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Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

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Re: Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the MT7621 based board you cite has two MIPS 24k CPUs, straight out of 2005 Yes, I'm having a lot offun with a 14 year old CPU, so I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali > without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more wi…

> 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.…

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!

Re: Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

#232
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 are…

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.

Re: Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huawei hasn't updated OpenSSL in their cellular basestation firmware, despite promises to do so in 2012 & 2018: https://hmgstrategy.com/resource-center/articles/2019/04/04/... 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

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).

Re: Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huawei hasn't updated OpenSSL in their cellular basestation firmware, despite promises to do so in 2012 & 2018: https://hmgstrategy.com/resource-center/articles/2019/04/04/... 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

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).

VPNs and firewalls can't help when the cellular basestation is the issue. How would you prevent a malicious LTE client fron running these exploits?

Telcom security is a mess, but the frontline gear is usually the saving grace of the network.

Re: Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

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 u…

MIPS is a product of Wave Designs in California. We're years away from a non-western influenced CPU being commercially available.

Re: Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And also the software market (which others except apple and even that). Google play is off limit. It is still the world is free trade to china but not other way round. With that strategy agreed by ours, china will win forever. QED.

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.

Re: Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

VPNs and firewalls can't help when the cellular basestation is the issue. How would you prevent a malicious LTE client fron running these exploits? Telcom security is a mess, but the frontline gear is usually the saving grace of the network.

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?

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