Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027
bbc.com
bbc.com
If you don't have something thoughtful and substantive to say, please don't post until you do. Drop denunciatory rhetoric—it's tedious and evokes worse from others.
Remember that the community is divided on divisive topics and that the person disagreeing with you is probably not a spy, but just someone who disagrees with you.
Collapsing comments only works if javascript is enabled. It would be nice if a mechanism existed to collapse comments without javascript, perhaps with a list of collapsed identifiers in the URL
One thing I think we'll do is add links to comments to jump to next subthread (and jump to parent), which would at least enable you to skip the noise easily.
I guess the real question is: could you really detect well-executed astroturfing here, even if you tried very hard? I worry that authentic discourse on high-traffic pseudonymous forums is basically impossible if someone is determined to sew an opinion and has significant resources at their disposal.
I have no idea what kind of methods HN employs. I personally always check the posting history when I'm in doubt about the intentions of a poster. Most of the time, I find an extensive amount of fairly well considered comments on a variety of topics. That leads me to the conclusion that the account is 'genuine'.
To state it a bit more naively: if a Sybil attack would require the attacker to craft so many constructive comments in order to evade detection, it could actually have a net positive effect on the community as a whole.
I do the same, and in the cases where it's somewhat obviously a new or 'bad intentioned' it still surprises me how fast the comments are grayed out and/or dead (often within minutes).
I've always been curious how much of that was human curation and how much of it some algorithm. I've never gotten to see or play around with HN-style site data, but personally I'd probably write some code that takes into account valuable 'curator' users (with some checks and safeguards of course, and manually tagged by the moderators).
That's a misunderstanding. I know my posts on this are super repetitive, but I'm careful never to claim such a thing. How could we know? I'm merely saying that the overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be.
I've pored over this kind of data on HN so many times that the patterns are blazed into my skull. I'm happy to change my mind as soon as I see a new pattern—if nothing else, it would be a refreshing change of pace. So far, that has almost never happened on political topics [1]. It's more common on business topics, but most of those cases are at the boring end (people trying to promote their startup or whatever). I have to call this as I see it and tell you guys what reality is as far as we can tell. It would be a breach of trust with the community to do anything other than tell the truth, and in this case the truth about what we see is as boring and one-sided as my comments on the issue have been for the last five years.
Is it possible that sophisticated state actors are implanting biased comments into HN threads in ways that are so clever and subtle that they fool us completely, leaving zero traces in the data of the kind we know how to check? Of course. It's possible; how could we say otherwise? But this kind of thinking leads to the wilderness of mirrors, in which people see whatever they think they see. That way lies madness. We need some sanity-preserving heuristics. Fortunately we have at least two.
First: before concluding that there is manipulation, we need something objective to go on. We need some evidence—I'm tempted to say any evidence—that we can point to. And if you apply this rule consistently, which we do, the insinuations all evaporate under it. (Again, I mean on political topics. It's more complex on business topics.) Basically, every time we look, we find nothing. I'm happy to keep looking; the deal with HN users is that if someone is worried about abuse, they're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look. There are a couple such emails in the inbox at the moment that I'm hoping to get to tonight. But I don't know how to communicate to you guys how universal this pattern has been so far. The pattern is: HN users are all over the spectrum on divisive topics, they disagree with each other, often vehemently, and many people have trouble recognizing disagreement as genuine.
Second: any sufficiently well-executed astroturfing is undetectable by definition, so we can't rely just on detection. If sophisticated manipulators are among us, smart enough to evade all detection and fool all the moderators, the only defense the community has to fall back on is good-faith discussion: responding to false information with correct information, and refuting bad arguments with better arguments. That's good news, because that's how what we want HN to function anyway. Going into flamewar serves manipulators just fine, so in the long run our best hope is for HN to get better at what it ought to be doing in the first place. That's the best immune system, and the only one which stands a chance of maintaining a community against sufficiently subtle invasion.
[1] I say "almost" for strict accuracy, but the exceptions I'm talking about are boring and I'm leaving them out for brevity's sake, not because there's anything scintillating there.
I want to add that the flamewar type of discussion will attract a certain kind of visitors to the site, who will then steer the entire site in the flamewar direction attracting more of their own kind. For that reason I support nuking any thread that devolved into a flamewar and taking other measures to discourage them.
The key word here is "see". The problem is that we mostly see what we're primed to notice—which is basically whatever we most dislike—and we simply don't see (or don't weight as heavily) all the cases that don't feel that way. This creates a feeling of "every" or "always" (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835843 in this thread), which is a true statement of what you've seen, but only because your seeing is extremely conditioned by your passions on the topic. (I don't mean you personally—we all seem to have this bias.) People with opposite passions see literally the opposite picture. Moreover, the degree to which the picture you see feels unfair and unbalanced is a function, not of the raw data stream, but of the intensity of your passion, regardless of which direction it points.
For evidence, if you search my comments you'll find examples where I've admonished users for flamewar in the opposite direction, as well as for flamewar on other topics, including nationalistic flamewar about other countries (India is probably the second most common case; Russia was up there for a few years and still flares up at times).
If you see things critical of US/Europe/Canada sitting and not strongly moderated - that's because people can usually hold rational and informed discussion on those subject. (btw this one is sitting as well? is it not?)
I don't see the same when it come to China, it just gets flooded by propaganda from both sides, and it devolves into a flamewar. People start accusing each other for being spies and shills, and wishing ill on an entire people because of where they're born and how they happened to be governed. And that doesn't belong to HN and should be moderated, if you like information or discussion that conform to your existing bias you can definitely participate at /r/worldnews.
Can you present the evidence of manipulation? The data is in the open.
But I think it could be handled with a little bit more transparency @dang. When you "nudge" or "handicap" posts from reaching the homepage, we would like to know maybe.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] Here is an example I just ran across: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19956161
also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20136743
Faced with
> People like you are weak ass hypocrite pussies
the retort was
> "Always" is a strong word.
This is HN. :D
I feel like he nukes all my class war against the rich posts, but you have to realize I have personally accused of him fostering a white nationalist site for promoting assholes like you and also for hiding all my pro-communist comments.
So only one of us can be right, is dang a commie or nationalist?....or maybe everyone is complex and not entirely composed of a single ideology and also he was chosen to curate this website and that will ultimately anger both of us?
Anyway, here's the tea :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23400445
5G is the tip of the iceberg with respect to the UK's communications infrastructure involvement with Huawei.
"New restrictions will also apply to use of the company's broadband kit.
Operators are being told they should "transition away" from purchasing new Huawei equipment for use in full-fibre networks, ideally within the next two years."
Not clear if this is just FTTP or whether it includes FTTC, but I doubt there's a lot of new investment in FTTC going forward.
Any worthwhile Internet traffic should be encrypted in 2020, and if it isn’t, Huawei probably isn’t the most immediate concern.
And if it is encrypted, does it really matter who is listening?
Comments welcome, I know zilch about telecoms hardware.
Plus, if it's your tower, you can just switch it off, at an opportune moment.
Wouldn't traffic run through many parts of the network exposing data to even more providers? Wouldn't you be subject to any portion of the chain breaking, or being turned off?
5G operates on higher frequency and requires a larger density of base stations. If you can identify individual devices -- even without cracking the encryption they use -- then you can track them them geographically, and also conduct traffic analysis.
5G presents a potential security risk because it allows far greater granularity of device localization, even without GPS.
No that’s not required, 5G uses the same old frequencies as 2/3/4G for the bulk of the traffic, it only uses the >1Ghz frequencies for microcells in malls and other dense areas where appropriate.
That's simply not true. 5G cannot achieve its advanced speeds without higher frequencies, which cannot be deployed without greater density of base stations. Higher frequencies beget faster signal falloff and greater susceptibility to obstruction. "5G needs spectrum across low, mid and high spectrum ranges to deliver widespread coverage and support all use cases. All three have important roles to play." [1]
Microcells use high-band, not mid-band, spectrum. High-band may not be useful outside of dense areas because of its reduced range, but it is essential to 5G and the FCC is releasing about 5GHz of spectrum for this purpose. Mid-band (1GHz-6GHz) is the bread and butter of 5G, and the FCC has pushed to open this part of the spectrum as much as possible for 5G to work as intended. This part of the spectrum is the most versatile, but it is in short supply [2].
Part of the challenge of 5G involves more frequent handoffs between base stations versus past generations of mobile phone radio. Similarly, 5G devices use various mitigation techniques to deal with interference from nearby base stations. For both of these reasons, there is a substantial amount of interaction between a single handset and nearby base stations that may not be presently serving it.
[1] https://www.gsma.com/spectrum/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/5G-...
[2] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363622A1.pdf
It’s unlikely to be rolled out fully throughout the entirety of the providers network. So you’ll see it in high density areas where people are mostly outside. As I said, malls etc. Also higher speeds at the regular sub-ghz frequencies are achievable through beam-forming.
Beamforming can't overstep the physical limitations of a carrier wave, it just adapts the radiation pattern of the antenna array to improve range and reduce interference. This is useful to extend the range of high-band signals, because they operate in object-dense space with a high density of clients. It is also useful at the lower frequencies, because it allows an improvement in spectrum efficiency in an otherwise crowded part of the spectrum.
You are basically saying that beamforming allows more single-user MIMO to improve the data speed of an individual user's connection at the lower frequencies. I agree with that. However, you still need more base stations because (A) you won't see the massive advertised 5G speeds without sub-6GHz and mm-wave, and (B) you need more antennas as you improve MIMO to serve more simultaneous data streams to each individual user at sub-GHz.
I am not familiar with the authors of this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.07678.pdf), but it offers a good explanation with some images:
The spectral efficiency of Massive MIMO grows monotonically
with the number of antennas [28]. Thus, we can expect a
future where hundreds or thousands of antennas are used to
serve a set of users. There are, however, practical limits to
how many antennas can be deployed at conventional towers
and rooftop locations, for example, determined by the array
dimensions allowed by the site owner, the weight, and the
wind load. [...] Nevertheless, the spatial multiplexing
capability of these two dimensional planar arrays in our
three-dimensional world is far from what has been demonstrated
in the academic literature, where large one-dimensional arrays
are often considered in a two-dimensional world. In many
practical deployment scenarios, the user channels are mainly
separable in the horizontal domain [35] since the variations
in elevation angle between different users and scattering
objects are relatively small. [...] However, to deploy more
than a few hundred antennas per site and to obtain a truly
massive spatial resolution in the horizontal domain, we need
new antenna deployment strategies.
Instead of gathering all the antennas in a single box,
which will be visible and heavy, the antennas can be
distributed over a substantially larger area and made
invisible by integrating them into existing construction
elements.
Back on the tracking side of things...
AFAIKR 3G and above do not leak their IMEI/IMSI unencrypted. Of course nearly zero phones show or warn if encryption is used or not (though I think that's a setting in the SIM card).
"The extension of spectrum range has an impact on the network architecture. mmwave cells will employ shorter ranges of around 100-to-200 meters which will require extreme densification to provide high coverage. 3G networks reached densities of fourto- five base stations per km², 4G networks eight-to-ten per km², while 5G networks could reach densities of 40-to-50 per km²."
https://www.newtec.eu/article/article/choosing-the-right-con...
But a good question would be why 5g, and not every other computer chip in any computer and network equipment, which could be backdoored, and I doubt anyone verified the conformity of the chip to the blueprint sent to the factory.
Going forward this kind of infrastructure will probably be more important than any other kind (because this will control all the others too).
Will this finally move the cost-benefit needle toward verifiable computing (open chips, open fabs, open *ware)? Who knows. But so far it seems the power brokers of the old era (eg. countries) are trying to maintain control.
I’m asking, is there really a security risk that Huawei might listen in on telecoms. Is traffic at the low level more vulnerable somehow? Is it the prevalence of unencrypted communications? Is it leaking of metadata that people are worried about?
The specific technical risk is unknown, though. There are thousands of microcontrollers in a modern advanced electronic device. It's nearly impossible to inspect each one and see what exactly is backdoored and how.
You could make an argument about metadata, which is much more questionable from the get-go.
The parent comment was talking about being able to take advantage of the situation by making the enemy use your devices and then incapacitating their infrastructure at the perfect moment by activating the killswitch on those devices.
People are concerned that Huawei / the Chinese could effectively shut down important chunks of infrastructure that would cause chaos in a city like London, and many other places, and furtermore that the implied threat of such a mishap, might be used as a form of coercion.
Care to expand that thought? I don't particularly see how their communist-capitalism system would be ever accepted by EU or NA.
These infrastructure plans usually come with some kind of hand over of power to China.
Other than the risks of using Opera (and other software like AirDroid, TikTok, WeChat etc), the main way I currently see users outside China being affected by similar issues is if they use Chinese Android devices, including grocery store smartphones, or those popular HDMI android dongles.
China's export of technological-enabled totalitarianism and surveillance states (especially to developing countries) is accelerating.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3029260/chinese-...
If your argument here is “who cares if we can trust the hardware if the encryption works” I’d encourage you to think about how you know that the encryption “works” if you can’t trust the hardware. A lot of the encryption is out of necessity far removed from the end user, it’s not exactly PGP over email. And everything is never encrypted, the operations of mobile networks require a lot of extra metadata about the operations that is still sensitive even if you completely disregard the traffic over the network.
As for metadata, is there no cryptographic schemes that make metadata extraction impossible? I’m thinking like with Covid tracking apps, you can find out whether you were in contact with someone infected, without sharing any identifiable info.
Or maybe the higher density of 5G kit makes the attack cross-section larger somehow?
National security includes things such as the prevention of over-reliance on a foreign supplier working with a foreign subversive government hell-bent on their unfair mercantilist policies. It's economic security they worry about first, which could lead to a whole host of other security issues due to lost of leverage later on.
If that was true, no foreign country would be buying from US companies.
Maybe for spying, maybe because QA failed.
Huawei is on the US radar but somehow when Cisco left a backdoor on some routers it was "just a mistake".
Every country is guilty of stabbing in the back others (occasionally or all the time), it has been the case for centuries and is not likely to change.
I am French, we do not have our own tech so we get stuff from everyone around - we are probably in the worst spot from that perspective.
The first thing that pops into my mind here is the importance of end-to-end encryption. If you cannot trust anything in the middle (presumably because the internet goes everywhere), perhaps we can at least trust the networks and devices under our immediate control. This is still not perfect because these devices can be compromised at the factory too, but it's still a much better position to be in. I can't make my ISP install core routers that I am comfortable with, but I can make sure that I install network hardware and use computers & phones that I trust on both ends (or convince my counterparties to do the same).
China, on the other hand, has no clear separation between the state and large private companies, and has a state which does not acknowledge basic human rights in a myriad of ways. Again, the US is not perfect here either, but it sure is better.
Personally, I wish Europeans would use more, well, European equipment for this kind of stuff. This isn't out of some nationalistic sentiment (I have no problems using foreign equipment as such), but given the state of the world's affairs and the direction I fear it might be heading, a strong and independent Europe will probably be more important than ever in the coming decades.
We do watch US movies and series, but probably less the ones that decpit US everyday life and more the well known ones (say, Westworld - but not to start to live like them. Or Avengers).
One of the huge successes of the past was Dallas. Everyone was watching it but there was zero influence on normal life, it was a tale of aliens on another planet.
So no culture overload for us.
If that's true, how is it reasonable to allow this equipment to operate in the UK for 7 more years? Doesn't that mean the UK is willingly under national security risk for 7 years?
Unless, of course, there was never a security risk...
In 11 days' time.
(Also: do people really need more than one week?)
Now the risk profile of things has changed because people are out and about more.
But 11 days does seem a bit long, sure.
They are just panicking because of the economy (latest figures show a 20% crash).
Decision makers then need to asses those risks and possible mitigations and weigh them against a million other factors.
> Doesn't that mean the UK is willingly under national security risk for 7 years?
No, and I'll come on to why in a second.
Huawei, just like any Chinese corporation operating overseas, is an attack vector for intelligence gathering. Anyone presenting a counter-argument to this is either a shill for the Chinese government, or totally uninformed.
China has a culturally distinct attitude towards intelligence and intelligence gathering to nearly every western country. The national emphasis on the collective good blurs the line between private citizens, acting in a personal or professional capacity, and the stereotypical impression of a "spy" perpetuated in the west: on the payroll, going to their cubicle at the CIA each day. China's voracious appetite for intelligence (and, particularly in recent years, industrial espionage), means that it is impossible to distinguish between the commercial interests of a Chinese company and the Chinese state furthering its apparatus.
Remember Crypto AG? The Swiss crypto company jointly-operated by the CIA and German intelligence?[1] That's newsworthy because it's unusual: western states are typically limited to publicly lobbying their corporations for backdoor access, or working around things like end-to-end encryption (e.g. I believe PRISM used a combination of vulnerabilities to exfiltrate data from Hotmail and MSN prior to encryption taking place).
In China, we must assume that the reverse is the norm: the Chinese government does not need to lobby its companies to provide it with data, or to build-in backdoors or exploits. A Chinese corporation can be compelled to turn over everything it has, silently, and to compromise users and products to benefit the Chinese government, silently.
Crucially this is not a criticism of China. China can best be understood by Westerners as a series of tradeoffs to benefit the collective good, at the expense of personal liberty and privacy. Literally the argument you might encounter would be: "If you have nothing to hide then why do you care?"
The information gathered is not always as exciting as you might imagine. It's not just deployed into military intelligence or kompromat. It might "just" be used as a means of preserving China's status quo as a leading manufacturing hub (and, therefore, China's position as a growing economic power).
So China a) has a vast appetite for intelligence of all kinds, and b) does not draw a distinction between private citizens/corporations and state actors/corporations.
To answer your question:
Huawei has been a cornerstone of the UK's telecoms infrastructure for nearly twenty years, and in order to gain its foothold committed to allowing GCHQ full access to its codebase (HCSEC)[2]. The stipulation from Britain's intelligence community was that Huawei must not be allowed to have a monopoly position, or even a significant market share beyond a certain level.
I am not familiar with the specific technical reason that Huawei at 70% vs. Huawei at 40% of the UK's telecoms infrastructure would represent a disproportionate increase in risk, but I believe it is likely to be related to resource constraints -- fuck me guys, GCHQ is having to actively monitor and review the code deployed across a double-digit % of our telecoms infrastructure from the starting position of "this is provided by a bad actor"! -- and the doomsday scenario that Huawei's position of market dominance would drive competition down, resulting in a choice to either have e.g. 7G with Huawei, or not at all (7G is a fictitious example, but you see my point).
The UK is balancing the very real ongoing nightmare of monitoring Huawei's involvement in UK telecoms with the fact that it's a cheap, high quality supplier, and the fact that our closest allies -- the United States -- have been on a warpath over Chinese intelligence gathering since long before Obama put the kibosh on China acquiring Aixtron in Germany for national security reasons. Oh, and we want to get a trade deal out of the US in the near future.
The risk:reward for Huawei is at a point where it's no longer sustainable. Phasing its removal from our infrastructure will smooth our relationship with our closest ally, reduce our reliance on a Chinese state manufacturer, and reduce the workload on our signals analysts in GCHQ.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Isn't this contradicted by secret courts approving NAS warrants, loopholes like meta-data can is legal to collect, digital data is considered different that data you have on paper in your home etc. If CIA, NSA has some judge approval to ask Apple access to someone data and keep it secret do you think Apple(or Google) can challenge the secret orders?
What if a judge produces soem secret order so Apple and Google provide full access to everything do you think some manager or developer will make this public and suffer a fait similar or worse as Snowden? IMO we people in the west we sometimes forget how corrupt people in power are and how exceptions to laws and constitution can be found when national security is mentioned.
What you are broadly driving at is the necessity for many areas of intelligence gathering and espionage to be invisible to the public eye. There is necessarily a strong tradition of civilian oversight of intelligence agencies in nearly every democracy. For example, in the UK, domestic intelligence is overseen by the Home Secretary, the Intelligence and Security Parliamentary Committee, and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
Needless to say, a free press, whistleblowers, and civilian oversight do not exist in China.
I seen a video a few months back about US military considering internet as a new area of war and considering how to engage in such war , it is clear that not only China is trying to push their propaganda but the others are doing a similar thing (again I am not trying to say is the exact same thing just trying to prevent everyone focusing too muc in one direction and not noticing what is happening behind their backs at home)
I understand your position to be that in the US (I'll use the US as an example but it's broadly interchangeable with any western democracy), privacy violations and acts of espionage which are directionally similar to those occurring in China do take place, and whilst you acknowledge that they are not as bad, you draw equivalence between the surreptitiousness of both.
I think the point is a meaningful one. Much of the content of the PRISM presentations was worrying because it made very clear the extent to which the US government has expanded its intelligence-gathering in the last few decades.
Introducing a point like this into a discussion focusing on China might seem like 'whatabouttery' to many people ("X is bad, but what about Y?"). On paper, NSA and CIA overreaching could have similar consequences (or even look identical) to Chinese state sponsored espionage, but provided there are avenues for whistleblowers and a free press, the two are not equatable.
> the point I am struggling to make
Your English is very good, and I enjoyed talking to you.
The link states that Sir Andrew Parker (head of MI5) doesn't believe that the inclusion of Huawei in UK telecoms infrastructure will have a negative impact on the UK's relationship with the US.
The US has been emphatic that it could: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51581095
Also in the case of an actual war, it's surely better to not have your entire nations communications under enemy control.
The West needed 30 years to realize that (some are still working on this I think) because it thought that it had actually 'won' the Cold War through it's actions during the Cold War, when the reality was much more likely that the East had collapsed also without much 'help' from the West.
The countries on the 'losing side' in this battle of ideologies (like the Soviet Union and China) had adapted to this new reality much more quickly, both in different ways though, but none of them copied the 'obviously superior' model of the Free West.
Of course hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes I've got the impression that many people in the West still wear their rose-tinted Cold War glasses ;)
In the UK we haven't got past the rose-tinted WW2 glasses (especially those born from 1940-1970 who grew up with tales of WW2 as kids)
It's perhaps easy to forget now, but during the 30s, 40s, and 50s the face and "leader" of communism was Stalin – not exactly a friendly chap – and things like China's Great Leap Forward left over 20 million dead (mostly due to incompetence, not malice), and let's not forget Cambodia.
Details differ per care of course, but in quite a few cases all of this was done in the name of "freedom and democracy", which was perhaps not entirely unreasonable too. I'm not saying that it was the right thing to do (many other issues like national sovereignty etc. which come in to play), but I do think it's a bit more complex than your comment. I'm not sure if idly sitting by and doing nothing would have been that great of an option either.
There's a reason that communist symbolism and the like is considered taboo in many formerly communist Eastern European countries, somewhat akin to Nazi symbolism.
Most of the legislation passed revolves around redistribution of wealth, and it's not taking from the rich and giving to the poor but quite the opposite. Any and all amassed wealth is being extracted from the poor and being given out to businesses in the form of lucrative contracts or, more recently, bailouts. The companies that receive this money promise that it's going to trickle down while they fill Golden Parachutes, perform stock buy backs, and find other ways to funnel that money to their wealthy share holders.
The message for decades was that the government was inefficient and wasteful, and that private business can do it better. We've all heard the stories of the $300 hammer. But when things are privatized things generally get worse. Fewer workers earning lower wages doing more work but the overall product is worse and it's usually not cheaper. Any and all reductions in cost are just converted into profit margin.
The US is being sucked dry and when there's nothing left, the globalist in charge will just up and move on.
What product is worst and more expensive that you have in mind?
It's not that easy. Assuming they can afford to leave, most cannot, the fact that they've lived their entire lives here and their whole support system resides here makes it hard. Many people aren't upwardly mobile, and things aren't bad enough to make them desperate.
> What product is worst and more expensive that you have in mind?
Privatized utilities. The pitch in the 90s was that you'd have a bunch of providers competing to offer lower rates and the result would be lower prices. The reality is that you pay a very high base fee (no longer subsidized in the rate), and then you pay a service fee to your provider. Most rates are promotional so once a year you shop around or call up your gas provider to negotiate like you would your ISP. Switching providers usually results in activation fees and other costs.
This works great for large consumers (e.g. factories, businesses) who pay lower overall rates but the poor suffer. An example, I used $1.76 in natural gas last month but my bill was $36. I paid more in taxes ($2.04) than I paid for the gas. People in my state pay $32 a month in fees for the privilege of being able to pay for gas. That's on top of the deposit people with poor credit have to put down.
-- https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:34623859
-- https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/6611-report-municipal-f...
This is a geopolitical clash of power. It's not about respective political regimes, it's about relative power and influence. If China liberalises tomorrow none of the fundamental issues will change and China will still be a threat to the US. The only thing that will change is that the US will have to find something else in order to label China 'evil'.
No thank you. Stop pushing "China is victim of bully" or "China is here to save you from evil West" rhetoric.
China is using its military to forcibly steal territory the size of France from neighboring nations. That territory does not belong to China.
The US can rightfully sanction any nation that uses its technology and its currency. Those things belong to the US. The sea territory that China is stealing does not belong to it.
Other nations do not have to obey US sanctions. They're free to abandon all US technology and abandon the US dollar and its banking structures. Go for it.
Cite please. And won't the best way to debunk the "propaganda" be to just liberalize right? So ... everybody is waiting and has been waiting for decades, China should stop making excuses and get on with it.
The US destroyed Bolivia, replacing an elected government that was legally found to be allowed to run, with a far-right nationalist military-backed junta that refuses to hold elections : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_political_crisis
The US installed a brutal dictator in Chile, with the coup killing the legitimately elected president and overthrowing the liberal democracy, replacing it with dictatorship : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
No, it is entirely clear to anyone in the world that the US will destroy your country and kill you if you oppose, no matter how liberal it is, if it suits their geopolitical interests.
The US isn't responsible for the 2019 Bolivan political crisis and certainly didn't destroy Bolivia. I have to believe you are just trolling with language like, "The US destroyed Bolivia". Unless you call supporting the second round of elections (along with the European Union) the cause of the crisis they had. I've been in Bolivia recently, they will be just fine.
Not sure what you are implying wrt the Chilean coup d'état - the US didn't like Salvador Allende but he was overthrown by his own military.
The UK support of the Iranian coup d'etat in the 1950 (post WWII) was due to a conflict with AIOC (a British corporation) and US supported in turn. Not a good look by any means but also not a pattern of machinations as you make it out to be.
Because it seems to me that it was a coup. That was backed by the US. Which makes it a US backed coup.
[0] The OAS is a cold-war era organization that was literally founded in order to instrumentalize the Monroe Doctrine. Moreover, the current chairman of the OAS publicly states his support for regime change, and the organization is largely funded by the US. It was designed in order, and still largely acts, to implement US foreign policy.
The CIA literally had a budget in order to remove Allende from power. One of their top priorities was to fund, cause, and instrumentalize a military coup in order to remove Allende, which happened exactly in the timeframe they planned, and was executed by the actors that they had counselled and financed for the past two decades in the goal of removing any left-wing president : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_.... It is absolutely certain that the US was instrumental in the overthrow of Allende, with the CIA even publicly taking credit for creating the conditions that led to the coup. After the coup, the US politically and economically backed the military dictatorship. So yes, the US caused, and backed the coup. He was overthrown by his own military, that were organized to perpetrate a coup by the US.
It is literally a pattern of machinations. There aren't a series of dozens of coup d'états that mysteriously happen in countries with CIA activity that also happened to be against US interests, and that turned out exactly to further US interests. The CIA didn't make contacts in the militaries, in supranational organizations, and with local interest groups for fun.
Iran had no democracy. Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah, he was not democratically elected by the people of Iran. The Majlis that nominated him were a collection of feudal lords that dominated Iranian politics, they were not democratically elected by the people of Iran, they co-ruled Iran as a feudal kingdom.
If Iran were a democracy the Shah wouldn't have been appointing the Prime Minister.
It has been 40 years, and just look at Iran today: zero human rights. You're going to try to blame the US for four decades of theocratic dictatorship? Laughable. The timer on that excuse has long since expired. Iran is responsible for the condition of Iran today, and the people that installed the theocracy are solely responsible for that too.
> The US destroyed Bolivia, replacing an elected government
That's an entirely false, invented claim. Which is why you didn't even try to support it.
The Majles was literally an elected body. Yes, he was appointed by the Shah after being nominated by the parliament. That's how constitutional monarchies work. Justin Trudeau also was elected by a parliament and then appointed by the Queen.
The fact that a lot of the people in the Iranian parliament had feudal land is completely orthogonal here. They were still elected. A lot of the people in the US Congress are also incredibly wealthy.
Mossadegh was elected fair and square. He was overthrown and replaced by a puppet when he went against Western interests.
As for Bolivia, Morales was a legitimate, elected president of Bolivia. Under US pressure and support, the OAS fabricated evidence that the election was illegitimate, and the US backed a millitary coup. It was a coup orchestrated and following the interests of the US. Here is my source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/02/the-oa...
All of that information is also in the link I provided.
Oh, it’s totally fine then.
India is not re-educating anyone, but rules out muslim from citizenship? Not even mention the caste system, which is way worse than the color discrimination in US. When India became the 2nd biggest power in the world, all these will become target
India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
India has it's own shares of issues, but it's still an order of magnitude better than the Chinese Government.
I could argue the same, the so-called reeducation camps only applies to xinjiang province, and for those could only get education from religion maniacs, rather than a normal school. And there were numbers of attack events were caused by it. Keep in mind Uyighurs are not only living in xinjiang, there are uyighurs living in rest parts of China and doing well.
> India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
Aye aye, it took 200 years for the US to have civil rights for all (still problematic), and Inida takes 70+ years still working on the caste problems, when it reaches China, which was founded after India, we are suddenly asking for all equal society. Yes, unwillingly education is bad, but keeping them blank and poor is evil. Learning skills to fit into a society, even it doesn't fit into your propaganda, is not wrong.
> The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
US also has strong anti hate crime law, and is one of countries offers most assistance for anti-discrimination, law doesn't help unless vast majority are educated to do so, and vast majority has economy power to do so.
They're not perfect, but over the last 30 years they lifted half a billion out of poverty and didn't wage war all over the world.
Not everything needs to be wrapped in our style of propaganda, sometimes it can be wrapped in other brands instead.
Very simple explanation: it's impossible, unless the West can mow the rogue regimes left, and right, and is ready for a war with a nuclear power to do that.
> When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has.
Expecting a communist party to "liberalise" is effectively to expect it to kick itself out of power. The moment they loose power, their people will murder them. And if people wouldn't, then it would be their internal factions who will strangle each other without an iron handed big boss at the top maintaining internal order.
There is no way out for them. Their only way to avoid being torn apart alive is to stay in power, and their only way to stay in power is to exert, push, and expand it.
For them, to stop repressions, means to let their enemies to take the proverbial rifle from which barrel's the power grows, and to seal their fate, essentially to voluntarily chose death.
Any totalitarian system has an expiration date for this very reason.
In case of China, what that means is an instant gulag, or worse for 5 political dynasties:
1. Few remnants of Mao, and his wife's reign, and their confidants for, well, everything.
2. Deng Xiaoping's era communist billionaires, who will have to return millions they stole from the state in eighties.
3. Shanghai people, and Jiang, who will have to at least surrender their posts, and titles which they bought, and sold illegally, and all privileges coming with them.
4. Hu's clique, whose members will have to surrender their businesses, and stocks which they got through connections
5. And finally, Xi, and his friends, who managed to make a bigger mess in their 8 years in power, than the three previous dynasties combined.
Put it simply, do you expect a thief to voluntarily give a gun to the person whom he just robbed? An expectation that the West can share the planet with rogue regimes, is an expectation that a kleptomaniac, and a really rich person can live under the same roof. Even if the later can keep the former compliant under a gunpoint for some time, eventually the former succumbs to his urges, and the later has to shoot.
KMT is a way different fruit than the CPC.
> But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on.
I don’t want to get into a whataboutism debate about all the human rights violations the USA has engaged in (yes Trump but Obama as well and W before him and etc). But really I’ll just focus on “proper civil society”. Jfc is the sinophobia getting overt around here.
Even if I take the good faith argument that “it’s commentary about CCP not Chinese people” as I often hear after racist remarks, I’ll just point out I’ve been hearing comments like this all my life in all sorts condescending ways. Most of the time in bad faith. So I don’t give a shit about how you “intend” it to be.
Looks good to exibit tolerancy between like minded friends about accepted topics, abortion, sexual orientation, skin color and the like... But about a different political system other than western liberal democracy? No way!
And it's not like Chinas Communist Party (from Deng Xiaopin on) has not good credentials. It might be the more succesfull regime in the history of humanity if we talk about taking people out of poverty. Which system has improved the life of millions like the party?
But it doesn't matter. The aglosphere keeps with its cultural war against the new enemy. What are the signs that the Chinese want to export their way of life? Any recent war launched by China? Any attempt to force a Western goverment to accept their condicions? They are not the ones messing with other countries democracies.
Anyway, there are plenty of things not to like about the Communist Party, but seriously, the propaganda is out of control.
There are two distinct reasons I see:
1. Some people read recent actions like "investing in a deepwater navy", "setting up economic relations with Africa", and "forcing trading partners to not recognize Taiwan" as doing exactly those things.
2. Even if you ignore those things, if you believe the western powers have done these things already in the 20th century like "investing in a huge carrier fleet and naval bases around the world", "setting up colonies and promoting democracy around the world, sometimes through force", and "forcing trading partners into labor standards including pay and hours, bundled into a package we call human rights", then it's probably easier to assume others are capable of doing similar.
At that point it's a clash of values.
2. On a slightly different note, I think that while whataboutism is generally neither productive nor relevant, in this case a small amount could be relevant because the implication is that some other countries have developed to a state of "proper civil society, [...] democracy, and so on" while China has not. If the claim relates China to some base standard in the author's mind, then pointing out failings in those places seems like an attack on the point itself, but I don't know whether the US was at the top of their mind when crafting that sentence.
The “manipulation” you speak of is more hypothetical. If anything Facebook has done more manipulative harm thus far.
One way to think about this is what exactly would TikTok have to do to satisfy your accusations of them “manipulating” people? How does Huawei stop spying on Americans? If there is no answer then you can see not only how it is pointless to argue, but that your primary motivation is actually to prevent the shift of power, rather than based on any actual infractions by Huawei or TikTok. So should the Chinese just sit out of global economics because they could threaten US dominance and potentially spy on or manipulate US people? The current dialogue is centers on future power, not on any actual abuse of power by these companies. Not like the US actually spying on Angela Merkel.
Set up a subsidiary that's subject to US law and rather than Chinese law and also has majority ownership in America. It's what the China enforces on foreign companies, so fair is fair.
> So should the Chinese just sit out of global economics because they could threaten US dominance and potentially spy on or manipulate US people?
I have no problem with Chinese companies participating in global economics as long as they're not based on stolen technology. Also it's not "potential", this has already happened extensively. China rose to prominence by extensive state funded industrial espionage and US companies were too blinded by greed to counter it. The US needs more laws in place to prevent this type of behavior and more retaliatory action when it's committed.
So many Chinese people I see online seem to think that the US is scared of China becoming more powerful economical or some other nonsense. The US created current Chinese economic prosperity through extensive work by Nixon and others in that era. That was all a massive mistake based on the mistaken idea that if China became more economically powerful they would become more democratic and more freedom oriented. That has failed to be the case and it's time to rethink how the US has handled China historically.
Sounds kinda sinophobia to me.
During Soviet times, a Russian man was arguing with a British man over whether their respective countries had freedom of speech. The British man said "I can go to the Houses of Parliament and call Margaret Thatcher an idiot". To which the Soviet man said "It's the same for us. I can go to Red Square and call Margaret Thatcher an idiot".
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/a-different-future-for-tel...
Bingo. It seems like this is more a bet that they can't become wholly independent without the tooling itself, or can't become independent for a long while. I doubt it has much to do with "setting up incentives for transparency". I think the "will China become transparent about its actions" question is pretty much settled at this point.
- Churchill (I think)
If Trump gets reelected this year that will be his second term which is the limit, and so there will be a new administration in January 2025. If he doesn't get reelected there will be a new administration on January 2021.
The Belt and Road initiative was a clear sign that China is confident and more assertive geo-political player and intends to eventually replace the US as the dominant world power.
An easy choice of the UK to make considering they export very little of consequence to China ... Australia on the other hand.
If the last few years mismanagement of Brexit, privatising the NHS, "universal" credit, historic immigration renegs, the perpetually delayed reaction to Covid19, PPE procurement contracts going to zero-asset companies monetarily linked to Tory members and donors...
Well... A large part of me hopes it's mere incompetence.
But the bigger picture seems to be a party that —starting with May as Home Secretary— has been pushing harder and harder at knowing everything about everybody. Kicking out incumbent foreign hardware providers seems like a bloody good way to plant your own hardware in its place and achieve another level of control.
The country is essentially for sale. China just needs to make the "right" political donations.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/07/14/lord-brown...
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-...
Does this mean that operators will have to pay for it, so new investments will be required?
If 5G deployment price increase due to this political stuff, is gonna be then more expensive for the end user no? price will reflect it i guess...
Technology is bigger than any one person or place. Samsung could make x86 chips just fine without hiring a single Intel engineer, if they put enough money behind the project. Likewise, China could out-innovate silicon valley if they poured trillions into it (and I'm sure they make that calculation yearly and decide not to). Likewise, the US could build fabs and get back up to speed with China when it comes to chip production, but they would have to pour trillions into it, and it would disrupt our image of green/clean technology.
To clarify, while US-China superficially seem like the 'sides'. Really, what I think is happening is that the values of many (especially Western) countries around human rights, democracy, freedom of religion and expression, are coming into conflict with a new kind of Chinese authoritarianism that really doesn't care for these things and is quite willing to subjugate large groups of people in doing so (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, claims to Taiwan, etc.).
I think people are just waking up to the reality that the opening of China will not automatically lead to greater liberalism as was predicted.
Any long term resolution to the conflict has to involve the realization that China has had 100 bad years and now has a giant comeback. And that the US has had 60 good years but now large parts of it decline.
I wonder about this. Why does totalitarianism in a sovereign nation need to be fought? For those of us considering a democratic China...why do we think the country would fare better as a democracy? The Chinese civilisation is goes back thousands of years. Could the system they have now be the cumulative effect of all they have gone through to date? In other words it has evolved and generally serves its people. It may evolve into something else (possibly resembling Western democracies) but it may not. I don't particularly think it has to.
If you want China to stop being totalitarian, then you should wait until most Chinese citizens decide that they don't approve of the ruling party, and then let them decide what to replace it with. You cannot force democracy.
If it was not for china North Korea and possibly Pakistan would not have had nuclear weapons now. So no, it is not just in it's own borders.
It’s like being caught in a fight between your drunk uncle and your berserk cousin.
Europe does not have to align with either side. It is a superpower in its own right if it gets its shit together (one can dream).
As an European I don't what to think that the US seems so against kit from a Chinese company and completely fine with kit from an European company.
They should be worried about both. We also have a long term world domination plan (version 2.0)... ;)
The US would of course prefer that American technology be available, but since it's not then I suppose a partnership with two trusted allies is preferable to one with an untrusted adversary.
Nokia and Ericsson also aren't arms of the state widely believed (fairly or not) to actively facilitate global industrial and military espionage activities on behalf of a hostile government, so there's that.
While Obama made his move over SE Asia, the CCP applied the strategy they used in Australia with the PIGS. And while Trump very successfully destroyed what Obama tried to do in SE Asia, the CCP installed foreign military bases near center of trade in the Indian ocean while gaining political goodwill with middle east poorest countries. Most of Iraki oil is sold to China.
I'm not claiming i know what should be done, i'm just saying that China have already a lot of political allies and try to gain more, and now reached europe.
That equipment is everywhere it will take years and cost billions to remove and replace.
And yes there has been already pushback around it both in terms of demands to lower the time frame to 3 years and to increase it to 10.
In that context the failures of the US (as it is de-facto the standard-bearer of political liberalism in a broad sense), have real influence.
When the Chinese look around the world and they see the state of the US on imprisonment, racial conflict, failure during the current covid crisis and so on, this strengthens the domestic control of the party and the alternative autocratic system the government is advocating.
That said, the parent poster isn't the US government, but a private citizen raising a valid criticism of another country. So why can't it stand on its own, without a big show of self-criticism first? Can we not criticize others until our own house is in order? Once that happens, the discussion turns into an argument over moral equivalence or lack thereof -- ie. "the US' crimes are just as bad as China's!" versus "No these things are of completely different degrees!".
This line of argument quickly becomes tiring and, I think it completely muddles the original point, which is often what is intended when hurling "what about...!" into the discussion.
Should nobody have fought the Nazis?
So yes, this is a small victory in a massive war.
That's a pretty large economic cost. Bob can't watch his medical lectures on the train, so ends up behind in class, Mary's company looses a contract to a foreign competitor because she got frustrated with her bad VPN and didn't read over the bid one last time, Fred couldn't afford the cost of the new 5G contracts so didn't get much data and ended up losing touch with his friends who were all group video calling eachother.
All these socio-economic costs cascade for decades or more. Do they really outweigh the theoretical ability for another nation to disrupt network traffic for a few hours until a mitigation is put in place?
Those 'new applications' will be old applications with a few thousand more JavaScript libraries bundled with every page load...
5g is just another white rabbit big Multinational are chasing to justify/force infrastructure replacement.
Guess I’m on team Huawei now!
She is usually writes some messages to Bob, but probably couldn’t afford 5G plan and decided to end the relationship.
4g is everywhere in NL. it just works great whereever you are. so i really wonder where the immediate need for 5g is.
I live on an island near a metro with a lot of traffic when the ferry from the metro arrives, then it disappears. Every single ferry that comes in knocks out 4g responsiveness (or takes it down entirely) while the ferry disembarks until everyone moves away from that area.
So, for me, 5g has a projected material benefit (presuming my understanding of their brownbags were sufficient). I'd love to hear any actual cellular network engineers fully explain it because between words I didn't understand and trying to balance a salad and eat it without a table, I'm sure I misunderstood _something_.
If the CCP wants conflicts at least it needs to find allies, right? So why then it tries to piss off just about every countries it's surrounded by?
No shortage of Chinese allies - 70+ countries supported China's recent change to Hong Kong's laws (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1193422.shtml). Certainly none of these countries are bastions of freedom - North Korea, Venezuela, Chad, Myanmar, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan. But all of them support China to the hilt. Tanzania didn't even stop with an endorsement of the HK law, they also felt it necessary to mention that Taiwan is a part of China. Turns out Chinese loans go a long way in creating a sense of gratitude.
All countries barring the US need China more than China needs them. And China only needs the US until it has semiconductors of it's own.
The US and EU were asleep at the wheel these last 30 years - allowing China to grow powerful without also creating a counterweight like India. Now the world's dependence on Chinese manufacturing and Chinese consumption means that no one dares to criticise China, and there's no shortage of countries lining up to praise every action of Comrade Xi's.
That's why China can screw over every neighbour, taking what they please. Who's going to stop them? Is Vietnam or Malaysia suddenly going to stand up to China? No, they will merely grumble. Is India willing to provoke an actual war? No, they will merely ban TikTok and call it a day.
ah yes, exactly the same logic that resulted in World War 2
War with China would be extremely painful, every single item that modern life depends upon apart from food will suddenly become scarce. That acts as a powerful deterrent.