Decoding the President, because someone has to: Did Trump just blow up concerted US effort to ban Chinese 5G kit? President Donald Trump appears to have undermined an increasingly aggressive push by the US government and telcos to pressure the world to shun Chinese equipment in next-generation 5G networks. In two tweets (what else?) America's commander-in-chief not only questioned the rationale behind snubbing mobile network equipment …
China.
First you have to detect and prove the 'influence'. (BTW, we've seen cases of it with knock-offs)
Then you have the problem... you've just spend major money kitting out your infrastructure. Now you have to weigh how real the threat is ... of course this gets buried because you don't want to have to rip and replace everything.
First I notice the number of individuals that gave the thumbs down to what I think is the obvious first question that is the precursor to discussion about Huawei and 5 G today...how would anyone know if China gained privileged access to information by using Huawei as its stalking horse. Really, this isn't obvious? Are there a 100 people outside of the Chinese firewall that would have the skills to recognize if it happened, how it was happening, its meaning, its route etc. Likely they would also have to work for Huawei?
Really, all those thumbs down.
The world needs 5G now and the ROW is not able to deliver it, so either plant the infrastructure yesterday or engage with Huawei today. A change of commercial terms is what I would recommend so that their competitive advantage can come down market with proportionate velocity to how China has gained its edge...source code in trust outside of China, R&D centers located in the ROW, and usual GCHQ-like rigor in identifying and repairing vulnerabilities as government and commercial policy.
Oh yea, 'China, take down that firewall.'
>First you have to detect and prove the 'influence'.
To quote a news article from today about the trade show in Spain....this is one of the Huaeiw bosses speaking...
“PRISM, PRISM, on the wall, who is the most trustworthy of them all?” Guo said, in a reference to a U.S. data gathering program. “If you don’t understand that, you can go ask Edward Snowden,” he said, referring to the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed the program in 2013.
The truth is that all state actors are willing and capable of abusing your kit so you need to have an active program in place to defend against it. (Of course, this won't help with those secret court orders that you're not allowed to tell anyone about -- although there are workarounds to this if you're motivated).
"Ohh are you talking about Cisco? Yeah, the monthly parade of 'lol oops we left YET ANOTHER set of hard coded superuser credentials in yet another enterprise router family! our bad! again! lol" is suspicious as fuck."
And if Cisco's doing it, will Huawei still copy it? While Huawei maybe behaving themselves in the lower end router market these days, I've heard rumours that in the more specialised 3G/4G fields, checking Cisco bug reports is still a support technique.
The reality is that Cisco don't build the 5G solutions - they are just vendors in part of larger tenders, along with a lot of other companies that used to be more important in the telco space.
Given the lack of evidence against Huawei so far and governments not blocking them in bids, I suspect this was time wasting to allow competitors to catch up. And I'm not looking at Cisco...
'Let's see1) a company based in China that would be financially ruined if any government "influence" was found.
2) a company based in the USA with more security exploits than I can be bothered to count.
Which would you ban from "sensitive networks"?'
I do get the point, but it's irrelevant. Sure, the western democracies are infected by psychotically greedy companies of basically disgusting ethics like Facebook and Google, and there are plenty of others whose software actually gets worse and less secure as time goes on (Microsoft Windows), not even to count decaying dinosaurs like IBM and Oracle whose grotesquely overpriced and inefficient software is simply bad to have around ...
... but the fact that we have so stupidly surrounded ourselves with this shit is neither argument nor excuse for allowing a hostile foreign power to infect our critical systems and place us at a further disadvantage. China is objectively a bad government of bad people motivated to do bad things. It is growing in power and only a hopeless naif would imagine that it will not try to extend its malign influence to us if allowed to.
It simply cannot be allowed. The fact that Facebook and Google are self-inflicted diseases does not change that in the slightest.
You made a point that is missed by our politicians and the great UNWASHED.
The US has always been able to attract the best talent from the rest of the world so the quality of our education system did not matter. Our wealth and international "PRESTIGE" allowed us to attract a large proportion of the best and brightest minds from around the globe and thus benefit from other countries investments in their people. This party is over.
Today the most talented minds can find comparable paying jobs in their own countries or elsewhere and we have squandered all the goodwill we had.
This is not just about product development and innovation. The deficiencies runs all the way down to the the construction workers and gardeners in our society. It is almost comical to hear the discussion about bringing manufacturing jobs back without any regard to the fact that we do not have the number or workers or skill to facilitate advance manufacturing on the scale required by current industries.
In the USA, there are plenty of brains. Quite often whole departments in the leading universities are home-grown talent (and often 98% Asian, and good for them), and ex-coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia are learning code and are very competent, because for a lot of solid mid-level jobs, you just have to be trained. And if a local community wants good jobs, so that men can again be the breadwinner and play their part, then it makes sense to embrace any new way of doing that, instead of insisting older industries be put back on life-support.
The UK dominated the world for about 100 years (I am being generous) because it was first out the gate with the Industrial Revolution. It thought it could sail on that impetus forever, but eventually Germany and the USA surpassed it. The USA had the big impetus in the 1980s and 1990s (the Silicon Valley Revolution), but cycles are shorter and they are starting to be overtaken. Can any country get a second impetus and a second chance? Yes, look at Germany and China. The USA just has to have the will to invest in its own people, and in infrastructure, so that (unlike the UK), it's not caught trying to re-establish dominance on a crumbling foundation.
If it chooses not to do that, then it deserves what it gets, economically.
The USA just has to have the will to invest in its own people, and in infrastructure, so that (unlike the UK), it's not caught trying to re-establish dominance on a crumbling foundation. .... Hollerithevo
That does not address the fact that much greater minds be elsewhere working with others. It is those thinkers and tinkerers Uncle Sam would need to invest in. Simple outrageous fiat payments to principals for required services is a very simple and well tested route to almost immediately guaranteed success.
Obviously, presently, whenever there be an intelligence deficit with competitors or allies plowing ahead for leading advantage in vital future utilities and facilities, is national treasure being squandered on payment to decrepit home systems/bankrupt assets/zombie concerns/ponzi schemes/manic markets.
“Obviously, presently, whenever there be an intelligence deficit with competitors or allies plowing ahead for leading advantage in vital future utilities and facilities, is national treasure being squandered on payment to decrepit home systems/bankrupt assets/zombie concerns/ponzi schemes/manic markets.”
The regulatory authorities have the ultimate say in such amFM, and any company delving into such should exercise any/all due dilligence and expect to accept responsibility for any failings in filings, and any exponential learnings with leverage liabilities should be conducted with open honestly, as opposed to dire consequence deceit with a hope to garner advantage and destitution and despair for others, arms length guessing games, blaming all others as opposed to restitution and remedy.
A good example of such is the terrible suicide of the well known social media site, and as always is often only after the horse bolting do the alarm bells begin to toll.
The issue isn't brains.
US companies spend far more buying back their own stock than on R & D.
The next largest category is generally marketing.
This focus extends to employees: a young, cheap employee is far better than an older, expensive and not-puppy-like one. H1B is even better: should they become skilled, the poor sap is stuck in green card limbo for 7 years or more - a literal indentured servant.
Lastly, the notion that "training" is all that is needed is bollocks.
Society can not survive with everyone being a coder any more than society can survive with everyone eating cake.
The real issue is whether all parts of functional society deserve a reasonable share of revenue as opposed to the 1%. As the inequality numbers clearly show, the battles of the past 2+ decades have clearly swung in the 1%'s favor.
The issue isn't brains.US companies spend far more buying back their own stock than on R & D. .... c1ue
Hmmm? Surely that proves the issue IS brains. Or more accurately the distinct lack of higher functioning ones.
Are you in denial of that simple fact and thus complicit and supportive of the Grand Deceit?
I graduated in 2004 from an "old university" with a degree in applied computing, I like many of my contemporaries struggled badly to find work (cheers Tony Blair govt for opening the door to "intra company transfers" from India, outsourcing and listening to industry bleating about shortage of IT workers (translation we don't want to pay the UK going rate) as many companies taking on graduates in 2000 (when we started the course) stopped taking grads on post dotcom bubble and post outsource everything to India and "intracompany" transfer Inidian workers to the UK on Indian salaries. That was a great trick that one.
University at the time was utterly hopeless in terms of careers advice, even careers advice dept "we're not here to help you find a job" seemingly a lot better now, but in 2004 they were still under the impression that everyone came for the "experience" and that grad jobs were 10 a penny.
This being despite having a large industry board, my suggestion that they make an agreement with their industry board to shape the course to what the industry board were looking for in staff, skillsets they struggled to recruit - batted away - no no no thats not the done thing.
No wonder this country has horrific productivity issues, mismanagement runs rife even through universities and colleges, colleges is where failed management seemingly go off to, either to lecture (badly) or run depts into the ground by relentless cost cutting and course asset stripping
>Who is going to do this catching up?
We've been in this rather peculiar state where there's both a chronic skills shortage and ongoing corporate drives to thin down the workforce, offshoring it where practicable. Suddenly we're expected to find people to develop state of the art communications systems as well as all that whizzo new military hardware that's being demanded by the Pentagon. (One local company reported it was looking to hire "10,000 engineers" -- seriously.) To add to our problems we're not that welcoming to foreign workers; our wages aren't that competitive any more and our visa system is driven by a lottery where even if you do get a work visa there's no guarantee that it will be renewed when it expires.
Ultimately I can blame this on the "Smiling Curve", the notion that the profir in business is in product conception and marketing, not actually making things. This may well be true but it masks and unfortunate reality -- the people charged with the boring stuff like manufacturing may well want a piece of the other the curve and will be a good position to grab it.
This highlights Trump's lack of understanding of corporate taxation and research and development. Under higher corporate taxation with exemptions for income spent on R&D corporations used to have functional R&D departments. Under present day tax rules with so many loopholes there's no reason to spend on R&D, it doesn't help the quarterly profit motive.
I know this is very short sighted in terms of the long term viability of a great many western(?) corporations, but the taxation/investment rules as they exist have created the failure of these once great companies. That and MBAs/bean counters running companies and not understanding the core business.
@XSV1
I too drive a Rav4,... I've never had the stereo up that loud to find out what value it tops out at,..... I think I'm going to have to try that now.
The Air con values are a bit odd,.... lowest temperature is 16degrees (C) which is warm, then below that, it's 'Lo' which is chilly,... could do with a couple of settings between the two.
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I'm tempted to train up a GPT2 neural net with Trumps twitter stream, alongside a Fox news headline stream of the time, and maybe a tiny bit of LSTM, then see if going forward it can generate realistic Trump tweets in real time response to new headlines. I'm betting it could. I'm betting it would be scarily similar. Could we replace Trump with an AI and not even notice?
AI is a mind-lever, as opposed to an independent consciousness. Beware not the pawnish Terminators but (the mindset of) the chiefs of Skynet.
Push-AI gets programmed (eg by rules or training data/regimes). But pull-AI (adapt-to-thrive bots) in the political world becomes whatever thrives best in that world. Like scaremongering and threat-creation. Like human politicians, just amplified. Oh, we already have one.
"10 Print "We will deliver brexit. A brexit people voted for. A brexit good for jobs and the economy."
20 Goto 10"
You need an if statement as there's a massive difference between which leader you ask.
if(party == "Conservative")
cout<<"red, white and blue Brexit";
if(party == "Labour")
cout<<"jobs-first Brexit";
Ahh, there's the problem with Maybot. Some idiot went and defined Brexit as Brexit, and forgot to include an escape condition in her ontological schema discovery algorithm. She's been stuck in an infinite logic trap, attempting to goal seek 'Brexit' without realising the definition is recursive. Does the PM have a bug tracker? Should be an easy fix. We can have this sorted by lunchtime.
I was wondering if Fox News isn't how trump gets is instructions from Bannon/Putin, but then he'd have to remember some code to watch for so probably not. Although, it would be interesting to analyze Trump's ever changing agendas against Fox News broadcasts. I wouldn't be surprised if that hasn't/isn't being done.
The issue is that the highest levels of government are held by people with the morals of drug cartels - but in more stupid. They say incredibly stupid things that are regularly proven wrong, but they think that, because of their position, their words have a special weight. They don't understand that respect is something that is earned, it is not a given. And it must be accompanied by acts that are on par.
When you declare a National Emergency, you do not go and play golf the very next day. The act is not on par with the words.
When you declare a National Emergency, you do not go and play golf the very next day. The act is not on par with the words.
An honourable tradition. Fiddling while Rome burns. Sometimes used by history's winners:
"With a hey nonny no on Plymouth Hoe, in the merry merry month of May, Turelay!
Pardon me Sir Francis, but I think you ought to know,
the Armada has been sighted while you're bowling on the Hoe."
Drake knew about winds and tides, and in the says of sail only there was no point in putting to sea when they were against you.
Today's politicians don't have exact knowledge of any technical subject, that's why they don't know when they are talking bollocks, because if they had studied anything in depth they would know how complicated is the real world.
Drake not being in a hurry to put to sea was based on n appreciation of the fact that the tide flowing into Plymouth Sound combined with a stiff south-westerly made it it impossible for the fleet to sail until the tide turned. I very much doubt that the insouciance displayed by The Orange was based on such sound judgement.
I think the real issue is that when he won the election, Trump couldn't really believe it
He probably spent the first few weeks thinking the Secret Service would burst in at any moment and tell him to piss off because the real president wants his office back.
Since they didn't throw him out he just keeps tweeting whatever comes into his head after the latest Whitehouse briefing so that he looks like he's doing something.
He's dialoguing through new channels that really appeal to what I call "Generation Yes We Can Talk About It And We Will Do Soon!" and he's metaflowing the discussion about the role of IOT in America v2.0.
In the same way that, back in the day, Gareth Newman asked "Are Friends Electric?", I'm ideating the meme that "Is Internet Things?" or even "Are Things Internet?"
And the backchannel feedback is "Yes! Yes! Yes!".
The Next Gen reboot of "Phones" (to use an increasingly irrelevant term) - I call these iEnabler v6.0G - will energise the dialogation of memes, ideas, thought-packets and fabulons, so it's good that Trump - a Man, an idea, a warrior, and a poet, that, least we forget, 76% of America v1.0 joyously shouted into office - has picked up the baton and saluted the flag with it. The line between advertisation, ideation and fact has blurred. And we are all better off for it. We have weaponised the truth. And it's exploding across the free world. We are entering what I call Information Super High Way v2.5, and my shoes are smoking.
So grab your artisan brew, and digitally run with me. The journey, the story, the path, will be ideaful.
I'm not quite sure who you're channelling - too literate for any of the usual suspects, and the man himself wouldn't get beyond "applaud Trump" before switching to CNN for his two minute hate - but send it in to a right wing thinktank regardless, they might give you a job addressing business influencers on the strength of it. It's a nice burlesque of at least one of the more idiotic courses I've been sent on.
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I wouldn't be too sure.
If he can provoke the Democrats into putting up another unelectable candidate and campaigning on Identity Politics, he could be looking to reelection as a lesser of two evils. You get strange effects when you have two lead candidates (or parties) who are both unspeakably awful, as witness Blighty 2017 when both parties got increased votes as people were more desperate than ever to keep the other one out.
"Contrarian in chief" assumes he's not just an idiot.
Trump has managed to damage the American government and institutions more than any person before him. I'd say the Russians have had their money's worth and much more with this quisling. Well done USA, you elected an idiot. Not the first idiot, but definitely the most damaging.
That's the one to follow. But note it should be qualified by "With core supporters." As long as they vote for him again he can win again. They will believe any old BS he feeds them. Their behavior last election proved it.
Consistency, who needs it? I'm President DJ Trump.
Trump is simply talking his usual childish drivel, repeating half-baked, poorly understood points from whatever cable news he was watching most recently—or whichever of his lickspittles and lackeys last got his ear. His tendency to repeat Fox 'News' lies and daft propaganda after a session stuffing his carcase with burgers in front of the telly is by now very well known. The only thing that makes these statements interesting (to a psychiatrist?) is how he so often gets the wrong end of the stick, doesn't remember key facts or simply invents things, like a boastful child. He has credibility with his apologists only because (a) they're even dumber than he is, and/or (b) he's a racist, misogynist, regressive slug, and they'll forgive everything else if they can have that. Those two categories pretty much explain the support of his aptly named 'base' and GOP/Fox, respectively.
As I've argued before, given China's history of bad behaviour and the nature of its government, we have to go by capabilities rather intentions, and for that reason western democracies should by exceedingly cautious before using any Chinese soft or -hardware. It's just too easy to secrete mal- and spyware into almost any electronic component you can think of, and arguably even easier with software when you have anything from 10⁴ to 10⁶ or more lines of code. I am not convinced by "But they share their source code" because (a) it is possible to be extremely sneaky, even unto meddling with hashes, and (b) that still doesn't cover the hardware, and I defy anyone to prove that every fantastically complex multi-layer motherboard coming out of the 恶意的混蛋 plant is precisely identical to the 50,000 others and does not have a 1mm² 'extra' snuck into Layer4 under a fat electrolytic (or even inside said capacitor).
I agree with the grown-ups on this: nothing touched by the Chinese should be allowed anywhere near secure or confidential data systems or networks or national infrastructure. The possibiltiies for mischief are sky high. the temptation is unquestionably there. And their government's motives are demonstrably vile.
It will do the west no harm to skill up in these areas (perhaps even a long term benefit); there is no pressing urgency about 5G (it can barely penetrate a brick wall, FFS, and self-driving cars are in the slow lane, whatever the manufacturers claim); and anything that damages the Chinese economy, while it may cause us some pain, certainly saps the dollars they will otherwise use to build aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships.
And if anyone is thinking about Osborne's witlessly stupid Hinkley-C nuclear plant (Tory chancellor partnering with a communist totalitarian regime and a foregin nationalised energy company, you couldn't invent more reekingly hypocritical shit), yes, I agree: if we're kicking Huawei out, having Chinese involvement in a strategic national nuclear infrastructure project is clearly batshit lunacy.
Please can you firewall the troll-in-chief off from any form of social media? Give him a sandbox that looks like Twitter, complete with artificially stupid TKL bots to respond to his nonsense, so that we don't have to read either his or the media's regurgitation of his brain farts.
Regards,
World+Dog
"Chinese technology is considered superior, and Uncle Sam wishes to block its introduction while *US corporations play catch-up*."
There are *no* US corporations in the telecoms infrastructure business. Huawei is world #1 telecoms infrastructure provider (despite various governments hindrances), Ericsson are #2 (boosted by those same hindrances) and are desperately hoping that 5G will revive their fortunes in the way that 4G did, Nokia is a distant #3.
What makes this a useful battle ground for the proxy war between the US and China is that neither side have anything to loose. US companies can source their 5G requirements elsewhere and no US companies gain unfair advantage from government interference (keeping the WTO out of the fight) and China has their own needs fully covered regardless of the outcome (and get to exert additional control on a stubbornly independent company).
Never forget about "Trump's Razor" - his actions are usually explained in the stupidest and most corrupt way possible.
I don't have any specific evidence, but based on the way Trump is acting it looks like one of his buddies (or Trump Org) has investments in a Huawei competitor.
His goal was simply to slow Huawei down a bit so they didn't get quite as large a share of the global 5G projects. And of course Trump is willing to blow up the world economy as long as he gets what he wants personally.
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