The US is charging Huawei with racketeering
Ratcheting up its pressure campaign against Huawei and its affiliates, the Department of Justice and the FBI announced today that it has brought 16 charges against Huawei in a sprawling case with major geopolitical implications (you can read the full 56-page indictment here).
Huawei is being charged with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute. The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei's business.
An example of this activity is provided in the indictment. Described as "Company 1," Huawei is alleged to have stolen source code for Company 1's routers, which it then used in its own products.
[...] Huawei is also alleged to have engaged in more simple forms of industrial espionage. While at a trade show in Chicago, a Huawei-affiliated engineer "... was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company ... removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside. Individual-3 wore a badge listing his employer as 'Weihua,'
[...] Together, the indictment lists multiple examples of Huawei's alleged conspiracy to pilfer U.S. intellectual property.
It's a good thing that the United States would never do 'bad things' or act in a manner like this.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday February 15 2020, @08:37PM (2 children)
First thing I did when I got my first EEPROM reader and SOIC8 adapter was to read and mount my ISP provided router's flash on my linux workstation and notice it's all FOSS, BusyBox and barely obfuscated OpenWRT bits and pieces.
Btw, second thing I did was to publish the undocumented telnet user name and password (that was naturally stored in plain text) only to realize someone beat me to it by 3 days :/
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15 2020, @10:47PM (1 child)
It would be doing a copyright infringement suit in international court against china for all the open source software, demanding the GPL required distribution. If this was done across China's technology industry with import bans for any technology failing to meet the requirements, it would do effectively what they claim to want while not making it look (as) vindictive. Furthermore, once China either aquiesced and ensured the data was available, or didn't and made it clear they were against intellectual property enforcement, the US could then pilfer china's technology without authorization.
Really though, as someone said in a comment I read a while back: China is for manufacturing parts cheaply that require hand finishing in your country of origin. That way when they copy your design, as they will, all they will be offering the customer is unfinished garbage that doesn't clutter up your own support lines because yours is finished and certified locally.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday February 16 2020, @02:52AM
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