[LINK] Blocking Huawei from Australia means slower and delayed 5G – and for what?

[Craig Sanders]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:46:29AM +1000, David wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 May 2019 20:41:30 AEST Craig Sanders wrote:
>
> > e.g. currently, while it's almost impossible to buy a non-"Smart" TV, you
> > **can** choose not to plug it in to a wired or wireless network.  With
> > ubiquitous 5G, that will NOT be an option, it WILL have a 5G connection to
> > spy on you 24/7 whether you want it to or not.
>
> I agree with your sentiments regarding spyware, but how will all this 5G
> spy-related usage be funded?  Will I have to provide my broadband account
> details before I can turn on the TV?

no, they'll have a 5G modem in them owned and controlled by the TV
manufacturer. at a very steep bulk-discount, of course.

other devices may have their own in-built 5G modem, or they may have a short
range wifi/bluetooth/whatever radio to piggyback on some nearby 5G modem.

this is not new, cheap data-only mobile phone services for monitoring and
tracking and general data acquisition have been around in pretty much every
generation of mobile phone services. It's the convergence of surveillance
tech, the so-called Internet of Things, DMCA and DRM laws, and rapidly
reducing price of connections and bandwidth that makes it so much worse.

> Anything which goes too far eventually creates a reaction.  Google et al
> gave rise to DuckDuckGo ("The search engine that doesn't track you.") and
> the EFF's Privacy Badger, and we can see push-back beginning to happen now
> in the case of Facebook.

Sure, a reaction.  In most cases, a tiny mostly-irrelevant reaction.

It doesn't matter if a tiny percentage of people withdraw from Facebook and
look for more privacy-respecting alternatives.  They'll be drawn back in to
FB due to network effects - and you don't even need to ever have had a FB
account for FB to have amasssed an enormous profile on you because pretty
nearly everyone will have friends or acquaintances or colleagues or employers
who ARE on Facebook.

Facebook will continue to dominate unless governments all around the world
legislate to make their constance surveillance illegal...and even that won't
be enough unless the US government also forces Facebook to be broken up.
neither of these things are likely to happen in any real way.

Same with duckduckgo....usage is miniscule compared to Google.  or Bing.

BTW, Google recently announced changes to their chrome/chromium API to prevent
the kinds of ad and javascript blocking done by plugins like ublock origin and
umatrix. google has established market domninance with chrome now, so they can
do whatever they like.


This is not to say that it's not worth even trying to resist.  You can achieve
small, *personal* benefits for yourself.  Just don't expect it to make much of
a difference in the wider world.  Same as cutting down your own personal water
consumption will make no difference at all while agriculture and industry
waste so much....or same as choosing not to use plastic straws is irrelevant
compared to all the other retail packaging and industrial waste.



> The reaction to Huawei spyware may be driven by big-power politics, but it's
> still a positive development I think.

i don't see it as "pushback" so much as "distraction": pay no attention to
what *we're* doing, look over there at what the evil chinese are doing.

craig

--
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>