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Chinese Media Calls For Boycott of Cisco
An anonymous reader writes "China's state-run media is calling on the country's wireless carriers to move away from Cisco products. According to reports, using Cisco products allows the U.S. to 'attack China almost at will,' and forms a 'terrible security threat.' Chinese officials are urging the companies' wireless carriers to switch to hardware made by Huawei and ZTE Corp. Citing cybersecurity concerns, the United States has banned the use of equipment from both Huawei and ZTE in its cellular networks. Cisco has not yet been named in documents describing the NSA's global wiretapping operations. Apple, a company named in leaked documents, has slashed iPhone production for the second half of this year on falling overseas sales."
Every country should boost its defences if another country is snooping around anonymously in its businesses!!! No country has the right to do that! Thank Edward Snowden indeed!
There is a war. Huaewei is dragged through the mud by witless/gutless/dimwits in the US Congress. Turnabout is fair play.
The silly thing is, that all of the cell phones across the planets are like little location devices, revealing your location, your contacts, your texts, and your conversations.
Cisco is on the slide anyway, and this won't really have a dramatic effect on the US economy. The problem, you see, is that the warriors aren't making enough money right now, and with moderate Middle East peace, there's no good money to be made from that.
Trade war? Insignificant. Sorry. Just not gonna happen.
If the boycott of Cisco takes place then a trade war has begun. Cisco is one of the most important tech companies in the USA. What if they boycott Apple, Microsoft, and several others? I expect there will be a trade war as well as a cold war among hackers.
Counterfeit Cisco equipment.
http://www.networkhardware.com/counterfeit-cisco-chat#.Ucmxi_m64zI
The idea really is that the counterfeits were finding their way into US Government via Authorized Cisco sellers buying up such devices from eBay.
The thing is, if it talks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's still a duck. If the hardware was working, just using cheaper chinese knockoff parts, the MTBF is likely a lot shorter.
But don't confuse counterfeit hardware, meant to look and act like the original, with aunthentic gear that's been refurbished and compromised in the process. Notice how malware gets onto storage devices (like digital picture frames) because somewhere along the production path, pirated software was used? This is the same principle in play.
The reason ZTE and Huawei aren't allowed to sell to US Government is because they (the US) can't wire-tap that gear. Likewise Cisco may have been complicit (or even forced at gunpoint for all we know) to allow wiretapping in their products. If those same products were sold to China, then it's equally likely the Chinese government can wiretap it as well if they figure out how the US does it.
But the point in all these Snowden related problems is that Cisco is going to suffer losses from this. Like the most "evil" companies in the US are the wireless carriers (Verizon, AT&T), Cisco (who provides them with hardware), Oracle (Databases), IBM and Microsoft. I wouldn't put it past any of these companies to be complicit with government requests to access or provide backdoors into their products.
More to the point, If you're fond of using cloud services (Gmail included) which the data is hosted in US data centers, guess what, the Patriot act says the US Government can access it all they damn well please.
It would be wonderful if some court found that the US can not spy on Americans or foreigners who's data is stored or transits in the US under the fourth amendment and to throw out the patriot act. But no, once the government takes rights away, it never gives them back.
I wish this were not the case. Maybe the US, Russia, and China need to do what European countries did in 1945 to 1945 and allow their students to travel freely among the nations. That way, the historic French/German hatred has waned to brawls at football matches and not trenches/tanks.
I probably sound crazy, but it might do good for an open border policy among the three superpowers. This doesn't mean that sovereignty has to be given up, just like Spain is still Spain, but at least the people in the country are not just seeing what is spoon fed to them in the press.
The 1946 decision to let Europeans wander among nations has done wonders for Europe... maybe we should consider the same thing here in the US?
Don't you understand what just happened? We are now entering a trade war ...
We have already been in a trade war with China for many years. Its merely been a one side trade war allowing China to do as they please ...
It starts with a 20-30% price discount on all goods and services due to currency manipulation. It continues with dumping products in targeted industries below "cost". Sometimes literally, sometimes indirectly by not enforcing Chinese wage and pollution laws. Yes such laws exists, they are merely selectively ignored for strategic industries and markets. It then continues with barriers to entry for US goods and services, entry may only be allowed with domestic partnerships and technology transfers (free R&D).
A very interesting read on this topic:
http://www.amazon.com/Death-China-Confronting-Dragon-Global/dp/0132180235/ref=sr_1_1
China doesn't pretend to go for anything other than "might makes right" which is why we can't accuse them of hypocrisy. The USA is supposed to follow the rule of law instead which is why we can. In the US it's not supposed to be a crime to just piss off powerful people. For instance Assange's real "crime" was publishing a leak that showed that Hillary Clinton was not fit to be trusted in a position of responsibility (eg. the instruction to steal credit card details to be able to frame foreign diplomats).
That doesn't make China any better it just shows that the US is currently being run more like China than the "spin" tries to convince us.
This has nothing to do with Snowden. This has everything to do with backlash against the US for blocking use of backdoored Chinese hardware in our networks. Since we blocked them from selling to us, they are trying to match the move by blocking us from selling networking gear to them, regardless of if there is a back door or not. It's Tit for Tat, nothing more.
AJ Henderson