Huawei and China

I said here years ago that if China wished to fuck the U.S., they could open-source an OS and make it so that American peeps could exist with some limits on how much they could be spied on by the 5-eyes (read: 'Israeli') intelligence services. Huawei made noise about open-sourcing Harmony but, as did most people in the business, I took the 'will believe it when I see it' approach. Thankfully Idiot Trump forced their hand a bit.

Basically, an American living with some modicum of privacy is no big deal and not a huge threat to China, but it makes the U.S. weep. The converse problem is not really a big problem for China because they could and I'm sure they will outlaw open-source installs without backdoors in their motherland. Ah, the joy and flexibility of a totalitarian dictatorship!

Now if China can harvest a privacy-minded user's data through various backdoors, that would be highly valuable data on the market (and we all know who brokers such material.) I'm sure it will be a cat-n-mouse game always, but having an Android alternative with enough of the code open-sourced can only help. Especially if it is clean, well designed, and well written.

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My wife got a Huawei Nova 7i the other day. I have to say that at first glance it was kind of impressive. Smooth and fast. The troubles started immediately. As best I can tell, interoperability with Google stuff is implemented by giving Huawei one's login credentials and they then ferry the content to you? Fuck that!

Worse, every time you turn around they want you to agree to hand over data from every sensor on the device and you have to decline every time. It's only a matter of time before you hit the wrong button which pops up to annoy you then 'snap'; they've got you! Not that Google is any different, but they have the art of subtlety down a little bit better.

Anyway, Google effectively fucked Huawei big-time and the device is unusable by a lot of people. Plus, my wife claims it gave her a headache, and I must say that it sets my high-end up-to-8Ghz EMF tester to a blaze where my up-to-5Ghz basically toy testers stay quite. So maybe they are playing around with higher frequency 5G crap already with the thing. I wouldn't say anything conclusive because I really have not done any careful testing yet.

So, after a few days I inherited the phone, did a factory reset, and put it back in it's box until someone starts spinning builds for it. That work is well above my pay-grade and I'm busy with other stuff as well. If I could get a Google-free device for specialty work it would be a great day! Not holding my breath, but things are looking promising thanks to the idiots in the whitehouse.