• @[email protected]
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      116 months ago

      So, I’m not exactly well versed in all this, could you fill me in on what threats Huawei poses to I, a random poor person going about my day in the US?

      I refuse to believe a Corp or the NSA isn’t already looking over my shoulder, and with nothing to steal, wouldn’t using Huawei tech be like picking between McDonald’s and Wendy’s? Same product, different flavor sort of situation?

        • @[email protected]
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          26 months ago

          OK, but in this metaphor I’m not a boxer, in a guy who watched part of rocky 2 and if you mugged me you’d find 3 pennies and a d20. I’m not even the ant unfortunately crushed in the machinations of these entities, I’m the dust in the grease among the cogs.

          In a practical sense it is a waste of time and resources for either of them to record my life, but if the China phone has a prettier ui and a cheaper pricetag it would be a huge improvement for me personally. Could one Midwest honky with a foreign phone and no free time genuinely cause any damage?

      • partial_accumen
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        156 months ago

        could you fill me in on what threats Huawei poses to I, a random poor person going about my day in the US?

        One example: You are likely employed by a business here in the USA. If you were to lose your job, that would be a large negative in your life. The NSA isn’t going to ruin an American business unless its the extremely small chance that there’s a national security reason. The CCP would absolutely ruin an American business if it helped a Chinese one. Unless you work for a Chinese employer, the NSA snooping on you would be more beneficial to you than the CCP.

        • @[email protected]
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          16 months ago

          I get that, but I’m taking on a practical point. I, a warm body behind a counter of a franchise in the Midwest, am not privy to any valuable corporate information that can’t be gleamed by simply walking into the store. We don’t have WiFi and I can’t plug my phone in. What is the espionage device in my pocket actually going to do to me on my day to day life of browsing Lemmy and playing music?

          • partial_accumen
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            56 months ago

            What is the espionage device in my pocket actually going to do to me on my day to day life of browsing Lemmy and playing music?

            In your case its not so much the device in your pocket, but the telecom switching gear on the backend that all that corporate and government data flows though. Huawei makes lots of that gear.

            In specific cases of phones, while your job may not be high value for espionage , there are lots of people that do work highly sensitive positions. If the specific handset redirects email, txt, or phone conversations then that would be a problem at the national security level.

            • @[email protected]
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              16 months ago

              Considering Chinese companies like Tiktok have been more than happy to sign agreements where data is only transmitted and hosted in the US, with US DoD oversight…

      • @[email protected]
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        16 months ago

        If you work at McDonald’s or Wendy’s, it really doesn’t matter what phone you use lmao

    • @[email protected]
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      116 months ago

      Everyone has the appetite for the secrets of everyone.

      Surprisingly, China publishes a lot of it. Like, a lot a lot. As in, pretty much all the work done at CAS and similar institutions is published, which is the equivalent to US national labs or Lincoln Lab or what have you.

      At the same time, Huawei itself publishes an obscene amount of work and is incredibly proactive in academic research - they open-source code, fund top-tier conferences, and publish basically every result they get. It’s actually stupid how much money they dump on conferences.

      Now, you might ask yourself, what secrets does the West have? Well, China already leads in 80% of critical technology fields, so unless you’re working in integrated circuit design/fabrication, quantum computing, high performance computing, natural language processing, vaccines, small satellites, or space launch systems… You probably don’t have much to hide. Plus, if you’re working in a field where secrets are important, you already likely have security clearance.

      As a Canadian I’m pissed off about Nortel too, but a bunch of Canadian companies got fucked by the dotcom crash and the 08 crisis and Nortel was unfortunately one of them. I’m more pissed off about Bombardier, which is an issue I’m actually affected by. Fuck the hyenas at the DOJ that killed Bombardier and the CSeries to protect their golden goose. How’s 737 Max sales going, Boeing? Getting outcompeted by the A220 that Bombardier was forced to sell to AirBus for $1? Yeah…

      Plus, Nortel outsourced their entire manufacturing and product design teams to Huawei in the 90s, so I don’t have too much sympathy for Nortel.

      The big powers bully us because we have no choice. That’s the repercussions of Trudeau’s foreign policy.