The Federal Communication Commission has declared Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE "national security threats," a move that will formally ban U.S. telecom companies from using federal funds to buy and install Huawei and ZTE equipment. From a report: FCC chairman Ajit Pai said that the "weight of evidence" supported the decision to ban the technology giants. Federal agencies and lawmakers have long claimed that the tech giants are subject to Chinese law, which "obligates them to cooperate with the country's intelligence services," Pai said. "We cannot and will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to exploit network vulnerabilities and compromise our critical communications infrastructure," the FCC said in a separate statement. Huawei and ZTE have repeatedly rejected the claims. The order, published by the FCC on Tuesday, said the designation takes immediate effect, but it's not immediately clear how the designation changes the status quo. In November of last year, the FCC announced that companies deemed a national security threat would be ineligible to receive any money from the Universal Service Fund. The $8.5B USF is the FCC's main way of purchasing and subsidizing equipment and services to improve connectivity across the country.

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: The U.S. fight against Chinese technology appears to be extending to another category: the security screening you normally see at the airport or border. Wall Street Journal sources understand the National Security Council and other U.S. agencies are pushing European governments (including Germany, Greece and Italy) to avoid using baggage, cargo and passenger screening systems from Nuctech, a Chinese state-run company that already has a foothold in the continent. American officials are reportedly worried any connected devices could pass sensitive data like passenger info and shipping manifests to Chinese spies.

Much like the claims against Huawei, there's no publicly available evidence of Nuctech forwarding data to Chinese surveillance systems. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration barred Nuctech from many U.S. airports in 2014 following a review, although the report is classified... The U.S. is supposedly asking European nations to replace Nuctech equipment with American equivalents — it stands to benefit if the Chinese company gets kicked out. That's a strong incentive to keep up the campaign, even if the surveillance claims are unwarranted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Trump administration has determined that top Chinese firms, including telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies and video surveillance company Hikvision, are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, laying the groundwork for new U.S. financial sanctions, according to a document seen by Reuters on Wednesday. The list of 20 companies that Washington alleges are backed by the People's Liberation Army also includes China Mobile Communications Group and China Telecommunications Corp as well as aircraft manufacturer Aviation Industry Corp of China.

The designations were drawn up by the Defense Department, which was mandated by a 1999 law to compile a list of firms "owned or controlled" by the People's Liberation Army that provide commercial services, manufacture, produce or export. The Pentagon's designations do not trigger sanctions, but the law says the president may declare a national emergency which would allow him to penalize any companies on the list that operate in the United States.

John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and who served as national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, writing for the Wall Street Journal: Take Trump's handling of the threats posed by the Chinese telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE. Ross and others repeatedly pushed to strictly enforce U.S. regulations and criminal laws against fraudulent conduct, including both firms' flouting of U.S. sanctions against Iran and other rogue states. The most important goal for Chinese "companies" like Huawei and ZTE is to infiltrate telecommunications and information-technology systems, notably 5G, and subject them to Chinese control (though both companies, of course, dispute the U.S. characterization of their activities). Trump, by contrast, saw this not as a policy issue to be resolved but as an opportunity to make personal gestures to Xi. In 2018, for example, he reversed penalties that Ross and the Commerce Department had imposed on ZTE. In 2019, he offered to reverse criminal prosecution against Huawei if it would help in the trade deal -- which, of course, was primarily about getting Trump re-elected in 2020.

The United States Department of Commerce today issued a change to allow American companies to participate in developing more streamlined standards for 5G with Huawei. TechCrunch reports: According to the Department: "This action is meant to ensure Huawei's placement on the Entity List in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei's pervasive participation in standards-development organizations."

The change is designed to allow Huawei and U.S. to both play a role in hashing out the parameters for the next-generation wireless technology. "The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation. This action recognizes the importance of harnessing American ingenuity to advance and protect our economic and national security," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement. "The Department is committed to protecting U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by encouraging U.S. industry to fully engage and advocate for U.S. technologies to become international standards."

The new Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) rule essentially allows companies to share information about technologies in order to develop a joint standard without requiring an export license. Beyond that, however, the DOC has no stated plans to ease up after placing Huawei on its entities list last year.

SoftBank Group's Arm and its Chinese venture clashed publicly over whether the venture's CEO had been fired, a dispute that threatens to disrupt a Western company central to the global semiconductor industry. From a report: The conflict erupted after the British firm told Bloomberg News the board of Arm China -- jointly owned by Arm and investors including China's sovereign wealth fund -- voted to oust Chief Executive Officer Allen Wu. Hours later, Arm China posted a statement to its official WeChat account asserting he was still in charge, a stance repeated across domestic social media. The U.K. firm then fired back to say Wu had been dismissed after an investigation uncovered undisclosed conflicts of interest and violations of employee rules.

"Following a whistleblower complaint and several other current and former employee complaints, an investigation was undertaken by Arm Limited," the company said in its latest statement, jointly issued with shareholder Hopu Investment. "Evidence received from multiple sources found serious irregularities, including failing to disclose conflicts of interest and violations of the employee handbook." The spat comes at a sensitive time for Arm and its 49%-owned Chinese affiliate, when Western companies are struggling to navigate an escalating clash between Washington and Beijing over technology leadership. Any prolonged conflict could also have ramifications for Arm, whose semiconductor architecture underpins the majority of the world's mobile devices. The British firm relies on Chinese names like Huawei for a large portion of its global revenue, and leans on Arm China to help it conduct business in the world's biggest smartphone market.

Canadian carriers Bell and Telus announced on Tuesday that each of them would not be continuing the use of Huawei equipment in their respective 5G networks, having signed deals with the Chinese giant's rivals instead. ZDNet reports: For Bell, it announced Ericsson would be supplying its radio access network. It added that it was looking to launch 5G services as the Canadian economy exited lockdown. Bell, which in Febraury announced it had signed an agreement with Nokia, said it was maintaining the use of multiple vendors in its upcoming network, as it had for 4G. "Ericsson plays an important role in enabling Bell's award-winning LTE network and we're pleased to grow our partnership into 5G mobile and fixed wireless technology," said Bell chief technology officer Stephen Howe.

Meanwhile, the British Columbia-based Telus also chose to go with a combination of Ericsson and Nokia. The company said it had spent CA$200 billion on its network since the turn of the century, and would part with a further CA$40 billion over the next three years to deploy its 5G network. Both Bell and Telus had previously used Huawei equipment in their networks. In February, Telus told the Financial Post it would be using Huawei in its 5G network. The third member of the Canadian major telco triumvirate -- Rogers -- said in January it would be using Ericsson equipment for its 5G rollout. The decisions from Canada's three major carriers now mean Huawei is increasingly isolated from 5G builds within the Five Eyes nations.

China's Huawei acted to cover up its relationship with a firm that had tried to sell prohibited U.S. computer gear to Iran, after Reuters in 2013 reported deep links between the firm and the telecom-equipment giant's chief financial officer, newly obtained internal Huawei documents show. From the report: Huawei has long described the firm -- Skycom Tech -- as a separate local business partner in Iran. Now, documents obtained by Reuters show how the Chinese tech titan effectively controlled Skycom. The documents, reported here for the first time, are part of a trove of internal Huawei and Skycom Iran-related business records -- including memos, letters and contractual agreements -- that Reuters has reviewed. One document described how Huawei scrambled in early 2013 to try to "separate" itself from Skycom out of concern over trade sanctions on Tehran. To that end, this and other documents show, Huawei took a series of actions -- including changing the managers of Skycom, shutting down Skycom's Tehran office and forming another business in Iran to take over tens of millions of dollars worth of Skycom contracts.

The revelations in the new documents could buttress a high-profile criminal case being pursued by U.S. authorities against Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of Huawei's founder. The United States has been trying to get Meng extradited from Canada, where she was arrested in December 2018. A Canadian judge last week allowed the case to continue, rejecting defense arguments that the U.S. charges against Meng do not constitute crimes in Canada. A U.S. indictment alleges that Huawei and Meng participated in a fraudulent scheme to obtain prohibited U.S. goods and technology for Huawei's Iran-based business via Skycom, and move money out of Iran by deceiving a major bank. The indictment alleges that Skycom was an "unofficial subsidiary" of Huawei, not a local partner.

MojoKid writes: AI and Machine Learning performance benchmarks have been well explored in the data center, but are fairly new and unestablished for edge devices like smartphones. While AI implementations on phones are typically limited to inferencing tasks like speech-to-text transcription and camera image optimization, there are real-world neural network models employed on mobile devices and accelerated by their dedicated processing engines. A deep dive look at HotHardware of three popular AI benchmarking apps for Android shows that not all platforms are created equal, but also that performance results can vary wildly, depending on the app used for benchmarking.

Generally speaking, it all hinges on what neural networks (NNs) the benchmarks are testing and what precision is being tested and weighted. Most mobile apps that currently employ some level of AI make use of INT8 (quantized). While INT8 offers less precision than FP16 (Floating Point), it's also more power-efficient and offers enough precision for most consumer applications. Typically, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 powered devices offer the best INT8 performance, while Huawei's Kirin 990 in the P40 Pro 5G offers superior FP16 performance. Since INT8 precision for NN processing is more common in today's mobile apps, it could be said that Qualcomm has the upper hand, but the landscape in this area is ever-evolving to be sure.

Well-known leaker Universe Ice on Twitter, along with dozens of other users, have discovered that simply setting an image as wallpaper on your phone could cause it to crash and become unable to boot. Android Authority reports: Based on user reports, many models from Samsung and Google are affected, while we've also seen some reports from users of OnePlus, Nokia, and Xiaomi devices (it's not clear if these latter devices ran stock software or custom ROMs). From our own testing and looking at user reports, Huawei devices seem to be less exposed to the wallpaper crash issue. There are a few solutions, depending on how hard the phone is hit. Some users were able to change the wallpaper in the short interval between crashes. Others had success deleting the wallpaper using the recovery tool TWRP. But in most cases, the only solution was to reset the phone to factory settings, losing any data that's not backed up.

The issue affects up-to-date phones running Android 10, but as it turns out, it's not actually new. Users have been reporting similar problems for a couple of years, and just last month Android Police reported on what appears to be a closely related issue specifically impacting Pixel phones running the Google Wallpapers app. [...] An issue with a very similar description has been reported in Google's Android issue tracker back in 2018. At the time, Google developers said they were unable to reproduce the issue and closed it out (Hat tip: inverimus on Reddit).

Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou has lost a key aspect of the trial on her extradition to the United States, a Canadian court announced on Wednesday. From a report: Meng, a Chinese citizen, was arrested in December 2018 on a warrant issued by U.S. authorities, who accuse her of bank fraud and misleading HSBC about a Huawei-owned company's dealings with Iran, thereby breaking U.S. sanctions on Tehran. Meng's lawyers argued that the case should be thrown out because the alleged offences were not a crime in Canada. But British Columbia's Superior Court Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes disagreed, ruling the legal standard of double criminality had been met. "Ms. Meng's approach ... would seriously limit Canada's ability to fulfill its international obligations in the extradition context for fraud and other economic crimes," Holmes said.

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: The National Cyber Security Agency in the UK is expected to conclude that U.S. sanctions against Huawei will make it impossible to use the Chinese company's technology as planned for 5G networks. The emergency review, announced on Sunday, is designed to pave the way for Downing Street to push for the total elimination of Huawei equipment in British phone networks by 2023 and quell a Conservative backbench revolt.

That move will amount to a hasty reversal of the policy announced by ministers in January to limit Huawei to 35% of the British 5G network supply. It also risks irritating China and adding hundreds of millions of costs to BT and other phone companies...

In early May, the U.S. said it would impose fresh sanctions against Huawei as part of a long-running campaign against the company, whose technology, the White House claims, could be exploited by China to conduct surveillance against the west. The U.S. sanctions, due to be introduced in September, would prevent Huawei from using U.S. semiconductors and software to build 5G equipment and force it to source alternatives, most likely from China. Whitehall sources said the threatened U.S. restrictions meant that any review would almost certainly say that Huawei posed a security risk. A particular concern was that Huawei would become reliant on unfamiliar and untested components, which could be exploited...

Leaks on Friday suggested that Downing Street was preparing the ground for a dramatic climbdown.

China's state-backed funds pumped $2.25 billion into a Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. wafer plant to support advanced-chip making as Washington tightens technology restrictions on the Asian nation. From a report: The Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. plant's registered capital jumps from $3.5 billion to $6.5 billion after the investment, the company said in an announcement on Friday. The chipmaker's stake in the Shanghai facility will drop from 50.1% to 38.5%, it said. The plant has capacity to produce 6,000 14-nanometer wafers a month and plans to boost that to 35,000. The new investment came as Washington moved to prevent sales to Huawei by chipmakers using U.S. technology. The Commerce Department on Friday said it would require licenses before allowing U.S. technology to be used by the Chinese company or its 114 subsidiaries, including its chip-design unit HiSilicon.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China is ready to take a series of countermeasures against a US plan to block shipments of semiconductors to Chinese telecom firm Huawei, including putting US companies on an "unreliable entity list," launching investigations and imposing restrictions on US companies such as Apple and suspending the purchase of Boeing airplanes, a source close to the Chinese government told the Global Times. The Trump administration on Friday moved to block shipments of semiconductors to Huawei from global chipmakers. The US Commerce Department said it was amending an export rule and the Entity List to "strategically target Huawei's acquisition of semiconductors that are the direct product of certain US software and technology," according to a statement on its website. "China will take forceful countermeasures to protect its own legitimate rights," if the US moves forward with the plan to bar essential suppliers of chips, including Taiwan-based TSMC, from selling chips to the Chinese tech giant, the source told the Global Times in an exclusive interview.

The Trump administration on Friday moved to block shipments of semiconductors to Huawei from global chipmakers, in an action ramping up tensions with China. From a report: The U.S. Commerce Department said it was amending an export rule to "strategically target Huawei's acquisition of semiconductors that are the direct product of certain U.S. software and technology." The reaction from China was swift with a report saying it was ready to put U.S. companies on an "unreliable entity list," as part of countermeasures in response to the new limits on Huawei, China's Global Times reported on Friday. The measures include launching investigations and imposing restrictions on U.S. companies such as Apple, Cisco, Qualcomm as well as suspending purchase of Boeing airplanes, the report said here citing a source.

Huawei has found a neat workaround to keep bundling Google apps on its smartphones: Launch new variants of old smartphones. From a report: The way the export ban has worked in practice is that Huawei devices that launched before the export ban (and some that launched even slightly after) can still be sold with Google apps. Devices that launched well after the ban, like the Mate 30 Pro, are stuck without the Google apps. So Huawei's solution, and its interpretation of the law, is that re-releases of old devices can still ship with Google apps. So meet the "New Editions" of old Huawei phones. This week, the company announced that the Huawei P30 Pro would be returning as the "Huawei P30 Pro New Edition," and earlier this year it re-launched the P30 Lite as the "P30 Lite New Edition." Both of these phones are from March 2019, so they're well over a year old now, but they both have Google app licenses, so welcome back!

Sony touted on Thursday the world's first image sensors with built-in artificial intelligence, promising to make data-gathering tasks much faster and more secure. Calling it the first of its kind, Sony said the technology would give "intelligent vision" to cameras for retail and industrial applications. From a report: The new sensors are akin to tiny self-contained computers, incorporating a logic processor and memory. They're capable of image recognition without generating any images, allowing them to do AI tasks like identifying, analyzing or counting objects without offloading any information to a separate chip. Sony said the method provides increased privacy while also making it possible to do near-instant analysis and object tracking. Sony joins tech giants like Huawei and Google that have been building dedicated AI silicon to help accelerate everything from image processing to machine learning.

President Donald Trump extended his effort to curb Huawei Technologies's access to the U.S. market and American suppliers. From a report: The president on Wednesday renewed for a year a national emergency order that restricts Huawei and a second Chinese telecommunications company, ZTE, from selling their equipment in the U.S. The move continues a battle with China over dominance of 5G technology networks. In the original order, which didn't name any countries or companies, Trump declared a national emergency relating to threats against information and communications technology and services. The Commerce Department then put Huawei on its "Entity List," meaning U.S. companies need a special license to sell products to the Chinese company. Further reading: Huawei Struggles to Get Along Without Google.

Huawei denied on Monday having any official involvement in an insecure patch submitted to the Linux kernel project over the weekend; patch that introduced a "trivially exploitable" vulnerability. From a report: The buggy patch was submitted to the official Linux kernel project via its mailing list on Sunday. Named HKSP (Huawei Kernel Self Protection), the patch allegedly introduced a series of security-hardening options to the Linux kernel. Big tech companies that heavily use Linux in their data centers and online services, often submit patches to the Linux kernel. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others have been known to have contributed code. On Sunday, the HKSP submission sparked interest in the Linux community as could signal Huawei's wish to possibly contribute to the official kernel. Due to this, the patch came under immediate scrutiny, including from the developers of Grsecurity, a project that provides its own set of security-hardening patches for the Linux kernel. In a blog post published on the same day, the Grsecurity team said that it discovered that the HKSP patch was introducing a "trivially exploitable" vulnerability in the kernel code -- if the patch was to be approved.

The Education Department has asked the University of Texas System to provide documentation of its dealings with the Chinese laboratory that U.S. officials are investigating as a potential source of the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The request for records of gifts or contracts from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its researcher Shi Zhengli, known for her work on bats, is part of a broader department investigation into possible faulty financial disclosures of foreign money by the Texas group of universities. The Education Department's letter, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, also asks the UT System to share documents regarding potential ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party and some two dozen Chinese universities and companies, including Huawei Technologies Co. and a unit of China National Petroleum Corp. The department is also seeking documents related to any university system contracts or gifts from Eric Yuan, a U.S. citizen who is the chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications.