Lithuania Says Throw Away Chinese Phones Due To Censorship Concerns (reuters.com) 83
Lithuania's Defense Ministry recommended that consumers avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found the devices had built-in censorship capabilities. From a report: Flagship phones sold in Europe by China's smartphone giant Xiaomi have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as "Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan independence" or "democracy movement", Lithuania's state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday. The capability in Xiaomi's Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the "European Union region", but can be turned on remotely at any time, the Defence Ministry's National Cyber Security Centre said in the report. "Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible," Defence Deputy Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters in introducing the report.
But how can you help Xi fight his enemies? (Score:2)
[If you must feed the troll, please change the Subject.]
Upon reflection, I'm wondering how sincere the Chinese censorship is. For one thing, it's not like Xi can make his enemies disappear just because Chinese citizens aren't allowed to talk about them. But I think the bigger and heavier aspect is that knowledge of the enemy is important and necessary to fight against and defeat the enemy.
Therefore my newest weird hypothesis is that the real objective is to create a special kind of paranoia. Xi wants everyo
And people are shocked? (Score:3)
I always just assumed those gifts were in there just waiting to be unleashed.
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Perhaps because it's too much trouble to maintain two separate firmware builds, one with and one without censorship ability, and flash each phone according to region of sale? Much easier to just have the censorship turned on and off by an easily-configurable flag.
Can I keep my phone (Score:2, Funny)
if I don't send SMSes about Tibet or Taiwan?
Because if I'm honest, ever since I got my first cellphone in 1994 (a Motorola "banana" 3200), I've discussed Tibet and Taiwan over SMS with someone exactly zero times.
Alternatively, can I get another phone just to talk about Tibet and Taiwan?
Re:Can I keep my phone (Score:5, Interesting)
China has a "100-year plan" [forbes.com] to become the world's last and most enduring super-power, with a "target date" of 2049, the centennial anniversary of China's Communist Revolution.
In 1980, China's total GDP was around $190 billion (in current dollars). By 2019 it had grown to over $12 trillion - and today, despite Covid and the weak economic outlook, Google suggests the World Bank believe it has reached $14.34 trillion.
China has absolutely no qualms about stealing and using intellectual property to under-cut competition. They're also not above blatant market manipulation [nikkei.com], having been found (just one example) by the WTO to be aggressively "dumping" cheap steel in Europe in a plan to wipe out European steel production - something they were very successful at.
After a "friendly trade visit" to the UK in 2016, a burglary at an innovative Scottish wave-power generating company [theguardian.com] went largely forgotten until photographs emerged of a Chinese company developing the exact same solution.
The list goes on.
The scary/amazing/ironic/etc. thing about this concerns the number of US companies - including titans like Apple and Amazon - who deal with Chinese companies knowing that so much intellectual property theft goes on.
I can't in truth disagree with your comment that China has a regime that "needs wholesale change", but, unfortunately, I look at the west and I see no great improvements. Just look at the corruption in Washington.
As the saying goes: "Thou hypocrite, firs cast the beam out of thine own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye."
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And here's the funny thing about that Scottish wave power company. It went defunct and bankrupt BEFORE anything came out of China... Who ever actualizes the idea comes out in the end the winner...
Anyways according to the article...
"Carn Gibson, who spent 15 years at Pelamis, where he was engineering manager, is disappointed that funding for the Pelamis project could not be found in the UK and appeared sanguine about the Chinese design.
Gibson, who is now senior consulting engineer at Quoceant, a new compan
Re: Can I keep my phone (Score:4, Insightful)
There's always the possibility that the list of censored terms could be expanded, assuming that it isn't already more broad than what is mentioned in the article
Re: Can I keep my phone (Score:4, Insightful)
What I meant to convey is, it's all fine and good for the Lithuanian authorities to tell people to throw their phones away over free speech concerns, but the reality is that 1/ Chinese censorship is very unlikely to impact the average Lithuanian and 2/ they're not the ones paying for the replacement phone.
Re: Can I keep my phone (Score:5, Informative)
I was watching this presentation in its original, and the primary course was not at all towards the private individuals, but for the state conducted purchases of such items for the state institutions. Sure, it is worth of knowing for the private person what his most affordable piece of equipment is packed with, yet I do not realistically think of a single private eyebrow being lifted by the statement.
Then, I am certainly unhappy, and so much more, that computing products of Microsoft or Apple are so much stuffed with the push of their gaming consoles or online subscriptions nowadays. There is serious lack of computing fundamentals.
Re: Can I keep my phone (Score:1)
Complacency in the face of evil (Score:2, Insightful)
This argument is not much different from "I don't care for privacy, because I have nothing to hide". And it is as stupid as that too. First of all — as we keep hearing about any and all "backdoors" designed for governmental use — if someone can turn the feature on remotely, most likely, anyone can.
And, second, as someone else pointed out already, the list of terms is, likely, dynamic and subject to update too. Can Russian hacker
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So what though? Many ISPs censor the internet, e.g. blocking The Pirate Bay. Consumers have a choice.
In this case Xiaomi hasn't even enabled the censorship on these devices and has no reason to.
Oh noes it's closed source and there could be anything else hidden in the OS, well the same goes for 99% of other phones on the market. If that bothers you then run Lineage.
This advice is just sending perfectly good devices to landfill.
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So what though? Many ISPs censor the internet, e.g. blocking The Pirate Bay. Consumers have a choice.
ISPs don't censor anything in any country that actually has freedom of speech.
Re:Can I keep my phone (Score:5, Informative)
if I don't send SMSes about Tibet or Taiwan?
Who said anything about SMS? From TFA,
The report said the list of terms which could be censored by the Xiaomi phone's system apps, including the default internet browser, currently includes 449 terms in Chinese and is continuously updated.
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And who uses the build in browser, so unless this affects Chrome/Firefox, and it affects Whatsup/Signal/Telegraph and any other non Chinese apps, who cares.
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Just like Apple.
Free Winnie (Score:3)
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if I don't send SMSes about Tibet or Taiwan?
Because if I'm honest, ever since I got my first cellphone in 1994 (a Motorola "banana" 3200), I've discussed Tibet and Taiwan over SMS with someone exactly zero times.
Alternatively, can I get another phone just to talk about Tibet and Taiwan?
Have you mentioned Wuhan, Chinese virus, Uighurs, detention camps, slave labor, genocide, Winnie the Pooh, Chinese spying? That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are lots [america.gov] of banned [ipfs.io] terms [supchina.com]. And those are just the ones that are current and known. The current unknowns and the future unknowns will add to the list. For example, Simu Liu [straitstimes.com] from the Shang Chi movie could get banned due to a four year old interview that could offend Chinese ultranationalists.
Different cultures, different holy cows (Score:1)
Try posting to Slashdot with the word "Nígger"... Don't bother to apply for work at NYTimes [reason.com] (or any other "progressive" outfit) after that. Wave American flag, and you're a racist [kutv.com].
No, I'm not equating it with China — freedoms are still much better in America, than in most of the rest of the world... But it kind of sucks here too already.
What sucks especially is that while Chin
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If I don't send SMSes about Tibet or Taiwan?>
Ah yes, the old "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" cognitive dissonance rationalization.
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>The capability in Xiaomi's Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the "European Union region"
You can keep it even if you do. This appears to be a limitation meant for Chinese region phones.
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There's that little note that it could be reactivated remotely.
Think of this as a warning about a zero-day exploit that doesn't currently have any known examples in the wild...but can be triggered by any web page.
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Which is wholly irrelevant. Every single phone has firmware which is remotely updated and can be made to do anything. By your logic, any remote updater is a "zero day exploit".
This is an insane premise to try to start from which removes any negative connotations from "zero day exploit".
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If I can't control whether and what gets updated, then, yes, I feel that way.
I don't consider "smartphones" to be secure, and won't use them for any confidential or financial transactions. (The web isn't *that* much better, but I feel that it is slightly better. But I still avoid on-line banking.)
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The last refuge of someone who knows he has no arguments left. "But I feel this way".
There's really no way to continue discussion from there, because the discussion becomes about feelings rather than facts.
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Remember the old USENET? People used to have a script that automatically put extra words in the signature that were jokingly intended to trigger the NSA and overload their monitoring capabilities. So add words like red-brigade, bomb, etc.
So why not do the same thing here. Every post, email, etc, just include "Free Tibet", "Seven dotted line must go!", "Winnie the Pooh", and so forth.
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how about re-flashing them (Score:2)
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would these censorship capabilities survive having the phones re-flashed with a new operating system such as Lineage? If that would clear them then why throw away an otherwise usable piece of hardware.
How do you suggest going about coaching a small country's population on this process?
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Oh about the same way a "use Linux" discussion works out every time Slashdot does a Microsoft story.
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Why do you think this small country is at all special against the problem?
It is universal arrangement, spreading from the political powers of the maker country.
Which is, let me remind you, officially communist - yet your main outsourcer.
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The Lithuanian government should have provided clear, easy to follow instructions to do just that for the 'phones that are most popular in Lithuania. Their population is just under 3 million so paying for this to be done (for those who cannot follow the instructions) would not be that expensive.
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That's way too difficult and not feasible. It puts that gov't on the hook for support activity way more complicated than any consumer company makes its consumers do. I'm not even sure about the formal legalities.
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It is NOT about Lithuania, first of all.
Next, this was reported as a behavior outline for the state purchasing agency: ban on these for these reasons.
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Xiaomi (Score:3)
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"Oh, bother!", said Xi the Pooh.
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Imagine the bitch of a time Uyghur paedophile dissidents in China must have to place a phone call...
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Deserves the same amount of vilification that Apple got over the child porn thing.
"Stupid Cancel Culture!!"
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To say Apple is being vilified and people like Xiaomi is peak daftness. There isn't a company in the world which has people praising them no matter what they do more than Apple, and Xiaomi is so "loved" that the first thing many people do with their phones is unlock the boot loader to install third party firmware.
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Xiaomi makes flagships too, and they are really good devices. Top not cameras, screens, CPUs etc. Throwing them away will be expensive.
Seems stupid to throw away devices that work fine just because there is a switch they could throw, but have not thrown and have no intention of or reason to throw, and if they do throw you can either live with not being able to search for "free Tibet" or throw it in the bin at that time.
If censorship came with a laugh-track. (Score:2)
Flagship phones sold in Europe by China's smartphone giant Xiaomi have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as "Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan independence" or "democracy movement", Lithuania's state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday.
That could be fun during a discussion about Tibet and you heard *bleeps* all the way through. Or a censor bar through pictures of Tibet.
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Or try using a wechat client to talk to someone in China and mention "falun gong" and immediately the connection resets. Fun times.
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Damn, I was looking forward to playing my falun gong tonight with my chamber orchestra!
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You can't even mention Falun Gong negatively, as in "Gullible relatives believe the fake Epoch Times owned by the know nothing Falun Gong pro-Trump kooks!" (wait, is saying Trump going to get me blocked?)
Non-story here (Score:2)
The report said the list of terms which could be censored by the Xiaomi phone's system apps, including the default internet browser, currently includes 449 terms in Chinese and is continuously updated.
Similar to how western manufacturers have to allow "features" that the Chinese government dictates for devices to be sold in China, Chinese phones do the same. You should care about the fact that there is a built-in capability to censor specific Chinese phrases in the system apps, in the sense that it is bad for any state to suppress the freedom of its population, but why care about owning such a device which could *potentially* enable such censorship (never been done on a non Chinese-region phone from Xiao
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This, or Symbian Nokia, rescued from the electronics dump bin.
No longer look for anything other, very happy.
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... but a phone you can flash to an open source OS.
Like a Xiaomi! Being able to unlock and flash custom firmware was the main reason I bought a Xiaomi. Then I fell in love with the stock camera app and flashed back to stock after testing some other roms. But I think of it as future proofing. When the phone gets old and unsupported, I can switch to a community distro like LineageOS. My old phone got another 3 years of life thanks to LineageOS (total 6 years or so for a cheap LG G2 Mini). Same thing if Xiaomi decides to do something stupid like censoring shit
Don't use Google! Throw it away! (Score:1)
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There's a big difference between switching from a search engine with tainted results and having the installed software/hardware censor terms. How convenient it would be if the Chinese could assassinate a dissident in Lithuania and prevent that fact from ever reaching the news because no one in Lithuania could post video, text, or images of the event. If this isn't international espionage, I don't know what else would qualify. It almost sounds like the first step in a plan to take over the world.
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There's a big difference between switching from a search engine with tainted results and having the installed software/hardware censor terms.
When preparing firmware images for a mobile device, companies start from a single source code base containing the features that are required for all the markets, and then they build many market-specific images, each one having only the features required for that region turned on. This is what every mobile phone producer does, and if they want to sell phones in China, one of those regional "features" will be government-mandated censorship in the built-in apps.
How convenient it would be if the Chinese could assassinate a dissident in Lithuania and prevent that fact from ever reaching the news because no one in Lithuania could post video, text, or images of the event.
No need for that. For example, Putin's government
File under D for Duh (Score:1)
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Which phones are known without this "feature" (Score:4, Interesting)
Short of re-flashing, which phones don't have this kind of censorship?
So what happens when ... (Score:2)
China says that if you want to sell phones in China then all your phones, everywhere, must include this censorship capability.
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Re: So what happens when ... (Score:1)
I call BS on that. Reference required.
Would a custom ROM (eg. Lineage) also affected? (Score:1)
Re: Would a custom ROM (eg. Lineage) also affected (Score:2)
Personally, I'd put the functionality in a binary blob driver. The one that custom ROMs crack out of the official ROMs to have proper hardware support for the device. Many Xiaomi devices run on Qualcomm chip sets, if they can be made to run with reference drivers/fully open source kernel, it might reduce the risk. In any case, if the hardware hides stuff from the software, getting root isn't going t
What about iphones (Score:1)