What happens when you type - Winnie the pooh ?
Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
41–50 of 427 posts
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there were allegations that you couldn't type Free Tibet?
What exactly are the allegations then? "have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as "Free Tibet" Censor by preventing one posting the phrase? Removing the phrase from web pages? What are the steps to reproduce?
The allegation is that the censorship code is there. It's disabled on phones in western markets, but can be enabled remotely by the manufacturer.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#43I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.
I was stupid enough to buy a Xiaomi phone without enough due diligence. Aside from all spying that is going on, the software is abysmal. The problem with replacing the OS is that I believe most banking apps I use will stop working. Might just need to write this phone off.
I have installed an AOSP-based rom on my Xiaomi 9T and banking apps (well, at least one) seems to be working fine.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#44From the article:
Relations between Lithuania and China have soured recently. China demanded last month that Lithuania withdraw its ambassador in Beijing and said it would recall its envoy to Vilnius after Taiwan announced that its mission in Lithuania would be called the Taiwanese Representative Office
No one trust China but this sure looks like politically motivated. Was someone else able to authenticate or reproduce the results.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#45There are no details really as to how Xiaomi censors those terms. If one does not use the bundled-in browser / app-store, I doubt Xiaomi can censor anything at all in other browsers unless they MiTM with client-cert. OTOH, many popular non-browser apps (at least the ones that matter) pin certificates, so even Lenovo-esque shenanigans wouldn't work [0].
What can they possibly be doing in the firmware or the ROM to break TLS (and other such authenticated key-exchange protocols)? The only thing I think of: Injecting a compromised https stack in to an app's classpath / ld_library_path. This may sound ambitious, but the Android modding community already uses such runtime swappers to great affect [1][2].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9072424
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#46I would like to see concrete reproducible evidence for this.
The 35 page report has details that should make it easy to replicate.
"This file contains a list composed of the titles, names and other information of various religious and political groups and social movements (at the time of the analysis, the MiAdBlacklistConfig file contained 449 elements). A fragment of the MiAdBlacklistConfig file is shown in Table 14." page 23
Linked elsewhere but here's the PDF report: https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi...
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#47I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago. Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward. The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.
Most people don't care if another country spies on them, since their laws don't apply to them. They would care much more if they are profiled by their own government. Or more like tech companies on behalf of the government spying on them, and them being discriminated, harassed, or jailed based on that data. So in a way its actually kind of smart to go with a Chinese phone if you live in America.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#48I suppose this isn't important but I am really curious: in which languages? Also how did the Lithuanian government find out?
It seems like the keyword match is based on Chinese, based on the extract on page 23 of the report.
Linked near the top of the thread, 32 pages of goodness: https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi...
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used the tweet due to the paywall of the Reuters article. Another user below found the best link, the true original source: Here's the official report: https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi... (link updated)
that link 404'd for me this should work (note: direct link to pdf) https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi...
We really should be discussing this pdf rather than some tweet.
Re: Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
#50Thanks to those who posted a link to the actual report [1]
It may be worth clarifying that all those keywords and terms are in Chinese. So when they say "Free Tibet" they mean that the phone has a blacklist file that contains "西藏自由" and which use is disabled in the "European region".
On the other hand, it seems that this blacklist file is actually downloaded into the phone, which suggests to me that they could update it to match any terms in any language if they wanted.
I think that Chinese manufacturers will really need to produce 'clean' firmware that satisfies independent audits instead of these superficial feature flags if they want to continue to sell in the West long term. If not they will suffer Huawei's fate one after the other when this sort of thing is found out.
[1] https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi...