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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

#51

Post by sigmar »

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 to steal IP.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-04/huawei-st...

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

ordu wrote: post #17
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…

Yeah, it strongly reminds me the media of USSR. They switched narratives in a perfect unison with politics like that. Sometimes they even did it ahead of politics preparing ground for changes in politics. I wonder what the mechanics of it might be in a democratic society. It was easy to do in USSR: top-down structure allowed state to rule media by orders. But democracy is more nuanced than that I believe. At least I'…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by freeflight »

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 US is a wealthy country doesn't mean everybody there is rich, but the wealth discrepancy is a home-made problem and not something China forced on the US.

In that context, this turn on China just feels extremely weird. If you'd explain to anybody 30 years ago how China would develop, the progress they would make and how they embrace capitalism, most people would probably consider you crazy.

Even more so if you then tell them that the US would spite and fight them for it. It's like no matter what they do it's wrong: If they are miserable they need "intervention", if they are doing great they need "containment".

[0] https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/chin...

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

#54

Post by me_again »

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.

Your comment seems so disconnected from the actual article that it's hard not to see it as astroturfing.

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

#55

Post by chongli »

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…

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

Not so far-fetched now, is it?

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

#56

Post by freeflight »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #34
chvid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US economy has benifited enourmously from its trade with China; that those benifits have not gone to the rust belt is really America's own choice.

Some of the US economy has benefited enormously from its trade with China. It's hard to imagine anything more cynical than the US blaming China for the poverty and job losses caused knowingly by US corporations taking advantage of cheap Chinese labour and resources.

> It's hard to imagine anything more cynical than the US blaming China for the poverty and job losses caused knowingly by US corporations taking advantage of cheap Chinese labour and resources.

Yet that seems to have become the popular narrative in many places.

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

#57

Post by NeedMoreTea »

deogeo wrote: post #32
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British were at it before the US, post-war Japan was at it. The US was built on it. The first few incarnations of US patent law only allowed US citizens to hold a patent - so foreign inventors and corporations could not protect their inventions in the US. It's such a common phase of growth that it is surprising people are surprised at China following along.

I'm not surprised or even judgemental about it - given a choice between respecting foreign-imposed IP law and the prosperity of your own people, who wouldn't choose the latter? Especially after such wonderful things as the opium wars. What I am surprised by is how long the US ignored the threat of moving production and knowledge to China, under the dogma of free trade.

Neither am I.

What does surprise me is that nations and industries keep doing it expecting "this time is different". Despite the regularity across history of first supplying the tools and training - whether shipbuilding, looms, steel making or iPhone assembly and chip fab, then claim they'll never be able to design as well, and can only copy. Sometime later another industry sails inevitably off to some far flung region.

Since free trade almost nothing is considered strategic like the Chinese and others once thought tea, rubber, spices or early inventions that were guarded most carefully. Neither seems quite the right balance. :)

> opium wars

Palmerston's opium war, kicked off by an out-of-control East India Company giving themselves an opium monopoly, and the Tory party loosely falling into step. One of the two wars had parliament winning a vote against the government for entering an illegal war. Difficult to understand the thinking of the era yet at the same time feels strangely familiar.

Course the French, US and others joined in, and the US was marketing cheaper Turkish opium. Roosevelt or Hoover had an opium smuggling ancestor, I forget which of the two.

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

#58

Post by kstenerud »

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…

This is a classic case of common knowledge in game theory, explained here [1] and here [2].

In short, change does not happen until most people believe that everyone else believes a piece of information (the information becomes common knowledge).

That US-China relations were in such a state was, until very recently, something that everyone knew, but not something that everyone knew that everyone else knew as well. Until something becomes common knowledge, no action occurs. Once it becomes common knowledge, the change in everyone's behavior is incredibly rapid.

We've had similar "watershed" moments in the past, for example the Vietnam war and #metoo, where public opinion changed, seemingly overnight.

So yes, it's absolutely believable and predictable that WSJ et al would be singing the same tune.

[1] http://www.gametheory.net/dictionary/commonknowledge.html

[2] https://www.epsilontheory.com/harvey-weinstein-common-knowle...

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

#59

Post by NeedMoreTea »

Theodores wrote: post #5
lowdose wrote: post #2

We are reading a lot about Huawei lately and it almost all seems to boil down to how "evil" their business practices are. Is this WSJ in the Overton window spinning a manufactured consent?

Did you read the comments for the article? This has the width of the Overton Window laid bare for you. The consent has already been manufactured! Nobody dare cross the line and say how cool they are with Huawei products. We have short memories, not so recently the Koreans were the ones doing all the IP theft, but nowadays Samsung is legit. Or you can go further back to when everything except and IBM PC (or Apple) was…

Call me suspicious, but there's a very common theme and phrasing in a lot of those comments. Manufacturing consent? You may very well think that.

The Indians and others were buying British looms and disassembling them way back. Standard practice seems to be buy a few extra to rip apart and understand.

The cliche has it: We don't learn from history.

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

#60

Post by ineedasername »

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 back of millions upon millions of dollars worth of R&D costs it was able to circumvent by theft of IP. Even were I to grant your claim that "any big tech company" does this (they don't-- see multi-billion dollar IP licensing agreements as evidence that such theft is less common than you claim) but even if I granted that claim, it wouldn't make this a satisfactory state of affairs. Embezzlement is somewhat common as well, but criminals don't get a pass for that theft when they're caught as a result of ubiquity of the crime. Neither should Huawei.

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