China Bans iPhone Use for Government Officials at Work
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Some HN posters believe that this is a tit-for-tat move regarding the Huawei sales ban, which is hardly comparable, as Huawei hardware cannot be legally distributed or sold by US companies.
There are bans on Huawei telecom equipment, but their phones, tablets, smartwatches, etc are not banned and are readily available:
https://www.newegg.com/Huawei/BrandStore/ID-15388
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Huawei/page/34F6034C-1D34-4913...
That T3 10 is now over 6 years old, for example.
Still not legal for US companies to distribute Huawei phones, though.
Obviously they are imported, that's the point. They are imported Chinese phones. Amazon and Newegg are US companies distributing imported Chinese Huawei phones.
There is a ban on Huawei telecom equipment, and a ban on selling tech to Huawei, but show me where phones are banned.
"Imported" here only means that they crossed the border, not that they are being lawfully distributed in the US.
> Amazon and Newegg are US companies distributing imported Chinese Huawei phones.
Not true. Third party resellers are importing and selling some Huawei phones.
> ... show me where phones are banned.
Can you buy a Huawei phone from a retailer in the US? Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart? Or from a telecom? AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile?
Huawei and ZTE have also both been banned from getting FCC licenses. You could definitely buy a Huawei phone in the US, but it wouldn't be licensed by the FCC.
yes, I already shared the links.
https://www.amazon.com/HUAWEI-P60-Pro-MNA-LX9-Unlocked/dp/B0...
>Third party resellers are importing and selling some Huawei phones.
It is a distinction without a difference. I buy on Amazon, I pay on Amazon. They have a complicated supply chain with third party sellers, but it doesn't make them immune from import bans.
>Huawei and ZTE have also both been banned from getting FCC licenses.
Yes, that is true, but yet to see any citation of an ban on imports, sale, or use.
Amazon third party sellers work like Ebay.
You are suggesting that when you buy something off Ebay, it is Ebay the one selling you the stuff, which is clearly not true.
You could find things on Amazon that aren't licensed to be sold in the US. That doesn't make them suddenly "legal".
> Yes, that is true, but yet to see any citation of an ban on imports, sale, or use.
If they cannot get a FCC license, they cannot legally distribute or sell their phones in US soil. That's just FCC rules [0]
But I'm honestly not sure what you are trying to prove here.
For example, I recently bought a Japanese Sony gadget on Ebay. It has Bluetooth. It definitely does not have a FCC sticker, nor has been licensed by the FCC. I was able to buy it, but Sony is not allowed to sell it in the US.
Does the fact that I bought it from an US website, mean that Sony is effectively selling this gadget in the US? Of course not, that's ridiculous.
[0] https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/equipment-authorizatio....
Your comment: “Huawei hardware cannot be legally distributed or sold by US companies.”
You were dead wrong. Just admit it, it’s not personal.
“Does the fact that I bought it from an US website, mean that Sony is effectively selling this gadget in the US? Of course not, that's ridiculous.”
You can’t be this naive. This is 2023 not 2001. Sanctioned companies selling through distributors has been around since sanctions. US laws have explicit rules around this and companies facilitating are themselves subject to sanctions.
Right. So you can illegally buy and sell stuff in the US. What a surprise.
> Your comment: “Huawei hardware cannot be legally distributed or sold by US companies.”
Yes, that was indeed my comment.
Because the FCC will not issue new licenses to Huawei, and Huawei cannot sell their hardware in the US without such licenses.
This FCC document clearly states exactly what it's banning:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-389524A1.pdf
https://www.fcc.gov/supplychain/coveredlist
"Telecommunications equipment produced by Huawei Technologies Company, including telecommunications or video surveillance services provided by such entity or using such equipment."
Phones are a part of telecommunications equipment.
The term “telecommunications equipment” means equipment used by a carrier to provide telecommunications services, and includes software integral to such equipment (including upgrades).
I don't think that includes phones. That is routing/switching hardware and software. I.e., infrastructure equipment, not consumer devices.
Also, in the same paragraph, you can read that they explicitly mention “video surveillance services” as telecommunications equipment, which are terminals as well.
[0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-90-133A1.pdf
edit: It's of course not Huawei, it's a totally new and different company which bought Huawei's server business a week after being founded, silly me.
Is that the case given that iPhones are manufactured in China?
My tinfoil hat theory is that they find it harder to hack iPhones to monitor their government officials.
Also, China has the capability to spy on everyone and their government is morally worse so of course they are. Social credit, concentration camps, etc
It is a fact that certain US agencies required Blackberry or Android, rather than iOS on iPhone, for this reason.
There are a bunch that are CNSSP-11 compliant, though: https://www.nsa.gov/Resources/Commercial-Solutions-for-Class...
It's not a hard breadcrumb trail to follow and i am also aghast at so many HN posters pontificating so strongly about nonsense
Banning iPhones because of Kaspersky incompetence protecting their corporate network? That is nonsense.
or to Pegasus ? When the OS runs everything it gets as a stream of bytes...
I think another insight might be that the Chinese gov doesn’t really like when large companies can influence their decisions. I’d imagine that if everyone in the gov has an iPhone it makes it harder to be tough on Tim Apple.
In the age of AI and model training, data is more than ever precious
The US spying on EU leaders and their industry is perhaps what China is worried about
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m...
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/russia-s...
When Xu was apprehended, he had with him an iPhone whose contents he’d faithfully backed up to the cloud, a lapse that allowed FBI investigators to recover all the data from Apple Inc.
...
FBI search warrants to Apple and Google had opened up his iCloud and multiple Gmail accounts, and digital forensics experts at the bureau had mined the contents of the phones recovered at the arrest. (Investigators were not able to recover anything, however, from the iPhone Xu Heng had been carrying. The day after the arrest, someone remotely accessed the device and wiped it clean.)
Certain Israeli private company can hack through any phone security (at least both ios and android) like its not there, you just need to pay enough. You can be genocidal murderer too, doesnt matter.
Good luck explaining this to nontrivial part of HN crowd who are absolutely uncritical of Apple. I think if google would be doing 100% as they do now but be a chinese company, they would be smeared to hell by the same crowd. At least both are US companies, so some diacussions with some can be had.
Hopeless "violence begets violence" situations like this underscore how disastrous a full exposé of both governments would be. It's a sad time to be a global citizen.
Can't we just say all nation states? It certainly isn't just major powers that have spy agencies.
E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_intelligence_agencies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Agency_(South_A...
Wikipedia lists them for 122 countries [1], out of 206 [2]. So about 60%. Maybe a little higher if a few are missing.
I do wonder if there's also some kind of commonly accepted division within those that separates the "big guys" vs the "little guys", e.g. if there's a certain key spying ability that takes a certain level of funding and sophistication. I mean, I do have to assume that there is a qualitative difference between the kind of spying done by "major powers" and others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies
Considering China's Biggest Export are Consumer Electronics and its adjacent industry, Apple has been the biggest help to that in the past 15 years. Not just on its products, but also the whole Supply Chain from Display to NAND. I warned about BOE and YMTC in 2016 on SemiWiki before both names enter into mainstream media. And it seems only Financial Times [1] ( or arguably Patrick McGee ) is getting it. Almost every comments on HN hate Qualcomm, during the Apple vs Qualcomm trial, the company that sided with Apple most was interestingly ( or not ) Huawei.
So no, there are still no signs they are tough on Apple. If anything Apple are helping Chinese companies to set up base outside of China to continue their operation. Actively funding and directing resources. This trend has only recently stopped some what after India demanded more local company to be used inside supply chains.
Again, if anything Tim Cook is very much Pro China.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/bf8e3846-2421-4f91-becf-2dfe39ec9...
I dunno, I think I'd rather a group of people I was trying to hack were using a collection of random devices with vendor-supplied customer Android builds on them than iOS.
> if everyone in the gov has an iPhone it makes it harder to be tough on Tim Apple
Everyone in the government is a party member and will toe the line. It's the middle-class public you need to keep your eye on.
You mean the US dominates. I don't see any EU, Canadian or Australian designed smart-phones, Office365, Google, Chat-GPT, AWS, I can buy reaching critical mass.
Edit: INB4 the chip hipsters who found out about ASML during the pandemic chip shortage, chime in with "but muh ASML is European!". Yes, it is European(Dutch), it's also based on EUV tech licensed from the US, and has EUV light sources at it's core secret sauce, made by Cymer, a US company, but I was talking about software products and services which are the big money makers.
EU, Canada, and the rest of the west are lacking in world dominating SW companies and rely exclusively on the US, which the US can always use as leverage.
Ironically, China's detachment form the US SW companies and the need to develop it's own giants, will give it a major advantage long term, versus US's allies which will keep relying on it.
Reached critical mass, or even world-dominating: Nokia, RIM, Figma, Skype, Spotify, Hetzner
> the US dominates
... by buying them.
// Of these, RIM lost critical mass, Spotify is on uncertain ground, and Hetzner seems fine.
Not even close. All of those are meh in terms of market cap and have plenty of competition making them easily replaceable by US alternatives.
The likes of Apple, Nvidia, Office365, Google, are irreplaceable in the EU, and they could buy all of those companies if they wanted to.
Point is whether EU could reach critical mass or domination, not whether could sustain. In their day, RIM (Canada) for biz and Nokia (EU) for normies destroyed US mobile sales.
That wasn't my point. We have engineers, but we have no local champions. ASML, SAP and Spotify can't balance out what the US has.
>they are just mostly working for US companies
THAT was my point. Europe has a lack of local top tech companies and our brightest minds are working to build up the US tech sector instead of the domestic one.
Just the other day I was saying to a person close to me of how right now the world economy is splitting into two separate future growth camps, China and the US, with Europe left somewhere in a stagnating middle.
I don’t agree China will have the advantage though, it will certainly develop its own standards and mandate it internally but it remains to be seen if it will be able to export those standards, it tried with BRI and that did not work, but that was more manufacturing oriented. It’ll try to tech again but it will be a tough sell. It simply does not have the goodwill required. Will see gains in Russia, Pakistan and Cambodia, some countries in Africa but that’s about it.
Edit: It could be retaliations against US sanctions. But there’s a difference: All these kinds of orders are made without any written documents. These are just part of the general decline of the rule of law in China, which there weren’t much to begin with.
There's no way that the Chinese gov actually believes that Chinese Tesla data stays in China.
But, if you don’t know anyone in the offensive security space and still want to get some general feelings, perhaps you can start by looking into things like “Tesla CAN bus security,” “Tesla infotainment security,” and “Tesla NFC fob security.”
Plus, here’s a heuristic for why they would have horrible security: they a are poorly built product which focuses more on flash than substance made by a company with an owner that is known to cut corners, and security is absolutely not one of the key selling points of this(or any other) car.
I explicitly gave search terms you can use to gain some feelings about the subject and included a heuristic.
Frankly, I find your backhanded comment (that you dug into my comment history to find) obnoxious.
And you know this how? Maybe the document do exist but are classified. As for rule of law - try civil forfeiture for example. It is but a pure theft that goes unpunished.
Countries have their own everything (laws, regulations, money, taxes etc) given that this is how the world's political power is managed.
Digital tech and information flow spread like if it is a universal something, but that is not how the worlds political power is managed.
At most you might have coalitions of allies that trust each other enough to have a joint info-space. But there isnt much trust even between EU and US, and ultimately its every truly sovereign entity for itself.
In that sense, an open and universal internet is an anomaly. It was a great thought experiment by hippie technophiles, and "connecting the world" is a commonly parroted platitude by social media executives, but humans are far from ready to interact with millions of strangers from their own country, let alone from around the world.
If anything, all this technology that was supposed to bring us together, has instead driven us further apart. The internet is our main source of information, yet it's been corrupted by advertising, corporations and governments to spread disinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale, and influence the masses towards their own agenda.
We're still in the early stages of the technological revolution, but it's clear that a universal communication medium cannot exist yet. We're not ready for it. China and Russia already have isolated alternatives, and it's only a matter of time before other countries or coalitions follow suit. In any case, we can safely assume that all of it will be heavily censored and controlled by each government. Cryptography will exist in some form, but there will be backdoors for any government to exploit as needed.
Is this too pessimistic? :) I'd really like to be wrong about all this, but I can't picture a scenario where billions of us happily sing kumbaya together around a virtual campfire.
But I also dont think that the hippy technofiles were all wrong.
Ironically, when you combine the finite Earth with extreme levels of digital information gathering and the zero cost of replication and transmission it is very hard to keep silos. E.g., pretty soon automated translation is a thing (and I am not an AI bro :-). Also you cant do much about joint dependencies on environmental deterioration without global coordination.
How its going to play out is unclear but the scenario of the same old clans fighting it out in the same old ways is not a given in the longer term. There are centripetal and centrifugal forces. For now the pattern seems to be tearing apart.
The link should be changed.
Compared to the thousands of requests they received and fulfilled in that time: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html
Did you mean to say “Apple has had to follow federal law when handed subpoena requests”?
For example the CLOUD act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Can apple not follow it, and will they protect it? Maybe someone with better knowledge on this topic can answer.
What are they even handing over in subpoenas?
That's no less of a problem for non-friendly governments
https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/252455036/Gov...
I'm a Apple fanboy myself and praise their security features. But as a USA company they are not above the law.
I don't think this is true.
If that is true, what a bizarre reaction. Apple wasn't behind this, and, if anything, it highlighted Kaspersky shortcomings.
What "kaspersky shortcomings" are you talking about?
iPhones are of course not invulnerable to malware, no one is claiming that. Android devices aren't either.
What Kaspersky "exposed" was that their corporate devices were compromised. They claimed victory afterwards when they found the fact. But the truth is that they inadvertently allowed malware to roam free in their corporate devices for several years, which is quite telling, especially for a security company.
Them shifting the blame to Apple is like blaming Cisco for a corporate network hack, when your personnel left a device exposed to the internet with no appropriate protections in place. Yeah, a Meraki could be as much of a "black box" as a mobile device.
I get that Kaspersky has no business with Apple, but the whole saga was bizarrely unprofessional from their part.
In terms of real-world actions, the US has more 750 military bases in 80 countries, including 300 in Asia.
China has 8 overseas bases: one in Djibouti and the rest in islands near China.
China is definitely trying to advance its economic interests throughout the world, by investing in infrastructure in Africa and Latin America.
That's what every country does or aspires to do. It's just business.
Better transparent soft power that delivers tangible results for the local populace rather than opaque coups, mercenary armies, and funding dictators and warlords.
like sure, i suppose every nation dreams of being the top dog ruling the world, and China even has a realistic shot at it
but i never got any 'we want to destroy the west' vibes from China
Frankly, China's reactions to the US "sanctions" have been extremely restrained and very far from proportional to what USA has done.
The claims of USA that their actions with the purpose of hurting leading Chinese companies like Huawei or SMIC are "sanctions", are pure BS. If they had really been sanctions, then USA would have presented to China some political demands that would have been conditions for avoiding sanctions, for instance they could have required the recognition of the fact that Taiwan is an independent country or a promise that they will not try to expand their sovereignty over the adjacent seas or better rights for minorities.
But USA did not tie any demands to the so-called "sanctions", so these are not sanctions. USA has also claimed that their actions, including the blackmailing of European and Taiwanese companies to stop selling their products to China have the purpose to hurt the Chinese military.
This is also complete BS. The impact on the military will be negligible. The only great impact has been on the US companies Qualcomm and Micron, whose competitors in smartphones and SSDs have been removed from the market exactly at the moments when it had become obvious that in the very near future the US products will no longer be competitive and will lose most of their market share.
Thus the champion of the "free market" could not find any other solution to stay in the top position, except by cheating.
The problem for USA is that this has been an action that has been possible to do only once, and it will be no longer available in the future. It has been wasted now providing gains only for some US companies, while many other US, European and Taiwanese companies have lost money, so they have been more preoccupied on how to circumvent the sanctions instead on how to support them.
If USA had adopted such policies against China at least 15 years earlier, they would have had a good chance to ensure a constant technological advantage for USA. If such policies would have been adopted some time later, in a future when China would still have had critical dependencies on US technology, in the case of a serious conflict they could have been blackmailed to accept whatever USA would have wanted.
Now, these policies have been adopted too late for preventing China to match USA in technology and too early to be able to force them to do anything, because by the time of any future conflict they will have had enough years to eliminate their external dependencies.
If that's a justification then isn't every kind of hypocrisy justified by self-interest?
The Chinese government is not acting with any sort of denial; these two actions may hold others to standards that they don't follow, but they don't seem to be avoiding that fact.
I think the real issue probably is somewhere between retaliation and the desire to support a domestic competitor. China has long had a view that it can't be reliant on a foreign company and that's especially true for the tech sector.