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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 16 2020, @09:59AM (1 child)
Perhaps your assessment is accurate. Someone in China has the ability to manufacture the molds we need, to the standards we want. We're just dealing with the wrong suppliers.
Then again, there IS a lag between the time China's IP thieves acquire trade secrets and whatnot, and the time that those secrets are implemented. There is another lag between implementation, and successful implementation.
Someone, somewhere, probably has some kind of a formula to figure out what those lag times are. I basically pulled my twenty years out of thin air. I can partly justify my twenty years, with the fact that it takes time for a concept to roll from our engineers, through corporate, then back out to us, in the manufacturing end of things. I'm talking months, to years, inside of a cooperative environment, with no outside, unwelcome influences. (Unless of course, we consider corporate headquarters to be hostile. ;^) )
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday February 17 2020, @04:45AM
Lets not forget that Steve Jobs tried to manufacture in the US, twice; and failed both times. It was not only a question of price - he simply was not able to do it. The was no - and perhaps is no - technology that would allow him to build Mac and iPhone here.
I do believe though that if he were forced to manufacture in the US, he would come up with required automation. It would be way more difficult and longer process, but everybody would win eventually.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.