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Are there any good non-Chinese smartphone besides Samsung? Preferably someone who delivers a stock android?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, I think everything can be enabled remotely by your manufacturer, no matter which... it is what we call "software upgrades".
But for me, a western, it's actually good to have a phone controlled by the Chinese. I would be concerned if it were controlled by my government, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I 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.
Are there any good non-Chinese smartphone besides Samsung? Preferably someone who delivers a stock android?
Thanks 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…
> which suggests to me that they could update it to match any terms in any language if they wanted. About the same thing as Apple scanning iPhones for what they say is child porn. suggests to me they could update it to match any images if they wanted...
Related, in this thread the OP discovered that he couldn’t take photos of an election ballot - they were being overwritten with a big green block.
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It's all covered in the 32 page research report: Xiaomi system applications (Security, MiBrowser, Cleaner, MIUI Package Installer and Themes) have been found to regularly download the manufacturer’s updated configuration file MiAdBlacklistConfig from a server located in Singapore. This file contains a list composed of the titles, names and other information of various religious and political groups and social movemen…
Right
There 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 bre…
Free Tibet. I just typed that on my Xiaomi with stock MIUI, using Google Gboard.