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“Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

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Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#31

Post by systemvoltage »

joshuaissac wrote: post #28
systemvoltage wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clone Chinese OSS, you need WeChat account or OTP+Phone in China. This feels totally against the principles of good faith in OSS dev. They can clone and take advantage of the rest of the world’s efforts while returning nothing back. Asshole, is the term for such entities. To be fair, some cool Chinese developers do have repos on GitHub. They’re not the majority though. Edit: Hold on folks, I need to find source of…

> To clone Chinese OSS, you need WeChat account or OTP+Phone in China Do you have a source for this? I tried signing up on Gitee (Chinese GitHub alternative), and it did not ask me to prove that I had WeChat or a phone number. > some cool Chinese developers do have repos on GitHub Mirroring their projects on GitHub might be fine, but given the current relationship between China and the US (where GitHub is hosted), Ch…

I need to find the source. I didn’t use Gitee and it was a couple of years ago, forgot where I was trying to download. I remember getting a QR code to get access to the code. Other login options were Baidu, WeChat, and Weibo.

Edit: I think I was most likely using Zhaodao.

https://zhaodao.ai/

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#32

Post by Sebb767 »

jeswin wrote: post #21
dannyw wrote: post #5

If China wants to use protectionism to wage digital economy warfare, let's respond in kind. No more Wechat, TikTok, Alipay, or League of Legends or Valorant, until China gives equal treatment to foreign internet firms. Note: Valorant installs a kernel driver as part of the "anti-cheat" system; described by many as a rootkit: https://www.osnews.com/story/131665/riot-games-maker-of-leag... Valorant's parent company is…

China exported $125B worth of mobile phones. Cutting Google Play Store off would seriously harm their ability to sell outside - I wonder why Google doesn't play hard ball.

Because the Chinese market is extremely large. Cutting them of will hurt them in the short term, yes, but it will also force the development and popularization of local alternatives, which will hurt Google very much in the long term - see their recent examples with CPU development and Huawei's own Playstore.

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#33

Post by meibo »

LockAndLol wrote: post #22
alexmingoia wrote: post #11

This is the type of behavior Apple intends to prevent with their signed app distribution, loathed by so many here.

Doesn't Google Chrome do that already (log everything) and still many people use it? And wasn't there a recent article about how programs couldn't be run on Big Sur because some server somewhere could verify the hash before it was ran? It was discovered because the OS slowed down to an unbearable speed except when running Apple programs. Signed app distribution won't solve this problem.

The difference is really that chrome is not a third party app doing it live to other browsers.

Chrome hides this as legitimate value to users - when I type out an URL on my desktop, I will get auto complete for it and shared history on my phone and my laptop. It's a trade-off.

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#34

Post by nomay »

Iolaum wrote: post #27

Apart from a lot of other issues mentioned here, this looks to me for a good argument of app sandboxing. It is a thing on mobile but not much on the desktop.

QQ comes with a bundled QQProtect.exe that can't be killed, QQ simply refuses to run without it.

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#35

Post by Yetanfou »

pjc50 wrote: post #12
alexmingoia wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This behavior isn’t unique to Chinese companies.

That's basically the problem, isn't it? In order to address this behaviour, the West would have to admit that it was bad, and that it was also bad when done by western companies, and have a coherent theory of privacy.

Nope, the problem here is that Recent does this, had it been Microsoft who was caught (as has happened several times) the problem would have been that Microsoft did it. The problem, in other words, is not related to the identity of the perpetrator. In some cases that identity might be a country - Tencent, Vkontakte, etc - while in other cases it is some commercial entity with probable ties to a country - Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, AT&T, etc.

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#36

Post by orbital-decay »

nomay wrote: post #34
Iolaum wrote: post #27

Apart from a lot of other issues mentioned here, this looks to me for a good argument of app sandboxing. It is a thing on mobile but not much on the desktop.

QQ comes with a bundled QQProtect.exe that can't be killed, QQ simply refuses to run without it.

Can't you sandbox both though?

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#37

Post by yorwba »

nomay wrote: post #30

It was trying to read certain types of URLs encoded in MD5, found to be these. https://i.imgur.com/rSOyTt7.jpg It wants to know what you searched on e-commerce sites. This is somewhat unsursprising, Tencent failed on e-commerce, it desperately needs these data to help with user profiling.

Here it is as text: https://www.v2ex.com/t/745030?p=3#r_10077384

According to that post, they don't even upload the URLs that match, but just the fact that there was a match for one of three groups of keywords. Seems like a lot of effort for little information gain...

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#38

Post by MereInterest »

alexmingoia wrote: post #11

This is the type of behavior Apple intends to prevent with their signed app distribution, loathed by so many here.

This is an argument for putting more control in the hands of users, in the form of better sandboxing and permissions. It is not an argument for taking away control from users, as Apple is doing.

Re: “Tencent QQ caught scraping all browser history on Windows”

#40

Post by dignan »

alexmingoia wrote: post #11

This is the type of behavior Apple intends to prevent with their signed app distribution, loathed by so many here.

People loathe Apple for locking down their own access to their computer, not for security measures. Signed app distribution solves an entirely separate problem- making sure you get the app unmodified. This is a problem with sandboxing. Apple also does have sandboxing, but mostly that’s not what people complain about.

You can have signed apps and sandboxing without Apple being the sole arbiter of what you install. For example, Linux has multiple options available to solve this. Signed repos combined with SELinux, or flatpak, and snap all solve the same problem.

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