It's been an Honor serving with you but you're our 'competitors' now, Huawei tells its sawn-off mobile limb Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has bid farewell to the company's budget sub-brand Honor, saying that selling the business will safeguard it from forces in America he believes are seeking to destroy Huawei. In a speech posted to an internal company forum, Ren decried the decision to sell Honor as the impact of US pressure, which …
Click bait title, implying the exact opposite of Ren's avowed intent. He seems to be trying to save parts of the business and the associated jobs.
From start to finish, the anti-Huawei campaign has clearly been politically motivated - primarily, it seems, driven by the effort to Make Trump Great Again, and other nations have merely toed his line.
The majority of IT hardware is now manufactured in China because it's cheap to do so. Huawei has no special brief or position in terms of any supposed intrusions of Chinese government interests. Furthermore, although the UK Huawei oversight board has found serious deficiencies in their software engineering, they're unlikely to be unique in that respect either. So logically we should either stop singling Huawei out or abandon all Chinese manufactured hardware.
The lackings were found in software, not hardware, but if you find you can't trust hardware, then...
"So logically we should either stop singling Huawei out or abandon allChineseforeign manufactured hardware".
A bit harder to do, right?
>> Huawei has no special brief or position in terms of any supposed intrusions of Chinese government interests.
Honestly, such authoritative statements make me wonder if these commentors are Chinese agents.
Like how do you know? What if the instruction is to deliver via a future FW update in 2023 for eg?
From the UK Huawei oversight board's own report:
"5.7The Oversight Board continues to be able to provide only limited assurance that the long-term security risks can be managed in the Huawei equipment currently deployed in the UK. However, this does not suggest that UK networks are more vulnerable than last year."
Their emphasis.
"At present, the Oversight Board has not yet seen anything to give it confidence in Huawei’s capacity to successfully complete the elements of its transformation programme that it has proposed as a means of addressing these underlying defects. The Board will require sustained evidence of better software engineering and cyber security quality verified by HCSEC and NCSC;"
"Overall, the Oversight Board can only provide limited assurance that all risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks can be sufficiently mitigated long-term."
"However, as highlighted in previous reports, HCSEC’s work has continued to identify concerning issues in Huawei’s approach to software development bringing significantly increased risk to UK operators, which requires ongoing management and mitigation. This is unchanged from last year;"
"No they were bought in 2020." I hear you say... I say this is your source! But I'll humour you and pull the report from 2018 then...
"Due to areas of concern exposed through the proper functioning of the mitigation strategy and associated oversight mechanisms, the Oversight Board can provide only limited assurance that all risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks have been sufficiently mitigated."
"3.9 The previous Oversight Board report spoke to two significant issues. The first of these was the extraction by Huawei HQ of a subset of source code from configuration managed repositories for onward delivery to HCSEC. The second was the failure of Huawei R&D to repeatably build a product to a consistent binary. As described in the previous Oversight Board report, this means that any assurance provided by the overall risk management strategy, and therefore the Oversight Board, is currently limited. "
The issue with inconsistent binaries was only identified in 2017, which remained unresolved in 2018.
Basically prior to 2017, they were setting up an ongoing "mitigation strategy and oversight mechanism", which once setup brought out issues that Huawei isn't/hasn't been resolving.
What made you think the UK Huawei oversight board has ever blessed Huawei as safe and no risk to national security?
If you think the report is bought, why wasn't it before? Because you like the answer?
Either it is an authorative source or it isn't.
strawman - do those competitors have a structure with an aggressionist governmental in control?
Didn't think so.
You are the same people who will call the govt muppets for letting China in, if a breach occurred.
"What the fuck did they think China would do? It's like letting the fox into the coop!"
>strawman - do those competitors have a structure with an aggressionist governmental in control?
That was the argument for trusting Crypto-AG. They're Swiss, if you can't trust the Swiss who can you trust? - In this case the CIA
If you actually cared about security you would buy from china and then test the hell out of it, rather than assume something is perfectly safe because you bought it from scandanvians
It's not just the hardware. There's not much you can do (presently) if you're, say, a European country concerned about most international traffic routing through one of the Five Eyes where it will be mined not just for military but also economic intelligence.
It seems reasonable to expect that there will not only be more control over infrastructure equipment, but increasing control on peripheral connectivity between geopolitical blocks.
"strawman - do those competitors have a structure with an aggressionist governmental in control?"
Wut? You think the US "governmental" is not "aggressionist" in its control of US companies when they demand they provide information not in US jurisdictions, or forcing foreign global companies to do its bidding, or else? Or when it's spying on the heads of state of an /allied/ countries?
The mind boggles.
Completely different things - China is NOT the same as the US from a political and diplomatic point of view to the UK. The worst negative diplomatic action by the US to the UK pales with the lightest negative diplomatic action from China.
The US relationship is largely clean with a few small dirty spots, the Chinese relationship is many, big dirty spots all over. The US would attempt to keep the dirty spots to a minimum (diplomacy), the Chinese are unhappy that the spots are not big enough.
You're argument is that they are both dirty and so imply it is the same thing. It isn't. They are both dirty, true, but in very different ways.
Seriously these comments are either Chinese robots or propoganda posts from their disinformation centres, or people are utterly clueless as to what Chinese government and military is doing in the international scene.
Why should the UK be eager for its infrastructure to be built out by equipment, from a company, with a governence structure that has a built-in conflict of interest, that will carry information the UK strategically requires to withold from Chinese government/military..
To save £200 milion?? A savings that Huawei offers but cannot be explained?
People were quoting that they pass the UK oversight review, they don't.
Then the rebuttal is that they are the only vendor to have an oversight. Yes they are the only ones with a governance structure designed for the CCP to intervene, with no legal recourse available to Huawei but to comply. The other vendors like ZTE are banned, and have been for a long time.
This isn't furniture, or plastic toys in question, it's core network infrastructure. Foundational equipment for a vital asset of any nation - intelligence and information. Terabits of info.
The mind boggles indeed.... when the UK does become aligned with Chinese values, I'll get your point.
A rat bites, a cobra bites - same thing, let's get a cobra.
I'm not a Chinese robot, I'm just an older American engineer. Its a bit late here so I'll keep my reply relatively short. The problem with China in general isn't that its behaving like China but it conned us. We still have rather a plantation mindset in the US when it comes to lesser cultures so we don't mind outsourcing menial work to the natives in other lands, often turning a blind eye to the rampant exploitation, crap working conditions and so on that characterize cheap foreign labor. So we were quite happy with China while they were doing this for us, assembling our products with cheap labor. However, like any good plantation workforce, we're only happy with them while they know their place -- if they start being independent then we can't control them, we can't profit from them and we have to take them down. (The history of the US and its minorities includes countless examples of this -- the Chinese in particular were systematically knocked down but, infuriatingly, they always got up. Look up stuff like the "Chinese Exclusion Acts" and the history of Chinatowns in the west to get some perspective.)
The attack on Huawei follows in this tradition but has been updated to draw on a rich tradition of the Cold War resulting in governments sounding like badly written James Bond novels. The phone stuff is particularly mind boggling since anyone who knows anything about this type of equipment knows its not the manufacturer that manages the data but the telco. (So by all means reserve your ire for China Telecom but leave Huawei out of it -- they have to build their kit to well defined standards, they don't control how its used.)
As far as Honor goes, the unpardonable sin that Huawei has committed is to produce product that's about twice the functionality of a similar Apple device at about half the cost. If we were profiting from this we'd say its just the 'free market' but realistically when it comes to the 'free market' there isn't such a thing when national interests are at stake (ask Qualcomm....). As for the UK....where exactly do they fit in on the global stage? Are they a force in the networking and telecommunications arena? Have I been missing something?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt but whether you meant it or not or were just being sloppy it is a shocking statement.
When Uncle Sam is 10 times as old as it is now that would be the opportunity to crow.
As it is - tangential - I have tried Huawei phones, watches and notebooks. All excellent to the point where, across the board, Apple had to play catch up with its latest products, Except that Huawei is already a step ahead with its own latest products.
I've got an Honor 9X. It was a bit of an eye opener -- quite the best phone I've ever owned and then some. As it was a 'cheap and cheerful' Honor it leaves you wondering what Huawei's flagship products must be like.
(As for the "lesser cultures" thing, you have heard of the concept 'irony', surely?)
>> The phone stuff is particularly mind boggling since anyone who knows anything about this type of equipment knows its not the manufacturer that manages the data but the telco. (So by all means reserve your ire for China Telecom but leave Huawei out of it -- they have to build their kit to well defined standards, they don't control how its used.)
You really have no clue what you are talking about. The management systems are not standardised, they can be integrated.. but they are not plug and play swappable. For all the confdence in your answer, you seriously really don't know how these core network equiment operates.
The telco depends on the management systems in the equipment to maintain and organise their networks.
The risk is not just limited to spying as you seem to think, the equipment could have a kill switch for eg and that will be that. Say a specific packet pattern processed in silicon, that triggers it.
The telco can twiddle its thumbs and call Huawei support, and no one at Huawei has to answer, on orders of the CCP. This is legal and required of Huawei as per Chinese law.
It is the buyers responsiblity in the current global legal frameworks to deal with such concerns.
If your router login is blocked, and you have no internet in your home, what recourse do you have other than to reach out?
That's what the telco could face, with a nation waiting in information darkness.
You can swap out a router with outage of a couple of days, with an attack vector like this its months/years to complete replacement, reconfiguring and network replanning. This equipment isn't sitting in stock at Telcos-R-Us, to buy with next day delivery..
As with any security vulnerability, the risk being that it is actionable and addressable to an actor, that happens to be a state actor that in action and in policy declares its antagonistic and aggressionist policy to the country.
Your plantation comment is your own projection, I don't see the relevance.
>>they demand they provide information not in US jurisdictions
All you are pointing out is that (1)people's privacy is less important that national security.
(2) those processes occur is courts and in public and are known. The parties in question can go to the courts of jurisdiction to seek justice.
So a tangential discussion should data privacy be the same importance as national security.
And (3) people can choose not to use those companies products/services for this reason.
Different from infrastructure, but even so indeed point (3) is what is being exercised here with Huawei.
At the end of the day, their networking kit is a security disaster not because of the Chinese government but due to them copying Cisco's bad ideas. The situation will change once Huawei hires in some security experts to redesign their stuff so that a compromise in one service doesn't result in total pwnage of everything else.
Even if they wanted to be lazy, in this wonderful new age of cheap SoCs, there's no reason modern routers and other complex networking equipment couldn't implement an ARMy of physically separate, low-powered hardware housed within a single box to limit attacks. That way, an exploit in most public facing services couldn't pose a risk to the internal management network and a denial of service event would result in a guaranteed automated restart of said services.
Huawei's 5g products are way ahead of the competition, so how did they copy them fron Cisco?
As for the 4g (and below) implementation in the UK, have there been any security problems with Huawei's kit?
But don't listen to me because anyone offering an opinion other than "China bad, Huawei evil" is just a Chinese bot...
well companies sold are either (1) in trouble already (2) sold for a hefty/unjustified premium.
For the former it was inevitable, but perhaps the cuts are smaller, for the latter, own shares and be part of the game.
These purchases make the headlines.
Less often companies are bought and get growth and scale, and jobs aren't cut, but people forget that (Apple acquisitions for eg)
The Honor brand wasn't doing well in international markets, and Huawei had already decided to focus on the main brand. Ad spend for Honor had been dropped long before the Google play restrictions.
But what affects Huawei affects Honor, so this isn't about the embargo as much as the spin says it is. If they wanted the brand, they would handle it the same as they handle Huawei phones in the non-China market.
So I suspect this ejection of Honor was a long term the plan, maybe accelerated by Google Play stuff.
It is completely separate and unrelated to the nework equipment ban, the issues Honor faces are from the US export restrictions alone. UK government did not and cannot do anything, as it is US tech that is in issue.
Maybe we need an international "FRAND" like requirement on technology exports too before we use it to a point of dependence, as we do now, and decouple it from politics.
"Huawei confirmed the sale of its Honor unit earlier this month, following weeks of persistent speculation, to a new entity called Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co."
Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co. - jointly owned by: Chinese Communist Party and Huawei, but "public" records will show otherwise.
The chinese government actually have to convince them to do things
Worrry about ZTE, who power most of 3G and hold a lot of 4G patents, they are 48.5% owned buy two PRC government companies.
plus the only company and country proven to tamper with equipment for inteligence purposes, are the USA and Cisco.
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