Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 333 posts

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#321

Post by r3bl »

homonculus1 wrote: post #170
r3bl wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you classify the US treatment of Japanese citizens during WW2 as inhumane? Back then, they were called war relocation centers. Right now, we call them concentration camps. Same thing will happen with the current camps, both in the US and China. In both cases, it's only the citizens of those countries that object to the usage of the term "concentration camps", while everyone else classifies them properly. Nobody…

Those Japanese-American detainees had legal residential status when they were illegally rounded up without due process. The detainees in the current border camps have no such status. Some of them are eventually admitted as refugees but there is no obligation to allow any of them to simply enter the country. Presumably they would be permitted to leave the camps if they decided to go to a different country. If not, the…

> Those Japanese-American detainees had legal residential status when they were illegally rounded up without due process.

...and let me quote the SCOTUS decision in the Korematsu v. U.S. (1944):

> Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers—and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies— we are dealing specifically: with nothing but an exclusion order.

Do you not see the issue here?

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#322

Post by isostatic »

manjana wrote: post #317
kjaftaedi wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even if you wipe your phone you can still have a compromised baseband.

Could you elaborate a bit on this please? I have never heard of such a phenomena which intrigues me quite a bit!

I suspect OP is thinking where a phone may be taken out of your hands/sight and had paranoid things physically done to it - as in the article.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#323

Post by throwaway1144 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #149
dirtyid wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rest of China is captured by wechat anyways. This is only really useful for foreign reporters travelling in XinJiang. China could technically just ban foreigners from travelling there but somehow thinks the optics of this is better.

It is weird because there are no travel restrictions for foreigners going to Xinjiang (mostly, some places are off limits), you just buy a plane or train ticket. Going to Tibet is a lot harder for foreigners.

The reality for accredited journalists attempting to visit Xinjiang is somewhat different to what's written down, or what a western backpacker on a tourist visa will be subjected to.

Hire a car+driver? Mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. Pressure on any translaters/fixers you may have. Drive somewhere that isn't the hotel? Find that there's an accident and you can't pass that way. Shops that close, constant tailing from security and police, general harassment, and nobody will talk to you because they believe they'll disappear.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#324

Post by isostatic »

helloindia wrote: post #314
igravious wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China is a police state May be good to make the distinction between the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region† in the very north-west of China and the rest of China itself. The surveillance, monitoring, detention, "education", and de-radicalisation that are happening in Xinxiang are not to my knowledge representative of the rest of China. It is, of course, very troublesome that this illiberal dragnet exists anywhere in…

> WeChat doesn't have end-to-end encryption, while other apps have them. So the difference is not minuscule. Any communication on Wechat is interceptible by Chinese govt agencies. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/07/wechat-chinese... Wechat doesn't fit the definition of a "malware", but it is a weapon that Chinese govt uses to monitor it's citizens. > Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/opinion/lea…

> WeChat doesn't have end-to-end encryption, while other apps have them

So by that reckoning any program supporting smtp is a "kind of malware"? Or http?

> Is WeChat actually required in China

Not for a typical westerner visiting Beijing, Shanghai etc. Most places will take cash or international credit cards. For immigrants, sure.

Xinjiang may well be different, but it's not on the typical western tourist/business track.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#325

Post by gargravarr »

manjana wrote: post #317
kjaftaedi wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even if you wipe your phone you can still have a compromised baseband.

Could you elaborate a bit on this please? I have never heard of such a phenomena which intrigues me quite a bit!

All phones have a 'baseband' firmware which controls the actual radio hardware - it's a binary blob installed by the manufacturer and generally not available to the user to tinker with, although as expected there have been many projects to reverse-engineer them. The firmware exists 'beneath' the OS and all user settings, so in theory, if it's compromised (and there have been PoCs), anything that happens in the baseband would survive a wipe and reinstall of the OS. Basically it means putting malware in a place that the user cannot delete it from.

Malware in the baseband firmware could theoretically intercept or disrupt radio traffic, or migrate from the firmware to the phone via other exploits in the OS to gain even more control. In essence, it's a particularly nasty thing that surveillance states would definitely use to their advantage.

This is why 'burner' devices should be exactly that - destroyed after use, because you simply cannot trust them after they've been anywhere near an invasive surveillance setting.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#326

Post by jandrese »

malandrew wrote: post #285
xenospn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is also working very hard to get rid of its minorities by simply distributing Han Chinese everywhere.

It's basically ethnic cleansing by dilution. In Xinjiang and Tibet it appears to go beyond just dilution, but that is the primary mechanism. When I was living there, there were tons of incentives to encourage Han Chinese to migrate to both Xinjiang and Tibet to completely dilute the local minorities to the point of irrelevancy.

In the US we called this "the melting pot". It doesn't matter what your ethnicity was before you moved here, your traditions and beliefs get integrated into American society so you are just an American.

This sort of thing has had a lot of pushback lately from well meaning but IMHO misguided folks who complain about "cultural appropriation".

You aren't asked to forget your cultural traditions, you're asked to bring your neighbors into them. To share the culture. But also to admit that the edges are probably going to be sanded off and you're going to see people from outside of your group participating.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#327

Post by olliej »

LocalH wrote: post #242
tomovo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope.. the user would also have to open Settings and explicitly mark the vendor certificate as trusted.

It says the devices were unlocked then the device was connected. I would assume the device is in the custody of the Chinese authority at this point. Thus, they can just go into Settings and trust the cert.

Changing trust settings on device requires the password.

Better question is: what are they able to pull off the device while it's unlocked?

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#328

Post by dang »

jlawson wrote: post #294
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Islamophobia is a made up word designed specifically to silence criticisms of Islam without having to address them. No other religion has such a word or such protections. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Christophobia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Judeophobia What was that now? I don't care if you have criticisms of Islam. But in the wake of the rise of stochastic terrorism especially among nationalist sentiments thr…

Yes, it's possible to say the word "phobia" after any religion's name. That doesn't mean the term has any currency. Proof: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Islamophob... Hard to interpret your last part. Seems like you're saying you don't oppose criticisms of Islam, you just think nobody should be allowed to make those criticisms. Yes, it's a bit off topic, I agree.

Religious flamewar is not ok here, so please don't go there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#329

Post by godelski »

jolmg wrote: post #175
godelski wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to your comment: We should be critical of our own government. Panarky clearly agrees with this (me too). The difference is that the conversation is about China. We can also have a conversation about the US or and how they are not respecting people's freedom. But this conversation is about China. It's also a conversation that needs to be had. Plus this redirection is similar to "Bob shot a guy 30 times." "Oh ye…

> But this conversation is about China. I don't know. It seems kind of weird to want to restrict the conversation like that, but I guess I kind of see your point. > Plus this redirection is similar to "Bob shot a guy 30 times." "Oh yeah? Bill punched a guy". The way I saw it, the neighborhood is turning kind of bad. Someone comments "Bob shot a guy 30 times", and another adds "Bill punched a guy". Neither of these pe…

It isn't so much about restricting as derailing.

Re: Chinese authorities install app on phones of people entering Xinjiang

#330

Post by Tepix »

Leary wrote: post #140
Tepix wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China signed the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This action almost certainly violates some of these rights (articles 18-21 come to mind: Articles 18–21 sanctioned the so-called "constitutional liberties", and with spiritual, public, and political freedoms, such as freedom of thought, opinion, religion and conscience, word, and peaceful association of the individual. )

When did China (PRC) sign the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Are you talking about the Republic of China?

They didn't sign it but they voted in favor of it.
Post reply on HN