Back to the future?
https://heritage.pearcey.org.au/the-rise-and-fall-of-semiconductor-manufacturing-in-australia/
Surprising or not?
The Whitlam Govt in 1973 decided it was more important to have cheaper colour TV’s made from imported components than supporting the local semiconductor and component manufacturing industry.
Whether this decision really increased consumer options. We have what we asked for?
European Countries including the UK and France are starting to remove thousands of Huawei 5G towers. BT (British Telecom) have a budget of US$700 Million to fund the work to rip out and replace the Huawei towers/tech in the UK, what other countries have budgeted is not clear but it will be expensive without a doubt. Main reason cited for removal are the “unacceptable security risk they pose” in line with the US led campaign to get rid of Huawei tech. I await the Chinese response to the move, it’s sure to be fiery.
Nokia Oyj 5G equipment seems to be the replacement tech being used by BT in the UK, a big bonus for Finland perhaps.
Oh found a response by China re Huawei Tower removal…Sweden cops the lashing:
One would think there should be a rational solution, eg. make Huawei chips in a western fab so the circuitry can be examined and confirmed to be at least as ‘security safe’ as other manufacturers products, and do the assembly in a similarly ‘safe’ facility.
Since Huawei arguably has better tech than the rivals they could baulk, yet western companies flocked to have their products made in China so there has to be a way. Until then it seems politics as usual between the ‘good guys’ (eg capitalists) and everyone else (eg everyone not capitalist, aka the ‘bad guys’).
Hopefully the mongrel grubs, aka, the Chinese Government will boycott all trade with all free world countries and really shoot themselves in both feet.
Be careful what you wish for. That populist idea will meet with everything on the shop shelves ‘Made in China’ that is most everything, whether the full product or component parts.
You are seeing posturing that signals what some like yourself want done, but it will take decades to bring ‘home’ everything that was ‘sent’ to China. As it comes ‘home’ prices will inevitably spike up and stay there because of higher costs, causing the share markets to react as profits plummet and peoples’ disposable income buys so much less.
I think China has far bigger shoes to endure whatever comes, than the west that is owned and operated by capitalists who value one thing in life, their accounts.
Not only that, but if our exports to Chinese cease overnight, expect huge economic pain in Australia with businesses going under, unemployment increasing substantially, our net individual wealth collapsing etc.
Interesting idea, and while Huawei might be receptive to the idea…western governments will continue on the security bandwagon as they will say the technology is designed by Chinese thus increasing the risk of the Chinese exploiting weaknesses either intentional or unintentionally created in the systems.
What is this free world of which you speak? China will not do anything so stupid as to not choose the target of their actions very carefully. China chose Oz because we were a nice case study to show all the other small-medium powers what happens when you cross China and the economic cost to them would be well worth it in the long run. They only need to pick a few proxies, even one, for this to work. China plays a long game and will bear some costs now for more profits and power in future.
You don’t mention that the USA has spent the last 100 years adding to their world power doing just what China is doing now, using military and economic leverage without concern for equity or ethics. Great Britain did the same the previous couple of hundred years and Spain/Portugal before them. Gunboat diplomacy, manipulation of foreign aid and concealed and open regime influence were used by all these powers. Their foreign policies were/are all about the exercise of raw power and gaining profit, nothing to do with morality or freedom or whether there is such a thing as the free world. All may from time to time dress up their motives with high sounding words but those words mean exactly the same in all cases; nothing at all. But in this country we are inclined to give, and keep giving, the USA a free pass and to be critical of China.
During the 500 years of western colonisation, industrialisation, exploitation and economic expansion it was mostly good because they were us. Now an eastern power is in the game running the same amoral power plays it is not good because they are not us. How does that make us morally superior?
Why single out China - evidence lacking, when there are so many examples of consumer abuse at the hands of Nations or Businesses that are not based on China? VW were more than happy to modify software to cheat emissions testing, US Govt authorities sought to force Apple to open their products to permit access to data, and Australia now had legislation approved or pending to ensure Govt is not blocked from accessing in secret communications.
It’s not to suggest China or Huawei may not be risks. It’s a simple question as to why consumers should think that these are the only risks, and whether consumers should put up with any government seeking to access a consumers’s products or content. The situation with Huawei highlights the concerns we should have with all in home smart devices. There are numerous well publicised concerns with smart TV manufacturers software (EG Sony), Amazon (Alexa/Echo privacy), or general Wireless and Internet security.
In seeking a fix for concerns relating to Huawei, if there is a solution, we might need to consider it the template for all connected equipment and devices? 
True. As China’s economic might increases, along with its presence in the world, many western governments are fearful iof its rise and of a eastern government system different to that in the west. Some of it could be indirect protectionism/patriotism, some could also be fearmongering.
Examine the circuitry involved in hundreds of millions of transistors? Technology today is far too complex to simply ‘peek under the hood’. Looking at the firmware would be easier, but you are still dealing with millions of lines of complex code that may in some areas have very subtle interactions.
There are plenty of people whose job is finding the vulnerabilities, and they have barely scratched the surface - whether it be Huawei, LG, Google, or even a company like SolarWinds that specialises in security!
I suspect it would be impossible at a practical level. We may choose a more viable medium-term solution such as getting India more involved in our supply chain or perhaps relying upon other Asian and African countries, but the global economy is just that - we have decided that Australia no longer needs to manufacture most things.
Australia has almost self-selected to be the target for the new global superpower. Whatever Trump said and did, neither the US nor China would win in a large scale trade war - but Australia is a European colony that speaks English and thinks it has a big voice on the world stage. China could probably drop Australia entirely without too much pain - but Australia’s economy would be destroyed by such an action. Of course, Australian leaders failing to recognise their minnow status do not help.
This terminology is close enough to its forerunners such as ‘yellow peril’ that I find it distinctly unsettling. Can I suggest that name calling is not appropriate regardless of how we might feel about a situation.
And yes, China is merely doing what centuries of European powers have done - though not quite so brazenly yet. We have not yet seen China ‘liberating’ countries half-way across the world - that may be another century away.
In the meantime Australia is trying to talk morality to China while ignoring ‘Western’ sins of the past and present and indeed being involved in many of them. We are still in Afghanistan! At least we have (I think) pretty much withdrawn from Iraq. We have not paid reparations or restitution to the original inhabitants of this land. (Interestingly but sadly, ‘Invasion Day’ on Wikipedia redirects to Australia Day.)
Of course, then there are are very direct ‘crimes’ like sanction-busting (and those committed by Australian troops that form part of our invasion forces).
I did not suggest it was easy, only a possible way to end the stalemate. Mandating a schematic with the layout goes a good way to solving that complexity and making verification theoretically possible even if not easily practical.
That being written, way back when I did hardware I was using ‘a chip’ for a highly secure purpose, selected from ‘the big book of chip specs and descriptions’. Most ‘a chip’ worked as I expected in the prototype batch, but a small number did not.
Trying to resolve how to stabilise the outliers I got connected to the chief designer who after looking at his schematic responded the chip should not be working at all for my specific application, but he breadboarded what I was doing and almost fell off his chair in surprise his test confirmed most but not all of the chips he tried functioned as I described per my design. Since mine was a very low volume ‘product’ the resolution was hand certifying individual chips since no alternative could be identified.
Many years later we found a particular processor would go into ‘control mode’ if a certain complex data pattern passed through its main memory pipeline. Fortunately ‘control mode’ only caused a hardware lockup any time the engineering T&D system was not operative so it was not a security or backdoor ‘feature’. It required a hardware patch to resolve, a technique not uncommon in those days.
More years on, a certain production processor had a consistent manufacturing error where two traces were too close together, and if specific values were in two specific registers and a specific operation on those registers was issued, and a concurrent memory load had a memory wait, the operation on the specific registers would return an incorrect answer.
Those were ‘accidents’ of design/manufacturing but the same ‘techniques’ could be designed-in to implement ‘special features’.
Summary, I understand fairly well as do many governments with ‘related departments’ as well as those who design ‘specially equipped devices’.
The USA has a long history of mandating “back doors” in technology.
When the DES standard was adopted based on IBM’s Lucifer symetric encryption, the key length was nobbled from 64 bits down to 56 bits, and even lower to 40 bits for any company using it for exported products.
But the cat was out of the bag, so the US Gov tried to mandate the use of the ‘clipper chip’. This had a builtin back door master key that was to be kept in escrow, and available to any law enforcement agency that needed to break the ‘bad guys’ encryption.
China does not force us to buy their products at the point of a gun - yet. Perhaps the Hightech Wars will start on the 200th anniversary of the Opium Wars when the Brits did that to the Chinese. Whether they do or don’t in future you can bet the Chinese have not forgotten those humiliations of the past.
While we may feel the people of Hong Kong have been betrayed and that China never intended to live up to the handover treaty we also forget that the British were called “Perfidious Albion” because of their habit over centuries of ignoring paper they didn’t like.
The point of these examples is not to excuse China or to sledge our ancestors but to point out it is not about good guys and bad guys. It is about power and all races play power games.
It is easy to get bogged down in history and use whataboutery to justify present day misdemeanours but the bottom line is that
Whatever the justification of Chinese actions, whatever the history, it is naive to think that China is acting in our interests - and it is frequently acting against our interests.
(The second point does not mean that China is the most frequent source of hacking incidents against Australian targets and does not even attempt to quantify the dollar cost of those hacking incidents. For sure there are many straight out criminal hacking incidents, whose sole goal is extortion to make money for criminal gangs - and those may in fact be the most numerous. It is also possible that a sophisticated state actor could conceal state actor hacking inside an extortion i.e. make it look like extortion when in fact the true goal is industrial espionage, for example.)
On the first point, ostensibly this arose out of Australia’s having the temerity to suggest that the Chinese government may not have been fully helpful to the global community regarding the origins of the COVID pandemic. However, as is suggested above, China plays a long game - so you can’t be sure how much the implied criticism of China is genuinely the motivation and how much it is a pretext.
That is self evident. We are not the only ones by a long way. Thankfully we are not in the position of some poorer countries that must decide if taking China’s largess is worth selling their soul.
The historical context is not to deflect from the main issues or to excuse China any of this but to point out that the power games stem from being powerful not from having a certain coloured skin or speaking tonal languages.
Indeed but we do need to take into account the kind of regime that it is and its approach to human rights. Noone in Australia wants any powerful country acting abominably but if we have to choose, I would rather not have one that has a dictator for life and very little respect for human rights.
I just received a Change.org petition from some bunch of left wing morons which has this puerile garbage at the top.
"The Australian government is beating the drums of war against China , pushed along by a new defence minister, Peter Dutton, and the hawks within.
Dutton and Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo have escalated a war of words against China to a dangerous new level.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent by the Australian government on a new arms race that includes long-range missiles that can reach China.
This is money that should be better spent on health, welfare education, justice for First Nations people and addressing the climate emergency instead of on handouts to corporate arms dealers.
At the same time, but a little more under the radar, is Australia’s participation in the 50th anniversary of the Five Power Defence Arrangements which includes provocative military exercises with Britain, Malaysia, Singapore and New Zealand this month, culminating with Japan’s military in the South China Sea.
Such war games do nothing to enhance security in the region. It does the opposite and a provocation in this instance could provoke war."
Unbelievable.
Quite frankly, I wish Dutton would STFU and go away. Clearly he, nor his cohort, have ever heard the term “softly softly catchee monkey”… in other words, shouting threats at China will do SFA to help the situation and will only make it much more likely that China will retaliate… oh wait… it did.
I don’t want to have to bow to my Chinese Overlords but with much more of this posturing from the current government, I think thats what will come.
The Chinese have a different way of doing business, a different way of seeing the world and the sooner our idiot government understands that, the sooner this impasse will be over and done.
It will not be over unless Australia is stupid enought to kowtow to China and capitulate to their demands followed by all future ones.
I posted it primarily due to this garbage.
" Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent by the Australian government on a new arms race that includes long-range missiles that can reach China."
We are really getting ICBM missiles and we will fire them at China? Not to worry about the fact that China already has nuclear armed ICBM missiles.
These morons must be related to the anti-vaxxers and the other conspiracy theory idiots.
Please bring back Huawei. It would be so much more of a sensible discussion. In participating in the growth of the economy of China the advance of its technological capabilities should come as no surprise. From smart LED light bulbs to Solar PV battery charger inverters and mobile phones … it’s all designed and manufactured in China.
We could draw similar parallels with past relationships between Australia and Great Britain, the USA, and Japan. In each of these examples Australia has never been an equal partner. Despite some wonderful inventiveness and creativity, Australia has relied on the technology, finances and ideology of our partners of the day.
Australia finally broke up with GB around 1942 in WW2, for a new partner across the Pacific. It seems given our current dilemma we are still slow learners.
