I would guess the implication is that almost all phones are built in China. So "Chinese cellphones" is a curious term - "Cellphones designed by Chinese firms" and "Cellphones manufactured in China" are wildly different circles in the venn diagram of mobiles.
Only Chinese cellphone design companies have a meaningful direct responsibily for Chinese government, which makes the difference. Manufacturers have resposibility too, but if they manufacture something else than intended, it will stop quite quickly.
> What is the difference? To not buy branded Chinese phones seems just protectionism and has little to do with security.
How does "protectionism" have anything to do with this? It's weird to inject that economic framing into a question about what kind of policies you want to be subject to, and who you want to be setting those policies.
If you can tell the President on Christmas Eve "Let's Go Brandon" which means something vulgar and you don't go to jail then you live in a free country
If you are incarcerated in a re-education camp because of your religion then you live in an unfree country
I can make violent threats against the President at his face and nobody would bat an eye. But my country is at the peak of unfree. So you didn't help :(
Edit: Ah, silly me. That was just a thinly veiled insult against China, the great big devil.
I think people forget, "Let's Go Brandon," isn't even always a gripe at the US president.
Everyone, the reporter included, knew fully well what the crowds were chanting. That phrase sums in 3 words how corrupt the media is to whitewash and censor any criticism of the establishment president and the mainstream narrative.
The US is orders of magnitude different to and better than China, but still has room for improvement.
I guess an old Soviet anecdote is very relevant here:
US citizen: I live in a free country! Nobody will prosecute me if I go next to White House and shout out loud "<name of US president>! You are an old stupid son of a bitch!"
USSR citizen: I also live in a free country! Nobody will prosecute me if I go to Red Square and shout out loud "<name of US president>! You are an old stupid son of a bitch!"
Let's go Brandon is not widely known, I am inclined to think, to the typical audience of President's Christmas Eve address. It does not warrant any action because of this.
Those that have individual rights, including freedom of speech/thought/religion and property rights. Independent courts. Freedom of movement. The right to your own body.
Probably a nation whose citizens feel comfortable and free in their nation without constantly having to remind themselves or the world that they are a "free-nation".
No nation is truly free, all societies are ruled by a small elite that is only concerned with its own wealth and power. How the elite rules depends on different factors, but their motives are always the same.
I grew up under military dictatorship in Latin America. Back then you could get in serious trouble if you said or did the wrong thing. There is a lot more “freedom” now but the people are still oppressed by their own social condition. Plus ça change…
No people are truly free, and that's ok. No one should be allowed to walk down the street and attack others. It's not "truly free" in the sense of "absolutely free". It's "to have the correct freedoms".
Just make sure beforehand that they're supported by LineageOS. Then you can wipe the OEM crap and run software you trust instead (assuming you trust the LineageOS developers).
If they're the kind that's sold artificially cheap under the assumption that they can make up the difference by showing you ads for the whole lifetime of the device, running a different OS has the added benefit of eating into their profit margins.
People should also be aware that certain devices will have specific features disabled when flashing to a custom ROM like LineageOS; vendor binary blobs on the OEM side and LineageOS' policy on reverse engineering them.
I believe the only manufacturers that have features disabled for unlocked bootloaders are Sony[1] and Samsung (Galaxy Z Fold 3 only).[2] Many Snapdragon-based Samung devices can't be bootloader-unlocked in the first place, and this includes most U.S. models.
Vendors that are LineageOS-friendly include Google, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Asus.[3] If you already have a Xiaomi phone, replacing the stock operating system with LineageOS could improve your privacy.
Show me a mid-market up to top end Android phone that isn't made in China...
Yes I know there's a series of specific Samsung models that are approved for US govt use and are likely made in a facility in south Korea.
I think we have two categories of things
A) phones made in China with software/OS load for CCP compliant censorship and data collection
B) phones made in China with software and OS load for the global market (example would be oxygenOS on an English language OnePlus phone. If it turns out there's hidden data collection or censorship frameworks in oxygenOS I would be very disappointed.)
I bought my Pixel 4a specifically because it wasn't made in China (Vietnam). I would have considered upgrading to the 6 if it were made somewhere else. I also was considering a Google Titan security key until I learned they were made in China, too.
Siemens Gigaset smartphones are made in Bocholt, Germany. I think Siemens is the last of the big consumer mobile manufacturers with any manufacturing in Europe to speak of.
Apparently /e/OS, the free Android distribution by Mandrake founder Gaël Duval, is available pre-installed, so there should be solid LineageOS support.
Where something is made doesn't tell us where the components are sourced however. It is MediaTek based, so make of that what you will.
imo the whole point of this article was that China silently exports tampered devices to Taiwan. Implication is that this might have happened to not only Taiwan, unless we have trustworthy audits.
>They can't tell other governments to censor anything, so yes?
The CCP can and do actively control what the international community says as much as possible, and they have enough money to make the changes happen. If you don't think so, look what happens in public discussions (or even mentions!) on/of Taiwan.
> A Digital Manhunt: How Chinese Police Track Critics on Twitter and Facebook
> Authorities in China have turned to sophisticated investigative software to track and silence obscure critics on overseas social media. Their targets include college students and non-Chinese nationals.
> Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter
> ...The authorities used a phrase common among China’s internet police that refers to tracking down the actual person behind a social media account: “touching the ground.”
> With growing frequency, the country’s internet police have hunted down and threatened internet users who voice their opinions. At first, its agents focused on local social media platforms. In 2018, they began a new campaign to detain users of Twitter inside China — account owners who had found ways around the government’s blocks — and force them to delete their accounts.
> Now, the campaign has extended to Chinese citizens who live outside of China. The document spells out how the Shanghai police want to discover the identities of people behind certain accounts and to trace their users’ connections to the mainland. Its officers can then threaten family members in China or detain the account holders when they return to the country in order to compel online critics to delete posts or even entire accounts.
It's worth calling out that later article analyzes a "request for bids" by the local Shanghai police, so I don't think it should be read to imply limits on what the Chinese government does, since the scope of a local police force would be limited to stuff that intersects with their jurisdiction.
They can tell Chinese companies to censor terms in their products overseas. This has already been done by several Chinese game companies. They can also use soft-power to control the products that companies make overseas such that censorship happens in the planning stage of the product such that some products just aren't made because they won't be marketable in China, a key money maker for many companies.
> They can't tell other governments to censor anything
They don't need to tell governments anything. Just turn on a built-in filter in a small OS update. Or install a fresh one for now or later in a larger update.
Maybe there are no other filters. There are none we know about. But we didn't know about this one until we did... And is anyone forensically checking what is in OS updates for their phones. You can check the release notes, but all you'll likely find there is the unhelpfully generic “security and performance changes”.
I have a Xiaomi phone. Great battery life, even compared to other devices with the same sort of spec and battery size. But they achieve that by cheating: it does non-standard things WRT killing processes to save power that means things you might want to allow to keep active¹, that you can allow to remain active on other Android devices, don't work as expected.
[1] Garmin Connect and integration services for other devices, background audio players, and so on.
I have Xiaomi. I doubt it can "censor" me as the only time my phone connects to internet is to download map updates to OsmAnd offline navigation software. The rest of the time it functions as just a phone. I do not even have data plan. I have another spare phone where I keep software that controls my various gadgets like drone etc.
One short technical description I've read said that it's a built-in filter thing (local database that only updates occassionally) and you won't see a lot of internet traffic related to the censorship.
Xiaomi ships different builds for regions. Some of them might be genuinely ok devices. The problem is you never know what you've got without an audit and some trust. Better just avoid them altogether.
You do not get something. It can not "censor" me because I do not use it online at all. They can put any spyware they want. It just won't matter in my case. I use my PC for online acvtivities. The phone is off the Internet.
> The rest of the time it functions as just a phone.
A decade ago people on for example Slashdot used to talk about how they wanted a phone that was ‘just a phone’. That sounds silly these days because people hardly ever use the phone any more, over using various text apps. A phone that just phones would be a useless device to 99.99% of people.
I understand but I do not give a flying fuck about what 90% or whatever is thinking about the subject. It is useful for me and that is all that matters to me. The others can and do make their own choices.
China still hasn't learned how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" works. If you want to do something evil and get away with it, you first need to focus purely on gaining market share. You need to reach a critical mass where people are completely dependent on your product. If you try to do evil before it reaches critical mass, people can still stop using your product. If China waited 5 more years before pulling crap like this Xiaomi could have been bigger than Apple or Google.
In that sense, doing things properly requires some detachment from the end goal. I think the CCP is too fearful of the imagined outcome of cultural dissolution and loss of control to achieve the patience required for that detachment.
US affiliated PRC containment bloc with try to malign any PRC brands that becomes successful regardless. Why do you think all these hit pieces started around time of Xiaomi record growth (80% in Q2 2021) when they passed Apple in market share and is catching up to Samsung for #1. It's the Huawei playbook of fabricating false security threats for useful idiots. At the end the day, these countries will go zero to negative sum to deny PRC access, i.e. US would rather deal with forest fires than use DJI drones. Thankfully for PRC brands, there's still ~90% of the world to sell to.
I think Anti-US sentiments around these discussions are disingenuous and creates a false impression of understating Chinese censorship while also doing a disservice to criticizing US censorship (Twitter bans, Parlor, etc.) because they’re not operating from the same intent and authority. There are no requests from US gov to censor on Twitter while there are absolute mandates and gag orders to say speak about anything against the CCP in China.
I would like us to focus on one topic at a time, avoid whataboutism and reduce the fog.
Uhhh, if the lobbyists run the government then in a way it’s the same thing.
Also, nobody is talking about twitter.
Finally their intent is the same. To control what I say and do. It is only anti US because I don’t want the US to slide down the slippery slope it’s going down, and I’m allowed to be critical of it in hopes it doesn’t end up similar to China.
> Uhhh, if the lobbyists run the government then in a way it’s the same thing.
This makes no sense to me. Can you explain further? May be if lobbyists are trying to lobby for amending the constitution or passsing a censorship law?
I am generally with you about the private corporations censoring when its a monopoly. Google and Apple lobby for making sure they are not appearing as monopolies. The most extreme example would be a hypothetical scenario where your only ISP in the area decides to ban a website. That is effectively censorship. But, as far as I know, that is illegal in US (FCC). These aspects are very different from Chinese censorship which is absolute, very transparently enforced and openly admitted by CCP.
This again? This is just a redo of the Lithuanian story from a few months ago. The blacklist is to prevent advertisements built into the OS from containing certain blacklisted words. It doesn't censor searches.
Have a link to the previous thread? Let’s not be so quick to dismiss this, getting it right is important. Censorship is gaining traction unfortunately.
every phone is chatty, unless you have a pi-hole equivalent when you're not on your secured home network, there's a lot of data being exchanged with every manufacturer.
True, but phoning home for telemetry to make better devices and out-compete the market is not great, but phoning home to censor and repress discussion on human rights violations is all together evil.
Another evil business using censoring for their AD's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 are used by random netizens to back their hate on China and Chinese people. Meanwhile majority of discussions do not seem bother to verify the source and continue passionate discussion as if they actually know what's going on.
I am not sure what to make off this. Since I myself repeated this same behavior all the time. And I see no one not even Noam Chomsky showing something that is fundamentally different?
No. Because of main stream media propaganda. Chinese minorities are preferentially treated. And the Uyghur genocide is a lie worse and more ridiculous than the Iraq WMD.
Comments like this makes me want to quit commenting here. Then I realized that comments like this indeed are the only reason I engage political debate here. Because otherwise Asian people are going to become the scapegoat once everyone believe they have to do something to unleash their unfounded hate over China.
All are manufactured "evidences" from dubious individuals.
I can manufacture much better evidences myself given me enough support from NED RFA Falungong.
Iraq WMD at least have "evidences" from CIA and backed by colin powell. Now a genocide is not backed by evidences from any 3-letter agency, or any US officials.
Use your feet to think about what's going on. You dont even need to engage your brain to smell the ridiculousness behind all these lies.
I am even frustrated by the laziness of the manufacturer. Come on, lies produced before at least passed scrutiny from morons. Now even an animal cannot stand its poor quality.
50+ links points to manufactured evidences. I am pretty sure that you have not read any of the source events reported and rehashed by western mainstream media.
And although reputation and integrity is unredeemable, you would still trust western mainstream media, after outrageous poor news reporting after Iraq, Syria, Assange, etc.
You are just fed with propaganda for your whole life without knowing the inhuman suffering you have been through.
I have not tried to convince you that no one was killed in 1989 06 04, for example 15 PLA soldiers have been killed in the event, 6 of them were directly killed by the protesters. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-some-of-the-protesters.... Have you seen any law enforcement personels get killed in other western democracy? All my memory points to no such reports. Why? Because democracy is law-based, there are laws granting self-defense rights under provocation. But you know why PLA did not do that? Because PLA is the army from the people, for the people, thus its name People's Liberation Army.
Your mind is simply fully of biases and stereotype that truth just does not make sense. Just like a DoS cannot run ELF executable.
First truth is that 'you can't trust your standard commercial smartphone'. This is why open source os is so important today.
Second, the evolution of Xiaomi products is very bad:
At the beginning, their smartphones were great because they used a MIUI version that was very 'pure': no crapware, no junk 'preinstalled apps', no call to home, interface that was customizable like you wanted.
In the first place, this is why people were buying the devices compared to Samsung phones with preinstalled and non removable apps like Facebook.
Now that Xiaomi became a leader on the market and has quite an important market share. They completely go the Samsung way with stuffing phones with a lot of junk and sometime deceitful one.
88 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadI have nothing against wanting to protect and industry, but it should not be done with misconceptions.
How does "protectionism" have anything to do with this? It's weird to inject that economic framing into a question about what kind of policies you want to be subject to, and who you want to be setting those policies.
That’s not a criticism of the individuals there, just a recognition of the conditions.
Admittedly that’s not any easy thing to define all the time.
Which nations are truly free then?
If you can tell the President on Christmas Eve "Let's Go Brandon" which means something vulgar and you don't go to jail then you live in a free country
If you are incarcerated in a re-education camp because of your religion then you live in an unfree country
Edit: Ah, silly me. That was just a thinly veiled insult against China, the great big devil.
Everyone, the reporter included, knew fully well what the crowds were chanting. That phrase sums in 3 words how corrupt the media is to whitewash and censor any criticism of the establishment president and the mainstream narrative.
The US is orders of magnitude different to and better than China, but still has room for improvement.
US citizen: I live in a free country! Nobody will prosecute me if I go next to White House and shout out loud "<name of US president>! You are an old stupid son of a bitch!"
USSR citizen: I also live in a free country! Nobody will prosecute me if I go to Red Square and shout out loud "<name of US president>! You are an old stupid son of a bitch!"
Let's go Brandon is not widely known, I am inclined to think, to the typical audience of President's Christmas Eve address. It does not warrant any action because of this.
War is productivity. Wage slavery is freedom. Nationalism is strength.
I grew up under military dictatorship in Latin America. Back then you could get in serious trouble if you said or did the wrong thing. There is a lot more “freedom” now but the people are still oppressed by their own social condition. Plus ça change…
If they're the kind that's sold artificially cheap under the assumption that they can make up the difference by showing you ads for the whole lifetime of the device, running a different OS has the added benefit of eating into their profit margins.
Vendors that are LineageOS-friendly include Google, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Asus.[3] If you already have a Xiaomi phone, replacing the stock operating system with LineageOS could improve your privacy.
[1] https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/24/22639869/samsung-galaxy-z...
[3] https://www.lineageoslog.com
Yes I know there's a series of specific Samsung models that are approved for US govt use and are likely made in a facility in south Korea.
I think we have two categories of things
A) phones made in China with software/OS load for CCP compliant censorship and data collection
B) phones made in China with software and OS load for the global market (example would be oxygenOS on an English language OnePlus phone. If it turns out there's hidden data collection or censorship frameworks in oxygenOS I would be very disappointed.)
https://news.samsung.com/us/samsung-devices-achieve-approval...
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/solutions/industries/gov...
Apple: I trust their US QA to detect planted spyware.
Apparently /e/OS, the free Android distribution by Mandrake founder Gaël Duval, is available pre-installed, so there should be solid LineageOS support.
Where something is made doesn't tell us where the components are sourced however. It is MediaTek based, so make of that what you will.
The CCP can and do actively control what the international community says as much as possible, and they have enough money to make the changes happen. If you don't think so, look what happens in public discussions (or even mentions!) on/of Taiwan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/business/china-internet-p...
> A Digital Manhunt: How Chinese Police Track Critics on Twitter and Facebook
> Authorities in China have turned to sophisticated investigative software to track and silence obscure critics on overseas social media. Their targets include college students and non-Chinese nationals.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/ch...:
> Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter
> ...The authorities used a phrase common among China’s internet police that refers to tracking down the actual person behind a social media account: “touching the ground.”
> With growing frequency, the country’s internet police have hunted down and threatened internet users who voice their opinions. At first, its agents focused on local social media platforms. In 2018, they began a new campaign to detain users of Twitter inside China — account owners who had found ways around the government’s blocks — and force them to delete their accounts.
> Now, the campaign has extended to Chinese citizens who live outside of China. The document spells out how the Shanghai police want to discover the identities of people behind certain accounts and to trace their users’ connections to the mainland. Its officers can then threaten family members in China or detain the account holders when they return to the country in order to compel online critics to delete posts or even entire accounts.
It's worth calling out that later article analyzes a "request for bids" by the local Shanghai police, so I don't think it should be read to imply limits on what the Chinese government does, since the scope of a local police force would be limited to stuff that intersects with their jurisdiction.
They don't need to tell governments anything. Just turn on a built-in filter in a small OS update. Or install a fresh one for now or later in a larger update.
Maybe there are no other filters. There are none we know about. But we didn't know about this one until we did... And is anyone forensically checking what is in OS updates for their phones. You can check the release notes, but all you'll likely find there is the unhelpfully generic “security and performance changes”.
I have a Xiaomi phone. Great battery life, even compared to other devices with the same sort of spec and battery size. But they achieve that by cheating: it does non-standard things WRT killing processes to save power that means things you might want to allow to keep active¹, that you can allow to remain active on other Android devices, don't work as expected.
[1] Garmin Connect and integration services for other devices, background audio players, and so on.
Xiaomi ships different builds for regions. Some of them might be genuinely ok devices. The problem is you never know what you've got without an audit and some trust. Better just avoid them altogether.
A decade ago people on for example Slashdot used to talk about how they wanted a phone that was ‘just a phone’. That sounds silly these days because people hardly ever use the phone any more, over using various text apps. A phone that just phones would be a useless device to 99.99% of people.
A video showing the censoring at work would be great!
In that case pre-installed and inactive is not much worse...
I would like us to focus on one topic at a time, avoid whataboutism and reduce the fog.
Also, nobody is talking about twitter.
Finally their intent is the same. To control what I say and do. It is only anti US because I don’t want the US to slide down the slippery slope it’s going down, and I’m allowed to be critical of it in hopes it doesn’t end up similar to China.
This makes no sense to me. Can you explain further? May be if lobbyists are trying to lobby for amending the constitution or passsing a censorship law?
I am generally with you about the private corporations censoring when its a monopoly. Google and Apple lobby for making sure they are not appearing as monopolies. The most extreme example would be a hypothetical scenario where your only ISP in the area decides to ban a website. That is effectively censorship. But, as far as I know, that is illegal in US (FCC). These aspects are very different from Chinese censorship which is absolute, very transparently enforced and openly admitted by CCP.
This again? This is just a redo of the Lithuanian story from a few months ago. The blacklist is to prevent advertisements built into the OS from containing certain blacklisted words. It doesn't censor searches.
they've moved to the track and hunt stage.
I am not sure what to make off this. Since I myself repeated this same behavior all the time. And I see no one not even Noam Chomsky showing something that is fundamentally different?
It does, you just need more karma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
I can manufacture much better evidences myself given me enough support from NED RFA Falungong.
Iraq WMD at least have "evidences" from CIA and backed by colin powell. Now a genocide is not backed by evidences from any 3-letter agency, or any US officials.
Use your feet to think about what's going on. You dont even need to engage your brain to smell the ridiculousness behind all these lies.
I am even frustrated by the laziness of the manufacturer. Come on, lies produced before at least passed scrutiny from morons. Now even an animal cannot stand its poor quality.
It should be the accuser to give extraordinary evidences for extraordinary claim. Not the other way around.
One only has to look at how China treats protestors to realize they aren't exactly the most concerned governments when it comes to human rights.
And although reputation and integrity is unredeemable, you would still trust western mainstream media, after outrageous poor news reporting after Iraq, Syria, Assange, etc.
You are just fed with propaganda for your whole life without knowing the inhuman suffering you have been through.
I have not tried to convince you that no one was killed in 1989 06 04, for example 15 PLA soldiers have been killed in the event, 6 of them were directly killed by the protesters. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-some-of-the-protesters.... Have you seen any law enforcement personels get killed in other western democracy? All my memory points to no such reports. Why? Because democracy is law-based, there are laws granting self-defense rights under provocation. But you know why PLA did not do that? Because PLA is the army from the people, for the people, thus its name People's Liberation Army.
Your mind is simply fully of biases and stereotype that truth just does not make sense. Just like a DoS cannot run ELF executable.
Second, the evolution of Xiaomi products is very bad: At the beginning, their smartphones were great because they used a MIUI version that was very 'pure': no crapware, no junk 'preinstalled apps', no call to home, interface that was customizable like you wanted.
In the first place, this is why people were buying the devices compared to Samsung phones with preinstalled and non removable apps like Facebook.
Now that Xiaomi became a leader on the market and has quite an important market share. They completely go the Samsung way with stuffing phones with a lot of junk and sometime deceitful one.