Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mashable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 169 posts

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

#81

Post by jansho »

sa-mao wrote: post #22
mrkrabo wrote: post #6

This is interesting. It goes to show how an autoritarian government can fix some problems in a more effective way. You can remove terrorist propaganda from YouTube, but how do you stop the spread of those videos in private platforms or messaging applications? And even if the first version of this spying app only checks for md5 sums, which is arguably useless, I'm sure they're working on something more effective.

You know how to fix the problem more effectively? try to find the root cause and fix it. It's simple and it works.

Kindly please expand on what the root cause is and what the 'fix' might be

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

#82

Post by saimiam »

Hasknewbie wrote: post #32
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…

In my opinion, in typical Beijing fashion the "competence" part of the equation is irrelevant. it's all about sending a message, loud and clear: "today we discriminate against YOU, by law, and there's nothing you can do about it". That the method used is laughably inefficient is not the point, it's all about keeping that boot in place on that throat, in a very visible manner.

Couldn't agree more.

Same with airline security theater, identifying citizens using biometric markers (Aadhar card in India), pernicious internet monitoring in the UK...the list goes on. I guess the idea is to use the dragnet to catch or deter a majority of the population from thought crimes and preserve resources for the real big fish.

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

#83

Post by throw2016 »

No one cares about China or the people of Xinjiang. China probably cares more about them than anyone else.

Human rights is just an opportunity for many to grandstand and make smug declarations while making the flimsiest of excuses with a straight face and hand waving away their own government's actions. Unfortunately so much water has flown under the bridge this is just not credible.

What happened to the concern for all the refugees from Syria now, everyone is fighting to keep them away yet are happy to make sanctimonious statements feigning concern to justify destructive action that decimates entire countries and destroys millions of lives driven entirely by political and economic agendas. This kind of odious hypocrisy is just not tenable anymore.

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

#84

Post by Alysha3434 »

draw_down wrote: post #78
cronjobma wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is absolutely sick. Why has this never reached the mainstream news?

Indeed, why...

I get paid over $95 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I'd be able to do it but my best friend earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heres what I've been doing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfJ3KWPnqqs

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

#85

Post by ascom »

sl4i6j3o4i98g wrote: post #74

Could we please get a copy of the apk? I feel we need a multi-pronged defense against such technologies: * Fake app, so people can pass a manual inspection of their device * Fake dataset, to feed so many false positives into their database it makes it time-cost prohibitive to investigate * Conflicting dataset - Duplicate MD5 strings matching 'bad' and 'good' files; may corrupt internal databases or provide plausible…

I downloaded it and decompiled it here, if anyone wants to take a look: https://mirrors.asun.co/chinese-spyware/

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

#86

Post by gipp »

throw2016 wrote: post #83

No one cares about China or the people of Xinjiang. China probably cares more about them than anyone else. Human rights is just an opportunity for many to grandstand and make smug declarations while making the flimsiest of excuses with a straight face and hand waving away their own government's actions. Unfortunately so much water has flown under the bridge this is just not credible. What happened to the concern for…

So, what, ethical government is a nonsensical idea and we all just accept autocracy around the world?

You're also putting a lot of words in people's mouths. Many or most of folks who have a problem with things like this are also the people concerned with their own government's actions abroad, and are _not_ those "fighting to keep [Syrian refugees] away".

Everything can be made to look like hypocrisy if you just freely mix and match opinions of completely different people.

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

#87

Post by logicchains »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #29
logicchains wrote: post #23

The headline is slightly misleading. It's not all muslim minorities in China: it's muslims living in the separatist Xinjiang region, who are ethnically Turkic. There are a non-insignificant number of muslims outside of Xinjiang, such as the Huizu, which are essentially Han Chinese muslims. Lots of the "terrorism" originating from Xinjiang has separatist rather than just religious motivations; I wouldn't be surprised…

When I read the headline, I immediately thought Xinjiang, because that is where they have the greatest concentration of Muslims and where they have had separatism issues. And then the first sentence starts with "China has ramped up surveillance measures in Xinjiang". So I don't consider the headline misleading at all. News sites necessarily have to use short titles. The lack of an exhaustive title shouldn't be critic…

I meant the headline of the Hacker News post, not the headline of the article. The original Hacker News post headline was "China forces its Muslim minority to install spyware on their phones", which is incorrect in the sense it implies that China is forcing all its Muslims to install spyway on their phones.

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

#88

Post by sl4i6j3o4i98g »

ascom wrote: post #85
sl4i6j3o4i98g wrote: post #74

Could we please get a copy of the apk? I feel we need a multi-pronged defense against such technologies: * Fake app, so people can pass a manual inspection of their device * Fake dataset, to feed so many false positives into their database it makes it time-cost prohibitive to investigate * Conflicting dataset - Duplicate MD5 strings matching 'bad' and 'good' files; may corrupt internal databases or provide plausible…

I downloaded it and decompiled it here, if anyone wants to take a look: https://mirrors.asun.co/chinese-spyware/

Legend! thank you.

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

#89

Post by astebbin »

throw2016 wrote: post #83

No one cares about China or the people of Xinjiang. China probably cares more about them than anyone else. Human rights is just an opportunity for many to grandstand and make smug declarations while making the flimsiest of excuses with a straight face and hand waving away their own government's actions. Unfortunately so much water has flown under the bridge this is just not credible. What happened to the concern for…

Besides being (in my opinion) incorrect on many levels - for instance, Western countries continue to rescue and provide for NEMA refugees, if not granting them residency - the parent comment is a great example of "Whataboutism," a classic logical fallacy and Soviet propaganda technique:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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

#90

Post by vslira »

dmoy wrote: post #69
sdiq wrote: post #50

Elsewhere, I read that China doesn't allow Muslim civil servants and students from fasting during Ramadan. Was that only applying to this region or was applicable to other regions with non-Turkic Chinese Muslims?

It's mostly just xinjiang that gets shit on. See e.g. http://time.com/3099950/china-muslim-hui-xinjiang-uighur-isl... The TL;DR of it is that it has not much to do with religion specifically, and much to do with the region pushing for autonomy (which doesn't rate particularly high in the eyes of Beijing). (This is not to say it's ok, just stating the reality of the situation)

This is important to stress. It doesn't make the decision any less oppressive, but framing it as anti-muslim instead of anti-insubordination obscures Beijing's real priorities.
Post reply on HN