Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23452097

by RobAley • 13 years ago

275 120 13 years ago

m.bbc.co.uk

runarb2• 13 years ago

So each time a UK residents visits a webpage his ISP will send the url to Huawei to ask for permission?

Good to see that Cameron don’t waste the opportunity and get the UK to use the same hardware platform as the Chinese. The Chinese are already one of the leaders in technology for censorship, with the great firewall and all, so it could be a lot of opportunities for synergy and cross border cooperation her…

iwwr• 13 years ago

More like, they bring a great deal of expertise from the Great Firewall.

runarb2• 13 years ago

Maybe Mr. Cameron can ask for the url list used by the great firewall also? The authorities could save a lot of time if they had an initial list to start with.

What are we nicknaming this? Maybe "he Great Hadrian Firewall" after the Hadrian's wall?[0]

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian's_Wall

pbhjpbhj6• 13 years ago

That's what they're trying to make it look like - in practice it seems more likely that Huawei are just providing a managed service in TT's server farms that filters a given list of sites.

Could Huawei maliciously use that data? Yes, like how the French/Russians can cut off our power. Or USA can poison all our coffee drinkers and fast-food eaters.

mseebach• 13 years ago

So each time a UK residents visits a webpage his ISP will send the url to Huawei to ask for permission?

No, each time a UK resident visits a webpage, his ISP will send the URL to a server in the ISP's network running software made by Huawei (which could be backdoored), loaded with watchlists maintained by a UK entity.

It's unclear how that software will redirect the request, but it's probably just a DNS hi-jack.

dijit• 13 years ago

it wasn't a DNS hi-jack with thepiratebay

piqufoh• 13 years ago

Maybe this is all a clever government ruse. If DC wants more of Britain's youth interested in technology, what better way than to force them to find ingenious technological solutions to get hold of their porn?

squidi• 13 years ago

Or some bizarre way to strengthen trading links with China perhaps. Cameron is not popular is Beijing since he met the Dalai Lama

jwr• 13 years ago

I find two things incredibly ironic:

1) The UK willingly submits all of its net traffic to monitoring, snooping and supervision by a Chinese firm. This is mindboggling. Why worry about NSA's ECHELON or PRISM now, when the government has just passed a law requiring every packet to be inspected by a Chinese system.

2) Let's learn from those who are best at censorship. Obviously China has significant experience in that area. UK has a lot to catch up, but they're working on it.

Think about it -- if somebody told you 10 years ago that the United Kingdom will outsource country-wide Internet traffic monitoring, policing and censoring to Chinese companies, you'd call them a nutjob.

mtgx• 13 years ago

I find it extremely unfortunate that more of the "democratic" countries are now starting to see China's model of censorship and surveillance of its population as something to aspire to.

This is not just a one-off. It's a trend. They all seem to want what the Chinese government has (full control over its population), while still "pretending" it's a democracy and everyone's rights are unharmed.

smackay• 13 years ago

There's an unfortunate view in the learned press that business-like governments such as Singapore and China are able to work efficiently and generally get things done and are generally to be admired (though not always publicly). Combine that with the UK Government's Big Sister approach to managing the population and the worst effects of political correctness and you can see where this is all heading - a country safely protected from itself under the watchful gaze of those that know what's best for us - Downton Abbey on a grand scale.

rmc3• 13 years ago

Conversely when people in China (or elsewhere) campaign for more liberty and freedom, the Chinese government can point to the USA/UK/EU/etc and say "Look they block things too!". Likewise when UK/EU/USA/etc. tell China to stop blocking things, China turns around and says "But you block things!"

timthorn2• 13 years ago

Let's be clear: government has not just passed a law requiring packet inspection, and there are ISPs who provide unfiltered connectivity. (Eg as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6082595)

The government is proposing that they may bring legislation to Parliament if the industry doesn't do something to thinkofthechildren, but what shape that might take is not yet clear.

the_mitsuhiko• 13 years ago

Let's be clear: government has not just passed a law requiring packet inspection Correct. That happened in the past already when ISPs were required to block access to the pirate bay.

rmc3• 13 years ago

Exactly. Let's all remember that we often call politicans sleeazy corrupt ineffective busybodies who'll appear for the opening of an envelope, and who make statements and press releases to manipulate the press & public. However when something like this comes along, suddely politicans are disciplined, determined, principled fighters of smut who can get their way....

vidarh5• 13 years ago

In other words: It could end up much worse.

It's "you do something 'voluntarily' now, which there'll be absolutely no democratic oversight over, or we force you". So instead of getting a nasty filtering system subject to freedom of information queries and parliamentary inquiries, we get a system where we are subject to the whims of these businesses, who will all point to the government and say "ask them", while the government will point to it being something the companies added "voluntarily".

Frankly, "voluntary regulation" like this should always be a massive warning flag.

walshemj2• 13 years ago

And giving another state access to black mail information is not a good idea

Is Huawei one of Lynton crosbys customers?

stef25• 13 years ago

Isn't it just using Chinese hardware? EDIT - I understand the hardware may be doing more than what it says on the box.

cpncrunch2• 13 years ago

Michael Hayden (former CIA head) says there is 'hard evidence' that Huawei has spied for the Chinese government. However he hasn't released any evidence. To be honest I don't really trust the CIA/NSA or Huawei. I think you just have to assume that if they _can_ spy on you, they _will_.

__alexs• 13 years ago

The article says it's only TalkTalk's traffic that is monitored by Huawei, not all the traffic in the UK.

Cameron just thinks it's awesome and would be happy if it was all of the traffic. Which actually is probably even worse.

cpncrunch2• 13 years ago

It also says "For almost a decade, Huawei has been a core part of telecoms infrastructure in the UK".

qwyck2• 13 years ago

I would like to point out that this article does not state that all UK traffic is being filtered by Huawei. The article mentions David Cameron praises the filtering system used by a single UK ISP, TalkTalk, and has demanded that similar measures be enforced by other UK ISPs. The article then describes the filtering system that TalkTalk uses, which is provided by Huawei.

Ofcom (an independent regulator) reports (http://media.ofcom.org.uk/facts/) that TalkTalk has a 17% market share at the end of 2012. So not all of the UK's net traffic is filtered through a service provided by Huawei.

beedogs• 13 years ago

Think about it -- if somebody told you 10 years ago that the United Kingdom will outsource country-wide Internet traffic monitoring, policing and censoring to Chinese companies, you'd call them a nutjob.

And today we call them Prime Minister. Fuck.

vidarh5• 13 years ago

To be fair, a substantial number of people call whichever prime minister is current a nutjob (or worse), so that doesn't seem to be a big change.

roy_x• 13 years ago

The only solution is: create more porn net traffic to blind all those inspection ... :)

dlitz2• 13 years ago

"Customers who do not want filtering still have their traffic routed through the system, but matches to Huawei's database are dismissed rather than acted upon."

In other words, when they screw up the implementation and it breaks something about your network connection (e.g. IPv6, TCP options, or dozens of other subtle things), there's nothing you'll be able to do to just get raw packets routed over the Internet.

This is going to break the network.

EwanToo• 13 years ago

It's been in place on TalkTalk's network for 2 years now, it really doesn't break things. It's not particularly aggressive, and only looks for HTTP and HTTPS traffic, not VPNs etc.

Whether you agree with it, like it, or want it, is an entirely different question (I don't want it), but it hasn't caused significant issues yet.

omh3• 13 years ago

Are you a TalkTalk customer?

I'm genuinely surprised that it isn't causing at least minor problems with some sites for more technical users. I manage a virus-scanning web proxy for our company and this is enough to throw up regular little glitches with all sorts of sites which "just work" when going direct.

auxbuss• 13 years ago

They also send a crawler to any urls that they've not "registered" before (by IP). About 30 secs after navigating to a new page their bot will crawl a visited page. robots.txt is not honoured.

Something to consider when testing, or using, "hidden" sites and pages.

harrytuttle3• 13 years ago

It does. It fucks up Microsoft ClickOnce, causes cache headers to be destroyed and adds latency.

dlitz2• 13 years ago

It's been in place on TalkTalk's network for 2 years now...but it hasn't caused significant issues yet.

Of course it hasn't; It's only been 2 years. You won't notice unless you're trying to build or deploy something innovative that breaks some of the assumptions that the designers of the filters never anticipated.

Layered protocols exist to allow them to evolve over time with a minimum of complexity (and cost). When you break the layering, you make that evolution more expensive. Look at how expensive it is to write a basic app that has peer-to-peer conectivity, thanks to NAT.

How are we supposed to deploy the next WebSockets when there are transparent HTTP proxies everywhere that aren't aware of it?

Economically speaking, widespread deployment of these sorts of filtering technologies are exactly like pollution: they look fine at first, but eventually they end up being very expensive for everyone, even the people who never used them.

zimbatm• 13 years ago

It would be interesting to compare Talk Talk latency with other providers. Surely this packet inspection cannot be free in terms of performance.

moreentropy• 13 years ago

This.

I expect my ISP to never, ever fuck with the application layer. Do your job and route my traffic, thanks.

There is no valid reason to pass traffic through the filtering system if a customer has opted out and won't be filtered. This costs real money to the ISP, so I presume they analyze that traffic. It doesn't matter if they pretend to do this to train the filter or feed some agency's data warehouse, this is madness.

flexie• 13 years ago

This Summer of Surveillance get's better and better :-)

eksith2• 13 years ago

  "Summer of Surveillance"

This should be on a T-shirt. Maybe borrowing the backdrop to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album and cross it with the digital rain form The Matrix. ;)

est2• 13 years ago

This is not surveillance, it's out right censorship.

Technically, censoring porn is no different from censoring anything else. It's only a matter of time for politicians to abuse this power.

dfgsfgsd• 13 years ago

UK -> China 2.0

tomhschmidt• 13 years ago

Nah, China is relevant.

cclogg• 13 years ago

I sit here in Canada on my moose, watching with my binoculars at the craziness unfolding below me (USA) and across from me (UK).

I whisper to the other 5 people that live in Canada, "Do you think they see us?"

One person responds, "No... not yet..."

DUH DUH DUH - to be continued.

andybak• 13 years ago

I seem to recall Canada has it's share of tech-ignorant, pro-censorship legislators?

mhurron• 13 years ago

Naive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

HelloMcFly• 13 years ago

They don't see you, but you see them.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/07/internet-porn-o...

jimworm2• 13 years ago

In 2011, Huawei offered to give roughly 50MM GBP's worth of mobile equipment to the London Underground as a gift, which the UK declined due to "national security" reasons.

In 2013, the UK is going to pay Huawei to filter all its Internet traffic.

switch007• 13 years ago

So now we must use a VPN for everything? of course that instantly means you're guilty of ... something.

me2i81• 13 years ago

Yes, like having a job...

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

This is very much about literacy

- do we expect firewalls on books children read, on radio they listen to? No. We expect parental supervision

Lets get back to blaming the parents please

adestefan• 13 years ago

There are people that demand libraries and schools remove books they find inappropriate. This is nothing new and will continue forever.

rmc3• 13 years ago

Well, the UK did have a country wide ban on "promoting homosexuality" in schools ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 ). They don't believe in parental supervision for some things.

pbhjpbhj6• 13 years ago

Do books and radio that children have ready access to have hardcore and/or illegal pornography.

Schools purchase from book catalogues that are "censored" in this sense and [legal] FTA radio is equally censored. So why shouldn't we allow people to get their internet equally censored.

Parental supervision includes using commercial services that censor hardcore pornography.

ihsw• 13 years ago

Why didn't we know about this beforehand? I wonder how much China bribed the UK to get them to use Huawei.

HowardMei• 13 years ago

Cisco helped China government build the Great Firewall 10 years ago. It's very advanced and powerful. I don't think Huawei can beat Cisco in the 'net filtering' business at GFW level. I guess it's just a budget limited version :)

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

Seriously, this incredibly misleading headline should get this post removed from HN.

Ever since the NSA story broke there seems to be a constant effort to post overly alarming headlines in the style of "look how much worse things are in places outside the US".

mcintyre19943• 13 years ago

Can you explain why the headline is miseading? The UK is at least as bad as the US because GCHQ and NSA have a special relationship, there's no plot here to make America look good.

qwyck2• 13 years ago

For me the headline, whilst technically true, was slightly misleading because "Chinese firm Huawei controls UK net filter" suggests a UK-wide net filter that Huawei controls. Whereas the BBC article headline of "Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM" does not suggest that.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Must be great fun to be a start-up in the UK.

harrytuttle3• 13 years ago

As an established enterprise company in the UK, we have our "own internet" which we run between our clients. It goes over encrypted point to point IPsec channels over leased POTS and LSE lines.

This is because we can't rely on the Internet as a business...

pbhjpbhj6• 13 years ago

Huawei is a UK registered company isn't it, certainly appears to be on Companies House WebCheck database. It also used to be called Huawei Symantec FWIW.

It's not a Chinese system, it's using Chinese technology, but then the PM uses Chinese technology, along with the entire government, every day. As do the US President and government presumably.

Yes there should be due diligence to ensure that data is not being collected and off-shored. The BBC seem to be going to pains to suggest that this is a massive Chinese espionage coup without actually stating as much.

What're the facts here. Chinese made technology is part of the UK internet. ZOMG! If the tech was from Cisco would it really make a difference.

both Huawei and TalkTalk employees are able to add or remove sites independently //

Right so TT employ a UK company whose UK employees are able to do their job.

I'm not saying oversight isn't necessary but this seems so overplayed unless the BBC have more facts they're choosing not to disclose.

Peroni• 13 years ago

Huawei is a UK registered company isn't it

Yes but that doesn't make them a UK company. Facebook & Google are UK registered companies but you'd never class them as a UK company.

pbhjpbhj6• 13 years ago

But under the same token we should be stopping Facebook or Google from routing our internet traffic as "they're going to be working for the US Government". Indeed there's more evidence that FB and Google are maliciously colluding than there is for Huawei having done anything wrong here.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilent just that this story has a measure of "Starbucks could be poisoning monarchists to further the aims of USA".

harrytuttle3• 13 years ago

I'd worry if it was Cisco too. They have been caught putting back doors into their kit.

edent• 13 years ago

Oh, it's worse than that. Every house which uses Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) has to have Huawei equipment installed on the premises.

http://huaweihg612hacking.wordpress.com/about/

BT own the monopoly on the copper infrastructure and they are the only company providing high speed ADSL. If you want 80Mbps broadband, you have no choice but to use the Huawei modem.

The device is reasonably hackable (and, in fairness, complies with its open source obligations http://www.huaweidevice.com/worldwide/technicaIndex.do?metho...) - but there's no real way of knowing what secrets the silicon holds.

So, the UK has sold off the line equipment, monitoring filters, and mobile infrastructure to one company. What could possibly go wrong?

bnc38• 13 years ago

You're right, we should go with US manufactured silicon. They are far more trustworthy.

criley22• 13 years ago

You're being facetious, but the UK and the USA are in some of the tightest relationships of any countries ever. The Anglosphere runs deep with the "Five Eyes".

The UK absolutely and fundamentally should trust the US over China -- after all, the UK and the USA have no-holds-barred sharing of intelligence and spying, while the UK and China have literally no pact at all and are adversarial in that regard.

USA equipment would be orders of magnitude more safe for the British people, as by forming a pact with the US, the US has responsibility to the British government for the intelligence gathered (and vice versa on the mass amounts they collect on us through GCHQ!)

But to pretend that the US is guilty and the UK innocent is absolutely, egregious biased and false. They dragnet over 200 fiber interconnects and literally copy all internet traffic for analysis. They are not our victims, they are our brothers in arms. Don't forget that!

suhailpatel• 13 years ago

Houses which also have BT's 330mbps FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) service have Openreach modems also made by Huawei (I have it installed myself)

mcintyre19943• 13 years ago

Interestingly, the BT router we had installed today appears to be from ECI Technology, Inc, an Israeli company. I had a quick look and I can't find them described as a Huawei shell or anything, only competitor. New back label, the rest looks the same as the Huawei one: http://www.imgur.com/0hJtXXH

andyking• 13 years ago

I recently bought a Huawei phone from a large mobile phone dealer. £70 contract-free, with a dual-core processor and Android 4.1.

Is there something I should be concerned about with this thing? It is remarkably cheap and seems good quality so far. I'll probably put Cyanogenmod on it if they come out with it, though.

ZoF• 13 years ago

Something you personally should be concerned about? Doubtful.

jpswade• 13 years ago

BT own the monopoly on the copper infrastructure

* Apart from in Hull[1]

they are the only company providing high speed ADSL

* Apart from Virgin Media[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_upon_Hull#Telephone_s...

2. http://mediacentre.virginmedia.com/Stories/Virgin-Media-boos...

corin_• 13 years ago

Virgin Media generally provide cable services rather than ADSL - maybe they offer ADSL in some areas? But your link doesn't mention that at all.

roberto7• 13 years ago

If you're going to be pedantic and point out minor inaccuracies of peoples posts at least be accurate yourself.

1. You don't need 100% of a market to be a monopoly.

2. Your second citation contains nothing about Virgin providing ADSL, they are primarily a cable broadband provider.

pktgen• 13 years ago

That looks like a standard VDSL2 modem to me. If you do not want Huawei equipment, is there any reason you couldn't purchase your own VDSL2 modem from anywhere and use that?

lnanek2• 13 years ago

but there's no real way of knowing what secrets the silicon holds.

Technically, some places do melt down the chips with acid layer by layer and dissect what is actually in them. It isn't easy, and tough to miss things, though, I imagine.

Will be interesting if we go back to the days when stories like the US managing to get back doored chips into Russia which blew up pipelines and stuff are actually happening.

runn1ng• 13 years ago

Well... chinese firm Huawei also made my cellphone

should I stop using it and start using US-made or North Korea-made phone instead? ...nah, it's not that much better over there.

LekkoscPiwa5• 13 years ago

How hard would it be to have a script creating millions of email accounts sending billions of random emails including words like "bomb", "attack", "taliban" among others rendering PRISM useless?

takluyver• 13 years ago

Work on the assumption that PRISM has spam filters at least as good as GMail, so it wouldn't be trivial to overload it with automatically generated content.

LekkoscPiwa5• 13 years ago

doesnt this mean that as long as terrorists use software to make their emails like spam the prism is useless?

riceonmars• 13 years ago

This is some of the most racist trash I've seen on Hacker News.

walshemj2• 13 years ago

Really compared to the comments about Obama on many sites all that people have commented hear is you cant trust Huawei not to do what MSS says.

vidarh5• 13 years ago

It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the concern of having a company that there are concerns might be influenced by the government of a dictatorship that are renowned for using net censorship to maintain its political control, potentially be in control of a network filter that most UK network traffic will end up going through.

I don't see anything in the article that complains about Huawei because it is Chinese in itself, as opposed to because of concerns there might be political connections at play, or the generic issue of having such filtering under control of a commercial actor in general.

tomphoolery• 13 years ago

Doesn't Huawei have components in many of the major phone & laptop manufacturers' products? Or am I thinking of another company?

dfox• 13 years ago

Huawei is sort of "Chinese Cisco", ie. while they probably have some custom silicon in their products they don't market silicon directly instead focusing on complete devices. So, you are probably thinking of another company.

da_n• 13 years ago

As an aside, I find it very interesting that the BBC website is so selective about which articles they allow (moderated) comments on, for example here is an article with a comment form

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23465992

It would be good to hear them explain what the process is for deciding which articles are allowed.

chrischen• 13 years ago

At least in this case of outsourcing to China, they're outsourcing to the experts!

ttflee• 13 years ago

What irony it would be!

The Green Dam project [1] which was advertised by the department of industry and information technology of P.R. China as protection of children from online pornography had been defeated after media exposure year ago. Now the authority in Britain wants to introduce essentially the same stuff!

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort

Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM

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