10 ms·

Xiaomi cellphones can censor searches: NCC

164 points by brimnes 5y ago

FpUser 5y ago
I have Xiaomi. I doubt it can "censor" me as the only time my phone connects to internet is to download map updates to OsmAnd offline navigation software. The rest of the time it functions as just a phone. I do not even have data plan. I have another spare phone where I keep software that controls my various gadgets like drone etc.
- daxuak 5y ago
  One short technical description I've read said that it's a built-in filter thing (local database that only updates occassionally) and you won't see a lot of internet traffic related to the censorship. Xiaomi ships different builds for regions. Some of them might be genuinely ok devices. The problem is you never know what you've got without an audit and some trust. Better just avoid them altogether.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    You do not get something. It can not "censor" me because I do not use it online at all. They can put any spyware they want. It just won't matter in my case. I use my PC for online acvtivities. The phone is off the Internet.
    - daxuak 5y ago
      I'm afraid that is not a common case for Xiaome's customer base.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > The rest of the time it functions as just a phone. A decade ago people on for example Slashdot used to talk about how they wanted a phone that was ‘just a phone’. That sounds silly these days because people hardly ever use the phone any more, over using various text apps. A phone that just phones would be a useless device to 99.99% of people.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    I understand but I do not give a flying fuck about what 90% or whatever is thinking about the subject. It is useful for me and that is all that matters to me. The others can and do make their own choices.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Lol so why post on a thread about how it impacts others if you don’t care and it doesn’t impact you? Why are you here?
iqanq 5y ago
- financetechbro 5y ago
  Because China is well know for keeping their censorship within their borders. Right?
  - iqanq 5y ago
    They can't tell other governments to censor anything, so yes? If they have a product that censors things that you need to access then don't buy it.
    - daxuak 5y ago
      imo the whole point of this article was that China silently exports tampered devices to Taiwan. Implication is that this might have happened to not only Taiwan, unless we have trustworthy audits.
    - Baeocystin 5y ago
      >They can't tell other governments to censor anything, so yes? The CCP can and do actively control what the international community says as much as possible, and they have enough money to make the changes happen. If you don't think so, look what happens in public discussions (or even mentions!) on/of Taiwan.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        Also: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/business/china-internet-police-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/business/china-internet-p... > A Digital Manhunt: How Chinese Police Track Critics on Twitter and Facebook > Authorities in China have turned to sophisticated investigative software to track and silence obscure critics on overseas social media. Their targets include college students and non-Chinese nationals. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/china-facebook-twitter-influence-manipulation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/ch...: > Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter > ...The authorities used a phrase common among China’s internet police that refers to tracking down the actual person behind a social media account: “touching the ground.” > With growing frequency, the country’s internet police have hunted down and threatened internet users who voice their opinions. At first, its agents focused on local social media platforms. In 2018, they began a new campaign to detain users of Twitter inside China — account owners who had found ways around the government’s blocks — and force them to delete their accounts. > Now, the campaign has extended to Chinese citizens who live outside of China. The document spells out how the Shanghai police want to discover the identities of people behind certain accounts and to trace their users’ connections to the mainland. Its officers can then threaten family members in China or detain the account holders when they return to the country in order to compel online critics to delete posts or even entire accounts. It's worth calling out that later article analyzes a "request for bids" by the local Shanghai police, so I don't think it should be read to imply limits on what the Chinese government does, since the scope of a local police force would be limited to stuff that intersects with their jurisdiction.
absoluteharam 5y ago
every phone is chatty, unless you have a pi-hole equivalent when you're not on your secured home network, there's a lot of data being exchanged with every manufacturer. they've moved to the track and hunt stage.
- Incipient 5y ago
  True, but phoning home for telemetry to make better devices and out-compete the market is not great, but phoning home to censor and repress discussion on human rights violations is all together evil.
underscore_ku 5y ago
don't buy Chinese phones...
- benbristow 5y ago
  * Chinese branded phones
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    What is the difference? To not buy branded Chinese phones seems just protectionism and has little to do with security. I have nothing against wanting to protect and industry, but it should not be done with misconceptions.
    - erulabs 5y ago
      I would guess the implication is that almost all phones are built in China. So "Chinese cellphones" is a curious term - "Cellphones designed by Chinese firms" and "Cellphones manufactured in China" are wildly different circles in the venn diagram of mobiles.
      - nicce 5y ago
        Only Chinese cellphone design companies have a meaningful direct responsibily for Chinese government, which makes the difference. Manufacturers have resposibility too, but if they manufacture something else than intended, it will stop quite quickly.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > What is the difference? To not buy branded Chinese phones seems just protectionism and has little to do with security. How does "protectionism" have anything to do with this? It's weird to inject that economic framing into a question about what kind of policies you want to be subject to, and who you want to be setting those policies.
- duxup 5y ago
  At this point I’m averse to anything from non free nations. I’ve started to take that into account when shopping. That’s not a criticism of the individuals there, just a recognition of the conditions. Admittedly that’s not any easy thing to define all the time.
Canada 5y ago
Technical details please.
- yorwba 5y ago
  Probably haven't changed since three months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683
dschuetz 5y ago
Google does that also, for the profanities in Russian language. Nothing new.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
brimnes 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220108194654/https://taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2022/01/08/2003770963 https://web.archive.org/web/20220108194654/https://taipeitim...
rdiddly 5y ago
Wish I had one so I could troll them with offensive search terms.
grouphugs 5y ago
justicezyx 5y ago
Technical details please? A video showing the censoring at work would be great!
option 5y ago
Do not buy Xiaomi phones
anotheryou 5y ago
Can't most manufacturers push apps over the air without user interaction? In that case pre-installed and inactive is not much worse...
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
China still hasn't learned how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" works. If you want to do something evil and get away with it, you first need to focus purely on gaining market share. You need to reach a critical mass where people are completely dependent on your product. If you try to do evil before it reaches critical mass, people can still stop using your product. If China waited 5 more years before pulling crap like this Xiaomi could have been bigger than Apple or Google.
- davesque 5y ago
  In that sense, doing things properly requires some detachment from the end goal. I think the CCP is too fearful of the imagined outcome of cultural dissolution and loss of control to achieve the patience required for that detachment.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  US affiliated PRC containment bloc with try to malign any PRC brands that becomes successful regardless. Why do you think all these hit pieces started around time of Xiaomi record growth (80% in Q2 2021) when they passed Apple in market share and is catching up to Samsung for #1. It's the Huawei playbook of fabricating false security threats for useful idiots. At the end the day, these countries will go zero to negative sum to deny PRC access, i.e. US would rather deal with forest fires than use DJI drones. Thankfully for PRC brands, there's still ~90% of the world to sell to.
cassac 5y ago
Next you’re going to tell me a US company is going to run stuff on your local phone without your consent all for the “greater good”
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I think Anti-US sentiments around these discussions are disingenuous and creates a false impression of understating Chinese censorship while also doing a disservice to criticizing US censorship (Twitter bans, Parlor, etc.) because they’re not operating from the same intent and authority. There are no requests from US gov to censor on Twitter while there are absolute mandates and gag orders to say speak about anything against the CCP in China. I would like us to focus on one topic at a time, avoid whataboutism and reduce the fog.
  - cassac 5y ago
    Uhhh, if the lobbyists run the government then in a way it’s the same thing. Also, nobody is talking about twitter. Finally their intent is the same. To control what I say and do. It is only anti US because I don’t want the US to slide down the slippery slope it’s going down, and I’m allowed to be critical of it in hopes it doesn’t end up similar to China.
    - stretchwithme 5y ago
      If the government isn't censoring, lobbyists running the government doesn't lead to censorship either.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      > Uhhh, if the lobbyists run the government then in a way it’s the same thing. This makes no sense to me. Can you explain further? May be if lobbyists are trying to lobby for amending the constitution or passsing a censorship law? I am generally with you about the private corporations censoring when its a monopoly. Google and Apple lobby for making sure they are not appearing as monopolies. The most extreme example would be a hypothetical scenario where your only ISP in the area decides to ban a website. That is effectively censorship. But, as far as I know, that is illegal in US (FCC). These aspects are very different from Chinese censorship which is absolute, very transparently enforced and openly admitted by CCP.
jeroenhd 5y ago
> MiAdBlacklistConfig This again? This is just a redo of the Lithuanian story from a few months ago. The blacklist is to prevent advertisements built into the OS from containing certain blacklisted words. It doesn't censor searches.
- dijonman2 5y ago
  Have a link to the previous thread? Let’s not be so quick to dismiss this, getting it right is important. Censorship is gaining traction unfortunately.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683
  - mmwelt 5y ago
    The relevant comment from the previous thread is probably: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28620561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28620561
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kvakvs 5y ago
Such a fancy way to ruin reputation outside China and lose market share.
justicezyx 5y ago
Another evil business using censoring for their AD's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 are used by random netizens to back their hate on China and Chinese people. Meanwhile majority of discussions do not seem bother to verify the source and continue passionate discussion as if they actually know what's going on. I am not sure what to make off this. Since I myself repeated this same behavior all the time. And I see no one not even Noam Chomsky showing something that is fundamentally different?
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  Is it hate to not like China due to how China treats minorities?
  - star-trek-fleet 5y ago
    No. Because of main stream media propaganda. Chinese minorities are preferentially treated. And the Uyghur genocide is a lie worse and more ridiculous than the Iraq WMD.
    - x1ph0z 5y ago
      Comments like this makes wish HN had a downvote button
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > Comments like this makes wish HN had a downvote button It does, you just need more karma.
      - justicezyx 5y ago
        Comments like this makes me want to quit commenting here. Then I realized that comments like this indeed are the only reason I engage political debate here. Because otherwise Asian people are going to become the scapegoat once everyone believe they have to do something to unleash their unfounded hate over China.
greatgib 5y ago
First truth is that 'you can't trust your standard commercial smartphone'. This is why open source os is so important today. Second, the evolution of Xiaomi products is very bad: At the beginning, their smartphones were great because they used a MIUI version that was very 'pure': no crapware, no junk 'preinstalled apps', no call to home, interface that was customizable like you wanted. In the first place, this is why people were buying the devices compared to Samsung phones with preinstalled and non removable apps like Facebook. Now that Xiaomi became a leader on the market and has quite an important market share. They completely go the Samsung way with stuffing phones with a lot of junk and sometime deceitful one.

164 points by brimnes 5y ago

I have Xiaomi. I doubt it can "censor" me as the only time my phone connects to internet is to download map updates to OsmAnd offline navigation software. The rest of the time it functions as just a phone. I do not even have data plan. I have another spare phone where I keep software that controls my various gadgets like drone etc.

daxuak 5y ago
One short technical description I've read said that it's a built-in filter thing (local database that only updates occassionally) and you won't see a lot of internet traffic related to the censorship. Xiaomi ships different builds for regions. Some of them might be genuinely ok devices. The problem is you never know what you've got without an audit and some trust. Better just avoid them altogether.
- FpUser 5y ago
  You do not get something. It can not "censor" me because I do not use it online at all. They can put any spyware they want. It just won't matter in my case. I use my PC for online acvtivities. The phone is off the Internet.
  - daxuak 5y ago
    I'm afraid that is not a common case for Xiaome's customer base.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> The rest of the time it functions as just a phone. A decade ago people on for example Slashdot used to talk about how they wanted a phone that was ‘just a phone’. That sounds silly these days because people hardly ever use the phone any more, over using various text apps. A phone that just phones would be a useless device to 99.99% of people.
- FpUser 5y ago
  I understand but I do not give a flying fuck about what 90% or whatever is thinking about the subject. It is useful for me and that is all that matters to me. The others can and do make their own choices.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Lol so why post on a thread about how it impacts others if you don’t care and it doesn’t impact you? Why are you here?

iqanq 5y ago

financetechbro 5y ago
Because China is well know for keeping their censorship within their borders. Right?
- iqanq 5y ago
  They can't tell other governments to censor anything, so yes? If they have a product that censors things that you need to access then don't buy it.
  - daxuak 5y ago
    imo the whole point of this article was that China silently exports tampered devices to Taiwan. Implication is that this might have happened to not only Taiwan, unless we have trustworthy audits.
  - Baeocystin 5y ago
    >They can't tell other governments to censor anything, so yes? The CCP can and do actively control what the international community says as much as possible, and they have enough money to make the changes happen. If you don't think so, look what happens in public discussions (or even mentions!) on/of Taiwan.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      Also: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/business/china-internet-police-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/business/china-internet-p... > A Digital Manhunt: How Chinese Police Track Critics on Twitter and Facebook > Authorities in China have turned to sophisticated investigative software to track and silence obscure critics on overseas social media. Their targets include college students and non-Chinese nationals. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/china-facebook-twitter-influence-manipulation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/ch...: > Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter > ...The authorities used a phrase common among China’s internet police that refers to tracking down the actual person behind a social media account: “touching the ground.” > With growing frequency, the country’s internet police have hunted down and threatened internet users who voice their opinions. At first, its agents focused on local social media platforms. In 2018, they began a new campaign to detain users of Twitter inside China — account owners who had found ways around the government’s blocks — and force them to delete their accounts. > Now, the campaign has extended to Chinese citizens who live outside of China. The document spells out how the Shanghai police want to discover the identities of people behind certain accounts and to trace their users’ connections to the mainland. Its officers can then threaten family members in China or detain the account holders when they return to the country in order to compel online critics to delete posts or even entire accounts. It's worth calling out that later article analyzes a "request for bids" by the local Shanghai police, so I don't think it should be read to imply limits on what the Chinese government does, since the scope of a local police force would be limited to stuff that intersects with their jurisdiction.

absoluteharam 5y ago

every phone is chatty, unless you have a pi-hole equivalent when you're not on your secured home network, there's a lot of data being exchanged with every manufacturer. they've moved to the track and hunt stage.

Incipient 5y ago
True, but phoning home for telemetry to make better devices and out-compete the market is not great, but phoning home to censor and repress discussion on human rights violations is all together evil.

underscore_ku 5y ago

don't buy Chinese phones...

benbristow 5y ago
* Chinese branded phones
- Hokusai 5y ago
  What is the difference? To not buy branded Chinese phones seems just protectionism and has little to do with security. I have nothing against wanting to protect and industry, but it should not be done with misconceptions.
  - erulabs 5y ago
    I would guess the implication is that almost all phones are built in China. So "Chinese cellphones" is a curious term - "Cellphones designed by Chinese firms" and "Cellphones manufactured in China" are wildly different circles in the venn diagram of mobiles.
    - nicce 5y ago
      Only Chinese cellphone design companies have a meaningful direct responsibily for Chinese government, which makes the difference. Manufacturers have resposibility too, but if they manufacture something else than intended, it will stop quite quickly.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > What is the difference? To not buy branded Chinese phones seems just protectionism and has little to do with security. How does "protectionism" have anything to do with this? It's weird to inject that economic framing into a question about what kind of policies you want to be subject to, and who you want to be setting those policies.
duxup 5y ago
At this point I’m averse to anything from non free nations. I’ve started to take that into account when shopping. That’s not a criticism of the individuals there, just a recognition of the conditions. Admittedly that’s not any easy thing to define all the time.

Canada 5y ago

Technical details please.

yorwba 5y ago
Probably haven't changed since three months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683

dschuetz 5y ago

Google does that also, for the profanities in Russian language. Nothing new.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

brimnes 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220108194654/https://taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2022/01/08/2003770963 https://web.archive.org/web/20220108194654/https://taipeitim...

rdiddly 5y ago

Wish I had one so I could troll them with offensive search terms.

grouphugs 5y ago

justicezyx 5y ago

Technical details please? A video showing the censoring at work would be great!

option 5y ago

Do not buy Xiaomi phones

anotheryou 5y ago

Can't most manufacturers push apps over the air without user interaction? In that case pre-installed and inactive is not much worse...

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

China still hasn't learned how "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" works. If you want to do something evil and get away with it, you first need to focus purely on gaining market share. You need to reach a critical mass where people are completely dependent on your product. If you try to do evil before it reaches critical mass, people can still stop using your product. If China waited 5 more years before pulling crap like this Xiaomi could have been bigger than Apple or Google.

davesque 5y ago
In that sense, doing things properly requires some detachment from the end goal. I think the CCP is too fearful of the imagined outcome of cultural dissolution and loss of control to achieve the patience required for that detachment.
dirtyid 5y ago
US affiliated PRC containment bloc with try to malign any PRC brands that becomes successful regardless. Why do you think all these hit pieces started around time of Xiaomi record growth (80% in Q2 2021) when they passed Apple in market share and is catching up to Samsung for #1. It's the Huawei playbook of fabricating false security threats for useful idiots. At the end the day, these countries will go zero to negative sum to deny PRC access, i.e. US would rather deal with forest fires than use DJI drones. Thankfully for PRC brands, there's still ~90% of the world to sell to.

cassac 5y ago

Next you’re going to tell me a US company is going to run stuff on your local phone without your consent all for the “greater good”

systemvoltage 5y ago
I think Anti-US sentiments around these discussions are disingenuous and creates a false impression of understating Chinese censorship while also doing a disservice to criticizing US censorship (Twitter bans, Parlor, etc.) because they’re not operating from the same intent and authority. There are no requests from US gov to censor on Twitter while there are absolute mandates and gag orders to say speak about anything against the CCP in China. I would like us to focus on one topic at a time, avoid whataboutism and reduce the fog.
- cassac 5y ago
  Uhhh, if the lobbyists run the government then in a way it’s the same thing. Also, nobody is talking about twitter. Finally their intent is the same. To control what I say and do. It is only anti US because I don’t want the US to slide down the slippery slope it’s going down, and I’m allowed to be critical of it in hopes it doesn’t end up similar to China.
  - stretchwithme 5y ago
    If the government isn't censoring, lobbyists running the government doesn't lead to censorship either.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    > Uhhh, if the lobbyists run the government then in a way it’s the same thing. This makes no sense to me. Can you explain further? May be if lobbyists are trying to lobby for amending the constitution or passsing a censorship law? I am generally with you about the private corporations censoring when its a monopoly. Google and Apple lobby for making sure they are not appearing as monopolies. The most extreme example would be a hypothetical scenario where your only ISP in the area decides to ban a website. That is effectively censorship. But, as far as I know, that is illegal in US (FCC). These aspects are very different from Chinese censorship which is absolute, very transparently enforced and openly admitted by CCP.

jeroenhd 5y ago

> MiAdBlacklistConfig This again? This is just a redo of the Lithuanian story from a few months ago. The blacklist is to prevent advertisements built into the OS from containing certain blacklisted words. It doesn't censor searches.

dijonman2 5y ago
Have a link to the previous thread? Let’s not be so quick to dismiss this, getting it right is important. Censorship is gaining traction unfortunately.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683
- mmwelt 5y ago
  The relevant comment from the previous thread is probably: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28620561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28620561

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kvakvs 5y ago

Such a fancy way to ruin reputation outside China and lose market share.

justicezyx 5y ago

Another evil business using censoring for their AD's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616683 are used by random netizens to back their hate on China and Chinese people. Meanwhile majority of discussions do not seem bother to verify the source and continue passionate discussion as if they actually know what's going on. I am not sure what to make off this. Since I myself repeated this same behavior all the time. And I see no one not even Noam Chomsky showing something that is fundamentally different?

JaimeThompson 5y ago
Is it hate to not like China due to how China treats minorities?
- star-trek-fleet 5y ago
  No. Because of main stream media propaganda. Chinese minorities are preferentially treated. And the Uyghur genocide is a lie worse and more ridiculous than the Iraq WMD.
  - x1ph0z 5y ago
    Comments like this makes wish HN had a downvote button
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Comments like this makes wish HN had a downvote button It does, you just need more karma.
    - justicezyx 5y ago
      Comments like this makes me want to quit commenting here. Then I realized that comments like this indeed are the only reason I engage political debate here. Because otherwise Asian people are going to become the scapegoat once everyone believe they have to do something to unleash their unfounded hate over China.

greatgib 5y ago

First truth is that 'you can't trust your standard commercial smartphone'. This is why open source os is so important today. Second, the evolution of Xiaomi products is very bad: At the beginning, their smartphones were great because they used a MIUI version that was very 'pure': no crapware, no junk 'preinstalled apps', no call to home, interface that was customizable like you wanted. In the first place, this is why people were buying the devices compared to Samsung phones with preinstalled and non removable apps like Facebook. Now that Xiaomi became a leader on the market and has quite an important market share. They completely go the Samsung way with stuffing phones with a lot of junk and sometime deceitful one.