And people wonder why the US has blocked Huawei infrastructure in the US. They have no qualms silencing their own population and invest heavily in surveillance technology. Why would anyone want their equipment?
What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.
The thing I'm starting to get increasingly scared about is what these US companies will do with the data that's already there. A significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with censorship, cancellation, and ostracizing of those who they politically disagree with. One could easily imagine a situation where this intensifies and suddenly political ideologues are analyzing all the voice recordings Alexa ever made in order to out political enemies. Keeping all this data around, in my view, means it will inevitably get misused over a long time scale.
>A significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with censorship, cancellation
This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech.
Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech?
Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument. Instead, you seem to be defining free speech as some narrow window of speech that you agree with and speech outside that isn't worth protecting. Ironically it ends up making your comment a good example of the exact thing you were decrying.
I am specifically worried about the extensiveness of the surveillance and control estate globally should western liberal values lose influence and autocratic control is grandfathered access to these tools of mass oppression. I think the discussion of the present can digress into relevant but distracting political debate, but it’s impossible to assert regardless of your political bent that these tools could be extraordinarily harmful in the hands of some future society.
I don’t see a way out honestly. The tools are too useful and too compelling. Any work done now on differential privacy, E2E, FHE, and other technologies can be easily reverted in a way that’s entirely transparent given the UX people expect. I feel that the rigorous maintenance of rights and freedoms as seen from a western liberal perspective is a very high energy state, and nature and human societies settle into lower energy states intrinsically.
I don’t understand the inclusion of cancellation in this argument. How is cancellation different from boycotting, a right long upheld by the Supreme Court with direct legal ties to freedom of speech?
at least the US has woken up to some degree. Humans are funny in how imagery impacts response to things. China has done trillions in damage to the US economy the past few decades but it wasn't tangible so we did nothing. They've killed far more people then 9/11 via shipping synthetic opioid precursors to Mexico but the response is non-existent. IP theft allowed them to undercut US businesses and destroy them but it's so abstract people don't get worked up into a frenzy over it compared to if they'd literally dropped a bomb on the same business
Russia should have paid attention to how much more effective economic and asymmetric warfare is compared to kinetic warfare
>Russia should have paid attention to how much more effective economic and asymmetric warfare is compared to kinetic warfare
I am 100% sure that Russian state-sponsored trolls are largely responsible for the current state of the "culture war".
Do you remember when Facebook reported how much Russian state actors had spent on disinformation spread on that platform during the Trump presidential campaign? It was of the order of $100,000. Pocket change, to turn the brains of an entire nation into argumentative mush.
I mean, US businesses willingly shipped their operations to China so it’s not really correct to lay all the blame on them. We could have kept our operations here but US business people wanted increased profits so they dismantled our industrial base and paid China to build up theirs.
Correct, but Apple follows US law first and Chinese law second. And Huawei follows Chinese law first and US law second. For example the US could block Apple from selling iPhones in china. If they didn't listen the US government could (theoretically) have the board arrested. Same story with China and Huawei. What this means is that China could tell Huawei to shut down their infrastructure in the US. Wether they would actualy be able to do so is unknown, but that that isn't a risk that makes sense to take.
But to your point, China has more control over Apple than the US does over Huawei as iPhones are assembled there (with most components beinf made in Korea and Taiwan).
> What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction.
Like how a year ago, Apple was going to enable 'client side' CSAM scanning of your devices photos, etc, until enough people got really mad that they put it on a hold?
Wonder what pretext that one is going to slip back in again as.
I figure that was just cover for complying with some government mandate about deleting unacceptable material--I suspect China. They knew they couldn't hide it forever so they came up with a cover story instead.
If this really were the reason Huawei would never have been allowed to operate in the US to begin with and Apple would be banned too - for breaking airdrop on behalf of the CCP.
The anti huawei thing only really kicked off when huawei started dominating key telecoms markets.
When they started kicking out huawei tech they also didn't discriminate between smart (where bugs could easily hide) and dumb tech like aerials (where they couldn't), suggesting that protectionism is at least as much a motive as national security.
> What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.
The stage is already set. Just make sure your suitcase is packed. The craziness won't come from the government, it'll come from this culture's own inherently fascist tendencies
I read some of the threads about the Airdrop changes, and some people argue it actually increases security (for reasons that are above my technical understanding). The fast track to release in China was odd, but I don't think it's super cut and dry that it was at request of Chinese authorities.
I'm amazed by how HN just takes every piece of data at face value and starts reacting to it like it's gospel. News story after news story. This place is no different than Twitter, Youtube comments, etc. It's very sad to watch.
I agree that it would be good to have more than one source for this story, and some independent confirmation. It's true that often these things turn out quite differently than was initially reported, and of course the correction never gets the same coverage.
On the other hand, many true stories also first circulate online in this format.
@dang is there any way the title could be a bit more clear that this is not a settled matter of fact? As it stands now, the submission's title summarizes the tweet and presents it as truth without any caveats, but in fact the tweet itself is simply hearsay ("Chinese social media users report" etc).
I know we're all expected to click through all links and make informed judgments, but like it or not, the title on HN is very powerful in guiding the conversation. Claims like this need an appropriate level of skepticism until corroborated...
Yeah, this is bonkers. At one time I thought the collective HN BS detector was calibrated a bit better, but the willingness to accept this tweet at face value is troublesome. This is similar to the debacle recently where Apple was supposedly scanning for QR codes and opening canary URLs clandestinely, which turned out to be simple user error.
I'm flagging this submission, I encourage everybody to do the same. A tweet suggesting that "some users report" some ambiguous behavior is not news. Perhaps some corroboration will emerge and this tweet will eventually be proven correct, but the onus of proof should always be on those who are making the exceptional claims.
Well, although I tend to agree with the point you are making, in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..
CCP is ruthless and has been repeatedly shown to have no qualms oppressing and killing people and abusing technology in similar ways. So the data point is not far fetched.
It would be good to have this either confirmed or proven false. Until then I find it a perfectly valid discussion.
> in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..
It kind of is a single data point with a vague "users report"
Also, extraordinary claims like this still require more than vague anecdotal proof. If this is on device, can we see the request packet that caused the video to be deleted? Can we see the decompiled code that allows for such a thing to happen?
Right, and the tweet even has the disclaimer "Not sure if it’s from the cloud or device level". If it's deleted from the cloud, which I consider more likely, it has nothing to do with Huawei phones.
Agreed - I think there should be a huge asterisk over the source of data. Twitter reports are not inherently accurate - they need 3rd party verification.
If this is true - it is a concerning but not surprising maneuver.
The author of the tweet is entirely aware she is spreading unproven rumors, just glancing through her articles she's penned it's mostly propaganda pieces meant to support more aggression towards China (note: she does not live in China).
Here's a few choice quotes:
"And then came the laughable claim in Xi’s speech that China does not ‘carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes’"
"The idea that Trump’s ‘China virus’ rhetoric is xenophobic is puzzling. "
Humans are stupid, buddy, it doesn't matter what forum you're on. Same dumb meat sacks, same heuristics, bias, emotions. We're even dumber in groups. Thinking you're smarter than the rest is proof that you're not.
This could be mostly rectified by having a free press in China. Another way to say it - the sole entity that could solve the problem of needing to rely on random internet claims about things happening in China is the Chinese government.
On the other hand, a lot of claims about China that are very easy to disprove - even with limited media freedom - are still widely believed in the West.
I'm thinking of two huge examples from recent times:
* The widespread belief that people in China have social credit scores.
* The belief that zero-CoVID was fake, and that CoVID was actually spreading like crazy in China, but was somehow covered up.
These are claims that can be disproven just by knowing people in China and asking them about their lives. Given how many millions of Chinese people live abroad, how many expats live in China, and how many cross-border connections there are in general, it's crazy that so many people still believe the above theories.
There's very little knowledge about China among the Western public, and there's a strong tendency towards conspiratorial interpretations of everything regarding China.
We are all here reading the comments. There is always at least one comment investigating or questioning the authenticity. I love HN because of that discourse.
With stories like these where I have known bias, I always come to the comments before reading the article.
Wether or not they can actually do this is debatable, but I wouldn't be surprised they did this if they could. I don't immediately accept it, but in terms of technology it seems plausible.
Not just losing the market but losing access to their network of fabricators and suppliers that make the iphone possible at Apple's healthy (to say the least) margins
To be fair, not even the US govt recognizes the Taiwan flag. One could say that Apple it's following US guidance on this.
> the White House deleted a social media post on COVID-19 vaccine donations that included Taiwan's flag. A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called the use of the flag "an honest mistake" by the team handling graphics and social media that should not be viewed as a shift in U.S. policy towards Taipei
Why would Apple say no? They just proved they'll likely say yes by removing airdrop in China, at request of the CCP government, because protesters were using it to pass along info bypassing the internet so it couldn't be censored.
I would not be surprised if this turned out to be yet another of those unverifiable China stories that pop up all the time, but later turn out to be wrong.
Does anyone know how it works between Chinese and US Apple IDs? For example if I FaceTime someone in China or use iMessage with them, is that protected from the Chinese government? Is there any info on this?
I'm skeptical videos are being deleted from the device by Huawei, which the title suggests, until actually proven. More likely is a cloud file storage provider is automatically deleting videos from a server based on some hash/identifier. Similar to how Google/Dropbox can flag copyrighted media.
Apple's "child sexual abuse image" monitoring proposal would do the same thing. Easy enough to implement at the device level--the authorities provide a list of forbidden hashes, any matching file goes away.
Soon we'll have US police departments demanding that phone providers delete pictures of police brutality, or even traffic stops. See this story, where someone was live-streaming a traffic stop so there was no way seizing the phone would lose the data.[1]
They can demand it all they want. The difference is that US law gives companies the legal right to say "no" when it comes to suppressing speech critical of the government.
We already have police in the US do that. Your link shows how they’ll use brute force to stop the evidence from being gathered. They’ll also play copyrighted music in the background so automatic copyright enforcement will delete an uploaded video.
I don't agree with Richard Stallman's political or social views but he was right all along when it came to being wary of software not having the user's best interests in mind.
My sentiments entirely. I think he's batshit crazy in a lot of ways - but one thing he got dead right was that letting companies put chips inside of devices that don't obey the device owner but the still obey the company is a damned terrible idea for freedom.
I've started calling it the "little green man" in the device that only takes orders from the company - not from me.
It's insidious, it's harmful, and it's definitely not limited to Huawei or China - governments and corporations all over the "west" are playing with this power, and we're going to get burned.
He gave a talk at northeastern (acm) in 1999? He’s a very much hard core open source… (thanks for the correction: free software) I think he told someone if their job didn’t include makeing the source code open they should quit. It’s not Linux it’s gnu/Linux..
I still think it’s too far, but we should control our own devices. We’ve lost that.
I’ve started running Linux as my daily driver.. it’s been great. Perfect? No. But pretty excellent.
I think the loss of freedoms Richard Stallman described were very much what was already happening around in with the Lisp environment. He was correct in saying this would be repeated as software ate the world.
So roughly the things he was right about were very hard to prevent. Which is partly why he was right.
the problem is he also have so f**g wrong opinions about so much s*t, but yes when it come to software he was right all the way, that make follow him a mental gymnastics marathon.
RMS foresaw all of this crap happening. This is why his message is probably going to outlive us.
I just wish someone would wade through all the crap he wrote and collect all the actually relevant stuff. All the other weird stuff just takes away from the core message of FOSS
I was speaking to someone at the weekend extolling the virtues of Huawei phones and how cheap they were and "I'm never paying for an iPhone or drinking the kool aid". I pointed out the history and security concerns and was greeted with a pfft and told I was paranoid.
I'm begrudgingly iPhone user. But I keep an exit plan and backups of all data. If only someone else made something that actually worked properly. For now I'm happy to use a West controlled company to run my personal infra. I suspect we're on a downward spiral though.
If you have a iPhone in China you'll find that Apple crippled the air drop functionality that protestors rely upon to communicate. I don't see this action and that one as having much daylight between them frankly.
I'm not a fan of Apple's bowing to China on things like this either but "Limiting AirDrop from 'Everyone' to 10 minutes before you have to turn it on again" and "Deleting pictures from user's phones" are quite different.
Completely missed that. What a cluster of assholes. Guess I should start thinking about the inevitable exodus. The CSAM scanning thing was the first strike off.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle between the extremes you posed? Both vendors only lease your device to you; it's ultimately under their control. There's a big open android world in between the Apple and Huawei ecosystems.
You can back up your data from Huawei phones, too. Apple had plans to scan the photos on your phone and automatically report you to the police if the algorithm thinks something is off. I wouldn't trust them at all.
I haven't ever heard of any concrete security issues with Huawei phones.
Huawei has been under extremely strict scrutiny for years (and even got hacked by the NSA, as Snowden's documents revealed), so the fact that nothing has ever stuck makes me think there really is nothing there.
As for this story, color me skeptical until some actual details come out.
Wow, this sounds like a very concrete reason to not buy any Chinese electronics as long as the CCP is in power. I assumed Chinese electronics was likely to spy on you, but there was some uncertainty in whether it actually happened. If this is true, then for pure self-protection individuals, companies, and governments pretty much need avoid any Chinese electronics with a network connection.
It is never too late to start. Regardless of the CCP, we’ve witnessed the over reliance on a singular country for hardware and its supply chain impacts. It is time to diversify.
Readit News
What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.
This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech.
Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech?
Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument. Instead, you seem to be defining free speech as some narrow window of speech that you agree with and speech outside that isn't worth protecting. Ironically it ends up making your comment a good example of the exact thing you were decrying.
I don’t see a way out honestly. The tools are too useful and too compelling. Any work done now on differential privacy, E2E, FHE, and other technologies can be easily reverted in a way that’s entirely transparent given the UX people expect. I feel that the rigorous maintenance of rights and freedoms as seen from a western liberal perspective is a very high energy state, and nature and human societies settle into lower energy states intrinsically.
Russia should have paid attention to how much more effective economic and asymmetric warfare is compared to kinetic warfare
I am 100% sure that Russian state-sponsored trolls are largely responsible for the current state of the "culture war".
Do you remember when Facebook reported how much Russian state actors had spent on disinformation spread on that platform during the Trump presidential campaign? It was of the order of $100,000. Pocket change, to turn the brains of an entire nation into argumentative mush.
This is the end result.
Yes it is. Think advertising, marketing, and product placement. It's so pervasive you can't even see it.
> Yes it is. Think advertising, marketing, and product placement. It's so pervasive you can't even see it.
But that's not the state. That'd be much more frightening.
If they do delete, then at least they only do that in China, and they treat other jurisdictions differently.
Correct, that twitter thread is only about Chinese people living in China.
"If they do have slave labor, then at least they only do that in China, and they treat other jurisdictions differently."
Good to know if that if something is bad, but doesn't affect you personally, it is suddenly no longer bad.
But to your point, China has more control over Apple than the US does over Huawei as iPhones are assembled there (with most components beinf made in Korea and Taiwan).
yeah, rhetorical question, but the issue here isn't necessarily adherence to local laws, but rather having some principled stance.
yeah, I'm hearing it, "principled stance"... one can dream
Wonder what pretext that one is going to slip back in again as.
Why is that? Culture, mores, and politics shape how power is used. What makes authoritarianism inevitable?
On one hand power begets power, on the other hand people are easily scared and readily convince themselves of the worst possible explanation.
The anti huawei thing only really kicked off when huawei started dominating key telecoms markets.
When they started kicking out huawei tech they also didn't discriminate between smart (where bugs could easily hide) and dumb tech like aerials (where they couldn't), suggesting that protectionism is at least as much a motive as national security.
The stage is already set. Just make sure your suitcase is packed. The craziness won't come from the government, it'll come from this culture's own inherently fascist tendencies
I agree. I don't know how the US can allow Apple products if they're willing to shut down Airdrop to suppress Chinese protests.
> They have no qualms silencing their own population and invest heavily in surveillance technology. Why would anyone want their equipment?
Yes, but enough about the US, we're talking about China.
On the other hand, many true stories also first circulate online in this format.
I know we're all expected to click through all links and make informed judgments, but like it or not, the title on HN is very powerful in guiding the conversation. Claims like this need an appropriate level of skepticism until corroborated...
I'm flagging this submission, I encourage everybody to do the same. A tweet suggesting that "some users report" some ambiguous behavior is not news. Perhaps some corroboration will emerge and this tweet will eventually be proven correct, but the onus of proof should always be on those who are making the exceptional claims.
CCP is ruthless and has been repeatedly shown to have no qualms oppressing and killing people and abusing technology in similar ways. So the data point is not far fetched.
It would be good to have this either confirmed or proven false. Until then I find it a perfectly valid discussion.
$0.02
It kind of is a single data point with a vague "users report"
Also, extraordinary claims like this still require more than vague anecdotal proof. If this is on device, can we see the request packet that caused the video to be deleted? Can we see the decompiled code that allows for such a thing to happen?
Dead Comment
If this is true - it is a concerning but not surprising maneuver.
Here's a few choice quotes:
"And then came the laughable claim in Xi’s speech that China does not ‘carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes’"
"The idea that Trump’s ‘China virus’ rhetoric is xenophobic is puzzling. "
I'm thinking of two huge examples from recent times:
* The widespread belief that people in China have social credit scores.
* The belief that zero-CoVID was fake, and that CoVID was actually spreading like crazy in China, but was somehow covered up.
These are claims that can be disproven just by knowing people in China and asking them about their lives. Given how many millions of Chinese people live abroad, how many expats live in China, and how many cross-border connections there are in general, it's crazy that so many people still believe the above theories.
There's very little knowledge about China among the Western public, and there's a strong tendency towards conspiratorial interpretations of everything regarding China.
This should be mostly rectified by asking a ramdon Huawei phone user in China.
With stories like these where I have known bias, I always come to the comments before reading the article.
If this is happening, I hope Apple says no to the CCP when they inevitably ask Apple to do the same.
Could Apple use that new CSAM-hash-comparison feature to accomplish something similar?
EDIT:
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
Nevermind - it looks to me like this mechanism is just for letting Apple know if they should pop open an encrypted image stored on their Cloud.
In the case of China, they should already be able to do that with impunity since they control the regional iCloud and keys
EDIT 2:
I'd also not be surprised if this was false however - I don't own a Huawei phone and I'm not located in China, so I can't verify this at all.
Apple will do whatever the CCP tells them to do because they are not willing to lose a market of a billion+ potential customers.
Companies have no problem being complicit in enabling authoritarianism as long as it's profitable.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20903613/apple-hiding-tai...
> the White House deleted a social media post on COVID-19 vaccine donations that included Taiwan's flag. A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called the use of the flag "an honest mistake" by the team handling graphics and social media that should not be viewed as a shift in U.S. policy towards Taipei
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-asks-us-no...
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-restricted-airdrop-cap...
Yes, that was why there was an uproar. If any hash is deemed bad, that could be of anything.
What’s even easier than that?
- Was this video taken within a geofenced area between these times?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/apple-limited-a-crucial-aird...
Only if the video is previously known, as far as I'm aware.
Deleted Comment
Apple gladly does whatever the CCP asks of them
EDIT:
Yeah looks to be on-device (page 4): https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/apple-refuses-barr-request-t...
Dead Comment
Soon we'll have US police departments demanding that phone providers delete pictures of police brutality, or even traffic stops. See this story, where someone was live-streaming a traffic stop so there was no way seizing the phone would lose the data.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/29/livestrea...
I've started calling it the "little green man" in the device that only takes orders from the company - not from me.
It's insidious, it's harmful, and it's definitely not limited to Huawei or China - governments and corporations all over the "west" are playing with this power, and we're going to get burned.
Seems more sane than the average person from what I've seen.
No tethering by the vendor.
I still think it’s too far, but we should control our own devices. We’ve lost that.
I’ve started running Linux as my daily driver.. it’s been great. Perfect? No. But pretty excellent.
I think the loss of freedoms Richard Stallman described were very much what was already happening around in with the Lisp environment. He was correct in saying this would be repeated as software ate the world.
So roughly the things he was right about were very hard to prevent. Which is partly why he was right.
1. Tweets about Ukraine have radically decreased 2. Elon posts increase even when you don't follow him.
I'm not saying it's intentional. It just shows the power of algorithms. They dictate what is and what is not news. Even small tweaks matter.
Most people I follow have either stopped tweeting, or largely tweet about Elon. Even popular YouTubers I follow can’t shut up about twitter/Elon.
Maybe I’m providing your point by not seeing non-twitter tweets but it feels like Elon starved twitter of real discourse.
I think this shows the power of fads, not algorithms.
I just wish someone would wade through all the crap he wrote and collect all the actually relevant stuff. All the other weird stuff just takes away from the core message of FOSS
Deleted Comment
I'm begrudgingly iPhone user. But I keep an exit plan and backups of all data. If only someone else made something that actually worked properly. For now I'm happy to use a West controlled company to run my personal infra. I suspect we're on a downward spiral though.
I'd rather they resurrected windows phone.
Huawei has been under extremely strict scrutiny for years (and even got hacked by the NSA, as Snowden's documents revealed), so the fact that nothing has ever stuck makes me think there really is nothing there.
As for this story, color me skeptical until some actual details come out.