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Though I believe Apple bowed to China to give them access to Chinese citizen's iCloud data. But you can operate an iPhone without iCloud fairly easily, which i
by kyrra 8y ago
Though I believe Apple bowed to China to give them access to Chinese citizen's iCloud data. But you can operate an iPhone without iCloud fairly easily, which is definitely nice. Doing more on-device helps them here.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud-china-user-data-state-run-telecom-privacy-security https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud-chi...
- Rjevski 8y agoCan’t you just select US sad your country when setting up the iCloud account and use a VPN? Or are Chinese devices different at the hardware level and only allow connecting to the Chinese (compromised) iCloud?
- btian 8y agoVPNs in China get blocked all the time.
- torstenvl 8y agoEven private VPNs? I'm not that smart about networking but it seems like it would be difficult to distinguish an SSL/TLS connection to your DigitalOcean server because you're doing normal stuff and one where you're tunneling HTTPS through it.
- selectodude 8y agoTheir deep packet inspection tech is very very good.
- viraptor 8y agoIt's not hard to distinguish a VPN connection by behaviour pattern really. Some simple features to detect: Both small packets and maxing out the window size in one stream. Lack of DNS queries from the host. Single connection dominating the bandwidth. There's a reason for all of those of course, but put them together on a residential connection: almost certainly a VPN user. And these are all really simple heuristics. In practice, we know you can identify which Netflix video are you watching just by the packet sizes/timing.
- earenndil 8y agoThere was a post recently about how someone was able to set up his own vpn which bypassed it. Something about the server padding out its response with garbage data?
- teknologist 8y agoYou are still piping all of your traffic through one server. This would not look like a regular usage pattern by any means.
- chatmasta 8y agoYou need a payment method with a billing address in the country.
- Rjevski 8y agoI believe there are tricks you can use to bypass that (attempting to download a free app?).
- ksec 8y agoWhich is why I have been crying for an iOS Time Capsule. I don't want to touch iTunes and do computer backup, that is like a very geeky way do it and most people in China don't even have Laptop or Desktop. If they can make Dual Sim and other features targeting the Chinese market; Apple's second biggest market, why cant they make Time Capsule specifically for China. ( Making it China only will likely piss off the Chinese Government. They could release it worldwide to avoid this.)
- radicaldreamer 8y agoThere is an iPhone Time Capsule... it's called iTunes and it has support full, encrypted device backups via home Wifi for years...
- randomdata 8y ago"I don't want to touch iTunes and do computer backup, that is like a very geeky way do it"
- radicaldreamer 8y agoOops :(
- plussed_reader 8y agoThey have iCloud for that.
- mattnewton 8y agoRight, and that’s back-doored by the Chinese government (in China). So neither fits gp’s desired featureset of local & frictionless.
- raydev 8y agoEvidence of back door?
- snaky 8y ago> an iPhone without iCloud Would it send less telemetry data to Apple?
- andrewhn 8y agothey did isolate the chinese icloud from the rest of the world, so whatever I guess.
- abalone 8y agoAlso several of the iCloud services are E2E encrypted and designed to withstand adversarial clouds. They talked about it at Blackhat.[1] Doesn't help things like mail or photos, of course, but it is extremely notable in the China context for one big reason: it does E2E encrypt messages. WhatsApp was banned from China when they implemented this. Apple stands out in this way... although they're probably getting away with it because most Chinese don't use Apple Messages. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U
- mtgx 8y agoYeah but even if they use e2e, which btw was found to be flawed at the protocol design level by prof. Matthew Greene and his team, they also automatically back-up the messages to iCloud with no way to disable that without disabling the whole of icloud. It would sure be nice if they changed that.
- mediocrejoker 8y agoCan you elaborate on what you mean by "e2e was found to be flawed"? Is the paper available online?
- coolspot 8y agoCommenter probably meant this research[0]. [0] - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-of-week-apple-imessage/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-o...
- threeseed 8y agoThere is the option in Settings to disable storing Messages and Backups in iCloud.
- sneak 8y ago...which does not affect the storing of Messages in device backups into iCloud.
- kodablah 8y agoWithout a public statement even saying they disagree with it, which seems to go against their pro-privacy principles and goes against what they've done in other government-based privacy disagreements they've had. I wish they'd make actions against their principles more transparent lest people think it's just lip service they are paying to the masses.
- 2muchcoffeeman 8y agoI have Apple and Android phones. I have a specific google account for my Android phones specifically because you can’t do anything on an Android without logging in. iPhones still work as phones just without cloud storage.
- drampelt 8y agoMaybe I'm missing something here but what can't you do on Android without logging in (other than Google services of course)? You can download apps to do pretty much anything you want without even touching the Play Store, as far as I'm aware you need an iCloud account to download any apps on an iPhone.
- SpaceGorilla 8y agoYea, not sure what he's talking about. You can choose not to sign into Google and use the web browser to install either fdroid or Aurora as the app store. Pretty sure you need to sign into iTunes to use the apple app store and cannot install any ipa?'s.