Worst game ever. Is it just OK and Cancel? then it seems to do nothing?
Going up to http://47.93.5.238:8081/APP/ there are two other apk's [GT - "Download the security security project" "Download the public security project" ]
There are so many errors in this article in the first few paragraphs that I have trouble believing any of it, even if the story itself is believable from what I know of Chinese religious oppression.
First, Xinjiang is in the west, not east. Second, Uyghurs in China do not speak Turkish. They speak Uighur, a Turkic language, but its orthography is Arabic and forced Chinese. It looks nothing like Turkish, which uses a modified Latin script.
Also there are about 10m Uyghurs as of 2010, not 8m.
Turkish was written with an Arabic-based alphabet until 1920s. The move to Latin alphabet for Turkic languages is new, and not yet universal. For example, Azerbaijani, the closest Turkic language to Turkish (so much that Turkish and Azerbaijani are mutually comprehensible) is written in Latin alphabet in the Republic of Azerbaijan but in Arabic alphabet in Iran.
Yep! Orthography is hugely political for Central Asian languages, so I am really disappointed that this article would make such a glaring mistake, among others. It does not seem very well researched.
They mean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Turkestan and article states : "Uighur Muslims are a Turkish-speaking minority of eight million in the northwestern Xinjiang region". For language you are correct but from my point of view it is nitpicking, same like 10m and 8m. Important parts are, they do not speak same language as Chinese and in country of China group in up to ten millions is still minority which can be oppressed by central government. For comparison Sweden or Portugal is around 10m people, which gives me nice point of refenece.
That article is several months old and I've never heard of it on mainstream media.
This disgusts me. It's like those people are being dehumanized like the Jews. Maybe this is part of a wider conspiracy so when another another oil, resource grabbing led war is started. People will say and do nothing to stop it because people have sub-consciously brainwashed.
There is a lot of other stuff going on that is completely unreported. I would recommend talking to Uyghurs directly.
Clearly China is trying to solidify their geographical borders by turning majority ethnic groups in those given regions in to minority groups of ever decreasing influence. This is straight out of a very old playbook for colonization. That they are able to so opening continue doing this in 2017 with so little global acknowledgement is only partially surprising.
That's utter rubbish. In fact, due to the lack of birth control policy over the ethnic minorities, the demographic structure in Xinjiang is changing drastically and the 0~6 years old Han population is less than 10% percent compared to 40% of the adult population. Colonization your ass.
The Han people are furious because the CCP uses Han as a tool to maintain its rule over China but keeps sacrificing the future of Han.
Given the CCP's pro-Hui policy, many of Han people fear that some day China will become an Islamic country like Iran or Malaysia.
When you talk to Uyghurs, don't forget to ask their opinions about the Hui Muslim and Erdogan's Neo-Ottomanism.
I feel sick about the CCP's cruelty but I feel absurd when you blame the ethnic majority for colonization.
Because you are a bigot and believe a half assed report in a half assed paper which was merely sourcing another half assed source aka fake news as the Left/Right calls it.
And the mainstream media actually investigates and reports on issues using facts?
There are obviously serious issues in Xinjiang. But the fantastical stories don't really help matters. The lack of serious reporting on what is really happening is a cause for concern
But even the original article aka spyware is quoting twitter as a source. I'd like a proper translation and confirmation of the sources before believing it. I'd hope the mainstream media is looking into the spyware issue since it's looks like there might be a story there but it's to hard to tell the real story atm.
>The app reportedly scans for the MD5 digital signatures of media files in the phone, and matches them to a stored database of offending files classified by the government as illegal "terrorist-related" media.
What a dumb way to scan for "illegal" content, considering the goverment already controls their portion of the internet. So instead of monitoring who is accessing what they decide to compare checksums of files which can be trivially changed which would result in a completely new hash value.
In my opinion, in typical Beijing fashion the "competence" part of the equation is irrelevant. it's all about sending a message, loud and clear: "today we discriminate against YOU, by law, and there's nothing you can do about it". That the method used is laughably inefficient is not the point, it's all about keeping that boot in place on that throat, in a very visible manner.
Same with airline security theater, identifying citizens using biometric markers (Aadhar card in India), pernicious internet monitoring in the UK...the list goes on. I guess the idea is to use the dragnet to catch or deter a majority of the population from thought crimes and preserve resources for the real big fish.
But it could just be v1.. or it could be the govt describing a flawed approach so the resulting countermeasures are totally ineffective against the actual approach.
For example, if the actual approach is extracting keyframes and comparing against a library of keyframes of existing content (legal and illegal) or doing object recognition within those frames, the "add a null byte!" countermeasures are meaningless.
This is actually what digital forensics specialists do as well, although they've probably moved on from MD5 by now.
I know there's been talk of "fuzzy hashes" as well, in order to catch files with trivial modifications, but when I studied forensics (about four years ago), that was still in the future.
Searching hundreds of thousands or millions of files by hand would be impractical and for many types of offensive content, the authorities don't want to have to distribute the actual offensive content to the people who are doing the detection.
i.e. in the US, possession of child pornography is such a serious federal crime that if one happens to discover it on a PC they are servicing, they (or their employer) are legally obligated to contact the FBI immediately. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to distribute a detection tool that basically contains the original images (in order to do GIS-style "find similar images" searches), because that tool would violate the law it was designed to help enforce. Short hashes can't be used to recreate the original images, so they're "safe" in that sense.
It's not an ideal approach, but it works pretty well and fits within common constraints of the field.
There's a Microsoft product called PhotoDNA that does a fairly decent job of finding near matches. It's specifically used by several major image hosting places (Facebook and Tumblr I can specifically attest to using it, at least in the past) to find CP content uploaded by users. The hashes are shared among the services using PhotoDNA via NCMEC.
This is very competent. It identifies some people trafficking in prohibited files, and it also identifies the true danger to the state -- people willing to circumvent their rules; when you pick up someone for bad files, and he (or his phone) says his buddy sent them, but his buddy's friend didn't report in, his buddy is eligible for a lot more trouble.
Experiment: tomorrow, ask 5 people you know who are not software engineers how to change the MD5 checksum on a file that resides on their mobile device.
Not to mention that it should be entirely possible to find offending files and create files that have MD5 collisions with them, causing false positives.
There is no publicly-known "preimage" attack against MD5. One would need to craft an offensive file and a non-offensive file themselves so that the hashes would match, then somehow get the offensive file into the official database.
Elsewhere, I read that China doesn't allow Muslim civil servants and students from fasting during Ramadan. Was that only applying to this region or was applicable to other regions with non-Turkic Chinese Muslims?
The TL;DR of it is that it has not much to do with religion specifically, and much to do with the region pushing for autonomy (which doesn't rate particularly high in the eyes of Beijing).
(This is not to say it's ok, just stating the reality of the situation)
This is important to stress.
It doesn't make the decision any less oppressive, but framing it as anti-muslim instead of anti-insubordination obscures Beijing's real priorities.
Yeah. In fact, the CCP has been pro-Hui Muslim to an extent that the Han majority fear the country will be Islamicized some day.
The ordinary people's resentment towards Muslim stems from the Hui's abuse of political privileges to expand their religious strengths, such as Saria Law, to intervene Han people's daily life everywhere, from Ningxia, Gansu to Henan and Shandong, from Canteens, Schools to Police, Courts.
In the meanwhile, the majority has little to zero knowledge about the Uyghurs because only a few Uyghur people live outside Xinjiang.
The situation is really weird and there is a conspiracy theory saying that the CCP leadership has been controlled by the Hui Muslim.
BTW, the Hui Muslim and the Uyghur Muslim have been enemies since the Qing Dynasty.
Somehow china is becoming Ingsoc from 1984. Control people, censorship, Dictator state with no prospect of change, monitoring people, big brother is watching you type stuff among other things.
Just a week ago I read about traffic warnings personalised by face recognition. Now this. Soon China might become Ingsoc with Minlove and Double think and what not.
Your post [1] was autokilled because rfa.org is on the banned domains list. Try submitting something from rfa.org and it doesn't show up on new [2]. pg wrote a bit about banned domains here [3].
I don't think rfa.org should be banned, perhaps message the admins and they'll take it off the banned domains list.
It would likewise be easy for authorities to beat you within an inch of your life and jail you indefinitely for "hidden communication with a bad intent" or something similarly inane. They don't need you to unlock your phone for proof.
"Countermeasures" don't matter when there're a million ways to terrorize you, your family, and your friends into submission. They just have to suspect you.
How easy do you imagine not only finding information on how to follow through all of these steps, but actually acquire the needed materials (burners) within the strictly controlled PRC is?
There should be more coverage about that both Muslim religious law and practical law in Muslim societies is heavily racist, sexist, in open conflict with human rights, and that's being flexible. In theory, well islam was created by a warlord in a conflict where he committed a dozen genocides, religious and ethnic. It's bad. Very very disgustingly bad.
I don't understand why this isn't seen as a serious problem.
Wow, those chinese surely are totalitarian in the way they approach surveillance technology aren't they ?
Good thing we have nothing like that. Only just closed hardware with closed or with some parts open complicated software mostly made by a few corporations which tend to and have in fact in past coopoerated with governments without even thinking about their customers.
Devil's advocate: Forced installation of highly visible spyware can be better in the sense that it makes people acutely aware of the fact that they're being spied on. From now on, separatists in Xinjiang will be reluctant to exchange their ideas on their phones and try to find other ways to communicate or circumvent the spyware. For example, someone might come up with a cracked version of the spyware that doesn't actually work although it looks okay upon casual inspection, and spread it like a virus in order to provide plausible deniability to people who are caught using it. On the other hand, if the surveillance apparatus were completely hidden, people will unknowingly expose sensitive communications to the authorities.
Of course, if I were the Chinese official responsible for this policy, I would use highly visible and easily circumvented spyware in addition to backdoors and other more covert forms of surveillance. The spyware would just be a diversion.
I think forced, public smartphone surveillance is absolutely worse than secret surveillance, in two ways. First, it has a strong chilling effect on free speech and free thought. In a country where the rule of law is not well-established, you can never be sure what the local officials consider "bad" speech. As a result, you keep your mouth shut more often, just in case. This takes a psychological toll on everyone surveilled, not just criminals.
Second, dedicated criminals will now actively avoid the compromised smartphones and seek alternate means of communication. As others have noted, the current surveillance malware seems easy to circumvent. This is why spy agencies don't generally advertise their sources and methods.
The premise is that everyone is already being surveilled in ways that Western three-letter agencies can only dream of, and that this Android app only makes this fact more obvious without making a significant contribution to the effectiveness of the surveillance regime as a whole.
It would be analogous to a big red icon on your home screen with Snowden's face on it. You already know everything he told the world about the American government's recent behavior. The icon is just a reminder that the country you live in does unethical things, and in the case of China, a helluva lot more unethical things.
Yes, it will have a chilling effect -- but only because the truth is chilling and this app reminds people of that truth. In America, a lot of what we say on these forums regarding our three-letter agencies is speculation. In China, pervasive surveillance and censorship is a reality, not just speculation. And I'm not sure whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing for the Chinese people to become more aware of this reality in their daily lives. I'm not saying this to pick an argument. I really don't know what to think of it.
You're doing liberty and democracy a disservice with your whataboutism. It's one thing to suspect your government of sneakily compromising hardware, another to receive official letters to install a surveillance app or be detained. Of course both are despicable, but they are not in the same league.
EDIT: I'm surprised about how many people jump to the defense of the Chinese government here on HN. Seems in stark contrast with the usual political opinion of the crowd. I can only ascribe this phenomenon to massive cultural relativism.
> It's one thing to suspect your government of sneakily compromising hardware, another to receive official letters to install a surveillance app or be detained.
Suspicions are of course lesser.
But sneakily compromising hardware is worse then officially compromising hardware!
I argue that you're doing them a disservice by not aknowledging them as the same thing and pointing fingers.
Probably not all people from that area have the gps on non-stop with facebook and google accounts signed in non-stop to receive those goody notifications.
What do you do in that case if you're the government ?
Is this OS specific? It would be good to have more details on the mechanism this app is using. Presumably this can only scan media that is stored outside of apps?
That hardly changes how terrible these measures are.
What's more, they seem technologically ineffective. As if the government were just trying to make a show of its power rather than provide real solutions.
It's absolutely indefensible and you must know it, considering you opened a new account to comment this.
The headline is slightly misleading. It's not all muslim minorities in China: it's muslims living in the separatist Xinjiang region, who are ethnically Turkic. There are a non-insignificant number of muslims outside of Xinjiang, such as the Huizu, which are essentially Han Chinese muslims. Lots of the "terrorism" originating from Xinjiang has separatist rather than just religious motivations; I wouldn't be surprised if this is why the Chinese government is so keen to crack down.
*Edit: the headline was originally 'China forces its Muslim minority to install spyware on their phones'
When I read the headline, I immediately thought Xinjiang, because that is where they have the greatest concentration of Muslims and where they have had separatism issues.
And then the first sentence starts with "China has ramped up surveillance measures in Xinjiang".
So I don't consider the headline misleading at all. News sites necessarily have to use short titles. The lack of an exhaustive title shouldn't be criticized unless it is clearly clickbait or contradicts facts or the article.
I meant the headline of the Hacker News post, not the headline of the article. The original Hacker News post headline was "China forces its Muslim minority to install spyware on their phones", which is incorrect in the sense it implies that China is forcing all its Muslims to install spyway on their phones.
It seems that mashable changed their headline, because I get "China’s forcing citizens in Muslim-majority region to install spyware on their phones" when I visit what appears to be a cached crawler copy at http://www.pipiscrew.com/2017/07/chinas-forcing-citizens-in-... but when I visit the article itself, I see a different headline.
Thanks for clearing up this mystery. Yeah, to me the original article headline was just fine. I think there is a bit of a problem when HN users change headlines when posting articles...cutting even a little bit can change the meaning significantly.
This is interesting. It goes to show how an autoritarian government can fix some problems in a more effective way. You can remove terrorist propaganda from YouTube, but how do you stop the spread of those videos in private platforms or messaging applications?
And even if the first version of this spying app only checks for md5 sums, which is arguably useless, I'm sure they're working on something more effective.
Terrorism is so easily thrown around as a blanket term these days. As many others have pointed out, the motivation seems to be more separatist than religious.
Separatist movements fit well with a traditional definition of terrorism, though (something like "politically motivated violence by non-state entities", maybe confined to violence against civilians). Purely religious terrorism was the exception until recently.
Separatism and terrorism are orthogonal. There are separatist movements that resort to murder, but there are also separatist movements that campaign peacefully.
The West does not currently have much of a problem with violent separatism. Maybe someone got into a bar fight over Catalan independence or Brexit, but all recent conflicts I'm aware of were relatively peaceful. If you compare this to the situation in Northern Ireland, I'd say things have gotten much better.
yougoslavian people will beg to differ. Civil war in a european country leading to the partition of the country into multiple states based on ethnic and religious criteria happened in europe just 25 years ago.
I have a slightly different perspective on what counts as "recent", most likely because I am younger than that. I also looked up the Troubles for my previous comment; apparently they officially ended in 1998, which is even more recent. Take my comment as referring to the last 20ish years when I talk about things getting better.
One might argue that Yugoslavia, then recently emerged from decades of dictatorship and still a communist Eastern European country, was not part of the ideological West at that time.
What is the simple way for the Chinese government to find the root cause of muslim terrorism and fix it? The only simple fix (as in simple vs easy) would be genocide or giving them their own independent state. The first option is horrible, and the second is not in the interest of the Chinese gov.
I personally doubt this will help solve the problem. Reminding a restive population that you dominate and scrutinize every aspect of their lives, even those of people who follow the rules, is a great way to build more resentment against a state. It also instructs the real terrorists to avoid the publicly-compromised communication channels.
Its their country and their laws, trying to solve the problem of Islamic extremism on their own.
In western countries, you get detained for years in Guantanamo under torture without knowing for sure why you got arrested. Young girls get married as early as 12 to creepy old dudes and there is no need to ask for installing spyware because the phones and communications are already tapped by default.
Anyone criticizing China while permitting their own country to do worse is an hypocrite. Still waiting for the outrage about the mass surveillance from Amazon Echo, Google and others. Only the European Commission is doing something visible against this trend.
In Xinjiang region, the concern is more about separatism, which is not terrorism, and which should be a right of any group.
> "Anyone criticizing China while permitting their own country to do worse is an hypocrite"
One can be critical of their own government while still being critical of others. Even in US, ordinary people don't have much control over the government, in particular over the security state, other than complaining, so "permitting" abuses shouldn't be considered hypocritical.
Answer: "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." -US Declaration of Independence
Depending on the specific case, it would be up to people to determine whether these conditions have been met.
Islamic extremism is deeply connected to separatism. That's what the "Islamic State" is all about.
You can surely be critical of others, your own government does comparably worse to the same minority without even letting ordinary people know. That is hypocrisy.
Separatism implies that something else exists to be separate from. ISIL has declared that all other states are illegitimate and are to be replaced by a "worldwide caliphate".
"Islamic extremism" is a nebulous category that can be ascribed to ANY socio-political unrest of peoples who happen to live in a predominantly muslim area.
What do they call extremism in other areas with deep socioeconomic problems? Non-islamic extremism?
"Anyone criticizing China while permitting their own country to do worse is an hypocrite."
Ridiculous statement. "Permitting", like it's my choice? You can live in a country and disagree with some of what it does. Even better in democracies where you can do so publicly and have some form of impact through voting.
Also happy I'm able to discuss this topic online without this post getting blocked/deleted and facing possible repercussions.
"Still waiting for the outrage about the mass surveillance from Amazon Echo, Google and others" Yes like that debate doesn't exist and no one talks about it?
I'm not happy with Gitmo either or the NSA's bullshit. Privacy and human rights violations like this by any government need to be stopped, every day it feels like we are treading closer to 1984 across the globe.
This kind of appeasement, the idea of minding only the business of your own country, seems a bit indefensible to me.
And you cannot determine if one is a hypocrite just from a fact, there's no outrage, or can you? Many solves this problem their way, pointing out, talking about it, criticizing it and so forth.
When aptly criticizing another government as authoritarian and harassing a minority, while having their own government doing worse to the said minority, this can be seen by others as:
a) exceptionalism (double standards)
b) cognitive dissonance
c) hypocrisy
There is no higher moral ground on this situation so option c) would be suited. It is great when we strive to get better human rights for everyone, and yet the human rights for the citizens of another country are being threatened by religious extremists.
How the government of this other country replies is really their own business whether we like it or not. Is it a mass violation of human rights? Perhaps. What made them reach such decision? We don't know either. Are we in the west doing any better? No. China is not bombing Syria nor toppling moderate Islamic governments in North Africa.
This bad situation won't charge in our own turf while the majority of netizens think that this only happens in other turfs.
Let's focus on meaningful and substantial discussions instead of derailing into personal attacks. Happy to reply if you have anything interesting to say.
Because the argument is already being attacked, and I’ve already attacked their previous ones with no change on their part
I’m obviously not attempting to be impartial considering I’ve directly called them out by name, but I’m glad you’ve noticed the tone of my comment awkarddaturtle.
Unfortunately, this isn't any different from what a variety of countries have been doing to muslims for the last 200 years. If your source of information is mainly the Media, I suggest you spend an afternoon browsing through Wikipedia and compare the numbers. The amount of terrorist attacks by 'so called muslims' (let's just say they are muslim for a moment) is minuscule by the amount of muslims killed by the west. Every single life matters, so let's put things in perspective. The west has occupied and terrorised muslim nations for 2 centuries, but since they control the media, they keep them in the category of 'bad guys'. This surveillance is disgusting. It's how muslims have been occupied and oppressed for 200 years. Those who oppose freedom should downvote this.
Yea, from what I've seen it's mostly retaliation from surviving members of family and friends who were killed by Russia/US/Canada/UK etc, etc. The whole thing sucks all around.
No one cares about China or the people of Xinjiang. China probably cares more about them than anyone else.
Human rights is just an opportunity for many to grandstand and make smug declarations while making the flimsiest of excuses with a straight face and hand waving away their own government's actions. Unfortunately so much water has flown under the bridge this is just not credible.
What happened to the concern for all the refugees from Syria now, everyone is fighting to keep them away yet are happy to make sanctimonious statements feigning concern to justify destructive action that decimates entire countries and destroys millions of lives driven entirely by political and economic agendas. This kind of odious hypocrisy is just not tenable anymore.
So, what, ethical government is a nonsensical idea and we all just accept autocracy around the world?
You're also putting a lot of words in people's mouths. Many or most of folks who have a problem with things like this are also the people concerned with their own government's actions abroad, and are _not_ those "fighting to keep [Syrian refugees] away".
Everything can be made to look like hypocrisy if you just freely mix and match opinions of completely different people.
Besides being (in my opinion) incorrect on many levels - for instance, Western countries continue to rescue and provide for NEMA refugees, if not granting them residency - the parent comment is a great example of "Whataboutism," a classic logical fallacy and Soviet propaganda technique:
Considering the "muslim minorities" went on a wild random stabbing campaign and randomly injected people with some sort of syringes in public places, AND entry into restaurands and stores all include metal detectors and xray scanners and armed troops are standing everywhere, I'd say there's already been a war declared by the minorities against the chinese there. Just in case you are wondering my wife has family who live in different parts of xinjiang. A couple of summers ago during the worst of it before all the above equipment was deployed many people were afraid to go outside their homes.
I was talking with my wife this morning and other parts of western china (not xinjiang) have some issues with radicalization. The muslims have been on a non stop jihad since its inception and this is just a continuation of it. We could also go over what's been happening in the russian republics (like kazakhstan) which also have been feeling the effects of "invasion".
>Considering the "muslim minorities" went on a wild random stabbing campaign and randomly injected people with some sort of syringes in public places[...]
What percentage of those "muslim minorities" actually took part in those acts? Does that percentage justify treating everyone who qualifies as "muslim minorities" like a criminal?
> The muslims have been on a non stop jihad since its inception and this is just a continuation of it.
That's not remotely true despite what extremists on both sides like to delude themselves into believing.
* Fake app, so people can pass a manual inspection of their device
* Fake dataset, to feed so many false positives into their database it makes it time-cost prohibitive to investigate
* Conflicting dataset - Duplicate MD5 strings matching 'bad' and 'good' files; may corrupt internal databases or provide plausible deniability