Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that assembles handsets products for many phone brands including Apple and Xiaomi, has stopped several production lines for Huawei phones in recent days as the Shenzhen company reduced orders for new phones, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named as the information is private.
I assume each model is made on more than one production line in parallel, so the quote above seems to imply that production didn't stop completely, but capacity was reduced.
The long term impact of this Huawei dispute will be China building out a complete vertical communications/computing stack from low level chips to operating system to phone design. They won't get any market share in the U.S. but they'll dominate China (obv), India, Africa, and have some decent minority share in Europe.
The ban is great for U.S. companies in the short term that are behind on 5G, but this will harm U.S. tech industry interests in the long term once China has that vertical stack up and running.
I wish the U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.
China already has an (uncompetitive) alternative stack, covering silicon to operating system.
The problem is with building a competitive stack, Huawei can't get access to a 7nm fab in China, nor is their talent skilled in working with the limitations of said newer process, which kneecaps their ability to build chips competitive with Qualcomm and Apple.
Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM license revocation and Qualcomm's inability to license them cellular patents under FRAND during this dispute, TSMC is unlikely to fab IP infringing chips.
If TSMC were to fab these chips, their other 7nm clients (primarily Apple, followed by ARM licensees Qualcomm & AMD (which uses ARM TrustZone)) would all be in an uproar as ARM would likely prohibit the use of their designs at TSMC fabs.
Wrt China building their own 7nm fab, it is very unlikely they will get it off the ground in the next few years. Only TSMC & Samsung have succeeded in this, Intel, Global Foundries (formerly AMD) and many others have spent tens of billions and half a decade trying to build better than 14nm processes to no avail.
> VThe problem is with building a competitive stack, Huawei can't get access to a 7nm fab in China
yet
> Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM l
ARM -> RISC, as ARM is not the only game in town. For example, at the moment I am having a lot of fun with a Unielec u7621 board (2 mini PCIe, mSata and USB3 with hardware accelerated NAT to handle 1Gbps) that costed me about $45 : https://openwrt.org/toh/unielec/u7621-06
I would love to see MIPS64 SOCs with a few GBs of RAM to replace my raspberries
This is a pretty weak rebuttal, the MT7621 based board you cite has two MIPS 24k CPUs, straight out of 2005: https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MIPS_24K
All of the MT7621"s speed is from ASICs that accelerate NAT & WPA2, without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along.
More competitive offerings like the OrangePi PC Plus ($19) and FriendlyARM boards based on Allwinner chips offer much nore performance for the dollar, but these are literally foriegn IP blocks Allwinner licensed, glued together and sent off to a 45n or 28nm fab to have manufactured. Most of the work Allwinner did for these chips was on a trashcan ready, buggy board support package.
> I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali
The Mali drivers that were just mainlined last month aren't necessarily feature complete like Intel, Via or AMD GPU drivers. Mali is licensed from ARM, which would be a showstopper for US embargoed companies.
> Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.
If MIPS64 were competitive on price, we would have a plethora of tablets & boards based on it. Currently, dated Mips 24k cores are a $0.10 afterthought that is used to boot and initialize the dedicated ASICs. We've started seeing ARM cores eat the router market though, they're likely delivering more performance for that $0.10.
I care more about freedom than performance here. Not feature complete is fine as long as it works for what I do, and that I can tweak it to do more.
Eventually, something that is not licensed from a western company (or which can't be protected by IP law) but that is fast enough for most uses will also become a $0.10 afterthought.
The mips24k is remarkable in that you can comfortably run a linux kernel with a lot of userland utilities and even text mode software -- just what we used to run on Linux computers many years ago!
China has a very distorted market, which has limited Alibaba and Tencent's ability to expand beyond China.
The lack of an app store is a problem unique to China that led to WeChat and similar becoming omnibus apps, doing many things moderately well. This isn't a problem in most other countries, as our govts don't block Google Play and FDroid.
As far as I know India has restrictions on Huawei network gear. US - China war is hypothetical, but Indo-China was is more closer to reality and each year both armies trading stones and punches.
The stronger China becomes, the closer India will get to US and Japan. It's a geo-political compulsion.
>>U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.
Not in this iteration of world where spycraft is part and parcel of nation-state functions.
China, sure. India, I am not so sure. All the popular social media platforms(except TikTok) in India are US based. English being the gateway language for most of the influential users, makes it trivial for platforms made in US to capture market there. Also, US has much more cultural exports to the country than China. There is no advantage a Chinese clone startup would have over a US one in India unless the product is vastly superior; this is why even Chinese firms are investing in Indian startups rather than entering into the market directly.
Hardware, they might dominate but for that to happen they need to have a solid alternative to the US based services.
Also in regards to India, China is a much more geo-strategic rival than the US. I do and China have actually had a shooting war. They also have territorial disputes. I suspect India trusts China less than it trusts the US.
> The long term impact of this Huawei dispute will be China building out a complete vertical communications/computing stack from low level chips to operating system to phone design.
Correction, this has been China's plan all along. This skizm is just speeding up the process.
Because that's worked so well for the last 20 years.
If China would open their economy to US companies in the same way the US was open to China pre-trade-war, then things could work.
As it stands China makes no secret about their desire to displace the US as the world's leading superpower, they've proven time and again they'll exploit any openings we give them toward that end. They don't want win-win scenarios, they want China-win-everyone-else-lose scenarios. It's long past time we stopped negotiating in good faith with bad actors.
That's the gist of China's admission to the WTO: they would have in no way qualified in terms of transparency or free trade, but promises were made that things would change.
They didn't.
If Chinese products are so yellow-star-spangled awesome, then why not let their citizens choose freely between Chinese and foreign products?
In the case of smartphones, they do have a choice, and a lot of people still choose iPhones and some even Samsung. Hardware isn’t really an area locked down like internet services are.
There's no google play because China banned Google.
China banned Google because Google refused to remove censor politic contents.
That contents mostly from An anti-CCP cult called FaLunGong and some other dissidents which all supported by the US.
It is well understood that the ability of foreign companies to do business in China is extremely constrained. Considering that the topic is Android, it seems worth noting that basically every Google service is blocked in China by the Great Firewall.
This is a known issue. The smart way to handle it would have been to have agreements with other neighboring countries where they promised to respect IP laws, and agreed to not steal IP the way China does, and also agreed to not block foreign companies the way China does, and if they did face heavy penalties. Once you have those protections, American companies reliant on China could easily transition to those countries instead if this threat did not force China to rectify their ways voluntarily.
Oh please. Plenty of Chinese acquisitions and investments were denied pre-trade war. You also see almost no Chinese brands in the US, but they are everywhere in the rest of the world. You think that's an accident? There was never any open market in the US, that's your first myth. US market access has been a political tool since at least World War II.
What Trump has done is ripping the covers off the whole machinery, not only in domestic politics but also US international relations, down to the naked ugly cores.
Never said the market was completely open, but the US doesn't require foreign companies to partner with a state-run competitor to steal their IP, then increase regulations until they ultimately run the foreign company out of the country. That's been the Chinese playbook for over a decade, even after admission to the WTO.
Also last I checked Foxconn bought quite a bit of property in Wisconsin, even if they strangely haven't done much with it. Could a US company buy (and by buy I mean get one of those multi-decade leases, since the CCC technically owns all the land) property in China?
The US is far from the Captain America ideal, but from a trade perspective we've been a lot more fair with China than they have been with us.
Hopefully the other long term impact will be western companies realizing they can't rely on being able to continue to do business with Chinese ones. The Chinese government will be perfectly happy to pull that plug when it suits them even if the American government hadn't been.
The evidence at hand that China runs an incredibly protectionist economy with long standing policies like requiring tech transfer and requiring chinese control to work there? The evidence at hand that China is interested in taking power on the international stage like the belts belt and road initiative? The evidence at hand that they don't have moral qualms like the concentration camps they run?
This isn't gaslighting. To even approach gaslighting it would require me blaming China's tendencies to do the same sort of economic move for the US doing this. This is a realistic view of the world and a likely positive outcome for Americans and other westerners.
My comment wasn't about hating or not hating China. It was about western companies having rational economic concern over depending on companies and resources under China's control.
The belt and road project in particular was not supposed to raise any negative emotions about China at all, it was meant to demonstrate that China does have an interest in expanding it's economic power, as indicated in my original comment.
To the extent that I raised moral issues with China (that was the part about concentration camps) the point was that we should expect them to not use this economic power based on some sort of principle of fairness.
I'd also be careful with the use of the word Chinese, since it applies both to the country and to the people. The vast majority of Chinese people are perfectly nice normal people, just like every other large ethnic group really.
The vast majority of Chinese are wholly in support of their government and of their country being great the same way as the vast majority of Americans are wholly in support of ours. And they're apologists the same way we are.
As far as China/Chinese, we're the exception in terms of not being an ethnostate. France, Ireland, Israel.. the west is full of them. It's mostly just the places that the west carved up that aren't ethnostates.
Personally, I'm not in favor of anthropomorphizing nation-states, I think it obscures the fact that people and politics are behind everything.
When you're placing words in my mouth, like you did before, I'd appreciate if you kept the distinction intact regardless of how you feel.
As for supporting them, in the abstract sense of "their ours" and in which I support the leafs (terrible hockey team that people from Toronto feel obliged to support), probably so. That doesn't mean that the people (especially in China) are responsible for the governments actions, that they would do the same thing given a choice, that I feel the same towards the two entities, etc.
If you're not in favor of anthropomorhpizing nation states translate "China's actions" to "The current Chinese government's actions" and not "The general population of China's actions"
France isn't an ethnostate. Like the US, France has jus soli, and the the country very much cultivates the idea of allegiance to the Republic and its ideals being the primary aspect of Frenchness. The National Front might want to change that, but French identity is a kind of civic religion.
The Chinese economy is not nearly as protectionist as you're making it out to be, and it has seen maybe opening up over the past few decades. Foreign companies have a huge presence in China. Apple phones and computers, European and American cars, American fast-food restaurants and Starbucks, and Western fashion brands are everywhere. Restrictions like joint-venture requirements have been successively removed from ever more industries (for example, they were removed in the automobile industry last year), and tariffs have been reduced to negligible levels for most products. China has censorship, which is why Google and Facebook aren't available in the country, but Apple goes along with the censorship and is not only available but also very popular.
The argument that poorer countries need a certain level of protectionism in order to develop isn't new (it goes back at least to Alexander Hamilton), but as China has developed, it has reduced barriers to entry for foreign firms. There's a wide gulf between how China is discussed in the United States and the reality.
Not really hard, there's no united position. Huawei is a significant supplier of 4G infrastructure in Europe so ditching Huawei completely would be very costly, and at the moment it's mostly a matter of the individual nation states.
I don't think there's a country that has issued a complete ban comparable to the US, and most European countries will probably purchase 5G tech from Huawei for parts of their networks.
These really basic maintenance tasks aren't happening, leaving cell networks vulnerable to anyone who can be bothered to look up a CVE and run the provided demo exploit code. Hard to maintain a network you can't secure :c
I think there's a misplaced assumption here, that you should trust a network to keep your traffic safe.
it's reasonable to think that regardless of their SSL implementation, you should assume that the network owner is going to try and spy on your traffic and sell it to the highest bidder
The cellular network being totally insecure is much worse than passive surveillance. Calls and texts can be rerouted and altered in transit, and mobile identities (eg: your SIM) can be impersonated on a whim.
This is obviously not good, but is there evidence that they are broadly worse than the competition? I always thought telco internal networks were full of stuff like this (out of date and misconfigured crap everywhere, with heavy reliance on firewalls/vpns).
Is there really SSL communication between terminals and base station in the LTE protocol? This seems unlikely because it's below the IP layer. They could of course use openssl for the crypto primitives in implementing LTE but are there vulnerabilities in those primitives that would be fixed by updating openssl?
There could be TLS involved in higher level protocols like IMS though. Or not. Does anyone know if eg VoLTE relies on the network for security or does it run SIP over DTLS or something?
The telcos really want to have Huawei in the running, as their presence on RFPs causes a 30% price drop in competitors bids.
Problem is, really basic maintenance tasks like updating OpenSSL aren't happening on Huawei's existing cellular basestations, leaving cell networks vulnerable to anyone who can be bothered to look up a CVE and run the provided demo exploit code. Hard to maintain a network you can't secure :c
> The long term impact of this Huawei dispute will be China building out a complete vertical communications/computing stack from low level chips to operating system to phone design.
Everybody does that to an extent- they'll just have to find some way of getting their CPU's (including their designs) directly from within China. This may not be as hard as people think with the Joint-Ownership thing that the Chinese government requires. I'm sure that chipmakers would love the business if they can get into China.
To address your comment- yes, they already do that, but because of loopholes, they probably won't have to develop a full stack.
Huawei has no 7nm fab available that will turn a blind eye to pirate ARM chips (since their ARM license was revoked), and it is unlikely any new 7nm fabs will be built in China soon. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077587
Wouldn't one of those joint-ownership project things where one company within China owns 51% of the project work out? It would have to be not Huawei, but would that work?
AMD did something very similar as a way to bypass tariffs in China (license their 1st gen 14nm Ryzen IP to a JV), but they've brought a ton of scrutiny to this loophole from both the USA & China, plus this trick won't work for Ryzen 2 since no 7nm fabs exist in China (and none are on the horizon).
The US government doesn't care about privacy, they care about other nations spying on their citizens. It is evident from all the leaks of NSA/CIA that they spy more on their citizens than other nations'.
> On the other hand, the US isn't currently occupying, detaining, and requiring patriotic reeducation for an ethnic minority within its borders.
Let's just ignore that the US is still running torture black-sites to this day and droning people all over the planet often based on nothing more than metadata and questionable ML algorithms [0] because that's what "the US spying on the world" is mostly about: State-sponsored assassinations and abductions.
That's why the US doesn't exactly occupy a moral high-ground on these issues, the only reason many US Americans think they are is that they've bought into the "only protecting you from the next 9/11" narrative, which is exactly the same narrative the Chinese government is peddling to its own citizens to justify its own measures: "Fighting terrorists, keeping the country save".
A cynic could now try to measure the bad vs the worse, but the reality remains that both are committing crimes against humanity on a regular basis and both justify them in exactly the same ways.
That's not context, those are "estimate numbers" about COVERT operations you didn't even source.
The drone numbers are even less useful because two different US administrations [0] [1] went through the effort of redefining "enemy combatant" to pretty up the "collateral damage" by drones. That's why Pakistan alone actually tallies up to over 3.400 drone victims [2].
You then compare that with 1989 Tiananmen Square and Tibet, so it is only fair to also factor in 2003 Iraq because just like China hasn't admitted any wrongdoing in Tiananmen Square, the US has yet to admit that going into Iraq was wrong.
Which counts just as much regardless of the US "not annexing Iraq", it still was an illegal war of aggression wreaking havoc on a sovereign country, killing hundreds of thousands of people, displacing millions as refugees, with the US government employing tactics like torture and abducting family members to fight an insurgency [3], destabilizing the region to this day.
And that's only Iraq, which hasn't been the only "US terrorism interventions" we've had in these past 2 decades but only one out of many.
The fact that so many people are unaware/in denial about a lot of this, only shows how effective the US government has been in hiding and legitimizing its own crimes against humanity.
And even when international bodies, like the ICC, try to investigate: The US shuts it down by sabotaging [4] any efforts at investigation and flat out threatening involved countries with sanctions [5].
So if we really want to be "realists", we have to be real about all of it, and not just cherry-pick estimated numbers to tally them up against each other.
Why is that source not confidence-inspiring? And don't you think it's quite telling, in-itself, that no transparent and reliable numbers exist on this?
> My point being, the last time the US murdered that many of its own citizens was April 6, 1865.
I don't see how that's a point for anything, crimes against humanity are not defined by the citizenship of the victims.
It's also an extremely dishonest take: If my own government is oppressing me, I at least can have the hope of starting a "revolution" and overthrow said government to improve the situation.
When it's a foreign government doing it, and not even my countries own military was able to stop them, what are my options to change anything? Not many, maybe start an insurgency, but anything that would "take the fight" to the actual enemy, an external enemy, would be considered "international terrorism".
Oh yeah we've been very kind to ethnic minorities in USA. Please ignore the Indian reservations and (not current, barely) kidnap-and-assimilate Indian boarding schools. Please ignore the racial disparities in prison. Please ignore The Drug War...
> they care about other nations spying on their citizens
No they don't give a shit about that. The US cares about other nations spying on their businesses and commercial interests and losing dominance of leading network technology to a foreign country which would then be the leader of said technology and the US would fall further and further behind and completely lose dominance like Europe lost dominance to the US due to WWII.
The networking business would never recover from that. Huawei has shown China can lead in something, the US wants to kill that idea and wants China to assume the position of Japan which leads in none of the tech despite having a sizable way to do that in the 80s.
The best way to deal with it is to mirror what Google did with Android by forking it and setting up a group of 20,000 engineers to work on that fork and making that community driven and open source available to any company that wants to develop on the platform... so due to the privacy concerns that competing technology destroys Google's dominance on mobile... maybe even makes a dent against Apple's privacy play. While they do that they should also drop the Great Chinese Firewall. Fork Chrome. And adopt Capitalist democracy.
I believe the true loser in this is Google. If i am any non us, android-reliant phone manufacturer, i am planning my exit strategy. Sure it won't come today or this year, but it is vital for companies to start to distance themselves from google licensing for their own betterment.
_All_ US products and licensing are impacted by this incredibly brittle international spat, driven by understandable but sadly misguided sentiments. Each time we do this it strengthens the positions of those whom the current leadership believes to be an 'enemy', because at least they are acting in a fickle manner towards the international community.
This attempt by the US to express power economically over... what is China at this point? A cheap and under-regulated labor pool for US consumers? Regardless, this attempt will continue to weaken the economic and diplomatic utilities that the US has available, at least when it is led by nationalistic political leaders.
The reason Google won is that manufacturers were completely incompetent in coming up with their own phone OSs either because of technical lack of capability or internal politics
MS could have had a chance, but they didn't have the vision and Android was the better choice (until now) to most manufacturers
Like you say, it's allegedly entirely about the iran sanctions.
In practice, it's clearly a trade war thing and I'd be willing to bet quite a bit that there was a personal thing between Huawei's loudmouth CEO and our vindictive president.
I think the trade war is interesting. If this were a street fight where someone hit you (for decades) and you hit back and the perception trumpeted is suddenly you’re escalating things. Compare it to the previous administration which had excellent relations and plenty of IP theft and those companies could demand whatever with little recourse. Definitely politics but not as usual.
The Chinese were playing by exactly the rules we set and asked them to play by, for decades. American companies were ecstatic to outsource manufacturing someplace cheap.
Only in the last couple years have people gotten upset and started calling them cheaters or whatever, retroactively.
It raises some questions. Are we blaming them for our inability to socialize our gains from trade? Were we expecting them to never learn and move up the value chain?
The irony is that all these complaints about IP theft started to flare up once China started to invest heavily in R&D and started pulling ahead in certain high-tech sectors. The real fear isn't that China is stealing IP, but that it might surpass the US economically. Huawei is a perfect example of this. Their heavy investments in the development of 5G and resulting dominance are precisely what caused them to become a target of the US government.
I love how you act like Huawei did nothing wrong. We don't just think they stole IPs, we don't just think Huawei are run by and for their government. The American economy is far from perfect but I seriously doubt that anyone at this point sees China's economy or level of self-built technology a threat.
Sure, most people have a bias or a slant, and it often comes out in what we write, but do you honestly think anyone who sees you are a brand new account and sees your comments here will think anything other than 'insert_country_here apologist'? And that it happens on every story critical of china? Seriously it gets old.
And this is precisely my point. Huawei was accused in the early 2000s of stealing Cisco IP. They settled the issue quietly back then.
Now, almost two decades later, after Huawei has spent billions in R&D and appears to be the market leader in 5G, all these old claims resurface, and the US government is quite openly trying to drive them out of business. Of course, by sheer coincidence, this happens while Trump is waging a trade war against China.
And for the record, Diogenes couldn't be a shill for anyone. Diogenes is happy living in his barrel in the market, do he clearly isn't motivated by money.
It used to be that Samsung would also be safe because South Korea is a major strategic ally of the US, but with the US using steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and a tariff on all Mexican exports, strategic allies aren't even safe.
Not really. Tariffs have hit e.g. Norway as well. Most of the countries affected are too small to complain - but they are quietly diversifying as a response.
I am currently wondering what the US reaction will be to the UK, should we refuse to fold to their current demands regarding not only Huawei, but also the demands to change our laws in order to create a more US friendly regulatory environment.
As British subjects, we are of course only allowed to divine such knowledge by the correct interpretation of which particular flowers have been chosen to adorn Lizzie's hat and the precise selection of jewelery she is wearing.
You might be right, but after the pomp and ceremony is over and syrupy vomit of 'special relationship' and some-such has been expelled, hopefully some real business will get done?
> Sure it won't come today or this year, but it is vital for companies to start to distance themselves from google licensing for their own betterment.
Which companies? Why would Samsung and other non-China based smartphone makers feel the need to do this?
Also switching away from Android because of the risk of being blacklisted by the US is akin to rebuilding the foundation of your house when it's built on mud. If you get blacklisted by the US losing access to android seems to be the least of your problems.
My company, roughly 400k employees and contractors, already sent security notices from the DOJ banning Hauwei, ZTE, etc. devices across the entire corporation. It effectively banned their phones from a not insignificant percentage of the population in one fell sweep.
I didn't make the policy, but it appears the corporation expects that you do not use any of these products in any way that might connect with our systems, per U.S. DOJ guidelines. I think it's interesting to see how quickly and strongly this was rolled out in the U.S.
It's probably best interpreted as an American idiom for what the rest of the world would call an "own goal." As in, you kick the football into your own team's goal, resulting in a score for the other team with no effort needed on their part.
Even if Huawei handsets in Europe are not a threat to national security, most consumers would expect them to be able to run Android, which Google can no longer sell them...
It's a great opportunity for the rest of the world to stop leaning on American companies and American technology. It would be wonderful for a European and/or an Asian alternative to Android to emerge.
The Russian government is using Sailfish in a big way. I heard the Russian post-office as well. There were negotiations with the Chinese government, but I assume that might have fallen through.
What has stopped Europe from doing this already? What conditions in Europe have prevented more innovation when it comes to hardware and software development?
I wonder why would Huawei bother buying android from Google instead of just using it, or respect any patent for that matter. If USA refuses to play with Huawei why Huawei should play with USA?
1) Android was an example. There are many components in a phone.
2) Much of the margin/profit comes from sales in international markets. For example, the EU. Where WTO-wise, copyright and patent rights still hold.
20% of Five Eyes, but the UK only represents 1 out of 28 countries in the EU which is 3.57%, yet they should dictate what everybody else does?
edit: Why the downvotes? As an EU citizen, I'm directly affected by this, and I very much do not like the idea of the EU towing the Five Eyes line to further fascilitate US foreign policy interests.
We very much would like to make our own decisions in our own interests and not have all our policies decided and forced upon us by the biggest brother on the planet.
That's a tad bit simplified, in reality, single countries can be overruled, it just doesn't happen that often [0], but it still happens.
In that context, I doubt the EU is gonna let itself get dictated what to do by the UK, which is in the process of leaving said EU. It would be like eating your cake and still having it.
Five Eyes network, plus more informal relations with various European intelligence agencies. Not surprising or hard to see that the US wants to keep a strategic rival out.
As you implies, national security is not much of a thing.
but it's pure naivety and shortsightedness that european countries take a pro-huawei stance in this trade dispute/war. Sure european people can get cheap smartphones from whuawei(because of Chinese government subsidies), but they would be pushed out of business in virtually every sector of the industry by whuawei someday. Anyone has been dealing with whuawei in business knows this. Actually this process has been ongoing.
Europe would have a bigger case by the numbers to be concerned at the US then china.
China incarcerates at an estimated 165/100k while the US at an reported 655/100k. The makeup of or prison population is skewed to certain minorities who are also more likely to go to prison vs the same charges to white suspects.
So the US has made it’s “concentration” bland and bureaucratic- but the overall system is still monstrous.
Does that number include those in the concentration camps? China is refusing to give any numbers about them and classifies them as "vocational training centres" so they likely wouldn't show up under that statistic.
I don’t disagree that China is a threat to our democracy, however I cannot accept that the US dictates what products I can buy as an EU citizen.
Remember the Snowden leaks and when the Obama administration made it clear that surveillance is targeting non-citizens? Remember when they made it clear that those of us, not living in the US, have no rights?
And indeed, we have no right to vote, we had no say in the Trump administration being elected and now we have no say in US’s economic war.
So you see, no matter what arguments you bring forth, as long as we have no say in it, our dependency on Android and other US technologies is becoming a serious problem.
> has: present tense third-person singular of HAVE
Not only does this appear to be whataboutism, it doesn't even make sense. By modern standards the past activities of pretty much any nation are unacceptable.
Putting people in re-education camps because of their ethnicity or religion isn’t the same as detaining illegal aliens. The US isn’t putting people in camps because of ethnicity or religion. Illegal aliens are in “camps” because they entered the US illegally. Drawing an equivalence between concentration camps (of the Nazi variety) and US immigration enforcement is ridiculous. If that difference can’t be discerned, then any intelligent debate is impossible. The immigration policy of the US is worthy of debate, but comparing the US to China or Nazi Germany is just nonsense.
Would you not please break the guidelines with rants like this on HN? No matter how wrong the comment you're replying to is, it only makes this place worse. briandear shouldn't have broken the guidelines with "just nonsense", but breaking them 10x more is definitely not helping.
Also, you've posted several unsubstantive comments recently. We're hoping to do better than that on this site, so if you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take their spirit to heart, we'd appreciate it. You might also find these links helpful for that:
I wonder if Huawei could sell their mobile business to BBK Electronics and avoid sanctions. BBK is already the second largest smartphone manufacturer after Samsung.
The Chinese government can order Huawei to do basically whatever it wants, and the former has so far shown no qualms about doing as much espionage, corporate or otherwise, as it can get away with. Infrastructure is one threat, smartphones are another.
It appears now that the US government can order Google, Qualcomm, Intel, and even non-US companies like ARM to do basically whatever it wants, and has shown no qualms in the past about spying on their European allies. From the a non-American POV the US does not have a clear moral high ground.
You're assuming the US government cares if a non-American thinks it has the moral high ground. I would be shocked if any decision maker ever considered that before making a decision.
Well ... depending on where you are in the US, certain officials and municipalities are already doing exactly what you describe, while many would openly like to do so except that some pesky laws and constitutional rights seem to be in the way.
Let's not even get into the US's treatment of foreign nations and governments. One man's freedom fighter, another man's terrorist.
There is no "moral high ground" between the two; you're just choosing which evil you are more comfortable with.
Right. Well, I stand by my opinion. I do think US is bad, and what's happening there is nothing short of a circus. But there is still a giant difference. Cultural, perhaps. I think you cant't wipe out two thousand years of dynastic rule in a century. While US is at parts removing rights in China some of those rights never existed. Human activists live in jail in China, I can't say the same for US. But how can you really measure evil, all the bad things minus good things? Is a nation where there is a strict authority who must be obeyed better than a ruckus of power-hungry politicians trying to gain money, who can say.
Well, anyway. Politics probably shouldn't be discussed in HN. Although it's very interesting topic.
As far as we know, apple has very much not built the decryption tech the govt wants. And we are reasonably sure this is true because of the persistence of vendors selling cracks.
I'm sure there are other examples too.
So I don't really see Huawei and apple/Google/Intel as at all the same.
So can U.S. government to U.S. companies.
In the end, it boils down to the question in whom you have less distrust.
Most people(in the world) will still side with U.S. no matter how they appear to be anti-american.
In all fairness, I have still to see any tangible evidence of this actually having happened. NSA-Backdoored Cisco Routers, on the other hand, are well-documented.
There's plenty of evidence of hacking and corporate espionage; that was what prompted the trade war in the first place. I don't know what public evidence there is about Huawei specifically, but I think it's naive to assume they're an exception.
The trade war started as a mercantilist-spat[1] and the targeted attack on Huawei for perceived "economic loss" as the biggest global south smartphone manufacturer that was due to surpass Apple is clear as day. Additionally any critical US infrastructure was already barred from acquiring ZTE/Huawei cell towers/5G access points.
Shit, I seriously doubt the validity of this article.
But it does go to show that, the majority of manufacturers who make their products in China need to tread lightly even more so now. If anything, this move by the US will make electronic manufacturers take a second thought about where the source their parts and (more importantly) which companies they deal with.
This icludings big companies like Microsoft and Google. I have no doubt that this could potentially hurt Googgl especially.
read up on the Huawei CEO interview. They won't compete over tech where they don't feel to be a technical market leader. In 5G they claim to be 2-3 years ahead, so they will fight for it and think they have a good chance of winning even if competed against. But for smartphones apparently they don't feel strong enough, so they'll happily sacrifice it instead of competing.
The problem with competition is, although it's good for the consumer, it hurts the business. So if you have to choose between battling for number one or getting reduced from number 2/3 to number 10, the latter might be the cheaper option. And then you can use the saved resources to compete in the fight that really matters.
That's fighting spirit. I wish in the west we could see any of this. Instead we see bickering on all political fronts.
This actually makes me wonder - what makes them unable to sell outside of Europe/USA? I heard of them being kicked out of SD/WiFi associations, but how does this affect them in China?
That's exactly it. The US is shooting itself in the foot. Because the message this sends to the bigger world is: don't get too successful or we will kill your business.
The irony is that that is exactly what western companies blame China for.
This is one possible outcome. Another is that China learns to be a bit less self-serving and more cooperative with the rest of the world.
> Because the message this sends to the bigger world is: don't get too successful or we will kill your business.
That seems like a bit of a biased interpretation. Do you believe the US is literally trying to kill Huawei, or might it be possible that this is a negotiating tactic to get them to realize and acknowledge the value they receive from the rest of the world generously trading with them, by demonstrating the consequences of what happens when someone treats them in the way they treat the rest of the world (I am referring to access to their markets)?
> The irony is that that is exactly what western companies blame China for.
Anything I've read suggests Chinese companies have much less restrictions on setting up operations in the US than vice versa, just one example being the mandatory Chinese partner situation, which is less strict than it used to be so they say. This somewhat common notion that they're "both the same" seems about as accurate as the also somewhat common notion that Chinese and American culture is the same.
Any proposition starting with the phrase "the irony is that..." is likely to be an atrocity against the concept of irony. Irony is a property of communication, not of situations. Irony is the rhetorical quality of communicating multiple messages to multiple audiences. Irony is not "coincidence", so it would not apply to a "USA did X and China did X" situation.
However, in this case, what China is doing doesn't matter. The public communications of USA elites are heard by multiple audiences. Their subjects are meant to understand "China is dangerous; the world is dangerous; fear everything; don't question the military-industrial complex; don't question the popular news media; we should always be at war." Their fellow elites in China are meant to understand "Representative government is a sham; we are not constrained by our subjects; if we want to deprive our subjects of access to your products we will; also fuck you."
Both audiences are getting those messages loud and clear. Isn't it ironic?
Lol how is that in any way the message being sent, give me a break. This has way more to do with the fact they are Chinese and more or less state sponsored than it has to do with them "being successful"... I genuinely don't understand why people are so quick to defend China.
Being kicked out of Android infrastructure kills sales of new models.
They will run out of components.
They need licenses to manufacture and sell phones in China. Even with all the problems with their IP enforcement, China is not total IP outlaw. They follow the basic rules.
This move by the US to sabotage Huawei will, in the long term, harm American competitiveness. I haven't yet seen or heard any concrete proof that Huawei poses a "threat" to national security. The fact that Trump mentioned their fate could be "negotiated" as part of a larger trade agreement with China points in the other direction. Either way, this is bad for free enterprise and free commerce.
Precisely why it was important to make it illegal to do business which such an entity, Huawei. US business relies of trademark, patent, contract and license enforcement, which is where the government steps in.
The Chinese gov't doesn't abide by any of these rules, nor do they enforce them, and subsequently Chinese companies are run the same way. That's not even getting in the espionage and the links between Huawei and the CPC.
Historically the US didn’t abide by any of these rules either, importing and copying European IP. With China developing further you’ll see them more and more enforcing these rules especially against developing countries.
For espionage you don’t even have to go back in time.
Historically US trade black people like livestocks. Does that justify the ongoing human trafficking/sex slave/forced labour in South east asian and eastern europe?
You've already posted several ideological and nationalistic flamebait comments to HN. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it. Would you mind reading the site guidelines to get an idea of the spirit of this site? We'd appreciate it.
Seriously? I view this as just government sponsored corporate extortion.
I can't believe there's a different view to it. Because the government could have stepped in for so many other issues but they cherry pick the one that will blow a competitor to US brands out of the water.
Name me one major US company that does not have close links to the US government.
Name one.
As for the IP angle, what evidence do you have that Huawei in particular built their 5G, or phones off IP theft? I postulate that as soon as China passes the US in development of new IP, the US will find no shortage of excuses to politically interfere in the market... Just like it is doing now, actually.
Has had a revolving door arrangement with the White House. Was fingered in PRISM. Was involved in the US Digital Services and 18F. Closely worked with the government to lower its repatriation tax burdens.
And if these specifics don't satisfy you, we all know that the Department of Defense was heavily involved with Silicon Valley since day 1. I'll wiggle my eyebrows vaguely, but suggestively at this fact, and let the audience draw its own conclusions, about the close relationship that the US Government has with SV tech firms.
I was unable to find references for any of your claims. What kind of "revolving door arrangement"? I looked at all of Apple's top management, and none of them are ex government with the arguable exception of their general counsel who was formerly a judge. As far as I'm aware there's no hard evidence of willing participation in PRISM. Apple denies it - the only link of any kind is a yellow bubble on that famous powerpoint slide, which could just mean they were hacked. And "worked with the government" on one or two things isn't the same as "close links".
I also find your eyebrow-wiggling an egregious rhetorical sin, employed only by those who have nothing more concrete to offer. Do you have anything at all to justify your vague insinuation that all of Silicon Valley is a giant government conspiracy?
Obama revolving door: Apple's top lobbyist to State department. Catherine Ann Novelli spent 8 years as VP of world-wide government affairs at Apple, and then three as Under-Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment.[1]
Apple-NSA collaboration with PRISM. [2]
USDS & 18F involvement: [3][4]
Secret collaboration on tax burden reduction. (It's a longer word for 'lobbying'. If you think it's not secret, please share with me the minutes from those meetings. If you think it's not collaborative, why do these meetings always result in tax burden reductions for the lobbyists?) [5][6]
2 million dollars in direct campaign contributions, in 2018. It seems that to do business, you need to grease a few palms, eh? [7]
You cannot operate a multi-billion dollar company in the US, and not have close ties with the US government.
Not to mention the large number of congressmen, senators, and government advisers who, among their tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, have large financial stakes in Apple.
The same thing that people talking about the Chinese boogieman mean.
A nebulous, ill-defined hand-waved general accusation, with no clear goalposts, that infers that there's an intersection between the company's past or present employees, and past or present employees, executives, or advisers in government, that the company at some point received government seed funding, investments, or government contracts, that secret meetings take place between the company, and the government, that the company is a special contractor for the government, building custom solutions for it, or that the company may be compromised by government meddling.
The beauty of accusing a company of having close ties with its government is that it can mean almost anything you want it to mean.
Is this to say that there is literally no noteworthy difference in the relationships Chinese and American companies have with their respective governments?
I'm open to the idea, what evidence would you propose supports this?
If it's a better model for a company to follow, why shouldn't I as a consumer be able to buy from them?
the trademarks, patents, contracts, and license enforcements are broken, and China/Huawei shows how much better technology can be made without them. The free market chose Huawei, a company without patent and trade distortions
Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that assembles handsets products for many phone brands including Apple and Xiaomi, has stopped several production lines for Huawei phones in recent days as the Shenzhen company reduced orders for new phones, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named as the information is private.
I assume each model is made on more than one production line in parallel, so the quote above seems to imply that production didn't stop completely, but capacity was reduced.