China accused the U.S. of infiltrating Huawei servers beginning in 2009, part of a broad-based effort to steal data that culminated in tens of thousands of cyber-attacks against Chinese targets last year. From a report: The Tailored Access Operations unit of the National Security Agency carried out the attacks in 2009, which then continuously monitored the servers, China's Ministry of State Security said in a post on its official WeChat account on Wednesday. It didn't provide details of attacks since 2009. Cyberattacks are a point of tension between Washington and Beijing, which has accused its political rival of orchestrating attacks against Chinese targets ever since Edward Snowden made explosive allegations about U.S. spying. Washington and cybersecurity researchers have said the Asian country has sponsored attacks against the West.

The ministry's accusations emerged as the two countries battle for technological supremacy. Huawei in particular has spurred alarm in Washington since the telecom leader unveiled a smartphone powered by an advanced chip it designed, which was made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. That's in spite of years-long U.S. sanctions intended to cut Huawei off from the American technology it needs to design sophisticated chips and phones. The U.S. has been "over-stretching" the concept of national security with its clampdown on Chinese enterprises, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. "What we want to tell the US is that suppression and containing of China will not stop China's development. It will only make us more resolved in our development," Mao said.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she was "upset" when China's Huawei released a new phone with an advanced chip during her visit to the country last month but noted that the US has no evidence China can make those components "at scale." From a report: "We are trying to use every single tool at our disposal to deny the Chinese the ability to advance their technology in ways that can hurt us," Raimondo testified at a congressional hearing Tuesday. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security this month opened an investigation into Huawei's phone and the "purported" 7-nanometer chip, made by China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, which was discovered in a teardown of the handset that TechInsights conducted for Bloomberg News. It is unclear whether SMIC has approval from Commerce to supply Huawei, which has been blacklisted by the US. Raimondo said she won't comment on any active investigations, but that the Commerce Department will investigate every time it appears a company may have violated US export controls.

Huawei's launch last week of the Mate 60 Pro smartphone "shocked industry experts," reports CNN, who didn't understand how Huawei "would have the ability to manufacture such an advanced smartphone following sweeping efforts by the United States to restrict China's access to foreign chip technology."

And in a related note, CNN adds that South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix "is investigating how two of its memory chips mysteriously ended up inside the Mate 60 Pro, a controversial smartphone launched by Huawei last week." Shares in Hynix fell more than 4% on Friday after it emerged that two of its products, a 12 gigabyte (GB) LPDDR5 chip and 512 GB NAND flash memory chip, were found inside the Huawei handset by TechInsights, a research organization based in Canada specializing in semiconductors, which took the phone apart for analysis. "The significance of the development is that there are restrictions on what SK Hynix can ship to China," G Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights, told CNN. "Where do these chips come from? The big question is whether any laws were violated."

A Hynix spokesperson told CNN Friday that it was aware of its chips being used in the Huawei phone and had started investigating the issue.

The company "no longer does business with Huawei since the introduction of the U.S. restrictions against the company," it said in a statement... Industry insiders said it was possible that Huawei had purchased the memory chips from the secondary market and not directly from the manufacturer. It's also possible Huawei may have had a stockpile of components accumulated before the U.S. export curbs kicked in fully.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

Afghanistan's Taliban-led government is working with Huawei to install a wide-ranging surveillance system across the country in an effort to identify and target insurgents or terrorism activities, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing a person familiar with the discussions. From the report: Representatives of the Shenzhen-headquartered tech company met with Interior Ministry officials on Aug. 14, the person said, and a verbal agreement was reached regarding the contract. The Interior Ministry initially posted images and details of the meeting on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In one post, spokesman Mufti Abdul Mateen Qani said the advanced camera system was being considered "in every province of Afghanistan."

The posts, which were later deleted, included comments from Abdullah Mukhtar, the deputy minister of the ministry. "We are willing to accept projects that are better in terms of quality and price," he said. "Reports on this meeting are factually incorrect. No plans or agreements were discussed," Huawei said in an emailed statement.

Huawei is accused by a semiconductor manufacturers association of setting up secret chip-making facilities in China to evade U.S. sanctions. The Guardian reports: The Chinese tech firm moved into chip production last year and was receiving an estimated $30 billion in state funding from the government, the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association was quoted as saying by Bloomberg, adding that Huawei had acquired at least two existing plants and was building three others. If Huawei is constructing facilities under names of other companies, as the Semiconductor Industry Association alleges, then it may be able to circumvent U.S. government restrictions to indirectly purchase American chip-making equipment, according to Bloomberg.

China's Huawei is plotting a return to the 5G smartphone industry by the end of this year, according to research firms, signalling a comeback after a U.S. ban on equipment sales decimated its consumer electronics business. From a report: Huawei should be able to procure 5G chips domestically using its own advances in semiconductor design tools along with chipmaking from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC), three third-party technology research firms covering China's smartphone sector told Reuters.

The firms, citing industry sources including Huawei suppliers, spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with clients. A return to the 5G phone market would mark a victory for the company that for almost three years said it was in "survival" mode. Huawei's consumer business revenue peaked at 483 billion yuan ($67 billion) in 2020, before plummeting by almost 50% a year later. The Shenzhen-based tech giant once vied with Apple and Samsung to be the world's biggest handset maker until rounds of U.S. restrictions beginning in 2019 cut its access to chipmaking tools essential for producing its most advanced models.

Huawei has claimed it will offer everything a carrier needs to run a 5.5G network next year. Which sounds great -- even if 5.5G is a little mysterious. From a report: Huawei announced its future products at the Shanghai incarnation of Mobile World Congress on Thursday. The Chinese firm's director and president of ICT Products & Solutions, Yang Chaobin, proclaimed Huawei intends for its launch "to mark the beginning of the 5.5G era for the ICT industry." But as The Register has previously reported, 5.5G is a contested label.

The 3GPP, which oversees development of 5G and other standards, is yet to formally declare 5.5G is a thing. It is, however, continuing to evolve 5G and is currently steering work on Release 18 -- which it has styled "5G-Advanced." It includes some significant changes, such as the ability to offer 10Gbit/sec connections -- if carriers can use 800MHz of spectrum. Release 18 will also require mmWave frequencies. Huawei appears to be referring to Release 18 as 5.5G, for reasons that aren't entirely clear.

Yang sprinkled a little hype dust on his announcement -- claiming that Huawei has "been working on applying AI-native technologies to 5.5G core networks to continuously enhance network capabilities and availability." Doing so will apparently "allow AI capabilities to be delivered to the very ends of networks." Righto. Just keep saying "AI" a lot and people will love it.

New submitter ole_timer shares a report from Wired: TikTok to Huawei routers to DJI drones, rising tensions between China and the US have made Americans -- and the US government -- increasingly wary of Chinese-owned technologies. But thanks to the complexity of the hardware supply chain, encryption chips sold by the subsidiary of a company specifically flagged in warnings from the US Department of Commerce for its ties to the Chinese military have found their way into the storage hardware of military and intelligence networks across the West. In July of 2021, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security added the Hangzhou, China-based encryption chip manufacturer Hualan Microelectronics, also known as Sage Microelectronics, to its so-called "Entity List," a vaguely named trade restrictions list that highlights companies "acting contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States." Specifically, the bureau noted that Hualan had been added to the list for "acquiring and ... attempting to acquire US-origin items in support of military modernization for [China's] People's Liberation Army."

Yet nearly two years later, Hualan -- and in particular its subsidiary known as Initio, a company originally headquartered in Taiwan that it acquired in 2016 -- still supplies encryption microcontroller chips to Western manufacturers of encrypted hard drives, including several that list as customers on their websites Western governments' aerospace, military, and intelligence agencies: NASA, NATO, and the US and UK militaries. Federal procurement records show that US government agencies from the Federal Aviation Administration to the Drug Enforcement Administration to the US Navy have bought encrypted hard drives that use the chips, too. The disconnect between the Commerce Department's warnings and Western government customers means that chips sold by Hualan's subsidiary have ended up deep inside sensitive Western information networks, perhaps due to the ambiguity of their Initio branding and its Taiwanese origin prior to 2016. The chip vendor's Chinese ownership has raised fears among security researchers and China-focused national security analysts that they could have a hidden backdoor that would allow China's government to stealthily decrypt Western agencies' secrets. And while no such backdoor has been found, security researchers warn that if one did exist, it would be virtually impossible to detect it.

"If a company is on the Entity List with a specific warning like this one, it's because the US government says this company is actively supporting another country's military development," says Dakota Cary, a China-focused research fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC-based think tank. "It's saying you should not be purchasing from them, not just because the money you're spending is going to a company that will use those proceeds in the furtherance of another country's military objectives, but because you can't trust the product." [...] The mere fact that so many Western government agencies are buying products that include chips sold by the subsidiary of a company on the Commerce Department's trade restrictions list points to the complexities of navigating the computing hardware supply chain, says the Atlantic Council's Cary. "At minimum, it's a real oversight. Organizations that should be prioritizing this level of security are apparently not able to do so, or are making mistakes that have allowed for these products to get into their environments," he says. "It seems very significant. And it's probably not a one-off mistake."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple may be forced to change the name of its new mixed reality headset in China unless it can come to an agreement with Huawei, which already owns the "Vision Pro" trademark in the country. Originally spotted by MyDrivers, the trademark was originally granted to Huawei on May 16, 2019, and gives the company exclusive rights to its use in China from November 28, 2021 to November 27, 2031. Huawei actively uses the trademark in China, and offers a number of products under the Vision name, including smart TVs and smart glasses. If Apple intends to sell its headset in China and call it Vision Pro, it may have to enter into negotiations with Huawei to release the trademark for a price. Apple has had a similar trademark issue with a Chinese company in the past. "Apple in 2012 paid Proview Technology $60 million for the rights to the 'iPad' trademark in China," reports MacRumors. "The payment followed several court cases in which Apple unsuccessfully argued that it had already acquired the rights for the name as part of a deal with Proview's Taiwanese arm."

Portugal has banned companies from 'high-risk' countries and jurisdictions from supplying equipment for its fifth-generation phone network, becoming the latest western nation to effectively block China's Huawei from its market. From a report: The country will prohibit the use of equipment in its 5G wireless network from suppliers based outside the European Union or from states that don't belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to a government statement posted online Thursday.

"Deep in a pine forest in Wilcox County, Alabama, three workers dangled from the top of a 350-foot cellular tower," reports the New York Times. "They were there to rip out and replace Chinese equipment from the local wireless network..." As the United States and China battle for geopolitical and technological primacy, the fallout has reached rural Alabama and small wireless carriers in dozens of states. They are on the receiving end of the Biden administration's sweeping policies to suppress China's rise, which include trade restrictions, a $52 billion package to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing against China and the divestiture of the video app TikTok from its Chinese owner. What the wireless carriers must do, under a program known as "rip and replace," has become the starkest physical manifestation of the tech Cold War between the two superpowers. The program, which took effect in 2020, mandates that American companies tear out telecom equipment made by the Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE. U.S. officials have warned that gear from those companies could be used by Beijing for espionage and to steal commercial secrets.

Instead, U.S. carriers have to use equipment from non-Chinese companies. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program, would then reimburse the carriers from a pot of $1.9 billion intended to cover their costs. Similar rip-and-replace efforts are taking place elsewhere. In Europe, where Huawei products have been a key part of telecom networks, carriers in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden have also been swapping out the Chinese equipment because of security concerns, according to Strand Consult, a research firm that tracks the telecom industry. "Rip-and-replace was the first front in a bigger story about the U.S. and China's decoupling, and that story will continue into the next decade with a global race for A.I. and other technologies," said Blair Levin, a former F.C.C. chief of staff and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

But cleansing U.S. networks of Chinese tech has not been easy. The costs have already ballooned above $5 billion, according to the F.C.C., more than double what Congress appropriated for reimbursements. Many carriers also face long supply chain delays for new equipment. The program's burden has fallen disproportionately on smaller carriers, which relied more on the cheaper gear from the Chinese firms than large companies like AT&T and Verizon. Given rip-and-replace's difficulties, some smaller wireless companies now say they may not be able to upgrade their networks and continue serving their communities, where they are often the only internet providers. "For many rural communities, they are faced with the disastrous choice of having to continue to use insecure networks that are ripe for surveillance or having to cut off their services," said Geoffrey Starks, a Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C.

Last month, Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican of Nebraska, introduced a bill to close the gap in rip-and-replace funding for carriers... In January, the F.C.C. said it had received 126 applications seeking funding beyond what it could reimburse. Lawmakers had underestimated the costs of shredding Huawei and ZTE equipment, and new equipment and labor costs have risen. The F.C.C. said it could cover only about 40 percent of the expenses. Some wireless carriers immediately paused their replacement efforts. "Until we have assurance of total project funding, this project will continue to be delayed as we await the necessary funding required to build and pay for the new network equipment," United Wireless of Dodge City, Kansas, wrote in a regulatory filing to the F.C.C. in January.

China's Huawei said on Thursday it is replacing internal software management systems it once sourced from U.S. vendors with its own in-house version, hailing it as a victory over U.S. curbs that once threatened its survival. From a report: Huawei held an internal ceremony to celebrate the switch to its own 'MetaERP' (enterprise resource planning system) in Dongguan, south China on Thursday, attended by the Huawei's rotating Chairperson Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company's founder Ren Zhengfei. ERP software is used by companies to manage key business operations ranging from accounting to supply chain management.

"We were cut off from the old ERP system and other core operation and management systems three years ago," said Tao Jingwen, a Huawei board member and president of its quality, business process and IT management department. "Today we are proud to announce that we have broken through that blockade, we have survived!" The in-house Meta-ERP has been rolled out across 80% of the company's business, Huawei said in a news release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Seagate has agreed to pay a $300 million penalty in a settlement with U.S. authorities for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to China's Huawei in violation of U.S. export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. Seagate sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with U.S. technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a U.S. trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of U.S. goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

Seagate shipped 7.4 million drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei's sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said. The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital and Toshiba were the other two, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

Chinese state-owned telecom firms are developing a $500 million undersea fiber-optic internet cable network that would link Asia, the Middle East and Europe to rival a similar U.S.-backed project, four people involved in the deal told Reuters. From the report: The plan is a sign that an intensifying tech war between Beijing and Washington risks tearing the fabric of the internet. China's three main carriers -- China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), China Mobile Limited and China United Network Communications Group (China Unicom) -- are mapping out one of the world's most advanced and far-reaching subsea cable networks, according to the four people, who have direct knowledge of the plan.

Known as EMA (Europe-Middle East-Asia), the proposed cable would link Hong Kong to China's island province of Hainan, before snaking its way to Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France, the four people said. They asked not to be named because they were not allowed to discuss potential trade secrets. The cable, which would cost approximately $500 million to complete, would be manufactured and laid by China's HMN Technologies, a fast-growing cable firm whose predecessor company was majority-owned by Chinese telecom giant Huawei, the people said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: China's chip industry will be "reborn" as a result of U.S. sanctions, a top boss at Huawei said Friday, as the Chinese telecommunications giant confirmed a breakthrough in semiconductor design technology. Eric Xu, rotating chairman at Huawei, issued fighting words against Washington's tech export restrictions on China. "I believe China's semiconductor industry will not sit idly by, but take efforts around ... self-strengthening and self reliance," according to an official translation of Xu's comments during a press conference. "For Huawei, we will render our support to all such self-saving, self-strengthening and self reliance efforts of the Chinese semiconductor industry."

The U.S. is concerned that China could use advanced semiconductors for military purposes. Huawei's Xu said these developments could boost, rather than hamper China's domestic semiconductor industry. "I believe China's semiconductor industry will get reborn under such sanctions and realize a very strong and self-reliant industry," Xu said. Last week, Huawei claimed to have completed work on electronic design automation tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes.

"But Huawei ideally needs chips of a much smaller nanometer size for more advanced applications, which they are currently finding it difficult to obtain," adds Reuters. "The company is still reeling from the effects of U.S. sanctions -- on Friday, it said net profit dropped 69% year-on-year in 2022, marking the biggest decline on record."

Belgium's intelligence service is scrutinizing the operations of technology giant Huawei as fears of Chinese espionage grow around the EU and NATO headquarters in Brussels, according to confidential documents seen by POLITICO and three people familiar with the matter. From the report: In recent months, Belgium's State Security Service (VSSE) has requested interviews with former employees of the company's lobbying operation in the heart of Brussels' European district. The intelligence gathering is part of security officials' activities to scrutinize how China may be using non-state actors -- including senior lobbyists in Huawei's Brussels office -- to advance the interests of the Chinese state and its Communist party in Europe, said the people, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. The scrutiny of Huawei's EU activities comes as Western security agencies are sounding the alarm over companies with links to China. British, Dutch, Belgian, Czech and Nordic officials -- as well as EU functionaries -- have all been told to stay off TikTok on work phones over concerns similar to those surrounding Huawei, namely that Chinese security legislation forces Chinese tech firms to hand over data. The scrutiny also comes amid growing evidence of foreign states' influence on EU decision-making -- a phenomenon starkly exposed by the recent Qatargate scandal, where the Gulf state sought to influence Brussels through bribes and gifts via intermediary organizations. The Belgian security services are tasked with overseeing operations led by foreign actors around the EU institutions.

Security researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have identified and outlined potential malware in versions of PDD Holdings' Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo, days after Google suspended it from its Android app store. From a report: In one of the first public accountings of the malicious code, Kaspersky laid out how the app could elevate its own privileges to undermine user privacy and data security. It tested versions of the app distributed through a local app store in China, where Huawei Technologies, Tencent Holdings and Xiaomi run some of the biggest app markets. Kaspersky's findings, shared with Bloomberg News, were among the clearest explanations from an independent security team for what triggered Google's action and malware warning last week. The cybersecurity firm, which has played a role in uncovering some of the biggest cyberattacks in history, said it found evidence that earlier versions of Pinduoduo exploited system software vulnerabilities to install backdoors and gain unauthorized access to user data and notifications. Those conclusions agreed in large part with those of researchers that had posted their discoveries online in past weeks, though Bloomberg News hasn't verified the authenticity of the earlier reports.

Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes. The Register reports: Chinese media said the platform is one of 78 being developed by the telecoms equipment giant to replace American and European chip design toolkits that have become subject to export controls by the US and others. Huawei's EDA platform was reportedly revealed by rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun during a meeting in February, and later confirmed by media in China. [...] Huawei's focus on EDA software for 14nm and larger chips reflects the current state of China's semiconductor industry. State-backed foundry operator SMIC currently possesses the ability to produce 14nm chips at scale, although there have been some reports the company has had success developing a 7nm process node.

Today, the EDA market is largely controlled by three companies: California-based Synopsys and Cadence, as well as Germany's Siemens. According to the industry watchers at TrendForce, these three companies account for roughly 75 percent of the EDA market. And this poses a problem for Chinese chipmakers and foundries, which have steadily found themselves cut off from these tools. Synopsys and Cadence's EDA tech is already subject to several of these export controls, which were stiffened by the US Commerce Department last summer to include state-of-the-art gate-all-around (GAA) transistors. This January, the White House also reportedly stopped issuing export licenses to companies supplying the likes of Huawei.

This is particularly troublesome for Huawei, foundry operator SMIC, and memory vendor YMTC to name a few on the US Entity List, a roster of companies Uncle Sam would prefer you not to do business with. It leaves them unable to access recent and latest technologies, at the very least. So the development of a homegrown EDA platform for 14nm chips serves as insurance in case broader access to Western production platforms is cut off entirely.

On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup. From a report: Called Mozilla.ai, the newly forged company's mission isn't to build just any AI -- its mission is to build AI that's open source and "trustworthy," according to Mark Surman, the executive president of Mozilla and the head of Mozilla.ai. "Working on trustworthy AI for almost five years, I've constantly felt a mix of excitement and anxiety," he told TechCrunch in an email interview. "The last month or two of rapid-fire big tech AI announcements has been no different. Really exciting new tech is emerging -- new tools that have immediately sparked artists, founders ... all kinds of people to do new things. The anxiety comes when you realize almost no one is looking at the guardrails."

Surman was referring to the rash of AI models in recent months that, while impressive in their capabilities, have worrisome real-world implications. At release, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT could be prompted to write malware, identify exploits in open source code and create phishing websites that looked similar to well-trafficked sites. Text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion, meanwhile, has been co-opted to create pornographic, nonconsensual deepfakes and ultra-graphic depictions of violence. The creators of these models say that they're taking steps to curb abuse. But Mozilla felt that not enough was being done. "We've been working on trustworthy AI on the public interest research side for about five years, hoping other industry players with more AI expertise would step up to build more trustworthy tech," Surman said. "They haven't. So we decided mid-last year we needed to do it ourselves -- and to find like-minded partners to do it alongside us. We then set out to find someone with the right mix of academic and industry AI experience to lead it." Funded by a $30 million seed investment from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla's parent organization, Mozilla.ai is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation -- much like the Mozilla Corporation (the org responsible for developing Firefox) and Mozilla Ventures (the Mozilla Foundation's VC fund). Its managing director is Moez Draief, who previously was the chief scientist at Huawei's Noah's Ark AI lab and the global chief scientist at consulting company Capgemini.

Germany's government is planning on forbidding telecoms operators from using certain components from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE in their 5G networks, German paper Zeit Online reported on Monday. Reuters reports: The ban could include components already built into the networks, requiring operators to remove and replace them, Zeit Online wrote, citing government sources. The government, which is now in the midst of a broader re-evaluation of its relationship with top trade partner China, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. A source, however, confirmed the report to Reuters.

Critics of Huawei and ZTE say that their close links to China's security services mean that embedding them in the ubiquitous mobile networks of the future could give Chinese spies and even saboteurs access to swathes of essential infrastructure. Huawei, ZTE and the Chinese government reject these claims, saying that they are motivated by a protectionist desire to support non-Chinese rivals.

Zeit Online said the government's cybersecurity agency and interior ministry had for months been checking if there were components in the growing 5G networks that could put German security at risk. The survey had not officially been ended, but the result was already clear, the paper said, citing government sources. The government would ban operators from using certain controlling elements from Huawei and ZTE in 5G networks.