Daniel60 <
dani...@eternal-september.org> wrote:
> All this ka-fuf-ful about Huawei and the Internet has me intrigued!!
>
> I use a Huawei 3G USB Dongle to connect to the Internet (like at this
> very moment!!). Does this mean that Huawei is getting a copy of all my
> e-mails (out and in!!)?? Does Hauwei know each and every website that I
> visit??
Emails would normally be encrypted so unless the Chinese have broken
some of the encryption algorithums that are still considered secure
by the industry (not that I'd rule it out), they wouldn't be able to
learn much from tapping into the raw network data via the modem. If
you were really important, I guess some useful hints might be learned
by simply looking at the quantity and frequency of Email data that
you access.
For the web, a compromised modem could tell them about every website
you visit by looking at the DNS resolution and IP address
information. If the website uses HTTPS, then they won't know what
information you are sending and receiving, but if you spent 10 hours
a day looking at "
www.ihatechina.com", that fact might be enough to
give them suspicions on its own.
Personally I'm right now using a 3G ZTE modem for all my internet,
which is another Chinese company and probably no more trustworthy.
I'm planning to switch to a 4G modem from Sierra Wireless once I
(maybe "if I") sort out some driver issues with the OpenWRT Operating
System running on my wifi router, which the modem plugs into. I
avoided a Chinese-designed modem not particularly for fear over them
watching my every move, but because Huawei now dominate the mobile
broadband modem market entirely in Australia (at least for Telstra
and Optus), and they seem to have stopped offering any modems that
can be controlled explicitly by the user.
That is to say, all their modems now insist on working via web
interfaces so that you can't use software on your computer (in my
case, my router) to directly tell them whether to, and how to,
connect. Plus they run their own networking software on the modem,
which exposes it to a risk of being hacked. It would probably also
make it easier to forward info to the Chinese government, though
I won't pretend that the old modems couldn't have been set up to
do that as well.
As for the government's worries about Huawei. As Misfit noted, that's
much more about the Chinese shutting down the country's internet if
we got on the wrong side of them. Network connected infrastructure
has already proven difficult to protect against hackers. But if the
protections themselves were written by your enemy, then you haven't
got much hope. Of course that would still apply to modems and phones
- an unhackable network isn't much good if all the devices to use
with it have been shut down by the Chinese, and I could only buy my
non-Chinese 4G modem 2nd-hand because, as far as I can tell, Huawei
is now the only game in town (Telstra-compatible, anyway).
> Sort of reminds me of a rumour, several years ago, where if you had a
> voice operated T.V., there was someone in New York (as I heard it) that
> was listening to all the conversations in your lounge room, just in-case
> you/someone told the T.V. to change channels or some such!!
I doubt that one, but it's more likely that they're all saved for
future reference somewhere. Amazon were caught out for that recently,
though I think only for conversations where the device picked up its
"keyword".