341–350 of 505 posts
When looking at the code snippets in the article I wonder about the variable names. This doesn't look like decompiled code. And I don't think their whole browser is open source. What am I missing here?
Unfortunately, xiaomi's business model is to sell hardwares with little to none profit margin and make profit as a internet company, I.e. advertising and so on. I give them the benefit of doubt that 90 days renewal was added and didn't work due to not unit tested maybe. Still, it is the same ad business as fb. I love the look of their phones, but I would pay for an iPhone for the benefit of secure os and better priva…
They give away low cost hardware because it's a military branch of the government whose purpose is establishing a global surveillance network. Being profitable is a nice to have but not a primary purpose as they get subsidized by the state regardless.
This paragraph stood out to me: > The intention here seems to be that aigt is the timestamp when the ID was generated. So if that timestamp deviates from current time by more than 7776000000 milliseconds (90 days) a new ID is going to be generated. However, this implementation is buggy, it will update aigt on every call rather than only when a new ID is generated. So the only scenario where a new ID will be generated…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chromes "Software Reporter Tool" basically scans your whole computer and sends that data off to Google/NSA. It's literal spyware. Firefox doesn't do this.
Instead Firefox uploads your geographical location to their servers every time it starts up. And before you ask, this telemetry cannot be stopped. And when you finally manage to do some therapeutic dissonance from the above default behaviour. Whenever you use the inbuilt DoH on Firefox, FF shares this stats with Cloudflare too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The photo editor on my Sony phone keeps telling me it wants to send data to Sony and refuses to open when I decline. So the Chinese are no worse than the Americans and, apparently, the Japanese in this regard.
Wow, so because of this one example you conclude "So the Chinese are no worse than the Americans and, apparently, the Japanese in this regard." You are saying that if you can find a single example of X happening in domain A and a single example of X happening in domain B, then "apparently" A and B must be "no different" with respect to X. People are murdered in Japan. People are murdered in Brazil. Thus Japan is no d…
Could China possibly have infiltrated as much of global communications networks as the NSA & Five Eyes have for the past decade and a half? Not likely! If we didn't have such successful digital espionage programs, would we instead rely on our corporations to spy on our behalf? Very likely, seeing as we've already done that too.
The thing about big data is you never know in advance what kind of data can turn into a gold mine for your business. So the strategy "collect as much as you can afford and get away with" is economically reasonable if not optimal. Until this changes, nothing will change. And Xiaomi is not an exception here.
Why don't we address the root of the problem? Who controls computer? If user of computer (with phone features) doesn't have a full control over it then this situation can and will be abused by some one who does. It seems a logical consequence of not having full control over your own computer. Why we discuss mostly the degree of such abuse and not the core of the problem ? Another core of the problem is dealing with c…