel a bit mistreated in the last centuries of exploitation.
But they were in theft of European IP when the U.S. was at a similar developmental level than China is now.
China offered foreign corporations to open factories in China, under the condition that's it's done with a local partner. Western companies put IP, funds and many other assets in the joint venture, willingly.
This is the same as American corporations selling tanks and planes to Israel. Now look right now and you have Israeli companies producing latest-gen weapons, with a large portion integrating American design and IP. Where is the outrage?
If you are thinking about groups of hackers hacking into networks and stealing plans and designs, we're more at the stage of McCarthyism hysteria or anti-japanese sentiments in the 80-90s. So far, what's more obvious is state-sponsored Russian hackers, and a bit behind Israeli hackers.
Now at the individual level or at corporation level, it is true there are cases of theft. For example, there are blatant copies of the Mercedes G-Wagon, many other cars and products. Chinese will get a copy of your product and will find a way to sell you a copy for 1/3rd the price. There is no wholesale state sponsored theft, and a large percentage of Chinese companies actually follow the law.
I think people must be very careful currently. You're just being a mouthpiece for Steve Bannon and Trump by writing "wholesale state sponsored theft"
That's because the Chinese don't have IP worth stealing. But there have been quite a few documented cases of the US stealing IP from European countries that they thought was worth stealing...
If only. So far they've been very much the opposite, even in comparison to other CN companies! Which is one key reason why this whole kerfuffle is going to be so much of a problem for them. In theory, they would have plenty to gain by retooling towards open solutions - but everything so far implies that they won't!
If the US government partnered with a US company founded by former Defense Department people to build a product called Freedom Fone using mostly open source software, would you trust it?
Most of the Shenzhen ecosystem is based on open-source ideas and tech, and China has seen an enormous level of innovation by doing so. Why should they partner / share with EU economies who are trying to regulate them out of existence?
If OnePlus make a smartphone that is £300 cheaper than an iPhone XR and offers roughly the same functionality, shouldn't I be able to buy it independent of what politicians think?
Indeed, it's widely known that Cisco/Juniper is pretty much in bed with the US intelligence, and so is Microsoft.
It is also not very smart to antagonize a world power that you also need for a lot of critical components, including lots of modern fabs.
That requires the ability to think and plan long term, which many recent US presidencies have lacked.
Beginning with Thatcher and exploding after the UdSSR fall came neoliberalism: ruthless privatisations everywhere (telcos, railways, postal services to name the most horrid examples which more often than not turned into shitshows), the total gutting of social security networks (anything from unemployment insurance over healthcare to social/affordable housing), and the lowest of the low being pitted against each other to totally implode wages while the top level enjoyed ever more and more payouts. Many a company employed their own cleaning and building maintenance staff - now it's all outsourced to the cheapest bidder.
No wonder this has also reflected back into politics...
That's not what that article says at all.
Meanwhile: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/evidence-of-backdoors-i...
US companies don't control the mobile network device business now and won't after this. The largest beneficiaries of this are European.
[1] KiCAD http://kicad-pcb.org/
[2] Qucs https://github.com/Qucs/qucs
[3] gEDA http://www.geda-project.org/
[4] Yosys https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys
[5] SymbiFlow https://symbiflow.github.io
[6] The OpenROAD https://theopenroadproject.org
[7] The OpenROAD https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project
[8] Chisel3 https://github.com/freechipsproject/chisel3
Dreaming of Huawei backed RISC V SoCs is a pipe dream anyway, at least for mobile processors. For a mobile SoC you need a GPU as well. There are no viable open source GPU architectures, and all vendors are US-based (Vivante, Broadcom (?), AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel, only the first three ever do licensing deals) or UK based (ARM (Mali), PowerVR).
Also, other US companies with GPUs besides the first 3 in your list are are open to licensing if the fees are big enough. I can't give more details than that though.
This is a news story about a UK company being prohibited from dealing with Huawei due to its products containing "US origin technology". So I'm assuming that US GPU companies would also be prohibited from licensing to Huawei due to their IP's "US origin".
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-20/european-...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SiFive-R...
Should everyone who runs a website open to the public have to know the laws of Iran and obey those intended to apply to their website? Should websites have to attempt to block access to visitors from countries whose laws they either don't know or don't want to comply with? Both of those approaches break the internet as we know it.
> Here’s the issue: the law uses the term “data subject” but doesn’t define the term. Some may assume that data subjects are EU citizens, but that analysis seems to exclude the explicit language of the law and practical considerations. There’s tourism, travel, residencies, students abroad, and much more to consider. Because GDPR uses inconsistent qualifiers when referring to data subjects and informal descriptions of who a data subject is, the public has been left with varying interpretations and significant challenges. [1]
In some interpretations, a US citizen who is traveling in the EU and orders something from a US company would be considered a data subject, and the company they ordered from would need to comply with the GDPR.
So how would that be enforced? Either through treaties or by requiring non-EU companies to establish a representative entity in an EU member state. [2]
[1] https://kirkpatrickprice.com/blog/what-is-gdpr-personal-data...
Immigrants (in the US) are not allowed to vote in presidential elections either...
China is not going to keep still. My expectation is that they will support Huawei (and other chinese companies) in a big way to establish alternatives to ARM, Android, Windows (?) and other technologies missheld from them.
Copyright is being used similar to DRM. Companies will take notice. This promises to be good for Open Source, perhaps also Open Hardware.
Maybe China could just change its laws to void ARM's patents. Then Huawei wouldn't need to worry about licensing.
Extreme, I know. But China will very likely, at some point, need to counter this somehow.
Edit: I wonder if China could afford a trade boycott against the US. Also, doesn't it own tons of US bonds? What if it had a fire sale on them? How would that affect the US?
Most people overestimate this. Of the $22T US Debt, only $6T is held by all foreign accounts combined, $1T of which is held by China. The majority of US Debt is held domestically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...
It would probably hurt them in the long term if anything - weakening the dollar makes their export-driven economy more expensive, ultimately stifling growth.
But hey, I live in the US. Most everything in big-box stores is made in China. I can't quite imagine how China could just cut off exports to the US. But maybe they have a slush fund. And I certainly can't imagine how the US could function without stuff from China. Who could fill the gap?
I was in the US during the 70s oil boycott. Gas lines. Oil too expensive to stay warm in the winter. It sucked.
Still, I wonder what the timeline would be for a production ready RISC-V chipset. They might be out of business before it's ready
EDIT: Apparently Huawei has been developing their own ARM cores via architectural liscence so they might be able to hack together a poor solution in less time than that by sticking with ARM in the short term and they might be able to get a decent MIPS SoC (for pre-existing Android compatibility) working in less time than 5 years.
[0] https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/huaweis-chip-arm...
The MIPS ISA is now also open source, as of Q1 2019[0].
China will probably retaliate by banning a major US tech company, maybe Apple? Keep doing this a couple of times and pressure/lobbying/economic damage will force a resolution.
They are made by Espressif and use Tensilica cores.
Tensilica is a US company, owned by Cadence. I don't know of any ties between Espressif and Huawei.
Under all 3, jurisdiction the ARM is screwed if Huawei will begin claiming their contractual obligations from them. Maybe UK courts will give them some special treatment.
It's silly to look at a centuries long geopolitical struggle for hegemony through the lens of fair play as though it's just a game among friends.
It's their problem now to figure out how to develop top tier hardware and software without stealing it from American companies and rebranding it.
Arm China really does a bad job. Besides, its empolyee turn over rate also rise to about more than 40% from 5% since the creation of Arm China due to the bad management:(
Everyone seems to be jumping the gun here "working towards the president maybe"
I am concerned this is going to eventually backfire on us.
until the US cannot maintain superior millitary power.
> I am concerned this is going to eventually backfire on us.
it certainly will, the same way any collapsing superpower "backfires". The brunt of it will be felt by the citizens, while the rich and powerful would have an "out".
EU companies have no reason not to trade with Iran under the JCPOA, but US law says that any company that does cannot trade with the US. That's not the currency controlling, it's the trade.
There may be legitimate security concerns about 5G and its ability to be penetrated. On that basis, doesn't that mean that the design of 5G is inherently flawed?
That is the issue.