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Hong Kong’s protesters use AirDrop to spread information to mainland visitors
- wyc 7y agois there any open source alternative to firechat (https://www.opengarden.com/firechat/ https://www.opengarden.com/firechat/), which seems to now require internet account creation prior to use? something imbued with cryptography that communicates purely via local peer discovery/hopping such as wifi/bluetooth/optical signaling, etc.
- lukewrites 7y agoThis is one of the edge cases that makes me dislike Apple's walled garden. The Chinese gvt can simply request that Apple remove firechat and other decentralized chat apps from the App Store and that's that.
- r3drock 7y agoThere is briar.
- xgulfie 7y agoManyverse (built on Secure Scuttlebutt: https://manyver.se https://manyver.se) works over Bluetooth, WAN and WLAN, does not support direct messaging yet though.
- baybal2 7y agoI remember getting bluetooth spam in Chinese malls like 10 years ago. Used to be near impossible to walk around with bluetooth on, then the popularity of Android and Iphone (both of which don't support obex or obex ftp) quickly drove popularity of spam devices to nil
- baybal2 7y agoI knew a Panasonic guy who worked in Shenzhen. He worked on their Android phones. I recall he was complaining how Google was vehemently opposed to any kind of "mainlining" IrDA support in Android. He says that Google was ok to support a semistandard API for IrDA just for the Japanese market under agreement that Panasonic would not market such phones outside Japan. Panasonic laobans scratched their heads for a minute, and sput on that request, deciding to move with their own, self supported APIs.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoAnd why did Google oppose it?
- baybal2 7y agoThat's a mystery. Maybe because of the same reason they axed obex
- cesarb 7y agoAndroid has something similar (Nearby Notifications), which AFAIK uses BLE beacons (Eddystone). I saw one once at a nearby shopping mall, when I turned on Bluetooth just to see what's there (I normally keep Bluetooth disabled).
- freedomben 7y agoWorth mentioning in case anyone in HongKong or China needs it: Streisand can help you set up a VPN to avoid censoring[1] https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
- umvi 7y agoIsn't naming an anti censorship tool "streisand" similar to naming an anti-facism tool "hitler"?
- smrq 7y agoOnly if Hitler had tried but failed at fascism and inadvertently made people more free instead.
- umvi 7y agoI mean... Hitler did fail in the end. Germany is certainly more free post Hitler than it was pre Hitler
- fao_ 7y ago> Hitler did fail in the end. And yet Nazi flags fly in America, 50 years later. There was even a fascist parade in a prominent city in the last week. (https://twitter.com/_SJPeace_/status/1137466984168329216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/_SJPeace_/status/1137466984168329216?ref...)
- filoleg 7y agoNot really. Streisand Effect is defined as "a phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely."[0], so it seems to fit perfectly 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
- umvi 7y ago
- Taniwha 7y agoUm, Hong Kong is OUTSIDE the Chinese firewall (for now) More likely they are doing this to preserve anonymity
- ppseafield 7y agoThe article says it's to share news with tourists in HK, who would have previously been behind the firewall. > But news of the protest has been heavily censored in mainland China, with any mention of the mass movement wiped off the Chinese internet. > Hong Kong’s protesters have therefore turned to Apple’s AirDrop feature to get their message across to their mainland Chinese compatriots. That the messages are written in simplified Chinese—Hong Kongers use traditional Chinese—confirm that the intended audience is Chinese tourists.
- burkaman 7y agoThis is about protesters subverting the purpose of the firewall, not a technical loophole. Tourists from mainland China might not know about the protests, because of the firewall. Protestors are using AirDrop to directly deliver photos and information to the tourists, which is probably much more effective than physical posters that people can ignore or rip down.
- z2 7y agoQuestion--could a directional wifi antenna be used (plus amplification) to AirDrop things from HK across the border into Shenzhen? On that note, I stayed at an international hotel chain on the Shenzhen side's border that had terribly slow but unfiltered internet. Google.com auto-redirected to Google.hk. I always wondered if they used a VPN or maintained a covert internet beam from across the river... EDIT: Derp--another comment already posted this question.
- dylz 7y agoIf it's an international chain they likely have VPN set up at the edge, and have licences allowing their VPN connection filed with the party
- 7y ago
- olalonde 7y agoSeems like a click bait article, there's no China firewall in Hong Kong and plenty of free Wifi spots.
- dang 7y agoOk, we've taken the firewall out of the title above.
- lukewrites 7y ago"Hong Kong's protesters use AirDrop" seems a drastic redaction. It would be helpful to know _what_ they're using AirDrop for. How about "Hong Kong's protesters use AirDrop to spread their message to Mainland tourists"? "Hong Kong's protesters use AirDrop to inform tourists why they protest"?
- dang 7y agoOk, we've added an extra phrase from the main text that conveys this.
- lukewrites 7y agoThanks, appreciate you taking the time! :)
- philplckthun 7y agoFWIW the “Great Firewall of China” is indeed the technical implementation of itself, but he also become synonymous with government censorship in China in general. Just because mainland citizens leave the country does not mean that they leave behind the lasting influence of that censorship, especially since the most-used apps from China, like WeChat remain filtered and censored, so I think the title is quite a fair summary and not just click bait.
- verst 7y agoHow does mobile roaming for mainland Chinese visiting HK work? Are they put on a different VNET which still experiences censorship? After all HK phone providers could have secret agreements to enforce the GFW filtering (redirect traffic through China etc) for Chinese citizens. When I visit mainland China on my T-Mobile roaming plan I am on some sort of separate subnet that is uncensored and I can continue to access services I cannot use with a China SIM card.
- orblivion 7y agoWhat about airdropping across the river to Shenzhen? For that matter, what about setting up Gotennas for some communication?
- escapecharacter 7y agoWould love to see drone usage for sly data transfer here.
- zoom6628 7y agoNothing sly about drones - the area around the river is open on both sides, especially the HK side which is grass for easy observation of people trying to cross illegally (setup decades ago). More sly would be people using OpenGarden to create a community linked by across the 'air gap' of river by powerful hubs on HK side and SZ side. That might actually work.
- pshc 7y agoNo idea if this is practical, but I wonder people living on either side of the river could set up some kind of laser-based point-to-point pipe that would be nearly undetectable unless you knew exactly where it was?
- derrick_jensen 7y agoit might be easier to have some sort of point to point packet radio setup. Wouldn't be as fast, but would probably be more reliable and the infrastructure/tooling is already in place to do this.
- woah 7y agoThere is, of course, a wide range of commercially available wireless ISP hardware, most of it made right there in China. It would be easy to set up many gigabit links. But it’s very easy to detect and home in on radios and the government wouldn’t take kindly to it. Lasers have the advantage that they are hard to detect if you’re not in the beam.
- scilro 7y agoThis reminds me of people who say that we can free North Koreans by (physically) airdropping tapes and books on Pyongyang - surely the only reason they support their government is because they're heavily censored, once they see the truth they'll rise up in arms! It's a narrative that's somewhat condescending. It makes it seem like all these people are just being held hostage by their governments. The reality is that people in China or North Korea are like people everywhere else -- either they're deeply uninterested in politics, or they are, in which case they probably have a more sophisticated view of these issues than assumed. Some information freely available via VPN isn't going to change anyone's mind.
- theothermkn 7y agoI think the real reason that airdropping information into North Korea won't help is that it's a slave state held hostage by a ruling family that secures aid for itself with the threat of nuclear Armageddon and the immediate shelling of Seoul. But this is also the reason that the sophistication or lack thereof of their political belief systems is irrelevant: These are not participatory governments. I would highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith for a reset of one's political expectations, especially for countries with resource extraction economies. The mechanics of selectorate theory can be very, very brutal.
- 420codebro 7y agoHaving a tenancy to send an entire family (and future generations) to a forced labor camp for trivial "violations" tends to make people STFU. I have no doubt that people in North Korea know there is an outside world that is a little less fucked up. Do they (at an individual level) have an empowerment to enact change? Lol that's a good one.
- Forge36 7y agoI mean, we do physically drop in banned media. https://www.google.com/amp/s/gizmodo.com/how-one-group-is-infiltrating-north-korea-with-usb-driv-1502225423/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/gizmodo.com/how-one-group-is-in... Information spreads. Some people defect. Whether this effort helps is hard to measure. That it's succeeding shows many people are interested and change is possible/desired.
- burtonator 7y agoThis is fascinating. I actually started writing a scifi novel about zombies that had something similar called ripple. The state wasn't talking about the outbreak but the videos spread through ripple and people were freaked out.
- burtonator 7y agoActually.. I was wrong. I called it 'Cast' and it was just a small part of the book. I wrote it back in 2013 but never published it. .... The government tried to prevent the mainstream media from showing the pictures but with the Internet this was impossible. At least until the Internet fell... It was still all over Cast though. It was encrypted, onion routed, wireless, and distributed. Cast eventually destroyed all the social networks like Facebook and Twitter and left then in the dust like so many Friendsters. Pictures and videos of small outbreaks spread over Cast like ripples in a vast pond. Except these were more like information tsunamis. They just kept coming. You would bump a video and send it to your friends only to find another video a few moments later. Something was happening and we all knew. You don't expect the speed at first. You can't outrun them. My theory is that the virus evolved to spread through accelerated replication. A long life is not a problem so burning out the body isn't an issue. When a virus first mutates into an effective form, and the host population is extensive, it’s usually fatal. The only goal of a virus is replication. If it kills the host but can replicate faster then that’s the strategy that will be selected. Especially when there are plenty of hosts. And that was the problem with humanity. There are billions of people on the Earth. Most of which live in the cities. None of which have any immunity to H. Evolution is a bitch.
- burtonator 7y agobtw.. maybe this is a solution to the firewall... Just create a super cheap wifi device that has 64-256GB of storage and you can leave it 'open' so that people could use it as file storage caches. Maybe some sort of web of trust to validate things like binary file integrity otherwise the state could inject malware.
- xster 7y agoThat just centralizes and adds more vulnerability to the person who bought the device (vs something more ephemeral and software based where you have more plausible deniability).
- xster 7y agoI think they're all valid points worth debating but wrt this article's framing, the contents of the AirDrop don't seem to have anything to do with the Hong Kong protests. Infant milk powder, train ticket score etc could just as well be in random Falun Gong pamphlets you get in Chinatowns abroad. At this point, I'm not even sure the protest (communist black helicopters will come pick you up to CCP black sites where you'll get waterboarded for criticizing China) has anything to with the thing being protested (extradition for crimes punishable under HK laws with 7+ years in prison (which criticizing China hopefully is not)), but that's a different story.
- lnanek2 7y agoLast article I read said the mainland had a 99% conviction rate. Anyone going over there isn't getting a fair trial. They'll just be canned and counted as some official's crime fighting spree no matter if they did it or not or whatever political purpose their bodies can be put to.
- xster 7y agoThe mainland conviction rate doesn't matter. It's about the HK criminal laws and whether the case in question was sentenced a 7 year prison term under HK law before extradition is even in question (if it's simultaneously a crime under the target country's law).
- yskchu 7y agoHigh conviction rate is not something unique to China - Canada and Japan are also at 97% and 99% respectively https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate
- Engineering-MD 7y agoThe difference is the conviction rate in China is over 10 times higher than that at 99.9% [1,2] and thought to be driven by political interference/corruption rather than only targeting high yield cases. Bear in mind the context of china’s top court rejecting the notion of an independent judiciary [3], it is clear there is a difference between a high conviction rate in these countries and China. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/11/china-scored-99-9-percent-conviction-rate-last-year/?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/1... [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/12193202/Chinese-courts-convict-more-than-99.9-per-cent-of-defendants.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/121932... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/chinas-top-court-rejects-judicial-independence-as-erroneous-thought https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/chinas-top-cou...
- kccqzy 7y agoI still don't understand why the use of AirDrop is necessary. These Chinese tourists have already crossed into Hong Kong, a land that currently enjoys freedom of speech. Why aren't traditional methods like banners or brochures or flyers be distributed to tourists from the mainland? Is AirDrop faster and more effective?
- ximeng 7y agoNot everyone picks up fliers. They're also not anonymous.
- shane369 7y agoTo be honest most of us in China don't believe in the protesters value. And we think the protesters should be punished. The censorship is actually a good thing for HongKong. If Chinese public sees what's going on, most likely it will just hurt Hong Kong. Business will start to cut ties with HK, no more shopping, public anger towards HK people...etc. The young good citizens of HK simply don't know what they are tampering with.
- clubm8 7y agoI see several people discussing VPNs in the comments, but I'm surprised no one is mentioning Tor. Is Tor identified and blocked reliably by the great firewall, even with bridges? (The Tor UI claims meek-azure works in China, is this not accurate?)
- Kliment 7y agoTor is identified and blocked reliably, whether using bridges, relays, or anything else.
- cronix 7y agoCurious if China will demand that feature be removed from the Chinese version of iOS now.
- gdfiutyer 7y agoI don’t think they will, but as a security concern, maybe have receiving content set to “Contacts Only” by default.
- carapace 7y agoIn addition to fake news problem, real news problem.
- Lucadg 7y agoThis is fascinating and scary at the same time. As we slide in a surveillance global system too busy to notice, Hong Kong is showing us the possible future of Western societies. Maybe time to cancel extradition agreements with the US?
- tempguy9999 7y agoThe only way to change things is to fight back legally. I've done so and if I'm pretty much the only one to bother the government or the press then nothing will happen. My absolute frustration, and reason I'm close to giving up, is I see people posting warning of bad things to come, politically, ecologically, technically, but they do nothing. One person alone usually can't change much. A few can but even getting a few to do anything is nearly impossible. If everyone just wrote a single letter a year to their mp/representative/whatever, even just phoned up a business about excessive packaging, things would start to move. It's in your hands basically.
- moonhorse 7y agoThe reality is that mainlanders want prosperity and stability over democracy. Unless protesters could prove there is a better way to bring prosperity, the propaganda efforts would be futile. It is not 1980s any more. VPN would not help. I learnt about what happened to Tiananmen Square, but I also learnt there is CIA agents behind a lot of these incidences. Real world is complicated. Politics is pragmatic. I do hope different countries could put their trifles aside and focus on the big picture as a specie. But it will be a long way. Too much pride, too much at stake. Power struggle is too deep in our genes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Arn_Thor 7y agoWould millions of minority citizens interned in "re-education" camps count as "trifles" in your estimation? Because a lot of people internationally are not fans of that, and it's hardly a matter of pride or power struggle. It's an authoritarian government mistreating its citizens without due cause. That's exactly what HK people are trying to prevent happening to them... The old guard, many immigrated from the mainland, strive to one day democratize China. Hong Kong's youngsters say "screw that, let them keep their dictatorship, we just want to be left alone with the freedoms we've got"
- moonhorse 7y agoI fully understand your hatred towards the Chinese government. I want to point out what I believe is the root cause. It has nothing to do with communism. Chinese has a deep rooted culture of long range thinking (think "Sun Tzu"). It has always been willing to sacrifice piece for the whole, sacrifice short term for the long term. We read those historical stories as we grow up. It is very scary at times, especially when you end up at the wrong side of the table and you are being sacrificed. This moral code probably is very different from yours. From your perspective, what happens in Xinjiang is severe violation of human rights; from those top guys' perspective, this is sacrificing the freedom of a minority for the stability and prosperity of a whole people. I am not saying I approve this policy as I certainly do not want to be those interned. And you might argue that this "long range thinking" is really servicing communism party's self interest. But your response demonstrates that the chasm is deep. And the chasm is on a cultural level and wont bridge easily. What this trade war scares me the most is also related with this chasm - it is just so hard to transcend cultures and reach slightest bit of mutual understanding. For a while west thinks China could turn, but now it is really starting to realize there is fundamental difference. It is very scary to me. Like most people on this forum, I do not want to see any escalation in any form of conflict. I just want a peaceful globe and we could continue do our thing that occasionally crosses border. And speaking of this Hong Kong protest, many Hong Kong friends disapprove it. I read WSj every day and there is no mentioning of what a normal Hong Kong resident think of it. In the end, what do you expect a 18 year old high school protester to understand in regards to what "democracy" mean? At that age, we easily aggrandize our self-righteousness and self-importance and are easily influenced. It is a matter of age. I think fundamentally what is driving such grievance is that Hong Kong is no longer as important as before. And younger generation see no hope. But this is simply inevitable capitalistic evolution. Smart young Hong Kong natives are now looking for opportunities in Beijing. This is the future and we have to embrace it.
- yy77 7y agoairdrop is actually like a security hole when Apple set "open to everyone" by default. There are already quite some cases using it to send * photos as sex harassment. Apple should set default to "only contacts".
- neilalexander 7y agoI'm pretty sure it defaults to contacts-only by default. At least it did on my devices bought in the UK.