U.S. officials say Huawei can covertly access mobile-phone networks around the world through "back doors" designed for use by law enforcement [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source was not immediately available.], as Washington tries to persuade allies to exclude the Chinese company from their networks. From a report: Intelligence shows Huawei has had this secret capability for more than a decade, U.S. officials said. Huawei rejected the allegations. The U.S. kept the intelligence highly classified until late last year, when American officials provided details to allies including the U.K. and Germany, according to officials from the three countries. That was a tactical turnabout by the U.S., which in the past had argued that it didn't need to produce hard evidence of the threat it says Huawei poses to nations' security. When telecom-equipment makers build and sell hardware such as switching gear, base stations and antennae to carriers -- who assemble the networks that enable mobile communication and computing -- they are required by law to build into their hardware ways for authorities to access the networks for lawful purposes. They are also required to build equipment in such a way that the manufacturer can't get access without the consent of the network operator. Only law-enforcement officials or authorized officials at each carrier are allowed into these "lawful interception interfaces," generally with the carrier's permission. Such access is governed by laws and protocols specific to each country. U.S. officials say Huawei has built equipment that secretly preserves the manufacturer's ability to access networks through these interfaces without the carriers' knowledge.

After capturing the U.S. television market with aggressively priced Roku TVs, China's TCL wants to replicate that success with inexpensive phones, IoT devices and connected appliances -- and in the process, turn its still relatively unknown brand into a household name. In other words: TCL wants to be the next Samsung. From a report: It won't be easy. The phone market, TCL's next target, is firmly dominated by Apple and Samsung and hard to penetrate for newcomers. The company also faces headwinds from the Trump administration's ongoing trade war with China, as well as political resistance to fellow Chinese tech companies like Huawei. And while TCL's partnership with Roku has been key to building its U.S. TV business, it has also forced the company to operate with razor-thin margins as Roku cashes in on a rapidly growing advertising business that's been a newfound source of revenue for other TV manufacturers.

TCL was founded as an audiotape manufacturer in China's Guangdong province in 1981. It has since become a growing force in the consumer electronics industry, manufacturing phones, TVs and appliances that are sold worldwide under a number of brands. In 2019, TCL sold 32 million TVs globally, it recently told investors. Across all of its businesses, TCL's 2018 revenue amounted to $16.3 billion, with a net profit of $586 million. Two-thirds of TCL's TV revenue already comes from overseas, and the company is looking to grow its international business even further. TCL is set to officially enter the U.S. smartphone market under its own brand in the second quarter of this year. After spending the last few years slapping licensed names like BlackBerry on phones it manufactures, the company previewed its first line of TCL-branded handsets at CES in January. It's expected to reveal official launch dates, specs and carrier partnerships at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month.

mikeebbbd writes: U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Thursday stressed the threat posed by China's Huawei Technologies and said the United States and its allies should consider investing in Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson, or both firms, to counter Huawei's dominance in next generation 5G telecoms technology.

China's Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo and Vivo are joining forces to create a platform for developers outside China to upload apps onto all of their app stores simultaneously, in a move analysts say is meant to challenge the dominance of Google's Play store. From a report: The four companies are ironing out kinks in what is known as the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA). The platform aims to make it easier for developers of games, music, movies and other apps to market their apps in overseas markets, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The GDSA was initially aiming to launch in March, sources said, although it is not clear how that will be affected by the recent coronavirus outbreak. A prototype website says the platform will initially cover nine "regions" including India, Indonesia and Russia.

Apple this week has been granted a patent for a foldable device with a unique hinge mechanism that utilizes movable flaps to help prevent the display from being creased or damaged when folded. From a report: Published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today, the patent explains that the hinge mechanism would ensure adequate separation between the first and second portions of the display. When the device is unfolded, movable flaps would extend to cover the gap, and then retract when the device is folded. Early foldable smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold and Huawei's Mate X have noticeable creases along the bending portion of the display. Motorola's new foldable Razr avoids this issue with a unique hinge design, but early reviews indicate the device makes creaking sounds when opened or closed.

Due to a U.S. government ban on sales to Huawei, Google revoked its license for popular apps last spring (including Gmail and the Play Store). But this week Huawei executive Fred Wangfei suggested that even if that ban is lifted, Huawei would continue developing its own app ecosystem instead to avoid the possibility of future political complications.

The vice president of risk management and partner relations at Huawei later called those remarks "incorrect," while elsewhere Huawei issued a slightly different statement -- that "An open Android ecosystem is still our first choice, but if we are not able to continue to use it, we have the ability to develop our own." But BGR was already noting that Huawei "is ready to invest $3 billion this year to incentivize more than 4,000 developers to improve its Huawei Mobile Services system. Another billion is reserved for marketing purposes."

And Android Authority suggests Huawei should stick to its original statement. "Maybe it's time for Huawei to go all-in on Harmony OS and do what it can to bring a viable alternative to Android and iOS..."
If there's any company today that has the financial resources and raw talent necessary to bring in a viable third choice for smartphone operating systems, it's Huawei... Sure, it would be a long-term investment and there would inevitably be short-term losses as the company tries to find its footing and develop Harmony OS to have its own identity. But it would prevent something like the Huawei ban from happening to the company again as well as further the company's ambitions as not only a smartphone manufacturer but as a technology creator....

Huawei would have major difficulties in encouraging wide adoption of Harmony OS for one major reason: it's Huawei. The Huawei ban exists because the United States government doesn't trust Huawei and there are numerous (as yet unproven) accusations against the company related to espionage, IP theft, fraud, and even violations of international treaties... Huawei is already in a bad situation. It's going to need to dig itself out of the hole it's in regardless, so why not use this opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade and develop Harmony OS as a viable third option on the way?

Maybe the industry needs a shake-up... Maybe a new operating system is just the kind of fire OEMs need to turn the market around. Maybe a real, potent threat that the billions of people who use Android and iOS just might jump ship to something else would scare companies into taking some real risks.

As I said earlier, there aren't too many companies out there right now that could do this, but Huawei could.

An anonymous reader writes: Market research firms Canalys and Counterpoint Research have posted their 2019 global smartphone market share reports. Both reports say the biggest mover is Huawei, which, thanks to a whopping 16-17 percent annual growth, claimed the No. 2 smartphone vendor spot in 2019, behind Samsung and ahead of Apple. Both firms have similar global market share numbers for 2019, with Samsung around 20 percent, Huawei at 16 percent, Apple at 13 percent, and Xiaomi and Oppo around eight percent each. Counterpoint credits Huawei's success in its hometown of China for its success, saying, "This was the result of an aggressive push from Huawei in the Chinese market, where it achieved almost 40 percent market share." According to the firm, China makes up 60 percent of Huawei's shipments. "For what it's worth, Canalys has Q4 2019 as Huawei's first quarterly decline -- down seven percent from Q3 -- in two years, which it blames on the [Trump Administration's Huawei export ban]," adds Ars. "Together with the annual Apple Q4 surge thanks to the launch of a new iPhone, Huawei fell to third place again within that time period."

The German government is in possession of evidence that Huawei, the leading maker of telecoms network equipment, has collaborated with Chinese intelligence, the Handelsblatt daily reported on Wednesday. Reuters: "At the end of 2019, intelligence was passed to us by the U.S., according to which Huawei is proven to have been cooperating with China's security authorities," the newspaper quoted a confidential foreign ministry document as saying. Chancellor Angela Merkel's government and her conservative ruling party are split on whether Huawei's equipment poses a security threat to Europe's largest economy, where the three mobile network operators are all customers of the Chinese firm.

Britain will allow Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to play a limited role in its next generation 5G mobile networks. From a report: The U.K. government said that Huawei will be restricted from being involved in "sensitive functions" in a network of features labeled as "core." There is also a limit in place on how much equipment networks can buy from one "high risk vendor" for a particular part of the infrastructure known as the Radio Access Network (RAN.) This is essentially the part of the network that hooks up your devices with the actual 5G signal. That cap is set at 35%. "The cap at 35% ensures the U.K. will not become nationally dependent on a high risk vendor while retaining competition in the market and allowing operators to continue to use two Radio Access Network (RAN) vendors," the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre said in its review of the country's telecommunications supply chain on Tuesday.

The Commerce Department's efforts to tighten the noose on Huawei Technologies Co. is facing a formidable obstacle: the Pentagon. From a report:Commerce officials have withdrawn proposed regulations making it harder for U.S. companies to sell to Huawei [the link may be paywalled] from their overseas facilities following objections from the Defense Department as well as the Treasury Department, people familiar with the matter told WSJ. The Pentagon is concerned that if U.S. companies can't continue to ship to Huawei, they will lose a key source of revenue -- depriving them of money for research and development needed to maintain a technological edge, the people said. The Treasury Department wanted to make sure that Secretary Steven Mnuchin had a chance to weigh in, said one of the people. Cabinet officials are expected to meet on Huawei and other China issues in the coming weeks. The splits within the Trump administration on how to deal with Huawei show the difficulty of confronting China on technology without harming U.S. companies.

Huawei has postponed its upcoming HDC.Cloud developer conference as Chinese authorities try to control the spread of the deadly coronavirus detected in the southeastern city of Wuhan. From a report: The controversial company's event was going to take place in Shenzhen -- which lies more than 700 miles south of Wuhan -- Feb. 11-12, but it's been rescheduled to March 27-28. "Based on the prevention and control of the pneumonia epidemic situation of the new coronavirus infection, we attach great importance to the health and safety of all the participants," Huawei said in its announcement. It also asked staff to avoid traveling to Wuhan and limit contact with animals, Reuters reported, and said it set up an outbreak prevention and control team in the city.

Dutch navigation and digital mapping company TomTom said on Friday it had closed a deal with China's Huawei Technologies for the use of its maps and services in smartphone apps. From a report: The deal with TomTom means that the Chinese telecoms and technology giant can now use the Dutch company's maps, traffic information and navigation software to develop apps for its smartphones, according to a Reuters report. A TomTom spokesman said the deal had been closed some time ago but had not been made public by the company and he declined to provide further details, according to the Reuters report. China's largest smartphone vendor has been forced to develop its own operating systems (OS) for both smartphones and computers after being added to a US blacklist in May on national security grounds, barring it from buying US-origin technology and blocking access to widely used apps such as Google Maps in Huawei's new devices.

Engadget reports on a new tech-industry-in-space comedy premiering tonight on HBO:
If you thought that HBO was done mocking technology companies now that Silicon Valley is done, think again. Avenue 5 is the channel's new sitcom, and one that asks the question: "What if tech bros were in charge of more than just our internet histories?'" The answer, at least according to the first half of the season, is that it won't be pretty -- or safe...

The Avenue 5 is a large space liner that, in the words of cinematographer Eben Bolter, is designed after a vulgar space hotel that goes too far and "gets the details wrong". This Titanic-like vessel and its 5,000 passengers are on a routine jaunt through the solar system when a minor disaster strikes, and its course is altered. But this is space, where a small deviation changes the flight time from eight weeks to several years.

The ship is owned by Herman Judd (Josh Gad) of the Judd Corporation, a self-regarding business magnate who, in Bolter's mind, has "only ever had one good idea." He's not quite an analog for the Bezoses and Musks you may be thinking of, but more a cracked-mirror version of both. Throughout the show, he attempts to impose his thinking on the crisis as if he was still in California, or wherever Silicon Valley moved after the show's alluded-to Huawei Wars. Early on, Judd is presented with the intractable problem of space physics, and he hopes to fix things as he did on Earth. He says, in the Jobsian tradition, that you can make something happen by making someone say that it can. The fight between visionary optimism and reality is harder when you're surrounded by an infinite vacuum, after all.

Avenue 5's point seems to be that you can't simply blue-sky your way out of a crisis when reality keeps getting in the way.

An anonymous reader quotes Slate:
Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook really the danger to democracy it looks like? Is Uber really worse than the system it replaced? Isn't Amazon's same-day delivery worth it? Which harms are real and which are hypothetical? Has the techlash gotten it right? And which of these companies is really the worst? Which ones might be, well, evil?

We don't mean evil in the mustache-twirling, burn-the-world-from-a-secret-lair sense -- well, we mostly don't mean that -- but rather in the way Googlers once swore to avoid mission drift, respect their users, and spurn short-term profiteering, even though the company now regularly faces scandals in which it has violated its users' or workers' trust. We mean ills that outweigh conveniences. We mean temptations and poison pills and unanticipated outcomes.
Slate sent ballots to "a wide range of journalists, scholars, advocates, and others who have been thinking critically about technology for years," and reported that while America's big tech companies topped the list, "our respondents are deeply concerned about foreign companies dabbling in surveillance and A.I., as well as the domestic gunners that power the data-broker business."

But while there were some disagreements, Palantir still rose to #4 on the list because "almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel."

Interestingly, their list ranks SpaceX at #17 (for potentially disrupting astronomy by clogging the sky with satellites) and ranks Tesla at #14 for "its troubled record of worker safety and its dubious claims that it will soon offer 'full self-driving' to customers who have already paid $7,000 for the promised add-on... Our respondents say the very real social good that Tesla has done by creating safe, zero-emission vehicles does not justify misdeeds, like apparent 'stealth recalls' of defects that appear to violate safety laws or the 19 unresolved Clean Air Act violations at its paint shop."

Slate's article includes its comprehensive list of the 30 most dangerous tech companies. But here's the top 10:

1. Amazon
2. Facebook
3. Alphabet
4. Palantir Technologies
5. Uber
6. Apple
7. Microsoft
8. Twitter
9. ByteDance
10. Exxon Mobil

There's also lots of familiar names higher up on the list, including both 8chan (#20) and Cloudflare (#21). 23andMe came in at #18, while Huawei was #11. Netflix does not appear anywhere on the list, but Disney ranks #15.

And Oracle was #19. "It takes a lot to make me feel like Google is being victimized by a bully," wrote Cory Doctorow, "but Oracle managed it."

Bruce Schneier comments on the issues surrounding 5G security: [...] Keeping untrusted companies like Huawei out of Western infrastructure isn't enough to secure 5G. Neither is banning Chinese microchips, software, or programmers. Security vulnerabilities in the standards, the protocols and software for 5G, ensure that vulnerabilities will remain, regardless of who provides the hardware and software. These insecurities are a result of market forces that prioritize costs over security and of governments, including the United States, that want to preserve the option of surveillance in 5G networks. If the United States is serious about tackling the national security threats related to an insecure 5G network, it needs to rethink the extent to which it values corporate profits and government espionage over security. To be sure, there are significant security improvements in 5G over 4G in encryption, authentication, integrity protection, privacy, and network availability. But the enhancements aren't enough. The 5G security problems are threefold.

First, the standards are simply too complex to implement securely. This is true for all software, but the 5G protocols offer particular difficulties. Because of how it is designed, the system blurs the wireless portion of the network connecting phones with base stations and the core portion that routes data around the world. Additionally, much of the network is virtualized, meaning that it will rely on software running on dynamically configurable hardware. This design dramatically increases the points vulnerable to attack, as does the expected massive increase in both things connected to the network and the data flying about it. Second, there's so much backward compatibility built into the 5G network that older vulnerabilities remain. 5G is an evolution of the decade-old 4G network, and most networks will mix generations. Without the ability to do a clean break from 4G to 5G, it will simply be impossible to improve security in some areas. Attackers may be able to force 5G systems to use more vulnerable 4G protocols, for example, and 5G networks will inherit many existing problems. Third, the 5G standards committees missed many opportunities to improve security. Many of the new security features in 5G are optional, and network operators can choose not to implement them. The same happened with 4G; operators even ignored security features defined as mandatory in the standard because implementing them was expensive. But even worse, for 5G, development, performance, cost, and time to market were all prioritized over security, which was treated as an afterthought.

New submitter profi shares a report from Computing: Huawei has released the source code of openEuler, its distribution of Linux based on CentOS. The operating system was formally launched by Huawei in September 2019 in response to U.S. sanctions, which had briefly affected the company's access to Windows and Android operating systems. The source code has now been published on Gitee, the Chinese version of Github.

OpenEuler comprises two organizations on Gitee, one for source code and one for package sources. The openEuler organization was keen to highlight two particular packages, iSulad and A-Tune, among the openEuler source code. "iSulad is a lightweight gRPC service-based container runtime. Compared to runc, iSulad is written in C, but all interfaces are compatible with OCI. A-Tune is a system software to auto-optimize the system adaptively to multiple scenarios with embedded AI-engine." The announcement continues: "You will also see several infrastructure-supported projects that set up the community's operating systems... these systems are built on the Huawei Cloud through script automation."

Among the package sources, covered by the src-openeuler organization on Gitee, are around 1,000 packages with versions in both ARM64 and X86 architecture packages. Huawei claims its developers have made a number of enhancements to ARM64 openEuler code to improve multi-core efficiency. It is also working on a "green computing" ecosystem with Linaro and the Green Industry Alliance. At the moment, the organization claims, there are more than 50 contributors and just under 600 commits. The openEuler community has around 20 SIGs or project groups.

"The gigabytes of data we're using -- although invisible -- come at a significant cost to the environment," argues the CBC's senior technology reporter. "Some experts say it rivals that of the airline industry." And as more smart devices rely on data to operate (think internet-connected refrigerators or self-driving cars), their electricity demands are set to skyrocket. "We are using an immense amount of energy to drive this data revolution," said Jane Kearns, an environment and technology expert at MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. "It has real implications for our climate." [Kearns is also the co-founder of the CanadaCleantech Alliance....]

It's not the gadgets themselves that are drawing so much power, it's the far-flung servers that act as their electronic brains... The data centres, often bigger than a football field, house endless stacks of servers handling many terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of digital traffic. Just as laptops tend to warm during heavy usage, servers must be cooled to avoid overheating. And cooling so many machines requires plenty of power. Anders Andrae, a researcher at Huawei Technologies Sweden whose estimates are often cited, told CBC News in an email he expects the world's data centres alone will devour up to 651 terawatt-hours of electricity in the next year. That's nearly as much electricity as Canada's entire energy sector produces. And it's just the beginning.

Andrae's calculations, published in the International Journal of Green Technology, suggest data centres could more than double their power demands over the next decade. He projects computing will gobble up 11 per cent of global energy by 2030 and cloud-based services will represent a sizeable proportion of that. "This will become completely unsustainable by 2040," Andrae wrote...

The information and communications technology sector as a whole is thought to be responsible for two to three per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- roughly on par with the often-criticized airline sector.
The article also notes that by 2018 Amazon had already switched to renewable energy for at least 50% of its cloud computing servers. And it also adds that tech companies "in Canada and abroad...are coming up with innovative solutions to curb the growing problem."

Solutions being investigated include recovering the low-level heat generated by servers and increasing the speed and capacity of data transfers (including one approach involving a quantum dot multi-wavelength laser).

Huawei reported resilient revenue for 2019 on Tuesday as the embattled Chinese technology group continues to grow despite prolonged American campaign against its business, but cautioned that growth next year could prove more challenging. From a report: Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, wrote in a New Year's message to employees that the company's revenue has topped 850 billion Chinese yuan ($122 billion) this year, a new record high for the Chinese group and an 18% increase over the previous year. Xu said Huawei, the second largest smartphone maker globally, sold 240 million handsets this year, up from 206 million last year. "These figures are lower than our initial projections, yet business remains solid and we stand strong in the face of adversity," he wrote. He acknowledged that Huawei is confronting a "strategic and long-term" campaign against its business by the U.S. government. If the campaign persists for long, it would create even more "difficult" environment for the 32-year-old firm to "survive and thrive," he said.

The Indian government has allowed Chinese telecom company Huawei Technologies to participate in trials for 5G networks, a company spokesman said on Monday. From a report: India's nod to Huawei comes at a time when the global rollout of 5G technology has been complicated by U.S. sanctions against the company. The United States has been lobbying allies not to use Huawei's network equipment in their 5G networks.

Bloomberg looks back at what tech industry titans predicted would be happening "by 2020." - Here's what Huawei Technologies Co. said in 2015 predicting a "superphone" by 2020, according to ZDNet: "Inspired by the biological evolution, the mobile phone we currently know will come to life as the superphone," said Shao Yang, a strategy marketing president of Huawei. "Through evolution and adaptation, the superphone will be more intelligent, enhancing and even transforming our perceptions, enabling humans to go further than ever before." It's not entirely clear what that means, but it probably hasn't happened yet. In the interim, Huawei found itself in the middle of a trade war, and the Chinese company is focusing largely on mid-priced phones for its domestic market...

- In 2013, Elon Musk outlined his vision for a new "fifth mode of transportation" that would involve zipping people through tubes at speeds as fast as 800 miles per hour. Several tech entrepreneurs heeded Musk's call and went to work on such systems inspired by the billionaire's specifications. In 2015, one of the leading startups predicted a hyperloop spanning about 60 miles would be ready for human transport by 2020. Rob Lloyd, then the CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, told Popular Science: "I'm very confident that's going to happen." It hasn't. His company, now called Virgin Hyperloop One, has a 1,600-foot test track in California and hopes to build a 22-mile track in Saudi Arabia someday. Musk has since experimented with hyperloops of his own, and even he has had to scale back his ambitions. Musk's Boring Co. is building a so-called Loop system in Las Vegas, starting with a nearly mile-long track that consists of a narrow tunnel and Tesla cars moving at up to 155 miles per hour...

- It was barely two years ago when the maker of blowdryers and vacuum cleaners said it would sell an electric car by 2020. Dyson canceled the project this year, calling it "not commercially viable."
Other predictions include John McAfee's infamous 2017 prediction that one bitcoin would be worth $1 million by the end of 2020, "about three weeks before a crash would erase 83% of value over the next year."

And in 2012 Intel predicted that by 2020 we'd have computer chips that consumed almost no energy