Oxford University reportedly turns off its Huawei money tap

How to shoot oneself in the foot

I suppose they have forgotten that the University houses the University of Oxford China Centre and that the new building there was paid for by Mr Dickson Poon, a philanthropist from Hong Kong.

Very slick

Very slick words indeed from Mr Zhengfei. Have to admire the economy with which he packs so much mis-direction into so few words.

I don't like to be too pessimistic, but in the end, it may come down to a straight choice between being most easily spied on by western spooks, or eastern ones.

Not a theist, but god help us.

IDK about this case, but Chinese tech for their domestic market has backdoors so they can monitor everyone's communications. Thing is, some Western authorities seem to want the same backdoors in consumer grade kit here, just not in their own.

Who can you trust? No-one is probably the answer, since we know our governments actively exploit the security of our own devices. This is why we need full-stack open source hardware + software to defend the little people.

Ellacoya OK, Huawei not OK

Is that the situation here? Not specifically re Oxford University, but generally re Phorm and Ellacoya and Plusnet and BT Retail and Stratis Scleparis and ten years since DPI first fell off the edge of the Internet...

FYI

About a week ago my home pocket wifi (E5330) - made by Huawei, started acting up. I used wireshark to see what was happening, I soon found the problem. Fixed it. About and hour later when I remembered to turn wireshark off, I saw a reverse connection from Poland to my wifi. After some reverse engineering (3 hours), I discovered that port 26550 was set up for port knocking. It hid a 64-bit knock in the first packet. After the knock, a ten minute udp session was sent over the wifi back to a different IP in Poland than the IP that was used to do the knocking. Most likely I won't be able to decrypt it. I dumped the firmware and compared it to an official firmware image. Hashes were the same. What do you suppose? More than likely I will give it to a company to reverse engineer the entire firmware image. There was nothing worth stealing from the pc it was talking to.

The Real Problem

The West’s fear of Huawei stems mainly from concerns that the company may be using its growing market share to secretly backdoor its equipment to assist the Chinese state with industrial and political espionage.

The real problem is that Huawei can, by Chinese law, be required to backdoor their own equipment at any time. What seems to escape a lot of the press is that this is just as true for the United States, as Snowden revealed, and seems to be also true for GCHQ, ASD, and pretty much every other nation on earth with respect to firms domiciled therein. Australia seems determined to even make that extraterritorial. Have to wait and see on that.

"China build pretty much anything that has a cable, led and chips."

True now, but only insofar as China was much cheaper than "the west" and was willing to invest in infrastructure. As China's economy grows and salaries rise, it will become cheaper to build stuff in India, Phillippines, Vietnam etc. This has already happened 10-15 years ago with no-tech items (eg textiles) and lower-tech items (eg disk drives). As Chinese costs rise relative to other Asian countries, higher and higher-end tech will move manufacturing out of China and into their neighbours. Think of China being now in the position that Japan was 30 years ago.

Alternative to Oxford

Perhaps Huawei could look towards Coventry University. It is far enough away from London to be aware that US spooks and corporates are something to be watched out for just as hard as Chinese ones.

We have lots of your fellow citizens here and perhaps you could send some more money?

It's too late anyway - better learn Mandarin

It's typical that governments are quite happy to hit on the Chinese in the domestic market whilst knowing full well they've lost the battle.

Let's add up a few things:

- we have a major global warning and pollution problem;

- so has China, so much more than "us" that they HAD to take action, and China being China, it didn't hold back once the decision was taken;

- China has embarked on a MAJOR stimulus for electric transport, with bonus points for efficiency;

- green energy (wind/solar) is woefully insufficient to fulfil our power needs;

- fossil fuel power generation merely moves many small exhausts into a few big ones

- current nuclear reactors are plutonium/steam based because of some "we need weapons grade stuff for bombs" decisions in the 70s..

.. but the Chinese are well ahead in the alternative stream of thorium based reactors (liquid salt based) - and have developed their own IP whilst addressing the issues such as corrosion. As a matter of fact, they may go live with a test reactor this year, or in 2020. All that while Trump is encouraging coal to keep his voters happy, and has allowed the EPA to pretty much ignore pollution and global warming so they're not developing solutions either.

What do you reckon is going to happen to the dollar when the Chinese are starting to use and sell those smaller, safer plants? It makes the renminbi more interesting as a reserve and energy currency, and unlike Iraq, the Americans can't bomb the crap out of them for having the temerity not to use the dollar for energy sales..

Doesn't it all come down to Chinese manufacturers not playing ball by inserting 5-eyes backdoors?

Perhaps I should stop using Cisco network gear

In case it's enabling the Americans to spy on me, as opposed to normal commercial gouging...

I strongly suspect that this is more related to the trade dispute and "America first" than any genuine issues.

All vendors are based in countries where governments could attempt device comprising, either for targeted shipping or backdoor as a standard service.

Perhaps the Chinese could accuse AWS of enabling mass surveillance by the NSA with all the concentration of data and networking and compute while standardising their configuration for interception..."cloud is US cloak encouraging people to provide the state intelligence service with all their data voluntarily and unwittingly."

Basically they are all either at it or capable. Set up your networking properly, try to avoid single vendor setups (usually easy as they all have services they don't provide) and use encryption.

If you don't trust anyone keep your data off the Internet, otherwise use caution and wait for evidence before backing the latest political manoeuvre...

You know.....

growing up in the mainly southern parts of the US... learning to never trust politicians, bible thumpers, so on and so on... Huawei must be the original pig with lipstick... I apologize if I offend any one... but for a company that big, in China, with all its goodness.... aw hell no matter what all the libs say... a pig is still a pig.... just like in my country... you don't get big by smooching, you gotta be sucking someones (in this case CHINA) tallywhacker. They are surely doing the devils work.. we should all beware

In a couple of months

The UK will be following its master into a trade war with the Chinese, if it wants any tariff free business in the US (in 5 years time when the trade deal is signed).

But maybe that won't be quite so appealing by then:

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/a-major-global-depression/