Isn't that something of the nuclear option? Not doing business in China has to be a multi-trillion dollar project duplicating most of the computer assembly industry somewhere else.
Isn't that literally what they're doing with News, though? Apple is doing business in China but Apple News isn't available. They're not censoring news stories or altering them for Chinese audiences, it's simply not available.
"is a different order of magnitude than disregarding a country’s rules and laws"
Apple seems willing to disregard American laws regarding backdoors, national security, and access to device information.
I find it interesting that we're all proud that Apple will "stand up" to the US federal government and resist attacks on privacy and liberties, but then so many turn around justify them doing the exact opposite in China. "Well, when in Rome..." sounds like an awfully convenient rationalization as well.
Apple hasn't disregarded any US laws. The Constitution specifically protects their ability to act in the ways they did. The Chinese government, however, does not.
When did they disregard anything involving laws about backdoors? As far as I know, there are no laws on the books in the US yet that say you have to provide a backdoor into your product. I could be wrong though.
If you’re taking about the case with the San Bernadino shooter, they challenged the FBI in a court of law, which is exactly how something like that should be handled, is it not?
As for China, if it was my choice, I wouldn’t do any business in China if I was a company that stands up for privacy. But that’s probably why I don’t run a trillion dollar company.
The issue is that normally, Chinese censorship does not apply to travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM. However, the way Apple implemented censorship for News+ goes beyond the norm, such that even foreign travelers are impacted.
It's not a good thing for Apple to be innovating on ways to enforce Chinese censorship (although if I understand correctly, it doesn't matter—China could already censor roaming cell traffic, they just choose not to).
> Chinese censorship does not apply to travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM
Really? Travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM are excepted from Chinese censorship laws? I find this very difficult to believe. It's more likely that censorship laws are simply more difficult to enforce on travelers, which doesn't make it any more legal.
While China, even as a tourist, you are still subject to Chinese laws and regulations. Just because a rule isn't always strictly enforced doesn't mean it's nonapplicable. Any unsubstantiated claims to the contrary are "difficult to believe"
When you travel with a US sim all your traffic is routed back to the US first so it’s quite slow, but it is uncensored. Another trick is you can buy prepaid sims in Hong Kong which use the exact same networks but are uncensored so the internet is fast and uncensored. But this route is expensive.
> Cowtowing to governments is detrimental for everyone.
So should Apple News allow Nazi stories in Germany? Should they allow stories disparaging the Thai king in a Thailand? Should they allow speech that creates an immediate threat to a person in the US? Should Apple pay taxes? Should Apple prohibit child porn?
All of these are examples of “kowtowing” to governments. What’s the difference between kowtowing and following the law? How can someone expect Apple to pay a “fair share” of EU taxes but then expect them to not follow Chinese law? If a company boycotts countries based on ideology, pretty soon every country gets boycotted over something or another. There are exactly zero perfect countries.
Yet in other contexts (most notably, taxation, labour, environment), we rage against the big tech companies for not obeying laws/norms/decency standards in the countries in which they operate.
Companies can simultaneously observe the laws and respect the norms of the countries in which they operate, whilst playing a role in bringing about incremental change over the long term.
To do otherwise is some combination of rudeness, irresponsibility or arrogance.
According to the TFA, Apple (or any foreign company) is not obligated to block traffic at the device-level in the manner described by TFA:
> This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network
This is only partially correct. One has to have a foreign sim and have data roaming turned on (which implies paying the higher rate). The author didn’t state if they did both.
I would like them to be principled, and apply those principles consistently, worldwide. Kowtowing is really not the right metric. Some things that governments want to impose on a company are good, and some things are bad. So:
Should they allow stories disparaging the Thai king in Thailand [or anywhere]? Yes.
Should they allow speech that creates an immediate threat to a person the the US [or anywhere]? No.
Should they pay taxes? Yes. (This isn't about principles; this is just about following local financial laws where you operate.)
Should they prohibit child porn? Yes.
Should they allow Nazi stories in Germany [or anywhere]? I'm actually not sure where I personally stand on this, but I imagine people with decision-making ability at Apple may have a strong stance on this, and they should decide for themselves.
Note that all of this is a reflection of my sense of morality and ethics. I don't expect everyone to share it; obviously my sense of right and wrong has been heavily influenced by where and how I've grown up. But I would like Apple (and all companies, really) to take a consistent, principled stance based on the values they want to display as a company. And if that closes some markets to them, then so be it.
I would think following rules set by the government is important. There are also environmental protection rules, safety rules, etc. etc. Apple says they follow all the rules (laws) in all the country they do business in. Do you really want Apple to pick and choose which they follow?
Yes, I do want them to pick and choose. Or, rather, I want them to take a principled stance and apply it worldwide, even if that means some markets are closed to them.
I believe censorship is fundamentally abhorrent, China's example of it insidiously so.
Just out of curiosity, did you "collapse" this comment thread since it's just a meta discussion, or is it somehow getting affected by user voting while still remaining at +1?
> To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app.
Does anyone know if this claim is true? I would have assumed this is as simple as serving the not allowed response to any request from a Chinese address range, and it seems like it would be easy to test using a VPN.
(In general, while I don't approve of censorship this seems like an odd hill to die on — the problem is that a repressive government is still sovereign and there aren't exactly many options for a company with such extensive business ties other than complying with that government's laws within its borders)
Yes, when you use a US carrier roaming in China you have a US IP:
>This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network.
Assuming you’re using it to access websites or services with PoPs in US/EU then tunneling traffic via US/EU VPN would add negligible latency, actually would probably improve your latency overall.
It is horrible for latency to use a US carrier roaming in China but without an immediate frame of reference people probably don’t notice. Those roaming with us sims are probably mostly accessing us websites so the latency isn’t going to be much different than accessing the site from local Wi-Fi assuming it’s not blocked. Where it really shows is trying to access Chinese sites in China roaming with a us sim.
If you want low latency roaming in China, state owned China Mobile will sell you a solution for that:
Just because you have a US IP address, doesn't mean traffic actually gets routed through it.
My limited understanding (from one uni course) is mobile devices get a secondary identifier that the networks use for the actual routing process. While a device may officially identify as having a US IP address, the cell carriers communicate a secondary, current IP address/identifier local to the device's current position.
It's much like how DNS works. You don't route all traffic through a DNS server. You send it a readable name, then communicated directly with the IP address that's returned.
This is how your mobile data traffic is served by your operator:
In 3G/LTE network there are terms called Gn interface, Gi Interface, Gp interface and many others.
Gn is to manage your mobility.
From Gi you will get local ip address and internet access.
From Gp you will be routed to you own cellular operator Gp interface.
When you are on your original cellular operator network, you will be served by Gn and Gi interface for your internet access.
When you are roaming, you will be served by Gn and Gp interface of local cellular operator that will forward to your original cellular operator’s Gp. After that it will routed to Gi interface of your original cellular operator.
It is pretty horrible for latency. Despite T-Mobile's free international roaming (albeit at reduced speeds), I'll usually get a local SIM card if I'm in the country more than a week because the latency can make it unusable sometimes.
IIRC the carriers do this for billing/metering reasons; otherwise they wouldn't have any idea how much data you're using while roaming, and would have to blindly trust whatever the partner carrier tells them.
This allows both the home and "visiting" operator to charge money. Also there's a (probably expensive) dedicated global network for these operator connections.
What I'd like to see is way for the visiting operator to charge little and route my packets directly to internet. I remember reading that this mode is also supported by the specs
I’m the one that “broke” the story the author mentioned as being reported in 2015. At the time, the team at the New York Times reached out to a source at Apple that confirmed that this behavior was intentional: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/technology/apple-is-said-...
iOS disables Apple news based on the mobile country code / network code and not on the name in my experience.
If your iOS device doesn’t have cellular capability or if it is in airplane mode, it uses Ip addresses. This means you can enable airplane mode and connect to a vpn over Wi-Fi and circumvent the censorship.
The mechanism that does this appears to be the same mechanism that disables “global” Apple maps and switches to Apple maps provided by Chinese map maker Autonavi.
I wrote this post at the time the explains the censorship behavior which hasn’t changed.
No, it wouldn’t help. It looks at the country code transmitted by the cell tower you are connected to. The only countermeasure would be to keep your phone in airplane mode.
I always believed in absolute freedom of expression. I cheered Google when they prioritized values over revenues and abandoned mainland China because of censorship requirements.
But maybe I need to update my beliefs based on new evidence.
When free expression enables disinformation campaigns, when false rumors get amplified into mob violence, when stochastic terror organizes online, maybe the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.
Is it completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from China's policies of censorship and social control?
>When free expression enables disinformation campaigns, when false rumors get amplified into mob violence, when stochastic terror organizes online
Society (and humanity) at large doesn't actually need the internet to do this. You already know about the LA riots in 1991 (and civil unrest before that); that wasn't organized over the Internet and yet was much more destructive than any riot in the US since then.
Cults (Jonestown, scientology), domestic terrorism (the Oklahoma City bombing, among others), and anti-woman violence (Polytechnique) all predate the rise of the mass-market Internet. Meanwhile, as opposed to the crime waves of the 80s and 90s the planet is a significantly safer place than it was then.
Contrast what China did 2 years earlier; they didn't need the Internet to murder hundreds of peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square. Or the concentration camps jailing people simply for existing (and chopping them up for organs), or the Great Leap Forward that managed to kill more people through starvation than there were casualties in WW2 (and other disastrous and unprotestable policies).
That's what policies of censorship and social control get you- people who can't speak up or forget how to cause catastrophe after catastrophe. People who actually have to think once in a while perform better, and people who are better at that tend to bring prosperity wherever they go, so they concentrate in countries where that ability is rewarded the most. Even though members of a more tolerant society mess up, they don't tend to turn into institutional mass murder (whereas that's exactly what happens in unfree societies like China's).
>the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.
This has some truth to it; the 24-hour news cycle should be regulated because the direct result of its existence deludes members of society into thinking it's more dangerous than ever before when the exact opposite is true. But that's about all the truth it has.
There have always been disinformation campaigns. Ironically, you're probably the victim of one right now - the belief that there is some kind of vast "disinformation campaign" active in the west is a conspiracy theory that is routinely shot down by people who investigate the credibility of such claims in the media (e.g. Taibbi, Greenwald).
Luckily, we can read the articles written by people who investigate claims of vast online disinformation campaigns, and discover they are false. That's because there's not much censorship in the west. We can learn that the mainstream, 'official' narrative is false.
In China you'd never read about any claims that contradict the official narrative. You'd maybe suspect there was something wrong with it, but have no good way to prove it.
BTW I don't know what "stochastic terror" is. But you sound pretty scared. Maybe you've fallen victim to it ;)
Educate yourself. Stochastic phenomena are encountered in many forms in technology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)#Stochastic_terrorism
Stochastic terror is the term for a situation where pro-violent rhetoric runs rampant in a community and occasionally one of its listeners "randomly" commits a violent physicial act.
So it's just terrorism then. What kind of lone wolf terrorism isn't accompanied by at least one other person saying they agree with the terrorist's cause? Do we really need a term for this?
The Chinese Communist Party has been imprisoning, torturing, and murdering journalists, researchers, artists, authors. The Chinese Communist Party is running concentration camps.
Yes, it is completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from the Chinese Communist Party's policies of censorship and social control.
Outrageous as the fake news Russian collusion conspiracy theory peddled by the likes of CNN and MSNBC for the last two years might seem, I think rushing to censor them would be the wrong conclusion to draw.
In my opinion this is one of the saddest and most dangerous trends of modern times, the desire to give up any and all freedoms in exchange for perceived safety. We've welcomed 1984 with open arms.
The problem is that slippery slope is not a hypothetical argument in this case. You can be jailed in France, today, for wearing a pro-BDS t-shirt, because it's "hate speech". At the same time, for all the political censorship that Europe has compared to US, it doesn't seem to be doing anything to stem the rising popularity of their extremist parties.
The problem, as usual, is that there's no "we" in "must we allow". You're not actually the person who's going to be doing the allowing - best case, if you live in a non-corrupt democracy, you'll be voluntarily giving that authority to somebody else; and not even to a specific person, but a role. If the bounds of that authority are too specific, it becomes useless in practice because it's easy to avoid its scope. If they are too vague, and the precise bounds are left to the discretion of the enforcers, it just gives them another channel to manifest their biases.
Google gets a whole different level of scrutiny on HN wrt their business practices than any other company it seems. Apple can do whatever the Chinese government asks, yet almost all comments in this thread are aimed at justifying their innocence using business and sovereignty arguments. However, the yet to launch dragonfly project gets huge opposition. Are there any other companies getting the same level of scrutiny.
> Google gets a whole different level of scrutiny on HN wrt their business practices
In part, it's because Google's business practices involve collecting all the information they can on users. I don't spend much time worrying about China (or other governments for that matter), but if I did, Google and Facebook would top my list of companies that I would be critical of.
I’m pretty sure that if Apple had Google’s privacy-busting business model they’d be loathed too. If as a bonus they also worked on drones with the Pentagon you’d have even more hate. As it stands I’m yet to see an Apple article here that isn’t filled with people talking about the “Apple tax” and trying to define them as a monopoly.
Microsoft works with the DOD and gets minimal scrutiny. Also all the posts about apple tax also have similar number of posts talking about the google tax, even though google atleast allows people to download apks and install, like the route fortnite took.
Microsoft is one of the more loathed companies for what they’ve already done, never mind what they do now. I’m not sure where you’re getting “minimal scrutiny” from, except as another attempt to mitigate an understandable reaction to Google’s “winning” combination of hypocrisy and dominance.
I don’t know about you but I challenge every MSFT employee I know about the moral gymnastics involved in working for the largest software vendor defense contractor. Battleships run Windows. It made me really sad when they bought GitHub.
Same for Amazon, who runs a whole racist region (GovCloud) which only employs US citizens.
They do have a privacy busting business model in China. It's called selling a $1000+ device advertising its privacy features, and then handing over iCloud to a PLA owned company. They effectively sacrificed their own principles to stay in the Chinese market.
Do we really believe that the way to circumvent all of China's internal internet control is for someone to just buy an iPhone? There are Uighurs in Xingjiang who own iPhones right now. Should they believe that iMessage in China is end-to-end secure and not worry that the government can obtain access? Based on the assurances of Tim Cook?
True, but if you believe the marketing hype as a Chinese user, you might be suckered into using it, believing it would protect you better than WeChat did.
The point is, Apple sells Privacy everywhere as their brand, but in China, has deprived their users of most means of attaining it, either by making their own offerings less secure, or by banning from their App Store, any third party apps that could let their users have privacy from the government.
A lot of excuses being made for Apple not living up to their principles in China and kowtowing to the almighty dollar (or renminbi in this circumstance)
If we are being honest, Facebook easily gets most of the scrutiny here because of the rampant news hysteria. Google is a very distant second.
But I agree that Apple seems to get a pass here and in the news coverage as well. Perhaps because Apple is more established or because Tim Cook has better connections with media and government? Or maybe they hire the best PR firms.
But rather than focusing on individual firms, I think we should be focusing on the monopolies these tech giants are creating and the dangerous it can be for society if they aren't "fair" actors. And if we want, we should expand it beyond tech to banking, agriculture, media, etc.
Just a few years ago we were worrying about "too-big-to-fail". And here we are with endless mergers and ever greater concentration of wealth and power and influence.
Dragonfly was this outrageous: (from memory) Google's managers sold the Chinese government on this: "we will require and verify a phone number for every user of Google in China. We will provide a state-run police department of your choice with an unredacted list of every single Google query performed by every single phone number. No restrictions. No warrants. Do whatever you want with it."
Whatever China wants includes concentration camps on the same order of magnitude as the Holocaust (they're not death camps, just imprison over 1 million people based on ethnicity alone.) It includes a social score that is similar to America's no fly list, except extending to rail and not restricted to a few thousand people. Simply mentioning the anniversary date of tiananman square over any chat network (such as whatsapp, or wechat) would get your Internet cut off immediately. Free speech is such that you cannot publish a childish caricature (of their president as a teddy bear). And Google says here is every query by every user, by phone number. Go wild.
On the outrage-o-meter Google's dragonfly is like a surprise thermonuclear strike against an unsuspecting populated city during peacetime. Apple not showing news is like a guy grimacing at you, shaking his head in disgust, and turning on his heels and walking away.
It seems from your comment that you have a lot more knowledge on dragonfly than what is out there in the open. If possible, would you please elaborate a little more on the the google executives promises to China?
>GOOGLE CHINA PROTOTYPE LINKS SEARCHES TO PHONE NUMBERS
>GOOGLE BUILT A prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users’ searches to their personal phone numbers, thus making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor people’s queries, The Intercept can reveal.
...
>Sources familiar with the project said that prototypes of the search engine linked the search app on a user’s Android smartphone with their phone number.
...
>“Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China.”
...
>The search engine would be operated as part of a “joint venture” partnership with a company based in mainland China, according to sources familiar with the project.
>Google's prototype Chinese search engine links searches to phone numbers
>Google’s secret prototype search engine for China reportedly links users’ mobile phone numbers to what search terms they’ve used.
>This feature would allow the Chinese government to simply associate searches with individuals, thereby putting Chinese citizens at increased risk of government repression if they search for topics that their government deems politically sensitive, according to the Intercept.
We were talking about the outrage over Dragonfly, versus the smaller outrage over lack of availability of Apple news.
By the way, can you be more specific about iCloud? The Dragonfly claim is that Google would be sharing a list of search queries per telephone number with a state company, to use however they want. Can you be clear regarding the equivalent iCloud functionality? (I don't doubt you, just interested in where the abuse would happen.) Could you give an example?
In the context of this article, you seem to be comparing "not making Apple News available in China" with Dragonfly and pretending that the two are even remotely the same.
Yes, DragonFly is a theoretical / not launched project. Apple's iCloud collaboration with Chinese government and Apple News censorship isn't - they've actually deployed it. The double standard is striking, why is HN giving a pass to Apple when they collaborate with totalitarian regimes?
Apple is simply not making Apple News available in China. That's not "censorship", that's "not doing business in China". Censorship would be if Apple News was available but only carried state-sponsored articles devoid of any criticism. Ya know, kind of like what Dragonfly is aiming to do.
Apple has done the right thing here, which is to refuse to provide a service in the market where the only way to do so is to be complicit in human rights violations. This is exactly what most people unhappy with Dragonfly said Google should have done.
There's not enough information here to think this is a major scandal. Does Apple News respect your home region everywhere in the world except in China? Or is this just the typical international content licensing tarpit? I would blame copyright hell before I would assume Apple is kowtowing to China somehow. Given that China apparently allows foreign mobile devices an exception to the Great Firewall network blocks, it seems unlikely the Chinese government is specifically targeting the Apple News app for being blocked. I'm struggling to see how it makes sense to think of this as "censorship" rather than just "software and content licensing are both complicated and terrible".
Apple pisses when China growls. I personally think their claim of being privacy guardians is a bunch of PR & marketing BS. Didn’t they also handover the encryption keys for iCloud in China to the Communist Regime ?
It's China that is censoring the news here. But for some reason we're mainly blaming Apple for it? It's makes no sense.
And what the heck does the API Apple uses to determine location have to do with it? If Apple had the choice, they would use no API to censor the news.
Anyway, for the people who really are worried about censorship (I am) it's worth understanding and acknowledging what's actually going on here. This problem is not an Apple problem and if you try to treat it like one, that's actually worse than doing nothing at all since it draws attention away from the actual problem.
(There are Apple problems, of course, but this isn't one of them.)
This is a big China problem.
It's stretching the Nuremberg definition a bit when you accuse a company of it when they try to have their products follow the laws of the countries where they sell them. I'm sure there's a line in the sand somewhere there but refusing to distribute outlawed publications is surely not over it.
Apple is famous for fighting anything which might associate the brand with a degraded user experience. So shipping an apple branded product which tacitly accepts censorship seems like tacit complicity, which is the most cynical type of complicity.
There is no alternative option for them that doesn't involve just not selling in China. If they want to sell in China (a huge population of people who love to buy devices), then they have to play by the Chinese government's rules. It's not like they can just sneak around and hope the government doesn't notice, because China will not hesitate to ban the sale of legitimate Apple devices if they feel justified in doing so.
Apple ships products that conform to local regulations and this is absolutely normal. Do you think entreprises should choose which laws they comply to and which they don't? Good luck financing your state with that because I'm sure they'll all opt out of tax regulations...
They shouldn't conform to local regulations that are contrary to their publicly stated company ideals. One way to do so is to not do business in countries where it's impossible to conform.
> One way to do so is to not do business in countries where it's impossible to conform.
Keep in mind that we're talking about China. If Apple pulls out, there's no shortage of Chinese companies that the Chinese government is buddy-buddy with who will happily go all-in on spying on consumers.
Apple obeys Chinese regulations, but it's reasonable to assume (based on their actions in the US) that they don't enjoy it. Which means they're not going to go out of their way to give the Chinese government more than they need to. This is potentially in contrast with the Chinese technology companies who would be more than happy to provide extra data to the government.
Apple is able to hold their position in China only because they comply with regulations, but in so doing they provide consumers with a better option than going through any of the Chinese government-friendly companies. Yes, it sucks that they have to comply, but in a scenario where Apple either chooses or is forced to withdraw from China it is the Chinese consumers who will suffer the most, because they will be left with only government-friendly alternatives.
It's an ages-old argument: "if I won't do this evil thing, somebody else will, and they will be worse at it". It also makes you complicit in and responsible for whatever you help with, though.
But I don't have a problem with Apple here, because they did exactly that - they're not providing their News app/service in China at all, rather than providing a censored version where they would be implementing the censorship. Yes, this means that local competitors will offer their own apps, likely censored even more. And it's up to Chinese citizens to hold them to account. But when it comes to American companies, it's our job to do so.
Apple is going above and beyond China’s legal requirements in censorship, censoring news voluntarily in their News app on US phones with US SIM cards when used in China-phones that can access normal news websites without censorship just fine outside of the News app.
This is a behavior specific to Apple’s new product, which has not launched for Chinese users at all yet.
Devil’s advocate here, but I think geolocation is more important than SIM card or place of purchase.
China doesn’t want certain information within its borders. If you could “smuggle” it via outside phone + outside SIM, it makes all protections worthless.
Same with Netflix: even though I pay with credit card from Europe, when physically (IP-wise) in US I can see the US catalog.
Except that's not how it works in reality (and the article covers this): if I go to China with my T-Mobile US SIM card in my phone, and connect to a Chinese telecom network, I will still be able to access Facebook, Google, and any news site, regardless of whether or not the Great Firewall would usually block it for Chinese citizens with Chinese SIM cards.
But Apple is censoring content on US phones with US SIM cards while they're physically located inside China, which is a huge departure from established practice, and isn't actually useful since the same non-Chinese phone can access all the same news sites via Safari.
We know Apple isn't blocking Apple news voluntarily in China because if they were, they would choose to block it other places too. In fact, blocking it everywhere would be trivially easy and very cheap: they would simply not have a News app at all.
If you don't like Apple's publishing standards, then by all means object as vociferously as you see fit. Just don't get that confused with the Chinese government's control of information.
My issue isn’t with any single particular instance of censorship, but with Apple’s willingness to censor, regardless of market or local regulations.
This is exemplified by this above-and-beyond blocking, as well as their censorship of entirely legal content (e.g. nudity) in the US app store.
I would have much less issue with them if there were a setting to install an alternative app store on the iPhone; then it would simply be editorializing. As it stands there is no way for me to persist e.g. a gay porn app on my iPhone, and that crosses the line into voluntary censorship of legal content by Apple.
I don't think you know what China's legal requirements in censorship are. I think you're trying to infer what they are from the fact that the censorship of other content sources works somewhat differently. But these look like differences in implementation details.
> ...censoring news voluntarily...
That just doesn't make sense. If Apple wanted to censor their News app, there's no reason they would restrict themselves to China. They could "block" it everywhere, if that's what they wanted to do -- by simply not having a News app at all.
> Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app. This information is not available via public APIs in iOS specifically to improve privacy for users.
Regardless of the merit of the argument of Apple censoring News in China, this is a stupid argument. For Apple, there is no private API: they wrote the thing themselves; for privacy they prevent third-party applications from accessing it. What would you like them to do, remove the API entirely or open it to third-party developers?
No, because now my phone doesn't work. I can't send text messages, I can't use most of the hardware, I can't change basic settings…none of these can function without the APIs that Apple currently keeps private. It's obvious that there should be functionality to say set the device's passcode–but it's also pretty clear that normal apps should not be able to access this.
I lived in U.S. for eight years and found out about this fact after I came back. It's deeply concerning, the fact they don't block news app but block news feeds in China is weird.
I used to use News App with U.S. sim card, but the restriction got tighter and tighter.
Perhaps one day we can stop talking about "feature-gating" (and "geoblocking" for that matter) and just treat these censorship mechanisms as the attacks on the freedom on the web that they are.
That'd be the best move here. If the author wants Apple to operate according to their (US-based) ideals in China, that's a perfectly valid argument to make. So make it.
Instead, the author does some overly verbose and hot take dance to propagate clickbait, which is then shockingly submitted to HN. Call this garbage for what it is.
They also censor or at least filter out content they are not comfortable sharing on their iTunes movie platform. I’m not sure how appropriate the word censor is here in this context. They are a private company that can choose which content they release in which area, or at all, especially to adapt to local customs or laws. Similar to how you can get rice and a chicken leg at McDonalds in Indonesia, but can’t in America.
Just noticed in the screen shot that the poster's wifi was on. In which case they had a Chinese IP and it wouldn't work. Did the OP test on cell network only?
124 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadThey might be the same broad concept, but I think it’s a much larger conversation than just following orders.
I don’t agree with the decision to censor in China but it feels like an unrealistic comparison to make here.
Apple seems willing to disregard American laws regarding backdoors, national security, and access to device information.
I find it interesting that we're all proud that Apple will "stand up" to the US federal government and resist attacks on privacy and liberties, but then so many turn around justify them doing the exact opposite in China. "Well, when in Rome..." sounds like an awfully convenient rationalization as well.
Which American law did they disregard? Unilateral opinions from one branch of government are not "laws".
This isn't an Apples to apples comparison.
If you’re taking about the case with the San Bernadino shooter, they challenged the FBI in a court of law, which is exactly how something like that should be handled, is it not?
As for China, if it was my choice, I wouldn’t do any business in China if I was a company that stands up for privacy. But that’s probably why I don’t run a trillion dollar company.
It's not a good thing for Apple to be innovating on ways to enforce Chinese censorship (although if I understand correctly, it doesn't matter—China could already censor roaming cell traffic, they just choose not to).
Really? Travelers with a foreign cell phone and foreign SIM are excepted from Chinese censorship laws? I find this very difficult to believe. It's more likely that censorship laws are simply more difficult to enforce on travelers, which doesn't make it any more legal.
The reverse is also true: a Chinese mobile number, even while roaming in the US, will still be subject to the Great Firewall.
Not that I agree with Chinese practices.
So should Apple News allow Nazi stories in Germany? Should they allow stories disparaging the Thai king in a Thailand? Should they allow speech that creates an immediate threat to a person in the US? Should Apple pay taxes? Should Apple prohibit child porn?
All of these are examples of “kowtowing” to governments. What’s the difference between kowtowing and following the law? How can someone expect Apple to pay a “fair share” of EU taxes but then expect them to not follow Chinese law? If a company boycotts countries based on ideology, pretty soon every country gets boycotted over something or another. There are exactly zero perfect countries.
That seems fairly easy to navigate, are there harder questions that prove this is a more nuanced question?
Companies can simultaneously observe the laws and respect the norms of the countries in which they operate, whilst playing a role in bringing about incremental change over the long term.
To do otherwise is some combination of rudeness, irresponsibility or arrogance.
> This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network
https://www.freedomsurfer.com/firewall/
Should they allow stories disparaging the Thai king in Thailand [or anywhere]? Yes.
Should they allow speech that creates an immediate threat to a person the the US [or anywhere]? No.
Should they pay taxes? Yes. (This isn't about principles; this is just about following local financial laws where you operate.)
Should they prohibit child porn? Yes.
Should they allow Nazi stories in Germany [or anywhere]? I'm actually not sure where I personally stand on this, but I imagine people with decision-making ability at Apple may have a strong stance on this, and they should decide for themselves.
Note that all of this is a reflection of my sense of morality and ethics. I don't expect everyone to share it; obviously my sense of right and wrong has been heavily influenced by where and how I've grown up. But I would like Apple (and all companies, really) to take a consistent, principled stance based on the values they want to display as a company. And if that closes some markets to them, then so be it.
I believe censorship is fundamentally abhorrent, China's example of it insidiously so.
Does anyone know if this claim is true? I would have assumed this is as simple as serving the not allowed response to any request from a Chinese address range, and it seems like it would be easy to test using a VPN.
(In general, while I don't approve of censorship this seems like an odd hill to die on — the problem is that a repressive government is still sovereign and there aren't exactly many options for a company with such extensive business ties other than complying with that government's laws within its borders)
>This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network.
If you want low latency roaming in China, state owned China Mobile will sell you a solution for that:
For a moment, I thought you were claiming to be one of a group of Sims.
My limited understanding (from one uni course) is mobile devices get a secondary identifier that the networks use for the actual routing process. While a device may officially identify as having a US IP address, the cell carriers communicate a secondary, current IP address/identifier local to the device's current position.
It's much like how DNS works. You don't route all traffic through a DNS server. You send it a readable name, then communicated directly with the IP address that's returned.
In 3G/LTE network there are terms called Gn interface, Gi Interface, Gp interface and many others. Gn is to manage your mobility. From Gi you will get local ip address and internet access. From Gp you will be routed to you own cellular operator Gp interface.
When you are on your original cellular operator network, you will be served by Gn and Gi interface for your internet access. When you are roaming, you will be served by Gn and Gp interface of local cellular operator that will forward to your original cellular operator’s Gp. After that it will routed to Gi interface of your original cellular operator.
edited: Gn function
IIRC the carriers do this for billing/metering reasons; otherwise they wouldn't have any idea how much data you're using while roaming, and would have to blindly trust whatever the partner carrier tells them.
What I'd like to see is way for the visiting operator to charge little and route my packets directly to internet. I remember reading that this mode is also supported by the specs
iOS disables Apple news based on the mobile country code / network code and not on the name in my experience.
If your iOS device doesn’t have cellular capability or if it is in airplane mode, it uses Ip addresses. This means you can enable airplane mode and connect to a vpn over Wi-Fi and circumvent the censorship.
The mechanism that does this appears to be the same mechanism that disables “global” Apple maps and switches to Apple maps provided by Chinese map maker Autonavi.
I wrote this post at the time the explains the censorship behavior which hasn’t changed.
https://www.larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china...
I always believed in absolute freedom of expression. I cheered Google when they prioritized values over revenues and abandoned mainland China because of censorship requirements.
But maybe I need to update my beliefs based on new evidence.
When free expression enables disinformation campaigns, when false rumors get amplified into mob violence, when stochastic terror organizes online, maybe the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.
Is it completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from China's policies of censorship and social control?
Society (and humanity) at large doesn't actually need the internet to do this. You already know about the LA riots in 1991 (and civil unrest before that); that wasn't organized over the Internet and yet was much more destructive than any riot in the US since then.
Cults (Jonestown, scientology), domestic terrorism (the Oklahoma City bombing, among others), and anti-woman violence (Polytechnique) all predate the rise of the mass-market Internet. Meanwhile, as opposed to the crime waves of the 80s and 90s the planet is a significantly safer place than it was then.
Contrast what China did 2 years earlier; they didn't need the Internet to murder hundreds of peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square. Or the concentration camps jailing people simply for existing (and chopping them up for organs), or the Great Leap Forward that managed to kill more people through starvation than there were casualties in WW2 (and other disastrous and unprotestable policies).
That's what policies of censorship and social control get you- people who can't speak up or forget how to cause catastrophe after catastrophe. People who actually have to think once in a while perform better, and people who are better at that tend to bring prosperity wherever they go, so they concentrate in countries where that ability is rewarded the most. Even though members of a more tolerant society mess up, they don't tend to turn into institutional mass murder (whereas that's exactly what happens in unfree societies like China's).
>the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.
This has some truth to it; the 24-hour news cycle should be regulated because the direct result of its existence deludes members of society into thinking it's more dangerous than ever before when the exact opposite is true. But that's about all the truth it has.
Luckily, we can read the articles written by people who investigate claims of vast online disinformation campaigns, and discover they are false. That's because there's not much censorship in the west. We can learn that the mainstream, 'official' narrative is false.
In China you'd never read about any claims that contradict the official narrative. You'd maybe suspect there was something wrong with it, but have no good way to prove it.
BTW I don't know what "stochastic terror" is. But you sound pretty scared. Maybe you've fallen victim to it ;)
Stochastic terror is the term for a situation where pro-violent rhetoric runs rampant in a community and occasionally one of its listeners "randomly" commits a violent physicial act.
Yes, it is completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from the Chinese Communist Party's policies of censorship and social control.
That's not what I said. I said "there might be something to learn".
Maybe my belief in unlimited free expression at any cost isn't the best way.
Must we must allow terrorist recruiting and incitement to violence and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns and targeted intimidation?
It's a slippery slope fallacy to assume that any restriction inevitably leads to relinquishing "all freedoms".
(https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...)
The problem, as usual, is that there's no "we" in "must we allow". You're not actually the person who's going to be doing the allowing - best case, if you live in a non-corrupt democracy, you'll be voluntarily giving that authority to somebody else; and not even to a specific person, but a role. If the bounds of that authority are too specific, it becomes useless in practice because it's easy to avoid its scope. If they are too vague, and the precise bounds are left to the discretion of the enforcers, it just gives them another channel to manifest their biases.
In part, it's because Google's business practices involve collecting all the information they can on users. I don't spend much time worrying about China (or other governments for that matter), but if I did, Google and Facebook would top my list of companies that I would be critical of.
Same for Amazon, who runs a whole racist region (GovCloud) which only employs US citizens.
Do we really believe that the way to circumvent all of China's internal internet control is for someone to just buy an iPhone? There are Uighurs in Xingjiang who own iPhones right now. Should they believe that iMessage in China is end-to-end secure and not worry that the government can obtain access? Based on the assurances of Tim Cook?
The point is, Apple sells Privacy everywhere as their brand, but in China, has deprived their users of most means of attaining it, either by making their own offerings less secure, or by banning from their App Store, any third party apps that could let their users have privacy from the government.
And then Tim Cook went to China and praised the government for it's vision of an open internet: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04...
A lot of excuses being made for Apple not living up to their principles in China and kowtowing to the almighty dollar (or renminbi in this circumstance)
But I agree that Apple seems to get a pass here and in the news coverage as well. Perhaps because Apple is more established or because Tim Cook has better connections with media and government? Or maybe they hire the best PR firms.
But rather than focusing on individual firms, I think we should be focusing on the monopolies these tech giants are creating and the dangerous it can be for society if they aren't "fair" actors. And if we want, we should expand it beyond tech to banking, agriculture, media, etc.
Just a few years ago we were worrying about "too-big-to-fail". And here we are with endless mergers and ever greater concentration of wealth and power and influence.
Whatever China wants includes concentration camps on the same order of magnitude as the Holocaust (they're not death camps, just imprison over 1 million people based on ethnicity alone.) It includes a social score that is similar to America's no fly list, except extending to rail and not restricted to a few thousand people. Simply mentioning the anniversary date of tiananman square over any chat network (such as whatsapp, or wechat) would get your Internet cut off immediately. Free speech is such that you cannot publish a childish caricature (of their president as a teddy bear). And Google says here is every query by every user, by phone number. Go wild.
On the outrage-o-meter Google's dragonfly is like a surprise thermonuclear strike against an unsuspecting populated city during peacetime. Apple not showing news is like a guy grimacing at you, shaking his head in disgust, and turning on his heels and walking away.
This article came up when I searched it:
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...
>GOOGLE CHINA PROTOTYPE LINKS SEARCHES TO PHONE NUMBERS
>GOOGLE BUILT A prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users’ searches to their personal phone numbers, thus making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor people’s queries, The Intercept can reveal.
...
>Sources familiar with the project said that prototypes of the search engine linked the search app on a user’s Android smartphone with their phone number.
...
>“Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China.”
...
>The search engine would be operated as part of a “joint venture” partnership with a company based in mainland China, according to sources familiar with the project.
--
The Guardian's article leads with these sentences: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/18/google-ch...
>Google's prototype Chinese search engine links searches to phone numbers
>Google’s secret prototype search engine for China reportedly links users’ mobile phone numbers to what search terms they’ve used.
>This feature would allow the Chinese government to simply associate searches with individuals, thereby putting Chinese citizens at increased risk of government repression if they search for topics that their government deems politically sensitive, according to the Intercept.
So Apple allowing China what is essentially unrestricted access to iCloud data is not[0,1]? For honesty's sake, let's not cherry-pick.
That high-horse you're on only works when applied evenly and without prejudice.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/04/apple-...
[1] https://qz.com/1176376/apples-icloud-service-in-china-will-b...
By the way, can you be more specific about iCloud? The Dragonfly claim is that Google would be sharing a list of search queries per telephone number with a state company, to use however they want. Can you be clear regarding the equivalent iCloud functionality? (I don't doubt you, just interested in where the abuse would happen.) Could you give an example?
It's China that is censoring the news here. But for some reason we're mainly blaming Apple for it? It's makes no sense.
And what the heck does the API Apple uses to determine location have to do with it? If Apple had the choice, they would use no API to censor the news.
Anyway, for the people who really are worried about censorship (I am) it's worth understanding and acknowledging what's actually going on here. This problem is not an Apple problem and if you try to treat it like one, that's actually worse than doing nothing at all since it draws attention away from the actual problem.
(There are Apple problems, of course, but this isn't one of them.) This is a big China problem.
To say it another way, there are multiple parties doing multiple wrongs here.
Keep in mind that we're talking about China. If Apple pulls out, there's no shortage of Chinese companies that the Chinese government is buddy-buddy with who will happily go all-in on spying on consumers.
Apple obeys Chinese regulations, but it's reasonable to assume (based on their actions in the US) that they don't enjoy it. Which means they're not going to go out of their way to give the Chinese government more than they need to. This is potentially in contrast with the Chinese technology companies who would be more than happy to provide extra data to the government.
Apple is able to hold their position in China only because they comply with regulations, but in so doing they provide consumers with a better option than going through any of the Chinese government-friendly companies. Yes, it sucks that they have to comply, but in a scenario where Apple either chooses or is forced to withdraw from China it is the Chinese consumers who will suffer the most, because they will be left with only government-friendly alternatives.
But I don't have a problem with Apple here, because they did exactly that - they're not providing their News app/service in China at all, rather than providing a censored version where they would be implementing the censorship. Yes, this means that local competitors will offer their own apps, likely censored even more. And it's up to Chinese citizens to hold them to account. But when it comes to American companies, it's our job to do so.
Apple is going above and beyond China’s legal requirements in censorship, censoring news voluntarily in their News app on US phones with US SIM cards when used in China-phones that can access normal news websites without censorship just fine outside of the News app.
This is a behavior specific to Apple’s new product, which has not launched for Chinese users at all yet.
China doesn’t want certain information within its borders. If you could “smuggle” it via outside phone + outside SIM, it makes all protections worthless.
Same with Netflix: even though I pay with credit card from Europe, when physically (IP-wise) in US I can see the US catalog.
But Apple is censoring content on US phones with US SIM cards while they're physically located inside China, which is a huge departure from established practice, and isn't actually useful since the same non-Chinese phone can access all the same news sites via Safari.
The idea that Apple is controlling things here does not make sense. Obviously, if Apple had the choice they wouldn't censor Apple News at all.
We know Apple isn't blocking Apple news voluntarily in China because if they were, they would choose to block it other places too. In fact, blocking it everywhere would be trivially easy and very cheap: they would simply not have a News app at all.
If you don't like Apple's publishing standards, then by all means object as vociferously as you see fit. Just don't get that confused with the Chinese government's control of information.
This is exemplified by this above-and-beyond blocking, as well as their censorship of entirely legal content (e.g. nudity) in the US app store.
I would have much less issue with them if there were a setting to install an alternative app store on the iPhone; then it would simply be editorializing. As it stands there is no way for me to persist e.g. a gay porn app on my iPhone, and that crosses the line into voluntary censorship of legal content by Apple.
> ...censoring news voluntarily...
That just doesn't make sense. If Apple wanted to censor their News app, there's no reason they would restrict themselves to China. They could "block" it everywhere, if that's what they wanted to do -- by simply not having a News app at all.
FTFY
Regardless of the merit of the argument of Apple censoring News in China, this is a stupid argument. For Apple, there is no private API: they wrote the thing themselves; for privacy they prevent third-party applications from accessing it. What would you like them to do, remove the API entirely or open it to third-party developers?
I used to use News App with U.S. sim card, but the restriction got tighter and tighter.
Instead, the author does some overly verbose and hot take dance to propagate clickbait, which is then shockingly submitted to HN. Call this garbage for what it is.