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Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

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Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#341

Post by ksec »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #250
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #50

Daring Fireball [1] has another passage from the article which is illuminating with regards to any promises Apple makes about how it will resist governmental pressure to compromise its products, vis-à-vis Apple's CSAM scanning tool. "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial di…

"Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair." As a publicly-traded, trillion dollar company, where profits are at stake, this would seem to make sense. What does not seem to make sense is why anyone would believe Apple might ignore its own financial interests and those of its shareholders and deliberately sacrifice a major opportunity^1 in order to resist government pressure based on so…

> Why would anyone hold such an assumption.

Because that is what Tim Cook Apple's marketing and PR suggest Apple does. The force of good. Social Responsibility and Justice. Standing up against the government. ( They didn't explicitly say this but the message is something fairly similar )

Instead of creating "insanely" great product for our customers, friends and family. It is now about product that "enrich" people's lives.

Like you said, Apple has to act on its own interest. Most of these wouldn't be problem for many had Apple not paint itself as so righteous.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#342

Post by ktsayed »

simonh wrote: post #224
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can have a very long debate about that but I think it's beside the point with regards to Apple's CSAM effort. The point is that Apple is inventing a tool that is very amenable to being wielded as a weapon of mass surveillance, and oppression. The maps analogy is that it's one thing for the Chinese government to tell Apple to implement a mapping app from scratch so that it can be used to display bogus mapping data.…

We’ll, what Apple built with CSAM checking is a tool that checks images uploaded to their servers, and only those images, against a digital fingerprint. There is no novel technology in this. It’s very basic stuff doing a specific thing. It’s in no way a meaningful stepping stone to doing anything else. If you’re against Apple scanning images uploaded to iCloud for CSAM that’s fine, say that, but it’s no stepping ston…

It was not only their severs, they scrapped plans to check local user content. If it was only their servers, there would have been no uproar.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#343

Post by doctorwho42 »

Sebb767 wrote: post #313
kelnos wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this would never happen, but I wish companies would just default to not doing business in China, unless they are able to sell their product, uncompromised. I wouldn't mind legislation to that effect, though I'm sure that would come with a ton of unintended consequences. If China (and similar repressive regimes) wants these sorts of products with onerous restrictions built in, they should have to build them the…

> If China (and similar repressive regimes) wants these sorts of products with onerous restrictions built in, they should have to build them themselves. I'd also like to add that they are, for the most part, already building our products quite literally. Being on the bad side of China might've a farther reach than just missing out on a few customers.

And apple is one of the few companies that could change that with more US or other non-dictatorship country investment. Apple has 200 billion in cash and other securities... Build some infrastructure, build a lobbying arm to get some of these infrastructure spending gridlocks fixed, build somewhere other than china.

Yeah it's hard, but if they aren't willing to do it, maybe we as a society should enact laws to force their hand? It's not like it's an impossible task.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#344

Post by chrononaut »

quitit wrote: post #316
gbasin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I compared the same area in apple vs google maps, the islands don't even show up in google unless you zoom way in. You sure about this?

People outside of China are served a different set of maps. Each country is served maps that conform to their territorial claims. E.g. If you view the map of India while in India, it'll appear different than if you viewed it in China.

Why do we see some of these behaviors within China maps, outside China?

> .. the obfuscated coordinate system for geo-aligning maps ..

https://goo.gl/maps/Qr2QRB7aB2jrg9Rk7

Roads are not aligned to the satellite imagery for example.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#345

Post by smt88 »

bmitc wrote: post #339
brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #302

When businesses become so large, they no longer are a $countryOfOrigin company (A US company in the case of Apple). They become multinational entities that have no loyalty to a nation, just loyalty to pocket books.

That is an excellent point and one I have tried bringing up before. Allowing corporations and individuals to obtain such massive amounts of wealth is a national security threat.

It is also a personal security threat and democracy threat.

See also: http://expatalachians.com/biplanes-over-blair-calling-in-the...

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#346

Post by OldHand2018 »

sneak wrote: post #100
pupppet wrote: post #27

This will be the logical conclusion to every major American corporation unless someone puts a stop to this. If profit comes before everything, then so will China's 1.4B potential market vs US's 330M market.

You are forgetting about manufacturing. While China is indeed an important and huge market for sales... approximately 100% of Apple's products are manufactured in China (save some tiny fraction that are assembled in India or Texas). Every iPhone sold everywhere worldwide (except the few assembled in India) comes from China. Apple cannot exist without China. Full stop.

My M1 Mac mini says "Designed in California Made in Malaysia" on it.

So perhaps it is "approximately 95%"?

It would be really interesting to know the actual number, wouldn't it?

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#347

Post by dopa42365 »

bmitc wrote: post #339
brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #302

When businesses become so large, they no longer are a $countryOfOrigin company (A US company in the case of Apple). They become multinational entities that have no loyalty to a nation, just loyalty to pocket books.

That is an excellent point and one I have tried bringing up before. Allowing corporations and individuals to obtain such massive amounts of wealth is a national security threat.

Ah yes, THE nation. Very specific, especially in this context.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#348

Post by saurik »

elisbce wrote: post #331

I thought the HackerNews crowd could do better than "Google/Apple/X is offering something censored / is complying with local laws / local government requests in China/Russia/X so it must be bad and they must stop". Don't be so naive. 1. In order for US/international companies to survive in China/Russia/heavily censored countries or regions, they have to comply to local laws. Otherwise they are blocked or shutdown com…

1) This article is about Tim Cook negotiating deals to help the Chinese economy to avoid bad press that they aren't a team player over there, and so this has nothing to do with "complying with laws".

2) FWIW, to reply to that anyway: while this article is not about this, Apple does go far out of their way to make themselves a bottleneck that would be subject to these laws in the first place.

As a trivial example of this, Apple blocks VPNs from being installed on end user phones by not hosting them in their store and additionally requiring a special entitlement that requires a paid developer account (so you can't code your own VPN and install it yourself).

Now, you can claim this is them "complying with local laws" (though I bet if you actually looked they are going well above and beyond the call of duty here), but that is frankly a "shit take" as it fails to explain how every Android phone sold in China DOES allow you to install VPN apps: sure, Google doesn't host them for you, but they let you sideload anything you want (including a VPN).

The reality is that Apple has uniquely decided to build a completely-centrally-controlled ecosystem where they CAN block you from installing a VPN on "your" phone, while Google did the morally-reasonable decision that happens to avoid them becoming a tool of authoritarian regimes.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#349

Post by MangoCoffee »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #227
MangoCoffee wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not replying to that. I'm replying to your comment thank for clarify >And you now changed it to "College education are not compulsory and free in both countries" i never change my statement to OP and what's wrong? both countries doesn't offer free College education. one is cheaper doesn't mean its free.

Ok, so you mean "College education are not compulsory or free".

do you understand "College education are not compulsory and free"?

edit: "Double negatives are two negative words used in the same sentence. Using two negatives usually turns the thought or sentence into a positive one. Double negatives are generally discouraged in English because they are considered to be poor grammar and they can be confusing."

https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-double-negat...

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#350

Post by bmitc »

dopa42365 wrote: post #347
bmitc wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an excellent point and one I have tried bringing up before. Allowing corporations and individuals to obtain such massive amounts of wealth is a national security threat.

Ah yes, THE nation. Very specific, especially in this context.

You're unnecessarily reading into it too much. By nation, I meant whatever nation houses one of these corporations, particularly the country that houses the headquarters.
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