This whole thing is coming down about 2 months after the hardware warranty expires.
You think it will last that long?
If you want best-of-breed total censorship solutionsā¢, why wouldnāt you buy from the experts?
Sure, if you have the cash, sinister western defense contractors and āLawful Intercept Solution Providersā have your surveillance needs covered; but for active censorship, nobody does it like team Chinaā¦
Iām not sure, given todayās climate, why any country would purchase hardware or software made by any other country. It seems irresponsible.
Very few of them have much choice, in the short term. On the software side, you can create yet-another-debian-fork in about ten minutes; but actually having a usefully-competent in house team evaluating/improving/securing/etc. the system, rather than just pulling from upstream and changing a few graphics could easily take north of a year to get in full swing, even with countries that have reasonable technical talent pools.(And then you have the excitement of trying to hunt down all the foreign legacy applications, and there will be a whole lot of them, that youād need to recreate.)
On the hardware side, things are even worse. There just arenāt that many facilities, worldwide, capable of producing certain advanced components(eg. semiconductors), and prepare yourself for some sticker shock if you want to move manufacturing based on political concern rather than supply and labor costsā¦
Not to say itās a bad idea(and various countries are taking more or less serious stabs at it, some with better results than others); but itās the kind of project where youād have to start pumping cash in now, and maybe start seeing results comparable to what you could have just purchased and had shipped to you in a week in 6-18 months on software, hopefully less than a decade in hardware. Very much a long-term project.
āVery much a long-term project.ā
Isnāt that what countries are?
A very large chunk of the UKās communication infrastructure is already supplied by Huawei.
UK politicians are totally out of touch with the general public. They keep trying to pass laws no one wants.
Iāve heard that theory consistently professed; but their behavior certainly seems to veer dangerously close to that of a nuclear-armed corporation pulling dodgy accounting stunts to juice their quarterly report to keep the shareholders happyā¦
This should be the definition in the 21st century edition of The Devilās Dictionary.
Iām no fan of censorware, but the idea that Chinese censorware is going to be any worse that that produced in the Western world because itās, you know, made in China, makes me uncomfortable. Thereās a heavy implication that if itās produced by China, it must be extra evil, and I donāt think thatās a particularly useful attitude.
Thereās already enough of a āweāre only safe once China is destroyedā attitude coming from the far right. I donāt think we need echoes of it coming from people like Cory, even in the cause of making people aware of Britainās plans.
because itās, you know, made in China
Itās not that itās made in China ā¦ the issue is Huawei.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/19/huawei-spied-chinese-government-ex-cia-boss
And this is a greater danger than censorware by, letās say, companies that have done work to any other government?
Ha, I see your point.
One detail to note, in this case, is that the ācensorwareā system works as follows:
- A user subject to the censorware system(either through a client installed on their machine, or at the ISP level) makes a network request.
- The request is checked against a blacklist maintained by Huawei.
- If the request fails the check, and the user is not āopted outā, then the request is blocked or rewritten to point to a āblockedā page.
- If the request succeeds the check, or the user is āopted outā, it is allowed to continue.
So, every request gets sent directly to Huawei, opt-in or opt-out, porn or not. The idea that the UK would voluntarily send a major Chinese telco contractor(or an American one, or anything other than one so tightly under their thumb that its insides are oozing out) full particulars of all their internet traffic seems kind of insane. It isnāt even clear that they have any say over the details of the blacklist, save that exerted by discovering the problem after the fact and complaining about it.
The blacklist doesnāt have to be implemented directly at a Huawei server farm; itās probably implemented on a server farm inside the ISPās infrastructure, to minimize the performance impact. (It doesnāt even have to be done there; they could cache a hash table on the userās PC or home router if they wanted.) Also, if the userās opted out, theyāre almost certainly not going to run the requests through the censorware filter, because that costs CPU and therefore money, as opposed to doing it with routing.
As far as having Huawei run the censorship tables, it means youāll have more censorship of things the Chinese government is prudish about, like Tibet and grass mud horses, than of things the Brits are prudish about, like David Cameronās visits to the Ecuadorian embassy for his affair with Julian Assange.
And to reiterate my original point, if there were bad things to be done with my browsing history, Iām pretty certain that itās my own government would have far more opportunities to misuse it than a foreign government.
This is a bad idea. The involvement of a Chinese company doesnāt make it more bad.
While thereās no doubt that invoking the sort of free-form āfear the Chineseā will increase opposition to the scheme, I personally donāt think the benefit is worth the cost.
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