Huawei cyber vulnerabilities

If you are of Chinese background and/or you are an outspoken critic of China and/or you have sensitive secret Australian security or military or intellectual property information in your possession or ? then the Chinese government otherwise the Australian government.

Nah. :slight_smile:

Baby steps.

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It must be about security, but oh wait, it can be resolved by trade talks. Really, it must be about security, right?

Huawei has said the US president’s attacks are motivated by a desire to advance American economic interests and have nothing to do with national security.

Funny that?

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There’s the politics of it (the posturing, the manoeuvring, the BS) and then there’s the reality of it.

The reality of it remains: all tech companies are potentially compromised and should be assumed to be compromised unless there is demonstration to the contrary.

Huawei attempted to demonstrate to the contrary - in respect of just one Huawei device (never mind about their entire product range) - and

a) failed to demonstrate it (so far), and

b) did show that their software process is not very good.

The “Huawei dispute” might go away but the problem remains. All it would mean is that the US government would be choosing to ignore the problem i.e. prioritising money over security.

China, being at the foundation of the entire tech industry, as the manufacturer of a great many devices, is in a position to insert vulnerabilities (compromises) that are extremely difficult to detect or eradicate. That is an inconvenient truth.

I doubt anyone could seriously argue that China does not have the technical capability. So it really comes down to whether you believe they have the motivation.

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Without detracting from your many salient points, it is ‘easy’ to find a fault, but it is ‘not easy’ (and could be impossible in a practical sense) to show an ‘absence of faults’. And so goes the suspicion about Huawei.

The link to it being solvable in trade wars seems the only concrete issue on the table.

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For sure. In a brave new world we are only just starting to approach that problem.


 and every other tech company (particularly in for example US, China, Australia).

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I suspect the Chinese Embassy in Washington has failed to hold enough events at the Trump International - or at Mar-a-Lago.

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Having been involved in an industry regulated by the old CoCom regime and how the political bent of some countries is all it takes to raise the ire and long arm of US laws, pardon me, but meh.

Why do some countries fail? It could be as the US claims, corrupt, socialistic, communistic etc governments, but at least as like the reality that once governments of any of those sorts comes into power the US does everything in its power to make them fail. Evidence? The political animosity between the US and Iran goes back a long way but Cuba might be the best case study.

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Is this like shipping grain to Iraq in the 1990s?

Just sayin’. And of course, one has to ask why Iran is facing this trade barrier in the first place when it did everything that was asked of it in relation to nuclear inspections. There is also the obvious question regarding how Reuters somehow got hold of these alleged documents.

The current US hegemony is coming to an end, and struggles like this are part of its death throes and attempt to prevent the inevitable.

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Exclusive: Newly obtained documents show Huawei role in shipping prohibited


This would be everything to do with the current legal action against Huawei and its CFO - but nothing to do with Huawei cyber vulnerabilities, if any are demonstrated.

Technically that isn’t relevant. The alleged violations of sanctions occurred long before the (temporary) agreement regarding nuclear inspections i.e. the allegations if proven were definitely violations at the time they were committed (even though there was a brief period years afterwards when they might not have been violations).

Two wrongs don’t make a right? Whataboutery is not a strong line of argument.

To the extent that it is “like” it, a cursory review of the Wikipedia article reveals

  • AWB paid out a massive settlement
  • senior managers sacked, fined and banned for a period
  • AWB has ceased to exist (in my opinion as a direct result of the Iraq sanctions case)

I’m fairly certain that Huawei won’t cease to exist as a result of this Iran sanctions case and that proportionately the effect on the company will be much smaller than it was for AWB.

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No, you are correct in that. My point is that the current sanctions on Iran are arbitrary and inconsistent with international law. They were put in place unilaterally by the current superpower, which persuaded other countries to join by threatening to withdraw international banking system privileges.

That’s a pretty big wrong.

That the agreement between the United States and Iran was temporary only refers to the fact that one of the parties withdrew - illegally under international law.

In short, I cannot see why Iran should care about US sanctions against Huawei or any other company or country. Similarly, I cannot see why Chinese businesses should care other than because the US has deep pockets and bears a lot of grudges.

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I think the point is that the US government has the right to control exports out of the US, and allegedly Huawei actively sought to evade US export controls and knowingly export US-made equipment out of the US and into Iran.

Whether those sanctions were arbitrary or even immoral probably doesn’t make a lot of difference to the legal case against Huawei.

Once again, irrelevant due to the timing. This specific legal action against Huawei is a decade old (or more).

There are other complaints against Huawei about IP theft - which probably have some basis - but all of it has to be proven in a court of law.

None of this has anything to do with the bigger picture about state-sanctioned cyber vulnerabilities, which is a much bigger problem than Huawei. The US is as guilty as China.

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No need to get a Huawei as Apple and Google will also be spying on you.

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They’re not giving up.

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This is how the US government deals with upstart foreigners that have better technology than the American companies. It will be interesting to see how this goes into the future.

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Hopefully not an echo of the past, FDR, oil, scrap iron and Japan.

It’s only computer chips and computer code for 5G, right?:wink:

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The US kept supercomputers under tight control. That went really well. Using technological porn as the best methods of comparison, drum roll - Linpack.

China has #4 in a system using Chinese Sunway chips. Without US ‘assistance’ to telegraph American companies may not be the most reliable of suppliers (courtesy of US government) it might have been many more years before they got their own working at class. And #6 in a system using Intel chips.

#1 for now, Fujitsu, one time victim of a trumped up (actually Clinton’s time) anti dumping suit against NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi since all 3 had faster vector processors than Cray could build. The processor, a Fujitsu ARM. The US changed the rules to put vector systems ‘out of business’ by heavily investing in massively parallel machines that became the norm.

To quote one of our members and considering how many times the US government has ‘encouraged’ other countries to roll their own at the highest of high technology, ‘you can’t fix stupid’ who still think they can own, operate and control it all.

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I suspect no credible Chinese company will be spared since such actions usually come under ‘US National Security’, as did the supercomputer dispute I mentioned.

Regardless of what decisions the Biden administration makes, China will no doubt decide that the US is ‘unreliable’. It will increase its efforts to improve its own technological base, and the only real losers will be consumers whose options are shrunk.

If Biden listens to his economists he will get rid of Trump’s sanctions, as they make very little sense.

From the individual’s perspective, it’s great to know we have a clear choice between US companies that provide data to the NSA or Chinese companies that provide who knows what to the Chinese government.

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Or any other company interested in data collection to establish profiles of its users. I suspect Chinese companies are similar if one lived in China.

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