UK: From 5G in Tiree to the Isles of Ebony, carry me on the waves… Sail Huawei, sail Huawei, sail Huawei The British government is set to severely restrict the use of Huawei's cheap kit to a fraction of non-core networks across the UK due to worries about the Chinese vendor's link to China. A pair of official reports – one by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, and the other by the National Cyber Security Centre …
Actually the other high risk vendors are Ericsson and Nokia. Any vendor of such complex technology is at high risk of including security vulnerabilities. And they all include backdoors because governments, including the UK government, require them. This is 100% about a trade war started by Trump and 0% about actual security and privacy.
..... bang on. There is no way this work should be going to forriners. We build the finest capacitors and valves in the world and our bakelite insulators are second to none.
As for the security issues? I've never heard so much nonsense, Who cares if they copy our data? They won't make sense of it, they all talk Chinese.
Anyway, what will 5G ever do for us........
IOT, Edge computing, something something something.....
Here's betting I still wont get decent data speeds anywhere along the GWR line that links Vodafone in Newbury to Vodafone in Paddington, passing the HQ's of both O2 and Three on the way....
Personally I'd blame Enya, or perhaps Matthew (or the article title generating machine) as I now have that song stuck in my head...
Choosing a non-US network component supplier is "rejecting the cause of freedom" ?
I have breaking news for you, my dear : The USA no longer represents Freedom. Not with the NSA pilfering communications all over the world without any right to do so, and certainly not with a government that does not hesitate to separate children from their parents under specious border rules.
Besides, for a country that is so free market-oriented, you are especially badly placed to complain when the market doesn't choose you.
I agree totally, though as for separating childten from their parents, don't forget the Tories have removed that very protection accepted by Mays government:
https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/08/mps-vote-pledge-reunite-child-refugees-families-12025966/
We're talking about Liz Cheney here, whose definition of "freedom" is "the right to do what I think you should do".
This is a woman who publicly attacked her own sister's marriage to another woman, and equated criticizing Trump with treason. Except when it involves hunting wild animals, she's never been big on promoting freedom, at least as any rational person understands the notion.
There is no such thing as "The Special Relationship". It's a meaningless phrase wheeled out by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Either when UK politicians are trying to puff thelsemves up to look big to the home crowd, or as a form of lubrication so the UK doesn't feel so bad as it's put over a barrel by the US.
Which then means it doesn't matter that it's going through Chinese, Finnish, American etc gear, it has the possibility to be siphoned off anywhere.
If you are using secure transfer / communications, it doesn't matter what you are running over, that's what its for. If you are not, it doesn't matter what you are running over as your communications can be intercepted and redirected anywhere.
What the limiting of use of a hardware provider does is, reduce their potential market and dominance. It also makes it so that if a piece of hardware has a fault, intentional or otherwise, the impact it limited in scope. Which should be part of your infrastructure plan anyway, especially if it is critical. It doesn't stop data from being stolen if you are not securing it in the first place.
I think the real security concerns are less about tapping the data - almost all the interesting traffic is quite well end-to-end encrypted nowadays with VPNs for commercial users, and higher for government stuff. They are much more about:
1. Control - being able to disable or disrupt large parts of the network remotely (for example, from China).
2. Traffic data - finding out who is moving where, who is talking to whom, how often, how the patterns are different from yesterday and last week, etc. That is, after all, the reason why the US government is banning chinese-made drones in government purchases.
Of course, mostly this is really a commercial issue: the US wanting to continue to apply pressure to China so Donald can get a "fantastic deal" in place.
Yeah but on your £2k government-owned laptop, it would have been bought without the connectivity included due to security concerns... Only then to have the additional 5G card bought and paid for later on citing poor speeds with 3G/4G using your goverment VPN......
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The fact that your data passes through Chinese equipment should not be what concerns you - data doesn't care about the nationality of the equipment.
The fact that your data passes through Menwith Hill is what *should* be a matter of concern.
By doing what you're told, peasants.
Fucking cockwombles.
Just seen the "Editor-at-large"* of TechCrunch on the Beeb essentially parroting a lot of Yellow Peril bullshit he's been fed. Pity they couldn't get someone from El Reg on board to actually cut through the smoke and mirrors and point out that this is just another front in Trump's ongoing effort to demonstrate how little he understands about trade (or anything else for that matter). He's already admitted this has fuck all to do with security when he suggested letting Huawei back in if China gives him the trade deal he wants.
*Judging by his appearance I think they gave him that title because of his fondness for Wigan kebabs.
If the NSA and GCHQ can't tell what network traffic etc is coming out of Huwaei's kit and where it's going, then they better get rid of their security chaps and get new ones.
This is far more about forcing people to buy US kit (or we won't give you a nice Brexit trade deal, etc) with the added bonus of the NSA's own backdoors in it to make it easier for them to slurp data, then any kind of security concern about China.
But wait... the NSA get to [cough][cough] "inspect" it before shipping it to Blighty.
Don't worry. To even up the score, China is ensuring the parts for RAF's F-35 are ... "good".
The MoD promoted Exception PCB as an example of a UK-based firm that forms part of the F-35's supply chain in a publication in March.
It did not mention that Shenzhen Fastprint, a company based in China, bought Exception PCB in 2013.
NSA's own backdoors in it to make it easier for them to slurp data
And the incestuous union continues - the NSA sniff our data, GCHQ sniffs the US' data and it all somehow ends up being blended together.
So that the NSA/GCHQ can say, hand on heart, that "no we don't do surveilance on our own citizens" - but only because they have already outsourced it to each other..
Ahhh, that's a new one for the list..
"Won't somebody think of freedom / the children."
Don't be enablers of paedophiles / terrorists / pesky Chinese!
Funny how all the US complaints have come from Republicans....
Anyway, to be fair to BoJo (a little bit of me died inside) I expected him to do exactly what the USA wanted...
> I expected him to do exactly what the USA wanted...
He will. This is just something that can be put into the "negotiations" when the US tells the UK under what conditions a "trade deal" can be done. Yes, excessive quote marks, because words with precise meanings are so yesterday.
So one of the problems in discussions like this are because people link Event X to Outcome Y sort of thing - whereas they need to look at larger numbers of events and trends over much longer timescales. I’m sure somebody knows the proper terminology for it, but I see it really as “Group of both related and unrelated stuff happens over time, and years later you realise you’re in the shit, and the Chinese are the only ones with paddles”.
For example.
Event: In the early 2000s Huawei and ZTE received tens of billions of $$$ in “loans” (which they never had to pay back) from the Chinese national development fund. The idea was to go out and win in international markets.
Event: The Chinese government pumps billions more $$$ to fund infrastructure projects (like roads, airports, sports stadia, etc.) in Africa (and other developing regions). “Coincidentally” Huawei and ZTE are awarded huge comms projects in those same countries.
Event: Huawei is implicated in the African Union security breach (well documented - just Google it).
Event(s): Time and again Huawei is found to be directly copying Western designs in routers, optical transmission and softswitch design. Suits are settled out of court – like the one against Cisco where their source code was directly implemented on Huawei routers and they even kept Cisco splash screens and code comments! Note that Huawei no longer has to copy Western designs – in many areas they don't need to because they are well ahead. Mobile tech was the first of these areas, but they are catching up, level with, or ahead of Western companies in other areas too.
Event: Some years ago I attended a lecture by Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, during her book tour. In the Q&A after I asked her if she thought BT’s total dependence on a Chinese vendor represented a security threat. She paused for several seconds before answering “yes”…then giving a much longer answer about how GCHQ was there to make sure national comms infrastructure is secure.
Outcome: In the mid to late 00’s Huawei and ZTE are always the low bidders in major telecoms projects across Europe - clearly at "below cost" prices. They start gaining ground in all of the PTTs, and BT in particular develops a massive dependency on Huawei – not just for equipment, but also for teams of engineers who actually run the network for BT. By the time 5G strolls along BT is so hooked on Huawei there is no economic alternative.
Outcome: In the BT 21CN initial award, Marconi received none of the business. Arguably they had good solutions in at least two part of 21CN – the softswitch (which was awarded to Ericsson who totally screwed it up to the point where the NGN project to replace System X had to be abandoned, despite this being the “economic driver” for 21CN in the first place!!), and the DSLAMs. Huawei won the DSLAMs (which never worked with either the Ericsson or Sonus softswitches) and the optical core. They built on that over time.
Outcome: Matt Bross, former CTO of BT and one of the driving forces behind 21CN (and presumably the choice of Huawei as supplier), leaves BT some years later and joins Huawei as a CTO. I suspect I’d better not add my opinion to that fact.
Outcome: Just in case you think I’m picking on BT, TalkTalk buys DSLAMs (these ones actually work with Sonus softswitches), home routers, set top boxes and anything else they can get from Huawei. They buy them because they work, and they’re cheap.
Outcome: Nortel, Marconi, Alcatel, Lucent and other smaller “national” telecoms vendors go belly up. You can argue that AlcaLu sort of still exists as a loss-making colostomy bag on the side of Nokia, but they are no longer the technology power houses they used to be. The clever people in those companies who used to drive innovation and standards in those “national” telecoms vendors find senior posts in…Huawei. Check out any standards group and you’ll see Huawei employees driving all sorts of innovation.
Does Huawei represent a security threat? Absolutely. In the same way that any other vendor does. Maybe a bit more, given their track record of ethical fluidity.
But I totally agree this is really about a long running trade war, and the Chinese are winning.
Well written Kevin, i completely concur with your analysis.
Its not a simple good & bad, they cheated heavily and have now got to the point where they can make significant positive contributions in their own right but they destroyed the competition in the process & have hoovered up all the significant leadership.
Its a bit like TB appointing his cronies in top civil servant & quango positions that still influence & exert his governments ambitions long after he has gone.
In my original post: "Does Huawei represent a security threat? Absolutely. In the same way that any other vendor does. Maybe a bit more, given their track record of ethical fluidity."
But I hear you - Cisco has backdoors for the NSA. Two differences:
First, Western vendors are excluded (usually by subsidy of Huawei/ZTE or by government mandate in RFPs) from Chinese infrastructure - especially banking and military. So there is no reciprocal vulnerability in China.
Second, Cisco may once have had a monopoly on router tech, but that time has passed. There is a technological and economic alternative to every Cisco product. That is not the case with Huawei in 5G. There are very few Western networks these days that are overwhelmingly dependent on Cisco. And if they find themselves uncomfortable with that dependence they can change it within one technology procurement cycle.
which really says it all.
Anyway the TL;DR of all this is that Virgin and BT can send me a Huawei router to use at home, while simultaneously not being allowed to use them the other end "because" ? How expendable are the punters ?
From MIT in 1971, here is a 3 sentence story showing how hard AI is:
1. John goes into a restaurant
2. He orders lobster
3. He pays his bill and leaves.
Now, what did John eat?
No AI is remotely close yet to answering this question, easily answered by a 4 year old child.
The salad. He's allergic to shellfish, but takes the lobster home in a doggy bag for a cat with very expensive tastes. The cat objects to the use of a doggy bag and goes out for dead bird and pond water.
or,
Nothing. The restaurant was called Bistromath and he simply toyed with it. He leaves halfway across the galaxy from where he started.
doggy bag for a cat with very expensive tastes
Or, as my cats prefer to call it "we know what we like and you *will* provide it".
And it's not dead bird and pond water, it's fresh goldfish with pond water.. Fortunately, the remaining goldfish know that when a cat-shaped object appears, it's safest to dive to the bottom of the pond. And their offspring have inherited that caution.
Or, alternatively, any vague non trivial Google query where you or I understand the question, but it's clear that ol' Uncle Google is simply throwing up keywords and hoping they stick.
My touchstone is
"phone cases that do not include iPhone cases" for example. Returns a list that is only iPhone cases.
When it actually returns what I asked for - that's more like it.
The key thing isn't the 'non-core' or 'high-risk' points, its the 35% market cap. Huawei will get to make substantial sales, but Nokia and Ericsson each have the opportunity to make big bucks off UK mobile networks as well. Whether other European countries will make similar decisions or follow the more open German approach remains to be seen.
GOP politicians will complain, but they don't keep things in perspective - Huawei already serves networks and employs people in the UK, it's too costly and too late. FWIW, GCHQ & MI5 both seem happy enough for this compromise, likely because they get to keep an eye on Huawei without handing them the whole network. This compromise won't carry half the diplomatic upset a full ban would have done. Whether domestic politicians like Tory MP Tom Tugendhat can be pacified is another question entirely.
Even if I believed the security scares about Huawei's routers, I fail to see why there is a problem with 5G all of a sudden. After all, technogically it's mainly just faster 4G but the marketing bods wanted a new label and most of the networks are already running Huawei kit and the sky hasn't fallen in yet.
There's also the problem of: who else can supply the kit? Huawei has working 5G kit, because the Chinese mobile market needs it and they've done the work and filed the patents to make it happen. They've already offered to license the kit so that others can make it, except those still won't be American companies because they lost the ability to make the kit years ago: China is just so much cheaper.. Regulators could always take them up on this and enforce "second-supplier" rules. Theoretically this might drive up costs, but seeing as no one but journos and orange wombata give a shit about 5G at the moment, it's not really an issue. I got my first 4G sim card this week and it's plenty fast enough for me.
Yours is a totally understandable viewpoint. Check out my post above "The horse has bolted long ago" and see what you think.
I agree with you...4G was just as insecure as 5G because Huawei is a major 4G supplier. I think the step to 5G is showing that, in some cases, they are the ONLY supplier that is viable economically.
Another way to think about this political decision is that it would have been heavily influenced by BT saying to the government "you can't ban Huawei...we literally have no choice...we've gone too far down that road to turn back now".
Basically we are seeing the end result of almost two decades of Huawei's growing strength, telcos choosing to abandon their national suppliers, and governments ignoring the long term security implication of losing their national telecoms suppliers. At the time each decision could be positioned as "reasonable and consistent with free markets".
Whatever you think about modern US extremism in all its forms, they have taken decisive action to try to prevent Chinese infiltration into their secure infrastructure. Chinese vendors will not be selected for long haul US routes or for international subsea connections. This allows the US to build secure military interconnects over these core networks. All the traffic in and out of these core networks is encrypted, so technically it can pass over non-secure access equipment. However, encryption is only one aspect of security. In WW1 and WW2 Britain was a pioneer in something called "signals intelligence" - where you do not need to decrypt a message for it to have military value. You look at who is talking to whom and how often. These days we would call this Big Data Analytics. So the US approach is "secure" in one sense, but vulnerable in another. Thanks to BT's dependence on Huawei the UK can't even try to be secure because it would break BT's financial model.
On the other hand - we get cheap phones, hurrah!
Except intelligence agencies have analysed the android code in those Huawei phones and they found about 25% of it is doing stuff they don't understand. They're not saying it's doing bad stuff...just that it shouldn't normally be there and they can't figure out what it's doing.
All of this is circumstantial and "what if" conspiracy theories. Except one thing we know for sure - with so much of the UK's infrastructure based on Huawei gear the Chinese do have a remote control "kill switch" for UK's internet. It's something that could only be used once, but it would be more effective than nuclear weapons if it ever came to a real war.
Liz Cheney, Wyoming's sole house representative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney was even more damning, accusing Boris Johnson of having chosen "the surveillance state over the special relationship," and having rejected "the cause of freedom."
Seriously, when has America been associated with freedom ?
No snark: the repulsive old hypocrite who wrote their lying Declaration of Independence kept his 200 odd slaves in kennels whilst eating 8 course dinners by himself, and a choice from 20,000 bottles of wine.
And as for surveillance, has this profoundly stupid woman heard of Snowden and Assange ?
This is contrived for brexit. Pick a show-fight with Trump to tell the world we're not his puppet. While also giving in to him on all the important matters (35%, and that in roles like scrubbing the floor).
We can see it's a show-fight from the number of mountains being made of molehills. Like Congressman Jim Banks introducing a bill to prevent intelligence sharing with countries who allow Huawei (close Menwith Hill?) He let slip, but his BBC interviewer completely missed, that it was nothing to do with a situation like the UKs, which leads me to conclude that it's a meaningless show-bill for Stuttley's benefit.
Gingrich has - perhaps unintentionally - hit the nail on the head when he states that the US is "losing the internet" to China.
Which goes back to a point I and many others made a long time ago - this is primarily around politicians "supported" by Cisco etc to make noises about foreign state surveillance, American jobs falling by the wayside etc.
America lost the internet years ago when it failed to see the opportunity in front of it. The government failed to encourage innovation, spurred on by the same players who insisted their tech was fine - yup the tech that always comes to you full of vulns and needing a dozen patches before its fit to carry traffic, thanks Cisco. That is of course the same Cisco who happily put some special features in to help the nice folks at Fort Meade and Langley listen in. And who purchase much of the raw componentry and skill to make it work from...oh yeah, China.
And to be clear we are all doing that.
>Gingrich has - perhaps unintentionally - hit the nail on the head when he states that the US is "losing the internet" to China.
Yes, he has also unintentionally indicated that the US still regards "the Internet" as US territory/property/soil. Given the shenanigans at ICAAN and Nominet and the lack of US government action, I wonder how long before the rest of the world forks the Internet and sidelines the US...
"Limit providers from deploying "high-risk" equipment in areas that are sensitive to national security, such as near military bases and nuclear power stations".
Yeah. So no Huaway near nuclear power stations. And who is building the new nuclear power stations like Hinkley Point C? Yup, the Chinese. And no Huaway near military bases. Who is building circuit boards for the F35 aircraft?.... Yup, another Chinese owned company.
The powers that be may have suddenly discovered a disliking for Chinese kit but they actively destroyed our own industrial capabilities before sending business to the Middle Kingdom, mainly to line their own pockets and those of their friends. Ferranti, Marconi, Lucent, Alcatel, Nortel and all their supporting businesses in design and manufacture. And that is before we get to the other industries that have been similarly sacrificed. The lack of foresight or even cogent thought amongst our ruling elite is staggering, almost as much as their greed.
The whole issue seems redundant, though.
Pimplethinskin has shown it's all to be about trade not security - he said if things go well with his China talks he'll consider letting Huawei back in or words to that effect.
It's either about security or it isn't, Shirley.
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