Canada

Canada Set To Ban Chinese Tech Giant Huawei From 5G Network 70

Canada is planning to ban Huawei from working on Canada's fifth-generation networks. CBC.ca reports: The move puts Canada in line with key intelligence allies like the United States which have expressed concerns about the national security implications of giving the Chinese tech giant access to key infrastructure. [...] Critics have warned that Huawei's participation in Canada's 5G networks could give the company an inside look at how, when and where Canadians use internet-connected devices -- and that the Chinese government could force the company to hand over that personal information. China's National Intelligence Law says Chinese organizations and citizens must support, assist and co-operate with state intelligence work. [...] Huawei insists it is a fiercely independent company that does not engage in espionage for anyone, including Beijing.

Huawei already supplies some Canadian telecommunications firms with 4G equipment. As Global News has reported, telecommunication companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Huawei equipment while the federal government's review of 5G was ongoing -- although that number has waned over the years. It's not clear whether Ottawa's decision to bar Huawei from 5G will require those companies to rip out existing Huawei equipment, or whether compensation would be provided.
Apple

Apple Reportedly Testing E Ink Outer Display for Upcoming Foldable (techcrunch.com) 24

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ming-Chi Kuo is one of a handful of Apple analysts whose reports always warrant a second look, regardless of how strange they might seem at first blush. We've heard plenty of reports that the company is testing its own version of a foldable device, in its customary style of being fashionably late to the party, while also being the best dressed there. It stands to reason that the company is experimenting with all sorts of takes on the form factor. While companies like Samsung and Huawei have made great strides since the first generation of foldable devices, one can certainly make the argument that no one has perfectly cracked the code just yet. The screen technology has improved a good bit in recent years -- and so, too, has E Ink technology. "Apple is testing E Ink's Electronic Paper Display (EPD) for future foldable device's cover screen and tablet-like applications," Kuo reported on Twitter earlier today. "The color EPD has the potential to become a mainstream solution for foldable devices' must-have cover/second screen thanks to its excellent power-saving."
United States

US, Over 55 Other Countries Commit To Democratic Internet Governance (cnn.com) 72

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: More than 55 countries and the United States announced their commitment Thursday to defending a free and open internet, agreeing to uphold digital human rights in response to rising authoritarianism in cyberspace. The agreement (PDF), known as the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, aims to forestall an emerging "splinternet" characterized by the growing repression of internet users in closed regimes such as Russia and China -- and the divergence of those countries from the internet's founding principles of universal access and unfettered information flow. Concerns about the internet's long-term trajectory have been amplified by the war in Ukraine, according to senior Biden administration officials, as Russia has moved to block western social media services and penalized the sharing of accurate information about the conflict.

Many of the commitments outlined in the agreement reflect existing US policy initiatives, and the administration officials described the declaration as a way to organize and harmonize those efforts internationally. Under the agreement, countries have pledged not to abuse internet technologies for illegal surveillance; block content or websites in violation of so-called net neutrality principles; or use digital tools to undermine trust in elections. They agreed to support multilateral efforts against cybercrime, an issue that's grown in significance as businesses and governments alike have reeled in the face of devastating ransomware attacks. They committed to using only "trustworthy" network equipment, a nod to the spying risks the US and its allies have said are associated with Chinese vendors such as Huawei. And they joined together in reaffirming support for the decentralized, consensus-driven approach that for decades has underpinned decisions about how the internet should work.

Security

Former NSA Computer Scientist: Patching Vulnerabilities Gives False Sense of Security (itwire.com) 112

A former NSA computer scientist is disgusted with the current state of security practices, writes ITWire. Slashdot reader samuel_the_fool shares their report: Patching of vulnerabilities is the security industry's equivalent of thoughts and prayers, a prominent American security expert has said during a debate on the topic "Patching is useless" at a recent online conference named Hack At The Harbor. Dave Aitel, 46, a former NSA computer scientist who ran his own security shop, Immunity, for many years, said the remedies proposed by security vendors and big technology companies had served to lull people into a false sense of security all these years and ensure that all the old problems still remained.... Aitel pointed out that if there were vulnerable devices on a network, then they should be removed and substituted with others, rather than being continuously patched....

Aitel was no less severe on Linux, noting that the biggest contributor to the kernel was the Chinese telecommunications vendor Huawei Technologies, which he claimed had been indicted by the US, and asking how one could rest content if so many patches were coming from a company of this kind.

On the positive side, he had praise for ChromeOS, an operating system that is produced by Google, and recommended the use of Chromebooks rather Windows machines.

Aitel called for vulnerability management, advocating the government as the best entity to handle this. His argument was that no other entity had sufficient power to push back against the lobby of the big software vendors and the security industry.

China

EU Accuses China of 'Power Grab' Over Smartphone Technology Licensing (ft.com) 88

The EU is taking China to the World Trade Organization for alleged patent infringements that are costing companies billions of euros, as part of what officials in Brussels claim is a "power grab" by Beijing [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] to set smartphone technology licensing rates. Financial Times reports: Businesses, including Sweden's Ericsson, Finland's Nokia and Sharp of Japan, have lost money after China's supreme court banned them from protecting their patents by securing licensing deals in foreign courts, the European Commission said. Chinese courts set licence fees at around half the market rate previously agreed between western technology providers and manufacturers such as Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Huawei, it added.

The lower licensing fees set by Beijing deprive smartphone makers and other mobile telecommunications businesses of a crucial source of revenue to reinvest in research and development. "It is part of a global power grab by the Chinese government by legal means," said a European Commission official. "It is a means to push Europe out." Smartphone makers have agreed global standards for telecommunications networks. In return, technology manufacturers must license their patents to others. If they cannot agree on a price, they go to court to set it. Chinese courts generally set prices at half the level of those in the west, meaning their companies pay less for the technology from overseas providers. In August 2020, China's Supreme People's Court decided that Chinese courts can impose "anti-suit injunctions," which forbid a company taking a case to a court outside the country. Those that do are liable for a â147,000 daily fine and the judgments of courts elsewhere are ignored.

Cloud

Is It More Energy-Efficient to Program in Rust? (amazon.com) 243

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS "is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions."

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS's Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust "combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java."

But there's another reason they're promoting Rust: Worldwide, data centers consume about 200 terawatt hours per year. That's roughly 1% of all energy consumed on our planet... [C]loud and hyperscale data centers have been implementing huge energy efficiency improvements, and the migration to that cloud infrastructure has been keeping the total energy use of data centers in balance despite massive growth in storage and compute for more than a decade... [I]s the status quo good enough? Is keeping data center energy use to 1% of worldwide energy consumption adequate..? [Will] innovations in energy efficiency continue to keep pace with growth in storage and compute in the future? Given the explosion we know is coming in autonomous drones, delivery robots, and vehicles, and the incredible amount of data consumption, processing, and machine learning training and inference required to support those technologies, it seems unlikely that energy efficiency innovations will be able to keep pace with demand...

[J]ust like security, sustainability is a shared responsibility. AWS customers are responsible for energy efficient choices in storage policies, software design, and compute utilization, while AWS owns efficiencies in hardware, utilization features, and cooling systems.... In the same way that operational excellence, security, and reliability have been principles of traditional software design, sustainability must be a principle in modern software design. That's why AWS announced a sixth pillar for sustainability to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. What that looks like in practice is choices like relaxing service-level agreements for non-critical functions and prioritizing resource use efficiency. We can take advantage of virtualization and allow for longer device upgrade cycles. We can leverage caching and longer times-to-live whenever possible. We can classify our data and implement automated lifecycle policies that delete data as soon as possible. When we choose algorithms for cryptography and compression, we can include efficiency in our decision criteria.

Last, but not least, we can choose to implement our software in energy efficient programming languages.

There was a really interesting study a few years ago that looked at the correlation between energy consumption, performance, and memory use.... What the study did is implement 10 benchmark problems in 27 different programming languages and measure execution time, energy consumption, and peak memory use. C and Rust significantly outperformed other languages in energy efficiency. In fact, they were roughly 50% more efficient than Java and 98% more efficient than Python. It's not a surprise that C and Rust are more efficient than other languages. What is shocking is the magnitude of the difference. Broad adoption of C and Rust could reduce energy consumption of compute by 50% — even with a conservative estimate....

No one developer, service, or corporation can deliver substantial impact on sustainability. Adoption of Rust is like recycling; it only has impact if we all participate. To achieve broad adoption, we are going to have to grow the developer community.

That "interesting study" cited also found that both C and Rust execute faster than other programming languages, the blog post points out, so "when you choose to implement your software in Rust for the sustainability and security benefits, you also get the optimized performance of C."

And the post also notes Linus Torvalds' recent acknowledgement that while he really loves C, it can be like juggling chainsaws, with easily-overlooked and "not always logical" type interactions. (Torvalds then went on to call Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution.")

The Rust Foundation is a non-profit partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla.
China

FCC's 'Rip and Replace' for ZTE and Huawei Balloons To $5.6B (lightreading.com) 68

Today, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel notified Congress that providers have initially requested approximately $5.6 billion from the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program to cover the costs of removing, replacing, and disposing of insecure equipment and services in U.S. networks. From a report: "Last year Congress created a first-of-its kind program for the FCC to reimburse service providers for their efforts to increase the security of our nations communications networks," said Chairwoman Rosenworcel. "We've received over 181 applications from carriers who have developed plans to remove and replace equipment in their networks that pose a national security threat. While we have more work to do to review these applications, I look forward to working with Congress to ensure that there is enough funding available for this program to advance Congress's security goals and ensure that the U.S. will continue to lead the way on 5G security."
Government

The Next Huawei? US Threatens to Inflict 'Export Control' on Russia if It Invades Ukraine (stripes.com) 119

How exactly could Russia be deterred from invading Ukraine? The U.S. government is now "threatening to use a novel export control to damage strategic Russian industries, from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to civilian aerospace," according to Stars and Stripes (an editorially-independent newspaper for the American military). The newspaper cites administration officials as its source: The administration may also decide to apply the control more broadly in a way that would potentially deprive Russian citizens of some smartphones, tablets and video game consoles, said the officials. Such moves would expand the reach of U.S. sanctions beyond financial targets to the deployment of a weapon used only once before — to nearly cripple the Chinese tech giant Huawei. The weapon, known as the foreign direct product rule, contributed to Huawei suffering its first-ever annual revenue drop, a stunning 30% last year, according to analysts.

The attraction of using the foreign direct product rule derives from the fact that virtually anything electronic these days includes semiconductors, the tiny components on which all modern technology depends, from smartphones to jets to quantum computers — and that there is hardly a semiconductor on the planet that is not made with U.S. tools or designed with U.S. software. And the administration could try to force companies in other countries to stop exporting these types of goods to Russia through this rule. "This is a slow strangulation by the U.S. government," technology analyst Dan Wang of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Shanghai, said of Huawei. The rule cut the firm's supply of needed microchips, which were made outside the United States but with U.S. software or tools.

Now officials in Washington say they are working with European and Asian allies to craft a version of the rule that would aim to stop flows of crucial components to industries for which Russian President Vladimir Putin has high ambitions, such as civil aviation, maritime and high technology.... But the effort could face head winds from American and European business interests that fear using export controls could lead to Russian retaliation in other spheres — and eventually cause foreign companies to seek to design U.S. technology out of their products. That's because the extension of the rule beyond a single company like Huawei to an entire country or entire sectors of a country is unprecedented.

"It's like a magic power — you can only use it so many times before it starts to degrade," said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank. "Other countries will say, 'Oh, man, the U.S. has total control over us. We'd better find alternatives.'"

The newspaper also spoke to Paul Triolo, chief of technology policy at a global political risk research and consulting firm called Eurasia Group. His opinion "this would be weaponizing the U.S. semiconductor supply chain against an entire country."

And in more ways than one: Targeted use of the foreign direct product rule could be a blow to Russia's military, which relies on a type of chip called Elbrus that is designed in Russia but manufactured in Taiwan at a chip foundry called TSMC, according to Kostas Tigkos, an electronics expert at Janes Group, a U.K.-based provider of defense intelligence. If the United States barred TSMC from supplying those chips to Russia, as it successfully barred TSMC from supplying Huawei, that would have a "devastating effect," Tigkos said.

In a statement, TSMC said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations" and that it has a "rigorous export control system in place ... to ensure export control restrictions are followed."Analysts say that Western multinational firms probably would comply with the export controls. All U.S. chipmakers include clauses in their contracts requiring customers to abide by U.S. export rules.

The article also explores a scenario where businesses in China step in to supply Russia (citing estimates from the Peterson Institute for International Economics that China already builds 70% of the computers and smartphones that Russia imports).

"If Chinese firms wound up supplying Russia in violation of the rule, that would leave Washington with a major diplomatic dilemma: whether to sanction them, even if they make ordinary — not military — goods."
China

After US Sanctions, Huawei Revenue Plummets Nearly 30% In 2021 (theguardian.com) 53

"Chinese telecom giant Huawei said on Friday its annual revenue had fallen by nearly a third from the previous year," reports Agence France-Presse, "as it continued to be weighed down by U.S. sanctions that have hit its smartphone sales..." The firm's revenue for this year fell by 29% year-on-year to 634 billion yuan ($99.5 billion), said rotating chairman Guo Ping in an annual new year message... Huawei's revenue has fallen in 2021 due in part to the offloading of its budget phone brand Honor, which was sold [in late 2020]...

Huawei's travails have forced it to quickly pivot into new business lines including enterprise computing, wearables and health tech, technology for intelligent vehicles, and software. The United States has barred Huawei from acquiring crucial components such as microchips and forced it to create its own operating system by cutting it off from using Google's Android operating system...

The group is the world's biggest supplier of telecoms network gear and was once a top-three smartphone producer along with Apple and Samsung. But it has fallen well down the smartphone ranks owing to US pressure.

In October, the group said its January-September sales volume had fallen 32%.

China

Apple Shifted To Chinese Suppliers To 'Cut Costs and Curry Favor With Beijing,' Report Finds (9to5mac.com) 68

According to a new report from The Information, Apple has increased its reliance on Chinese partners, both as a way of cutting costs as well as to "curry favor with Beijing." 9to5Mac reports: Today's report from The Information comes on the heels of a separate report from the publication earlier this month in which it described a so-called secret deal between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Chinese government officials. Through this deal, Apple reportedly committed to investing more than $275 billion in China over five years.

The report details that Foxconn, which is headquartered in Taiwan, is on the verge of being unseated as Apple's top supplier by Luxshare, which is headquartered in China: "Luxshare has the potential to unseat Foxconn as Apple's top supplier. The Chinese company already exceeds Foxconn's main publicly listed unit in terms of market capitalization, though Foxconn generated roughly $105 billion from Apple in 2020 -- more than 10 times Luxshare's haul. But in terms of valuation, Luxshare has also eclipsed major Apple contractors such as Quanta Computer, Pegatron and Wistron, all of which are headquartered in Taiwan. Foxconn has become increasingly concerned about Luxshare's meteoric rise, including its significantly higher net profit margin, going so far as to form a task force to study the company, Reuters previously reported."

The report explains that Apple's move to shift more of its business to Chinese companies is part of Tim Cook fulfilling his $275 billion pledge to the Chinese government: "In shifting more business to Chinese companies, Cook, the architect of Apple's supply chain in China, is fulfilling his pledge to Beijing to expand its domestic tech industry, which will help the country reduce its reliance on companies based outside the mainland, including Taiwan -- a country China considers a renegade region. A year after Cook signed the economic agreement with China, Luxshare became the first Chinese company to secure a final assembly contract for a major Apple product, the AirPods, ending the dominance of Taiwanese firms. Apple's moves also might win over more Chinese consumers, which at times have shunned Apple in favor of local brands like Huawei based on nationalism. Apple generates nearly 20% of its revenue from the country."
The report goes on to mention that Apple helped Luxshare manufature AirPods in 2017. "The AirPods were Luxshare's first major assembly contract for Apple, catapulting the company into the upper echelons of Apple suppliers that handle, pack and ship finished goods," reports The Information.
China

Presentations Point To Greater Huawei Role In China Surveillance Than Acknowledged (thehill.com) 45

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: PowerPoint presentations from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies indicate that the company has a larger role in China's surveillance efforts than was previously known, according to The Washington Post. The Post reviewed over 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many of them labeled "confidential," in which the company detailed how the government could use its technologies to identify voices, track people for political purposes and monitor the movements of inmates within prisons, among other surveillance tactics.

While the Post could not confirm who the presentations were shown to, the newspaper said that PowerPoints detailing surveillance tactics specific to government agencies -- such as slides appearing to refer to China's controversial prison reeducation and labor programs -- may have been intended for government audiences. While China's Communist Party depends on tools such as facial recognition to find dissenters, it has warned tech companies like Huawei against misusing the technology in the private sector, the Post said.
"Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report," the company said in a statement to the Washington Post. "Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards."
China

Huawei Recruits Smartphone Partners To Sidestep US Sanctions (bloomberg.com) 30

Huawei, whose smartphone business has been devastated by U.S. sanctions, is planning to license its handset designs to third parties as a way to gain access to critical components, Bloomberg is reporting, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The Shenzhen-based tech giant is considering licensing its designs to a unit of state-owned China Postal and Telecommunications Appliances Co, or PTAC, which will then seek to buy parts barred under the Trump-era blacklisting, said one of the people, asking not to be identified discussing internal matters. The unit, known as Xnova, is already selling Huawei-branded Nova phones on its e-commerce site and the partnership will see it offer self-branded devices based on the larger company's designs.

Chinese telecom equipment maker TD Tech Ltd. will also sell some phones featuring Huawei's designs under its own brand, another person said. The partnerships are subject to change as negotiations are still ongoing. The move may be Huawei's best chance at salvaging its smartphone business after U.S. sanctions cut off its access to key chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Google's Android apps and Qualcomm's 5G wireless modems. Since Huawei first came under fire from the Trump administration, its shrinking consumer business has seen sales fall for four straight quarters.

China

Biden Signs Bill To Secure Telecoms Against National Security Threats (axios.com) 27

President Biden signed into law a bill that requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to secure telecommunications systems against potential foreign threats to national security. From a report: In recent years, lawmakers have increasingly voiced concerns about Chinese telecom giants' operations in the U.S., and possible surveillance by the Chinese government. Under the new law, the FCC is barred from considering authorization for products made by companies on its "covered list," which includes Huawei and ZTE. The designation blocks U.S. companies from using FCC funds to purchase communications equipment and services that the U.S. government considers a national security threat. The bill received near-unanimous support in Congress. It was sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), along with House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.).
Operating Systems

Huawei Offloads x86 Business As It Chases Self-Sufficiency (lightreading.com) 28

In yet another shift away from its traditional hardware business, Huawei has sold its x86 server unit to a state-owned Chinese firm. Light Reading reports: China company registration data confirms that the sale to Henan Information Industry Investment Co. Ltd., owned by the Henan provincial government, concluded on November 5. The size of the transaction has not been disclosed. Huawei's server business, like its once high-flying handset division, has been hit badly by US sanctions, which prevent it from obtaining the Intel chips that power 90% of the world's servers. The vendor flagged the possibility of a sale at a company event six weeks ago. Eric Xu, one of Huawei's three co-chairmen, acknowledged the server unit had "encountered difficulties" and said Huawei was in discussions with some potential investors.
Communications

US Telecoms Are Going To Start Physically Removing Huawei Gear (bloomberg.com) 59

All over the country, hardware from Huawei and ZTE keeps American telecom networks humming. In the coming months, many of those networks are going to start ripping it all out. From a report: On Friday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission officially kicked off the reimbursement program for replacing equipment from the two Chinese companies, both of which have been deemed a threat to national security. That means that telecoms can apply for subsidies to purge the hardware from their networks. A lot has been made of the geopolitical connotations of the technology blacklist, which includes Huawei and ZTE, but the physical logistics of overhauling the nation's connectivity infrastructure is just as complicated given how much banned equipment is currently in the wild.

The process that started last week allows telecoms to file expenses for wiping out the hardware. Whenever those funds are approved and sent, "the clock starts ticking," says John Nettles, president of Alabama-based Pine Belt Communications Inc. "You're expected to complete it within one year after receiving your first reimbursement." For the target recipients of the program, small and usually rural carriers with no more than 10 million customers, that means 2022 is going to be an insanely busy year. Without expansive subsidies, these telecoms have said they would not have been able to afford to comply with the government mandate, but now with federal reimbursements, they'll soon be under the gun to source enough labor and eligible replacement gear to meet the FCC's deadline. Nettles estimates it'll likely take a four-person crew a week to overhaul each of his 67 towers.

Government

Huawei, SMIC Suppliers Received Billions Worth of Licenses For US Goods (reuters.com) 14

Suppliers to Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and China's top chipmaker SMIC got billions of dollars worth of licenses from November through April to sell them goods and technology despite their being on a U.S. trade blacklist, documents released by Congress showed on Thursday. Reuters reports: According to the documents, first obtained by Reuters, 113 export licenses worth $61 billion were approved for suppliers to ship products to Huawei while another 188 licenses valued at nearly $42 billion were greenlighted for Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC). The data also showed that more than 9 out of 10 license applications were granted to SMIC suppliers while 69% of requests to ship to Huawei were approved over the same period.

[T]he Commerce Department said that the release of an "arbitrary snapshot" of license approvals "risks politicizing the licensing process and misrepresenting the national security determinations" made by the government. It also stressed that approved license applications do not represent actual shipments and around half of all licenses are used. It added that license applications involving Huawei and SMIC are processed under policies developed by the Trump administration and maintained by the Biden administration.

A former senior Commerce Department official in the Trump administration who declined to be named echoed the agency's view. "This very small period of license activity is not an accurate window into the Huawei and SMIC license process," he said, noting that the goal of preventing the companies from obtaining leading edge technology without unnecessarily harming U.S. exports of other goods had been successful. "This [document release] seems designed to mislead people and generate headlines," he added.

Android

Study Reveals Android Phones Constantly Snoop On Their Users (bleepingcomputer.com) 113

A new study (PDF) by a team of university researchers in the UK has unveiled a host of privacy issues that arise from using Android smartphones. BleepingComputer reports: The researchers have focused on Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme, and Huawei Android devices, and LineageOS and /e/OS, two forks of Android that aim to offer long-term support and a de-Googled experience. The conclusion of the study is worrying for the vast majority of Android users: "With the notable exception of /e/OS, even when minimally configured and the handset is idle these vendor-customized Android variants transmit substantial amounts of information to the OS developer and also to third parties (Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) that have pre-installed system apps." As the summary table indicates, sensitive user data like persistent identifiers, app usage details, and telemetry information are not only shared with the device vendors, but also go to various third parties, such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And to make matters worse, Google appears at the receiving end of all collected data almost across the entire table.

It is important to note that this concerns the collection of data for which there's no option to opt-out, so Android users are powerless against this type of telemetry. This is particularly concerning when smartphone vendors include third-party apps that are silently collecting data even if they're not used by the device owner, and which cannot be uninstalled. For some of the built-in system apps like miui.analytics (Xiaomi), Heytap (Realme), and Hicloud (Huawei), the researchers found that the encrypted data can sometimes be decoded, putting the data at risk to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. As the study points out, even if the user resets the advertising identifiers for their Google Account on Android, the data-collection system can trivially re-link the new ID back to the same device and append it to the original tracking history. The deanonymization of users takes place using various methods, such as looking at the SIM, IMEI, location data history, IP address, network SSID, or a combination of these.
In response to the report, a Google spokesperson said: "While we appreciate the work of the researchers, we disagree that this behavior is unexpected -- this is how modern smartphones work. As explained in our Google Play Services Help Center article, this data is essential for core device services such as push notifications and software updates across a diverse ecosystem of devices and software builds. For example, Google Play services uses data on certified Android devices to support core device features. Collection of limited basic information, such as a device's IMEI, is necessary to deliver critical updates reliably across Android devices and apps."
China

US To Open Program To Replace Huawei Equipment In US Networks (reuters.com) 31

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Monday said it would open a $1.9 billion program to reimburse mostly rural U.S. telecom carriers for removing network equipment made by Chinese companies deemed national security threats like Huawei and ZTE. The program, which was finalized in July, will open Oct. 29 for applications through Jan. 14, 2022.

Last year, the FCC designated Huawei and ZTE as national security threats to communications networks -- a declaration that barred U.S. firms from tapping an $8.3 billion government fund to purchase equipment from the companies. The FCC in December adopted rules requiring carriers with ZTE or Huawei equipment to "rip and replace" that equipment. The issue is a big one for rural carriers that face high costs and difficulty finding workers to remove and replace equipment. The FCC's final order expanded the companies eligible for reimbursement from those with 2 million or fewer customers to those with 10 million or fewer customers. The FCC in September 2020 estimated it would cost $1.837 billion to remove and replace Huawei and ZTE equipment from networks. [...] The affected companies included the previously designated Huawei and ZTE, as well as Hytera, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co and Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co.

United States

US Agrees Not To Pursue Fraud Charges Against Huawei CFO (theverge.com) 90

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou would appear in a Brooklyn federal courtroom today via streaming video and enter a plea regarding US charges against her. From a report: Canadian authorities arrested the Chinese executive in December 2018 on suspicion of violating US sanctions, and she has remained there on house arrest ever since, fighting US attempts at extradition. Hearings in her extradition case ended in August, with the ruling scheduled for October 21st. Meng was indicted on fraud charges claiming the Chinese technology and telecommunications company misrepresented its relationship with an Iranian affiliate, along with accusations it stole intellectual property from T-Mobile. The 13-count indictment named Meng, Huawei, and two of its subsidiaries -- Huawei USA and Skycom. On Friday afternoon, Meng pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors submitted a statement of facts asserting that in 2013 she told financial institutions the Iranian company Skycom was a partner of Huawei while knowing that Skycom was owned and controlled by a Huawei subsidiary to act as its agent in the region. As part of the deal in making this admission, the prosecution says "Meng has agreed to the accuracy of a four-page statement of facts that details the knowingly false statements she made to Financial Institution 1."
The Courts

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou To Be Released After Agreement With US In Wire Fraud Case (cnbc.com) 109

The chief financial officer of Chinese tech firm Huawei will be released and allowed to return to China after reaching an agreement with the U.S. government on fraud charges, prosecutors said Friday in a Brooklyn federal court. CNBC reports: A U.S. district judge accepted the deferred prosecution agreement, which will last until Dec. 1, 2022. Under the deal, the executive, Meng Wanzhou, affirmed the accuracy of a statement of facts and agreed not to commit other crimes, or risk prosecution. Meng, the daughter of Huawei's founder, was arrested in Canada in December 2018. The U.S. sought to extradite her on bank and wire fraud charges, claiming she was misled a financial institution to violate American sanctions on Iran. The U.S. said Friday it plans to withdraw its extradition request.

Meng pleaded not guilty to the charges on Friday. As part of the agreement, however, she took "responsibility for her principal role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution," acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Nicole Boeckmann said in a statement. According to Boeckmann, Meng admitted to making "multiple material misrepresentations" while CFO of Huawei about the company's business in Iran, in conversations with the senior executive of a financial institution. The government claimed she did this to continue Huawei's business relationship with the firm. Boeckmann said the admission confirms the core allegations against Meng.

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