
Huawei Accused of Technology Theft - tooltalk
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/08/730898429/huawei-accused-of-technology-theft
======
walrus01
It's well known in the telecom/internet infrastructure business that Huawei:

a) bugged the hell out of Nortel's ottawa area offices, both physically, by
rootkit, and by getting their own people hired to physically smuggle out
documents and design data

b) Copied the entire DWDM / optical transport product line

c) Released a nearly identical product a few years later, and sold it at a
ridiculously low price, effectively killing Nortel.

Many years later the vacant ex-Nortel office buildings came up for lease. One
of the candidate tenants for that large of an office space were parts of the
Canadian federal government, ministry of defence, etc. Every serious tenant
passed on the space because it's so riddled with bugs.

[https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the-
my...](https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the-mystery-of-
the-listening-devices-at-dnds-nortel-campus)

[https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-
for...](https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-former-
nortel-site-because-of-surveillance-bugs-1.1477766)

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/department-
of-...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/department-of-national-
defences-new-1-billion-facility-falls-short-on-security/article31685234/)

~~~
dnomad
What a bunch of pure bullshit.

1\. None of those links provide anything like evidence or support of your
accusations.

2\. It's absolutely remarkable that Huawei had somehow committed all these
crimes and yet nobody has ever managed to prove anything significant in a
court of law.

All we get are wild accusations and law suits that get thrown out.

Here's the really remarkable aspect here: the US government doesn't need to
actually force propaganda on its citizens. If there's one thing we can learn
very clearly from this entire ridiculous episode it is that American citizens
and the American media will happily propagandize themselves. They will eagerly
believe the most far fetched claims without a shred of proof, despite all
actual evidence to the contrary, and they will spread those claims to each
other in a kind of extremely intense decentralized disinformation machine.
There's nothing else like this in the planet. You would think after Iraq
Americans would learn even the tiniest bit of skepticism... But no.

I won't even bother pointing out any more how HN has devolved into a 24/7
racist anti-China Two Minute Hate system. At this point it's beyond clear that
the community has abandoned any kind integrity. I don't think there's anything
to be done which is why I'I've left and had to go through the embarrassing
exercise if unrecommending the site to people I've previously recommended it
to. People will say this is just a phase but I doubt it. When a community
abandons any kind of Truth standard and just embraces bullshit I don't think
it recovers.

~~~
scoot_718
Nice comment history.

~~~
whitexn--g28h
Definitely a good read, reminds on when I was in Hong Kong and my guide would
always say June 4 Incident around tourists from the PRC. The mainlanders would
always immediately start defending the government.

------
fc373745
Seems like a lot of accusations against the Chinese and their tech is being
force fed down our throats lately. Not surprising, since we are currently
within a trade war and any opportunity to drive out Chinese competition would
be taken - especially since Huawei would have been a huge competitor in the
smartphone market (I heard their camera quality is currently the best).

I"m skeptical, as some of these accusations are not that far-fetched. What I'm
more concerned of, is whether or not this is driven by some higher entity so
that mass-hatred for the Chinese and their tech is accumulated, which would
mean state driven media.

Despite all of these accusations of being one step behind, Huawei seems to be
on the forefront of a lot of things - especially in the field of 5G, so it
would seem possible that the US would pull some propaganda antics to make us
reconsider Huawei and Chinese Tech

Its tough trying to read and discern for yourself anything on the web nowadays
- as for this matter, I'm putting my thoughts on Huawei and Chinese tech on
hold since I think both cases are true - That there are some concerns with
tech theft against the chinese, but its also being extremely exaggerated.

~~~
geofft
The passive voice here is fascinating. Huawei did something! What did they do?
They got accused.

Who is accusing them? AKHAN Semiconductor (and the FBI), a small company in
Illinois whose primary product is these diamond-coated screens. Past their
founder, the second person on their about page is their "Vice President of
Government Affairs;" the third person listed on their about page is their
"Global Security and Intelligence Advisor," a former senior CIA officer who
joined the company in May.

If the roles were reversed - a small display-tech company in China that
recently got a senior Party member and intelligence officer to join made
accusations about America with the help of the Chinese national police
organization, and Xinhua was reporting on it - I think we would be very
skeptical!

~~~
codycraven
I had a friend at Huawei about a year ago tell me how they had lawyers come in
and prep them on the exact procedures they should follow in the event of an
FBI raid. This was well before I heard anything in the news about China,
Huawei, etc tensions.

Knowing this, I personally give quite a bit of weight to any accusation
against the company. I have a hard time justifying in my mind that a company
operating legitimately in the US would prep their employees on how to respond
during an FBI raid.

~~~
elygre
Uber prepared their employees for this:

"At least two dozen times, the San Francisco headquarters locked down
equipment in foreign offices to shield files from police raids."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/uber-s-
se...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/uber-s-secret-tool-
for-keeping-the-cops-in-the-dark)

~~~
muro
Uber, the paragon of virtue when it comes to following the law.

------
cherioo
What I had hoped to see discussed about these IP thief story is, what is our
IP protection system doing. The patent and copyright system that has been the
bane of every IP court case, are those system simplify disfunctional is the
one use case that they're suppose to address?

Are huge corporation like Nortel/Samsung/Cisco suddenly too small to defend
for themselves, in the US and EU, where I would assumed to be the biggest
market? Is the Samsung that got sued for rounded-corner phone not thought of
to patent their technique to put oled onto curved glass? (which sounds
extremely patent worthy)

edit: grammar

~~~
jhanschoo
These IP policies only work nationally, and internationally among friendly
countries that respect IP treaties (Hint: China isn't one of them).

Next, these countries still get to export goods containing the stolen
technology back to countries where the IP was stolen (perhaps via third-party
distributors), since there is typically no provision barring that.

------
proy24
Unrelated but in their Bangalore office, they had sleeping bunks and showers
in office premises and managers were routinely setting impossible deadlines
and employees encouraged to work all day and night and sleep/shower in office
if needed.

~~~
gloflo
Sounds like the typical working conditions of an Apple Inc satellite. Also
unrelated.

------
rexarex
Cisco was a rip off of The Stanford Blue Box. AFAIK the deans of the biz
school and CS school founded Cisco with tech created by Stanford and were
almost sued. Stanford decided that it wasn’t worth the potential bad press to
be sueing faculty.

~~~
paulryanrogers
"Someone else does it too" isn't a very strong argument.

We may be approaching a world where all critical infrastructure must be open
hardware and software, or face a Balkenizd patchwork of suppliers local to
each market.

(Not a Cisco or Huawei fan myself.)

------
chlee
Wall Street Journal has recently published an article [1] detailing some of
the most high profile technology thefts and espionage related to Huawei.

According to the article, here's a list of thefts and espionage attributed to
Huawei, employees of Huawei, or people related to Huawei.

1\. Stealing tech at tradeshows:

On a summer evening in 2004, as the Supercomm tech conference in Chicago wound
down, a middle-aged Chinese visitor began wending his way through the nearly
abandoned booths, popping open million-dollar networking equipment to
photograph the circuit boards inside, according to people who were there.

A security guard stopped him and confiscated memory sticks with the photos, a
notebook with diagrams and data belonging to AT&T Corp. , and a list of six
companies including Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. and Nortel Networks
Corp.

2\. Secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s
U.S. offices :

Alarm bells included the discovery around 2012 of secure rooms impenetrable to
electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei’s U.S. offices, akin to facilities in
intelligence stations around the world, American security officials say.

3\. Former staff admits stealing :

“They spent all their resources stealing technology,” said Robert Read, a
former contract engineer from 2002 to 2003 in Huawei’s Sweden office. “You’d
steal a motherboard and bring it back and they’d reverse-engineer it.”

4\. Stealing tech from Cisco :

Eighteen months before the Supercomm imbroglio erupted, Cisco accused Huawei
in January 2003 of copying its software and manuals—the first time Huawei had
to fight a major international allegation of its theft.

“They have made verbatim copies of whole portions of Cisco’s user manuals,”
Cisco said in its lawsuit. Cisco manuals accompany its routers, and its
software is visible during the router’s operation; both are easily copied,
Cisco said.

The copying was so extensive that Huawei inadvertently copied bugs in Cisco’s
software, according to the lawsuit.

5\. Stealing tech from Motorola :

Email fragments recovered from Mr. Pan’s laptop and included in Motorola’s
complaint show Mr. Pan wrote to Mr. Ren after the meeting, “Attached please
find those document [sic] about SC300 specification you asked.” Huawei later
made a similarly small device, weighing half the SC300, which it marketed to
rural communities in developing markets.

5\. 5G related tech theft:

Mr. Barker had never heard of “user specific tilt,” which could multiply the
number of signals from an antenna and tilt them to provide greater accuracy in
communicating with mobile phones.

Mr. Barker had, however, heard of a conceptually identical technology, ”per
user tilt." He coined it seven years earlier, according to a Quintel lawsuit
alleging misappropriation of trade secrets by Huawei. Quintel said it had
shared the technology with Huawei in September 2009 after Huawei proposed a
business partnership.

The partnership never came through. Huawei filed papers to secure a patent for
the concept a month after their first meeting, using a document still
emblazoned with Quintel’s name and the words “commercial in confidence.”

6\. Camera theft :

Rui Oliveira, a 45-year-old Portuguese multimedia producer, told the Journal
he flew to Huawei’s Plano offices in May 2014 to meet Huawei executives, who
were interested in his patents for a camera attachment to smartphones.

In a conference room, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs, Mr. Oliveira
recalls, two Huawei executives listened as he shared data on his product which
he hoped to license manufacturing to Huawei. He recommended pricing it at
$99.95.

“We’ll talk later,” he says Huawei told him.

Three years later, a friend in Portugal asked him why Huawei was selling “his
camera.”

“Huawei? That’s impossible! What?” he remembers saying.

7\. Stealing songs :

Paul Cheever, a bespectacled preschool teacher who records music as The
Cheebacabra, said his life has become overrun with paperwork and costs since
he sued Huawei in California last year for taking his song “A Casual
Encounter” and pre-loading it on Huawei smartphones and tablets for free
distribution to its customers.

Mr. Cheever said in his court filing that he discovered the alleged theft
after noticing user comments on YouTube that associated Huawei devices with
his song.

8\. Stealing Tappy, the mobile phone testing robot, from T-Mobile :

In the U.S., Huawei engineer Xiong Xinfu had endured a nine-month fusillade of
demands from Huawei’s China-based engineers for information on how to
replicate a robot called Tappy developed by T-Mobile to mimic an ultra-fast
human finger and test a smartphone’s responsiveness. In May 2013, Mr. Xiong
eventually stole part of Tappy at Huawei’s behest, U.S. prosecutors say.

9\. Stealing Solid State Drive technology from Silicon Valley :

In October last year, Yiren “Ronnie” Huang, a longtime Silicon Valley engineer
and co-founder of San Jose’s CNEX Labs Inc., accused Huawei in a lawsuit of
stealing his firm’s solid-state disk storage technology, used for managing
data generated by artificial intelligence. CNEX said at a hearing in April
that Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu issued a directive that led to a Huawei
engineer in June 2016 posing as a customer to steal CNEX secrets; Huawei
denied wrongdoing. The suit is ongoing.

10\. finally, forcing employees to be dishonest :

Jesse Hong, a software architect at Huawei’s California unit, said in a
lawsuit that his bosses ordered him in November 2017 to use fake company names
to register himself for an industry conference organized by Facebook Inc. The
social-media giant had invited other companies to a Telecom Infra Project
meeting, a collaboration on network design, but excluded Huawei. The suit was
confidentially settled in April.

Mr. Hong said he refused to carry out the directive, leading his supervisor to
unleash a stream of abuse and a threat: “If you don’t agree on this, then you
quit right now.”

After Mr. Hong declined, Huawei fired him. The company says it acted in good
faith.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-
litte...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-littered-
with-accusations-of-theft-and-dubious-ethics-11558756858)

~~~
Youcandothis
Most of this is not stealing, but instead copying and spying.

~~~
scarejunba
Curious pattern here where knowledge of secrets is considered stealing or not
stealing depending on the subject.

I wonder if it's just different people reading or if the community itself
views it differently.

After all, "it's not stealing if you have your copy" does mean parent is
right.

~~~
mokus
Agree/disagree is not the only factor involved in voting - another one that I
suspect is in play here is “interesting/uninteresting in the context of the
present discussion”.

~~~
scarejunba
A fair point. Surely in the question of intellectual property, it is just as
relevant here as it is there.

------
swang
wasn't samsung's foldable tech stolen as well? makes sense considering how
fast huawei was able to get it.

~~~
threeseed
I posted this a while back about why Samsung rushed the release of their
foldable phone:

a) Samsung spent a ton of money and research in building foldable OLED
screens.

b) This technology is allegedly stolen by a supplier and sold to BOE Display:
[https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-
supplier-...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-supplier-..).

c) Huawei uses the foldable BOE Display technology in its Mate X smartphone
and is on track to be the first to release it.

d) Samsung panics as it learns that the technology it built might be released
by a competitor earlier than them and consumers might think of them as less of
an innovator. May sound silly but the Chinese companies have been getting a
lot of traction recently e.g. P30 Pro.

e) In addition Samsung goes into lock down as it fears there might be more
leaks to other companies.

f) Combination of d) and e) means that there is less real world testing of the
device than for other phones. And hence how we got to this point.

~~~
solarkraft
I remember reading this post. What has changed since then is the on-track-ness
of everyone =)

------
Causality1
I think most people who follow the smartphone space will recall when Samsung
accused Huawei of stealing their foldable screen technology and sure enough a
few months later Huawei is demonstrating folding phone prototypes. I know the
row with the US government is more about security threats, but I like to think
of Huawei's implosion as the consequences of refusing to respect the rest of
the world.

------
ape4
Would like to see Nortel given their assets.

~~~
walrus01
The shambling corpse of the Nortel DWDM/optical transport/carrier transport
product line was acquired by Ciena.

------
bstar77
I'm curious of the political implications of this situation. You have one side
(the anti Huawei side) that is aided by a very unpopular US president and US
government institutions that are highly mistrusted. You also have the
narrative that companies like Google and nations like Canada have been coerced
into supporting this "assault" on Chinese interests.

It also doesn't help that there is a "trade war" in effect where many people
believe collateral damage is going to happen, just or not... that it's simply
a reality of a (proxy) war. Finally, you have the Huawei customers/supporters
(from all over the world) that feel strongly these accusations are fabricated
and entirely self serving to the US.

How do we navigate this mess and get to the core facts in an age where expert
opinions and fact checking is undervalued? And, as it relates to China, where
is the line between xenophobia and justified concern?

~~~
mabbo
The US didn't chose Canada as an ally in this fight arbitrarily. One of the
top other comments on this thread will tell you all you need to know about why
Canadians are 100% down with going after Huawei: they killed off Nortel via IP
theft.

I watched as friends' parents lost their jobs, as one of the leading telecom
companies in the world was undercut by a competitor who has stolen their
source code, IP, products, everything.

Trump doesn't like Huawei? Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
FWIW the Obama administration issued the original warning of distrust for
Huawei, so none of this should really come as a surprise.

------
wangii
surprised? I don't think so, after all Huawei had admitted in video: 'We lie,
we cheat, we steal!', and Chinese applauded! shame on them!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OifY3sqrmXQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OifY3sqrmXQ)

~~~
sschueller
"Good artists copy great artists steal" [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU)

------
jxramos
Do these companies ever actually innovate and build social/intellectual
capital beyond reverse engineering skills or are they gaming to pollute the
waters so much that they risk sacrificing the golden goose to whom they steal
ideas? This all sort of reminds me of the quip communism or socialism only
works until those in charge spend all the money of those who are productive.
If IP and the R&D expenses never become profitable and companies go under what
then?

~~~
pravda
Well, in the USA, American industry got its start by stealing British
technology.

At this point, China copying foreign technology is just the path of least
resistance.

Eventually, China will be doing the innovating.

~~~
spectramax
I really despise this kind of reasoning. You’re literally comparing 200 year
old history and justifying modern IP theft, and projecting forward.

~~~
matz1
Stealing works. If the benefit > risk, they should do it.

~~~
spectramax
What an insane argument. Murder, Theft, Deceit, Assault, Terrorism “works” as
well. Being a crow in the population of doves has short term benefits to the
individual, the crow in this case, but soon more crows will pop up and the
societal balance turns into chaos.

I’m sure we need not argue this obvious fact. Are you really condoning that
stealing OK if it works? I’m speechless.

~~~
matz1
>Murder, Theft, Deceit, Assault, Terrorism “works”.

Depending on the context, yes. Murder, for example, if I'm in a remote island
and someone is going to kill me and they are weaker than me, then yes
murdering them first works, the benefit > risk.

Likewise,in the context of Huawei, stealing works.

Note that I'm not saying the US shouldn't do anything to prevent/retaliate.

------
jhabdas
According to the interview with NPR the product was sent to the US and
returned via mail, presumably a US carrier.

------
Whatarethese
I'd be throwing my phone in the trash right about now. I would venture to
guess all Huawei data is going to China.

~~~
Youcandothis
Do you really own a Huawei phone? I think anyone that do trust them to the
same degree now as when they bought it.

------
mymindstorm
> Huawei Accused Of Technology Theft

In other news, water is wet.

~~~
prateeekm
debatable

~~~
outside1234
You are right water being wet is debatable

~~~
umvi
Depends on the temperature and pressure of the water I suppose.

------
scoot_718
Again?

------
jarfil
It's kind of funny to speak of "stealing tech" when it's the foreign companies
themselves who give Chinese manufacturers all that's needed to set up
production lines to make the tech. Like, what did you expect, that they
wouldn't run third shifts or sell the stuff to whoever paid them for it?

~~~
wybiral
> Like, what did you expect, that they wouldn't run third shifts or sell the
> stuff to whoever paid them for it?

Yes. Because of those pesky things called "laws" and "trade agreements". It's
still theft even if it wasn't always difficult to do.

~~~
axaxs
I mean, you have a point, but it's inevitable. If a person pays you to do
something, then you find out they are selling your work for an order of
magnitude more than you're making, it's human nature to at least question
this, at best mimic it, laws be damned.

~~~
wybiral
You seem to be justifying crime because it was so easy to commit that you
might as well.

Yard ornaments might be easy to steal, I mean, heck, people just leave them in
their front yard over night. But it's still theft, it's still illegal, and
even though the people made it easy there should still be a penalty for the
theft.

~~~
axaxs
I think most people would agree that idealogical theft is far different than
physical theft.

Not saying I agree with said theft, but when making deals with known
questionable actors, it's a bit of a given.

