As revealed by Snowden, US can compel tech companies to help their intel services too.
Instead of a total ban based on how friendly we feel towards certain countries, a trust but verified approach should be adopted. Establish comprehensive, robust and transparent security requirements and regulations for foreign tech firms to comply and allow them to compete on a level field. Review source code and hardware design for critical components, like what UK and Canada are doing.
A competent government should be able to achieve security without imposing unnecssary costs on consumers and companies using foreign suppliers.
> As revealed by Snowden, US can compel tech companies to help their intel services too.
Precisely.
People have short memories and don't seem to see the pot calling the kettle black. I expect better on HN. We have hard evidence that GCHQ/NSA have hacked pretty much everything yet far too often people ignore this to jump on the weakest of speculative hearsay to accuse without hard evidence our Chinese and Russian friends of stooping to our GCHQ/NSA levels of evil-wrong-doing.
Is this what they call xenophobia once you get to the facts?
no? you really don’t see the difference between a foreign hostile government spying vs the domestic one doing it? i don’t think either is good but just because one happens doesn’t mean it’s in our interest to allow another. especially from the governments perspective. it has nothing to do with xenophobia.
> you really don’t see the difference between a foreign hostile government spying vs the domestic one doing it?
The foreign hostile government can't legally do anything to me based on the information it gains. At worst it can blackmail me or abuse access to accounts, at which point I'll have the protection of my government.
The domestic government can do a lot of damage with the information it gains and importantly, I have little to no recourse. If it makes up an excuse to seize my funds, I can't really do anything. If a three-letter agency blackmails me into doing something, who's going to protect me?
They're both bad but a foreign government spying on me is less bad than a domestic one.
A bit off topic but it sounded like you were implying that domestic was less bad. I believe the reverse.
From what I remember it was the NSA that hacked Huawei, the problem they had was that there were routers on the market that they could not backdoor as easily as products from Cisco and other Western vendors that were amenable to their requirements.
It may not be xenophobia, it might just be plain paranoia, either way there is some public diplomacy going on that is carefully crafted to get people to fear the 'enemy' hacking everything. Why attribute everything to malice? Ultimately there is good money to be made in selling routers particularly if you can get a municipality to spend proper money on providing connectivity for a city sized area. Huawei might not be a front for the Chinese army, they could be wanting to make profit from a legitimate product. They know full too well that any backdoor specials could compromise their entire business model to lose all of their contracts to put themselves out of business. Why would they run that risk?
Cui bono applies, by making accusations NSA/GCHQ can get them out of the market so that the only option for customers is to buy equipment that is hackable by them.
but as a us citizen i could care less if the govt is spyin on non citizens. in fact, it might even be their job to, in order to keep us safe. the us isn’t responsible for treating everyone in the world as it’s citizens
> Don't think about this in terms of just governments tracking you. Consider if you have any work emails containing company secrets in them. Consider if you have 2FA apps installed that you would use to unlock or change your work password. And since it was almost certainly the Chinese Intel/Military that helps Huawei and other companies, you can be sure that whatever information Huawei gets access to doesn't need to just help them out, but might help any other company the Chinese government wants to see succeed.
-Me, 3 weeks ago on this website
Don't buy Huawei hardware. Their incentives to help their customers is far less than their incentives to help their government.
"Don't buy Huawei hardware. Their incentives to help their customers is far less than their incentives to help their government."
Every company in every country is going to jump if their government says them so. I wouldn't expect any telcos or phone manufacturers to act differently if they were paid or gag ordered to act against their customers.
But let's be honest, iphones and android parts are manufactured in china. There are most probably a lot of spying hardware we don't know about that call the mother land.
Do you think Apple blindly trusts the hardware that comes from their factories? I have no evidence either way, but I would be very surprised if their hardware experts in the US didn't tear down and verify the parts that get shipped to them, like they did with the SuperMicro motherboards.
The idea that there is a lot of spying hardware in an iPhone that Apple doesn't know about is an extraordinary claim.
Also, this person's argument is basically... we have proof that Huawei spies on behalf of the Chinese government/military but that's not as bad as a hypothetical where 2 major American corporations who spend tons of money on security do no due diligence to protect their hardware from security breaches from the exact same Chinese government/military. It's an absurd argument conflating a fact with a guess.
If someone is going to accuse a company of having third party spy chips in their phones, they'd better be ready to prove it. Especially if that company is known for their insanely strict (not very strict, actually insane) supply chain management and have been known to put suppliers into bankruptcy for not meeting the company's supply needs exactly (GTAT sapphire). Especially a company very recently in the news for having picked apart every chip on a server motherboard to find out if any of those chips were not in the BOM.
I don't have to blindly trust anything to know the burden of that proof is on the person making that claim. If you're going to accuse that company of mismanaging their supply chain and compromising the security of their users and their products while crowing publicly otherwise, you'd better come with some evidence.
Assume innocence over guilt, assume guilt over innocence; false positives or false negatives. Where burden of proof stands depends on the kind of error you're attempting to minimize.
In this case I don't think it's warranted to try and minimize the rate of error of accidentally not trusting even if you have had some trust before. It's because security is a hard, induction-based problem. You counter it with vigilance in the long-run. Ignoring local rumors with high potential impact adds up.
Additionally unless you truly believe you can't be impacted by privacy theft or think your actions are so petty that they would never be useful to analyze by a bad actor; or, you additionally have Apple stock or some equivalent stake, I don't know why you wouldn't be willing to distrust vehemently. To me it seems like accidentally being wrong about Apple is not worse than any of those things.
Alright then, I can play that game too. Apple Watches collect and process your DNA and the US Army uses it to create waves of genetic clone soldiers.
It must be true, because some random person said it on the Internet. If you want to assume Apple is doing awful things based on laughably improbable rumors with absolutely no proof, you must believe this is true. Every soldier is actually a genetic clone of an Apple Watch wearer, and you must explicitly accept this as true because I said it's true. I don't have to prove it's right, and you can't prove it's wrong, which by your logic means it must be true with no exceptions.
Unless you truly believe you can't be impacted by DNA theft or your genes are so petty that they would never be useful to the US Army, or you own Apple stock or some other stake, you must believe that Apple is creating an army of clones that will replace you and integrate into society as sleeper agents until the revolution is upon us.
You see how ridiculous that sounds? That is your argument.
My argument is weaker, it's just "trust but verify" plus our disagreement about the background probabilities of such rumors being correct based off of the contextual information we each believe is relevant. Chinese espionage and tech transfer is not a new thing but it's only recently been coming to a head in geopolitical discourse.
Most of the indicting evidence is mainly cyber-security related, which is not always the same as exploiting a hardware backdoor. But hardware backdoors are a solid vector for penetrating digital systems and this strategy has been exploited by state actors and corporate actors in domestic and foreign operations before. Like NSA plus Intel chips or their Google data-center taps as revealed through the PRISM leaks. Or Google with their microphones bypassing the recording lights.
So even if the evidence currently falls in Apple's favor, which is fine, there's still no good reason to believe that this will always be true and it's still good security hygiene to go through a cycle of paranoia to ensure that it stays true. China is just the most recent bad actor to add to the pile of institutions to defend against.
I agree that the rumor itself could be weak. But I would also be curious under what conditions you would be willing to take on the possibility of compromised hardware. Would it have to be Apple's CEO taking the issue public, risking their stock price? Would it have to be a verified Apple insider putting their reputation on the line for leaking trade secrets about their pipeline without confronting their superiors first?
It should also go without speaking that distrust is not quite the same as believing something. It's closer to holding doubt, and even if doubt can be motivated by a guess it's not the same as endorsing a guess as fact. You're misrepresenting my point in at least that regard.
Assume innocence over guilt is for individuals. For huge entities, the sane approach is to doubt them and request continuous never ending proof they are well behaving.
I wrote code used to design hardware semi-automatically. The size and complexity of the tinest chip make it impossible to check the finished hardware perfectly.
But even if you somehow managed to check it once, nothing proves it's going to be unchanged for years and years you order it.
Now add on top of that you have so many of them in one devices, and there are so many devices, and suddenly you can see how many wooden horses cross the border avec seconds.
The Snowden revelations caused tech companies to implement strong encryption for consumer facing communications. Apple, Google, and Facebook all offer encryption protocols that now piss off the US government and caused friction between the private and public sectors.
People saying "but PRISM" have missed the past five years of US politics. Even Obama was getting mad at US tech.
I always think of Ai Weiwei when considering just what's possible under the Chinese government and system. It's nice that my property won't be demolished and that I won't be kidnapped and beaten by police just because the government doesn't like my criticisms.
Do you have any proof despite statements that the entire internal surveillance programs of the NSA was dismantled or we should just believe because the US government would never lie to us?
Technically, while I do think that those companies have moved to stronger encryption over the past few years (which is a general trend I think) for consumer facing stuff, at least one of the changes that came out of PRISM was that Google started encrypting all of their communications in and out of their data centers (and in between) because PRISM was tapping at the datacenter level if I recall (something related to the note with the smiley face).
Encryption doesn't prevent state actors to require a secret backdoor. Your naive point of view ignore 40 years of history of spying and power abuse. It's worrying the past is erased so easily in the people's mind. It allows terrible behavior to come back rocking again and again.
One government is actually putting people into fucking camps[1], the other isn't.
The scale in which the Chinese Government is bad dwarfs the bad things the US Government may do. No Government is perfect, but there are orders of magnitudes in difference between the badness of the US and that of the Chinese Government.
So one is cancer, the other one is a broken leg. Yeah, I prefer to have the broken leg.
Doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow easily to break a leg.
Americans have been watching too much TV stating how great their country is, they now repeat it again and again without thinking about it. I've never seen any other free country population doing that anywhere in the world, and I travel a lot. It's even weirder when I come in the Valley and see that from the inside. Boy are you delusional.
I'm not American. I have no doubt that the American Government has its own daemons and is shit in many ways. However, it is at least notionally accountable to its populace, and has always claimed and aspired to be a beacon of freedom (I doubt its ever lived up t its claims). But the Chinese make no such claim, and do not act, nor try to act in such a virtuous manner.
As much as I detest America and their government, I'd rather a American hegemony than a Chinese one.
China putting some muslims, that may have been radicalizing, in camps to study Chinese history seems a lot better than the alternatives we employed in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
What kind of transparency would you like to see from them? For some things, like active secret investigations how would you expect them to act transparently and publicly?
That'll never happen. Even if the case is closed and there are no loose ends for that particular case, it would still reveal the collection methods used, potentially impacting other foreign intel and FISA related cases.
What? The CCP can be accused of many things, but a lack of transparency isn't one of them. They're easily one of the most transparent governments. They're just transparently authoritarian.
Did the Chinese government spend the last century toppling democratically elected governments and subjecting the populations to the horrors that followed purely for economic gain?
Lets not mention the torture program, which the current head of CIA took part.
Or the "humanitarian" invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia and Syria without UN Security Council mandate. Especially Lybya, which is much more democratic now with it's slave markets.
Or the protectionism that goes against the WTO treaties.
Or by weaponizing the dollar, which is supposed to be the world's reserve currency, by the means of sanctions.
Should I mentions the use of nuclear weapons and napalm against targets with dense civilian population close by?
China, Russia and the US are all draconian regimes. Some target it's own people, other target people overseas and others target both.
The difference is that one has holywood at it's side to show them saving the world time and time again from aliens, metheors and vile russians / nazis. And people just treat the US government as the good heart kid that makes a few mistakes.
Depends who is defining what is ethical of course. The fact that ethics is cultural will mean that each side will probably think they are the most ethical.
To disprove that claim: try to come up with an ethical framework which makes no mention of a higher power as justification, and tell us why it is better than all others. Most land on some variant of utilitarianism and then disagree what the objective function should be.
We can dance around the idea of ethics or we can actually look at historical actions taken by both. Putting the Chinese & US government interventionism on the same plain for objective ethics judgements is a joke (regardless of whos cultural ethical standards you use).
All of his/her comments in this post are seemingly only there to stir up people. There's no evidence behind the things they're saying other than a hand-waving attempt at minimizing China's bad faith actions by saying others do similar things. When arguing that someone who is 10/10 bad is equal to someone that is 4/10 bad you have to really reach to equate the two and not see the nuance.
There is no evidence? Too funny, I was hoping the work required was just reminding this (expected educated) audience of history, rather than teaching a full course myself.
There is a reason the statue of Lin Zexu is in Chatham Square, NYC.
Your posts in this thread have continually grown more and more incivil and arrogant in defense of Chinese spying. Stating that you thought this audience HN was smart but now you realize you have to teach this audience on HN is incredibly condescending. What do you get out of taking this stance towards this audience?
When did 'western powers' invade China and drug a large percentage of their population between 1918 and 2018? What was the percentage of their population? What were the drugs? What was the purpose? Who did it? How did something that you say supposedly happened 100 ago effect a country 200 years ago?
This is an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence. You've shown no evidence of the statements you've made in this thread so far so I hope you'll change that up and provide us with some here. I'd be very interested in seeing some for this.
Your condescension only seems to grow and you continue to get more incivil while crying out that you're getting attacked (elsewhere in this thread saying I'm attacking the messenger). I think I'll call it quits in trying to have a civil conversation with you since you only seem interested in spewing unsubstantiated pro-Chinese statements and attacking everyone in this thread that doesn't agree with you.
Even if that was true, as an American, I would much prefer leaking to my government over that of a Communist dictatorship hellbent on becoming the ruling super power.
The growing danger is apps originating in china that request excessive permissions. Utility apps that claim to save battery & space are all suspects. At a minimum they are adware, but most likely state owned malware.
It seems more and more that the citizen of the world has to agree to the sovereign will of the nation where their desirous objects are built.
Its getting kind of like I wonder if the world will respond to these things by bringing the tech local. Could I grow my own products closer to the border, where inspection and compliance is much more trustworthy? Well, its a European question .. perhaps it would happen. Perhaps also, the balkanisation of technological manufacturing prowess in the European states, counter to this, might just blow the whole thing out of proportion, too.
China felt generous to build an entire new building for African Union. About $200 Million cost, and it came complete with bugs (as in spy ones) and backdoor-ed network that sent the data to China every night.
NSA would have done the same, that's what countries do. There I said it. But the story, for me, is more about Huawei doing whatever their owner wants. Stay away from them
NSA would've bugged the building without investing anything in that country. Not quite the same.
The original exploiters of Africa are mad that China is investing and building infrastructure on that continent, which will raise historically low prices.
They'll regret most Chinese investments, there's already a major backlash against the Chinese style "investment." You think China is doing this for Africa's good? China is enslaving them with a signature.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-07-10/china-...
I expect the Chinese are less exploitative in their investment approach than the Europeans that acted in Africa (slavery and just outright theft was the modus operandi for centuries), yes.
At the end of the day, the roads, high-speed rail, bridges, harbors, etc... the Chinese build can't be removed from the continent even if the individual countries do reneg on debt. This could create the kind of stable environment required to attract both Chinese and non-Chinese investors and talent in the future.
China has 10,000 years of documented history and this is a long game, they don't seem as interested in get rich quick schemes as some other civilizations.
>>I expect the Chinese are less exploitative in their investment approach than the Europeans that acted in Africa (slavery and just outright theft was the modus operandi for centuries), yes.
Sure. And US also tried to, more or less, exterminate the natives. Or should go back to Greek /Persian wars? Things change at logarithmic pace and China /Russia are wayyy behind. Russia and the uncle that pays for the niece's college with a catch. China is even more brazen and flush with cash....You Sri Lanka can't pay the $11 BILLION in yearly interest only that a leader signed at one point? We'll just take a major port for 99 years and essentially own you since we can enforce the agreement you signed by sending 300k soldiers in a week's time.
For all their faults, US and EU today actually believe that a free world--within the local limitations--is best for all. US companies didn't get the major Iraq's oil contracts, but at least the oil is on the free market.
Good observation, yes, a jobs program for the ridiculous number of Chinese engineers being produced that is funded by Chinese banks and paid for with 99 year low interest loans and resources in exchange.
May not be the best model, but sounds better than the "bomb our way to profits" approach we've seen employed elsewhere.
"I expect the Chinese are less exploitative in their investment approach than the Europeans that acted in Africa (slavery and just outright theft was the modus operandi for centuries), yes."
This is an absurd comparison. A normal comparison of hypotheticals would be Europeans today vs. Chinese investments today.
"China has 10,000 years of documented history"
That's an even more absurd claim, wow! Actually it's LESS than half of your claimed period.
"and this is a long game, they don't seem as interested in get rich quick schemes as some other civilizations."
We're not discussing "civilizations" here, but governments. More specifically, the government of a dictatorship.
- Why not take the last 500 years? China's trade was quite beneficial to its trading partners, Europe's was generally not. Anything less than 100 years, I would consider noise.
- China has 10,000+ years of history (adding documented was a mistake)
- Chinese culture plays too big of a role in decision making to ignore it in my opinion, you may disagree.
The only thing i agree with you is this: Chinese building of African projects is CURRENTLY better than American, British, European or Worldbank loans.
Loans are rarely ever used for the intended projects. Only, a minuscule part of the loaned funds are used to start the projects. The rest are split to offshore accounts, buy votes and grab more political power.
Do the loaners know that loan will go to waste? Yes and they hope it does. Why? Neo-colonization & Neo-slavery - illusion of independence.
Direct force is old fashioned and too costly. Subtle economic sabotage and puppetry is much better.
With loans, you can threaten debtor countries to depreciate their currencies. Use your multinationals to evaporate domestic competition, stunting their competitiveness. Extract their raw materials and dictate the price. Place of corrupt individuals in key offices and more.
Is China exploiting African countries? Absolutely. Ghanaian gold mining is basically Chinese.
Yet, conventional loans are like carrots placed in front of a horse, pulling it just before it bites. Think Charlie brown.
Chinese will build roads, bridges, airports, power plants instead of giving loans. Yes they'll give jobs to Chinese engineers but the project will be completed. - on time too.
Sure Chinese milk the cow dry but it will eat and grow fatter, instead of leaner.
Which prices will it raise? I'd expect the investment to lower prices for various raw materials China wants (because why would they invest to pay more in the end?) and consequently it would also lower prices for goods manufactured in China from those materials.
China entering the African market will raise the prices that domestic producers can sell products at, due to increased demand for resources in limited supply.
In the end, more money will be made by the people who actually live and work there, not the international arbitraguers (if no shenanigans are added to the process).
Huawei phones are still great in terms of affordability with high end spec. Tell the nonrich people more about the eavesdropping and most don’t give it shit
I'm using one; given GCHQ/NSA/whoever already are watching my data, that UK ISPs use Huawei gear - and from who knows where - I don't really care.
I can't see what they'd want with my info. If I was working on stuff to be patented or something then maybe ...
If I use an Apple device the Chinese or USAmericans could be surveilling me; Samsung/LG, perhaps the Koreans; Sony/Fujitsu maybe the Japanese ... I wouldn't know either way, nor ever need to care AFAICT.
As the parent suggests, perhaps if you have a lot to lose then paranoia about this might pay off.
Just to be clear... paranoia is an irrational fear that people are out to get you. If you are actually being spied on by someone (you are) then that word doesn't apply since the fear of that spying is 100% rational.
Yeah, what I was aiming for was anything on the scale from conscientious through to paranoid. If you're "hot" on the issue, rationally or otherwise it could pay off to some extent.
You might say, if it pays off then it's not paranoia -- never cross a road and you can't be run over crossing the road, but I'd still consider it paranoid.
You're not the only one. It seems like paranoia has taken on this new-ish meaning over the past few years of just being afraid of something that is totally valid. It seems the previous usage of it has kinda died out somewhat.
We've banned you for using multiple accounts to do nationalistic flamewar on HN. That's obviously an abuse of this site.
I understand how frustrating it can be when common criticisms feel one-sided and unfair. But this isn't the way to defend against them. It only makes the threads even worse.
HN's audience is mostly Western, so whatever biases Western populations have are going to be reflected here. If you want to respond to these with a contrary, minority view, that's great, but you need to do it thoughtfully and substantively, instead of breaking the site guidelines by lashing out and flaming.
In my experience, to argue contrarian positions well requires accepting in advance that you're not going to be able to change the bulk of opinion; the forces determining it are beyond the power of an internet forum to change. There are still plenty of people who agree with you or are willing to listen, if you post thoughtful, substantive comments as HN users should. When you know something that other users are unwilling to take in, the temptation to lash out at them becomes hard to resist–but if you succumb to it, you only discredit the truth, and that helps neither you nor them. It just makes everyone double down on what they already believe.
Do you have proof that any of the news about China (from tons of different sources, including other countries that are not America) is propaganda or not accurate? You're implying a global conspiracy is afoot to besmirch the good Chinese name when everyone has known for a while that they're generally bad actors behind the scenes when it comes to spying and stealing of secrets/IP/tech.
Can I have some of the verifiable evidence of your anti-Chinese propaganda from the last 10 years? You seem adamant that there's an abundance of it across the globe and that it's so pervasive over the past 200 years. I'd love to see just some of the recent bits.
Huh? The Cold War was not a conspiracy in the way you're implying at all. It was very publicly out there as you had kids under desks to avoid nuclear war and both countries saying how awful the other is. Westerners know plenty about China... you seem to be referring to a time hundreds of years ago where China was this far-away place and no one knew about it or understood it because we primarily traveled by trains and boats that took weeks to get anywhere and didn't have an internet connection with them. Times are a little different and have been for a long while.
Today people from the West travel to and live in China constantly. Tons of Chinese kids come to America and go to universities (some where they're like 20% of the school's incoming class). How do you think all of the west's stuff is made in China? From communicating with Chinese people and traveling to China. It didn't just magically happen. It's also pretty well known to the West and other parts of the world that China has been stealing state and corporate secrets for a very long time.
I really don't get this argument. The West (and world) knows China inside and out.
What you are stating couldn't be further from the truth. The average US citizen actually knows very little about China (we can include most of the World) and are very easily manipulated into accepting views that do not reflect reality.
Can I see your evidence of this? Because what I stated actually has evidence. There's explicit proof of people in America moving to China. There's explicit proof of Chinese students coming to America to learn. There's explicit proof of us creating deals with the Chinese for manufacturing. There's explicit proof of Americans and Chinese communicating. There has never been more Chinese - Americans in the US.
You however hand-wave my whole post away and say it can't be further from the truth with no evidence. You also say that the average US citizen actually knows very little about China. I would argue that's inaccurate. I would say that Americans have never known the Chinese better. All people are able to be manipulated into accepting views that do not reflect reality. I'm not sure how that still supports the belief that was stated above that Westerners know little about China. What mysteries do Westerners not know? Their brutal concentration camps have even been in the news recently. Their hacking attempts have been in the news forever. Their party's takeover of the government and potential lifetime dictatorship has been in the news.
You seem to be implying that everyone in the US are dunces.
Instead of a total ban based on how friendly we feel towards certain countries, a trust but verified approach should be adopted. Establish comprehensive, robust and transparent security requirements and regulations for foreign tech firms to comply and allow them to compete on a level field. Review source code and hardware design for critical components, like what UK and Canada are doing.
A competent government should be able to achieve security without imposing unnecssary costs on consumers and companies using foreign suppliers.