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The interesting bit to me: If you load the app with content before entering China, when you are in China the app won't open. It seems to be deactivated if your
by bigethan 11y ago
The interesting bit to me: If you load the app with content before entering China, when you are in China the app won't open. It seems to be deactivated if your phone connects to any Chinese cell tower. This seems to be a bit heavy handed, particularly for Apple, but also doesn't feel terribly surprising.
Also, the article seems to be based on some Reddit posts and no actual fact checking, so the quality of the journalism here is pretty low for the NY Times. I'd expect they could check with some of their staff in China rather than write "it appears" and use an anonymous source.
- yeldarb 11y agoI think it's actually using location services (GPS+wifi triangulation) to determine where you are rather than traditional server-side inference from IP address. I'm on vacation in China right now and did some experimentation and even if I have my VPN connected the app still says it's not supported in this region.
- vbezhenar 11y agoChina is an exception here. I live in Kazakhstan, News app is not available here. But I just set my region to US and I have working News app without any problems.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoI reason it's a preëmptive block so China won't try to block the servers to prevent Chinese users pretending to be U.S. users and reading US news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384070 This would be consistent with that hypothesis.
- interpol_p 11y agoIt almost feels like lazy edge-case coding instead of intentional censorship of on-device data. Like someone didn't reason about how to handle local data when shifting regions, and the app is just behaving in a way consistent with how it locks down information per region.
- rtpg 11y agoI don't know if the Times has any full-time reporters left in China, what with the visa refusals a while back