from the 1984-was-not-supposed-to-be-an-instruction-manual dept.
http://mashable.com/2017/07/21/china-spyware-xinjiang/
China has ramped up surveillance measures in Xinjiang, home to much of its Muslim minority population, according to reports from Radio Free Asia.
Authorities sent out a notice over a week ago instructing citizens to install a "surveillance app" on their phones, and are conducting spot checks in the region to ensure that residents have it.
— Delinda Tien (@TienDelinda) July 14, 2017
The notice, written in Uyghur and Chinese, was sent by WeChat to residents in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital.
Android users were instructed to scan the QR code in order to install the Jingwang app that would, as authorities claimed, "automatically detect terrorist and illegal religious videos, images, e-books and electronic documents" stored in the phone. If illegal content was detected, users would be ordered to delete them.
Users who deleted, or did not install the app, would be detained for up to 10 days, according to social media users.
Related Stories
China Snares Tourists' Phones in Surveillance Dragnet by Adding Secret App
China has turned its western region of Xinjiang into a police state with few modern parallels, employing a combination of high-tech surveillance and enormous manpower to monitor and subdue the area's predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities. Now, the digital dragnet is expanding beyond Xinjiang's residents, ensnaring tourists, traders and other visitors — and digging deep into their smartphones.
A team of journalists from The New York Times and other publications examined a policing app used in the region, getting a rare look inside the intrusive technologies that China is deploying in the name of quelling Islamic radicalism and strengthening Communist Party rule in its Far West. The use of the app has not been previously reported.
China's border authorities routinely install the app on smartphones belonging to travelers who enter Xinjiang by land from Central Asia, according to several people interviewed by the journalists who crossed the border recently and requested anonymity to avoid government retaliation. Chinese officials also installed the app on the phone of one of the journalists during a recent border crossing. Visitors were required to turn over their devices to be allowed into Xinjiang. The app gathers personal data from phones, including text messages and contacts. It also checks whether devices are carrying pictures, videos, documents and audio files that match any of more than 73,000 items included on a list stored within the app's code.
Apple takes flak for disputing iOS security bombshell dropped by Google
Apple is taking flak for disputing some minor details of last week's bombshell report that, for at least two years, customers' iOS devices were vulnerable to a sting[sic] of zeroday exploits, at least some of which were actively exploited to install malware that stole location data, passwords, encryption keys, and a wealth of other highly sensitive data.
Google's Project Zero said the attacks were waged indiscriminately from a small collection of websites that "received thousands of visitors per week." One of the five exploit chains Project Zero researchers analyzed showed they "were likely written contemporaneously with their supported iOS versions." The researcher's conclusion: "This group had a capability against a fully patched iPhone for at least two years."
Earlier this week, researchers at security firm Volexity reported finding 11 websites serving the interests of Uyghur Muslims that the researchers believed were tied to the attacks Project Zero identified. Volexity's post was based in part on a report by TechCrunch citing unnamed people familiar with the attacks who said they were the work of [a] nation—likely China—designed to target the Uyghur community in the country's Xinjiang state.
[...]For a week, Apple said nothing about any of the reports. Then on Friday, it issued a statement that critics are characterizing as tone-deaf for its lack of sensitivity to human rights and an overfocus on minor points.
[...]
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute, summed up much of this criticism by tweeting: “The thing that bugs me most about Apple these days is that they are all-in on the Chinese market and, as such, refuse to say something like ‘A government intent on ethnic cleansing of a minority population conducted a mass hacking attack on our users.’"
[...]Apple had an opportunity to apologize to those who were hurt, thank the researchers who uncovered systemic flaws that caused the failure, and explain how it planned to do better in the future. It didn't do any of those things. Now, the company has distanced itself from the security community when it needs it most.
See also: The stakes are too high for Apple to spin the iPhone exploits
Apple says Uighurs targeted in iPhone attack but disputes Google findings
Related: China Forces its Muslim Minority to Install Spyware on Their Phones
China Installs Surveillance App on Smartphones of Visitors to Xinjiang Region
On Tuesday, Don HO, the developer of Notepad++, a free GPL source code editor and notepad application for Microsoft Windows, released version 7.8.1, prompting a social media firestorm and a distributed denial of service attack. Notepad++ v7.8.1 was designated "the Free Uyghur edition," in reference to the predominantly Muslim ethnic group in western China that faces ongoing human rights violations and persecution at the hands of Beijing.
"The site notepad-plus-plus.org has suffered DDoS attack from 1230 to 1330 Paris time," HO said in an email to The Register. "I saw the [reduced] amount of visitors via Google analytics then the support of my host confirmed the attack. The DDoS attack has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by our host [Cloudflare]."
[...] For expressing that sentiment, the project's website was DDoSed and its GitHub code repository has been flooded with angry comments in the Issues section – intended for people to report bugs or offer suggestions.
HO said Notepad++'s Tiananmen Square release didn't really attract much attention. The Charlie Hebdo release, however, got his site hacked. "The reaction of this time is more like 'Boycott Beijing 2008 OG' on the Notepad++ website, while Notepad++ was on SourceForge," he said, noting that SourceForge forum was similarly flooded by Chinese spammers in 2008.
Also at The Verge.
Related: China Forces its Muslim Minority to Install Spyware on Their Phones
Massive DNA Collection Campaign Continues in Xinjiang, China
China Installs Surveillance App on Smartphones of Visitors to Xinjiang Region
Apple Lashes Out After Google Reveals iPhone/iOS Vulnerabilities
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @04:16AM (2 children)
Was he right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @04:58AM
Ted Kaczynski was right. Industrial society has brought about the bad future.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday August 06 2017, @12:46PM
Was Theodore "Unabomber" Kaczynski right? Possibly, yes and no. Clearly bombing people and airplanes wasn't the greatest idea he ever had but it apparently made sense to him, and he is paying for that now. Reading his "manifesto" (Industrial society and its future) was actually quite interesting and in parts spot on and this from something being written and sent out in 1995. It's way above the norm for the type of manifestos that crazy serial-bombers/killers/whatever tends to write. You can download it and it's just about 30ish pages long so it's not a very long read, compared to as an example Breiviks 1515 page manifesto (2083 – A European Declaration of Independence) which is mostly complete drivel and copy-paste at it's best (I stopped reading if fairly quickly as it's quite horrid, perhaps it gets better towards the end, but I doubt that). Kaczynski wrote something that is clearly a well thought through academic paper which isn't all that odd since he was actually educated, and Breivik didn't or wasn't.
Perhaps it says something else, typing something out on a typewriter compared to just using a word processor might have you think things through more since there is no easy way to edit text and correct mistakes made a long the way. That said not all things written on typewriters are great, the 20ish page SCUM manifesto by Valerie Solanas from 1967 as an example is not as well thought though as Kaczynskis manifesto, but still way better then Breiviks manifesto.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @04:55AM (3 children)
I'd prefer this rather than the government using secret courts and Orwellian legal orders forcing private companies to backdoor their software effectively turning them into government spyware. What China is doing is dubious, but I think doing the exact same thing -in mass- and trying to do it covertly is magnitudes worse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday August 06 2017, @12:56PM
It's China: It's not either. It's both.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @11:13PM (1 child)
You seem to think that the US (or UK or similar) is using "Orwellian legal orders forcing private companies to backdoor their software".
If that were true, it would be kind of silly to pay contractors $billions to figure out how to do stuff. There would be nothing to figure out: just use the backdoor.
Also, there is no way that normal companies would manage to keep such secrets. Shamefully, lots of their staff aren't even US citizens.
I'm torn. Are you really that dumb, or are you just trying to hurt the US software industry by encouraging a belief that they have government-demanded backdoors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 07 2017, @05:00PM
not necessarily backdoors, but I'm 100% certain that three-letter-agencies can just drop a piece of paper on someone's desk at any major tech company and get the data they want.
I actually respect Apple for just not having that data in the first place(wrt phone encryption keys). More companies should follow that precedent.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday August 06 2017, @05:33AM (6 children)
I didn't know Chinese was a language.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RedBear on Sunday August 06 2017, @06:01AM (5 children)
Chinese |ˌCHīˈnēz|
adjective
of or relating to China or its language, culture, or people.
noun
(1) The Chinese language
Whether it is specifically Mandarin or Cantonese being referred to is unimportant in many contexts. The Chinese people aren't really separated in any practical sense by the two main languages. It's quite likely the edict was either issued in the dominant local language or in both Mandarin and Cantonese. But if that is the usual way, it would be redundant to state that explicitly all the time, thus "Chinese" is substituted. Uyghur (WEE-gurr) is mentioned because it is a very different language. The character set looks remarkably similar to Arabic, actually.
Now let's talk about the 60 or so incompatible dialects in greater India.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @06:25AM (3 children)
Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken languages; Chinese is the written language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @06:39AM (2 children)
Traditional or simplified :-) ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @07:08AM
Calligraphy or block letters?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @07:34PM
The contemptible "Taiwan independence" splittists do extreme harms to cross-Strait relations. True compatriots see this clearly. We must abandon "Taiwan independence" for the peaceful development and the integral benefit of the Chinese nation.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @12:15PM
There are some differences in written Cantonese vs written Mandarin but they are mostly quite similar and thus can be considered dialects of the same language.
However spoken Cantonese and spoken Mandarin are different enough that they should be considered separate languages. The mutual intelligibility of Cantonese vs Mandarin is probably lower than Spanish vs Italian.
Spoken varieties of Min Nan (e.g. Hokkien, Teochew) are even more different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @05:34AM
Wait, does that mean Chinese phones don't come with Chinese Gov spyware built-in? :)
They should make all guys install it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C74PnRlX0AA0TnX.jpg [twimg.com]
;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @09:44AM (4 children)
Considering what muslims are doing to the world today can the chinese government be blamed for this?
Blowing up planes, recruiting for their holy war, killing people for not being straight, FGM, child marriage, thighing, hating the world. [news.com.au]
How soon until we pick a country, wall it up, throw all of the muslims in, and kill any who leave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @01:48PM
Maybe if we look deeper we might even find US Gov/CIA involvement with Muslim separatists in China.
After all Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, etc weren't fucked-up Islamic states till the US and their allies messed them up. For the past decade the USA has been trying to turn Syria into another of those fucked up states whereas the Russians were working against that (and trying to prop up a relatively less fucked up dictatorship).
The Saudi Gov is a great pal of the US and UK and the biggest sponsor of the terrorist-friendly version of Islam.
Islam is a sub-par religion as major religions go, but it doesn't have to be as bad as the versions the US Gov and their allies prefer/spread.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @05:26PM (2 children)
> ... thighing, ..
Assumed a typo? What were you trying to write??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @08:50PM
Not a typo. Look it up if you really want to know.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @11:29PM
Yeah, so...
Mohammed married a 6-year-old. He didn't actually put his penis into her until she was 9 years old. While waiting for her to grow big enough, he would satisfy himself by placing his penis between her thighs. (thus "thighing") So that is what he did when she was 6, 7, and 8 years old.
Muslims consider Mohammed to be the perfect man. His example is to be followed. So, obviously, one can marry a 6-year-old and thigh her. This is at least somewhat common.
The sexual weirdness doesn't end with that horror. You can have sex with slaves and sell used slaves, but you can't share a slave or have sex with one that is pregnant by some other man. You can have sex with goats or sheep, and you CAN share those. Numerous US service members report seeing muslims fuck goats and sheep, typically via long-range night-vision or thermal imagers, and there are videos you can find that feature it. You have to shave your crotch. Except for certain kinds of family members, modesty is required around the opposite sex, but there is a way to get an exception. If a man nurses on a woman's breast, then he counts as the right kind of family, even if he isn't a baby when he nurses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @09:48AM
In the UK, everyone will have their encryption backdoored by public servants that refuse to deal with the islamists they and their predecessors let in.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @10:39AM (1 child)
Yes, we have all the alt-wrongs, the 3 %, the Neo-Nazis, the Richard Spencer, Glenn Beck, InfoWars subscribers, people who up-mod jmorris on SoylentNews, yes, all these and many more, including Hairyfeet (but only because of his Challenge, we have an office pool on that one), and Goldbugs, the KKK, and the CCC, and Jeff Sessions and Paul Ryan and Rand Paul, all these we have required to have smart phones so they can be tracked. Of course, we are not so stupid as the Chinese, with their long tradition of imperial edicts, to actually make a law or something about this. We just invest in Apple. And Google. And jmorris.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @01:31PM
wow, no one in my office reads soylent except for me. Hairyfeet would not be a known entity and moreso of an ailment; this could be true in context here as well come to think of it.
I did catch a guy reading the other site, but he was young and not aware of how it used to be.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Sunday August 06 2017, @02:39PM (1 child)
I'm curious if this requires usage of a particular phone. I only see Android mentioned in the article, so what about Apple devices? Or Microsoft? Or a dumbphone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @11:46PM
That's a good question. As for Apple, I doubt they would be able to get their app into Apple's walled garden. But on the other hand, all the government needs to do is ask and Apple will hand over their iCloud backups, so they are likely even more owned than the Android users. For Microsoft, who knows? Do they even have a significant number of users in China?
Dumb phone users are already owned, in the sense that all their communications (calls and texts) are already tracked and logged so there really isn't anything of interest on a dumb phone that they wouldn't know already. They are obviously worried about smart phones which can access the internet and send and receive encrypted communications.
I suppose you could lie and say you don't have a phone, but if they catch you then it probably isn't going to be pretty.