I don't think it's defending chinese companies as much as it is highlighting that companies on both sides are susceptible to more or less the same type of government control.
I personally think it's something worth mentioning when it's the most common reason cited for avoiding a chinese company.
You think the types of governmental control are the same between US and China? It seems clear that at least a few US corporations successfully resist meddling attempts.
Yet we have photos and video of US “customs” intercepting Cisco shipments and loading backdoored firmware or tampering with the hardware. They boast about it.
If it came to a war, the US and China are both going to shut down whatever communications channels their “enemies” are using. This is just one of the reasons that US DoD is so interested in SpaceX’s StarLink.
> Yet we have photos and video of US “customs” intercepting Cisco shipments and loading backdoored firmware or tampering with the hardware. They boast about it.
Having your shipments intercepted en-route by spies is very different than directly cooperating with those spies. None of those interceptions required cooperation by Cisco.
Apple has also famously resisted government demands to develop a backdoor for its hardware. IIRC, all indications were that the government's demands would have been rejected by the court system had the case progressed far enough to provide a definitive answer.
Cisco complained! That does so much... a customer getting a backdoored router doesn't really care if Huawei consented to adding the backdoor or Cisco didn't, they still get a backdoor.
Huawei says, in public, that it's important to their reputation to be known to ship un-backdoored devices. Cisco says the exact same thing.
What we think happened: Cisco complained to the government ... Apple resisted government demands.
What really happened: Intelligence Community: "So, we'll demand you backdoor devices, we'll intercept a few and modify them, and then you'll public complain and resist, and then after the media frenzy has died down..."
You pretty much have no idea what's happening in China. These companies are not happy at all to cooperate believe me. Jack Ma has expressed this many times, as much as he could without getting in bad terms with his own government. These companies are playing around in order not to comply with the government (which is exactly what US companies are doing as well). Pressure from the public or from other countries should get these companies some leverage when negotiating with the gov.
Exactly. iCloud Master Key? Done, no VPN in App Store? Done. List of Banned Keyboards in App Store? Done. iMessages, I assume is still encrypted, but China don't give a damn about it as long as they can get it via iCloud.
Apple was publicly able to say no, but what happened in private?
In fact TLAs would want it to appear that they'd been rebuffed -- there's not much point in them having access to devices that no one will use because they know about that access.
Apple has a vested interest in being honest and transparent about this specifically because nobody would trust them if it was discovered that they'd been secretly cooperating with everything in private while denying it in public. A revelation like that would literally ruin them as a company, and that's generally not the end goal for most companies.
As someone in Europe, I don't think the Chinese government has much of a reach, or even interest, as far as myself goes. I don't like them, but they're more regionally oriented.
Whereas the U.S. government regularly meddles around the globe, no matter where you are.
I don't think they are regionally oriented. If recent attacks on European aerospace intellectual property have shown anything it's that the Chinese government is determined to undermine any foreign technology sector that surpasses its own.
IMO this "attack on intellectual property" is probably used to create their own world class technology. The USA attacked European IP centuries ago to build its own industry.
Probably South Korea and Japan and any other advanced country did the same in the past to learn and to advance ASAP. The world has become a better place because of it.
But compare attacks on IP with politically relevant incidents like these:
You seem to be advocating for the end of all European intellectual property rules. Do you think that European businesses should give up trying to protect their industrial secrets all? I'm guessing you'd say not but that's just a guess.
Maybe the world would be better off but unless that's reciprocated by those Chinese companies creating world class technology based on European work then it's just suicide for European industry.
If Chinese companies are able to steal industrial secrets that allow them to produce better cars cheaper than say VW or BMW that might be very good for the world but not so great for European jobs.
You might be fine with that but I, personally, am not.
You are right that I am against European intellectual property and intellectual property in general.
The industry should be open for or even leading modern lifestyle trends of rich modern free societies. In particular, I think these EU politics are insane and extremely costly and prohibitive and detrimental too a modern society:
Poverty is detrimental to everyone and everything except slave holders and wage slavery.
A rich neighbor is better than a poor neighbor.
Technology removes poverty.
EU manufacturing has been transferred to China because of competition by low wages. As China advances, the people in China will hopefully demand a better quality of life instead of engaging in competition by low wage and low quality of life.
I am European and I hope that Europe will benefit the world by proposing a good lifestyle for modern wealthy societies and related products. I doubt that IP and keeping the rest of the world poorer and less developed is economically and technically and morally the right approach.
Unlike most physical goods, information can benefit everyone at almost no additional cost.
The sooner China and any other country can advance science and world class technology, the better for everyone. Europe will then "steal" from them.
If Chinese companies can produce products like cars and solar panels that help to fight climate change and air pollution and destruction of the environment for fossil fuel then they deserve their profits even more while VW and BMW do not.
> The employee, Roy Jones, 49, who was let go by the hotel giant, has revealed to the Wall Street Journal handled social media accounts from his desk at a customer engagement center in Omaha, Nebraska.
> According to WSJ, Jones says he had no idea that he would lose his $14 per hour job after "liking a tweet".
> > Friends of Tibet congratulate global hotel chain #Marriott International for listing #Tibet as a country along with #HongKong and #Taiwan. pic.twitter.com/SXKWb20v3e— Friends of Tibet (@friendsoftibet) January 9, 2018
> Jones told the WSJ he wasn’t aware of any instructions on dealing with China. He also said he didn’t fully understand what the issue was about.
> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”
It's not the Iraq war, but it's also not something you would want to happen to you. Currently Marriott employees are on strike... because of wages, nobody gives a shit about that guy. He's just gone, maybe he has another job now, maybe not, who cares.
And for what, again? For liking a tweet, which China doesn't like because they're occupying Tibet so brutally for so long now and think that gives them the right.
Though that employee had no clue what it was about, it boils down to that they want to force you to look the other way. Oh, you can know that other people are being tortured and killed, but you can't speak out, at all. So either you stay ignorant of what you can't help, or you have this on your mind.
But this not just another thing in life, like being disallowed entry into one country of hundreds. A person who is denied the right to speak out against the brutalization of others, is being brutalized themselves every second of their life from here on out. The fact it's in a way we don't recognize and internalize instead, make part of ourselves, makes it so much worse to me. I can't accept that others accept it, their acceptance is futile. They can have the world, they cannot have me.
> Mercedes, which is owned by Daimler, (DDAIF) ran afoul of China's stance when it paired a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama with a photo of one of its luxury sedans on Instagram -- a social media platform that is banned in China.
> "Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open," the quote read.
> The ad was posted on Monday and garnered nearly 90,000 likes before Mercedes deleted it the following day, according to a screenshot posted by Chinese state media.
> The Global Times, a state-run newspaper that often strikes a nationalistic tone, criticized Mercedes, saying the company was quick to respond to the incident but shouldn't make such mistakes in the first place.
> Mercedes issued a statement in Chinese about the incident on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter (TWTR), offering a "sincere apology" three separate times.
They posted a "quote commonly attributed to the Daila Llama", without mentioning the name Dalai Llama, on their instagram, which isn't even accessible in China. And then they apologized three times after deleting it.
Don't just ask what X or Y are currently doing, ask what X and Y are. These two examples aren't the only ones, and I bet you, everything else staying as it is, they won't be the last. If you give totalitarianism the little finger, it cannot help but want the hand, just like a scorpion must sting.
> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.
-- Hannah Arendt
That's why the Iraq war "predicted Snowden and killbots", if you just squint right.
I think the opposite is also true, if you want to control your people completely, you need to control more than "your" people. That both elements in China and elements in the US (and countries in the EU and many others, let's say all countries for the sake of simplicity) want that is of no help to, uhh, decent folk anywhere. They don't benefit from being used as cannon fodder against this other battleship that uses "its" people as cannon fodder. All oppressive regimes can make an agreement before you can say "oh shit", and then focus on subduing their own populations with the means they built while having other nations as an excuse.
So the fact that "we" or "others" are "doing it too" should make the alarm bells louder, not more quiet.
> Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
Every time China is critized, the US is brought up. Maybe just to "highlight" something, but here it takes up several pages before any actual discussion of the story. Every time the US is critized, China isn't brought up. Wouldn't that make great sense, too? "Snowden says the NSA X" "yeah, but China does Y!". I don't think I've seen that once, whereas "but the US!" is a constant companion.
I agree that responsibility matters. Like, I have opinions on things going on in the US or China, but I'm much more responsible for things my government does, or what companies I support with money do.
And in this case, it's even fair to point out the hipocrisy of the US asking allies to drop Huawei for reasons smart allies should also drop US produced things for. But then again, we know all that, and we actually do have threads about that stuff as well, so why not also have one about Huawei.
> as it is highlighting that companies on both sides are susceptible to more or less the same type of government control.
Except they aren't. Just the fact that you mention "both" sides shows your ignorance. The alternative to Huawei, as I have mentioned, is not an American corporation it is a European one (Ericsson or Nokia). This isn't a case of the American government forcing allies to abandon Huawei so an American corporation can profit.
It is my understanding that Nokia _acquired_ Alcatel-Lucent, and the only significant part of that conglomerate still in the US is Bell Labs (which are also now owned by Nokia.)
I personally think it's something worth mentioning when it's the most common reason cited for avoiding a chinese company.