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Small Internet service providers are "stunned" that the Federal Communications Commission is enforcing a ban on Huawei and ZTE network gear during the ongoing pandemic.
The FCC already voted unanimously in November 2019 to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment in projects paid for by the commission's Universal Service Fund (USF). But the ban, inspired by fears that the Chinese vendors' equipment poses national security risks, is just now coming into effect, with the FCC announcing yesterday that USF money "may no longer be used to purchase, obtain, maintain, improve, modify, or otherwise support any equipment or services produced or provided by these suppliers."
The Rural Wireless Association (RWA), a trade group that represents ISPs that serve fewer than 100,000 subscribers each, said yesterday it is "stunned by [the] FCC's decision to immediately bar use of USF funds on Huawei and ZTE equipment and services during a time when it is critical to keep rural Americans connected."
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:03AM (21 children)
Good. Maybe the other ISPs will put more effort into picking equipment vendors that aren't stuffing the circuits with eavesdropping opportunities and cyberattack vectors. The fact that it's happening in the middle of the coronavirus is likely in part because the Chinese government is trying to take advantage of the situation.
China is not a friend.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:52AM (2 children)
China is China's best friend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @02:26AM (1 child)
Authoritarian regimes are nobody's friend, not even to themselves, because authoritarianism is ultimately self destructive. While there have been rare leaders such as Hannibal of Carthage, they never last very long and are always replaced by someone worse, often through murder. Democracies select for con-men, dictatorships select for psychopaths.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:53PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:17AM (7 children)
Think more, kneejerk less.
Networking gear is primarily about routing. And routing is, in turn, driven by a series of interconnected systems. You can't just magically get packets from your router to China - those packets would need to be sent. And if literally anybody noticed packets (using sniffing, checking the logs of other routers, etc, etc) being sent to China, or even any place other than exactly where they should have been sent - then that's GG. You can prove it beyond a doubt, replicate it, and Huawei is dead. But, lo and behold, not a single person has ever managed to this. And there's damn sure 0 doubt all of our intelligence agencies have been trying to do so endlessly to make sure only they can spy on us.
This is just destroying the free market for the sake of the trade wars. And in general I'm not really against protectionism but only when it benefits the nation and the consumer. In this case this will likely only benefit non-Chinese hardware providers and result in a greater cost to all Americans.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:34AM (6 children)
Weren't there a number of "unexplainable" incidents of that thing in the last few years? Coincidentally, not one case of misrouting through any other country.
Understand it and remember it well: your love for China is unrequited. The relationship is abusive.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:39AM (5 children)
That has NOTHING to do with routers but BGP and lazy configurations by lazy admins.
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-pakistan-knocked-youtube-offline-and-how-to-make-sure-it-never-happens-again/ [cnet.com]
But with your bias, I don't expect you to recognize reality of fail ISP policies "all the way down" in not managing their networks allowing these BGP hijacks to continue to happen. Most top level ISPs already fixed these, but we still have hijacks all the time.
https://labs.ripe.net/Members/vasileios_kotronis/artemis-an-open-source-tool-for-detecting-bgp-hijacking-in-real-time [ripe.net]
https://twitter.com/bgpstream [twitter.com]
https://bgpstream.com/ [bgpstream.com]
I'm not even that AC, but you're mind is clouded by propaganda. Rationality out the window.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:27AM (4 children)
Are the "reeducation" camps propaganda, or are they real? Is the "social credit" system propaganda, or real? What you say?
If one is of a "wrong" ethnicity, or thinking "wrong" thoughts, or reading "wrong" books, or anything, their existence becomes miserable and likely short. Is that what you want to happen to people?
Even if they are paying you now, you are only a tool. Especially if you are not Han born. Tools are used, broken, and discarded.
(Score: 4, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:44PM (3 children)
And those have to do with routing the packets... exactly how?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:18PM (2 children)
And you are born yesterday and do not understand.
Dude, you are playacting too heavily; suspension of disbelief gets stretched past breaking point, and a certain quote comes to mind:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:59PM (1 child)
The way the Chinese government treats its people is such a concern to the vast multinational corporation I work for, that they have closed down their plants in China and walked away from the extra billions in profit they have been making.
Oh, wait, no they haven't, because why would they? They don't care and neither did you before Trump started using China as a distraction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @02:34AM
I cared long before Trump, but boycotting China has long been difficult. It often comes down to 'buy some item made in China, buy it 'made locally' from Chinese sources (read: Chinese made label locally applied to Chinese made product) or do without. And that is before we get into crooked importers that relabel known defective Chinese products as coming from other countries. That last one only tends to come out when enough people die from it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:02AM (8 children)
I've yet to see transfer logs or packet dumps supporting these allegations. Looking up "huawei disclosure exploit", all I'm reading is the usual firmware bugs and patches. There aren't any technical paper suggesting malicious backdoors or unusual conduct beyond the industry standard practices when it comes to security.
So, feel free to cite actual evidence to the contrary. Otherwise, you're just regurgitating propaganda.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by inertnet on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:38AM (7 children)
That's what I've been wondering about. This is a conspiracy theory, but although it keeps coming up as reason for the ban, I've never seen proof of government backdoors in Huawei equipment. This makes me think that the American government knows about backdoors that they don't want the public to know about, so the USA can use these backdoors themselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:00PM (1 child)
More likely it's just lies, and this is part of the trade war. That makes a bit of sense, but it's no excuse for jerking people around with quick deadlines.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:44PM
Agree that this is just part of the trade war but define quick deadlines. What's the ISPs doing between November 2019 and now? Nothing but hope that FCC will reverse the decision? TFA didn't say how long the RWA is asking for.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:42PM (3 children)
No. If there were any backdoors, NSA would at very least burn ONE to show everyone how evil China is. But nothing. So the logic is that none exist. This has been the result of MI5 (or whatever) review. Same for German review.
If you want backdoors, look no further than the CA (Certificate Authority) system. You don't need to do weird shit to intercept and manipulate traffic on your target if you can just own the CA against your target. But that has nothing to do with Huawei.
The reality is that Huawei is providing good-enough equipment for much cheaper prices and someone realized that it's not just shoe-laces and tube socks that they've outsourced. So instead of actually investing in your country (which is what China has done though it's education system), US just starts to play the bully. The sad thing is that China's political system is more thin-skinned than Trump's face makeup and they can't capitalize on the retard in the White House. Anyone criticizing "anything China" results in boxing-diplomacy from Beijing. That's not how US became a superpower and it's not how China will either. China, for what it's worth, has MOSLTY squandered Huawei technical advantage and COMPLETELY squandered their COVID advantage by having no effective leadership. China is becoming dominated by Xi Xin Ping - they do what the "leader" tells them instead of what is good for China...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:21PM
> China is becoming dominated by Xi Xin Ping - they do what the "leader" tells them instead of what is good for China.
Yes - this is 100% my read too.
Any organization, even down to small groups, that is fundamentally abusive is bound to fail. Think about yourself in that kind of situation - are you bringing your best self? No, you're covering your ass and giving mandatory minimum. To "the boss" it looks like incompetence which further detaches him from reality (evidence of his superiority). One day.... boom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @03:21AM
If backdoors that the NSA could exploit do exist it is less likely the U.S. would ban these routers since the government would consider the fact that they can exploit them a good thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:55PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @03:27AM
I remember when they kept saying that Russia was interfering with the elections. The big media narrative kept changing. At one time it was that they were doing it through propaganda. Counter argument to that is if Russia exercises their free speech and such speech does affect the opinions of voters isn't that exactly what America is supposed to encourage?
At another time it was that the elections were hacked. Of course there was never any evidence/proof to this but that never stopped the media from claiming it's true. and why is election infrastructure that can be hacked over the Internet in such a way as to allow the results to be changed even connected to the Internet? and how do you know that the elections weren't hacked in both directions and such hacking was a wash to begin with? I mean, there is no evidence of hacking to begin with so what evidence is there to indicate what direction is was hacked or if it was hacked in both directions so as to cancel each other out.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:28AM
If that's a concern then why would anyone still be using US-made gear? As Snowden showed, that's stuffed with US government backdoors and spying capabilities.
Oddly enough, the same stuff that has yet to be discovered in Chinese gear, despite e.g. the UK having an entire infosec division dedicated to doing nothing but picking over Huawei and similar networking equipment.