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Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

nytimes.com

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Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#411

Post by bogomipz »

Harken wrote: post #395
bogomipz wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"The market is too large to leave." Or stated another way "there's too much money involved to worry about ethics." Yet Google left it and they seem to be doing OK. Apple could well afford to leave it too: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/02/apples-cash-hoard-swells-to-...

Google has to deal with some manufacturing issues related to their phones and tablets, but does not entirely depend on China for manufacturing. Apple is overly-dependent upon Chinese manufacturing to have hardware at all. Leaves them beholden to Chinese rules, whereas, if they had manufactured elsewhere, China would have to deal with demand for a needed foreign product. Now, however, if Apple pulled out, they would l…

I didn't understand your Google hardware comment. Google search in China predates any hardware by years. Google search(Google China) is 2005 and the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 isn't until 2008.

Apple isn't dependent on the Chinese for manufacturing they are dependent on Foxconn, a Taiwanese company. And China wants Foxconn there. They greatly incentivized Foxconn to set up shop there.[1]

There's no reason Apple with its' hundreds of billions in cash reserves couldn't finance an "iPhone City" like China did in Zhengzhou and put it elsewhere.

And seeing how Foxconn is looking towards automation which isn't dependent on human labor, they could set it up an automated iPhone City anywhere, including the US.[2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/technology/apple-iphone-c...

[2] http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal...

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#412

Post by bobjordan »

My business has an AWS China account and below is the email I received on Friday. It is definitely a crackdown year, on several fronts even other than the internet. Like this year I was forced to pay a $300 fine because I didn't report to the police station within 24-hrs of re-entry while living in my own leased home. Now, my company is not huge but I've employed +100 people and we pay a lot of taxes, social insurance, provide jobs for local families. They do not give a shit about that you will follow the laws of China to do business here or you will be thrown out.

Overall, this year has really chilled my enthusiasm for getting too comfortable with the thought of living here the rest of my working life. In this age with so many elite Chinese being trained and educated abroad, it is really hard to beleive things are going in this directon. I mean, IT Is already hard enough, we need a server in our office that is connected to another server in France, and we need it reliable and without issue. Making this type of stuff even harder on us as a business is really irritating. I really do tell myself every day "if it was easy everybody would be doing it".

"Dear Customer, According to the telecom regulations and the requirement of MIIT/MPS and Internet supervision agency, please check up two parts below. • The illegal “over the wall” proxy sites and provide hosting campaign service for illegal “over the wall” proxy sites. • All main domains which don’t have ICP recorded number via MIIT and All websites which have illegal content. We will continuously receive notification from the regulators to close such services or shut down server deployment immediately. In case your will be involved in any consequences of such violation, please stop immediately if you have such illegal services and deployment. Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

Regards, AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by SINNET"

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#413

Post by acdha »

yarg wrote: post #388
acdha wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's technically true but largely irrelevant because it ignores the hard problem: if you're a covert agent supported by a major power, sure, you may have the opsec training and resources needed for that to be relevant but in most cases the question is not crypto magic but how it handles discovery, trust, and individual compromises. You can have perfect steganography but as soon as a government informant says they g…

Dissent against authoritarian governments will always be a game of cat and mouse - sometimes the cat will catch the mouse, there's no preventing that. But I think that you're underestimating the power of the mathematics here in terms of the levels of achievable misdirection. If the government gets into your unencrypted context you're pretty much fucked - I'll give you that - but it does not necessarily mean that anyo…

A nation state doing traffic analysis will have people working full time to subvert the initial weak link of getting the software (which nobody else uses so simply possessing it will be seen as a sign of criminal intent) and keying information, doing statistical analysis to find why people have unusual access patterns to that innocent content and correlating people not known to be connected who are showing those same atypical patterns around the same time, etc. It doesn't matter if your source data is entirely fluffy kitten videos if there's a set of users inexplicably accessing the same set of videos in temporal or geographic proximity without a known link.

The other problem is trust: you said you'd have no idea where the key came from. Ignoring the high possibility of the state recording enough history to answer that question, the bigger risk is active subversion: using that software is evidence that you're trying to evade surveillance, which is risky no matter how warranted, and making those requests is clear proof that you're doing so. The hardest problem here would be detecting moles and honeypots: secret police distribute software versions which leaks your activity to them, distribute keys online and in person, etc. They're not going to arrest you as soon as you install it but will wait, possibly for years, seeing who else your activity links in.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#414

Post by [deleted] »

yarg wrote: post #388
acdha wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's technically true but largely irrelevant because it ignores the hard problem: if you're a covert agent supported by a major power, sure, you may have the opsec training and resources needed for that to be relevant but in most cases the question is not crypto magic but how it handles discovery, trust, and individual compromises. You can have perfect steganography but as soon as a government informant says they g…

Dissent against authoritarian governments will always be a game of cat and mouse - sometimes the cat will catch the mouse, there's no preventing that. But I think that you're underestimating the power of the mathematics here in terms of the levels of achievable misdirection. If the government gets into your unencrypted context you're pretty much fucked - I'll give you that - but it does not necessarily mean that anyo…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#415

Post by resf »

eps wrote: post #372
resf wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would harm Chinese people. If you lived in China, would you consider an iPhone or a Chinese phone to be more secure against intrusion?

That's a very naive point of view. Apple has shown the willingness to compromise to access the Chinese market, so there's absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't or haven't bow to their other demands, including the weakening of their device security.

Your argument is that it's OK to hurt someone if there's a chance that they might be hurt regardless.

If I were Chinese I'd be feeling pretty damn patronized if someone told me they were taking my iPhone away and I should be happy about it.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#417

Post by kekeblom »

patrickaljord wrote: post #109
mauvehaus wrote: post #102

This from the company that removed the headphone jack from their phones while crowing about the "courage" involved in making the decision. I'm not going to pretend to believe that Tim Cook's letter (cited elsewhere) was much more than a PR move in a country they were unlikely to face any substantial consequences for (at least publicly) standing up to the government, or that I really believe that corporations have a r…

Aren't they forced to follow Chinese laws when doing business there? Not saying what they did is moral but it seems the moral question here is whether they be doing business in China, not whether they should be following the laws while doing business their because they don't really have a choice once they decide to do business there. Google for example doesn't do business there so they don't have to respect censorshi…

Fyi, Google does do business in China. They have offices in Beijing and Shanghai at least. Their phones are most probably also manifactured in China which is pretty big business.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#418

Post by KMag »

halter73 wrote: post #354
KMag wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has this "do no evil" value Former Google engineer here. There's a subtle but significant semantic difference between "Don't be evil" (the real motto) and "Do no evil" (a confusion between the Hippocratic oath and the Google motto).

Can you explain the semantic difference between being and doing in this context? What I'm mostly interested in is how you can rationalize doing evil while not considering yourself as being evil. Is it based on the idea that you might do evil unintentionally or that you could be coerced into it? Are there other reasons for the distinction?

If Google has determined that censorship is evil, but an open society is a noble goal, then "Do no evil" would prevent Google from collaborating with censors under any circumstances. "Don't be evil" would allow collaborating with censors if Google believed that collaborating with censors was the fastest way to inducing a closed society to open up (or some other greater good).

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#419

Post by wfunction »

dane-pgp wrote: post #410
jonny_eh wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple is willing to revoke apps that China doesn't like, are they willing to add secret encryption backdoors too? Where do they draw the line?

You're right that a clear dividing line is needed here. To be fair to Apple, though, they have given this official statement on the matter: "As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It’s something we feel very strongly about." https://www.app…

> Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services.

Is there any reason for them to not automatically generalize this to "...with any entity from any country"? I'm wondering about a case where a government agency hides behind some other veil and makes Apple insert some backdoor.

Re: Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship

#420

Post by bsder »

enraged_camel wrote: post #198
xienze wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Of course, I get that. But it's always companies like Apple that make so much noise about social justice who don't stick to their guns when China's involved.

I don't get your complaint at all. What would you rather have them do? What would "sticking to their guns" involve? Or would you rather have them not "make so much noise" about social justice?

> What would you rather have them do? What would "sticking to their guns" involve?

Start building factories elsewhere. Help put together a similar manufacturing ecosystem in a different country. Automate their manufacture so much that it no longer matters if labor is done in China.

If Apple paid an extra 10-20% to locate factories elsewhere and started pulling out of China, it would be a gigantic hit to China while being only a 20% hit to Apple. And Apple could threaten China instead of China threatening Apple. And China wouldn't dream of making these kinds of requests again.

Apple has more leverage than they are willing to use.

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