UK and US governments warn against using ZTE hardware

[HEXUS]

UK clampdown is largely due to potential risks to national security.

Read more.

[LSG501]

And which non Chinese built item should we use instead...considering most of my electronics items have 'built in china' on the packaging I'm sure they could find another way in....

There's not many electronic items not built in places like china these days.

[lumireleon]

.....Behind the scenes you might find its Cisco, Apple, IBM and many other American companies are pushing for such a legislation and why? because Chinese companies are producing affordable but competitive products and are becoming a threat to their market share.

[Luke7]

And which non Chinese built item should we use instead...considering most of my electronics items have 'built in china' on the packaging I'm sure they could find another way in....

There's not many electronic items not built in places like china these days.

Think you'd be surprised by how much of our electronics *isn't* produced in China. A huge portion is from Taiwan and they aren't exactly on great terms with China politically speaking. Another huge supplier is, ofc, Korea.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Think you'd be surprised by how much of our electronics *isn't* produced in China. A huge portion is from Taiwan and they aren't exactly on great terms with China politically speaking. Another huge supplier is, ofc, Korea.

Taiwanese firms like Foxconn have factories in China though.

[Ironbuket]

because Chinese companies are producing affordable but competitive products and are becoming a threat to their market share.

Or in other words, producing reverse engineered inferior copies where they save on R&D and dont care about quality so can sell for less

And any Chinese company you may care to list that does have some quality now, is very (very) likely to drop in quality in the future and produce crap like the rest of them, simply because they can and easily get away with it

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Or in other words, producing reverse engineered inferior copies where they save on R&D and dont care about quality so can sell for less

And any Chinese company you may care to list that does have some quality now, is very (very) likely to drop in quality in the future and produce crap like the rest of them, simply because they can and easily get away with it

The same was said about Japanese made stuff,Taiwanese made stuff and South Korean made stuff decades ago. Plenty of Chinese made stuff,especially made for the Asian markets is fine,since people earn less and they can't afford to dispose of stuff like we do here every 5 seconds,to get the latest tech toy.

Its like with some of the Chinese power tools in Asia,which were not as sophisticated/refined as a Bosch,but could take a lot of punishment in the hot and humid conditions. In fact I remember talking to someone a while back,and they said often companies over here specify the quality of Chinese products made for import here,and its not too uncommon for them to be of worse quality since it drops costs for them and increases margins.

After all look at Dyson,he fired all his workers here and moved production to Malaysia to cut on labour costs,and at the same time reliability went down too(apparently).

Look at how many products have inherent design issues like batteries exploding,etc and many of these are not down to Chinese production or design,but its generally down to cost cutting and poor QA/QC,etc during the design process.

Examples included bendy iPhones,the iPhone you needed to touch in a particular way,exploding Samsungs,overheating laptops due to lack of cooling,GPUs coming off their PCBs,airbag issues with many cars due to faulty mechanisms,etc. None of these are budget products from cheap companies either.

Its all about dropping costs,including R and D costs,to maximise margins,but like the Japanese,Taiwanese and South Korean firms before them,Chinese firms will operate at lower margins. The same accusations of Japanese,Taiwanese and South Korean products being cheap copied rubbish was also made,even their cars. Yet,look at how these companies managed to catch the market.

Basically its down to the company doing the work - if they want to make a quality product its fine,if they don't it won't be. It doesn't matter where it is made,otherwise why did companies like Rover suffer,but Japanese cars made here were perfectly fine??

Also considering China has plenty of intelligent people,with a history going back 1000s of years,and great technological leaps made even back then,to literally say they are incapable of building anything decent is daft.

Why did the Allies take all that German tech like V2 rockets and take it to bits?? We wanted to know how it worked,ie,we reverse engineered what we could to improve the stuff we were making and then we hired loads of scientists,and quietly made sure none of them ever got into legal issues.

Or should we start saying that all those German scientists employed in the US,UK and USSR after WW2 were responsible for all the big jumps and we were copying German innovations too?? Wernher von Braun was the head of the V2 programme and was responsible for the Saturn V.

Things like delta wings,flying wings,swept wings to reduce drag,forward swept wings,production axial flow jet engines(basically all modern jet engines and turbofans tend to be axial flow),etc were all implemented by German scientists first.

The father behind modern stealth was a Soviet researcher and yet the US implemented his findings to a much bigger degree than Russia ever did. So was the US copying Soviet research??

Basically if you look at scientific research and engineering as whole,all those ideas are not done in isolation in one country or by one people,its always been a worldwide thing. Even the concept of being able to reverse engineer something is indicative of being clever enough and having enough of an engineering and scientific base to do so,and ALL largish countries have done it to some degree in the last 200 years.

If countries are that paranoid of other countries copying their stuff,then they only have their selves to blame - they should have kept production locally then and dropped their margins? Instead they want to charge high prices and pay their workers the least amount they can get away with, to increase margins,firing local workers whenever they can(like Dyson),whilst enriching the board of directors and owners who pat themselves on the back for a job well done,etc. Its like trying to catch the horse after its bolted.

[Ttaskmaster]

Sorry, I must have missed something - What exactly is this threat to national security? I don't think the article actually said... are the capacitors spying on my data, or something?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Sorry, I must have missed something - What exactly is this threat to national security? I don't think the article actually said... are the capacitors spying on my data, or something?

Probably the Chinese spying standards are not compatible with the NSA/GCHQ/Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Cambridge Analytica/Joe and Jane's Dog accessories shop spying standards,so they are doing this so you don't have a spying API conflict,which might lead to the spying streams being entangled. Don't tangle the streams!!

[3dcandy]

Got nothing to do with any of this. They shipped hardware and tech to countries banned from receiving them like North korea, Syria etc. They we warned against doing it, did it anyhoo and then failed to discipline the people responsible. So they've been banned.

[peterb]

I suspect the security threat is real.

There was a case in 2008 where counterfeit Cisco routers were sold to the US government which were said to have security flaws, either leaking data or providing a back door entry to the systems.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cisco-...o-us-military/

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If countries are that paranoid about threats,they should be making these things locally. The moment you palm off production anywhere,anything could happen,at any point in the chain.

All quick buck,and no consideration for doing stuff locally - you can see what is happening with companies like GKN for example,where indigenous companies are being broken up for a quick buck,and no one is looking at the longterm interests of the country. In the end it means we end up depending more and more on foreign firms.

Even our new nuclear power plants are being made with Chinese help based on a secondhand French design. So what about that??

Plus even the NSA was caught putting their software on US made routers which were being sold abroad:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...outers-snowden

The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas – even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons, says Glenn Greenwald, in an extract from his new book about the Snowden affair, No Place to Hide

Plus,have people forgotten this:

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/03/p...ion/index.html

Obama administration spied on German media as well as its government

What about this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-33398388

The Wikileaks website says it has evidence that a number of senior Brazilian government officials were routinely spied on by the National Security Agency in the United States.

Basically you can barely trust any country now,that they won't try to spy on you since national interests are more important for most countries. If national security is important things need to be done indigenously and everything needs to be carefully analysed just in case.

Anyway,IMHO OFC,like with Huawei this is less about threats and more the case,Chinese OEMs are increasingly getting business throughout the world,and instead of competing and spending all those billions of USD,they saved by firing local workers and palming off production to cheaper countries,the incumbants probably are moaning that they might need to cut margins,spend more on wages and automation if they shift production back here,spend more on R and D,etc and compete.

When those Chinese factory cities were acting like cheap sweatshops for our firms,to increase their margins,at the expense of local workers in the UK and US there was none of this noise. Funny that - what a coincidence.

The moment local Chinese firms used the same factories,but pushed lower margins and started selling competitive indigenous designed products,its all panic stations. Something,something,capitalism,right??

They only have got themselves to blame.

[utopic]

The same was said about Japanese made stuff,Taiwanese made stuff and South Korean made stuff decades ago. Plenty of Chinese made stuff,especially made for the Asian markets is fine,since people earn less and they can't afford to dispose of stuff like we do here every 5 seconds,to get the latest tech toy.

Its like with some of the Chinese power tools in Asia,which were not as sophisticated/refined as a Bosch,but could take a lot of punishment in the hot and humid conditions. In fact I remember talking to someone a while back,and they said often companies over here specify the quality of Chinese products made for import here,and its not too uncommon for them to be of worse quality since it drops costs for them and increases margins.

After all look at Dyson,he fired all his workers here and moved production to Malaysia to cut on labour costs,and at the same time reliability went down too(apparently).

Look at how many products have inherent design issues like batteries exploding,etc and many of these are not down to Chinese production or design,but its generally down to cost cutting and poor QA/QC,etc during the design process.

Examples included bendy iPhones,the iPhone you needed to touch in a particular way,exploding Samsungs,overheating laptops due to lack of cooling,GPUs coming off their PCBs,airbag issues with many cars due to faulty mechanisms,etc. None of these are budget products from cheap companies either.

Its all about dropping costs,including R and D costs,to maximise margins,but like the Japanese,Taiwanese and South Korean firms before them,Chinese firms will operate at lower margins. The same accusations of Japanese,Taiwanese and South Korean products being cheap copied rubbish was also made,even their cars. Yet,look at how these companies managed to catch the market.

Basically its down to the company doing the work - if they want to make a quality product its fine,if they don't it won't be. It doesn't matter where it is made,otherwise why did companies like Rover suffer,but Japanese cars made here were perfectly fine??

Also considering China has plenty of intelligent people,with a history going back 1000s of years,and great technological leaps made even back then,to literally say they are incapable of building anything decent is daft.

Why did the Allies take all that German tech like V2 rockets and take it to bits?? We wanted to know how it worked,ie,we reverse engineered what we could to improve the stuff we were making and then we hired loads of scientists,and quietly made sure none of them ever got into legal issues.

Or should we start saying that all those German scientists employed in the US,UK and USSR after WW2 were responsible for all the big jumps and we were copying German innovations too?? Wernher von Braun was the head of the V2 programme and was responsible for the Saturn V.

Things like delta wings,flying wings,swept wings to reduce drag,forward swept wings,production axial flow jet engines(basically all modern jet engines and turbofans tend to be axial flow),etc were all implemented by German scientists first.

The father behind modern stealth was a Soviet researcher and yet the US implemented his findings to a much bigger degree than Russia ever did. So was the US copying Soviet research??

Basically if you look at scientific research and engineering as whole,all those ideas are not done in isolation in one country or by one people,its always been a worldwide thing. Even the concept of being able to reverse engineer something is indicative of being clever enough and having enough of an engineering and scientific base to do so,and ALL largish countries have done it to some degree in the last 200 years.

If countries are that paranoid of other countries copying their stuff,then they only have their selves to blame - they should have kept production locally then and dropped their margins? Instead they want to charge high prices and pay their workers the least amount they can get away with, to increase margins,firing local workers whenever they can(like Dyson),whilst enriching the board of directors and owners who pat themselves on the back for a job well done,etc. Its like trying to catch the horse after its bolted.

hear hear

[badass]

Sorry, I must have missed something - What exactly is this threat to national security? I don't think the article actually said... are the capacitors spying on my data, or something?

A router is simply a computer. Computers can be a national security risk when compromised - so can a router. Or more specifically, millions of them. However this is about breaching sanctions IIRC. Don't sell to North Korea.

[3dcandy]

It's all about the sanctions. And then getting caught being silly about the sanctions. And then rewarding your directors because you made a load of money because you broke the sanctions...

[azrael-]

Well, *someone* needs to bolster the faltering iPhone sales. Might as well be the US and UK governments by yelling "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!".