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Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns

reuters.com

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

#211

Post by stickfigure »

nitrogen wrote: post #174
stickfigure wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably Apple ensures there is nothing nefarious in the hardware, but it seems an unlikely avenue for compromise. Most of the "phone" is Apple-provided software. In theory sure, you could have a chip snooping on the bus. But it would have to have a lot of OS-level knowledge and then how would it exfiltrate the data without OS-level access to the IP stack? Like the Bloomberg/Supermicro story, I am extremely skeptic…

how would it exfiltrate the data without OS-level access to the IP stack Do iPhones use modems embedded in the SoC? Modem firmware can communicate with the cell network without the OS.

Which cell network, in which country? What protocol are those packets going to travel over, what is their destination, and how do they get routed?

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

#212

Post by rualca »

lmilcin wrote: post #189
rualca wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it is not and has not been surprising for decades. I still recall the Supermicro backdoor chip story, and how once the Bloomberg news broke it was immediately so obvious and so clear that backdoor spy chips were undoubtedly being injected. But a few years have blown by and the story is now a renowned hoax. https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/12/supermicro_bloomberg_... So tell me, is this sort of story also uns…

So... this would be like saying "We have a murderer, we have ample evidence for it on tape and multiple witnesses. But there is also this one person that lied about being witness so then it must mean that the suspect is innocent."

> We have a murderer, we have (...)

It sounds you lost track of the discussion. If you browse back through the thread you'll notice that the whole point is that without evidence this sort of accusation lies deep inside conspiracy theory territory, among all nutty baseless conspiracies. The key difference in this case is that, unlike all other conspiracy theories, there is indeed evidence that provide substance to accusations. Stating that an accusation is obvious is not evidence nor enough on itself. As I pointed out, the accusations in the Supermicro case we're also immediately obvious. Too bad they were not grounded on reality and after all these years there is no evidence to support them. But they were obvious, right?

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

#213

Post by effingwewt »

lmilcin wrote: post #193
marderfarker2 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is practically part of Chinese culture and upbringing. Wow. Didn’t expect such blanket and shallow statement on HN. Are you a Chinese yourself? On what basis do you base your assumptions on? Really. > What we call cheating or stealing is a standard business practice there. If you point it out they will back off and try somewhere else, ad nauseam. Now this is something that is attributable to human behaviour. Pre…

> But why did you single out the Chinese? For my experience working with Chinese and other peoples' reports of the same? I have worked for a company that has outsourced production to a Chinese company. They would try new trick every other month. Replacing parts for cheaper substitutes, skipping process steps, using counterfeit components. You point it out, they fix it, then they do the same when you are not looking a…

Yea I think parent is more worried about being PC than being truthful. All of the points mentioned were true, they just aren't PC.

Gutter oil has been outlawed for a good minute now, yet it gets into even the restaurants, I've friends from mainland China who say even if you stay away from street vendors eventually you will eat it, so people just give up worrying about it.

Myriad and many are the stories of factories taking specs and running off to start a cheaper knockoff competitor.

Sometimes the truth sucks. I used to dream of visiting China, now I'd be scared to.

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

#214

Post by throwaway4good »

nytgop77 wrote: post #207

worth noting, that blacklist filtering decompiled code looks this way (just one line; to show the naming) if (iNativeAd.getAdTitle() != null && m12161a(iNativeAd.getAdTitle(), str) If to believe the naming, it is filtering advertisements.

That would be my interpretation as well - these non mangled names I guess they come from an api.

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

#215

Post by pulse7 »

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?

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

#216

Post by summm »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #8
EveYoung wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to sound paranoid, but won't even LinageOS phones have to run closed-sourced firmware and drivers?

Correct, its entirely possible they could be doing more insidious stuff at the firmware level, but dumb keyword checking is almost certainly implemented in userspace. I don't think you can trust any proprietary firmware out there, its just a question of which you trust less than the others.

Not only firmware. Custom ROMs actually have to use binary blobs in kernelspace and userspace as well, in order to be able to use the hardware.

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

#217

Post by sneak »

effingwewt wrote: post #208
sneak wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anyone who knows how to root a device that doesn't know how to torrent?

Not even just that but magisk modules can show phone as stock to banking apps and such. Really this all just shows that people will truly put up with anything to make their lives more convenient, or for them to have to do less work.

> truly put up with anything to make their lives more convenient

This is a contradiction in terms.

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

#218

Post by pphysch »

belter wrote: post #152

From 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)?

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

#219

Post by miles »

pulse7 wrote: 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?

Mongolia needs allies to withstand China's looming threat https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Mongolia-needs-allies-to-wit...

The implications of the rise of China's military for Mongolian security https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/5340

China accused of 'cultural genocide' in Inner Mongolia https://www.ucanews.com/news/china-accused-of-cultural-genoc...

China’s Crackdown on Mongolian Culture https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/chinas-crackdown-on-mongolia...

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

#220

Post by avodonosov »

reginold wrote: post #133
avodonosov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the piece quoted above is the correct original source. I wanted to post exactly this snippet myself. From that a possible test case can be to open this HN thread in MiBrowser and see the webpage blocked due to the "free Tibet" phrases posted here (assuming MiAdBlacklistConfig includes English versions). If anyone has a Xiaomi phone and is willing to accept the MiBrowser terms of use, please try.

Right. MiAdBlackListConfig does not include English versions, according to the 32 page research article. Therefore "Free Tibet" is not relevant. A user here testing this is irrelevant. If someone wants to verify, figure out where we can get the codebase and search these strings ourselves.

Chinese versions are posted already too, so this thead can be used for testing now.
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