The German government has given providers until 2026 to reduce their exposure to high risk vendors (Huawei and ZTE) to less than 25% of equipment, with a complete ban in places like the capitol and near military bases.
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.
It is terribly revealing about what the US has been up to that the minute they realise Huawei is more cost competitive they develop a rip and replace program to get Chinese gear out of the system. They understand what is possible; and likely because someone in the intelligence apparatus wrote a report saying "the Chinese could [do this thing we are doing]".
There isn’t anything magic here. It’s not that China would have particularly special capabilities over this equipment. It’s that it’s so full of vulnerabilities that any nation state (or really any determined good hacker) can get into these systems.
Was there any comparison actually done between various providers that didn't stay within some 3-letter agency like NSA? Generally a lot of equipment is full of holes and its nigh impossible to keep track if every year there is new version, scales of this matter of course but this move specifically nicely aligns into general start of US trade war with China.
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).
> whether US is spying or China is makes 0 practical difference
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.
" 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 " I like to know more about those Eastern Europe US - controlled coups I didn't know about.
Post cold war, the US have been very interested in having friendly governments in the previous eastern bloc nations. This hasn't been evident in actual coups, it's evident when you follow so called soft politics. Look at trade agreements, vocal support, NATO status etc for clues here.
The US knows how to manipulate with both the carrot and the stick.
Do you can imagine any other reason despite "carrot and stick" why these governments were friendly to the US?
And yes, soft power and coups are two very different things.
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.
The only reason the Euromaidan happened was, because Janukovych ran on a pro EU platform and promised an association agreement with the EU. The day before signing that agreement he got bought off by Putin and proclaimed that Ukraine would instead join a customs union with Russia and Belarus. No population would allow such a shameless betrayal without massive protests.
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 a lot like they've set up a puppet government in Ukraine
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.
With (deserved) increased scrutiny in Huawei and friends, I'm half tempted to get the discarded gear to actually put in production use. China/Huawei is no longer in a position to pull something stupid.
Current gen functioning gear at a discount price will be very tempting.
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.
If they haven't already, likely Germany will also introduce a new law like the Dutch did such that a court order or judge is no longer necessary to hack someone and you don't have to be a criminal either. Additionally, it goes without saying of course, you don't never any form of evidence of anything.
Luckily for now, the Germans, for all their flaws, still have a much better understanding of the concept of privacy than the Dutch, and are pushing back as they can. Being a bit more historically conscious will do that to you, I guess.
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.
Well, it was the country that banned traffic cameras doing average speed check on longer stretches, because it was an unreasonable indiscriminate privacy intrusion, storing the number plate information of all passing cars, with a potential for abuse.
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:
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.
In China, Huawei is known for offering competitive salaries but also demands a lot from its employees. Many people tolerate the toxic work environment in exchange for financial benefits, particularly as they gradually improve their family's lifestyle with their rising income.
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.
Any company with deep financial dependency on the Chinese market (basically all Chinese companies) will have connections with the Chinese Communist party (aka the ruling government), including all Chinese citizens in the country... They will have "deep connection" with the government because all these people and entities are subject to the local laws and established interests and they don't really have an alternative. It's not like the US or the West is so immigration happy welcoming them in with open arms.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
Open source does nothing if you can't verify the shipped code is actually running that. Plus after the whole Supermicro controversy we'd have to check what appear to be ball bearings for embedded spying circuitry.
It is funny, because even foreign experts working in China are expected to join the trade union, although they can’t vote in its elections (not a huge loss). Huawei’s connection to the PLA stands out among Chinese companies, but you are correct that every company in China will have strong ties to the CPC and could have strong involvement by the PLA. They mostly don’t, however, the government isn’t that well organized outside if just governing, and China’s corporate scene is very chaotic. A lot of it is just a hyper competitive market that turns them a certain way.
Well, Nortel had a former US Navy Admiral as CEO at some point.
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.
I think it’s related to Huawei’s PLA roots. Its founder spent an 11 year career in the PLA. It is not clear about huawei’s ownership structure outside that it is kind of owned by employees, but not really.
PLA in the past is basically a career choice for people from rural area. You get sponsored for education, and will get a job in the city after you quit the army. Most of my childhood friends served in the army before they got their jobs, because they sucked in school. That was the only choice for them.
Sure. He is older than me, I don't know what was the policy then.
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.
Wait until the world finds out that most Israeli tech founders have roots in Unit 8200 ;) And a lot of US companies were founded through known CIA fronts.
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.
It isn’t that Chinese spying is somehow less virtuous than American spying, it’s more why take the chance? The only reason China ever bothered with Cisco or Nortell at all was to copy their tech, but China wouldn’t let an overseas tech come in today to drive their cellphone network today. They would think that’s just stupid. But when America does the same they cry bloody murder.
Well, US has zero domestic 5G equipment manufacturers. So it is not really a question of China managing US mobile networks.
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.
I also worked on the telco side and we did dd for huawei equipment in 2010 (it was early days of IMS). They actually flew us to their hq in shenzhen and i spent weeks there. I haven’t seen anything like what you’re describing but one thing I remember is how paranoid about security (including physical security) they were always talking shit about “those thieves from zte”. I found this pretty hilarious and still do
>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).
I would call that highly unprofessional and a red flag.
The environment you are describing is 'developing world', especially when it wants to play the catch up game. It can only get worse because they soon find out catching-up is a lot more difficult than they imagined. As a Chinese I don't want to work in Chinese companies, but I do understand why they do it.
Eh in sweden I got asked to do unpaid overtime and the CTO refused to write me a recommendation letter since I had refused to do the (completely illegal) unpaid overtime.
They were hiring mostly young immigrants because they are more pliable to this sort of things.
Was it even legal to ask for unpaid overtime in Sweden?
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.
All massively successful companies, especially starting from scratch are very demanding.
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 issues and benefits you list are not specific to either "side". It feels a bit like you picked and chose through rose-tinted glasses when, really, everything you listed may happen in either case and are more symptoms of the quality of leadership.
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.
Lol, same experience working with a big-ish Chinese game developer. The project manager I worked with for over a year had simply disappeared when I returned from a 2 week vacation, and nobody wanted to talk about what the reason was, only "oh, he doesn't work here anymore".
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).
Chinese will have farewell parties with coworkers who have good relationship with. They just don't like sending announcement or good-bye-mail to the entire company.
If you a just "someone" to a Chinese, you will not be notified.
With the risk of sounding to defend this culture, sprinkled with a tiny bit of whataboutism:
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.
The digitisation and GPS-localisation of everything has been a mistake.
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.
Huawei was beginning of the souring of the west's relationship with China, starting with Australia, which had major security concerns about Huawei being allowed our build our 5G networks.
"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...
Huawei would probably have 90 % of the 5G equipment market if this smear campaign had not started.
They were even beating Nokia and Ericsson in their respective home markets
But that only happened because Huawei became the most competitive offer back then. Now Nokia is back in business due to a political decision that eliminates its competitors.
In near future world will have these factions. US and its allies and vassals. China+Russia,Iran,NK. India is hostile to China but close to Russia. It won't let go Russia as needs the resources and has been burnt few times to become solely dependent on US.
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.
If the US manufacturers can't compete with Chinese manufacturers on price / performance, then there are laws enacted to protect them. And laws are always "for the greater good."
And we always have justifications ready: war on terror, war on drugs, war on child pornography, war on fake news with more wars coming.
China sells to both Russia and Ukraine. I remember there was a youtube video showing a Russian dude went to a Shenzhen factory to buy drones and discovered some Ukrainian buyers also there.
In regards to Africa, China is indisputably better than the US at foreign policy as a fact.
Check out the passport rankings to see who objectivity has the best foreign relations. https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php surprised to see Syria and Pakistan lower than "Palestinian territories".
Even if they're doing it for selfish reasons, 10 years of Chinese business has done more to lift the continent out of poverty than 30+ years of Western NGOs.
I don’t think he meant the Chinese were generous in Africa but just better than the Westerners. I’d take debt and infra over poverty and bombs any time of day.
Chinese missiles and bombs are also making headway in africa as China keeps growing its military arms exports. Nigeria and Angola are ts 2nd and 3rd largest buyers after Pakistan.
I am a bit puzzled. The second link you posted shows that China is investing way more than the US (which is actually divesting for the last few years). For arms, it's still a too low of an amount to make a difference.
It's very weird when people post links which contradict their text.
I usually block people that do that, because I find a quick trawl through their comment history often reveals they're deliberately spreading misinformation and/or gaslighting.
You are the one gaslighting. China is simply claiming that the USA invests less than they actually do.
HN doesn’t have a block function, but ya, I don’t see wolf warriors adding much to the conversation either. You guys just have a twisted view of the world and it isn’t interesting interacting with that.
The us already has a full blown military base IN Germany - there is likely plenty of intelligence sharing already and similar interests around security. Not sure US needs to back door too heavily for most info
Germany not only has several important bases, like Ramstein with the largest American military hospital outside American soil, and several other large bases (K-Town), but also houses two of eleven unified combatant commands in a single city: EUCOM and AFRICOM are both in Stuttgart.
Needless to say there's plenty of CIA around as well. Just look at the welcome guide for Frankfurt for new officers in the field from one of the more recent leaks. Can't remember which.
probably not because it was factually incorrect (though it was) but because, factuality aside, it was likely to produce a worthless, intellectually vacant flamewar (which it did). oops
Reminds ne of using DistroWatch to argue that Linux Mint is the most popular distro. User contributed, selection bias etc. It's not even clear what thought you're pushing.
(Having said that, internet infrastructure is not the best in Germany, but this problem has no relation to Huawei or China).
Neighbour countries like Denmark or Netherlands (which both have aggressively banned Huawei) have much better internet than Germany. So the difference is hardly because of lack of technology. I would chalk it down to Germany being silly conservative and content about its old incompetent monopolies running things.
This is pure bullshit. 164.58 Mbps looks great until you realize that’s only true for sites within China or sites whitelisted by the CCP. It’s obviously 0 Mbps for Google or BBC. For sites that haven’t been reviewed, they throttle the connection. All sites on Cloudflare become unreliable. GitHub is sporadically banned.
Any sane person would much rather live in Germany.
Sites being blocked is different from internet being slow. Theoretically it's possible for GFW to disappear (very unlikely) or malfunction (more likely) and access to Google or BBC is suddenly much faster. Practically you can use a proper VPN.
I don't disagree with your opinion on which country is better to live in.
I ran a pretty popular site that at its peak got a terabyte a day back a few years ago. One of the most common complaints I got was that cloudflare is unstable in China.
The link you gave says serving Chinese traffic is at request, not for all sites.
My bad, I thought HMD was Chinese just based on abysmally bad quality of the phones they manufacture. Surprised to see this from a former leader. My first cell phone was made by Nokia, it was absolutely rock solid.
Are their phones that bad? I have never bought any of their flagships (typing this on an X30), but I've found that the phones are excellent for their price point, plus they put pure Android on them, which is quite rare these days for non-Pixel phones.
My previous phone was a Nokia. Worst phone I've ever owned.
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.
Random freezing sounds more like a software problem than a hardware problem.
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.
I've happily switched from Nokia to Samsung and so many niggles were gone. I couldn't imagine a Samsung PM seeing Android alarm and go "lets just allow alarms to blare till the speakers breaks loose, Google's snooze settings belongs on a spaceship"
I guess it depends on the person. I have a Samsung tablet, and would rather it was running the stock Android launcher. I also detest that there are (Samsung or otherwise) apps on there I do not want to use and cannot uninstall.
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.