US Government Probes Huawei and ZTE

judgecorp writes "Two leading Chinese telecoms companies, Huawei and ZTE, are under investigation for possible spying in the U.S. A government committee says the companies may be stealing U.S. economic secrets, and use of their equipment might open U.S. infrastructure to espionage."

Comments

Experience with my Huawei router

[FTWinston]

It was free with our ISP, so don't judge me. (We're with TalkTalk in the UK ... ok, do judge me.)

It used client-side validation only to determine whether or not I was entering a valid port to forward to. By copying the admin page to my local machine and updating the target, I was able to remove the validation and set up my port forward to .255 ... I managed to resist the urge of setting up a forward to something actually invalid, in case the router completely died on me.

If the guys that made my router are spies ... they're not very good.

Industrial espionage

[girlintraining]

Everyone is so concerned about China, but wouldn't you know, France is so well-known for industrial espionage that executives for pharmaceuticals and large companies are told not to use fax machines in hotel rooms because the lines are monitored, or send unencrypted email, etc. Laptops not only aren't allowed to be left unattended, most people in the know won't let sensitive information be left on them -- encrypted or not.

Everyone acts like China invented industrial espionage. Well, they didn't... they're just really bad at it, which is why everyone is noticing them. First rule of effective espionage: Don't suck.

Re:No good can come from this

[hedwards]

Oh, please, compared with the rights abuses in China that's not even worth mentioning.

Huawei and Ericsson

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for Ericsson in Sweden, and it was a well know fact that Huawei stole a lot of research material from the company. There was a case were a Chinese employee was caught hard copying (-as in Xerox) several research papers (I don't remember all of it, but I think even the Chinese embassy was involved).

One of the few things Ericsson has going for them is their research (since their services division is a joke and doesn't bring any substantial revenue for the company), but if this continues they will be dead on the water in 10 years time.

Funny thing about all of this is that Ericsson has a research center in China, from where they bring those 'employees' who end up getting the info for Huawei.

Re:Please Clarify Your Post Title

[shuttah]

Interesting.

I don't think the immediate characterization of Huawei as a puppet to Beijing is altogether justified, seeing how here in America we have SPECIFIC branches of the government - like the CIA - making donations to stateside companies - like Facebook.

The CIA donates to a social network (facebook) = China blocks the network (Facebook).

Then America calls it censorship.

But when Beijing donates ($8 Million) to Huawei and America blocks it...

America says it's National Security?

Re:Competing interests

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for Ericsson, now I work for Alcatel-Lucent, both at US offices, but not US companies. One of the things we've noticed is anywhere one of those two companies opens an office, shortly after, huawei opens an office within 10 miles. I swear it's true. Right now I'm sitting less than 5 miles from one of their office, at my old office, the story was the same, and remember the ericsson and alcatel offices are only 50 miles away from eachother, yet huawei has two, one close to ericsson, one close to alcatel. We started keeping track once we noticed at first. When at Ericsson, we'd always laugh that when we published our roadmap, 2 days later huawei would publish theirs, and it'd look similar so we started screwing with our roadmaps. I understand that in slashdot it's popular to go "ohhh evil amerika!!!!!!!!!!! they do it two!!!!!" but really, the behavior of chinese companies is more than a little suspect.