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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

The long term impact of this Huawei dispute will be China building out a complete vertical communications/computing stack from low level chips to operating system to phone design. They won't get any market share in the U.S. but they'll dominate China (obv), India, Africa, and have some decent minority share in Europe.

The ban is great for U.S. companies in the short term that are behind on 5G, but this will harm U.S. tech industry interests in the long term once China has that vertical stack up and running.

I wish the U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.

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China already has an (uncompetitive) alternative stack, covering silicon to operating system.

The problem is with building a competitive stack, Huawei can't get access to a 7nm fab in China, nor is their talent skilled in working with the limitations of said newer process, which kneecaps their ability to build chips competitive with Qualcomm and Apple.

Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM license revocation and Qualcomm's inability to license them cellular patents under FRAND during this dispute, TSMC is unlikely to fab IP infringing chips.

If TSMC were to fab these chips, their other 7nm clients (primarily Apple, followed by ARM licensees Qualcomm & AMD (which uses ARM TrustZone)) would all be in an uproar as ARM would likely prohibit the use of their designs at TSMC fabs.

Wrt China building their own 7nm fab, it is very unlikely they will get it off the ground in the next few years. Only TSMC & Samsung have succeeded in this, Intel, Global Foundries (formerly AMD) and many others have spent tens of billions and half a decade trying to build better than 14nm processes to no avail.

> VThe problem is with building a competitive stack, Huawei can't get access to a 7nm fab in China

yet

> Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM l

ARM -> RISC, as ARM is not the only game in town. For example, at the moment I am having a lot of fun with a Unielec u7621 board (2 mini PCIe, mSata and USB3 with hardware accelerated NAT to handle 1Gbps) that costed me about $45 : https://openwrt.org/toh/unielec/u7621-06

I would love to see MIPS64 SOCs with a few GBs of RAM to replace my raspberries

This is a pretty weak rebuttal, the MT7621 based board you cite has two MIPS 24k CPUs, straight out of 2005: https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MIPS_24K

All of the MT7621"s speed is from ASICs that accelerate NAT & WPA2, without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along.

More competitive offerings like the OrangePi PC Plus ($19) and FriendlyARM boards based on Allwinner chips offer much nore performance for the dollar, but these are literally foriegn IP blocks Allwinner licensed, glued together and sent off to a 45n or 28nm fab to have manufactured. Most of the work Allwinner did for these chips was on a trashcan ready, buggy board support package.

> the MT7621 based board you cite has two MIPS 24k CPUs, straight out of 2005

Yes, I'm having a lot offun with a 14 year old CPU, so I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali

> without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along

Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.

> I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali

The Mali drivers that were just mainlined last month aren't necessarily feature complete like Intel, Via or AMD GPU drivers. Mali is licensed from ARM, which would be a showstopper for US embargoed companies.

> Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.

If MIPS64 were competitive on price, we would have a plethora of tablets & boards based on it. Currently, dated Mips 24k cores are a $0.10 afterthought that is used to boot and initialize the dedicated ASICs. We've started seeing ARM cores eat the router market though, they're likely delivering more performance for that $0.10.

I care more about freedom than performance here. Not feature complete is fine as long as it works for what I do, and that I can tweak it to do more.

Eventually, something that is not licensed from a western company (or which can't be protected by IP law) but that is fast enough for most uses will also become a $0.10 afterthought.

The mips24k is remarkable in that you can comfortably run a linux kernel with a lot of userland utilities and even text mode software -- just what we used to run on Linux computers many years ago!

MIPS is a product of Wave Designs in California. We're years away from a non-western influenced CPU being commercially available.

And also the software market (which others except apple and even that). Google play is off limit.

It is still the world is free trade to china but not other way round. With that strategy agreed by ours, china will win forever. QED.

China has a very distorted market, which has limited Alibaba and Tencent's ability to expand beyond China.

The lack of an app store is a problem unique to China that led to WeChat and similar becoming omnibus apps, doing many things moderately well. This isn't a problem in most other countries, as our govts don't block Google Play and FDroid.

> I wish the U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.

That's exactly what the UK did. It's called the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC).

Here's the latest (public) annual report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

They should use this center for technology transfer... heh.

As far as I know India has restrictions on Huawei network gear. US - China war is hypothetical, but Indo-China was is more closer to reality and each year both armies trading stones and punches.

The stronger China becomes, the closer India will get to US and Japan. It's a geo-political compulsion.

>>U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.

Not in this iteration of world where spycraft is part and parcel of nation-state functions.

China, sure. India, I am not so sure. All the popular social media platforms(except TikTok) in India are US based. English being the gateway language for most of the influential users, makes it trivial for platforms made in US to capture market there. Also, US has much more cultural exports to the country than China. There is no advantage a Chinese clone startup would have over a US one in India unless the product is vastly superior; this is why even Chinese firms are investing in Indian startups rather than entering into the market directly.

Hardware, they might dominate but for that to happen they need to have a solid alternative to the US based services.

Also in regards to India, China is a much more geo-strategic rival than the US. I do and China have actually had a shooting war. They also have territorial disputes. I suspect India trusts China less than it trusts the US.

> The long term impact of this Huawei dispute will be China building out a complete vertical communications/computing stack from low level chips to operating system to phone design.

Correction, this has been China's plan all along. This skizm is just speeding up the process.

Sure, but access to the U.S. market could have been used as an incentive to ensure data security globally.

Because that's worked so well for the last 20 years.

If China would open their economy to US companies in the same way the US was open to China pre-trade-war, then things could work.

As it stands China makes no secret about their desire to displace the US as the world's leading superpower, they've proven time and again they'll exploit any openings we give them toward that end. They don't want win-win scenarios, they want China-win-everyone-else-lose scenarios. It's long past time we stopped negotiating in good faith with bad actors.

That's the gist of China's admission to the WTO: they would have in no way qualified in terms of transparency or free trade, but promises were made that things would change.

They didn't.

If Chinese products are so yellow-star-spangled awesome, then why not let their citizens choose freely between Chinese and foreign products?

Free trade is a two way street.

What are you even talking about?

There are plenty of choices between domestic and foreign products in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Jxci7d8UM

On the other hand, good luck getting a Chinese smartphone in the US now. Better pony up your $1K+ for Tim Cook.

> What are you even talking about?

It is well understood that the ability of foreign companies to do business in China is extremely constrained. Considering that the topic is Android, it seems worth noting that basically every Google service is blocked in China by the Great Firewall.

In the case of smartphones, they do have a choice, and a lot of people still choose iPhones and some even Samsung. Hardware isn’t really an area locked down like internet services are.

But the “stacks” in the play store. There is no google play.

There's no google play because China banned Google. China banned Google because Google refused to remove censor politic contents. That contents mostly from An anti-CCP cult called FaLunGong and some other dissidents which all supported by the US.

This is a known issue. The smart way to handle it would have been to have agreements with other neighboring countries where they promised to respect IP laws, and agreed to not steal IP the way China does, and also agreed to not block foreign companies the way China does, and if they did face heavy penalties. Once you have those protections, American companies reliant on China could easily transition to those countries instead if this threat did not force China to rectify their ways voluntarily.

In other words, TPP.

Oh please. Plenty of Chinese acquisitions and investments were denied pre-trade war. You also see almost no Chinese brands in the US, but they are everywhere in the rest of the world. You think that's an accident? There was never any open market in the US, that's your first myth. US market access has been a political tool since at least World War II.

What Trump has done is ripping the covers off the whole machinery, not only in domestic politics but also US international relations, down to the naked ugly cores.

Never said the market was completely open, but the US doesn't require foreign companies to partner with a state-run competitor to steal their IP, then increase regulations until they ultimately run the foreign company out of the country. That's been the Chinese playbook for over a decade, even after admission to the WTO.

Also last I checked Foxconn bought quite a bit of property in Wisconsin, even if they strangely haven't done much with it. Could a US company buy (and by buy I mean get one of those multi-decade leases, since the CCC technically owns all the land) property in China?

The US is far from the Captain America ideal, but from a trade perspective we've been a lot more fair with China than they have been with us.

They are already doing that, this is presumably part of what the entire conflict is about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

Hopefully the other long term impact will be western companies realizing they can't rely on being able to continue to do business with Chinese ones. The Chinese government will be perfectly happy to pull that plug when it suits them even if the American government hadn't been.

That's some excellent gaslighting, given the evidence at hand.

The evidence at hand that China runs an incredibly protectionist economy with long standing policies like requiring tech transfer and requiring chinese control to work there? The evidence at hand that China is interested in taking power on the international stage like the belts belt and road initiative? The evidence at hand that they don't have moral qualms like the concentration camps they run?

This isn't gaslighting. To even approach gaslighting it would require me blaming China's tendencies to do the same sort of economic move for the US doing this. This is a realistic view of the world and a likely positive outcome for Americans and other westerners.

The Chinese economy is not nearly as protectionist as you're making it out to be, and it has seen maybe opening up over the past few decades. Foreign companies have a huge presence in China. Apple phones and computers, European and American cars, American fast-food restaurants and Starbucks, and Western fashion brands are everywhere. Restrictions like joint-venture requirements have been successively removed from ever more industries (for example, they were removed in the automobile industry last year), and tariffs have been reduced to negligible levels for most products. China has censorship, which is why Google and Facebook aren't available in the country, but Apple goes along with the censorship and is not only available but also very popular.

The argument that poorer countries need a certain level of protectionism in order to develop isn't new (it goes back at least to Alexander Hamilton), but as China has developed, it has reduced barriers to entry for foreign firms. There's a wide gulf between how China is discussed in the United States and the reality.

Belt and road is just them being smart.

We ran the Marshall plan once upon a time, now we just spend our fortune fighting wars in backwaters.

You're gonna hate on the Chinese for doing the sort of things we should have been doing?

My comment wasn't about hating or not hating China. It was about western companies having rational economic concern over depending on companies and resources under China's control.

The belt and road project in particular was not supposed to raise any negative emotions about China at all, it was meant to demonstrate that China does have an interest in expanding it's economic power, as indicated in my original comment.

To the extent that I raised moral issues with China (that was the part about concentration camps) the point was that we should expect them to not use this economic power based on some sort of principle of fairness.

I'd also be careful with the use of the word Chinese, since it applies both to the country and to the people. The vast majority of Chinese people are perfectly nice normal people, just like every other large ethnic group really.

The vast majority of Chinese are wholly in support of their government and of their country being great the same way as the vast majority of Americans are wholly in support of ours. And they're apologists the same way we are.

As far as China/Chinese, we're the exception in terms of not being an ethnostate. France, Ireland, Israel.. the west is full of them. It's mostly just the places that the west carved up that aren't ethnostates.

Personally, I'm not in favor of anthropomorphizing nation-states, I think it obscures the fact that people and politics are behind everything.

When you're placing words in my mouth, like you did before, I'd appreciate if you kept the distinction intact regardless of how you feel.

As for supporting them, in the abstract sense of "their ours" and in which I support the leafs (terrible hockey team that people from Toronto feel obliged to support), probably so. That doesn't mean that the people (especially in China) are responsible for the governments actions, that they would do the same thing given a choice, that I feel the same towards the two entities, etc.

If you're not in favor of anthropomorhpizing nation states translate "China's actions" to "The current Chinese government's actions" and not "The general population of China's actions"

France isn't an ethnostate. Like the US, France has jus soli, and the the country very much cultivates the idea of allegiance to the Republic and its ideals being the primary aspect of Frenchness. The National Front might want to change that, but French identity is a kind of civic religion.

From all of this, don't you think it's more likely long term impact is that other countries realize how dependant they are on American products?

It's not an either/or proposition, I'm sure that will happen as well.

For what it's worth, as a Canadian, we all already know how dependent we are on the US.

I thought Europe was frowning hard on huawei too

What news do you read? From here it seems quite divided.

some titles passing in reddit and other websites

Not really hard, there's no united position. Huawei is a significant supplier of 4G infrastructure in Europe so ditching Huawei completely would be very costly, and at the moment it's mostly a matter of the individual nation states.

I don't think there's a country that has issued a complete ban comparable to the US, and most European countries will probably purchase 5G tech from Huawei for parts of their networks.

Huawei hasn't updated OpenSSL in their cellular basestation firmware, despite promises to do so in 2012 & 2018: https://hmgstrategy.com/resource-center/articles/2019/04/04/...

These really basic maintenance tasks aren't happening, leaving cell networks vulnerable to anyone who can be bothered to look up a CVE and run the provided demo exploit code. Hard to maintain a network you can't secure :c

I think there's a misplaced assumption here, that you should trust a network to keep your traffic safe.

it's reasonable to think that regardless of their SSL implementation, you should assume that the network owner is going to try and spy on your traffic and sell it to the highest bidder

I don't see what part of that means the network operator shouldn't do their best to try to keep it safe.

The cellular network being totally insecure is much worse than passive surveillance. Calls and texts can be rerouted and altered in transit, and mobile identities (eg: your SIM) can be impersonated on a whim.

This is obviously not good, but is there evidence that they are broadly worse than the competition? I always thought telco internal networks were full of stuff like this (out of date and misconfigured crap everywhere, with heavy reliance on firewalls/vpns).

VPNs and firewalls can't help when the cellular basestation is the issue. How would you prevent a malicious LTE client fron running these exploits?

Telcom security is a mess, but the frontline gear is usually the saving grace of the network.

Is there really SSL communication between terminals and base station in the LTE protocol? This seems unlikely because it's below the IP layer. They could of course use openssl for the crypto primitives in implementing LTE but are there vulnerabilities in those primitives that would be fixed by updating openssl?

There could be TLS involved in higher level protocols like IMS though. Or not. Does anyone know if eg VoLTE relies on the network for security or does it run SIP over DTLS or something?

The telcos really want to have Huawei in the running, as their presence on RFPs causes a 30% price drop in competitors bids.

Problem is, really basic maintenance tasks like updating OpenSSL aren't happening on Huawei's existing cellular basestations, leaving cell networks vulnerable to anyone who can be bothered to look up a CVE and run the provided demo exploit code. Hard to maintain a network you can't secure :c

https://hmgstrategy.com/resource-center/articles/2019/04/04/...

> The long term impact of this Huawei dispute will be China building out a complete vertical communications/computing stack from low level chips to operating system to phone design.

Weren't they already doing this?

Everybody does that to an extent- they'll just have to find some way of getting their CPU's (including their designs) directly from within China. This may not be as hard as people think with the Joint-Ownership thing that the Chinese government requires. I'm sure that chipmakers would love the business if they can get into China.

To address your comment- yes, they already do that, but because of loopholes, they probably won't have to develop a full stack.

Huawei has no 7nm fab available that will turn a blind eye to pirate ARM chips (since their ARM license was revoked), and it is unlikely any new 7nm fabs will be built in China soon. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077587

Wouldn't one of those joint-ownership project things where one company within China owns 51% of the project work out? It would have to be not Huawei, but would that work?

AMD did something very similar as a way to bypass tariffs in China (license their 1st gen 14nm Ryzen IP to a JV), but they've brought a ton of scrutiny to this loophole from both the USA & China, plus this trick won't work for Ryzen 2 since no 7nm fabs exist in China (and none are on the horizon).

Complete vertical integration is literally what the CCP's goal has been since 2015 (Google "made in China 2025"), long before any bans.

Until the world of democracies decide to subsidize the costs to help counter the pitfalls of censorship.

That would be pretty great for humanity, though.

The US government doesn't care about privacy, they care about other nations spying on their citizens. It is evident from all the leaks of NSA/CIA that they spy more on their citizens than other nations'.

Technically, the US spies on the world... and shares info about their citizens with a number of other governments.

On the other hand, the US isn't currently occupying, detaining, and requiring patriotic reeducation for an ethnic minority within its borders.

I feel like an "It's already happening, and this is what you get" appraisal cuts less favorably towards China than the US.

> On the other hand, the US isn't currently occupying, detaining, and requiring patriotic reeducation for an ethnic minority within its borders.

Let's just ignore that the US is still running torture black-sites to this day and droning people all over the planet often based on nothing more than metadata and questionable ML algorithms [0] because that's what "the US spying on the world" is mostly about: State-sponsored assassinations and abductions.

That's why the US doesn't exactly occupy a moral high-ground on these issues, the only reason many US Americans think they are is that they've bought into the "only protecting you from the next 9/11" narrative, which is exactly the same narrative the Chinese government is peddling to its own citizens to justify its own measures: "Fighting terrorists, keeping the country save".

A cynic could now try to measure the bad vs the worse, but the reality remains that both are committing crimes against humanity on a regular basis and both justify them in exactly the same ways.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

Got millions by whom? USA got millions in re-education camp?

Oh yeah we've been very kind to ethnic minorities in USA. Please ignore the Indian reservations and (not current, barely) kidnap-and-assimilate Indian boarding schools. Please ignore the racial disparities in prison. Please ignore The Drug War...

> they care about other nations spying on their citizens

No they don't give a shit about that. The US cares about other nations spying on their businesses and commercial interests and losing dominance of leading network technology to a foreign country which would then be the leader of said technology and the US would fall further and further behind and completely lose dominance like Europe lost dominance to the US due to WWII.

The networking business would never recover from that. Huawei has shown China can lead in something, the US wants to kill that idea and wants China to assume the position of Japan which leads in none of the tech despite having a sizable way to do that in the 80s.

The best way to deal with it is to mirror what Google did with Android by forking it and setting up a group of 20,000 engineers to work on that fork and making that community driven and open source available to any company that wants to develop on the platform... so due to the privacy concerns that competing technology destroys Google's dominance on mobile... maybe even makes a dent against Apple's privacy play. While they do that they should also drop the Great Chinese Firewall. Fork Chrome. And adopt Capitalist democracy.

Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. This wretched subthread is an example of what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yea they should do that for apple and google too. Oh wait.

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