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Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

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Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#91

Post by JetSpiegel »

liability wrote: post #70
ummonk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this why most people on HN and in the tech community writ-large oppose patents in tech? Faster innovation happens when IP protections aren't holding back innovation.

A level playing field is more important than any hairbrained theories I might(do) have about IP law. Far worse than tech patents and copyright are tech patents and copyright that only apply to some companies but not others.

By this point, the US patent system can be considered a self inflicted wound. It's not like there have been decades of activists trying to take it down.

Maybe the US could have a cheap 5G vendor, if it had abolished patents decades ago, but now it's too late, the cat is out of the bag.

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#92

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

freeflight wrote: post #53
vneumanarc wrote: post #12

Just huawei? Isn't that the case for china's rise overall? Wasn't the basis of US-China relations the past 50 years a simple transfer of technology/capital for cheap labor/lax environmental regulations? We looked the other way while china took our technology and money. And they looked away as we exploited cheap labor and lax environmental law. It was a wage, technology, capital and environmental law arbitrage. It ter…

> But at least the elites got ridiculously wealthy. Not just the rich, it also lead to the creation of a Chinese middle-class by lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and developing the country as proper economy [0]. A factor that regularly gets underplayed in favor of a narrative where US Americans, still living in the wealthiest country on the planet, blame the Chinese for "missing out". Yes, just because the…

People are fine with foreign countries with good economies. What isn't fine is an asymmetric trade imbalance caused by one sided protectionism, currency manipulation, espionage, and tariffs that aren't reciprocated.

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#93

Post by NeedMoreTea »

dfrage wrote: post #81
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the same empty arguments were made against Japan, and were levelled against the nations producing the imported cotton cloth that people were starting to buy in preference to long established Lancashire cotton mills. "Don't buy Japanese electronics or motorcycles, they only make poor cheap copies" would be commonly heard in the seventies and early eighties. They easily - and quickly - moved past that phase, as…

I absolutely don't know anyone who was saying that about Japanese electronics in the 1970s in my part of US flyover country. Sony was considered to be one of the very best in the world, and my family was greatly disappointed in the 1980s when Sony moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico and they had to fix many cold solder joints on TV sets. If you wanted a good reel to reel tape deck, Teac was your first choice. One…

Maybe US experience was different - I certainly remember that impression through the seventies, and the reputation mainly being with the Euro makes - Dual, Grundig, Quad, Tannoy etc.

Sony TV had reputation for poor colour. I think they modified their NTSC designs to PAL, or shared something with the US standard. Enough to be noticed by customers anyway. That reputation stuck around a while, but was fading when Walkman arrived (early 80s?), and by the end of the decade they had a solid reputation among the best TVs. Couldn't tell you when they adopted PAL "properly". By the end of the 80s, Japanese makes had cornered the mass market, and were chipping away at the higher end, and many of the Euro brands fading, or disappearing.

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#94

Post by dfrage »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #93
dfrage wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely don't know anyone who was saying that about Japanese electronics in the 1970s in my part of US flyover country. Sony was considered to be one of the very best in the world, and my family was greatly disappointed in the 1980s when Sony moved a lot of manufacturing to Mexico and they had to fix many cold solder joints on TV sets. If you wanted a good reel to reel tape deck, Teac was your first choice. One…

Maybe US experience was different - I certainly remember that impression through the seventies, and the reputation mainly being with the Euro makes - Dual, Grundig, Quad, Tannoy etc. Sony TV had reputation for poor colour. I think they modified their NTSC designs to PAL, or shared something with the US standard. Enough to be noticed by customers anyway. That reputation stuck around a while, but was fading when Walkma…

Sounds like it. None of the brand names you mention were known in my part of the US at the time, and I don't even recognize any of them today except for Gundig.

For TVs, Japan very conveniently for the US shares the same NSTC standard, their only issue is that half of Honshuu, the big island, is on 50 cycle power, the other on 60 cycles (both at 110-120V for consumers like the US with our 60 cycle power). So with their two biggest markets being satisfied with the same gear, I can well imagine the fragmented European market suffering.

Note also SECAM for France, countries it influenced, and apparently Eastern Europe per Wikipedia either initially so its subjects under Soviet domination couldn't receive PAL signals from across the Iron Curtain, or because it's insensitive to amplitude and phase variations from long cable or microwave links.

What about radios? While Sony pioneered the small and inexpensive lo-fi radio with their own transistors, this was very big in the 1950s through the 1960s, but by the time I was paying attention in the 1970s no Japanese company had a commanding lead in radios in the US, they were pretty much a low end commodity by then, except for shortwave sets, which weren't big in the US by then.

The first Walkman was released in Japan in 1979, the brand and general format was very big in the US by the early 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman

Sony and Phillips also closely collaborated on the Compact Disc, its capacity was supposedly dictated by one Sony guy's insistence that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as conducted by Herbert von Karajan would fit on one (you have to split a movement between sides for a single vinyl LP release, that was very annoying).

They also scored a big early hit two years later in late 1984 with a very small CD player, the head of the project estimated how small was possible with current technology, made a block of wood that size, and challenged his engineers to make one no bigger. Ah, the "Discman", it was per Wikipedia and my memory very important in the early adoption of CDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discman

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#95

Post by agent00f »

ineedasername wrote: post #60
chvid wrote: post #4

I am amazed on how weak the accusations are. A ringtone? Some guy who thinks he can patent the idea of a camera attached to a smartphone? A hitpiece like this could have been written about just about any big tech company. And it is leaving out the story of how Huawei committed its true crime: That within some fields (5G notably) it is today a lot more advanced and cheaper than its competitors.

It seems like you went in with preconceived notions about the subject. Either way you chose maybe the least relevant example of Huawei's activities in your straw man construction of a counter argument to the article. The first two paragraphs alone detail attempts at massive exfiltration of proprietary information that dwarfs issues of a camera-phone patent. If Huawei's crime is cheaper products, it got there on the b…

> It seems like you went in with preconceived notions about the subject.

This rather seems more applicable to the wsj and you. The op points out how weak some of these claims are, which is a sign that the wsj is desperately throwing everything at the wall and hope something sticks. This figures given they're a largely conservative pub prone to supporting the gop/Trump econ policy, which I might add a disturbing proportion of techies are sympathetic towards.

What's particularly revealing about this issue is how many parrot the "stealing" talking point while at same time going on in the past about how software shouldn't be patented etc. Basically it shows they want to be able to use the ideas of others but not vice versa when they're getting beat, typical hypocrisy.

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#97

Post by agent00f »

sigmar wrote: post #51
chvid wrote: post #4

I am amazed on how weak the accusations are. A ringtone? Some guy who thinks he can patent the idea of a camera attached to a smartphone? A hitpiece like this could have been written about just about any big tech company. And it is leaving out the story of how Huawei committed its true crime: That within some fields (5G notably) it is today a lot more advanced and cheaper than its competitors.

They note that Huawei's patent contained Quintel's name in the documents. How are those accusations weak? Seems like impressively strong evidence. Between T-mobile's tappy (resulted in indictment), Quintel's antennas, CNEX Labs, Tekelec Inc, motorola, cisco source, and Akhan Semiconductor's Diamond Glass[1](unmentioned in this piece) seems like there is quite a bit of evidence that Huawei has a company wide directive…

Huawei is a massive org which does tons of technical work, and beyond a handful of things it's already down to ring tones, which only shows how desperate the accusers are.

You might as accuse Google of ip theft due to that Oracle/Java thing. Or Americans of it since I'm sure it's happening at some level, eg Uber from waymo lawsuit.

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#98

Post by nailer »

alexro wrote: post #20
nailer wrote: post #11

Anecdote. May be untrue. Don't trust everything you read online, etc. A friend was a 7 year Ericsson employee (ending in 2012). In his opinion, Ericsson's networking equipment was universally acknowledged as having slow deployment times. Nokia's stuff was much faster to deploy. When Huawei hired the ex-Nokia engineers at 2.5x their previous salary, they asked them how Nokia did particular tasks. The engineer would sa…

If we follow this logic rigorously, how then to explain that Huawei is actually got some of the best smartphones and other products not found across the competitors?

- Weird sudden downward moderation of a previously highly voted comment that is mildly critical of a Chinese company.

- Response which doesn't seem to understand the post it is responding to.

- Response is in broken English.

I think I know what's going on here.

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#99

Post by codedokode »

Wikipedia article [1] says that US has been also involved in industrial espionage:

> In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech

Also, other article [2] mentions that West had earlier stolen a secret of porcelain manufacturing from China.

Are those the examples of proper, not dubious "ethics" that we should learn from? Did Europeans returned the stolen secret?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Origins

Re: Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered with Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics

#100

Post by codedokode »

discreteevent wrote: post #74
dspwizard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most amusing part is that Huawei developed 5G tech on its own - nokia has shit and e/// is not better. Even in regards of 4G massive MIMO tech - Huawei is years ahead of other, they couldn't steal this tech from anyone - because one one had it.

That may partly be because a lot of r&d departments that used to be there are now long gone because Huawei put them out of business. Not just by stealing but because it was nearly impossible to compete with a company who were backed again and again by the Chinese government despite failing many times.

What is wrong with being backed by the government? Also, Wikipedia article on Echelon mentions a case of alleged industrial espionage by US: [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...

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