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China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

mashable.com

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Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#11

Post by nunobrito »

Its their country and their laws, trying to solve the problem of Islamic extremism on their own.

In western countries, you get detained for years in Guantanamo under torture without knowing for sure why you got arrested. Young girls get married as early as 12 to creepy old dudes and there is no need to ask for installing spyware because the phones and communications are already tapped by default.

Anyone criticizing China while permitting their own country to do worse is an hypocrite. Still waiting for the outrage about the mass surveillance from Amazon Echo, Google and others. Only the European Commission is doing something visible against this trend.

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#12

Post by libeclipse »

buttcake wrote: post #10

Wow, those chinese surely are totalitarian in the way they approach surveillance technology aren't they ? Good thing we have nothing like that. Only just closed hardware with closed or with some parts open complicated software mostly made by a few corporations which tend to and have in fact in past coopoerated with governments without even thinking about their customers.

Comparing potential backdoors in proprietary systems with forced installation of spyware on endpoint devices?

I don't think they're the same.

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#13

Post by caseysoftware »

zython wrote: post #5

>The app reportedly scans for the MD5 digital signatures of media files in the phone, and matches them to a stored database of offending files classified by the government as illegal "terrorist-related" media. What a dumb way to scan for "illegal" content, considering the goverment already controls their portion of the internet. So instead of monitoring who is accessing what they decide to compare checksums of files…

Yes, it does.

But it could just be v1.. or it could be the govt describing a flawed approach so the resulting countermeasures are totally ineffective against the actual approach.

For example, if the actual approach is extracting keyframes and comparing against a library of keyframes of existing content (legal and illegal) or doing object recognition within those frames, the "add a null byte!" countermeasures are meaningless.

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#14

Post by fiblye »

libeclipse wrote: post #8

I can think of so many countermeasures. - Append a null byte to the end of your files, giving them a unique hash value. - Disallow internet access to the application. - Spoof the server using DNS tricks and control what is sent and received. - Reverse engineer the application to make it look as if it's working while it actually isn't. - Sandbox the application. - Use an alternative phone for all of your "sensitive" a…

How easy do you imagine not only finding information on how to follow through all of these steps, but actually acquire the needed materials (burners) within the strictly controlled PRC is?

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#15

Post by eivarv »

nunobrito wrote: post #11

Its their country and their laws, trying to solve the problem of Islamic extremism on their own. In western countries, you get detained for years in Guantanamo under torture without knowing for sure why you got arrested. Young girls get married as early as 12 to creepy old dudes and there is no need to ask for installing spyware because the phones and communications are already tapped by default. Anyone criticizing C…

Yes, but a hypocrite can still be right.

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#16

Post by Kenji »

buttcake wrote: post #10

Wow, those chinese surely are totalitarian in the way they approach surveillance technology aren't they ? Good thing we have nothing like that. Only just closed hardware with closed or with some parts open complicated software mostly made by a few corporations which tend to and have in fact in past coopoerated with governments without even thinking about their customers.

You're doing liberty and democracy a disservice with your whataboutism. It's one thing to suspect your government of sneakily compromising hardware, another to receive official letters to install a surveillance app or be detained. Of course both are despicable, but they are not in the same league.

EDIT: I'm surprised about how many people jump to the defense of the Chinese government here on HN. Seems in stark contrast with the usual political opinion of the crowd. I can only ascribe this phenomenon to massive cultural relativism.

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#17

Post by CrazyHumanist »

nunobrito wrote: post #11

Its their country and their laws, trying to solve the problem of Islamic extremism on their own. In western countries, you get detained for years in Guantanamo under torture without knowing for sure why you got arrested. Young girls get married as early as 12 to creepy old dudes and there is no need to ask for installing spyware because the phones and communications are already tapped by default. Anyone criticizing C…

This kind of appeasement, the idea of minding only the business of your own country, seems a bit indefensible to me.

And you cannot determine if one is a hypocrite just from a fact, there's no outrage, or can you? Many solves this problem their way, pointing out, talking about it, criticizing it and so forth.

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#18

Post by [deleted] »

nunobrito wrote: post #11

Its their country and their laws, trying to solve the problem of Islamic extremism on their own. In western countries, you get detained for years in Guantanamo under torture without knowing for sure why you got arrested. Young girls get married as early as 12 to creepy old dudes and there is no need to ask for installing spyware because the phones and communications are already tapped by default. Anyone criticizing C…

[deleted]

Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

#19

Post by snuxoll »

nunobrito wrote: post #11

Its their country and their laws, trying to solve the problem of Islamic extremism on their own. In western countries, you get detained for years in Guantanamo under torture without knowing for sure why you got arrested. Young girls get married as early as 12 to creepy old dudes and there is no need to ask for installing spyware because the phones and communications are already tapped by default. Anyone criticizing C…

I'm not happy with Gitmo either or the NSA's bullshit. Privacy and human rights violations like this by any government need to be stopped, every day it feels like we are treading closer to 1984 across the globe.
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