CBC News has found Huawei's financial ties to Canadian universities total more than $56 million. But there are no federal guidelines around how these investments should be managed and disclosed, and that raises questions about who will own the findings of the research and the resulting patents.
[...] "Frankly, the government of Canada has fallen down catastrophically," says Christopher Parsons, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which studies the way information is used, and misused, across technologies. "No one knows exactly what they should be doing."
Parsons, who is also the managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, says the government's failure to set out policy guidelines for private sector funding has made it difficult for universities, which rely on that funding to stay at the forefront of wireless research and, in turn, attract top students.
Huawei says it is one of the biggest funders of academic research in Canada. Google, Microsoft, Rogers and Bell are among the others but declined to provide CBC News with any figures. Like Huawei, they are not required to disclose funding details.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/huawei-academic-funding-in-canada-1.5372310
Canadian universities pwned by big corp: does anyone else remember when universities and governments did research without the financial 'help' of corporations?
Related Stories
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/huawei-sues-fcc-to-stop-ban-on-huawei-gear-in-us-funded-
Huawei has sued the Federal Communications Commission over the agency's order that bans Huawei equipment in certain government-funded telecom projects.
[...] The FCC voted unanimously on November 22 to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment in projects paid for by the commission's Universal Service Fund (USF). The order will affect many small telecom providers that rely on the companies' network gear.
[...] "The US government has never presented real evidence to show that Huawei is a national security threat," Song said. "That's because this evidence does not exist. When pushed for facts, they respond that 'disclosing evidence might also undermine US national security.' This is complete nonsense."
[...] "We've built networks in places where other vendors would not go. They were too remote, or the terrain was difficult, or there just wasn't a big enough population," he said. "In the US, we sell equipment to 40 small wireless and wireline operators. They connect schools, hospitals, farms, homes, community colleges, and emergency services."
Hoftstra University law professor Julian Ku said that "even a small [Huawei] victory in the case, one that makes the FCC go and start the process over again, would be a huge victory for them," according to The New York Times. But it may be a difficult case for Huawei to win because US courts usually give federal agencies "a tremendous amount of deference," Ku said.
Previously:
Huawei Funds $56M in Academic Research in Canada. That Has Some Experts Concerned
How China Is Building A World-Beating Phone Network
FCC Tells US Telcos: Buy Chinese Kit And You Won't See Another Dime From Us
American Giants Get 90 Days To Wrap Up Deals With 'Dangerous' Huawei
Huawei's First Google-Free Phone Stripped And Searched: Repair Not Too Painful... Once You're In
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Urges Europe to Take a Stand Against Huawei
Microsoft President Says US Government Isn't Being Open About Huawei Ban
Huawei: ARM Cortex-A77 Cores Would Shorten Battery Life
Huawei Might Put its IOT OS on Mobile Phones After All
Huawei Announces HarmonyOS, a Smartphone OS and Android Alternative
Huawei Doesn't See Open Source as the Fix for Spying Accusations (but They Should)
Huawei Reportedly Helped North Korea Build Out 3G Network in Secret
Huawei's Android Alternative Lives on... for IoT
What Huawei To Go: Hundreds Of Chinese Tech Giant's US Workers To Get Pink Slip
Trump Administration Will Loosen Restrictions Against Huawei
Huawei Soldiers on, Announces Nova 5 and Kirin 810
Huawei Blacklisting Predicted to Cause DRAM Prices to Drop 15%
NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Huawei
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:06PM (4 children)
They did research with the financial "help" of the military and intelligence agencies. In fact, they still do.
Personally, I prefer corporate sponsorship of research. They are usually interested less in offensive applications.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:55PM
Butbut this is the Chicoms engaging in the capitalist model of research and science! We can't have those commie bastards becoming a powerful capitalist country without paying Danegeld to the US empire!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @02:20AM
Unless of course in some countries/regions, separation of corporations and government goes from a gamut of none existent to officially so but practically not - which basically boils down to the same thing, military/intelligence agency sponsored if you follow the bread crumb to source.
Folks, despots, warlords and drug barons hire professionals to hide their money trail and blood stains but they are all amateurs when compared to the likes of China.
Continue to think that Chinese MNCs like Huawei are purely corporate equivalent of the western world like the Apples and Microsofts where there exist some side channel government arm-twisting mandates instead of actually being baked into the formalization of the corporate vision form day 1 and one day you'll be in for a very surprising revelation.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday December 02 2019, @09:29AM
Yeah but this is Huawei and it's been nearly a week since the last Huawei-bashing story has run so there's a need for some filler. In the meantime please pay no attention to all the CIA-sponsored research [wikipedia.org] that's going on. You can trust them, they've never done anything dubious, it's Huawei you need to focus on.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday December 03 2019, @04:39PM
Based on what evidence? Once an organization has reached a significant enough size, they're gonna be open to all avenues of raking in the dough. Offensive, Defensive, Exploitative, or otherwise. Google, the darling of the tech community, the "Don't be Evil" organization, phasing out the "Don't be evil" motto. Is a nice example.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:08PM (6 children)
Finally someone coming to grips with the harsh reality that he who pays also gives the orders? Or in other words: if you want to give the orders, you better be prepared to pay for it?
Naaaahhhh, that would be common sense. Much more likely the Very Mighty King Next Door said JUMP! Next question is going to be: how high?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:39PM (5 children)
I mean, it's Canada, not the US, so I can't give my "decaying empire" shpiel, but in the Information age, this is what a decaying empire would look like.
Historically "decaying empire" leads directly to "collapsing empire thrashing around starting huge wars it can't win"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:52PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 01 2019, @11:46PM (3 children)
Maybe so, but you do get tiresome after a while anyway...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 02 2019, @04:08AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @12:19PM (1 child)
What's prostate lands, precious?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 02 2019, @04:07PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:17PM (8 children)
Impressive: three out of the last four articles are bashing China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:24PM
And not a single "bash" was illegitimate. Fuck China.
(Score: 1) by hopdevil on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:27PM (1 child)
It is Thanksgiving weekend in the states, news is slow so propaganda flows. I don't blame soylent for it..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:19PM
None of those stories was propaganda. China really does have rampant research fraud and drops rocket boosters on buildings.
Why shouldn't academics complain about Huawei funding? They complain about oil, Israel, etc.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:15PM
As Angelica Pickles says, if the shoe hurts, wear it. And this from someone who grew up in basically China's US landing zone (Flushing, NYC) and has an ethnically Chinese (but nationally Malaysian) girlfriend. The PRC is going to create a technological dystopia *and export it.* There is no solution to this that doesn't involve hundreds of megadeaths.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:49PM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @03:52AM (1 child)
The question is who gets the patents. Remember that the Universities are government subsidized, so there are legitimate questions about whether or not Canadian tax money should be supporting their work, never mind if Huawei is claiming exclusive use of the results.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday December 02 2019, @04:03AM
Canada can always choose not to subsidize their universities, if they don't like the consequences of those subsidies. It's not Huawei's job to police Canadian government policy on universities.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 02 2019, @12:29PM
One needs to ramp up the rhetoric well before Christmas to build up an China-adverse reaction and make the population rallied and less inclined to blame trump for the pains it's gonna feel once the tariff wars resume [theguardian.com].
With all the de-peaching or whatevs of his orangeness, have you forgotten those tariffs already?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Captival on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:17PM (3 children)
Now that the Clintons and Bidens aren't making obscene profits in China, we must all be extremely concerned about their influence. Same thing with Russia, who was our good buddy right up until November 2016, where they suddenly became the worst country ever and the root of all evil. But not before, when they were handing out million dollar "birthday gifts" to certain Democrats. That was okay. Nothing to see here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:34PM
:42:
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @07:17PM
Once again, a republitard managing to put the blame of every single bad thing in the Universe on democrats.
This isn't even entertaining anymore.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday December 02 2019, @07:20PM
Turns out invading a neighbor and attacking our elections can have an effect on friendships.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:49PM (8 children)
Seriously, I don't for a moment think the Google or Apple or any other tech giant is more or less moral than Huawei, especially since all of these companies have been willing to bend to the whims of various governments. And obviously every phone on the market is manufactured by Chinese companies anyhow so changing the label is irrelevant. And of course the US security establishment is hacking them all too.
I've long since given up worrying about surveillance. That boat has sailed, and we're pretty much powerless to stop it.
We have two Huawei phones and they are hands down the best I've owned. (incuding Moto, Pixel, BlackBerry, Samsung.)
Right now Dog+World is in a rage about China, but it wasn't that long ago that Dog+World was in a rage about Turkey, or Syria, or North Korea, or Venezuela or.... A year from now China will be forgotten and there will be a new Blood Enemy of the US.
In the meantime ask yourself this: what would happen if China just stopped exporting any electronics to the US?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @07:00PM (6 children)
China has been an enemy for a long time. It's just that Americans have a short attention span and dependency issues.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Sunday December 01 2019, @07:39PM (1 child)
"Oceania is at war with Eurasia. They have always been at war with Eurasia. "
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @05:21AM
You've been retarded since before birth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @08:52PM (3 children)
>China has been an enemy for a long time.
They were an ally in WWII
they helped the opposition in wars on their border; Korea & Vietnam but that’s to be expected.
It is only recently that they’ve become an economic competitor and with the South China Sea, a military threat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @02:35AM (2 children)
Because they were the enemy of _the_ enemy. However their basic government model is at odds with the democratic world, so in that sense they are an enemy. They don't adhere to a lot of the basic human rights, and in some instances violate them to the extreme.
They're only becoming relevant because they are now in a much more economic stable ground and is also starting on expansion strategies, in various forms, through out south east asia. Their road and belt policy, i.e. one belt one road, is just one of that form.
If you look at the timelines of how this came about it is almost too perfect to be accidental. They were an economically/socially poor country, by western standards, even though they are resource rich, coming out of WW2 and under the communist regime. After Mao, they slowly open up and with the help of the western world built out their economic empire to only be second to none and still improving. Now with that foundation, the rallying of President Xi to reign in that build up of wealth and economic presence into more central government control is the perfect move to lead into their expansion plans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @05:40AM (1 child)
I think this is missing some key points. The basic Chinese governmental model is democratic. Villages elect representatives. These representatives generally stand for about 2,000 people and have quite substantial federal granted power. These representatives then elect other representatives than go on to elect e.g. the president. Interestingly enough this model tends to be quite stable. I think this is because each representative is able to do a much better and appropriate job. The president can focus on big picture and long-term goals, without worrying about demagoguery to keep himself in office. And the low level representatives actually have some clue what can help their people when they're so localized. In the US each of our federal representatives in the House now stands for more than 700,000 people. That's absurd. Yet if we did have some strongly representative system, we'd probably end up going the exact path as China since many thousands of representatives would just become complete chaos.
The reason we're turning against China is because we're losing power. Our power is fundamentally derived from our economy. Even things like our military are just a function of our economy. The things you're seeing today such as countries and corporations starting to turn towards China all come down to the exact same thing - economy. This [wikipedia.org] is a table of effective economic size. China's economy is already 30% larger and rapidly growing. For instance this year they saw slower than expected growth (due to the trade wars) of only 6%. We saw faster than expected growth of 2%. That's a 40% relative decline by decade, more like 50% due to compounding gains. Even India is now expected to surpass the United States sometime near a decade from now.
And at the same time this is happening our elections are becoming ever more polarized, destructive, and full of demagoguery. Politicians promising things they can't deliver, promising things that they can deliver but that they undoubtedly know will harm the country, so forth and so on. It's a shit show. Our nation is strong enough, and people content enough, that I think any suggestions of collapse are greatly exaggerated. But I do think we've already entered into a transition point where our global dominance will just gradually decline. Obviously those in power see this happening and are doing all they can to reverse it. You can't effectively change our system, so they're working to undermine China's. Expect to see the exact same thing applied to India over the coming years since I think India will probably lean more towards China than the west. However, I don't think our dominance ending is really a bad thing at all. I think a multi-polar world is probably the way to go. If everybody thinks the same way, how do you know if you're wrong? When you have many different systems, people can see which system is working better and which system is working worse. And as all of the world economically develops, people themselves can even vote with their feet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @06:08AM
But in China despite them having elections and representatives there's only One Party. In the Great USA there are Two Parties (the others aren't allowed to count[1]). That's 100% better!
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/how-republicans-democrats-prevent-independent-candidates-getting-ballot-ncna866466 [nbcnews.com]
https://newrepublic.com/article/146884/america-stuck-two-parties [newrepublic.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 02 2019, @12:36PM
You mean Trump's gonna lose the 2020 elections, all those trade wars cease and tariffs are reverted?
'Cause otherwise you won't be able to forget China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Sunday December 01 2019, @10:04PM
"Canadian universities pwned by big corp: does anyone else remember when universities and governments did research without the financial 'help' of corporations?"
In the past they just got the benefits of the taxpayer paid for research with next to no direct contribution. It appears they only get a partial subsidy on our dime these days....
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @12:04AM (2 children)
Huh. Didn't see that coming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @01:57AM (1 child)
I almost forgot. Is she still being detained?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02 2019, @04:03AM
Last I heard she was fighting extradition to the USA where she faces bank fraud charges. The trial starts in January.