https://www.pcmag.com/news/china-decides-iphones-pose-a-national-security-risk
Employees at some Chinese ministries must stop using iPhones before the end of September.
Employees at some Chinese ministries must stop using iPhones before the end of September.
Of course it is, for the Chinese. Listen, if it isn't a homegrown tech product, it's a threat to your national security, and even most of the homegrown ones are, regardless of what nation you're from or in. This is fact.
Agreed. Investing in local R&D and having at least enough production capacity to locally manufacture enough decent-quality devices for government use is essential for national security.
But it is also very expensive. The US and China can probably afford it, and I suppose the EU as a bloc can. But for anyone else the cost would be prohibitive. India is a top-five economy, and yet we have only been able to develop 130nm (!) chips locally. (Taiwan makes 5nm chips and China is now reaching 7nm.)
Perhaps a solution would be for many of the 'other' countries to band together. The blueprints could be open-sourced so all partners can trust each other. Whether something like this will work in today's political climate is of course another question.
This seems like a logical step, both as a political counter move to the US limiting Huawei and TikTok, and as an actual security measure. If the Chinese state can get intel from Huawei devices, surely the US can get intel from iphones. I'm surprised they didn't include Microsoft.
Edit: a word.
Well that and MS is like a national champion in China. MS is one of the few companies to follow Chinese law and thus, Bing is the only foreign search engine allowed. MS is what China is hoping every other foreign company will emulate. So yeah, no way China is going to go after MS.
*Edit. Heck, MS is expanding in China even amidst the tech war because they love China so much.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/29/microsoft-faces-us-scrutiny-as-it-nears-10000-employees-in-china/
If anything USA should be banning MS for national security issues.
So is basically every American tech company. I think its safe to assume that government has access of some sort to any entities that are physically present there be it US, China, India or France. US has some scary gag laws that make whistleblowing almost impossible. Just look at Snowden and PRISM.
One more reason I’m proud to be an American, where our tech companies have no ties or connections to the government.
Can't wait to see where Linux phones are in a few years but I have my doubts. Mostly around the app ecosystem (yes I know, just use the web browser for a lot of them), but hopefully the concept stays alive!
I mean it's not like you'd catch a US government official carrying around a Huawei phone either - fair is fair.
Of course they pose a national security risk. Imagine your government officials walking around with devices fully capable of recording bodily activities, location, sound, video, and transmit it to a foreign power, with or without the wearer's knowledge. 🤯
Then add the ability of third party powers to use Israel's NSO spying capabilities for these devices.
The moment I could replace these devices with my own home-grown ones, I would. If anything, it's surprising it took them this long. Maybe they thought they had enough control over Apple.
Imagine your government officials walking around with devices fully capable of recording bodily activities, location, sound, video, and transmit it to a foreign power, with or without the wearer’s knowledge.
They don't have to imagine it. They are actively DOING it with TikTok! Then there's the not so small matter of all the spying that Huwaei was doing using their 5G network equipment.
Here's another one: Have you read the articles about Mozilla reporting what a privacy nightmare today's cars are? China has banned Teslas from being parked in our around their Government Offices and Military bases. Today's cars, especially EVs, are absolutely loaded with high end spy tech. Video recording in optical and non-optical wavelengths, audio recording, gps positioning, radar and ultrasound systems, remote control of those systems, remote data access to those systems...
Since China banned Tesla's cars from being parked in sensitive locations what do you think they are doing with their auto brands such as BYD?
Everyone is spying on each other like mad.
Haven't read Mozilla's report but I'm in the field and am fully aware. What I can tell you is that at least some of the Motown manufacturers are very privacy oriented at least for now.
Huawei is an unmitigated disaster. Security analyses of their equipment from some years ago showed hundreds of security holes on a single piece of infrastructure networking equipment. Countless vulnerable copies of OpenSSL, you name it. Even if they didn't have any backdoors, the equipment was such a Swiss cheese that you could enter it from many of the gaping holes. The only reason we use it is cost, making the moneys for the shareholders.
What I can tell you is that at least some of the Motown manufacturers are very privacy oriented at least for now.
[Citation Needed]
Huawei is not a publicly traded company. It's a private company wholly owned by its employees.
Huawei may be "owned" by its employees but that isn't the same thing as being controlled by them. Huwaei's structure is extremely unusual and highly opaque.
https://sayari.com/resources/huaweis-ownership-opaque-unusual/
I really don't have any way to disprove this. There have been two English language studies into Huawei's structure. The earlier one by Balding et al tries to claim that it is employee owned in name only but there is a more recent one by a Japanese university that contradicts this fact. Interestingly neither of the studies raise issues about significatly unequitable profit sharing so there's that. The founder of the company owns about 1% of the shares.
As a gross generalisation I think large company management in China is broadly equivalent to provincial management (citizens have a say, but there is a hierarchy that responds to the party), is that what the Japanese report said?
The report says this:
First and foremost, as discussed above, employees own the majority of the Huawei’s shares issued, and Huawei has been an “employee-owned company” at least since 2011 according to the available Annual reports show. Second, the highest decision-making body in corporate governance is the Commission, comprised of representatives directly elected by employee shareholders one vote one share. Shareholders' representatives exercise voting rights on important management matters such as the election of directors and auditors, on behalf of employee shareholders. Third, BOD is the highest body in management strategy, business operations and customer satisfaction underneath the Commission. All directors and auditors are elected from employees. Currently, all of them are employee shareholders. Fourth, Ren Zhengfei has a right of veto.75 Ren Zhengfei himself responded to a reporter that “This comes with a time limit and when the new rules76 were passed this limit77 was extended. I do not exercise my right to veto unless there is a major problem78” (Bilibili Z Generation Paradise, 2019)79. In this regard, Jiangxi Sheng, the chief secretary of Huawei's BOD, told reporters at the Southern China Morning Post that “These rules were the Governance Charter” and went on to say that the Governance Charter strictly stipulates the important matters subject to the exercise of the right of veto, citing management personnel and capital increase as two such examples.
It's a representative system within the company. I think this is what you meant.
Surely quite a lot of it is owned by the Chinese government. I thought that was the point of the ban, in China essentially all companies are controlled in some level by the Chinese government, and so no Chinese company can be trusted.
Perhaps some mom and pop equivalent corner shop isn't controlled by the Chinese government, but certainly anything operating internationally will be.
It's definitely likely that they collaborate with the government in some capacity because of how important Huawei is but that was only one part of why sanctions the enacted. IMO the bigger problem for the US was that Huawei was catching up to western corporations in crucial technologies like 5G so the sanctions were put in place in prevent them from competing. It's just run-of-the-mill protectionism.
They weren't just catching up, the US had nothing, Ericsson had nothing and Huawei had functioning 5G base stations deployed. It took Ericsson another 6? months to get even basic shilled 5G of the ground.
Older or lower cost product lines have been yes. This will likely expedite more movement there.
iPhones pose a risk to the National Security Agencies’ ability to spy on the citizens
China isn't exactly happy with the US government right now due to the sanctions imposed over advanced chip technology, and this move could be viewed as part of a an ongoing reaction to that. So far, Micron has been the main target for retaliation. The US government already imposes its own restrictions on Chinese hardware and services. Notable, Huawei equipment is banned and TikTok can't be installed on government devices.
Already did. This is the tit-for-tat regulation. America did cause, and China did effect.
Any US technology has NSA backdoors. I'm surprised it took them this long to realize, since they do the same thing.
I'm sure they've known for years, there just wasn't a lot they could do it about and relations with the US were good enough that it wasn't a serious problem...until now.
They’ve already been in India for a while, they’ll just expand there while looking for another one as a backup.
They could always use Taiwan. All the benefits of a chinese sweatshop except it's not China.
between 23-32k TWD yearly for factory workers (from the couple of sites I saw) which is less than 1k USD
I have no clue what the purchasing power of that is though.
I'm not sure where you got these numbers from but I think you're off by over a magnitude. Taiwan's GDP per capita is over US$30K nominal, and over US$70K PPP. In GDP per capita PPP they're sitting around 13th in the world as of 2023. The minimum wage is over US$800 per month. Trading Economics shows manufacturing average salary of over US$1600 per month. You might have looked at monthly numbers thinking they're yearly. Although even that's low given that the lower bound is lower than minimum wage.
well shit glassdoor does default to monthly instead of yearly. this is their fault and i will get revenge.
Yep. They’ve been using their cash and Cook’s supply chain skills to crush competition and secure sweatshops wherever cheap labor can be found. It’s been going on for years. I think they have seen the tensions building in China and Taiwan and have been making mostly subtle changes for years. Covid was an excuse to ramp that up.
China bashing aside how likely is the us engaging in tech espionage of foreign countries? Are there any merit in the statement below? (Serious replies only)
“Measures are believed to be aimed at eliminating perceived national security risks from telecoms devices made by a US company”
That's the new way countries are spying on each other. China and the states are both doing it a lot.
China bashing aside how likely is the us engaging in tech espionage of foreign countries?
It’s been documented already. I guess the next question is if there’s any reason to think it’s stopped.
Update: I guess not. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/us-spying-allies.html
Not sure what tech espionage means. Espionage - yes they are engaging in it and always have. Everyone is. If it means espionage using modern technology, also yes. Tapping underwater cables, collection of unencrypted data, you name it. Snowden lives in exile because we know about it.
Apple's recent reductions on their privacy stance are having consequences.
Huh. Who woulda thunk.
They haven’t reduced their privacy stance, as far as I’m aware. In fact, the only public previous reduction was a concession to China over iCloud storage
And if you really want full privacy, storing data in Apple’s cloud storage was never ideal. Apple, like many other cloud storage companies, hands cloud storage data over to authorities if they’re given a warrant.
On-device storage is a different story though. Apple has a no backdoor policy for the iPhone and iOS, which is why they’re constantly getting into fights with law enforcement and government agencies. On device backdoors would offer a massive security vulnerability that would be exploited by bad actors.
Apple does have some advantages, in that you can enable encryption of your data so that Apple doesn't have anything to turn over.
But yeah, I still wouldn't recommend them because they could disable that tomorrow.
Even if they disabled E2E, the data would still be encrypted, and they wouldn't have the key to force it to decrypt. Also, removing that feature would royally piss off their customers that they sold "security" to for a decade+.
Personally, I use their cloud storage. IMHO, the risk is low and the convenience is worth it for me, as someone in the US.
Even if they disabled E2E, the data would still be encrypted, and they wouldn't have the key to force it to decrypt.
Since it's all closed-source, we don't really know that. Apple also controls the OS of your device so they could easily push an update that sends your key to their server.
Apple has many privacy issues, but this ain't one of them, in my opinion.
