The United States has landed another blow to China’s technological advancement, by revoking licenses that allowed Intel and Qualcomm to buy and sell chips to Huawei Technologies, reports @engadget.
Huawei was hit hard when it was placed on U.S. trade restrictions lists in 2019, but a recent comeback — including the launch of an AI-enabled laptop powered by an Intel chip — appears to have renewed the government’s national security worries.
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
ERDAL ARIKAN WAS born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker.
He loved science.
When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four.
This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal; he decided against a career in medicine. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes.
“I like things that have some precision,” he says. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”
Arıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university.
Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to #CalTech, one of the world's top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California.
He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist #Richard#Feynman. It was like being blessed by a saint.
The field was still young, launched in 1948 by #Claude#Shannon, who wrote its seminal paper while he was at Bell Labs;
he would later become a revered MIT professor.
Shannon's achievement was to understand how the hitherto fuzzy concept of information could be quantified, creating a discipline that expanded the view of communication and data storage.
By publishing a general mathematical theory of information
—almost as if Einstein had invented physics and come up with relativity in one swoop
—Shannon set a foundation for the internet, mobile communications, and everything else in the digital age.
The subject fascinated Arıkan, who chose #MIT for graduate studies.
There was one reason: “#Bob#Gallager was there,” he says.
Robert Gallager had written the textbook on information theory. He had also been mentored by Shannon's successor.
In the metrics of the field, that put him two steps from God.
“So I said, if I am going to do information theory,” Arıkan says, “MIT is the place to go.”
By the time Arıkan arrived at MIT, in 1981, Gallager had shifted his focus and was concentrating on how data networks operated.
Arıkan was trembling when he went to Gallager's office for the first time. The professor gave him a paper about packet radio networks.
“I was pushing him to move from strict information theory to looking at network problems,” Gallager says.
“It was becoming very obvious to everyone that sending data from one place to another was not the whole story
—you really had to have a system.”
IN 1987, AROUND the time Arıkan returned to Turkey, #Ren#Zhengfei, a 44-year-old former military engineer, began a company that traded telecom equipment.
He called it #Huawei, which translates roughly to “China has a promising future.”
Ren tried to distinguish his company by maintaining a fanatical devotion to customer service.
Frustrated with the unreliability of suppliers, Ren decided that Huawei would manufacture its own systems. Thus began a long process of building Huawei into a company that built and sold telecom equipment all along the chain, from base stations to handsets, and did so not only inside China but across the globe.
The rise of Huawei is painstakingly rendered in a small library of self-aggrandizing literature that the company publishes, including several volumes of quotes from its founder.
The theme of this opus is hard to miss, expressed in a variety of fighting analogies. In one such description, Tian Tao, the company's authorized Boswell, quotes Ren on how the company competed against the powerful international “elephants” that once dominated the field.
“Of course, Huawei is no match for an elephant, so it has to adopt the qualities of wolves:
a keen sense of smell, a strong competitive nature, a pack mentality, and a spirit of sacrifice.”
The hagiographies omit some key details about how the wolf got along.
For one, they dramatically underplay the role of the #Chinese#government, which in the 1990s offered loans and other financial support, in addition to policies that favored Chinese telecom companies over foreign ones.
(In a rare moment of candor on this issue, Ren himself admitted in an interview that Huawei would not exist if not for government support.)
With the government behind them, Chinese companies like Huawei and its domestic rival #ZTE came to dominate the national telecom equipment market.
Huawei had become the elephant.
Another subject one does not encounter in the company's library is the alleged use of #stolen#intellectual#property,
a charge the company denies.
“If you read the Western media about Huawei, you will find plenty of people who say that everything from Huawei was begged, borrowed, or stolen. And there is absolutely no truth in that,” says Brian Chamberlin, an executive adviser for Huawei's carrier group.
But in one notorious 2003 case, Huawei admitted using router software copied from #Cisco, though it insisted the use was very limited, and the sides negotiated a settlement that was “mutually beneficial.”
More recently, in February, the US #Department of #Justice filed a suit against the company charging it with “grow[ing] the worldwide business of Huawei … through the deliberate and repeated misappropriation of intellectual property.”
The indictment alleges Huawei has been engaging in these practices since at least 2000.
The Chinese government also provided support to help Huawei gain a foothold overseas, offering loans to customers that made Huawei's products more appealing.
One of Huawei's biggest foreign competitors was #Nortel, the dominant North American telecom company based in Canada.
But Nortel's business was struggling just at a time when competition from Chinese products was intensifying.
Then, in 2004, a Nortel security specialist named Brian Shields discovered that computers based in China, using passwords of Nortel executives, had been #downloading hundreds of #documents from the company.
“There's nothing they couldn't have gotten at,” Shields says.
Though no one ever publicly identified the hackers, and Ren denied any Huawei involvement, the episode added to the suspicion in the West that Huawei's success was not always achieved on the up and up.
It had failed to adapt, disappointed its customers, and was ill-prepared to respond to new Chinese competition.
And there was that hack.
Huawei seized the moment.
Nortel's most valuable asset was the unmatched talent in its Ottawa research lab, known as the Canadian equivalent of the legendary Bell Labs.
For years, Huawei had been building up its research capacity, trying to shed its reputation as a low-cost provider whose tech came from purloining the discoveries of others. It had a number of R&D labs around the world.
Now, with Nortel's demise, it could pursue a bigger prize than market share:
technical mastery. And respect.
The head of research at Nortel's lab in Ottawa, #Wen#Tong, grew up in China and joined Nortel's wireless lab in 1995 after earning a doctorate at Concordia University in Montreal.
He had contributed to every generation of mobile technology and held 470 patents in the US.
If telecommunications companies staged a research scientist draft in 2009, Wen Tong would have been a first-round pick.
Now he was a free agent, and Google, Intel, and others courted him.
Tong picked Huawei. He wanted to keep his networking scientists together, and the team didn't want to leave Canada.
The Chinese company was happy to recruit the group and let them stay in place.
Huawei also promised them freedom to attack the signature challenge for networking science in the 21st century:
creating the infrastructure for #5G.
In this iteration of mobile platforms, billions of mobile devices would seamlessly connect to networks. It promised to transform the world in ways even the scientists could not imagine, and it would mean vast fortunes for those who produced the technology.
The race for #patents would be intense, a matter not only of profit but also national pride.
Not long after Tong joined Huawei, in 2009, a research paper came to his attention.
Tong had helped produce the technology that provided the radio-transmission error correction for the current standard, known as turbo codes.
He thought the polar codes concept could be its replacement in 5G.
But the obstacles were considerable, and Tong originally couldn't interest his Canadian researchers in attacking the problem.
Then, in 2012, Huawei asked Tong to restructure its communications lab in China.
He took the opportunity to assign several smart young engineers to work on polar codes.
It involved the none-too-certain process of taking a mathematical theory and making it actually work in practical design, but they made progress and the team grew.
With each innovation, Huawei rushed to the patent office.
In 2013, Wen Tong asked Huawei's investment board for $600 million for 5G research.
“Very simple,” Tong says. “20 minutes, and they decided.”
The answer was yes, and a good deal of that money went into polar codes.
After Huawei came up with software that implemented the theory, the work shifted to testing and iterating. Eventually hundreds of engineers were involved.
Tong was not the only information scientist who had seen Arıkan's paper. #Alexander#Vardy of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego says the paper achieved “something that people were trying to do for 60 years.”
The challenge was that polar codes were not suited for 5G's short blocklengths
—the amount of 0s and 1s strung together.
Vardy and his postdoc, #Ido#Tal of the #Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, modified the error-correcting technology so it outperformed other state-of-the-art codes when applied to 5G's short blocklengths.
Vardy says he presented his findings in a conference in 2011.
“Huawei was there in the audience, and right after that they ran with it,” he says, seemingly without rancor.
(UC San Diego owns Vardy and Tal's patent and has licensed it to Samsung on a nonexclusive basis.)
Today Huawei holds more than two-thirds of the polar code patent “families”
—10 times as many as its nearest competitor.
The general feeling in the field, Vardy said, was that Huawei “invested a lot of research time and effort into developing this idea.”
It seemed “all the other companies were at least a few years behind.”
But all that work and all those patents would be wasted if the technology didn't fit into the 5G platform.
“It has to be adopted by everybody,” Tong says.
“You have to convince the entire industry that this is good for 5G.”
If polar codes were to be the symbol of Huawei's superiority, there was one more hurdle:
“I had the responsibility,” Wen Tong says, “to make it a standard.”
In 2009, a Turkish graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, #Erdal#Arikan, published a paper that solved a fundamental problem in information theory, allowing for much faster and more accurate data transfers.
Unable to get an academic appointment or funding to work on this seemingly esoteric problem in the United States, he returned to his home country.
As a foreign citizen, he would have had to find a U.S. employer interested in his project to be able to stay.
Back in Turkey, Arikan turned to #China.
It turned out that Arikan’s insight was the breakthrough needed to leap from 4G telecommunications networks to much faster #5G mobile internet services.
Four years later, China’s national telecommunications champion, #Huawei, was using Arikan’s discovery to invent some of the first 5G technologies.
Today, Huawei holds over two-thirds of the #patents related to Arikan’s solution
—10 times more than its nearest competitor.
And while Huawei has produced one-third of the 5G infrastructure now operating around the world, 💥the United States does not have a single major company competing in this race. 💥
Had the United States been able to retain Arikan
—simply by allowing him to stay in the country instead of making his visa contingent on immediately finding a sponsor for his work
—this history might well have been different.
"Manuel Atug, Gründer und Sprecher der unabhängigen @AG_KRITIS findet die Debatte werde zu geopolitisch geführt. Würde es wirklich um Sicherheit gehen, würde es länderunabhängige Sicherheitsvorgaben und -prüfungen geben, bei denen alle Hersteller nach beispielsweise vom @bsi festgelegten Kriterien geprüft werden. So wie sie geführt werde..." https://background.tagesspiegel.de/digitalisierung/der-umgang-mit-huawei-bleibt-unklar
Uhm... it's unlikely I can install a custom #android rom to a #Huawei EVR-N29 device, right? It has EMUI 12 and Huawei doesn't offer bootloader unlock codes any more since $deity knows when.
As news of #AlexeiNavalny's death spread, spontaneous memorials took place in several urban areas, with people taken into custody in 36 cities from the border city of #Belgorod to #Vorkuta, an Arctic mining outpost once a centre of the Stalin-era gulag labour camps, to #NizhnyNovgorod, #Krasnodar, #RostovOnDon and #Tver. #Ukraine
On several occasions, #Hungary has stood aside or opposed #EU positions critical of #China on issues such as #HumanRights, and welcomed Chinese investments despite the EU’s call for members to align relations with China in line with those of the bloc.
Hungary is home to #Huawei Technologies’ largest logistics and manufacturing base outside China. #Ukraine
In #Jungundnaiv 686 mit Claudia Plattner (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) äußert #TiloJung viel Angst davor, dass die Chinesen an seine Daten kommen könnten.
Dass die Amis nachweislich seine Daten wo's nur geht abgreifen, scheint ihm eher gleichgültig zu sein.
Meiner Erfahrung nach spiegelt das leider allzu oft die Meinung der Menschen wider.
Alla fine, ho sistemato quell’ #applicazione (e l’ho caricata), quindi ora sul vecchio #Android ho sempre #KDEConnect a fare da #touchpad, ma in più ho questo #WebView in primo piano: a tutti gli effetti un #browser#web totalmente funzionante eccetto per il non essere cliccabile, che mi riproduce qualsiasi cosa io voglia. 🤭️
Ecco i #tostapane volanti sul mio #Huawei tutto #spacc, sotto c’è il touchpad #virtuale attivo che funge.Tbh, ogni volta che in qualche modo riesco a rimettere in circolazione degli screensaver su un #dispositivo dei miei, penso che il #mondo è diventato proprio #noioso. Solo perché non sono stati più necessari, ecco che i #salvaschermo sono spariti. Spero che prima o poi torneranno #mainstream come lo erano un tempo, e che le generazioni correnti e future possano ricominciare ad apprezzarli. Ho visto questo #video (sotto) su #RokuCity, che mostra come #Roku ha dimostrato che al #pubblico generico gli screensaver piacciono… quindi potremmo bene farli tornare. Per favore. Voglio. Ormai su molti ambienti utente o sistemi operativi non sono nemmeno più supportati in modo adeguato, e questa cosa fa schifo perché metterli significa avere un’ #esperienza peggiore di cosa si aveva 20 #anni fa… 🙏️