Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network • Hacker News Board

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#61

Post by BLKNSLVR » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #12

close04 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take it your mobile phone is built in Germany, with German components. ;) It's just a matter of picking your poison. You think your Cisco router has no backdoors? Your Intel CPU? Your Windows OS? Your Gmail account? This isn't about making you safer, it's about removing competition (as crappy as it may have been). And they eliminate competition both economically and in the spying game. The more companies there are th…

Mmm. As an Australian, the main reason I'd be happy with using US telecom equipment would be the fact that Australia makes up 1/5th of the 5 eyes. I'd expect our security people to have a very good idea of what backdoors are or are not present.

The UK is part of the 5-eyes and they've got Huawei gear deep in their critical infrastructure.

What I like is that the NSA actually hacked Huawei, and yet it's the Chinese company that we're fearful of being hacked by.

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#62

Post by BLKNSLVR » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

lx3459683 wrote: post #16

roenxi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmm. As an Australian, the main reason I'd be happy with using US telecom equipment would be the fact that Australia makes up 1/5th of the 5 eyes. I'd expect our security people to have a very good idea of what backdoors are or are not present.

So US/AU government backdooring AU citizens is okay, but if China has access it's bad? People actually think like this now? We just collectively rolled over and accepted mass surveillance?

I like the idea I've seen proposed elsewhere, that I'd rather be spied on by a government entity that's no allied with my government. Less chance of being black-bagged.

Luckily I'm an exceedingly boring person, so it won't happen either way, but it's still an interesting, and valid, point of view (pending ones travel plans).

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#63

Post by 3pt14159 » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #42

torgian wrote: post #25

This is kinda funny and hypocritical when you devote a few brain cells to this. Every country is gathering data on everyone. If you think they are respecting your privacy, you’re naive. The US has been doing it for years. Secretly. EU and I bet you Australia too. And even China, yes. But hey, at least China is honest about what they’re doing. Gotta respect that at least. Point is, it’s just a show.

I'm going to take issue with this, because I see this line of argument a lot on HN recently. There is a fundamental difference between "like in kind" and "like in severity". Do the US and China both monitor telecom? Yes. Has the US built a national firewall? No. Do the US and China both have legal processes for acquiring court ordered telecom intercepts? Yes. Is the US legal system wholly subordinate to political goa…

The real problem is that I'm not sure its really going to change anything. Do we really think that the Chinese can't hack our network gear? The SS7 hack was disclosed in 2008 and was ongoing until at least 2017, the last year I looked into it.

Nationalizing 5G or specifying a specific source of origin will help at the margins, but I'm coming to the conclusion that without a fundamental redesign of the internet security isn't possible. Even then, I'm not sure. Even if you somehow change the internet at the protocol level and magically make it secure form the legion of vectors the surveillance can just move somewhere else. Sell some rooted phones on eBay. Buy a security company or a social network. The Chinese bought 500px (a company I was CDS of for a year before I quit) for a hot minute before selling it back to the Americans (to Getty). With the RAWs they now have the sensor fingerprints of a ton of DSLRs tied to real email addresses, etc. Plus countless photos of naked people that were private.

Sure they could probably have gotten that data some other noisy way, but this is basically risk-free, and they probably made a profit on it by scaring Getty that the photo licensing business was about to get into a margins war with China.

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#64

Post by fivecents » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

wemdyjreichert wrote: post #52

Many people seem to dislike the anti-china move. However, let's not forget that china has put over 1 million Muslims in literal concentration or reeducation camps. That's wrong. China needs to stop, and if not buying their cell gear helps, we should consider it too.

> Many people seem to dislike the anti-china move

doesn't everyone know about Chinese gov's 'wumao's?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/17/how-to-spot-a-state-fun...

> china has put over 1 million Muslims in literal concentration or reeducation camps

also the whole North Korea regime/nuke/suffering is China's work. China still deports North Korean refugees back to North Korea even though it knows those people will die of torture.

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#65

Post by BLKNSLVR » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #51

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #4

Tie my kangaroo down sport, that's good news. Now we just need the sleepy EU to wake up so we get their spyware removed from our Mobile Operators infrastructure here!

considering all the downvotes maybe I haven't really explained the problem properly or maybe I deserved it idk. Here some points that I should probably have made clear instead of writing a snappy one-liner without substance. Banning Huawei isn't going to increase the security or reduces the backdoors. I've been working many years for NEVs and later started a recruiting firm that did OSINT in this domain. First of all…

Regarding #3: I know a couple of people that have gone to China on business and found 'brown envelopes of cash' left behind in their taxi.

And this was for a company of lesser world-stage significance than a mosquito bite on a giant's lower leg.

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#66

Post by fivecents » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #58

pelario wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fan or defensor of China here; but the US has way more history of intervention in other countries; so I would be much much worried about US-based companies that provide searching or social networking services

But China has a worse record of human rights abuses. In regards to intervention in other countries, China consumes them. Tibet, Taiwan no longer exist according to China. They've all got bad history. If God existed and was to strike down on the unworthy nations of the world, very few would be spared. And I dislike this as much as any rational person (hello? rational people...?) but if it came to choosing sides in wha…

you forgot to mention North Korea and its people.

China made North Korea's existence possible by backing Kim. Still, China is deporting North Korean refugees back to North Korea, even though it knows those people die of torture & "execution shows".

oh and there's the organ harvesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-the-fac...

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#67

Post by BLKNSLVR » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

vermilingua wrote: post #38

close04 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the US is an insider for AU... how? Because if the NSA brought any revelation it's that the US backdoored even their allies without them knowing. I get choosing the least evil but this is a defense only as much as burning dows a building and saying "at least this little piece survived" is a defense.

Nope, FVEY was conducted very much with cooperation between the involved parties. We (Aus) have very close structural and cultural ties to the US, but China is approximately as foreign as it gets. The US may not be an insider per se, but in theory we share at least some core values. (Not to say that I personally am ok with any of it, but from a societal perspective it makes a little sense.)

But Australia's economic health relies far more on trade with China than it does with the US.

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#68

Post by close04 » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #54

close04 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take it your mobile phone is built in Germany, with German components. ;) It's just a matter of picking your poison. You think your Cisco router has no backdoors? Your Intel CPU? Your Windows OS? Your Gmail account? This isn't about making you safer, it's about removing competition (as crappy as it may have been). And they eliminate competition both economically and in the spying game. The more companies there are th…

What are the backdoors in my Gmail account?

It's when nobody can read your Gmail emails except....

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#69

Post by bogomipz » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

torgian wrote: post #25

This is kinda funny and hypocritical when you devote a few brain cells to this. Every country is gathering data on everyone. If you think they are respecting your privacy, you’re naive. The US has been doing it for years. Secretly. EU and I bet you Australia too. And even China, yes. But hey, at least China is honest about what they’re doing. Gotta respect that at least. Point is, it’s just a show.

>"Every country is gathering data on everyone. If you think they are respecting your privacy, you’re naive"

This isn't about data gathering or respecting privacy, this is false equivalency. This is about infrastructure, specifically the integrity of a country's telecom infrastructure at the hardware level. The ability to compromise or disrupt a country's Telecom infrastructure is seen as a matter of national security by every country. The article even site the control plane difference in 5G:

>"“This new architecture provides a way to circumvent traditional security controls by exploiting equipment in the edge of the network – exploitation which may affect overall network integrity and availability, as well as the confidentiality of customer data."

There are basically only 5 vendors in the mobile switching space. ZTE and Huawei are both Chinese vendors while the 3 remaining vendors are European - Ericsson(Sweden), Nokia(Finland) and Alcatel-Lucent(France.) None of those last 3 non-Chinese vendors have a record of human rights abuses, censorship or state-sponsored hacking. If you worked in an agency in a Western government tasked with providing procurement guidelines for network operators in which vendors would you prefer?

Re: Australia bans Huawei and ZTE from supplying technology for its 5G network

#70

Post by tynpeddler » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

The west is slowly starting to realize something that China has realized for years; economic policy is not a question of economics but of geopolitical strategy. Free markets are nice in theory (and often in practice), but once you let in bad actors with the clout of a nation state, all the usual assumption behind free markets no longer apply. It's pretty disappointing that, based on what we now know, western economists aided China in gutting western industry under the guise of "China is just subsidizing the west, we'd be stupid not to take advantage." Even worse, we had already rejected that argument when applied to companies like Walmart, but for some reason we thought it would apply to whole national economies.