Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting a Chinese Giant

As a side-side note, I do understand how journalists may want a career as writers and US articles tend to have pointless details&#x2F;descriptions, but this is IMHO way too much:<p>&gt;Khan was casually dressed in a dark peacoat, black button-up shirt, gray pants, and sneakers. Shurboff’s attire was more businesslike: a light blue dress shirt, gray sports jacket, black trousers, and brand-new leather shoes.

I&#x27;ll be slightly pedantic: the coating is almost certainly diamond-like carbon (DLC), not diamond.<p>DLC is a complicated class of materials, generally composed of amorphous carbon (no long-range order - kind of like glass) with the same kind of interatomic bonds you see in diamond (sp3 bonds). It&#x27;s often applied by sputtering or ion beam deposition.<p>Diamond is sp3-bonded carbon with long-range crystalline order. It&#x27;s most often made by chemical vapor deposition, which is slow and expensive compared to DLC deposition methods.<p>The DLC coating described in the article won&#x27;t do much to reduce glass breakage. But it will greatly increase scratch resistance because it&#x27;s nearly as hard as diamond.<p>Diamond doesn&#x27;t melt unless you&#x27;re heating it while it&#x27;s also under enormous pressure to keep it from turning to graphite. It does ablate, or vaporize when hit with laser pulses. This is used to remove small graphite inclusions in diamond.

&gt; The FBI asked them to travel to Las Vegas and conduct a meeting with Huawei representatives at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. Shurboff was outfitted with surveillance devices and recorded the conversation while a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter watched from safe distance.<p>Is this common practice for criminal investigations?

Super long read only to find out at the end, it might be nothing at all.

&quot;They recall the gemologist saying he’d analyzed the diamond glass sample and concluded that Huawei had blasted it with a 100-kilowatt laser, powerful enough to be used as a weapon.&quot;<p>What? how can you determine that from a piece of broke glass?

The point of the story is not whether the glass is &quot;unbreakable&quot; or not.<p>It is about the extent of the Huawei scandal.

So after Businessweek&#x27;s story about Supermicro sending hacked boards to companies, the FBI director Wray deflected questions by saying<p>&gt;“We have very specific policy that applies to us as law enforcement agencies to neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation,”<p>Why are they now seeming to break that policy by confirming this investigation?

Is it really standard practice to demand a sample be returned in original condition in 60 days?<p>Especially a sample of glass?<p>Surely the buyer would want to bend it, scratch it, coat it, paint it, etc. to determine if it&#x27;s suitable for their usecases?<p>In my experience, it&#x27;s typical for samples to be provided free (or for a nominal cost), with no strings attached. If there was anything &#x27;secret&#x27; in them, they would be protected by copyright, trademarks and patents.

This descriptions does not sound like it&#x27;s about something that is &quot;virtually unbreakable&quot; :<p>&quot;The sample looked like an ordinary piece of glass, 4 inches square and transparent on both sides. It’d been packed like the precious specimen its inventor, Adam Khan, believed it to be—placed on wax paper, nestled in a tray lined with silicon gel, enclosed in a plastic case, surrounded by air bags, sealed in a cardboard box—and then sent for testing to a laboratory in San Diego&quot;

A marketing ruse?

beauty is skin deep, Huawei is ugly to bone...

I&#x27;ve read so many stories proclaiming Huawei&#x27;s misdeeds yet nothing solid thus far, with all scenarios hanging on the hypothetical thread. Yet oddly, it is somehow working and skepticism after all is rooting certainty.

Sounds like the FBI is just flailing around, and latching onto bottom feeders in the smartphone components industry in an attempt to find dirt on Huawei. This case is a good example: AKHAN had 28 employees and was going on 80 in 2014, but now it only has 5 employees and has zero revenue.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chicagobusiness.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;20140917&#x2F;BLOGS11&#x2F;140919854&#x2F;akhan-semiconductor-gets-3-5-million-to-stay-in-illinois" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chicagobusiness.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;20140917&#x2F;BLOGS11&#x2F;140...</a><p>Also, how does a startup without any sales dollars afford the services of Thompson Coburn LLP? And just LOL at Adam&#x27;s final claim around disclosing the FBI investigation to help with landing a customer: do you think federal agents would have allowed him to break his non-disclosure agreements if this investigation had merit? Whole thing is pretty fishy

Is there anything that Huawei does that Western companies don&#x27;t do, such as trying to steal their competitors secrets?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;google-sues-uber-over-self-driving-car-secrets&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitaltrends.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;google-sues-uber-over...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-43010348" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-43010348</a><p>For any older person this is no news. Didn&#x27;t we something like this with Hitachi in the 80s?<p>Of course the authorities try to ban purchases from foreign companies that steal American company&#x27;s secrets, but they don&#x27;t apply the same rule to American companies that steal other American companies secrets.<p>They also don&#x27;t seem so eager to launch sting operations against American companies who aim to steal other American companies secrets.