Nokia is replacing Huawei at Deutsche Telekom sites in Germany
lightreading.com
lightreading.com
Basically the same problem played out in the US as well, where smaller operators looking to offset massive hardware costs for 5G upgrades selected high risk vendors who came in well below cost to establish a spying foothold in our telecom networks. The FCC handed out almost $2 billion last year to help these networks rip and replace.
Current gen functioning gear at a discount price will be very tempting.
In the UK, for example since around 2010, Huawei turned over code to an independent oversight board: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/huawei-cyber-secu...
Could you please suggest some read on why equipments are considered coming in well below cost? Haven't heard this before.
Note the dates the Huawei CE12808 was put into and taken out of service. Less than one year.
Also, to most of the world whether US is spying or China is makes 0 practical difference, both can and will be used against given country when decided (ie secret services helping 'their' big companies win big contracts due to leaking some related secrets, many cases like this in the past).
It does make a practical difference. It is better to be spied on by the weakest power. That is probably still China if we blindly guess that their GDP is overstated and note that their military is less adventurous than the US.
In the Middle East, Eastern Europe and maybe Africa there is actually a good chance that the US spying will be used to overthrow your government or literally build an invasion plan. I have no idea how active they are in South America but I assume the sausage making process is ugly there too. I don't think China has been accused of doing either yet although I assume it is going to get started on government-toppling sooner or later.
India would be in a tough spot though. They should probably figure out how to produce telecoms gear through native companies if they haven't already.
The US knows how to manipulate with both the carrot and the stick.
It looks a lot like they've set up a puppet government in Ukraine, it seems a bit incredible that level of trust just developed out of the blue after Euromaidan. And the CIA would have been almost negligent not to be involved in managing the Euromaidan. It'd line up well with the leaked recordings of Victoria Nuland discussing who should be in government, the relatively suicidal stance Ukraine then took towards diplomacy with Russia and just be in character for the CIA.
I'd imagine the Belarusian government would look at that and much rather be using Huawei tech then Cisco. The risks are pretty obvious and one sided. And I doubt Ukraine is the only place the CIA have been moving in to in the east; any government in the region should be worried about US involvement in their politics.
This was completely on Russia and Janukovych without any possible influence of the CIA.
The Nuland phone call was after Janukovych fled the country even though an agreement had been reached. And yes, Nuland had an opinion on what a solution could/should look like.
It "looks like", but only if we glance casually at a couple of articles (or sometimes even just headlines of articles) here and there, without taking the time to, like, actually read them.
Or we pick up random partial factoids (like about the Nuland cable), and we start thinking "Hmm, this would align with [some vastly larger mental model we have the world works]" without stopping to think about what the factoid is actually about, or whether it actually has much of any significance to begin with.
What you have here is article that says "CIA, Ukraine" and you're thinking right way it's about Ukraine being a puppet state. But that's not something the article asserts, or even comes close to talking about as a topic.
Sure it's based on OpenStack so, they could switch to a different distribution. But there are plenty of Huawei proprietary bits that aren't straightforward to replace.
Full disclosure: Former Huawei employee who worked on one of the aforementioned proprietary bits.
Either my sarcasm detector is way off or…
And it's not like there haven't been repeated offenses of privacy abuse in the Netherlands the past few years.. (With little to no repercussion whatsoever..) The general response of the average (uninformed) citizen is that they have nothing to hide, so they don't care. And it is well know that abuses only happen in other, less developed countries, with said countries starting at the southern, eastern, and "western" boarders. So, as long as they inconvenience someone else's life, all is well.
As the poem goes:
First they came...This is the country that makes you put your full name and address on personal websites yeah?
Now the Dutch tax services just went ahead, broke the law, stored and analyzed the number plate information of millions of drivers to try to determine if they were using their company car more than allowed for private use. For more or less zero gains. And no retribution when found out.
And by the way, no, personal, non-commercial websites are absolutely not required to have the user's full name and address on them. Link:
https://www.bmuv.de/themen/verbraucherschutz/digitaler-verbr...
I worked on a Deutsche Telekom cloud project, which was somewhat internally competing with the Huawei-built Open Telekom Cloud. At the same time, a business partner and I also consulted other telco companies.
What I have seen, down to the data center from Huawei was insane. From a technical perspective (hardware and software) was great, but the pace they ate up people was something I am not familiar with in European culture.
This one day, checking the servers in the DC, a manager-like dude was shouting at his subordinate engineer to fix things. I found it weird (and a bit unprofessional). Next day, a new engineer joined the team, the previous one was not there anymore. When I asked how did they replace him so quickly, they told me that they literally flew someone in from China overnight.
They delivered. Their things worked. Tech was great. I wouldn't want to work in such environment.
As a successful company, Huawei has also popularized the so-called "Wolf-like Spirit" among other Chinese firms.
The "Wolf-like Spirit" implies an expectation to work extremely hard and do whatever is necessary to achieve the company's goals.
One anecdote involves some Japanese customers who visited ZTE, a competitor of Huawei. To break the deals, Huawei allegedly sent individuals who pretended to be ZTE employees and entertained the customers with drinking and whoring for a week.
No one should trust a company like Huawei. Or any companies with deep CCP connection from China.
As such if the default stance is not to trust or do business with Chinese-related parties this will exclude the entire country eventually, since they aren't given any realistic alternatives to being completely blacklisted they'll likely retaliate (understandably).
What should they do? Just "cooperate"? No amount of cooperation or action from the Chinese side will get them to be trusted or viewed differently, because the fundamental issue isn't that Huawei is selling backdoored or hacked devices (which they aren't, or otherwise everything would have been ripped out instantly)... it's that they fundamentally do not trust the company, or anything from China.
Deep links between government and large companies exist in every country whether acknowledged or not.
In Huawei's case, frankly the issue was that it was the first time a company not in the West's control became a major player in a strategic industry. Alleged CCP/PLA links are just part of the narrative built against them but the issue was more general.
If a company is making ball bearings or bathroom fixtures, you don't have to worry much about their ties as long as they're not your sole supplier. How do you backdoor a manual mechanical valve?
Whereas for anything that has computer code in it, open source down to the microcode or GTFO. Countries will (and should) want to stick to suppliers in the local and allied countries if a foreign one isn't willing to provide that, and have no objections if a country they're doing that to wants to do the same to them.
I know it was an anecdotal example, but a Western company purchasing Chinese-produced ball bearings will most probably mean that Western company doing business with and empowering the Chinese military-industrial complex, seeing how ball bearings are such an integral part of military armoured materiel.
Which goes to show that splitting economic things up into civilian vs. non-civilian is an exercise in futility at the end of it all, and this goes for the West, too.
It's not about that. You could say that about doing business with them on anything whatsoever. If you buy their plastic toys they could use the profits to build tanks.
The problem here is that they're giving you a device you're putting in a sensitive place containing opaque binary computer code that could be doing anything, which customers can't feasibly replace with their own or audit because they don't have the source code.
My friends weren't from villages, their parents work in state owned entities, in order to get a position in these big state companies, you have to either have good education or being offered a job after military. In the past, the government must offer a job to people out of military. The most common reason for people to go into military is to have a job in the future. This applies to both city and villages. However, with the reduction of the army, this has changed. Now you get paid a good salary while in military, but you don't automatically get a job.
If you study well, but you cannot afford school, you can also go to military universities, where your expenses is paid, but you will have to work in the military for a fix number of years afterward.
Military roots or no, in the end every company must obey the laws of the country they’re founded first and foremost, and then try not to break the laws of the countries they operate in. This is the reality. Just like AT&T can be compelled to spy on X, Y; so can any other company be compelled by their government.
And this idea that western spying is good and Chinese spying is bad… its ludricuous. Spying is just bad.
And Nokia/Ericsson/Samsung could have won the 5G core bids if the pricing structure and/or features were better than Huawei’s.
Not defending Huawei, but considering how the US market works… they won pretty fairly.
In the end customers will pay the price of “China bad”. And most likely tax payers for all the subsidies governments will telcos to remove Huawei equipment from their networks.
The article refers to T-Mobile US, which is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom.
No one should trust any company. Period.
That's one of the reasons European companies have faltered while Chinese ones (or American) are expanding. Can do attitude and hard work, there's no magic recipe.
Work/life balance, Friday afternoons off, leave office no later than 6pm, 4 day week, etc are all very nice but then if your competition work their asses off 6-7 days a week you're going to be eaten alive.
Work hard: The organization can become rife with politics and self-interested high-risk high-reward behaviors. People may stop collaborating, i.e. sharing knowledge, which can impede decision making, increase risk, and undermine innovation. Employees may only care about financial compensation, so it's easy for other companies to poach them, and indirectly steal insider information. Employees may burn-out causing resignations and interruptions to projects.
That's why the alternative arose.
Work/life balance: The organization is focused on productivity, not hardship. On sharing the work burden, on being able to trust your colleagues to come through. Meetings are short, direct, and no time is spent on fighting. Like an effective sports team, that passes the ball when appropriate.
My perspective is that European companies are failing for other reasons. In particular, the US, both as a state, and their private actors, are actively undermining the European economies and industries, and corruption has become rampant, partly due to the enormous bribes that are possible by well-funded actors. All legal, of course, in the same way that Super PACs are unquestionably legal.
Anyway, more to the point: I want to focus on the organizational culture aspect. Sometimes employees do get "lazy", or complacent. Isn't that a leadership problem?
I'd love to hear your various ideas on how these problems can be solved.
The US act in their own interests as they should and, I think, are ruthlessly pragmatic. Europe undermines itself because they are constantly shooting themselves in the foot, starting from their own governments.
I would call that highly unprofessional and a red flag.
https://chat.openai.com/share/2778df30-19c5-4cf6-8f0b-07c30a...
Same but much more frequently for the regular developers, people you worked with just disappeared from one day to another with everybody pretending that nothing happened (of course I was an outsider in the company and nobody would have told me anything anyway, but usually you'd get an announcement or a good-bye-mail on the internal mailing list or Slack channel, but nothing ever, people just disappeared, and somebody else showed up to take their place after a a few days).
Total clown show.
If you a just "someone" to a Chinese, you will not be notified.
I also worked in a very PC cultured, all colors and genders and opinions and whatever welcome, very western, woke style company and a new joiner, who was allegedly unhappy with his job, disappeared without a trace from one day to the next. After many weeks me questioning, what happened, I got at least a "he is alive and reasonably well" answer.
Not saying that this is common, but when it's about saving face, companies, regardless of their previously projected image, can turn to such autocratic style when it comes to communication. Basically what they radiate: "just stop asking and move on", your colleague is not of concern anymore.
They were hiring mostly young immigrants because they are more pliable to this sort of things.
Unfortunately that's the reality. Young immigrants feel insecure in the country and would grab and hold on anything can keep them afloat above the water level. People make different decisions based on their circumstances. It is not going to change a lot.
So he was pivoting to hiring more non EU people.
For West's sake I hope that they end up becoming aware of all that, sooner rather than later, because there's no way that they can make better and cheaper electronic/electric things on a grand scale compared to China. Now it's EVs, next it will be China-produced fridges that home in on what the Western population is eating, then China-produced TV sets and so on and so forth.
Probably easier to buy a supermarket chain to find that out; or just buy the data.
So it turned out that the buyer of Nokia might have done a good deal after all. With a little help from their friends they have new business.
"China envoy says Australia fired first shot with Huawei ban" https://apnews.com/article/technology-china-sydney-australia...
"Huawei? No way! Why Australia banned the world’s biggest telecoms firm" https://www.smh.com.au/national/huawei-no-way-why-australia-...
"Huawei ban is just the start of the great decoupling" https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/huawei-ban-is-just-the-st...
"A Chinese official openly declared on Wednesday that Beijing has singled out Australia for economic punishment, saying the federal government cannot profit from China while "smearing" it" https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/chin...
I'm not aware of any evidence ever being shown about this specific issue.
Have we learnt nothing from the snowden leaks? Are we now living in innocent rainbow land?
Africa will be interesting and SEA while not friendly with China likes the cheap stuff and for them China spying vs US spying is not very different.
For US/Europe politicians one challenge would be to convince voters to be deadictted to cheap stuff they are used to buying. Particularly if replacement isn't local. Like Tesla vs BYD.
And we always have justifications ready: war on terror, war on drugs, war on child pornography, war on fake news with more wars coming.
Sometimes unlocking it would take 10 seconds before I could use it. Showing the keyboard would take a couple of seconds. It would freeze randomly. Etc.
The only good thing about it was that it used stock Android.
After a couple of months I ended up switching to a similarity priced Motorola. Night and day difference. It's close to stock Android and the only big drawback is the Moto lock screen.
Caused by the stock Android you praise? Or where does get HMD the hardware-adaption layer from? To my understanding (no inside knowledge) they have zero own development.