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Verizon is following AT&T's lead and cancelling plans to sell Huawei's Mate 10 Pro smartphone that boasts support for the upcoming super-fast 5G network, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday.
Verizon's decision is reportedly based on political pressure from the US government, which is seeing a reinvigorated fear of spying from China as US regulators urged an investigation of Chinese-made telecom equipment in December 2017. It's the same reason AT&T dropped its deal with Huawei to offer the Mate 10 Pro on January 8.
Huawei's Mate 10 Pro with 5G networking capabilities seemingly falls under the category of Chinese-made telecom equipment under investigation, as the company has been accused of having ties with the Chinese government.
Previously: U.S. Lawmakers Urge AT&T to Cut Ties With Huawei
Related: U.S. Government Reportedly Wants to Build a 5G Network to Thwart Chinese Spying
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:16AM
processors and user-servicable signing keys, including the ability to wipe the vendor/oem signing key.
And mandate source code for the firmware.
Oh right... if these hard choices were made, people might start asking the US to do the same for US manufactured hardware/firmware and some stuff might come out that would put the US Government and its corporate cronies in an unflattering light...
Seriously, if we want secure hardware we need to start pushing governments worldwide for truly open systems with user replaceable encryption and open and documented firmware/software at all levels of the stack. It won't stop shit like spectre, meltdown, or intentionally designed hardware exploits, but it will go a long ways towards helping reduce vectors of attack, and hopefully allow the hardware to be secure in a subset of usages without threat of remote access or exploit.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday January 31 2018, @10:32AM (2 children)
I know we do this every time anyone mentions 5G, but...
How about they sort 4G reception first? That would be far more valuable to the customer. Other than as a replacement for ordinary 'wired' home broadband, what use is 5G? 4G can easily stream video to a phone. What's the point in more bandwidth?
5G is particularly pointless for anyone on a capped data package, which is virtually everyone.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @11:27AM (1 child)
"What's the point in more bandwidth?
5G is particularly pointless for anyone on a capped data package, which is virtually everyone."
The point is, now you can blow through the cap in 10 minutes instead of needing to wait an hour or two! Do I hear "weaponized autoplay video ads"?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 01 2018, @11:24AM
A valid concern, but it'll probably be ordinary ads that do it, not malicious intent.
Some otherwise-decent mobile websites still have autoplaying videos, and browsers don't block them! e.g. TheOnion.com on Safari for iPhone.
A thought occurs: what if Chrome for Android had an on-by-default policy of refusing to download more than 1MB of data for a website? Perhaps tune it more finely, say, no more than 500KB of JavaScript, but no cap on images or video.
(Score: 2) by Dale on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:43PM (1 child)
What is the big deal? Are they afraid the Chinese are going to get the same information they are collecting on everyone already? Are they sad they can't sell it to them? They created the data vacuum thing a reality. How can they be upset when others do the same thing?
I am not defending the concept at all. I'm just pointing out the pot getting into a name calling contest with the kettle with all their fear mongering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @06:24PM
Consider what we created in World War II. We make nuclear weapons. That doesn't mean we want the whole rest of the world to have them. No, it isn't unethical or wrong for the rest of the world to want them, but we still aren't OK with that. We want the advantage, and we openly admit this.
That continues to today. It wouldn't be unethical or wrong for Haiti or the Bahamas to get nuclear weapons. We still don't want that.