Google Warns of US National Security Risks From Huawei Ban (ft.com) 119
Google has warned the Trump administration it risks compromising US national security if it pushes ahead with sweeping export restrictions on Huawei [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], as the technology group seeks to continue doing business with the blacklisted Chinese company. Financial Times: Senior executives at Google are pushing US officials to exempt it from a ban on exports to Huawei without a licence approved by Washington, according to three people briefed on the conversations. The Trump administration announced the ban after the US-China trade talks collapsed, prompting protests from some of the biggest US technology companies who fear they could get hurt in the fallout.
Google in particular is concerned it would not be allowed to update its Android operating system on Huawei's smartphones, which it argues would prompt the Chinese company to develop its own version of the software. Google argues a Huawei-modified version of Android would be more susceptible to being hacked, according to people briefed on its lobbying efforts. Huawei has said it would be able to develop its own operating system "very quickly."
Google in particular is concerned it would not be allowed to update its Android operating system on Huawei's smartphones, which it argues would prompt the Chinese company to develop its own version of the software. Google argues a Huawei-modified version of Android would be more susceptible to being hacked, according to people briefed on its lobbying efforts. Huawei has said it would be able to develop its own operating system "very quickly."
Afraid of competition (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh, yes. If somebody major (and Huawei is about twice the size of Google) does a successful fork of Android, then Google will be losing a major part of its influence on the market.
Translation: Google concerned about Android fork (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, between Communist Party in a different country and international Google, I don't know that one choice is necessarily worse than another.
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Google is fucked. Huawei number one phone and os company within 3 years
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If they really ban Huawei from US tech, they won't get access to memory, CPU, SD Cards and Wifi. I fail to see how Huaweii can get anything sold outside of China with this type of ban.
Of course, this whole thing is a ploy by Trump to get the upper hand in future negociations, so there's that.
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Re:Translation: Google concerned about Android for (Score:4, Insightful)
yes I blacklist every /8 that is registered to RIPE, APNIC, AFRONIC, and LACNIC for my switches running voip. None of my customers are going to need to register from there and trunking is always done on ip-trust not dynamic registrations. Simply by banning all those /8 I think my Fail2Ban alerts are maybe 1 or two an hour from all boxes combined. Without those blocks it was several hundred an hour even with the recidive filter enabled.
Facebook ban is brilliant (Score:5, Funny)
Facebook just blocked Huawei from pre-installing Facebook on their phones.
No Facebook spyware.
No Google Play Services spyware.
Lovely! Best phone ever.
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I am a bit skeptical about Huawei phones coming with an unlocked boot loader. Of course I would like it if it happens. But if it does there is already LineageOS, the successor of CyanogenMod. It is essentially what you ask for.
In terms of licensing, anything seems possible depending on how much the trade war between the US and China escalates. In an extreme scenario, we could get massive embargos both ways and China starting to ignore copyright openly.
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1) Select between MacOS, Android and HuaweiOS when buying a phone.
There are so many things wrong with this statement.
MacOS? macOS isn't for phones, that's iOS.
Also, that's Apple's OS, which as of right now, they're free to limit to their own hardware.
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What we get is:
1) Select between MacOS, Android and HuaweiOS when buying a phone.
2) Having the ease of rooting one of the three and installing a third party image that you like
No, you won't get that, for the same reason you can't install iOS on an Android phone, and you can't install an image of Android built for phone A to phone B.
It would be even better if they started using Linux instead of Android
Android *is* Linux.
Who knew, 2019 is the year of the Linux Desktop
Wasn't 2018 the year of the Linux desktop? Or was it 2017? Oh that's right it was 2016. Never mind it was 2015....
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So Android isn't Linux, but Android does contain Linux already you are correct in sentiment.
Plugging user-space services to Linux doesn't make it not Linux. Neither does the language in which those services are implemented.
You could argue there is no Android "OS" and it's just services that run on Linux. That's fine. But the software that exists today in the AOSP project is a distribution of Linux. I'm going on what Android is today, not what it could be with years of development.
Android contains the Linux kernel and relies on this (at the moment).
Google is making their own kernel for Android called "Fuchsia"
Fuschia isn't a "kernel for Android". It's a new OS based on a new kernel called Zircon. I got that out of the very fir
Re:Translation: Google concerned about Android for (Score:5, Insightful)
The other danger is that the Chinese stop assisting with Android security and instead start exploiting it. Why bother share details of zero day vulnerabilities when only the targets of your spying are vulnerable to them?
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Gee, I suppose Google's reluctance to help the U.S. Military isn't looking like such a smart decision now.
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Trump: Huawei GFTO
Google: but, but we're such good lefties, surely we rate an exception!
Trump: LOLGFY
Re: Translation: Google concerned about Android fo (Score:1)
Carriers routinely fork and abandon Android already, this would be no different. But really, who buys a shitty Huawei phone in the first place?
So what ? (Score:2, Funny)
"Google argues a Huawei-modified version of Android would be more susceptible to being hacked"
And so what ? These phones are not, and won't, be sold in the US anyway.
Google looking out for itself (Score:2)
LOL (Score:1)
Yes, I'm sure that Google is quite concerned that Chinese users of hardware not made by Google might be at risk from forked Android...
Without getting political (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Without getting political (Score:2)
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Why do you want to "fuck useless" ?
Do you really think Huawei will implement a platform that will not be able to run seamlessly all Android apps ? They are not dumb.
Re:Who Cares (Score:5, Funny)
Love those headphone jacks.
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Your troll-fu is weak.
Artificial Crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't like about this whole topic is too many people are insisting on acting like Hauwei can do the impossible and must be suppressed or they will take over everything.
The impossible thing is that everyone is acting like they can/will/are doing is to trick up their gear to superspy on everyone AND get away with it. Of course it would be easy for them to install malware at the software or even the chip level. Anybody can do that. What is impossible is for them to do is to do so without it being detected. And if it were detected that would be end for them.
If that happened nobody who wasn't forced or didn't care to would buy their stuff anymore. Probably most of their mobile device customers wouldn't care so they would keep that business but they would probably be sued out of existence for all their infrastructure gear. There is no way they don't know this.
Huawei has a deserved bad reputation for unfair business practices and IP infringement but that is not what they are being banned for. Instead everyone is yapping about a security issue that doesn't really exist.
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Of course it would be easy for them to install malware at the software or even the chip level. Anybody can do that. What is impossible is for them to do is to do so without it being detected. And if it were detected that would be end for them.
We ALREADY have unintentional securlty bugs in devices that aren't detected for years. The best example of this in recent memory is heartbleed. You're saying that Hauwei couldn't put intentional, but plausibly deniable bugs in their phones that allowed snoopi
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"Plausible deniability" is a myth. It is exceptionally hard to put such bugs in an OS when there is a clean reference copy. It is extremely easy to put backdoors in apps. Nobody halfway competent would attack the OS and Huawei is pretty competent at this game.
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Nobody is spending a ton of money to scrutinize every patch RH does. You can bet that this ton of money will be spend for any patch Huawei does and if anything jumps out, it will be used publicly against them And they know that. Quite obviously.
Open Source OS isn't invulnerable (Score:1)
Just add a complicated new feature or major patch with an "accidental" buffer overflow bug. It probably won't get noticed for a long time if it's added by an employee or friend of the repo maintainer, and if it is noticed then they claim it was an accident. Then they do it again using a different contributor.
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There is no "just" about your idea, this is very hard to do. And while analyzing patches is easy, confirming such an analysis is even easier. They will not be _that_ stupid.
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You act like these bugs are easy to spot. They are not. There's no stupidity involved in missing a subtle bug that can be exploited by a hacker.
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These bugs are relatively easy to spot in an OS. They are almost impossible to spot in an application. That is my whole point.
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You have anything besides screaming and "I do not like your statement"? You have any actual, rational, credible insight? No? Thought so.
Re: Artificial Crisis (Score:1)
What about all the branch prediction exploits found in Intel CPUs, such as Spectre and Meltdown? How do we know that those weren't intentionally implemented, or undisclosed by state actors? They've been there for what, fifteen years?
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Everybody? Near as I can tell it is only the alleged U.S. Administration that has their panties in a knot over Huawei. The Orange Man himself said that Huawei could be included in a trade "deal" between the U.S. and China thus giving the lie to the "security" angle (from the view of the Administration, not Google's suddenly discovered "security" threat). The only trade deal will be a wash because Trump's idea of a deal is he wins and you lose. China will never accept that. Sooner or later the Administration
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Well given your presidents grasp of most topics* why assume that him saying that makes the security problem a fake one? Isn't it more likely he just doesn't understand it?
(* as evident of claims by him directly without a biased selection or "interpretation" that is)
Re: Artificial Crisis (Score:1)
Assuming anything he does is a crude shakedown attempt is the safest bet.
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Of course it would be easy for them to install malware at the software or even the chip level. Anybody can do that. What is impossible is for them to do is to do so without it being detected. And if it were detected that would be end for them.
That argument is too simple, clear, and true to be accessible for most people. Obvious truth is not something that most people can handle.
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Historically this is not the case.
About 11 years ago, Westinghouse, the last real American contender in the nuclear power space, sold their IP to China to build their new reactor, the AP1000. It was sold to several state-owned power entities. They did this with the idea that China would only build Chinese AP1000s, and Westinghouse would have the rest of the world. Unfortunately, China turned out to the be the only place that had an appetite for nuclear power, hurting Westinghouse. Now the rest of the wo
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This country allowed Google to form and it never would have under any other country in the world
What do you mean by that ?
Yes, it is a national security risk (Score:1, Troll)
Because NSA cannot bug Huawei products and so cannot spy on American allies if their phones run non-US OS. Great risk for national security!
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Google, on the other hand, would lose control if Huawei forked the OS. Google doesn't want that, so they make up this canard about a security risk.
Literal shills (Score:1)
The fact that we non-government types are even hearing about this means it's the political equivalent of virtue signalling.
Google is counting on the tech crowd's disdain for the orange man to put pressure on the politicals to change these policies.
In google's favor, not necessarily in our favor.
Also, I like the weasel words and FUD being used here, don't you?
Google has warned the Trump administration it risks compromising US national security...
Oh noes! A warning?! That sounds bad!
Risk?! LAWDY HAVE MERCY! We don't want anything risky now do we?
NATIONAL SECURITY!?!?! HOLY MOLEY! DEFCON ONE! Cal
What will happen if... (Score:2)
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Robots are placed and workers go to work in a really friendly nation.
Lots of nations are ready for anyone to ask about a factory location.
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Mobile devices less risk (Score:1)
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There is zero interest in protecting the interests of the nation.
There is no loyalty to the nation that provided them the opportunity.
When it comes to paying taxes, there is zero desire to support the nation.
Profits and "share holder" interests are more important than anything else.
It reminds me of the movie Rollerball with James Caan where the world was run by corporations.
As the Apostle Paul wrote:
1 Timothy 6:
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When it comes to paying taxes, there is zero desire to support the nation.
You only find this troubling if you think corporations are people. They are not. They have no feelings, other than the feeling to maximize profits. Which they will do. That's why we have regulations.
US companies are doing *exactly* as much as they are able to get away with within US law. Are you suggesting they should voluntarily give the govt some arbitrary sum of money? Again, that's not in their DNA. You think such a system is viable? Each company pay whatever they think is good?
Blame your elected offici