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

Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 333 posts

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#311

Post by chriscappuccio »

dirtyid wrote: post #159
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is weird because there are no travel restrictions for foreigners going to Xinjiang (mostly, some places are off limits), you just buy a plane or train ticket. Going to Tibet is a lot harder for foreigners.

I think Tibet still very much has Western imagination captured whereas Uyghar Muslims... do not. Even more cynical analysis, Xinjiang is fundamentally an exercise in reducing the real problem of Islamic radicalization and the non response from many countries (including Muslim ones) is that they are quietly observing to see if the experiment pays off. The danger of Xinjiang is that surveillance state + "vocational" re…

[dead]

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#312

Post by dang »

zwaps wrote: post #282
iiuuhhggff wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were multiple terrorist attacks in that region. Once China started cracking down, there haven’t been any.

We know that putting people in concentration camps by the millions is effective. It takes a particular kind of cruelty to see the world from the eye of effectiveness only, and that thinking propagates through society. No surprise that Chinese have been found to be the least honest and least trustworthy society in many experiments and studies, e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/scie... https:…

Please don't use HN for nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for. Racial/ethnic/national slurs are particularly unwelome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we had to ask you this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989263). We ban accounts that repeatedly violate the site guidelines, so please don't do this.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#313

Post by logifail »

aejnsn wrote: post #262
curiousgal wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Huawei is likely one of the companies that contributed to this very Xinjiang endeavour The article you cite just says that they supplied networking equipment, how is that different than, for example, U.S. conecetration camps using Dell laptops? Would you also blame Dell? I swear whenever China/Huawei is mentioned on HN, the comments transform into a huge propaganda machine.

That's a rather unfair comparison, and softens the harsh reality of Huawei's actions. Dell didn't sell the laptops with the intent of them being used for that purpose. China says jump and Huawei jumps to build whatever state-sponsored surveillance tooling they need. That's not how it works with Dell, Cisco, Juniper, etc. Remember the stories about network devices being intercepted via parcel services? I'd bet I can m…

> China says jump and Huawei jumps to build whatever state-sponsored surveillance tooling they need

We'll see your Huawei and raise you AT&T

"The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades [...] The NSA exploits these relationships [..] commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies."

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#314

Post by helloindia »

igravious wrote: post #286
rwmj wrote: post #13

Before I went to China I bought a burner phone, mainly to install WeChat (which is also a kind of malware and also "required" in China). Basic Android phones are not too expensive these days - I wonder if it will become commonplace to own several and physically separate your life across them? FWIW I got a Huawei phone (Honor 10 Lite) for under 200 EUR, but much cheaper phones than that are available. Edit: To be clea…

> China is a police state May be good to make the distinction between the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region† in the very north-west of China and the rest of China itself. The surveillance, monitoring, detention, "education", and de-radicalisation that are happening in Xinxiang are not to my knowledge representative of the rest of China. It is, of course, very troublesome that this illiberal dragnet exists anywhere in…

>

WeChat doesn't have end-to-end encryption, while other apps have them. So the difference is not minuscule. Any communication on Wechat is interceptible by Chinese govt agencies. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/07/wechat-chinese...

Wechat doesn't fit the definition of a "malware", but it is a weapon that Chinese govt uses to monitor it's citizens.

>

Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/opinion/learning-to-survi...

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#315

Post by helloindia »

redwards510 wrote: post #189

What I don't understand is why they leave the app installed on the person's phone after the scan if it does not do any further scanning in the background.

The app is to monitor foreigners and the natives, while they're in Xinjiang. Deleting the app on just one scan would be defeating the purpose.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#316

Post by dang »

bitcharmer wrote: post #101
tantalor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're referring to this form: https://www.axistravel.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ONL... Regarding email address, it's under "contact information" same as "home address". What's the problem? Regarding social media, it says "optional", so...?

Not sure under which rock you were hiding all this time, so here you are: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48118558 https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/01/u-s-customs-ca... https://www.zdnet.com/article/warrantless-phone-laptop-searc...

Please edit personal swipes out of your comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#317

Post by manjana »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #304
eladrin201 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a dual sim Mi phone for this purpose as well. It worked out really well. At the border crossing from Hong Kong into mainland china, they didn't seem interested in my devices fortunately. Still will wipe my phone before I use it again, however.

even if you wipe your phone you can still have a compromised baseband.

Could you elaborate a bit on this please? I have never heard of such a phenomena which intrigues me quite a bit!

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#318

Post by limoo »

murbard2 wrote: post #6

The US is forcing its tourists to give away a list of all their social media accounts and all their email accounts. If you're a foreign journalist writing pseudonymously for your safety, you must now share that information with the US government to enter the country. This isn't quite on the level of forcing people to install malware on their phone yet, but give it a couple years.

Have you ever thought about creating web site? I have a blog that gives you free information about it. I know you can be a self taught web designer. www.limotorsh.com

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#319

Post by limoo »

murbard2 wrote: post #6

The US is forcing its tourists to give away a list of all their social media accounts and all their email accounts. If you're a foreign journalist writing pseudonymously for your safety, you must now share that information with the US government to enter the country. This isn't quite on the level of forcing people to install malware on their phone yet, but give it a couple years.

Have you ever thought about creating web site? I have a blog that gives you free information about it. I know you can be a self taught web designer. https://www.limotorsh.com

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#320

Post by NamTaf »

braythwayt wrote: post #98
erdo wrote: post #82

Given China's expansive attitude to industrial espionage (all foreign companies are fair game), if I were in charge of security for a large multinational, what's my security policy going to be for my employees who travel to China for meetings? Does this change anything? or is behaviour like this from China or indeed anyone else, already priced in?

Others can chime in, but I believe that most serious companies doing business with China have a burner-device policy for employees travelling to China. Your devices will all be hacked with industrial espionage malware, and just in case you don't have anything on those devices, you will be given devices as "gifts"—like flash drives and WiFi-equipped smart home devices--that will exploit any devices you didn't bring wi…

The company I work for (small on the world scale, but reasonably big in my country) forbids our standard issue laptops from going, instead giving us special travel laptops. These are blocked from the corporate wifi and do not have any VPN connection back to the corporate network. We do all email through webmail. We hand them back upon returning and they get wiped with a fresh install of the OS.
Post reply on HN