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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I am going to put it in the most blunt, politically incorrect and frankly offensive way: I don't want my communications to touch any Chinese services, hardware, applications or processes. This is what my gut feelings are. I have surveyed over 200 suppliers in China, I've got zero trust in their professional ethics.

EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications. No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure because it's reasonable to expect strong ethics and professionalism. It's completely opposite with Chinese companies. Really. This is a broad generalization to help navigate. Of course there are exceptions, many, in fact. I find it totally ironic that the CCP is recently cracking down on low level corruption in mid-sized firms in China (a good thing), while ignoring their own deeds.

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> EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications.

Before telling that EU or US should develop its own infrastructure for communications, think why it's not there already, and why it needs a boot from the government.

US, and EU largely nuked their own industries without any foreign spies blowing up bridges.

I cannot single out what's in particular what's solely responsible for demise of industrial economy in the West, but having tried it myself I can say that the sense of swimming against the current is omnipresent.

Don't just spray money, first think why doing so 10 times before did not work.

I think the decline of the industrial economy in the US is substantially down to the US government effectively subsidizing foreign manufacturing with seignorage (dollar printing) profits.

Optimizing for quarterly returns means nobody plans for 10 or 25 years into the future. You won't get a bonus for planning ahead.

A lot of it is labor costs. There's also the fact that there are other, more lucrative industries for American industry to chase. Everything has tradeoffs. I don't know if I would say industry left the US due to a failure of any kind. This is kind of the definition of an economic comparative advantage.

Not true at all, labour costs only make few percents of high value goods you import from third world countries.

Even if they were to go up tenfold, it will not make that much of difference.

People who moan about labour costs making any difference to modern manufacturing are just keeping regurgitating a myth.

In fact, trained manufacturing labour costs in coastal China are now significantly passing that of US averages, and even more so of US flyover states.

I'd guess that most manufactured goods have a margin of a few percentage points.

Labor cost are way lower in southern and eastern europe.

Sometimes when I read History, I wonder why the hell people at the time didn't see the obvious threats that were looming over them. Actually there's always some guys that see what's coming and tell, but nobody cares and a lot of time passes whith plenty of opportunities to correct the course.

Then comes the war or an empire falls.

US/EU sold out to cheaper prices in China partly due to currency manipulation and partly due to the fault of their own (meaning capitalistic incentives, no regulations, international trade agreements, etc.).

Further they did so with the presumption that China will shed off its authoritarian tones as it grows. That didn't pan out as well.

I would say your assessment of this situation is pretty spot on - we need to ask Why and what led to centralization of manufacturing specifically.

Hit tech industries are limited by the number of educated people in the population available to support them, so they operate at the whims of citizens and the education system.

If countries want to expand their silicon design and manufacturing capabilities, then they need to somehow get their citizens to study the relevant fields necessary to grow such industries.

American university graduates tend towards degrees related to business or healthcare. I'm not sure how countries like China, Korea, and Japan manage to graduate so many technical people.

Part of the issue is chicken-and-egg. It's hard to get a job in the field of chip design / manufacturing because there just aren't that many of those jobs available in the USA, outside of a few key regions.

This hard to explain for me, as somebody faring from Russia, a country super hostile to entrepreneurs.

From one side just any place in US, or EU, are 100000% better deal for people doing business on paper, yet you keep running in the overall "systemic apathy" towards boring businesses like manufacturing.

You all get all the welcome if you are doing something relatable to people making social elites like some hot shot VC business, and have a personal image of Musk Elon. You feel the entirety of society is ready to flex, and mold itself around you.

Now, try to come to some "high society" event, and complain that some absurd accounting law effectively shutting down your manufacturing business... People will not even look at you, if not trying to snub you.

You feel some kind of unease, or friction.

If I were to be in Russia, I will just know that bureaucrats are bastards, I will bare with them, and go doing my business later like if nothing happened. The negativity ends there.

In the West... But in the West, the most of the obstacle course only begins when you already pass the red tape. You will keep having to deal with the same impassionate attitude with your own employees, your professional community, every lawyer/banker/mba dominated circle be it a client, or a supplier.

While bad guys in Russia will hit you on the head, and take your money one way or another, the "bad" guys in the West will just say "we don't need you, your business, and your money, go away."

There was a narrative that was pushed by Davos and others that advanced economies should be structured around services. I talked to economics students in Manchester at some point and they sneered at me, when I argued that Germany was in a much better place compared to most places in Europe because it hadn’t lost all of its industrial base. They called that thinking backward. One other reason I can think of is that a large majority of decision makers in Europe and US are non-technical and/or even openly hostile to practical aspects of industry. So everything operates with multiple levels of indirection between stakeholders and technical people.

It sincerely pains me to write this, but I tend to agree with the general conclusion of this comment. Of course, Germans, French, Canadians....etc are NOT immune to incompetence or unethical conduct either (see Enron, VW, Total...etc). But once you've dealt long enough with Chinese CM/ODM/OEMs, you've seen things that make you nod along this comment.

JUST YESTERDAY, we received an SDK doc from a well-known networking gear OEM that was encrypted using 3DES. [1]

[1] https://www.precisely.com/blog/data-security/aes-vs-des-encr...

For sure. But the specific statement of expecting "strong" ethics from some group of companies is bizarre.

I would go all the way and say that it is completely unreasonable to expect "strong" ethics from any company. There are just too many individuals involved with their own incentives.

It's like looking at MLB dopers and expecting european cyclists to be a better type of person and never dope. It will never happen that way. However, you could reasonably expect a sport whose governing body does regular testing of athletes and their gear to have less cheating. You could say that has nothing to do with ethics. It's about consequences.

This should be a very easy conclusion for anyone that has ever read about cheating in any kind of system. sports, finance, academia's replication crisis, scrabble tournaments... it is sad, but the most reasonable conclusion is to expect cheating and unethical behavior. It's just what people, including some very good people, end up doing due to pressure and being able to get away with something. And if it is profitable to just pay the fine and not do a recall, don't do a recall. Even if that means kids will die.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/

I agree wholeheartedly. Another thought that comes to mind is the idea that laws are a weak guarantee of outcome.

When you mentioned Germany, I chuckled a little. Worked there for many years and corruption and lack of professionalism I witness in IT section was astonishing. At least here in US corporate corruption is not blunt; nobody here - like it happened to me in Germany - will meet you for the first time, listen to your case and then ask for $15,000 Euro bribe.

Here is a good start how terrible German ethics are:

https://www.dw.com/en/image-problems-mount-in-corporate-germ...

And then my favorite case of corrupted to the core Siemens:

https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-the-massive-siemens...

Thanks for the contrast. We also know the VW scandal. As I said, this is a broad generalization from my own experience with mid-sized firms in China. I can only expect larger unethical behavior with CCP members in the board meetings.

At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process. Worse, unspoken threat and chilling effect executives and leadership team would have to appease the CCP members. There was a recent example of this - Jack Ma.

How’s Jack Ma related to your trust in Hua wei? It was a different company and it wasn’t just random interference from the government it was the other way round. Jack Ma started using his position to interfere with government.

I think it's very much related. Can you imagine Jeff Bezos disappearing for 2 months because he didn't appease the US Feds?

Now imagine the chilling effect it would send to the rest of the executives from small to large corporations.

It’s not comparable... China isn’t a democracy and free speech isn’t a thing.

Can I imagine Jeff bezos being arrested for committing a federal crime: yes

Speaking out against the government is a crime? Did Jack Ma get a trial?

Yes. It is a crime. Depending on the type of crime, you may or may not get a public trial.

> It’s not comparable... China isn’t a democracy and free speech isn’t a thing.

And that makes it right? Or are we on the "it's their culture, so we aren't allowed to be critical of it" bandwagon?

You can be critical, sure. But applying your sense of right and wrong doesn’t make much sense.

In my eyes, Jeff Bezos is constantly disappearing. I mean, he's only in the media spotlight once every few months right? I'd dread to think what happens to him while he's missing during those media lapses...

Can you imagine a billionaire implicated in child sex scandal and with potential dirt on many politicians mysteriously dying in jail?

> At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process.

Sure? https://www.dw.com/en/internet-exchange-de-cix-accuses-germa...

I've worked for a few German mega-corps and I was always struck by how in point their "anti-bribery" training was. It kind of felt like a "how-to" course on bribery where they just tell you not to do the thing at the end.

Kind of like those anti-drug campaigns in schools where the police would tell you about all the different drugs and how not to use them. "This here is crack cocaine, it's like regular cocaine but cheaper and more effective. Most people put the crack rock into a glass tube and light it with a torch. Now smoking crack makes your body feel better than anything in the world. So don't do it." Then they tell you how to spot a drug dealer and let you know that most offer free samples.

Regarding Siemens it reminds me of John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man about the engineering firm Chas T Main. Bribes are merely one technique to obtain power by companies like these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...

> No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure

Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. I've been living in Germany for 5 years, and for the most part I love it, but the telecom situation is shocking. Speeds are slow, most people are still on DSL, and hardly a day goes by where I don't have at least a few minutes of random network blackouts, which is really great for working during a pandemic. A few weeks ago my home internet was down for 72 hours. Sometimes it feels like like when I have traveled in the developing world and the power just goes out sometimes and nobody makes a big deal about it because they're used to it.

If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. This is not due to technology, this is due to carriers and ISPs. Those two are completely separate from tech companies making networking hardware. Ironically [for this comment] Germany uses A LOT of Huawei stuff for the access network on xDSL.

>If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment.

Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively.

Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure.

It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol.

When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.

You might have missed my point.

The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use.

And of course, you should not compare next gen access infrastructure with xDSL, as they are not mutually exclusive, and all countries have areas with degraded infrastructure on old technology, but also new infrastructure on new technology.

This is, again, completely unrelated to who makes the telco equipment.

>You might have missed my point. The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use.

Excuse me, but isn't this what you claimed in your original post? Quote: "If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment."

Yes, I said that, and that would mean "The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use."

OP said: > > No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure > Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad.

My intention was to note that the fact that German communication infrastructure is bad is not related at all to the manufacturer of ICT equipment, in the context of the quality of German (and European - in general) telco equipment manufacturers.

If Germany has bad infrastructure, and uses XYZ European ICT equipment manufacturer, this cannot be extrapolated to mean that XYZ is bad at making ICT equipment. The same applies to Huawei. The fact that some countries have good or bad infrastructure is not related to what equipment they use (at this point in time).

The end result being that quality of telco infrastructure is not an argument for or against any particular maker of equipment, because those two things are unrelated.

Any to underline why they are unrelated - simply because ISPs are profit-driven businesses and not tech playgrounds, so they will not invest in the latest and greatest equipment that XYZ/Huawei has to offer, instead they will milk the existing equipment and infrastructure dry and then switch to the cheapest new next-gen-access "thing" that exists for the next 20+ years. This does not mean that XYZ/Huawei doesn't have anything better to offer, it just means that the telcos do not want it.

> Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad.

German here. That's not because our tech companies are incompetent (AVM's FritzBox DSL/Cable modems are top notch, Fraunhofer and the public broadcasters' research arm IRT are leading in communication standards development)... it is a side effect of our dysfunctional politics and decades of "conservatives" in government:

1) Our mobile networks are ... lackluster because the governments (both center-left and "conservative") extracted something like 50 billion € from the operators during the infamous UMTS license auctions to prop up the government's balance sheet. That, together with the cost of building out a network in rural areas that don't have many customers, is the reason why mobile plans are so expensive and the quality so bad.

2) Our fibre adoption rate is so utterly disgusting because the fibre plans were shelved by the newly elected Conservative government in 1982 - it got replaced by cable-TV so that the percieved "too far left" (=too critical of the government) public TV stations could be "countered" with private TV stations. I wish I were joking, unfortunately I'm serious: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...

...compared to where?

Eastern Europe, south east Asia, even in Spain and the US I had better experience with internet.

Also Nordic countries.

Where in Germany did you live with such bad internet?

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

If you wanna play case for case, we’ll be reading the China stack until heat death

While I absolutely do have the perception that Chinese businesses are more corrupt than Western businesses, admittedly any sort of data or analysis would be welcome.

that's kinda that point... you dont get any data from China.

You don't trust health data from tobacco companies either, but you can still figure out ways to analyze the health of tobacco.

This certainly is not my wheelhouse, but I assume someone has made some attempts to analyze this?

At least you know that some forces existed where this got documented. Good luck with that in China!

I happened to work a few years in German company that made fiber and carrier ethernet products for telecoms. We had a lot of ethics and professionalism and really good feature set, even occasionally we out innovated other companies, but we didn't have the price point that Huawei can achieve, hence contracts went to China.

I guess maybe you don't hear about as much corruption in Germany is if you are a whistleblower, then you get poisoned https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36185194

Wild speculation: this draft proposal would favor smaller chip makers that have been acquired by China. https://www.datenna.com/china-eu-fdi-radar/

I wouldn't trust Americans either if I had no access to courts that had jurisdiction over them. This is one of the issues of trade without reciprocal jurisdiction. The problem extends beyond just communications hardware and the special concerns of that category.

What did Huawei do to make you come to this conclusion?

Why isn’t encryption the solution here?

There is a lot of rot in Huawei: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/technology/huawei-rackete...

No, the US government and media say there is. That is not necessarily the truth.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1612385723&dateRange=custom&...

Holy shit

Encryption does not protect you from:

1. metadata leaks 2. denial of service backdoors - a real consideration for nations going to trade war with China and Huawei is pretty connected to the Chinese government

Also there is the problem that lot of tech is legacy and can not be easily upgraded for encryption (think SMS and mobile calls)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scanda...

Ironically. You could be right about the 200 suppliers in China, except that Huawei in this case IS actually one of the few trustable Chinese companies.

In this very same thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26019039

Are you forgetting about COINTELPRO and PRISM?

I feel like this is akin to one of those Stanford psychology experiments, but in political science/cultural development, i.e. what happens when you bomb a country back to the stone age (interregnum post-Qiang dynasty, then WWII), but then juice up the economy in 2-3 decades but without the "normal" cultural/political/ethical development, and in a complete effectively laissez-faire libertarian-but-also-authoritarian-with-a-lot-of-bribes environment

It goes beyond ethics. The CCP has clear long term global power goals and espionage plays a large part of this.

China threads turn into whataboutism. Yeah obviously the West spies as well. But we don't tend to use that to steal IP and coordinate with our state-owned or virtually quasi state owned companies. Even if we did do that I'd rather the spying be on our side. Plus we do have some individual liberty protections (no matter how deteriorating) and can push for more/transparency (Democracy versus a dictatorship).

We're in confrontation already why give up such an important strategic asset?

Well, maybe the idea is to fix your own house first?

I mean this is the whole reason we've got into the Brexit situation, by constantly casting blame on the EU for our own government's failings. But I guess that's the whole point in Democracy isn't it? Constantly blaming someone else, making up false accusations of someone else, and when they try to defend themselves, intensify the accusations.

I am also curious about where you think Huawei stolen the 5G IPs from? Or are you regurgitating false accusations without any evidence?

- I never claimed huawei stole 5g ips i don't know much on this subject but you can not argue that China has not stolen IP broadly and aggressively - sure fix the house. but why let a foreign actor in the 'house' who would do even more damage.

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