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India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

reuters.com

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Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#281

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

profsummergig wrote: post #16

ref: "the new tobacco" this last year i'm seeing very concerning behavior in students in the 14-20 range. complete addiction to their phones. very deep interests in things i was completely unaware that they existed. similar to how when i started noticing anime girlfriends/waifus in 2016. about 40% are deep in discord communities where i literally cannot figure out a single sentence of what they're talking about. if s…

If by "society" you mean the state, I disagree.

The world is changing quickly, and many people may run into problems, but I'd rather let cultural solutions to these problems naturally arise. Relying on a government to impose top-down solutions on these complicated and poorly understood problems is a recipe for a disaster of unintended consequences.

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#282

Post by NebulaStorm456 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #249
MonkeyClub wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm shocked India is currently run by a nationalist regime headed by the so called "butcher of Gujarat"[1], there isn't much that would shock me wrt to that lot's totalitarian tendencies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Narendra_Modi

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Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#283

Post by rjdj377dhabsn »

mlmonkey wrote: post #116
greycol wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not defending it's use but a secret program is a targeted program, you can't use it in sweeping arrests without parallel construction. Whereas with an openly existing program you can point out that someone has been talking to their friend about how to get abortion medication and arrest them. The real issue with 100% enforcement of law is it requires a society with differing values to not just agree on which laws…

These are just excuses to convince yourself that what the US is doing is "not bad" but what India is doing is "terrible". Both are doing similar things. You have no idea what the US is doing; I have some inkling, and it is terrible. At least India is publicly disclosing what this app does, and that the phone has this app. Do you have any idea what the US does? Hint: that big data center in Utah, what is it for? Anoth…

Did you mean to reply to someone else?

No one is claiming the US government is doing less terrible things than the Indian government.

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#284

Post by throwaway2037 »

tacker2000 wrote: post #111
alephnerd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China doesn't require pre-installed apps but the Chinese government require all data processing and storage to be conducted within China with complete source code access. India chose to back off on data sovereignty [0] because it would have had a side effect of making Indian IT Offshoring less competitive plus to help make negotiating a US-India BTA easier [1]. [0] - https://verfassungsblog.de/cross-border-data-flows…

Most people in China install Wechat by choice, anyway

This is an interesting point. Is there anyone in mainland china that does do not install WeChat plus AliPay installed? It is hard to live without it! Literally, you can buy a kilo of veg from a wet market stall and pay with AliPay.

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#285

Post by SanjayMehta »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #271
SanjayMehta wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it since it came out. It does its job. I was getting 5-6 scam calls per day, now down to maybe 1 in a month. It's just a wrapper around their website (for now). I think this app is harmless but I don't think it should be forced onto anyone.

This is great first hand feedback. I like these kinds of HN posts. How do you think it works? Example: If enough people report, then some police agency investigates? Rinse and repeat enough times and the scam calls/SMS should fall?

It partially automates the process of lodging a complaint against a call, SMS, or WhatsApp communication.

On IOS, you still have to copy/paste the incoming number into a form, provide a screenshot of the message, date/time and it uploads the complaint to their systems.

They inform you that they will not send updates.

What I've observed is a huge drop in scammers, and new scammers get tagged as potential spam by the operator upfront. So they're doing something on the back end.

You can only file a police complaint if you actually suffered monetary loss. I haven't, so I don't know how that works.

The other benefit is that you can keep an eye on id theft used to get connections using your info. This is a huge problem in rural India. Scammers use this to create bank accounts to move money.

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#286

Post by da_chicken »

amarant wrote: post #242
nephihaha wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate, this isn't even remotely "nationalist". This stuff is being pushed across the world. Digital ID? The only people really desperate for it are our rulers.

How so? In Sweden we have digital ID and it's great! Super practical and I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens, given that it has the same legal protections as banks have regarding your account transactions etc. Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the bank…

Sweden's population is only around 11 million people, and you're geographically concentrated in the southern mainland provinces or near Stockholm. Both of those make thing a lot more practical to manage and make it a lot harder to abuse because you don't have the scale to make profit as attractive, or the distance to make oversight more difficult. You're also relatively culturally similar.

It doesn't seem like those should matter so much, but it really does make everything about democracy easier.

Things get much weirder when the population isn't so low or isn't relatively concentrated.

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#287

Post by noduerme »

komali2 wrote: post #278
amarant wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? In Sweden we have digital ID and it's great! Super practical and I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens, given that it has the same legal protections as banks have regarding your account transactions etc. Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the bank…

> Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the banks servers anyway, so it's not really a new capability. It's a single point of failure. Digital ID servers on creation because as valuable to compromise as value_of_bank_hack*bank_count plus whatever other services are rolled in. Furthe…

I think a lot of people in the US are clinging to the hope that this type of friction, along with judicial decisions, will cause the process of removing our legal protections to stall out. I'm not optimistic that this is the case, because the party currently driving the federal incursion on private and state-held data is the one that until recently was opposed to things like national ID. Anything can be done in the name of protecting people from N, if you can get a majority to be afraid of N.

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#288

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

observationist wrote: post #207
brokenmachine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"They're in charge, surely they must know what they're doing! They wouldn't lie to us! Literally nobody thinks that. Unfortunately most people don't have the time or energy to fight every emerging attack on freedom. Everything is going to plan for the billionaire class. Eventually everything will burn, only time will tell if it will be from global warming or food riots.

Most average people assume competence and good faith from people in charge. Most people don't question, aren't skeptical, and go through life in a fog. That's not most people here, but it's like Gell-Mann amnesia applied to politics. 99% of the time, when politicians put forth a plan to do things in a domain you're competent in, they look like morons. It's exceedingly rare for them to do things well. People trust ele…

Poll after poll in the US show a distrust in politicians and the governor. Our current president has a 37% approval rating.

Between the electoral college, gerrymandering and 2 Senators per state regardless of population, the minority control who gets elected.

Not to mention that anyone who trusts the police is naive.

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#289

Post by lazylizard »

amarant wrote: post #242
nephihaha wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mate, this isn't even remotely "nationalist". This stuff is being pushed across the world. Digital ID? The only people really desperate for it are our rulers.

How so? In Sweden we have digital ID and it's great! Super practical and I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens, given that it has the same legal protections as banks have regarding your account transactions etc. Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the bank…

the singaporean "singpass" has been an amazing convenience. at this point its like why is any company still asking you to fill in personal particulars on forms? they should ask for access to singpass and you just authorize them.

you apply to or for anything.. and they just give you the option of authorizing via singpass.. and you use your passkey-like singpass app to authorize it... and its done!

you go to hospital and they need your medical records? singpass

you go to university and they need your academic history? singpass

you apply for bank loan? insurance? license? food handling permit? singpass

Re: India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

#290

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

alephnerd wrote: post #4
qwerty59 wrote: post #2

Very concerning. I will be suprised if companies like apple comply though.

> I will be suprised if companies like apple comply though They will. All tech companies already comply with India's IT Act. And India now manufactures 44% of all iPhones sold in the US [0] while dangling the stick of a $38B anti-trust fine [6] but also the carrot of implementing China-style labor laws [10] that Apple lobbied for [11], so Apple doesn't have much of a choice because both China and Vietnam (the primary…

From what I just heard on the Upgrade podcast, Apple only put a splash screen up when you first purchased your phone “encouraging” users in Russia to download the app. It didn’t force you to.
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