Anyone know why OnePlus is mentioned ? The only reference seem to be a stupid CVE; I'm sure they have much worse bugs.
Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
271–280 of 427 posts
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
The common thread here is how Beijing is afraid from organized ethnic minority movements, religious movements and/or societies from the civil society that could have their own independent ideas. They are not that different from other Leninist inspired governments. Cuba does that. Vietnam does that. The Soviet Union certainly did that. These governments always lose their minds with the idea of people organizing themse…
People's Daily is an official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, i.e. "Beijing". Perhaps this fact can improve your analysis.
You are mistaken, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622783
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
The common thread here is how Beijing is afraid from organized ethnic minority movements, religious movements and/or societies from the civil society that could have their own independent ideas. They are not that different from other Leninist inspired governments. Cuba does that. Vietnam does that. The Soviet Union certainly did that. These governments always lose their minds with the idea of people organizing themse…
People's Daily is an official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, i.e. "Beijing". Perhaps this fact can improve your analysis.
The term in the list is actually 人民报 "People's newspaper" not 人民日报 "People's Daily newspaper". From a quick look at their website, 人民报 appears to be pretty anti-communist. Basically typosquatting.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking over drones owned by hobbyists. There seems to be a onslaught of positive DJI YouTube videos about how creating a user account is great and easy. Including fake comments praising DJI. Just search on YT DJI Mavic Pro setup. All this is too suspicious for me. I returned the drone for obvious reasons but millions of people are already buying into the ecosystem.
> All this is too suspicious for me. I returned the drone for obvious reasons but millions of people are already buying into the ecosystem. We're way past the point of no return with all of this. At some point you just have to accept the new normal. Some of this should be handled by national security teams but I am unsure where we stand (US). I'm surprised Lithuania of all places takes a firm stand on Chinese phones,…
Lithuania let Taiwan call its interests section an embassy or something and China is pissed so they were probably expecting blowback
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#275Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that camera thing was censorship, instead bug: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/comments/pgk8y3/comment/hbf5... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28395885
Censorship of the Taiwanese flag by Apple on the iPhone for users in China manifested itself as a crash whenever the Taiwan flag emoji was used[1]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-bug-iphon...
> But Wardle found that in some edge cases, a bug in the Taiwan-censorship code meant that instead of treating the Taiwan emoji as missing from the phone's library, it instead considered it an invalid input. That caused phones to crash altogether, resulting in what hackers call a denial-of-service attack that would let anyone crash a vulnerable device on command.
Which was also a bug—the conditions of which's existence are manifestly political (which I have zero desire/intent to defend here), but nonetheless an Apple-side bug that was patched eventually
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it comes down to, why bother when the simplest solution works ? Make no mistake: As and when they get caught out doing such things, the sophistication of their implementation is bound to increase, in response to it. Money is no object for state-actors and mega-corps.
It may not be a state actor. I am the last person to defend the CCP, but as the chinese phones are made by companies that have lots of reason to fear the government, this may be proactive censorship added by the vendor to avoid getting in trouble, and it might even have been accidentally left in foreign models. We don't know the full story yet.
There's really no difference between the state providing a blacklist, and the state inspiring enough terror that blacklists are compiled. Actually, there is - the latter is far scarier.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was stupid enough to buy a Xiaomi phone without enough due diligence. Aside from all spying that is going on, the software is abysmal. The problem with replacing the OS is that I believe most banking apps I use will stop working. Might just need to write this phone off.
Banking has to be the dumbest "security" industry there is. Restrict apps, but can still log in via browser. I have one bank app that actually says to screenshot a payment screen for your records, while blocking screenshots via app policy.
Bank websites in some (developed, European) countries restrict you to 6-8 digit passwords (not alphanumeric), and don't have a 2FA option like Facebook or Google do. It's a massive joke.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#279From the shared PDF page 23... "It has been established that during the initialisation of the system applications factory-installed on a Xiaomi Mi 10T device, these applications contact a server in Singapore at the address globalapi.ad.xiaomi.com (IP address 47.241.69.153) and download the JSON file MiAdBlacklistConfig, and save this file in the metadata catalogues of the applications. A list of applications for whic…
Similar lists existed within Google for their ("on hold" last I heard) project Dragonfly [0]. I saw a bunch of banned terms like these in the Dragonfly repo before they hid it from regular employees. It was a very long list. On it were also the names of specific activists and human rights lawyers, including some who'd been disappeared [1] or forcibly confined to mental institutions [2].
My impression is that Sundar was all-in on Dragonfly, and he only rolled it back because of tremendous external and internal pressure. As that pressure abates over time, expect Dragonfly to return. Word of warning for those who trust Google as a defender of digital privacy and human rights.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/06/un-human-right...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-ink-girl-defaced-xi-09...
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#280From the shared PDF page 23... "It has been established that during the initialisation of the system applications factory-installed on a Xiaomi Mi 10T device, these applications contact a server in Singapore at the address globalapi.ad.xiaomi.com (IP address 47.241.69.153) and download the JSON file MiAdBlacklistConfig, and save this file in the metadata catalogues of the applications. A list of applications for whic…
This is pretty clearly a low-effort filter for advertisements deemed political. > 204 "人民报", “People’s daily newspaper” People's Daily is an official Communist Party newspaper... Why on earth would they blocklist that if this is a politically-motivated censorship program (as the paper/many here are implying)?
It's a bad translation. "People's daily newspaper" should translate 人民日报 (the newspaper you mention); 人民报 contains no "daily" element.