The real lesson from the article, is:
“that which doesn’t hit one sharply-enough to kill one, IF one is relentlessly adapting, THEN it makes one stronger.”
Which is exactly why our sanctioning of Russian operations & oligarchs was sooo ineffective: we waited ages before doing it, did it layer-by-layer, & gave them warnings & time-to-adapt, to mitigate the effect of our action.
Sorry I can’t remember which journalism it was that pointed all that out, but it wasn’t my insight, it was someone else’s.
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There is no good strategy or good outcome with Huawei. CCP virtually controls any Chinese economic entity and has appetite for “secrets” of the West. Embracing Huawei would’ve been as bad as outcasting it. We’re at the point where I hesitate to buy most things that originated in China.
Everyone has the appetite for the secrets of everyone.
Surprisingly, China publishes a lot of it. Like, a lot a lot. As in, pretty much all the work done at CAS and similar institutions is published, which is the equivalent to US national labs or Lincoln Lab or what have you.
At the same time, Huawei itself publishes an obscene amount of work and is incredibly proactive in academic research - they open-source code, fund top-tier conferences, and publish basically every result they get. It’s actually stupid how much money they dump on conferences.
Now, you might ask yourself, what secrets does the West have? Well, China already leads in 80% of critical technology fields, so unless you’re working in integrated circuit design/fabrication, quantum computing, high performance computing, natural language processing, vaccines, small satellites, or space launch systems… You probably don’t have much to hide. Plus, if you’re working in a field where secrets are important, you already likely have security clearance.
As a Canadian I’m pissed off about Nortel too, but a bunch of Canadian companies got fucked by the dotcom crash and the 08 crisis and Nortel was unfortunately one of them. I’m more pissed off about Bombardier, which is an issue I’m actually affected by. Fuck the hyenas at the DOJ that killed Bombardier and the CSeries to protect their golden goose. How’s 737 Max sales going, Boeing? Getting outcompeted by the A220 that Bombardier was forced to sell to AirBus for $1? Yeah…
Plus, Nortel outsourced their entire manufacturing and product design teams to Huawei in the 90s, so I don’t have too much sympathy for Nortel.
The big powers bully us because we have no choice. That’s the repercussions of Trudeau’s foreign policy.
So, I’m not exactly well versed in all this, could you fill me in on what threats Huawei poses to I, a random poor person going about my day in the US?
I refuse to believe a Corp or the NSA isn’t already looking over my shoulder, and with nothing to steal, wouldn’t using Huawei tech be like picking between McDonald’s and Wendy’s? Same product, different flavor sort of situation?
I’ve read that DJI drones periodically send an encrypted data-payload to China, of the sites they’ve been, & what their camera has seen, as 1 little example.
I’ve read that chips whose implimentation was completed in China had extra logic added into them, to backdoor them, so that the computers they were put into ( the were networking chips ) could be entered by whomever had the backdoor key.
IF you have China make your infrastructure, and China declared last-century that “the destruction of the West is the midwife of Chinese dominion”, THEN you are handing the CCP the keys to your empire.
Modi, in India, has “bet the farm” that Russia will fight with it, provisioning India with military-means, to fight China … but Russia’s now an economic-vassal-state of China, so that can’t even be possible … which means that India has now bet its life on … nothing.
Delusion, including self-delusion, isn’t strategy.
Don’t think it goes only 1-way, though:
Do all the cars in Canada have remote-kill-switches which their manufacturers can activate? TTBOMK, yes, they do.
Apparently collection-agencies & banks use these, sometimes… & the police want the complete access to the same kill-switches…
Diebold voting-machines which were involved in some absurdly-obvious vote-manipulation, complete with coded-in back-doors, a few years ago, are another example: US company, helping highjack US elections.
There is good reason why security-geeks prefer Abloy physical-discs locks to electronic “locks”, where security is required: disc-key locks are not “bumpable”, & they have no back-doors or battery-for-security bullshit.
The brainwashed-by-propaganda just invest in the “security” that is pushed on them, endlessly, removing all alternative from the market.
That many Ukrainians still rely on Telegram, a Russian operation, for their “secret” sharing, is proof of non-viability of entire-populations of humankind.
Platforms are predators/parasites, & that includes hardware as well as software.
The world isn’t operating for humankind’s benefit: humankind is corporate-narcissism-machiavellianism-psychopathy’s prey.
Same as humankind is oligarchy’s prey, same as humankind was monarchy’s prey.
Ever since agriculture put-in-place a stable feudalism/class-system, then it’s been the same polarization-trying-to-extinguish-all-alternatives ( like there being any middle-class who has self-determination ), everywhere.
There’s a profoundly important book by Thom Hartmann, called “Screwed”, whose beginning ( the only part I’ve read ) SHOWS how national-economic-strength ONLY exists when the majority of the population is economically-autonomous ( ie a strong middle-class ), and FINALLY I understood economics, because all the “economics” stuff I’d read, until that, contradicted something fundamental…
it isn’t economic strength, when the majority are crushed-prey!
That the majority of the population need to be doing-well for the national economy to be doing-well,
is completely contradictory to the “so long as the top stocks are doing well, & the wealthy are doing well, THEN the country’s thriving” gaslighting, of normal “economics”.
Anyways, cynicism is a more-useful, more survival-oriented default, nowadays, evidence shows…
https://cdml.com/dangers-of-chinese-made-smart-devices/
https://semiengineering.com/chip-backdoors-assessing-the-threat/
The BIG problem, is that it COST$$ to even discover if one’s chips got trojan’d in Chinese manufacture, & if one has to choose between profit vs security, profit nearly-always wins, in moneyarchy.
So, it only “becomes a problem” when it’s discovered by someone, out in the wild.
And THAT means that we’ve globally rejected “prevention is cheaper than cure” paradigm, opting-instead for “we can’t afford to prevent, so if a cure is needed, our magical-Entitlement-power will save us, of course”, which is relying-on-bogus-belief, instead of relying-on-integrity.
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If you work at McDonald’s or Wendy’s, it really doesn’t matter what phone you use lmao
This isn’t a discussion on just what cell phone a person is using, but instead on network switching gear used on the backend where all the data flows through.
Someone should tell the US, then, because they sure as hell didn’t limit sanctions to networking equipment.
Sanctions aren’t the only tool in the toolbox. In this case it was a Presidential Executive Order
Potato, potato
