The IT Nerd

Well, I’ll place bets that this won’t end well. The founder of Huawei has said there is “no way the US can crush” the company, in an interview with the BBC:

Ren Zhengfei, founder and president of Huawei, described the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, the company’s chief financial officer, as politically motivated. The US is pursuing criminal charges against Huawei and Ms Meng, including money laundering, bank fraud and stealing trade secrets. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.

Mr Ren spoke to the BBC’s Karishma Vaswani in his first international broadcast interview since Ms Meng was arrested — and dismissed the pressure from the US. “There’s no way the US can crush us,” he said. “The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit.” However, he acknowledged that the potential loss of custom could have a significant impact. […] Mr Ren warned that “the world cannot leave us because we are more advanced”. “If the lights go out in the West, the East will still shine. And if the North goes dark, there is still the South. America doesn’t represent the world. America only represents a portion of the world.”

Why would you even say something like this knowing that the US along with a whole lot of other people want to kick your a** all over hell’s half acre at the first chance that you screw up? This seems to be a really dumb move and they may live to regret it.

The story of Huawei continues to trend in a direction where it is becoming clear that the company is a very bad actor. Case in point in this report from The Information where it illustrates Huawei’s tactics of stealing trade secrets, a lot of which were aimed at Apple. For example, there’s this about Huawei trying to get details on the Apple Watch:

The Huawei engineer attended the supplier meeting with four Huawei researchers in tow. The Huawei team spent the next hour and a half pressing the supplier for details about the Apple Watch, the executive said.

“They were trying their luck, but we wouldn’t tell them anything,” the executive said. After that, Huawei went silent.

Another alleged tactic is talking to people who formerly worked with Apple or its supply chain. In one case, a person interviewed with Huawei immediately after leaving Apple, only to be repeatedly asked about upcoming products and features. They refused and stopped taking interviews.

It’s pretty clear that Huawei is a bad actor. At this point, the company needs to be punted from every cellular network, Huawei phone products should be banned from sale, and every illegal act that they’ve done prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This sounds really harsh, but every time I turn around, they are just underlining the fact that they should not exist.

If you believe a new report from Bloomberg, the Canadian government is going to ban Huawei from Canada’s 5G networks. But that won’t be announced until the situation with the Canadians that China is holding in retaliation for the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the request of the Americans who want to put her in jail for a very long time is fully sorted.

Canada by banning Huawei from its 5G networks would join countries including the U.S., Australia and New Zealand that have blocked or limited the use of Huawei equipment. Other countries are looking at doing the same thing. It will also send Telus and Bell scrambling to find alternate networking gear as they are known to use Huawei. It will be interesting to see how China reacts to this report and if they alter their behavior as a result.

Pressure is increasing on the Canadian Government to ban Huawei from being part of Canada’s 5G networks. A change.org petition was started by David Morrish in Vancouver, B.C., who runs MBS Tech, a cyber security services provider for enterprise clients. It’s at just under 30,000 signatures and calls on PM Justin Trudeau to get this done and gives reasons why he needs to get this done. Clearly people want Huawei to have no part of any 5G network that Canada builds.

The question is, is PM Trudeau on board with this or not? And will Bell and Telus who are known to use Huawei gear in their networks reconsider this? I guess we’ll find out after the Canadian government finish their review of Huawei. And hopefully it leads to the release of the Canadians held unjustly by China.

From the “this escalated quickly” file, comes the announcement that The United States Department of Justice has announced it plans to seek extradition of arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou who is out on bail in Vancouver.

A 13-count indictment filed in New York City against Huawei, two of its affiliated firms, and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, accuses Huawei and an affiliate of bank fraud and wire fraud. The company is also charged with violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and conspiring to obstruct justice related to the investigation.

Canadian officials arrested Meng on a U.S. warrant Dec. 1. She has been detained in Vancouver since then.

This is sure to make life difficult for Canada as China is likely to flip out at this latest development in the Huawei gong show. At this point, Canada should just hand over Meng and be done with it.

Things go from bad to worse for Huawei with the news via the paywalled Wall Street Journal that says that T-Mobile has come forward to say that as far back as as 2014 Huawei had tried to steal plans for a robot developed by T-Mobile to test its phones. The Wall Street Journal also reports that federal charges are inbound on this front as well. What also doesn’t help Huawei is that this was fought in civil court and Huawei lost to the tune of $4.8 million in 2017.

Seeing as the rarely seen CEO of the company came out this week to say that they don’t spy for China and they like Donald Trump, the timing of this sucks for them. And it likely means that more bad news for the apparently shady Chinese telco is likely inbound.

I am guessing the pressure is getting to Huawei because the CEO and founder Ren Zhengfei who isn’t known for sitting down for the media had a lot of things to say to the media today. Starting with this:

In a rare sit down with international media, Ren Zhengfei addressed concerns raised by the U.S. government, which has warned that the company’s equipment could allow the Chinese government to have a backdoor into a nation’s telecommunications network. Ren, speaking Mandarin and using a company-provided translator, told the group that Huawei has never handed data to Beijing. “When it comes to cybersecurity and privacy protection we are committed to be sided with our customers. We will never harm any nation or any individual,” Ren told the journalists assembled at Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China.

Well. I don’t believe that as I find it highly implausible that if the Chinese government came knocking on the door of a Chinese company asking them to facilitate spying, that the company in question would not comply. Especially since China has laws that pretty much say that they have to comply.

He also said this:

“China’s ministry of foreign affairs has officially clarified that no law in China requires any company to install mandatory back doors. Huawei and me personally have never received any request from any government to provide improper information,”

Sure. Right. I believe that as much as I believe in the tooth fairy as Huawei simply saying that they haven’t been requested to put backdoors into their equipment isn’t the same thing as proving that this isn’t the case. At this point they need to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Then there was this:

Ren added. […] But Ren actually praised the U.S. president. “For President Trump as a person, I still believe he is a great president,” he said. “In the sense that he was bold to slash taxes. And I think that’s conducive for the development of industries in the United States.”

Clearly this guy knows that President Trump loves it when people pay him compliments. So he’s clearly trying to get onto his good side. What effect that will be interesting to see.

The fact that this event happened is very unusual. Thus I fully expect more “unusual” things to happen as Huawei tries to change the narrative on this story.

This isn’t a good time for Huawei. Late last week, Weijing Wang was nicked by Polish Authorities for spying:

Poland’s counter-espionage agency has charged a Chinese manager at tech giant Huawei in Poland and one of its own former officers with espionage against Poland on behalf of China, Polish state television reported on Friday.

The two men were arrested on Tuesday, according to the Internal Security Agency. Polish security agents also searched the offices of Huawei and Orange, Poland’s leading communications provider, where the Pole had recently worked, seizing documents and electronic data. The homes of both men were also searched, according to TVP, the state broadcaster.

The timing sucks for Huawei as they have been saying to anyone who will listen that all this spying stuff is overblown and they can be trusted. In the case of Poland, they’re considering limits on the use of Huawei gear.

A government official who is responsible for cyber security told Reuters “abrupt” policy changes towards Huawei were not warranted after the arrests.

But he said the use of the company’s products by state entities could be reviewed.

“We will analyse whether … our decision can include an end to the use … of Huawei products,” Karol Okonski told Reuters.

That must have freaked out Huawei as they’ve now sacked the employee in question:

The Chinese tech company Huawei on Saturday announced it has fired a sales director who was arrested in Poland and charged with spying for China, saying he has brought the firm’s reputation “into disrepute.”

The company said it has “decided to terminate the employment of Mr. Wang Weijing, who was arrested on suspicion of breaking Polish law.”

Sacking one employee isn’t going to make a difference. What will begin to make the difference for Huawei is if they are completely transparent and open themselves to having every portion of their business looked at by anyone who wants to look at them. Unless they do that, stories like these will be a death by a thousand cuts for them.

Reuters has the story of a bunch of people who work for embattled telcom company Huawei who decided that Tweeting happy new year from an iPhone was a really good idea. To be fair, they thought better of it and deleted the Tweet, but not before it went viral. For example, famous tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee took a screenshot of the Tweet:

That was fast pic.twitter.com/y6k0FJF7Gq

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 1, 2019

Huawei execs got wind of this and sent out a memo on January 3, announcing punishments for the employees involved in this rather embarrassing incident. The two employees who were directly responsible for this were demoted and their monthly salaries were reduced by 5,000 yuan. That’s about $728 USD. Huawei has also frozen the pay rank of its digital marketing director for 12 months. But this isn’t the first time that Huawei has had this problem. Gal Gadot who is otherwise known as the actress who plays Wonder Woman in the DC movie of the same name posted a  tweet promoting the Huawei Mate 10 from an iPhone. Which ironically Marques Brownlee caught as well (click the Tweet for proof):

Gal Gadot with the Huawei ad… tweeted from an iPhone. Niceeeee pic.twitter.com/aEKJVwoyBL

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) April 24, 2018

Plus they were caught using a pro camera to fake images so that they could demonstrate how good the cameras on their phones were….. Twice. Clearly this is a company who has issues beyond the fact that their CFO being arrested and people thinking that they are a threat to national security.