Huawei's Silicon Valley Outpost Allegedly Stole Trade Secrets From Cisco (siliconvalley.com) 97
"Controversial Chinese technology firm Huawei and its Santa Clara-based subsidiary Futurewei allegedly stole trade secrets from San Jose tech giant Cisco and used them to copy Cisco routers," reports the San Jose Mercury News, citing the federal indictment released Thursday.
The U.S. Department of Justice claimed in its racketeering indictment and a news release that Huawei and its Silicon Valley subsidiary stole operating system code and other data needed to make routers, and used the pilfered secrets to make Huawei-branded routers sold in the U.S. The indictment also alleges that five other unnamed U.S. firms were targeted. Cisco is not mentioned by name in the indictment, which refers to "Company 1." But the indictment cites a lawsuit filed in Texas against Futurewei and Huawei over the alleged router-data theft...
The indictment alleges that when the Texas litigation started, Futurewei and Huawei claimed to have already removed misappropriated code from products, and recalled routers containing that code. However, the firms had erased the memory drives of the recalled routers and sent them to China before they could be accessed, "thus destroying evidence of Huawei and Futurewei's illicit conduct," the indictment claims. "Also, in an effort to destroy evidence, Futurewei attempted to remotely access Huawei routers that had already been sold in the United States and erase the misappropriated source code contained therein," the indictment alleges, without saying whether the government believes the attempted erasure was successful.
The indictment does not make clear how U.S. prosecutors believe Futurewei and Huawei obtained the copyrighted code, but it claims the two companies had "hired or attempted to hire Company 1 employees and directed these employees to misappropriate Company 1 source code...." The two companies also engaged in "flagrant plagiarism" of Cisco's user manuals for routers, the suit alleged. While the allegations of stolen Cisco secrets concern routers sold in the U.S. in 2002, the indictment charges Huawei, Futurewei and two other Huawei subsidiaries with running a scheme from 2000 to the present "to operate and grow the worldwide business of Huawei and its parents, global affiliates and subsidiaries through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property of companies headquartered or with offices in the United States."
The indictment alleges that when the Texas litigation started, Futurewei and Huawei claimed to have already removed misappropriated code from products, and recalled routers containing that code. However, the firms had erased the memory drives of the recalled routers and sent them to China before they could be accessed, "thus destroying evidence of Huawei and Futurewei's illicit conduct," the indictment claims. "Also, in an effort to destroy evidence, Futurewei attempted to remotely access Huawei routers that had already been sold in the United States and erase the misappropriated source code contained therein," the indictment alleges, without saying whether the government believes the attempted erasure was successful.
The indictment does not make clear how U.S. prosecutors believe Futurewei and Huawei obtained the copyrighted code, but it claims the two companies had "hired or attempted to hire Company 1 employees and directed these employees to misappropriate Company 1 source code...." The two companies also engaged in "flagrant plagiarism" of Cisco's user manuals for routers, the suit alleged. While the allegations of stolen Cisco secrets concern routers sold in the U.S. in 2002, the indictment charges Huawei, Futurewei and two other Huawei subsidiaries with running a scheme from 2000 to the present "to operate and grow the worldwide business of Huawei and its parents, global affiliates and subsidiaries through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property of companies headquartered or with offices in the United States."
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It is known.
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It is known.
As well as why Cisco who sued Huawei at the time directly dropped the lawsuit instead of seeing them in court.
As Linux used to say: "God is great, but grep is greater". Just in this case it is /usr/bin/strings
The DOJ should really leave this skeleton in the closet. The damage from taking it out in its all of its glory and and showing it around will be BIGGER to us that not Huawei.
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Well, it explains why their code is described as buggy!
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In the late 90's and early 2000's - Canada's Nortel was being spied on as well - no proof it was Huawei, but suspicions were high. Later, when Nortel went bankrupt, spying devices were found in their corporate headquarters. A lot of innovation came from Nortel on cellular, ethernet and routing. As you said, nothing to do with Trump, Libtards at work here on Slashdot
In the early 2000s, as 3Com was collapsing, they briefly did a JV with Huawei. I don't think much ever came of it, because by then, 3Com was well past its prime. Huawei might have gotten some gigabit switch ASICs and IP phone tech, but that's about it.
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It's cute how you take a known activity of the Mainland Chinese Government (a.k.a., Red Chinese or Communist China) through their corporate branches and try to make it Trump's fault.
Good point. Admittedly, though, blaming Trump for something and then turning out to be wrong is pretty darn unlucky.
what is cuter... (Score:1)
Is that right wingers have no sense of humour and become huge cry babies when they are the butt of the joke.
If you can't take it don't dish it out.
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If it's stolen (Score:2)
It's no longer a secret.
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If you are making allegations, yet have no evidence to support them, then it is best to claim that everything must be kept secret.
Re:If it's stolen (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure what you think your point is.
The fact that the status of "secret" can be permanently lost is the reason trade secrets have legal protection.
Re:If it's stolen (Score:5, Insightful)
Because different things are protected by patents than trade secrets.
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Equally obviously, nothing needs legal protection if something else has legal protection.
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Why the f*** should trade secrets have legal protection?
Because it is a traditional Common Law right, and taking it away is not an option.
This is so simple. Seek better questions, harder questions.
Re:If it's stolen (Score:5, Informative)
But trade secrets don't have legal protection. If you buy a device and can ascertain and reproduce any trade secrets involved in its manufacture, you've done nothing wrong. The point of patents is that you're given a temporary monopoly in exchange for publishing your methods. There are laws concerning passing proprietary information to a competitor, industrial espionage, etc. but at a basic level, trade secrets depend on your ability to keep a secret. They have no inherent protection.
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They have no inherent protection.
Not it you can figure it out on your own, they don't. If you steal them, however, it is a crime as well as a civil tort, like stealing one of their printers.
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But information wants to be free! You can't steal a secret, since they still know it and haven't been deprived of it! Or does that logic only apply when it's convenient? Yes, I know there are laws concerning leaking proprietary information, I even said so in my post. My point was that trade secrets have no inherent protection. If they did, there would be no point to patents. You only get that exclusivity in exchange for publishing, and therefore spreading the knowledge.
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It depends on how you obtained it. Stealing trade secrets from your employer, is a civil tort case, you damaged the business by copying some type of information. If I buy something and I reverse engineer it, then it's mine to keep (unless off course, patents). All of these matters should be civil matters, rarely should these rise to criminal activity, unless you did something like forced entry on the way or you are spying in service of a foreign government (that'd be a military matter).
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A patents grants your intellectual property protection even if someone happens to replicate your work entirely independently and without any knowledge of your patent. Trade secrets do not do that. They only protect your IP if someone "misappropriated" your trade secrets and you will have to prove that they did so.
For more information see the Defend Trade Secrets Act [cornell.edu] signed in 2016 by Obama.
The
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Trade secrets are in fact protected from unauthorized disclosure. They are specifically enumerated as a protected thing; there are all sorts of well-established rights, rules, and responsibilities related specifically to trade secrets.
The Truth Is Out There! (and enumerated by reliable sources on the internet, if you do a search)
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Oh yes there is! Buckets and buckets, and that moron that was a beneficiary of a criminal conspiracy better learn how to forget that secret really fast.
If burglar breaks into my factory, and is caught by the police, and the police accidentally write details of my trade secret into the police report, I'm screwed, my secret isn't secret.
If I hire somebody to keep the windows covered and they screw it up, and you peek in the window from the sidewalk, I lost my secret.
If I contract somebody who accidentally lea
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A trade secret can be protected for an unlimited period of time, unless it is discovered or legally acquired by others and disclosed to the public.
Once the secret is made public, anyone may have access to it and use it at will. The more people know about the trade secret, the more difficult it will be to keep it secret. Trade secret protection is effective only against illicit acquisition, use or disclosure of the confidential information.
So like I said - the secret has no protection. Only the manner in which it is made public is there any chance of legal recourse - like breach of contract - against the people who were directly involved in the illegal disclosure of that secret.
But you know that, because you haven't actually looked into it in detail.
Do you feel stupid now? Because you should feel stupid now.
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You provided a link.
Why? Which words were relevant? Do you even know?
You haven't said anything other than "UR RONG," no, I don't feel "stupid" when you tell me how I "should" feel, I feel like I'm talking to that guy from high school who didn't read the assignment but wants to explain to me why the teacher is wrong. But that's just it; he doesn't even know what it says.
You say words, but they're not even responsive to what you dream they refute. And you produced a link that is also not responsive, and doesn
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Re:How is this even news? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this view of matters is too reassuring.
If *all* Chinese companies could do is steal secrets, it wouldn't matter much, because they'd permanently be playing catch up. That's not their plan at all. Their plan is to get to parity *quicker* so they can *pull ahead*.
China for years has suffered a crippling brain drain to the United States. An astonishing number of US research papers have at least one Chinese born author. China has made a concerted effort in recent years to reverse that, even recruiting US-born scientists to work in China. They've also made hay, poaching highly educated immigrants to the US facing suddenly-hostile immigration authorities.
China is much, much larger than us, and they are no longer a poor and technologically backward country. They see no reason to take second place to us, or to forgo any action that allows them to hasten the day they overtake us. They are now the second largest funder of research in the world, and if you go by *purchasing power* (PPP), they actually spend more than we do because a dollar goes farther in China than it does here.
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Nowhere did I say this was applicable to all Chinese companies but it's very true of Huawei.
It's disingenuous to suggest the US is losing much talent over "suddenly hostile immigration" authorities... China isn't exactly welcoming immigrants. The nation runs on corruption and authoritarianism and gets to where they are on the strength of numbers and exploitation of the masses more than anything else and without a massive change to the structure and function of their government and society, they're not overt
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Huawei currently is sitting on over 56,000 patents. They intend to play the intellectual property game. They also intend to cheat at it.
"Disingenuous" means "deliberately misleading", not "something I'd rather not believe." Multiple [foreignpolicy.com] media [nytimes.com] outlets [washingtonpost.com] from across the political spectrum have reported on China's attempt to woo immigrants away from the US. It is true the face headwinds [thediplomat.com] because of negative perceptions of China, but China is clearly determined to overcome this, largely with money, and the US is no [usnews.com]
Re:How is this even news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those Huawei patents are clearly valuable. If you want to get your hands on those patents without paying for them then you need to build a case that the owner is a hardened criminal and the only way anybody will ever bring justice to them is to move in and steal their stuff (nice and legal like),
If you use enough propaganda to inflame the rage of the ignorant you are half way there.
Next step is to declare that your country no longer recognises the validity of the patents. After that, you just ignore them and use all that sweet sweet IP and export it around the world (declaring it's better, safer and justified).
What if the other side hits back and does the same to you? Shut up! That would be wrong and stuff and we don't want to think that far ahead.
What a wonderful thought though. All nations simply stating "for the moment all IP is dead. Long live the new IP regime we are about to invent, with blockchain....and hookers".
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Linking articles discussing Chinese nationals returning to China along with one that basically paraphrases exactly what I said isn't a great way to show that your previous statement was anything other than disingenuous.
"China has prioritized global recruitment for nearly two decades, but programs such as Thousand Talents have seriously struggled to attract and retain top talent from abroad. This is in large part due to Beijing’s insistence on increasingly tight domestic controls. Unless the Communist
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"If *all* Chinese companies could do is steal secrets, it wouldn't matter much, because they'd permanently be playing catch up."
It would still matter a lot to the companies paying for the R and D, who would then have to watch as China was able to sell the products they designed at a lower price and still make a profit, thereby outcompeting them and consequently putting them out of business.
"China for years has suffered a crippling brain drain to the United States."
Which they have deserved because they are r
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They don't even respect the idea that Canada exists as a country.
Literally everyone knows this (Score:3, Interesting)
When then CEO John Chambers went to China to try to negotiate an end to this behavior, he left his notebook in the hotel room safe, popped down to the lobby, and popped straight back up to his room. His notebook was warm - in the ~five minutes he had popped down and back up, someone had turned on his notebook and tried to copy info from it.
Huawei copied Cisco devices with the full support of the Chinese government.
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This is all bullshit. The truth of the matter is that Huawei once used some header files that were copyright Cisco, Cisco sued them and Huawei removed those files and replaced them with near identical ones that didn't have the Cisco copyright. Then Cisco dropped the suit. It's a matter of public record.
Everything else is innuendo, lies and speculation.
Just listen to yourself for a moment. If people were phoning tech support what do you think the first couple of questions would be? "What model do you have?"
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Remember the reverse engineering was done at a per-interrupt level. That was true reverse engineering to understand how it worked. When you simply copy everything including the firmware you're making nothing except a poor copy.
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It's like you don't even get what you're talking about. Cisco produced more then just "cisco" routers. For example, Cisco sold Linksys routers, including the massively popular WRT54G series which Huawei copied, and sold...with "Linksys by Cisco" labels on it, with fake serial numbers, and mfg dates. You can even find the stories right here on /.
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What model was a clone of the WRT54G?
I had one of those, it was shit. Basically the reason I switched to Tomato on Buffalo hardware, and later pfSense.
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That *was* the clone. They were copying everything, logos, hardware, firmware.
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The Linksys was a clone? But Linksys has nothing to do with Huawei.
Maybe I wasn't clear, I'm asking which Huawei product was a clone. Which model. I want to look it up and maybe disassemble the firmware.
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There are some fake VOIP devices but none of them had anything to do with Huawei. In fact they seem to have come from Hong Kong. Any proof of this extraordinary claim?
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Maybe you're having problems reading? This is going back almost 18 years ago now, and the chances of you finding a counterfeit huawei router with linksys markings on it is almost nil, since there was a huge effort to seize and destroy them.
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But apparently no news coverage of this huge effort. There's coverage of the fake VOIP stuff but no suggestion that it was Huawei behind it.
The timeframe doesn't check out either. 18 years ago Huawei was only just expanding outside China and didn't have a consumer products division, they were focused on enterprise only. Enterprises don't use Linksys crap. In fact around that time they were partnered with 3com.
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Enough of the propaganda... (Score:2, Interesting)
...it's obvious that this is just trade war manoeuvring crap. Everyone backdoors everything. Everyone copies everyone.
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When you think about it Huawei gear is less likely to have backdoors than Cisco gear.
The Chinese government isn't going to put their country at risk by not disclosing flaws to Huawei, and will doubtless want their infrastructure to be as secure as possible so no backdoors. They aren't like the US government where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, they have far more control than that.
Plus Huawei will let you look at their source code and you can compare the binaries between export and
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The argument works under the assumption that everyone everywhere will get exactly the same Huawei gear.
That is not necessarily true. For application in their own country they may apply different security standards than when exporting their products to foreign countries. That might cause additional cost, but if the goal is backdooring equipment intended to be used by the 'competition', that might be worth it.
Huawei letting you look at their source code would also be
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Maybe the lesson is "pfSense is good enough for production use now".
This bunch of lies is getting tiresome (Score:4, Insightful)
Allegations, allegations, allegations. No actual proof. It is exceptionally obvious what is going on: The US wants to both have their own backdoors in equipment and to push its 2nd rate domestic communications tech industry.
What is news is the extreme level of persistent dishonesty used. But any last shred of honor in the administration (or even the pretense of it) went out the door with Trump. The the useful idiots are notice nothing and cheer this on, as usual.
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All we've been hearing lately is how the Chinese want to steal our data but it was last week (Feb 11) that the news came out that the US CIA and Germany owned the corporation that sold the encryption methods that many countries were using to send messages at the diplomatic level. So not only were they letting the US and Germany in on their secrets, they were paying those two countries for the privilege too. The story broke in the Guardian [theguardian.com].
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Indeed. We do know that the US steals data and trade-secrets and that their communications equipment (Cisco) is backdoored. We only suspect the backdoors in about Chinese equipment (they do the other stuff, but everybody does it...), but there is no proof. Given that proof would not be hard to come by if there is money available for an analysis, I am inclined to think that Huawei equipment does not come with backdoors. Of course, they can be patched in at a later time, but again, everybody can do that.
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Absen
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Absence of proof, when proof would be hugely desirable and easily obtainable is proof of absence. Or of terminal stupidity of the ones making the decisions.
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Even the people who shared video of the inside of the "miracle hospitals" they built in a few days have already long disappeared.
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Yes, that is true, but the US has usually made a distinction between government level espionage and industrial espionage. So from the US point of view, spying to get the contents of diplomatic messages is fair game, but spying to get trade secrets from a foreign company and giving them to a domestic company would be bad. And you don't hear the US complaining too much about other countries spying on the US government. What you are hearing is complaints about countries using government level spying targeti
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That is untrue. The US has managed to keep their industrial spying from becoming common knowledge by being discriminate, careful and exercising some restraint, but there are enough people that understand what is going on.
Re: This bunch of lies is getting tiresome (Score:1)
Also their Richardson (Dallas) is likely (Score:2)
Stealing IP - the way of the world in router-land (Score:5, Interesting)
So how did Csico get started in the router business? By stealing code.
http://www.ccnalk.com/news/ind... [ccnalk.com]
"They [Bosack and Lerner] started off the wrong way by stealing the university’s multiple protocol router software. They used this software to experiment on building their own router. They were able to build exact replicas of Stanford’s already successful ‘Blue Box’ router. In July 1986 Bosack and his new collaborator Kirk Lougheed were forced to resign from Stanford on charges on copyright violation and theft."
What goes around comes around
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And they had to give away free equipment for a long ass time, as they wouldn't take shares in the company.
speaking of, is there anything that surived the blueblox time?
Huawei Sues Verizon Over 5G (Score:4, Insightful)
In only the last five years, China has aggresively filed patents to pursue participating with international consortiums and trade agreements in a range of STEM fields to reach the apex of such organizations-- licensing. I do not see its reportage, but the opinion of associates is much of the delay surrounding 5G roll-out involves what patents Chinese companies hold.
"Backdoors" are not a single method or mechanism and their engineering not limited to any one domain of design. What has become clear is the US' dominance in their potential use and applicaiton is compromised by supply chains and many of the accusations currently leveled are, imo, a "barn door" problem.
What America consistently, persistently, and aggresively does is protect its profit margins (its "interests) in order to assert a nearly religious dogma that capital is paramount to any economic order-- even as its enterprise has, in plain view, becomes dependent on devalued labor.
I am not a Marxist, but have lived long enough to witness Marx' view and advocacy of labor is not a sentimental fiction.
CCP's Game (Score:3)
Communists don't steal anything - everything belongs to everybody under communism. They take from each according to his means. That's their game.
Except they know we have a different game. So they will amass a patent warchest and use it to clobber us in our game. Their metagame has both aspects.
The only problem is Clinton gave them MFN status in exchange for campaign donations without pricing in the higher costs to respect human rights.
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The path to normal trade relations with China began in 1998 with recommendations from Newt Gingrich, Bill Archer, and Philip Crane, all republicans, and a majority of the House. By 1999, it was a done deal. MFN status was not achieved through campaign donations, but there is warranted attention given to what Chinese money was received by the Clinton Foundation af
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Communists don't steal anything - everything belongs to everybody under communism. They take from each according to his means. That's their game.
Except they know we have a different game.
China's current system is pretty far removed from Marx, Lenin or even Mao. It's difficult to reconcile between the name of the CPC with their behavior as communists. It has authoritarian nature without any specific ideology. It's very much an ends-justifies-the-means sort of organization, with human rights and ethics being only considered out of convenience when dealing with the West. Socialism without ethics isn't socialism, as it doesn't serve the people. It's only the usual authoritarian-state nightmare
Industry practice (Score:5, Interesting)
About half a decade, we were looking at various SDN systems and we talked to a number of vendors. They outright said that there are only 2 creators of switch hardware, Cisco, HP etc, all buy chips from the same place, badge it and sell it, the OS simply runs on top of a chip and technically can be easily replaced.
We looked at Huawei because they sold Cisco clones (which is useful if you have legacy Cisco gear, you don't have to worry about the compatibility of optics or power sources), but they wouldn't deliver any service, the whole configuration was to be done in China by a Chinese engineer.
I don't understand why Huawei wouldn't simply use an open source product, there are plenty of Linux-based switch systems, Cisco's OS is kind of gnarly to work with.
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Purity Of Essence (Score:1)
Chinese try to steal our secrets, but we should deny them our essence! That way we can preserve and retain our precious bodily fluids.