 Huawei Technologies Co. warned the latest U.S. curbs on its business will inflict a “terrible price” on the global technology industry, inflaming tensions between Washington and Beijing while harming American interests. China’s largest technology company said it will be “significantly affected” by a Commerce Department decree barring any chipmaker using American equipment from supplying Huawei without U.S. government approval. That means companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and its rivals will have to cut off the Chinese company unless they get waivers -- effectively severing Huawei’s access to cutting-edge silicon it needs for smartphones and networking gear. Washington’s decision drew condemnation from Beijing, which regards Huawei as a national champion because of its success in dominating global networking technology. China and Huawei have threatened retaliation but Rotating Chairman Guo Ping on Monday refrained from commenting on a possible Beijing response -- a departure from just two months ago when the company warned Washington risked opening a “pandora’s box” and Chinese countermeasures if it chose to go ahead with additional restrictions. “Our business will significantly be impacted,” Guo said at a company briefing with analysts in Shenzhen. “Given the changes in the industry over the past year, it dawned on us more clearly that fragmented standards and supply chains benefit no one. If further fragmentation were to take place, the whole industry would pay a terrible price,” he added. Huawei is still assessing the potential fallout of the latest restrictions and couldn’t predict the impact on revenue, for now, Guo said. On Monday, a swathe of Huawei’s suppliers from TSMC to AAC Technologies Holdings Inc. plunged in Asian trading. Guo was far less vocal than colleague Richard Yu, who runs the consumer division responsible for smartphones. The outspoken executive said the restrictions that ostensibly aim to allay U.S. cybersecurity concerns are really designed to safeguard American dominance of global tech. “The so-called cybersecurity reasons are merely an excuse,” Yu, head of the Chinese tech giant’s consumer electronics unit, wrote in a post to his account on messaging app WeChat earlier on Monday. “The key is the threat to the technology hegemony of the U.S.” posed by Huawei, he added. Yu also posted a link to a Chinese article circulating on social media with part of its headline asking: “Why Does America Want to Kill Huawei?” Follow this and more news on Huawei on OUR FORUM.  Microsoft president and chief legal counsel Brad Smith has taken his turn at admitting Microsoft's former stance on open source put it on the "wrong side of history". In 2001 former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously said, "Linux is cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." Shortly after that and for the same reason, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described the open-source GPL (GNU General Public License) as "Pac-Man-like". Ballmer has since made peace with open source, and now Smith, who was one of Microsoft's top lawyers during its war on open source, has admitted he too was wrong about its approach to technology. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," he said in a talk about hot computing topics at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn … that you need to change." Of course today – with an eye on cloud developers and as the owner of a code-sharing site GitHub – Microsoft approaches open source completely differently, even shipping Windows 10 with a custom Linux kernel for developers who use the Windows Subsystem for Linux. "Today, Microsoft is the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world when it comes to businesses," said Smith. "When we look at GitHub, we see it as the home for open-source development, and we see our responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home for [developers]." Smith also said that in 2013 president Obama warned top execs from Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook that they too would soon face scrutiny over privacy. Obama made the prediction at a roundtable with tech executives who were pushing for surveillance reforms following Edward Snowden's NSA leak, reminding them they held more data about people than the government did. Smith said the "political watershed moment" arrived with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which affected tens of millions of Facebook users and resulted in huge fines for Facebook. Tune into OUR FORUM to learn more.  Apple recently confirmed one of the longest-running vulnerabilities in iOS history, affecting millions of iPhone users. And now new information reveals it just got bigger. In April, Apple acknowledged that every iPhone released in the last eight years was vulnerable to remote attacks through the iOS Mail app. At the time, the company played down the severity of this saying it had seen ‘no evidence’ of exploits but now ZecOps, the security specialist which discovered the flaw, has contacted me with new information that not only is it being triggered in the wild but that the first potential triggers existed a decade ago and every iPhone ever made is vulnerable (Apple confirmed there are 900M active iPhone last year). 05/12 Update: Apple has responded to me saying it will be sticking to its original statement regarding this vulnerability (found here) and is crediting ZecOps for its discovery. As it stands, Apple is not commenting on ZecOps' additional discoveries of vulnerabilities and real-world triggers dating back to 2010. Apple will deliver a fix in iOS 13.5, but there is currently no commitment to patch previous versions of iOS to protect older iPhones. Needless to say, I will keep this post updated with further developments on both sides. As it stands, further developments appear inevitable. 05/13 Update: while Apple continues to play down this vulnerability, significant action is being taken elsewhere. For example, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has issued a statement recommending the removal of the iOS Mail app. BSI President Arne Schönbohm states: “The BSI assesses these vulnerabilities as particularly critical. It enables the attackers to manipulate large parts of the mail communication on the affected devices. Furthermore, there is currently no patch available. This means that thousands of iPhones and iPads are at acute risk from private individuals, companies, and government agencies. We are in contact with Apple and have asked the company to find a solution for the security of their products as soon as possible.” iOS 13.5 cannot arrive soon enough. "Apple takes all reports of security threats seriously. We have thoroughly investigated the researcher’s report and, based on the information provided, have concluded these issues do not pose an immediate risk to our users. The researcher identified three issues in Mail, but alone they are insufficient to bypass iPhone and iPad security protections, and we have found no evidence they were used against customers. These potential issues will be addressed in a software update soon. We value our collaboration with security researchers to help keep our users safe and will be crediting the researcher for their assistance.” “We continued our research of the MailDemon vulnerability,” said ZecOps CEO Zuk Avraham. “We were able to prove that this vulnerability can be used for Remote Code Execution. Unfortunately, a patch is still not available.” For more visit OUR FORUM. |
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