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China The Internet Communications Government

China and Huawei's Dystopian 'New IP' Plan for 6G (justsecurity.org) 241

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this analysis from Just Security: Huawei's plans for 6G and beyond make U.S. concerns over 5G look paltry: Huawei is proposing a fundamental internet redesign, which it calls "New IP," designed to build "intrinsic security" into the web. Intrinsic security means that individuals must register to use the internet, and authorities can shut off an individual user's internet access at any time. In short, Huawei is looking to integrate China's "social credit," surveillance, and censorship regimes into the internet's architecture...

To avoid scrutiny of New IP's shortcomings, Huawei has circumvented international standards bodies where experts might challenge the technical shortcomings of the proposal. Instead, Huawei has worked through the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), where Beijing holds more political sway...

Huawei dominance on New IP and 6G would not only create a less free, less interoperable internet, it would pave the way for authoritarian governments to gain expanded say over future changes to the internet for years to come.

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China and Huawei's Dystopian 'New IP' Plan for 6G

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    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      I'm sure the British gov' would love to sneak this in, it's pretty obvious all secret services hate any encryption they can't break or don't have the keys for. Right now in the UK civil servants and no doubt their pork barrel appointees can spy on your internet usage without a court order if they simply 'suspect' you may be committing a fraud (or made a mistake on some form). Rather than contact you to check info, instead they'll spy on your Facebook conversations etc.

    • by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Sunday April 18, 2021 @07:04AM (#61286072)
      I don't think Huawei cares, this is mostly an imaginary bogeyman. Firstly, it has nothing to do with 6G. Secondly, it's an abstract research proposal, a bit like the bazillion proposals for what would eventually become IPv6. Similar real-names proposals have been made by other companies that aren't Huawei, e.g. Fecebook and Google. Finally, it'll never come to fruition. After quarter of a century we haven't even got IPv6 deployed, what chance do you think some random vendor's brain fart will have of being adopted? If this had come from anything other than Huawei, no-one would ever have noticed.
  • by Spacejock ( 727523 ) on Sunday April 18, 2021 @03:04AM (#61285676)
    It's coming. You know it is. An IP address for life, used on everything from passports to currency transactions.
    • One thing I've been meditating on is the considerable complexity and record keeping required in the modern age (nevermind the time sink to attend to it all).

      And it seems that there will be an ever growing caste that simply cannot keep track of it all. That can't decipher the legalese of their healthcare plan or cell phone contract.

      And they will be doomed to the fringes, no doubt, but there will be a tipping point where the fringe is the majority. And that will be ugly.

      Too much organization and bureaucracy c

    • VPNs and proxies will still always be a thing.
    • There's a flipside to that coin.

      For pretty much the history of mankind there have been 'things' that people want to access. And gatekeepers that mediate the access to those 'things'. And when the gatekeepers get too draconian there have been middlemen who sidestep the power of the gatekeeper.

      We already have internet 'node' gatekeepers. An example of how people sidestep those entry points would be the dark web.

      We already have absolute identification in many internet circumstances relating to finance -
    • It's coming. You know it is. An IP address for life, used on everything from passports to currency transactions.

      This makes no sense. With cell phones, I don't even have the same IP address for an hour. The world is moving the opposite direction of what you think will happen.

    • Intrinsic security means that individuals must register to use the internet, and authorities can shut off an individual user's internet access at any time.

      Some already believe in a license to access the internet [slashdot.org], so the above isn't that far fetched. As long as "social credit"* gives a person a feeling of control and superiority over another they will embrace it.

      *Moderating gives that feeling.

    • It reminds me of Right to read [gnu.org], written in 1997.

      We already have a SIN (USA) / SSN (Canada). I'm not sure why we need "yet-another-insecure-number".

  • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Sunday April 18, 2021 @03:35AM (#61285724) Homepage

    The next communication medium will be real name only, with verification. Anonymity will be portrayed as a dangerous anachronism from a benighted age. Your comments will be compiled into a score, and dip below that score and you will be cast out from society. After all, we trust experts, don't we? How do you have the standing to challenge them?

    We all cheered when the bad people were silenced, remember? A few said by defending their rights, we were defending our own. But they were mostly ignored. And here we are.

    • Not sure why this was downvoted. I mean, slashdot is a private company, right? They can do whatever they want! Almost as if company can do what they want. Imagine the possibilities! The Catholic Church can form it's own conglomerate, incorporating the Little Sisters, et al. The Holy See forming their own social media network, with their own social credit system. I mean, the CCP might whine for a bit, but given the number of Catholics/Christians in North America, do you think this idea might meet some resis
  • We should be happy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mcnster ( 2043720 ) on Sunday April 18, 2021 @03:38AM (#61285728)

    That the internet as it exists today is a distributed clusterfuck spanning most of the known universe, and wrestleable-to-the-ground by no one authority/body.

    Of course China wants to make the internet "trustable". That way they know who to arrest. The US, Russia, and every other government who's snorted enough cocaine to cover the Gobi Desert in vanilla frosting wants this as well. Ditto for the Big Five tech companies who advertise themselves as the world's public square and public fountain, then arbitrarily silence people and deny them water.

    The internet works today because by default it is an untrusted clusterfuck. This is a good thing. The people (IETF) who work everyday to keep the network from flying apart appear to have a good grasp on the Nash-Equilibrium for control versus anarchy. Whats ironic is that Huawi and the CCP proposing this trusted design-by-committee approach are two of the most un-trusted organizations on the planet.

    With respect to trust, NEVER trust anyone with a gleam in their eyes who say they want to "improve" the internet with sweeping generalizations in advance of the fact. (Mumbles something about systemd.) Rather, design the protocol, implement it, test it, and submit a Request for Comments looking back at the work done. If its a Good Idea[tm] the network engineers will implement it after its been thoroughly vetted. That's what they do. We only have to look at the 5G mess to realize that any other approach is untenable.

    So relax and make some popcorn, "New IP" will fail spectacularly. The world is just too big to cover all network Use Cases with a single "solution" (jesus, I hate that word), and too crazy to ever be trustable by default.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      Unfortunately politicians whether democratic or dictator don't like things they can control. At least dictatorships are honest about it however, whereas in democratic countries we get all sorts of Think Of The Children and similar BS and flannel in order to cover up the real intention which is control of access. In fact I'm surprised Covid hasn't been used as an excuse yet, it been used as a default reason for every other revocation of civil rights we've had in the last year here in Europe.

      • In fact I'm surprised Covid hasn't been used as an excuse yet...

        They're working on it. When pressed about Canada's horrible human rights violations, Prime Minister Trudeau said he's not going to address that - he's focused on getting Canada through Covid. How convenient.

    • by khchung ( 462899 )

      Exactly.

      Isn't decoupling with China what the US asked for? /. should celebrate and fully support China building its own IP so American ISPs can decouple from it easily.

    • That the internet as it exists today is a distributed clusterfuck spanning most of the known universe, and wrestleable-to-the-ground by no one authority/body

      Hmm, yes, I imagine the citizens of Myanmar, Ethiopia, India [hrw.org] dream of this uber internet that has no counterpart in the real physical world.

  • Ok, so this is a bad way for forcing things on people. On the otherhand, I am a fan of having a part of the internet where you cannot be anonymous. A formal internet. I bet it will be a lot more civilized.
    • by Pimpy ( 143938 )

      That already exists for many government websites and services. Many countries put out government-issued IDs that work as smartcards which are used for authenticating with government services, for example.

    • I am a fan of having a part of the internet where you cannot be anonymous. A formal internet. I bet it will be a lot more civilized.

      The last year has shown that people are willing to act rude and like trash, even when they are not anonymous.

  • So we have all forgotten Snowden and what he had to say?
    Someone is tracking you whichever way you take it.

  • by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Sunday April 18, 2021 @03:51AM (#61285740)
    including the USA, dont think for a minute that the US Government is your friend, they're not
    • >"including the USA, dont think for a minute that the US Government is your friend, they're not"

      And, yet, so many people on Slashdot continue to push for more and bigger government, especially at the Federal level to "solve all the problems." A true dichotomy.

      I don't like to think of the government as an "enemy" or "friend", at least not in the USA. More a group of huge, unwieldy, inefficient, inept, and costly organizations. Necessary, but yet also with the dire need to be constrained.

      But to equate t

  • “There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. ”
  • A person may be assigned an IP. That IP comes from a pool of numbers, and like passports, each country regulates assignment from a pool. Of course people use false ID's , use other peoples, or post under an innocents IP after wirelessly breaking into their OS or connection. Then things like VPN's Tor and Onion muck things up. Even digital certificates got canned, after CA's actually broke the rules! And in very corrupt countries, buying a passport is easy. The other trick is to build mobile phones with hea
    • > muck things up

      I'm not gonna listen to the obvious kiddie fucker. (And bomb belt owner, if from the middle-east.)

  • by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Sunday April 18, 2021 @04:50AM (#61285830)

    Huawei is proposing a fundamental internet redesign, which it calls "New IP," designed to build "intrinsic security" into the web. Intrinsic security means that individuals must register to use the internet, and authorities can shut off an individual user's internet access at any time

    No, this is incorrect. This whole New IP thingie just propagates over the Internet via copy-paste.

    I was curious, so I dug a bit deeper. This whole copy/pasted saga started from this workshop presented during the ITU meeting: https://www.itu.int/md/T17-TSA... [itu.int] - it was picked up and "analyzed" to death by scores of Internet fearmongers. I would guess that they haven't even read the original presentation.

    The original presentation does have mentions of "shutoff protocol" to protect against DDoS-es, but it also calls it "distributed" and "GDPR-compliant". There's certainly nothing about it being controlled by the government.

    And that's it. This one presentation is pretty much all we have, Huawei hasn't submitted anything actual since then. They did produce a couple more PDFs like this: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/f... [itu.int] that simply describes nothing concrete.

    • >"The original presentation does have mentions of "shutoff protocol" to protect against DDoS-es, but it also calls it "distributed" and "GDPR-compliant". There's certainly nothing about it being controlled by the government."

      Right or wrong, good or bad, GDPR was created by government and enforced by government. In the context of China (and some other countries), most everything is controlled by the government- so anything that can be controlled, will be controlled. Perhaps not across the whole world, b

  • ??? WOuldnt take much for a gov to ask either G or FB to track a persons activities.
  • The ITU makes regular attempts to kill the internet. It always starts with saying that the Internet is too chaotic and needs to be "regulated".

    Banning fast modems, charging internet by the minute, ATM and its seven layer model, and now asking individuals to register their address - the telecom industry has a long history of trying to ruin the internet. We should not give them another shot.

    • One of those is not like the other.
      The others are also mostly made-up though.
      ("Banning fast modems" ... WAT)

  • Think about it... if you're a Chinese guy running a very successful business... do you think they won't come to you and "convince" you to do their bidding?

    All the people here in their comfy armchairs who never left their safe spaces, point at "Huawei", as if it was a single person, and go "OMGliterallyHitler!", should think about how much they would grovel like spineless molluscs upon the first mere thought of threat from a government as ruthless as China's... They'd be "government-sponsoned" quicker than t

  • While the US is busy fear-mongering over 5G, other countries have, unsurprisingly, already continued on with 6G planning (incidentally, many of the same countries that were also involved in developing 5G). The fact that each country in the early days will put forward ideas that advance its own personal interests is not surprising, and almost every country tries this. To suggest that Beijing is making some kind of end-run around standards bodies and international organizations is simply nonsense. For starter

  • "To avoid scrutiny of New IP's shortcomings, Huawei has circumvented international standards bodies where experts might challenge the technical shortcomings of the proposal. Instead, Huawei has worked through the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), where Beijing holds more political sway..."

    Since the olden times, xG (3G, 4G and 5G) high level requirementes (the what) are defined by the ITU-R and ITU-T

    While the specifics (the how) are defined by Standards comitees )in the olden times, ETSI and FCC, nowadays, 3GPP).

    So, going to ITU at this stage in the game (10 years before rollout of 6G) is not a nefarious move. Is just standard procedure since 3G times.

  • If someone wants to build a protocol that is worse than what we have I suspect I won't be using it.

    I don't like the web in particular either, it's quite broken. And don't get me started on DNS. If a replacement is going to be more centralized, it better offer some really good things otherwise I'm steering clear.

  • "Misinformation" begone! Sounds perfect for the West too.

    The further upstream in the infrastructure chain we can get, the better, for making sure that only approved voices get heard.

  • It only took them 25 years to get its
  • and about IOT devices and pay per outlet fees?

"There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet." -Ambrose Bierce

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