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Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

reuters.com

361–370 of 427 posts

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Word of warning for those who trust Google as a defender of digital privacy and human rights. Surely that is literally nobody? At this stage I would be seriously concerned for anyone who identifies with this description.

Considering Google has forfeited a lot of money over many years for resisting Chinese censorship I would say they're more trustworthy on this issue than Apple or Microsoft which have both publicly caved. The remnants of the "Don't be evil" culture is what allowed Dragonfly to be resisted. No such culture exists at Apple or Microsoft.

[deleted]

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#362
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese culture and upbringing You can't post slurs like this to HN. Nationalistic, racial, and/or ethnic flamewar is not welcome either. I'm sure you can make your substantive points without any of that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hi dang. I have nothing against Chinese people. On the other hand what I described is day to day reality doing business in China and is easily backed by facts. You may not like, you may not be aware of it, it but it is truth. See accounts of other HN users in this thread. "I lived in China for a year and vouch for this type of behaviour. It’s just considered normal in China. "

I don't disbelieve you, but your comment definitely did not make it clear that you have "nothing against Chinese people". On the contrary, it rather it made it sound as if you did. No doubt you didn't consider this possibility because you know your own intent—but intent doesn't communicate itself. It's your responsibility to disambiguate that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

HN readers with Chinese backgrounds or Chinese connections have just as much a right to be here as anyone else does. I invite you to consider how someone in their position would feel after reading your comment about how "Chinese culture and upbringing" includes "cheating and stealing". Even minimal empathy would make you recoil from what you posted.

HN readers with Chinese backgrounds have already been hounded off this site by prejudicial comments. That's shameful. I don't want it to happen again, and your comment crossed into that territory. Please don't do it again. As I said above, you can make your substantive points—including relating your personal experience—without crossing into prejudicial generalization. It's not that hard - you just need to be mindful of the audience. You're broadcasting to a large, diverse population when you comment here.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#363
post #194

"Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan independence" or "democracy movement". Sent from my Xiaomi, let's see if it works. Anyway, I always thought if I have to use American phone backdoored by FBI or Chinese phone backdoored by China, I choose Chinese because they really cannot arrest me, unlike FBI.

Interestingly, people have been trying to flee Lithuania for the US when the USSR was still around, and not the other way around. I wonder if they might be skeptical of another communist regime starting to interfere with the country. Worked so well the last time...

Earlier this year Lithuania authorized Taiwan to open an embassy-type office, and the relationship with China has (as somewhat expected) gone downhill since then. This report sounds like the result of what you would expect any reasonable government to do in that case - investigate what influence or security weaknesses said country may have.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/22/china-lithuania-taiwan-...

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#364

Earlier 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.

This has some smell of a compliance issue. I.e. the company gets ordered to block stuff; the order states "this shall be blocked" and provides a list, and then the company does the simplest/cheapest way to comply which is literally checking for whatever was required by the order.

and then forgets to remove it from other markets.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh and it changes every 6 months "for security reasons" thus guaranteeing it's either very simple or you write it down!

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#366
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you will have a hard time proving beyond speculation that Apple or Microsoft has backdoors to their OS. Would be curious to see any sources though. I actually think that is the difference here, Chinese phones and possibly other devices have backdoors, but Apple/Microsoft likely do not.

> I think you will have a hard time proving beyond speculation that Apple or Microsoft has backdoors to their OS. This statement is absurd -- they don't need to keep a backdoor around because they control the front door. You do realize that controlling how/whether/when core system software updates are pushed to a device is equivalent to having a backdoor, don't you? The operating system on my phone can be 100% backdo…

"Basically all consumer phones (save for a few cobbled together exceptions) implicitly accept arbitrary software updates from their upstream vendor."

Actually ... all phones of all kinds explicitly accept arbitrary updates from the carrier in the form of java code that they can upload, and run, on your SIM card.

Your SIM card is a full fledged computer with CPU, RAM and storage and your carrier can upload and run arbitrary code on it.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#367
post #298

> The capability in Xiaomi's Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the "European Union region", but can be turned on remotely at any time , the Defence Ministry's National Cyber Security Centre said in the report. While a lot of comments are rightly focusing on the censorship aspect of it, IMHO, the most concerning part of this is that this intrusive capability, while disabled for the EU region can be remo…

But they didn't find anything in Huawei's device or oneplus device. That shows this is not a marching order from the ccp or government to export censorship abroad. If so, then all products with Chinese origin should all have them. What is likely happened here is that xiaomi included code they needed to comply with laws in china in products for aboard, but it is deactivated for in any region other than mainland china. They should have removed the code completely, either have different software builds or don't do anything on the client side to comply with laws in china. Apple complies with Chinese laws fine and I doubt they had to implement any client side changes.

I doubt xiaomi and other Chinese company dares to enable censorship anywhere in international markets, or have a secret plan to control world's information discourse to support ccp. Any censorship or apparent support of ccp will be caught within seconds. Its commercial and political suicide. Also if they do have a secret plan, just blacking out whatever people are typing on their phones is such a dumb, stupid, and crude way of implementing censorship.

Also, this report found no censorship mechanisms on huawei and oneplus phones. Yet they said people should ditch all Chinese phones, which implies all phones originated from Chinese origin companies have censorship mechanisms. That is a much larger conclusion than what the evidence they provided, seem like a politically motivated desire to discredit and defame all Chinese origin companies and products.

I also doubt ccp has a marching order for Chinese companies to censor speech internationally and manipulate world's information discourse. Chinese phones have big market share already, and huawei's gear has wide market share in Europe, but no one ever experienced censorship on their device for speaking against China. And if there is a secret plan to control world's information, they are doing a terrible job at it. The covid origins, xinjiang Uyghurs, Hongkong. The point of view of Chinese side is non existent. For example the xinjiang Uyghur situation, I know people in xinjiang, many of whom are uyghur people, the accusation of mass genocide, 1 million imprisonment, wide spread physical abuse and rapes in prisons, massive internment camps with forced labor is wildly inaccurate from the truth. Yet, it hasn't stopped this from becoming the wildly believed truth, to the point where if you disagree with these statements, you are a ccp shill, a genocide sympathizer and brainwashed. For me and a lot of mainland Chinese people I know, we feel our voices and our personal real life experiences are being censored by international media and public discourse. Sometimes I read something about China in the international discourse, it feels its talking about an alternative universe than my real life experience. I have to wonder who is really controlling the narrative, censoring speech and pushing their political agenda.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#368
post #337
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest missing piece in all these "free" phones is giant (bigger than Linux kernel) baseband firmware blob. Until we have something like Osmocom but for LTE, LTE-A, 5G, etc, all this is pointless.

> something like Osmocom but for LTE, LTE-A, 5G, etc We already do. SrsRAN[1] UE and OpenAirInterface. [1] https://www.srslte.com/

Not the same. It's only for use in computers with SDR hardware attached AFAIK. Nothing ready to flash into the phone firmware and just use it like OsmocomBB allowed with these Motorola phones.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#369
post #215

The blacklist is interesting, because it maybe shows China's government interests - some of which are not widely known: - "Independence of Mongolia" - Does this show they would like to acquire Mongolia (when the time will be appropriate)? - "The Organisation for the Liberation of Palestine" - Does this show pro-Israel support?

Independence of Mongolia refers to Inner Mongolia, a Chinese region with a low ethnic Han population. It and the country of Mongolia serve as buffers against the Russians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Mongolia Han: 79%. It's just one Google away.

> against the Russians

This seems to be rewriting the history of Russia creating an independent country of outer Mongolia out of collapsing Qing territory. It'd be akin to saying an independent Alsace nation "serves as a buffer" against the Germans.

Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

#370
post #4

What difference does it make to disable the censorship function compared to fully removing it from the code base? Considering that phone updates cannot be verified, every phone maker has the ability to secretly add such features at any time. And if the phone is link to a user account they could even do this in a targeted way.

The thing is if these censorship is enabled, its going to be found out in a second by someone and explode in the news. All it does is that it deletes a word you typed on your phone or prevent you from seeing a piece of content that you want to see. It's going to be so obvious. It will not achieve the desired goal to censor in the first place and will make people realize what you don't want people to see. It will completely backfire. Given it is a broken and illogical plan, then it is highly unlikely there is a a multi year effort to build phones, sale to international markets, just to censor what people want to say and feed people about ccp propaganda. Even if someone is so stupid and want to do it anyway. What you fear is the censorship actually work. But you don't have to worry about that as it will not work.
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