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Huawei phones automatically deleting videos of the protests?
- Obscurity4340 4y agoAre non-techy Chinese nationals on to this shit/have sources to flash non-State beholden Android OS's on the theme like GrapheneOS etc?
- dicomdan 4y ago
- vkou 4y agoI don't think Huawei deleted any videos of that. I'm also not sure how an international crime against peace has all that much to do with... Non-police suppression of domestic protests.
- dvh 4y agoBot, you broke?
- ww520 4y agoIt is an automatic script from their playbook to invoke whataboutism.
- p0pcult 4y agoWhat about it? Your question seems to leave it very open-ended.
- hutzlibu 4y agoIt was satire I strongly think.
- copenseethe 4y ago
- idiotsecant 4y agowhat about whataboutisim?
- eric__cartman 4y agoI don't agree with Richard Stallman's political or social views but he was right all along when it came to being wary of software not having the user's best interests in mind.
- grobbyy 4y agoRichard Stallman had extreme Cassandra Complex. Virtually everything he wrote 30 years ago came true (or will soon), but no one believed him.
- imachine1980_ 4y agothe problem is he also have so f**g wrong opinions about so much s*t, but yes when it come to software he was right all the way, that make follow him a mental gymnastics marathon.
- gryf 4y agoI haven't followed him for over 15 years when he started branching out from software into other things. What crazy has he accumulated since?
- heleninboodler 4y agoSpoken like a person who has never attempted to give Richard Stallman a parrot.
- gryf 4y agoI just googled that reference. Weugh.
- heleninboodler 4y agoThe whole rider is pretty nutty. Even on fairly mundane requirements he manages to sound a bit crazy. "I absolutely refuse to have a break in the middle of my speech. Once I start, I will go straight through." Presumably at some point he said he didn't want to take a break but someone stuck a break in the agenda anyway and he decided to declare his intention to throw a fit if that ever happens again. It reads a little like "100 ways in which RMS cannot handle the unexpected."
- dvh 4y agoIs there a video file I can test? I have Xiaomi phone.
- jmoak3 4y agoIt's hard to know for sure if this is real, but I wouldn't be surprised. If this is happening, I hope Apple says no to the CCP when they inevitably ask Apple to do the same. Could Apple use that new CSAM-hash-comparison feature to accomplish something similar? EDIT: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni... Nevermind - it looks to me like this mechanism is just for letting Apple know if they should pop open an encrypted image stored on their Cloud. In the case of China, they should already be able to do that with impunity since they control the regional iCloud and keys EDIT 2: I'd also not be surprised if this was false however - I don't own a Huawei phone and I'm not located in China, so I can't verify this at all.
- kube-system 4y agoApple doesn't own or operate iCloud in China. They have no say in the matter.
- jmoak3 4y agoMaybe I'm confused but the new CSAM-hash-comparison thing runs on-device, right? Or no EDIT: Yeah looks to be on-device (page 4): https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
- kube-system 4y agoThat is irrelevant when it comes to iCloud China. iCloud in China is owned and operated by the government of Guizhou. They own the building, the servers, and the private keys.
- jmoak3 4y agoI'm aware of iCloud in China. If a user chooses not to use cloud, could this mechanism still allow protestors sharing videos to be identified? EDIT: Or is this mechanism only for giving Apple the green light to pop open images already stored on the cloud (in which case you're right, the whole conversation is irrelevant) EDIT2: looks like this is just for giving apple the green light to open up uploaded images - which is irrelevant in China because they can already do that
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoAnd people wonder why the US has blocked Huawei infrastructure in the US. They have no qualms silencing their own population and invest heavily in surveillance technology. Why would anyone want their equipment? What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.
- amelius 4y agoHuawei just follows the law in China, just like Apple follows the same law but perhaps with some more delay.
- unsui 4y agomaybe the law is wrong? yeah, rhetorical question, but the issue here isn't necessarily adherence to local laws, but rather having some principled stance. yeah, I'm hearing it, "principled stance"... one can dream
- fauntle 4y agoApple has shareholders. It is eternally bound by the idiotic rules of capitalism, which demand higher returns every year. Principles will not matter until we force the system itself to change.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoI recently read an interesting book that's picking up traction among managerial types, called "The Infinite Game" by Sinek One of the main points is about this view that "companies must always make more short-term profit at any cost". Sinek says this is just a mind-virus that took hold after Milton Friedman started pushing it, and not only is it not actually true in any legal sense, it's a toxic philosophy that eats away at companies and slowly destroys them. He outlines how it's a big part of why Microsoft keeps losing out to Apple again and again. (Another point it goes on about is how much more productive your workers are if you treat them like human beings) So hopefully this book will keep getting more and more traction, and eventually we might not live in a toxic corporate dystopian hellscape
- khana 4y ago
- gryf 4y agoI was speaking to someone at the weekend extolling the virtues of Huawei phones and how cheap they were and "I'm never paying for an iPhone or drinking the kool aid". I pointed out the history and security concerns and was greeted with a pfft and told I was paranoid. I'm begrudgingly iPhone user. But I keep an exit plan and backups of all data. If only someone else made something that actually worked properly. For now I'm happy to use a West controlled company to run my personal infra. I suspect we're on a downward spiral though.
- willcipriano 4y agoIf you have a iPhone in China you'll find that Apple crippled the air drop functionality that protestors rely upon to communicate. I don't see this action and that one as having much daylight between them frankly.
- gryf 4y agoCompletely missed that. What a cluster of assholes. Guess I should start thinking about the inevitable exodus. The CSAM scanning thing was the first strike off.
- joshstrange 4y agoI'm not a fan of Apple's bowing to China on things like this either but "Limiting AirDrop from 'Everyone' to 10 minutes before you have to turn it on again" and "Deleting pictures from user's phones" are quite different.
- misslibby 4y agoYou can back up your data from Huawei phones, too. Apple had plans to scan the photos on your phone and automatically report you to the police if the algorithm thinks something is off. I wouldn't trust them at all.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y agoI haven't ever heard of any concrete security issues with Huawei phones. Huawei has been under extremely strict scrutiny for years (and even got hacked by the NSA, as Snowden's documents revealed), so the fact that nothing has ever stuck makes me think there really is nothing there. As for this story, color me skeptical until some actual details come out.
- Animats 4y agoWow. Soon we'll have US police departments demanding that phone providers delete pictures of police brutality, or even traffic stops. See this story, where someone was live-streaming a traffic stop so there was no way seizing the phone would lose the data.[1] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/29/livestreaming-police-traffic-stop/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/29/livestrea...
- vineyardmike 4y agoWe already have police in the US do that. Your link shows how they’ll use brute force to stop the evidence from being gathered. They’ll also play copyrighted music in the background so automatic copyright enforcement will delete an uploaded video.
- kube-system 4y agoThey can demand it all they want. The difference is that US law gives companies the legal right to say "no" when it comes to suppressing speech critical of the government.
- fortuna86 4y agoAmazing so many people are quick to compare this story to Apple or Google in the US. Huawei is functionally a part of the Chinese government.
- smoldesu 4y agoMost people are comparing this story to Apple's behavior in China. Google doesn't operate any substantial services in China due to data privacy concerns iirc.
- kube-system 4y agoThese decisions always boil down to business, even if there's some philosophical disagreements as a part of the broader context. Google pushed back against the CCP, but ended up following the law to the minimum extent they had to. It wasn't until the Chinese military hacked Google and stole their IP that they threatened to leave the market. Regulators called their bluff as they started blocking Google services in China. When they pulled out, it was clear they weren't going to be able to operate a profitable business there. > These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
- prewett 4y agoWow, this sounds like a very concrete reason to not buy any Chinese electronics as long as the CCP is in power. I assumed Chinese electronics was likely to spy on you, but there was some uncertainty in whether it actually happened. If this is true, then for pure self-protection individuals, companies, and governments pretty much need avoid any Chinese electronics with a network connection.
- imwillofficial 4y agoGood luck finding electronics that don’t touch the Chinese supply chain
- fumar 4y agoIt is never too late to start. Regardless of the CCP, we’ve witnessed the over reliance on a singular country for hardware and its supply chain impacts. It is time to diversify.
- fsflover 4y agoHere it is: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa
- imwillofficial 4y agoThat was easier than expected
- nodesocket 4y ago[flagged]
- imwillofficial 4y agoDid they ever?
- vehemenz 4y agoMaybe this is too false of an equivalency for me to comprehend, but I genuinely do not see any connection between the two scenarios you mention.
- Aachen 4y agoI will also defend a coal plant operator who is protesting against animal cruelty in the meat industry while I'd object to and protest their pollution separately. China having mask requirements, what kind of mental stretch is it that I must therefore also support everything their government does? Or am I misunderstanding your comment?
- mardifoufs 4y agoThe protests are related to covid restrictions. I think they are saying that we suddenly support anti-lockdown protesters now, when they used to be absolutely reviled barely a year ago when the same protests happened in the west.
- 4y ago
- DevX101 4y agoI'm skeptical videos are being deleted from the device by Huawei, which the title suggests, until actually proven. More likely is a cloud file storage provider is automatically deleting videos from a server based on some hash/identifier. Similar to how Google/Dropbox can flag copyrighted media.
- Havoc 4y agoYeah sounds like quite a feat for on device.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoApple's "child sexual abuse image" monitoring proposal would do the same thing. Easy enough to implement at the device level--the authorities provide a list of forbidden hashes, any matching file goes away.
- fomine3 4y agoApple's CSAM detection is based on known image's hash. Removing their own shoot images is very different task. How to detect? Maybe just based on geolocation?
- LorenPechtel 4y agoIt gets shared, the authorities notice, they ban it. Same as the CSAM stuff.
- cwoolfe 4y agoWhere it gets really dystopian is: How do we know the tweet is real?
- LatteLazy 4y agoClaims random Twitter thread...
- oxplot 4y agoI'm amazed by how HN just takes every piece of data at face value and starts reacting to it like it's gospel. News story after news story. This place is no different than Twitter, Youtube comments, etc. It's very sad to watch.
- boringg 4y agoAgreed - I think there should be a huge asterisk over the source of data. Twitter reports are not inherently accurate - they need 3rd party verification. If this is true - it is a concerning but not surprising maneuver.
- mvdwoord 4y agoWell, although I tend to agree with the point you are making, in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point.. CCP is ruthless and has been repeatedly shown to have no qualms oppressing and killing people and abusing technology in similar ways. So the data point is not far fetched. It would be good to have this either confirmed or proven false. Until then I find it a perfectly valid discussion. $0.02
- ehsankia 4y ago> in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point.. It kind of is a single data point with a vague "users report" Also, extraordinary claims like this still require more than vague anecdotal proof. If this is on device, can we see the request packet that caused the video to be deleted? Can we see the decompiled code that allows for such a thing to happen?
- aaronheid 4y ago
- JeremyNT 4y agoYeah, this is bonkers. At one time I thought the collective HN BS detector was calibrated a bit better, but the willingness to accept this tweet at face value is troublesome. This is similar to the debacle recently where Apple was supposedly scanning for QR codes and opening canary URLs clandestinely, which turned out to be simple user error. I'm flagging this submission, I encourage everybody to do the same. A tweet suggesting that "some users report" some ambiguous behavior is not news. Perhaps some corroboration will emerge and this tweet will eventually be proven correct, but the onus of proof should always be on those who are making the exceptional claims.
- jeswin 4y agoThe bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China - specifically to limit dissent and for preventing people from organizing [1]. A company that misses no chance to showcase its liberal credentials, bending over backwards for perhaps the most dictatorial government in the world to suppress the most basic of freedoms. To quote from Apple's article on racism [2], "With every breath we take, we must commit to being that change, and to creating a better, more just world for everyone." I guess according to Apple, Chinese people don't deserve any of what's written in their post. [1]: https://qz.com/apple-airdrop-china-protest-tool-1849824435 https://qz.com/apple-airdrop-china-protest-tool-1849824435 [2]: https://www.apple.com/speaking-up-on-racism/ https://www.apple.com/speaking-up-on-racism/
- dymk 4y agoApple did not block AirDrop in China. Apple made it harder to fingerprint protestors who forgot to turn off "Everyone" sharing.
- password4321 4y agoDiscussed 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33778302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33778302
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago> The bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China Why is this bigger news? Seems equivalent to me. Is it because Huawei is already seen as an adversary while folks persist in seeing Apple as somehow more benign?
- Joe_Boogz 4y agoTo me I read this as Huawei is already a “state controlled” entity. So this is egregious but expected by them. Apple however is two faced. Saying that they stand for bigger ideals but quietly supporting the communist party by disabling airdrop. Edit: I know it’s more complicated than my comment indicates. But it’s still a weird response by Apple none the less.
- Magi604 4y agoWhile it wouldn't surprise me if such a thing was actually the case, I want more evidence other than a Tik-Tok tier Tweet, otherwise this is just another inflammatory political Tweet rumor.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- maxbond 4y agoReminder that as a technologist, everything you do is political. You are building the context inside of which society exists. You are building the canals along which power flows. What you're doing might seem innocuous. It might be innocuous at the time. But as the pieces fall into place, as it responds to pressures from the market and the state, it might transform into something else entirely. Assuming this story is true, the tooling that was used here probably started it's life much like Dropbox. What more innocuous app is there then that? I don't really have answers for how to respond to this information; it's something I'm still working on myself. But as a community and industry, we can't blink it.
- poisonborz 4y agoAbsolutely this. Society, and the industry itself views software engineers still as highly paid blue collar workers doing menial plumbing tasks. In reality they are writing the words on the pages of social engineering. It can be a washing machine firmware programmed to ignore circumstances that could save shelf live of the device, networking firmware giving access to manufacturer that could be backdoored, game development where other parts of the software siphon data to advertisers, all realms of software has the potential to be a tool of adversaries. While this potential is there for every paid job ever, software works invisibly, it's untraceable and ununderstandeable for the general population. The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to.
- smoldesu 4y ago> The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to. They have a word for this in non-American countries - "regulation".
- maxbond 4y agoThere are regulations we should adopt, but what GP proposed is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach like regulation. For instance, we could, as software professionals, take an oath not to write malware or spyware ("malware with a budget"), and at the same time, take an oath to invest time in the security of a piece of software. If a civil engineer is approached to design a bridge in an unsafe manner, it is the expectation of society that they will refuse. If that bridge collapses, they're expected to take responsibility and to participate in an investigation to ensure this never happens again. We should be thinking along these lines. I used to think I was just a hacker and that software engineer was just a job title. After reading this series of blog posts [1], my eyes were opened. Once I accepted I was some kind of engineer, I asked myself what that meant. What I realized was, an engineer has a responsibility to society, because they build the context society inhabits. That's what separates them from a hacker or tinkerer, exploring in their garage for the joy of it. In your garage you can be an artist, accountable to no one. When you build the systems people rely on every day - you aren't a hacker anymore. [1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
- gjvc 4y agoGoogle for Huawei Nortel spying
- chinathrow 4y agoThe revolution will not be televised.
- neodypsis 4y agoDoes this confirm that Huawei phones come with some sort of spyware?
- jojo259 4y agoEvery consumer device comes with spyware. You mean Chinese spyware as opposed to Western?
- neodypsis 4y agoYes
- josephcsible 4y agoWhat spyware does the Librem 5 USA come with?
- barbariangrunge 4y agoIt's possible that there is some firmware on some impossible-to-replace hardware bits that that phones home. They removed everything they possibly could that does that, and it's amazing how far they went, even running the binary blobs they couldn't remove on isolated processors iirc in order to keep them islolated from the rest of the phone They really achieved something rare with the phone. I hope the project continues and the next version is even better
- dspillett 4y agoFor those who do not have a twitter account: https://nitter.net/msmelchen/status/1597807914395500545 https://nitter.net/msmelchen/status/1597807914395500545
- tguvot 4y agoWanted to post this to HN last night but there were absolutely no alternative sources confirming this. Are there any now ?
- operator-name 4y agoThe big question is if this was deleted from the device, or from the cloud. Cloud censorship is well known, where apps like WeChat are known to censor and put you on a list. If I were to guess (and hope) this is a case of being deleted from the cloud - something that's not uncommon in the west, the difference being that the western world uses it to enforce copyright.
- zac23or 4y agoHuawei is not different from Apple, Google, etc. No company really standing up for democracy. Companies defend their business and profits. And the idea "If you are not a customer, you are a product". it is totally innocent. EVERYTHING for any company is a product. Customers are products, employees are products, freedom, democracy. Anything is for sale if it makes a profit.
- valeg 4y agoPathetic. How did they organize the Tiananmen square protests without those shiny Huawei phones? This demonstrates an insecurity of the regime.
- amatecha 4y ago[citation needed], there's no evidence the phone has deleted the video (unless there's something in the text of the video that indicates as such)
- agilob 4y agoPretty sure this isn't new thing, I remember hearing about this ~2 years ago when first COVID lockdowns started.
- balozi 4y agoFrom a tech standpoint, how would this be accomplished? Using AI to detect "protest videos" and purge them from devices? Or maybe tracing the source of widely shared videos then going into the devices and purge? Obviously scanning all phone would be an impractical albeit impressive task.
- meibo 4y agoSELECT FROM user_videos WHERE time = "when the protest happened" AND exif_location = "where the protest happened"
- Markoff 4y agoHighly unlikely based on how Huawei phones work, some random twitter threat should clarify where were these videos excactly stores, what app is supposedly deleting them. Yes, Huawei can under their ToS delete various stuff from your (Huawei) cloud, if it contains sensitive content, but deleting from device, unlikely. Maybe don't upload sensitive videos to cloud next time?