President Trump yesterday signed a defense funding bill that included a sweeping ban on the US government using technology supplied by Chinese telecommunications giants ZTE and Huawei. The bill also includes a narrower ban on using surveillance gear provided by Chinese companies Hytera Communications, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, or Dahua Technology for national security applications.
The legislation directs federal agencies to stop using the Chinese-made hardware within two years. If that proves impractical, an agency can apply for a waiver to permit a longer phase-out period.
Obviously, being banned from selling to the US government is a significant blow to these companies. But overall the bill actually represents something of a reprieve for ZTE. Back in June, the US Senate passed a version of the bill that would have re-imposed an export ban that would have been a de facto death sentence for ZTE because ZTE is heavily dependent on components like Qualcomm chips and Google's Android operating system.
Previously: Verizon Cancels Plans to Sell Huawei Phone Due to U.S. Government Pressure
U.S. Intelligence Agency Heads Warn Against Using Huawei and ZTE Products
The U.S. Intelligence Community's Demonization of Huawei Remains Highly Hypocritical
Huawei CEO Still Committed to the U.S. Market
Rural Wireless Association Opposes U.S. Government Ban on Huawei and ZTE Equipment
ZTE Suspends Operations Due to U.S. Ban (UPDATED)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @09:08PM (1 child)
Back when Huawei cloud app was leaking positional data to their clouds in China, some guy posted a sniffer report of how the Chinese servers were seeing two dozen kilobyte per hour of GPS and wifi hotspots data while the American Google servers are seeing megabytes of everything from how many seconds you're looking through your gallery pictures and what kind of spelling errors you're making when chatting with your co-workers and family... Also worth noting how we had Samsung TVs leaking raw audio captures and no one even bothered mentioning anything about not putting those in boardrooms or command tends...
Suffice to say, Huawei is definitely being targeted over their refusal to backdoor. And no it's not a Trump thing. It's been going on since the Bush years and throughout the Obama administration as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @10:17AM
I think you mean refusal to give the Americanos a backdoor. I am sure they give their chinee masters all the backdoors they want.