There is so much evidence Huawei are a bad actor, and probably marching in lockstep with the Chinese government, that it has it's own very long Wikipedia page:
He reacted by citing evidence for his claims. Now it's time for the Huawei defenders to cite evidence for this supposed equivalency, and prove it's not just propaganda.
I am not Chinese and do think that the amount of accusations is much larger than the body of evidence to support them, I'd guess there are others of similar opinion, some of them Chinese, others not.
What I dislike is people generally assuming that I somehow agree with every single thing Huawei, or the CCP for that matter, has ever done.
Huawei doesn't really deserve the benefit of the doubt, a lot of their early success was due to hacking Cisco and Nortel then building competing products based on stolen information, all while the Chinese government was restricting non-Chinese telecom vendors from operating in the country.
I believe one of the major reasons why Huawei is so vilified is that it's the first Chinese corporation that not only outprices its Western competitors, but also outtechs and outmanages them. This goes so counter to the Gated Institutional Narrative that cognitive dissonance kicks in - media insist there must surely be something dishonest and fraudulent about Huawei.
Both Ericsson and Nokia barely make any profit, even amidst of what should be a 5G bonanza. They're famous for their perennial layoffs, constant cost-cutting, bland working conditions, outsourcing, infighting, insane level of bureaucracy and proliferation of management positions.
Huawei on the other hand, is well known for paying above-market wages (though long working hours), "poaching" skilled people from competitors, generous employee share scheme, valuing engineering above middle management, contributing to open source projects, and relative freedom their R&D personnel enjoys in tackling technical challenges. And their B2B offerings are the best value. And their consumer electronics is among the best value. And on top of that, they're highly profitable.
Even if you assert there's some secret money pump from CCP to Huawei, you cannot deny the fact that Huawei is a well-oiled machine that delivers. Pump billions into not only Nokia/Ericsson, but also IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle - the money would just get sucked into a black hole with very little to show for it. Huawei is portrayed as evil, because the alternative is to confront our weakness.
I think there's a lot of unfair finger-pointing at Huawei. China's hacking program is very prolific and has some impressive achievements. There's no reason why the Chinese government couldn't have found vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment and conducted a campaign that way, especially since that equipment is internet-connected at all times.
Respond to the strongest version of the argument, not a straw man. My meaning was obvious.
The above commenter pointed to the existence of a "very long Wikipedia page" criticizing Huawei as evidence that Huawei is a "bad actor." These sorts of "Criticism of" pages exist for many companies. Many of those pages are far more extensive than the page for Huawei. Are all those companies also "bad actors"? The existence of such a page in itself means nothing.
If you actually look at the "Criticism of Huawei" page, it contains no evidence that Huawei has installed backdoors in its equipment. There are the accusations of the US government, and various vulnerabilities that have been discovered over time (and patched), but vulnerabilities and backdoors are different things.
Then there are the various IP disputes. Tell me: which major tech company has not had multiple IP disputes over the past 20 years? The disputes that Huawei has been involved in are pretty minor, and the largest ones were 15+ years ago.
We're in the middle of a moral panic, in which suddenly, were being bombarded by messages that Huawei and China are the worst things in the history of the planet. Huawei is a "bad actor," whatever that's supposed to mean. Google stole Oracle's copyrighted Java API? Samsung violated Apple's design patents and has to pay half a billion dollars? Small potatoes. But Huawei copied Cisco's implementation of strcmp 15 years ago? Bad actor!
There's a whole section[0], and another entire page[1] on Wikipedia detailing accusations against them. China, too, has quite the detailed presence[2]. So let's not pretend they're trustworthy.
Then again, at the end of the day, you have companies with strong links to an adversarial government and which has been proven to have conducted economic espionage for the benefit of domestic companies, regularly violated (and violates) human rights, overthrown elected governments, invaded countries under false pretenses, and sentence people to death without a fair trial. If that's your line of logic, then there's more than enough shit to go around. Both sides are shitty.
The point being made is that industry-level security is not real evidence of malicious behavior on huawei's part. If you want people to avoid huawei, present proof.
I've read your other responses and while the points you make are reasonable, it's "obvious" to many that a certain threshold of belief has been crossed, most notably by industry insiders. There are far too many accounts of Huawei's behaviour that leads one to suspicion. You don't need mass media for this. Read the countless first hand experiences here and elsewhere. Unless of course you believe they're astroturfing.
Considering the anti-competitive, protectionist nature of the US backlash against Huawei, I think it's wise to be quite skeptical of these kinds of claims until they have been proven to be true by independent security experts.
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