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Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

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Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US destroyed Iranian democracy and replaced it by the Shah, a brutal autocratic leader whose abuse of power and violation of human rights led to the rise of the current far-right Islamic theocracy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... The US destroyed Bolivia, replacing an elected government that was legally found to be allowed to run, with a far-right nationalist military-backed junta…

> The US destroyed Iranian democracy and replaced it by the Shah Iran had no democracy. Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah, he was not democratically elected by the people of Iran. The Majlis that nominated him were a collection of feudal lords that dominated Iranian politics, they were not democratically elected by the people of Iran, they co-ruled Iran as a feudal kingdom. If Iran were a democracy t…

> Iran had no democracy. Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah, he was not democratically elected by the people of Iran. The Majlis that nominated him were a collection of feudal lords that dominated Iranian politics, they were not democratically elected by the people of Iran, they co-ruled Iran as a feudal kingdom.

The Majles was literally an elected body. Yes, he was appointed by the Shah after being nominated by the parliament. That's how constitutional monarchies work. Justin Trudeau also was elected by a parliament and then appointed by the Queen.

The fact that a lot of the people in the Iranian parliament had feudal land is completely orthogonal here. They were still elected. A lot of the people in the US Congress are also incredibly wealthy.

Mossadegh was elected fair and square. He was overthrown and replaced by a puppet when he went against Western interests.

As for Bolivia, Morales was a legitimate, elected president of Bolivia. Under US pressure and support, the OAS fabricated evidence that the election was illegitimate, and the US backed a millitary coup. It was a coup orchestrated and following the interests of the US. Here is my source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/02/the-oa...

All of that information is also in the link I provided.

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely this is a joke right? The white terror in Taiwan on a per capita basis was more brutal than anything in China. People were summarily executed, jailed, and robbed for even the slightest hints of anti-establishment sympathies.

From the numbers I can find from a cursory search, the upper estimates for deaths caused by the White Terror is ~32,000 (28k from the massacre that kicked it off plus 4,000 executed in camps). That's about .35% of Taiwan's then population of ~9 million. By contrast, the Great Leap Forward alone killed 16 million, and that's at the lower end of estimates. The population of China at the end of this was ~665 million, me…

But you hadn't even heard of that. Or the gwangju massacre in korea. Right?

Why is that? How come some things are marketed extensively to the American public but others are never mentioned?

(Also, if the goal is to criticize maoist China, I'd go with the cultural revolution instead of the great leap forward)

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#363

If this is just Realpolitik/hardware independence, fine, but security..? Any worthwhile Internet traffic should be encrypted in 2020, and if it isn’t, Huawei probably isn’t the most immediate concern. And if it is encrypted, does it really matter who is listening? Comments welcome, I know zilch about telecoms hardware.

National security != information security

National security includes things such as the prevention of over-reliance on a foreign supplier working with a foreign subversive government hell-bent on their unfair mercantilist policies. It's economic security they worry about first, which could lead to a whole host of other security issues due to lost of leverage later on.

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#364
post #9

This kind of thing is going to play out a lot over the next few years. It's a tough question: how to marry globalisation with the political realities. When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has. But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democr…

I think the simplistic sort of thinking that capitalism and human rights are 'inseparable' from each other and can be 'exported' like Coca Cola or Blue Jeans is just a leftover from the Cold War. The reality is much more complicated unfortunately, together with the slowly growing realisation that the USA has quickly lost it's 'role model' status as the leader of the 'Free World' after the Cold War has ended. The West…

> Of course hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes I've got the impression that many people in the West still wear their rose-tinted Cold War glasses ;)

In the UK we haven't got past the rose-tinted WW2 glasses (especially those born from 1940-1970 who grew up with tales of WW2 as kids)

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#365

If the protocols used for mobile networks were designed to be secure, most of the infrastructure couldn't do anything worse than a DoS attack. It'd still need some trusted servers for key management, but those could be standard hardware with relatively simple software.

That could be solved one layer up by just using Signal or similar for messaging and calls. Unfortunately voice over an LTE IP link is still quite unreliable compared to an actual call.

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't encrypt "metadata" that the machine needs to know to do its job, and with enough of that, you can de-anonymise any public posters. And you'll have metadata on (some of) their contacts too. Plus, if it's your tower, you can just switch it off, at an opportune moment.

If that's the case then you want as many providers as possible so no one has enough information to de-anonymize the traffic?

Turning aside concerns about current and future provider interoperability (which is also a common reason for concern when using huawei hardware for core network purposes and would get worse as you expect them to integrate with several different vendors)...

Wouldn't traffic run through many parts of the network exposing data to even more providers? Wouldn't you be subject to any portion of the chain breaking, or being turned off?

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this thought, why is the concern about 5G rather than existing mobile networks and existing fixed-line networks (Huawei kit is common in both)? Is something different about 5G or the UK implementation of it?

Just guessing, but maybe Huawei was more niche when the earlier generations were built, so organically participated less in them anyway? Or maybe the higher density of 5G kit makes the attack cross-section larger somehow?

They're cheaper and its more likely that profit constrained telcos will buy their equipment as a competitive edge while selling out their populace.

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#368
Something I don't see many people talking about is how Openreach, the UK's main physical layer broadband provider, uses Huawei kit in the majority of its street cabinets and has done since FTTC VDSL was rolled out a decade ago.

5G is the tip of the iceberg with respect to the UK's communications infrastructure involvement with Huawei.

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#369

All providers had their infamy moment at some point, leaving a backdoor behind. Maybe for spying, maybe because QA failed. Huawei is on the US radar but somehow when Cisco left a backdoor on some routers it was "just a mistake". Every country is guilty of stabbing in the back others (occasionally or all the time), it has been the case for centuries and is not likely to change. I am French, we do not have our own tech…

I think this is the most practical realization - That everyone is doing it, and will probably continue doing it until the end of time. If you accept this, then you can quickly constrain the things you should actually worry about to a much smaller list.

The first thing that pops into my mind here is the importance of end-to-end encryption. If you cannot trust anything in the middle (presumably because the internet goes everywhere), perhaps we can at least trust the networks and devices under our immediate control. This is still not perfect because these devices can be compromised at the factory too, but it's still a much better position to be in. I can't make my ISP install core routers that I am comfortable with, but I can make sure that I install network hardware and use computers & phones that I trust on both ends (or convince my counterparties to do the same).

Re: Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

#370

We will end up like cavemen if we start to banish every new technology coming from China based on racism. China will not stop developing new technology just because the US doesn't like it.

People get too caught up in attaching technology to a given place or person. "Chinese technology" vs "US technology". And probably a related phenomenon, when the "lead engineer in charge of the original Pentium" goes to work for Samsung or something (hypothetically), people think that means that Samsung is going to start making x86 processors or something silly like that.

Technology is bigger than any one person or place. Samsung could make x86 chips just fine without hiring a single Intel engineer, if they put enough money behind the project. Likewise, China could out-innovate silicon valley if they poured trillions into it (and I'm sure they make that calculation yearly and decide not to). Likewise, the US could build fabs and get back up to speed with China when it comes to chip production, but they would have to pour trillions into it, and it would disrupt our image of green/clean technology.

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