MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE • Hacker News Board

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#181

Post by apostacy » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:02 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #52

writepub wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illegal and unconstitutional. It's not up to the carries to dictate which phones work on their Network. That's the reason for standardization of network protocols Do you really want, hypothetically, a phone maker, say Apple, to get into a sweetheart deal with AT&T and make phone service on non Apple IMEIs unreliable? Or for AT&T to target certain political, religious groups ....

Unconstitutional? The carriers are private companies, I'm not sure what in the Constitution would apply. (I'd agree with "illegal" for the same reasons Ma Bell can't require that you use one of their phones on their phone lines, but that's just because lawmakers decided it should be illegal; they weren't constitutionally obligated to make it illegal.)

They are pseudo-governmental de-facto public utilities. They have been heavily invested in and subsidized by the government, and given special permission to provide vital infrastructure.

So no, they can't just do whatever the hell they want.

With that said, They SHOULD have a surcharge for ZTE phones, if they are hostile to their network.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#182

Post by hangonhn » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:08 PM UTC

papermill wrote: post #120

hangonhn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may surprise some of you but the idea of "elite school" is unknown to a good percent, possibly the majority, of people even in the US. I went to an "elite school" and my GF didn't think much of it. She just thought that it's a school where a lot of politicians and rich people send their kids but didn't infer any special status or qualifications from that observation. In some ways, she's absolutely right but cultur…

This is simply not true. Everyone in the US knows about Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. They are culturally significant institutions. So much so that people use "MIT" as a stand in for "excellence". "MIT of X". "kind of like the M.I.T. [sic] for magic." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_in_popular_culture If your gf didn't think much of your school, maybe it's not as "elite" as you wish it were. Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc are…

It's one of the three schools you just listed. Don't know what to tell you.

There are people who are different from us. I think your assumption that a large percentage of people think or believes the same things as us is a bit shaky. Sure maybe there are references to those schools in popular culture but can you really assume: 1. Popular culture is actually popular for the majority of Americans? 2. People consume all of popular culture? 3. People pay attention to the details in popular culture. Someone might say a line in a movie and not everyone is going to understand it nor is everyone going to look it up in Wikipedia or Google. 4. Even if people paid attention to the detail, are you sure that they understood it the same way?

It's not as if my GF haven't heard of those schools. It's just that she didn't think they are particularly elite. In her words, she thought my school is the New England version of Notre Dame. A good or even a great school but she didn't think it is "elite".

> Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc are as elite as you can get in the US ( and the world ).

I'm not too sure about that, especially when it's applied to the world. "elite school" is an idea that lives in the heads of people. It's not an actual club that grants special privileges. There's the Ivy League but that's an athletics association and you left out most of the schools in it from your list.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#183

Post by jmts » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:13 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #166

ryacko wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What grey area? It was bad enough they decided to send him home.

How was it bad that they sent him home? A spy is a spy. In China they would have just killed him or imprisoned him if a student were sending information "back home." If you don't believe me that China simply kills spies, look at the spy purges in the Obama years after a breach in the CIA's communications.

Reread their post. They said their action was bad enough for them to be sent home. Not that it was a bad decision for them to be sent home.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#184

Post by bigger_cheese » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

Armisael16 wrote: post #22

EpicEng wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... you don't think MIT is in the top tier?

It's bizarre that they felt the need to introduce MIT.

I've heard of the school but first thought wouldn't have been elite.

I'm Australian maybe elite has different nuances here I've always consider elite universities as the ones with centuries of pedigree Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard - the "sandstone" universities with their "old boys network" and all of that...

Compared to those schools I only have a passing familiarity with MIT, Richard Stallman was from MIT his really the only person I can think of off the top of my head compared to Cambridge which had people like Steven Hawking, Isaac Newton etc.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#185

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

Brain_Thief wrote: post #142

chrischen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual rights is a Western philosophy. Eastern philosophies have long favored collectivism, including the “free” Japan.

I've read your comment several times and am having trouble understanding your underlying point - could you elaborate?

Chinese culture encourages sharing ideas, not copyrighting ownership. Some things I've read say it comes from Confucianism. Regardless, they think it's good to spread and remix existing ideas instead of giving one party exclusive rights for 20-100+ years for their own profit. I agree with them that sharing ideas and tech seems to be a better default. If we had protections, they should be much more selective and careful.

In Shenzhen especially, you have to out-compete the others on implementation of ideas instead of rest on your laurels (err, copyrights and patents). Wired has a great documentary of its history and culture here with examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY

One I like that's about improvement more than stealing is the iPhone copy. That company got the copy out about a year before the iPhone hit China. Apple refused to let customers swap their batteries and SIM cards easily. Their I.P. protections let them pull bullshit like that. The Chinese knockoff did let you swap those. The chargers come to mind, too. If your interface is proprietary, a company will likely spring up offering a modified product or cheaper adapter that lets people keep their existing one.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#186

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

Daniel3 wrote: post #147

techie128 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a big believer in Open Source and Freedom of Knowledge, I think we, as humans, would progress much more quickly if we broke down barriers to knowledge sharing. It would help everyone progress much more quickly. Keeping knowledge secret, especially in research, which is usually publicly funded is not the right thing. We can debate all we want but the reality is that China has progressed and its people have benef…

Really? Blatantly ignoring patent laws, IP, international waters, the sovereignty of other countries, as well as their well documented strong arm capitalism-for-the-sake-of imperialism, like their infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka and other places for the purpose of bankruptcy is just seeking the common good? Its very funny to me how you praise them for championing "open source" philosophy with other people's IP e…

"Its very funny to me how you praise them for championing "open source" philosophy with other people's IP etc... adn then at the end of your statement wonder allowed about them not sharing any of their own. Uh, thats not "open source" thats imperialism by any and all means. "

Yeah, it's not the same as open source. They certainly don't give anything out like in open-source. Your comment is misleading, though. The Chinese companies, which include lots of competitors internal to China, just copy everything in their process of iterating products out. So, Chinese companies and/or government takes the I.P., create their own products, and other Chinese copy them. All this stuff keeps spreading cheaper and getting forked kind of like open source. Hits overcharging, proprietary suppliers hard like open source. Just isn't open source with the full benefits.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#187

Post by simmanian » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #168

mark_l_watson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with you. I am in the USA. I had dinner last night with several people talking about starting up an AI/medical company. When I got home, I found companies in China that were already shipping similar products to what we had just been talking about at dinner, just as possible ideas. My fields are NLP and deep learning, and from my perspective, research papers coming out of China have been innovative and h…

It's fine. We're not in China, we have room for disagreement.

I'm not pro-China by any means, but I think your comment leaves very little room for any civil discussion.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#188

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 11:56 PM UTC

msie wrote: post #167

eob wrote: post #61

I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home. What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding” I want to be ca…

Uh, if there was explicit instruction at the beginning not to scrape internal data and code, then there would be no misunderstanding in the first place. Was there any NDA???

[deleted]

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#189

Post by toufiqbarhamov » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 12:01 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #185

Brain_Thief wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read your comment several times and am having trouble understanding your underlying point - could you elaborate?

Chinese culture encourages sharing ideas, not copyrighting ownership. Some things I've read say it comes from Confucianism. Regardless, they think it's good to spread and remix existing ideas instead of giving one party exclusive rights for 20-100+ years for their own profit. I agree with them that sharing ideas and tech seems to be a better default. If we had protections, they should be much more selective and caref…

Chinese culture encourages sharing ideas, not copyrighting ownership. Some things I've read say it comes from Confucianism. Regardless, they think it's good to spread and remix existing ideas instead of giving one party exclusive rights for 20-100+ years for their own profit.

Except the communist party which controls all of China, and takes a highly authoritarian stance on the free spread of information they dislike and fear of course. They have a literal and digital Great Wall, I’m not sure how your square this fact with what you’re claiming is a cultural bias to collective information policies.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#190

Post by chrischen » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 12:27 AM UTC

penagwin wrote: post #154

chrischen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a “premium” carrier and what are they offering for the extra price?

Mostly just AT&T and Verizon, and Verizon is definitely the more "premium" one. I consider them premium because they cost more, they don't try to be the most affordable, they own other brands for that (cricket, etc.). The biggest difference is their coverage. If you live in, and mostly travel within a metro area you're fine with sprint/tmobile, but anybody who's ever travelled will find that verizon is the only optio…

This is true that Verizon (AT&T included) cover a lot more physical area. I was in the middle of the forest in northern Michigan, and the only signal out there was from AT&T. As it turned it turned out, T-Mobile allows you to roam if there is no T-Mobile coverage, so I was getting AT&T coverage.

I don't think Verizon can be considered high end, at least not definitively. Wherever T-Mobile does have coverage, their speeds are higher, and their offering of international roaming and by-default unlimited data are clearly geared to the "upper" end of the market of professionals that live in cities, that travel frequently.