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I’m more interested in the ways you can subvert a nation covertly by adjusting the algorithm. Up weighting/down weighting content that exacerbates a rival nati

• someperson 6y ago
  Delivering content curated by Chinese Communist Party approved algorithms and censorship on what may become a core part of world pop culture is definitely a powerful piece of soft power. It's no exaggeration that any app delivering content to young people several hours a day may one day rival Hollywood in cultural influence. But AirDroid gives you full remote access to your Android device through a web browser. Including messages (reading/sending/receiving), camera (taking photos/videos, and accessing existing photos/videos), and full access to files. It's used widely (even by corporate IT) to transfer files between Android devices and PCs over Wi-Fi. It's a very functional app with remote access to millions of devices, and just like Huawei there are of course a steady stream of major security vulnerabilities. These may be plausible-deniable "bugdoors", or just sloppy practices introducing major vulnerabilities than happen to be exploitable by independent researchers and nation states. The issue is that it's developed by a company based in China and thus very closely linked with the Chinese Communist Party and given what we know about the CCP, it's almost certainly regularly being used by the Ministry of State Security and People's Liberation Army for to exfiltrate specific highly valuable files eg, private messages, VPN and SSH keys. It seems strange there's no debate on banning AirDroid when it poses a far greater immediate threat than TikTok.
• brendawalsh 6y ago
  If you are in the US and have Netflix, watch Ip Man 4 and tell me what you think.