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Communications Businesses China Network Security United States

Trump Signs Executive Order Barring US Companies From Using Huawei Gear (reuters.com) 249

schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order declaring a national emergency and barring U.S. companies from using telecommunications equipment made by firms posing a national security risk, paving the way for a ban on doing business with China's Huawei. The executive order invokes the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president the authority to regulate commerce in response to a national emergency that threatens the United States. The order directs the Commerce Department, working with other government agencies, to draw up a plan for enforcement within 150 days. The order, which has been under review for more than a year, is aimed at protecting the supply chain from "foreign adversaries to the nation's information and communications technology and services supply chain," said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
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Trump Signs Executive Order Barring US Companies From Using Huawei Gear

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  • by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @07:54PM (#58599862)
    except the US government.
    • Nobody is allowed to spy on US citizens except the US government.

      Uh.....

      NO FUCKING SHIT SHERLOCK

      You are implying that because your government does bad that it should be a complete free-for-all and therefore EVERYONE should be able to do the same thing to you?

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I think they are implying that you shouldn't buy US hardware either, if you like privacy.

    • If you like China so much why don't you just move there? I hear they have gulag in the west for Muslims. Maybe you could get a nice spot over there.

  • by Dread Cthulhu ( 5435800 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @07:54PM (#58599864)
    I am sure this thread will be full of polite and civil discourse over this matter.
    • How could you possibly be so deluded? Your momma must have dropped you on your head during delivery.
    • I'm so mad, I don't even know who to yell at!

      F you! F Trump! F Huawei! F 5G! F the police. F the FCC. F the carriers. F everything about this story. I'm so mad, I can't even swear properly. F that.

    • I am sure this thread will be full of polite and civil discourse over this matter.

      You posted on the wrong story. You meant to post this comment on the Tesla / Solar City story that’s two above this one.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      But as a German, I got something insightful to add:

      The bit that was the tipping point of Hitler and Napoleon getting into power, was when they created laws that enabled them to circumvent the rest of the government and make any laws they liked, stating threats to the country.

      Aka these executive orders.

      The next steps will be:
      * Declare that anyone who disagrees, lacks patriotism, and is putting the country in danger. (Already in process.)
      * Declare all Chinese and "Chinese-sympathisants" a danger themselves. P

  • by Anonymous Coward

    So, no more Cisco?

  • by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @08:09PM (#58599934)
    The real emergency is how the European and American telecom titans allowed themselves to fall so far behind Huawei in 5G development. That's the reason for this 'security risk' declaration - there's billions of revenue at stake over the next five years. If Huawei establishes itself early then they'll pretty much have all the spoils to themselves. So much for our love of free market capitalism, which includes letting winners win and losers lose.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      You might have a point if Huawei wasn't being run as an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Running as an arm of the Chinese Communist Party simply makes the winner the Chinese Communist Party.

        It doesn't change the loser, or the reasons for losing.

        • Yes, it is the winner. But not in a free market system. They are the government of China. So if your point is that a government can "win" against private business in a chosen market, you are correct.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday May 16, 2019 @03:10AM (#58601148) Homepage Journal

        Huawei isn't an arm of the CCP, that's just propaganda with no basis in reality.

        When you cut through the bullshit and get down to the actual concerns raised by the security services, they are around a 2017 Chinese law that requires Chinese companies to cooperate with the government on spying. It's uncomfortably similar to laws in the US and UK requiring companies to do the same.

        If you don't trust Huawei for this reason, you can't trust any US or UK company either. They could be operating under a National Security Letter and you wouldn't even know it.

        • That's a false equivalency to draw between the US legal system and the Chinese government. We have National Security Letters. They harvest organs from prisoners. If you would prefer to trust the Chinese government rather than the US government, then go ahead but it's your funeral.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        I guess the most scary problem at-least for the very few who actually have the most money is if a socialist economy would actually do better than a capitalist one.

        Could compare the Soviet vs US/Europe before but Russia got a port/geographical issue and maybe that was even more true for Soviet.

        I'm definitely not saying non-capitalism and socialism is better. But if it did better ...

    • by cheesybagel ( 670288 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @08:53PM (#58600080)

      It is quite simple. You splurge tens of billions on marvelous "tech unicorns" like Uber while things like telecoms are considered old hat. Patents in telecoms are valued less in the US patent system than rectangular shapes with round corners. Then, voila, the US loses its edge in telecoms. Not surprising at all.

    • We were always at war with Eastasia.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. And anti-competitive politics usually just make things worse and hasten the decline of those so "protected".

    • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Thursday May 16, 2019 @12:10AM (#58600732) Journal

      The real emergency is how the European and American telecom titans allowed themselves to fall so far behind Huawei in 5G development.

      This is globalism at work. US and European companies exported competitive advantage to competing nation states to utilize exploitational labor laws in an effort to get an edge over commercial competitors.

      In other words they didn't place any value on the knowledge they exported that they invested in creating. This is what happens when the people making decisions about knowledge are short sighted and greedy.

      Look before you leap, for as you sow, so shall you reap.

    • The only "falling behind" that I've heard sources with any real authority on the matter talk about is cost, where the Chinese will naturally be ahead of their mostly European-based rivals. Motorola, the only American manufacturer of modern cellphone network hardware sold their wireless division to Nokia back in 2011 so there haven't really been any American companies in this space for quite some time and the market really is a case of Europe vs China.

      After Nokia-Siemens took over Alcatel-Lucent from Fran
  • big fucking deal (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does China use USA built routers?
    Uh not any more.
    Why?
    Because they don't trust foreign tech.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      And so it is safe for Trump to Make This Bold Move To Protect Americans.

    • Re:big fucking deal (Score:5, Informative)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:51PM (#58600468) Journal
      That's fine but then why is the US trying to tell everyone else that we should not use Huawei routers? As far as we are concerned, both US and Chinese routers are foreign tech and of those two countries, the only one that we know for absolute certain compromises "over-the-counter" electronic devices is the US. Huawei is only suspected of doing this.
      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        It isn't the U.S., it is Trump. He's American in name only.

        • This entire topic is so far beyond Trump's comprehension they probably just told him "Huwei is China, China bad!" and put a pen in front of him.
    • by rastos1 ( 601318 )

      Because they don't trust foreign tech.

      Or because they have cheaper, better and domestic replacement.

  • Sucks for businesses but I plan to take advantage. Does anyone have a list of the to-be-banned gear?
  • by youngone ( 975102 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @08:25PM (#58599986)

    President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order declaring a national emergency and barring U.S. companies from using telecommunications equipment made by firms posing a national security risk, paving the way for a ban on doing business with China's Huawei.

    I thought you guys in America were these rugged freedom loving individualists who didn't tolerate government getting all up in your business, but it turns out some New Jersey con-artist can just "declare" something and you all have to fall into line.
    Weird way to run a country.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Thursday May 16, 2019 @08:01AM (#58602014)

      The news stories are very poorly written and as usual embellish the truth. Trump can't ban any US company from doing business with any other US company such as a Huawei subsidiary. The executive order states that the Huawei equipment can't be used for things that may be "deemed a national security risk".

      Basically you can't use it for critical equipment (eg. a 911 call center or water supply etc) because it may have backdoors that the Chinese government may use in a war.

      You can still buy Huawei and ZTE equipment of Newegg and Amazon, you just won't win any government contracts with it. The Chinese State was subsidizing government contracts for 5G deployment but also 10G and beyond network equipment.

      I was bidding a small contract for a 10G deployment that HP, Cisco and other US companies were bidding at $100-250k. Huawei quoted $25k including flying a Chinese engineer on-site and a 3 year support contract. It was simply impossible, even if I did it all myself to just buy the hardware for that price, but the Chinese government subsidizes these contracts to get a foot hold into critical research and government infrastructure.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I'm so terribly tired of idiots parroting buzzwords. It's cringeworthy listening to copious quantities of rank nonsense frothing from mouths of politicians and talking heads who don't know shit about anything. 5G will change everything and completely transform society. 5G is more important than watts engine. 5G is the future. Just STFU already.

    Blockchain!! Crypto currency!!! AI!!!! 5G!!!!

    FUCK YOU!!

    Oh and pro tip for those concerned about security and foreign spying. USE END TO END ENCRYPTION. Go

    • USE END TO END ENCRYPTION.

      This is not sufficient. Encryption and VPNs do little to protect you from malicious ISPs who can, and do, attach tracking headers to all of your packets, and if the equipment that the ISPs use is compromised then encryption and VPNs would do little to protect you from that equipment. Only regulation can protect you from that, regulation which was overturned in March of 2017 [eff.org].

      This whole Huawei thing certainly seems like overblown fear-mongering, a symptom of Trump's inability to negotiate in a civilized wa

  • I mean if you're going to ban a company that manufactures in China for made-up reasons, you might as well make it lulzy.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:55PM (#58600482)

    Anti-competitive and anti-market politics usually heralds a collapse of those so "protected"...

  • I'm sorry, but with something as Important as Communications Infrastructure, I don't think we can just dismiss it as "Trump is just 'Protecting' American businesses". If there is doubt, it's better to find an alternative.

    You don't install a program that some claim it has a bitcoin miner just because you think they are dumb.

    Remember that we are dealing with Huawei, a big company (like those you love to hate), but a big company that is in bed with the one of the worst, most corrupted and authoritarian governm

  • ...is going to be a Huawei. Take that, you cheeto-coloured man-child.

  • People who use pro tip are idiots. One exception;)
  • by mtaht ( 603670 ) on Thursday May 16, 2019 @06:29AM (#58601636) Homepage
    To me, the only long term way to even start to get out of this nightmare (as we cannot trust anyone else's gear either, and we have other reminders of corruption like the volkswagon scandal) is to mandate the release of source code, with reproducible builds [wikipedia.org] , for just about everything connected to the internet or used in safety critical applications, like cars. Even that's not good enough, but it would be a start. Even back when we took on the FCC on this issue [taht.net], I never imagined it would get this bad.

    'round bufferbloat.net we did produce one really trustable router in the cerowrt project, which was 100% open source top to bottom, which serves as an existence proof - and certainly any piece of gear reflashed with openwrt is vastly better and more secure than what we get from the manufacturer - but even then, I always worried that my build infrastructure for cerowrt was or could be compromised and took as many steps as I could to make sure it wasn't - cross checking builds, attacking it with various attack tools, using vms, etc.

    "Friends don't let friends run factory firmware", we used to say. Being able to build from sources yourself is a huge improvement in potential trustability - (but even then the famous paper on reflections on trusting trust applies). And so far, neither the open source or reproducible builds concepts have entered the public debate.

    Every piece of hardware nowadays is rife with binary blobs and there are all sorts of insecurities in all the core cpus and co-processors designed today.

    And it isn't of course, just security in huawei's case - intel just exited the business - they are way ahead of the US firms in general in so many areas.

    I have no idea where networked computing can go anymore, particularly in the light of the latest MDS vulns revealed over the past few days [lwn.net], I long ago turned off hyperthreading on everything I cared about, moved my most critical resources out of the cloud, but I doubt others can do that. I know people that run a vm inside a vm. I keep hoping someone will invest something major into the mill computing's cpu architecture - which does no speculation and has some really robust memory and stack smashing protection features [millcomputing.com], and certainly there's hope that risc-v chips could be built with a higher layer of trust than any arm or intel cpu today. (but needs substantial investment into open on-chip peripherals)

    /me goes back to bed
  • The news here isn't really about Huawei. It's about Trump, again, declaring some kind of national emergency, and about how the short-cited congress passed stupid laws granting the president inappropriate powers. We've fortunately had classy-enough presidents that they really didn't invoke these overblown powers. But Trump uses them for whatever BS agenda he has - building a border wall, or punishing a company that won't play by his rules.

    The Republicans were rightfully upset when he did this with the bor

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