"It has been established that during the initialisation of the system applications factory-installed on a Xiaomi Mi 10T device, these applications contact a server in Singapore at the address globalapi.ad.xiaomi.com (IP address 47.241.69.153) and download the JSON file
MiAdBlacklistConfig, and save this file in the metadata catalogues of the applications. A list of applications for which the MiAdBlacklistConfig file was found in metadata catalogues is presented in Table 13."
...
"Once the applications have downloaded the file, the download date is recorded in order to facilitate periodically updating the list. The scheme for downloading the MiAdBlacklistConfig file is shown in Figure 11."
"This file contains a list composed of the titles, names and other information of various religious and political groups and social movements (at the time of the analysis, the MiAdBlacklistConfig file contained 449 elements). A fragment of the MiAdBlacklistConfig file is shown in Table 14."
Similar lists existed within Google for their ("on hold" last I heard) project Dragonfly [0]. I saw a bunch of banned terms like these in the Dragonfly repo before they hid it from regular employees. It was a very long list. On it were also the names of specific activists and human rights lawyers, including some who'd been disappeared [1] or forcibly confined to mental institutions [2].
My impression is that Sundar was all-in on Dragonfly, and he only rolled it back because of tremendous external and internal pressure. As that pressure abates over time, expect Dragonfly to return. Word of warning for those who trust Google as a defender of digital privacy and human rights.
Is it me or is this an extremely clumsy way of doing censorship?
Why not do this at network or server-side level? Why not use some kind of hash (ala Apple'e proposed child pornography hunter)?
In this design, everyone would have to have this plain text configuration file ... also other brands (Oppo, Huawei etc.) would have to have it. What if it needs an update? Suppose the hui muslims starts causing trouble ... Or if people starts using slang or deliberate misspelling ...
I have a Xiaomi device and can confirm the API request. It does this regardless of country, including in GDPR countries. It makes multiple requests like this per minute. And if you click on the Privacy Policy in the Xiaomi Smart Home app for instance, it shows a 404 error.
This is pretty clearly a low-effort filter for advertisements deemed political.
> 204 "人民报", “People’s daily newspaper”
People's Daily is an official Communist Party newspaper... Why on earth would they blocklist that if this is a politically-motivated censorship program (as the paper/many here are implying)?
I think you would have to be mad to leave the stock ROM running on a Xiaomi phone, IIRC they were caught logging peoples browser history a few years ago.
Several models have mainline LineageOS support, I'm running Lineage on my Mix 2S and hope to have years worth of updates going forward.
The hardware is really good value as long as you install an non-tainted OS.
There are no details really as to how Xiaomi censors those terms. If one does not use the bundled-in browser / app-store, I doubt Xiaomi can censor anything at all in other browsers unless they MiTM with client-cert. OTOH, many popular non-browser apps (at least the ones that matter) pin certificates, so even Lenovo-esque shenanigans wouldn't work [0].
What can they possibly be doing in the firmware or the ROM to break TLS (and other such authenticated key-exchange protocols)? The only thing I think of: Injecting a compromised https stack in to an app's classpath / ld_library_path. This may sound ambitious, but the Android modding community already uses such runtime swappers to great affect [1][2].
This is what kinda terrifies me about today's digital landscape. Now it's so cheap to hide surveillance capabilities (spyware, hidden microphones or cameras) that bad actors can just embed surveillance into every cheap device, hoping just by sheer numbers to get one into a sensitive area (e.g. Pentagon, Langley), and then remotely activate surveillance. With the computational capabilities of today's data centers, they don't even have to be all that selective anymore. They could just be monitoring everyone, at some granularity, dumping logs into a massive database with just enough metadata to make it searchable/queryable.
Is that even enough though? Couldn't china put in shadow processors or other hardware-level surveillance similar to Intel's management engine? And it would be extremely difficult to detect, let alone disable or mitigate.
The blacklist is interesting, because it maybe shows China's government interests - some of which are not widely known:
- "Independence of Mongolia" - Does this show they would like to acquire Mongolia (when the time will be appropriate)?
- "The Organisation for the Liberation of Palestine" - Does this show pro-Israel support?
I'm really not sure how serious I should take the threat of Chinese made electronics - almost all electronics are made China, not just Xaiomi and Hauwei.
My iphone is made in China by Chinese contract manufacturer (Foxconn) - does that mean all iphones could be compromised with Chinese malware? It could be possible, but how can you tell? Is it possible to observe network packets going form my phone to a Chinese or Chinese-allied country?
Genuinely curious, btw. Any feedback would be very appreciated.
Presumably Apple ensures there is nothing nefarious in the hardware, but it seems an unlikely avenue for compromise. Most of the "phone" is Apple-provided software.
In theory sure, you could have a chip snooping on the bus. But it would have to have a lot of OS-level knowledge and then how would it exfiltrate the data without OS-level access to the IP stack?
Like the Bloomberg/Supermicro story, I am extremely skeptical.
A Chinese-built phone that comes supplied with an OS, that's a totally different matter.
As far as I can tell, the meta solution here is open source hardware and software. Otherwise it just doesn't matter who is doing this, why they do it, or who is affected.
The core issue is the lack of end to end encryption and open source hardware and software. Options today are okay, but they need to be great to reach the right people. See my post in this thread about Pinephone and Librem.
Foxconn is not Chinese, it's a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, that does have most factories in China (but it also has factories in other countries). The reason why Foxconn is so successful is because they do a good job in quality control and honoring contracts, which sets them apart. They are trying to blend Western-style rule of law with Chinese wages and infrastructure.
The successful stories about western companies outsourcing to China do tend to fall into the category of building and running your own factory there, rather than contracting with a Chinese owned and managed factory to produce to spec, which suffers from all the ethical problems discussed in the parent post. E.g. these are all decisions taken by management, not individual factory workers, so if you want to reduce risk, then install your own management.
Network isn’t even the only egress route out of a cellphone. They have sophisticated radios, so a low-level (e.g. on-silicon) backdoor could send your data out to a nearby agent using all manner of electro-magnetic emissions.
You just have to trust the manufacturer and its supply chain, and that applies to open source too.
I think the whole discussion is missing the mark, so much so that I personally tend to believe that is the point. Your electronics spies on you, that's just how it is. The important question is if the data gathered could possibly hurt you now or in the future. We can only speculate on what thoughts and opinions become dangerous in the future. So with that said I would look at the problem from the perspective of "can this hurtful data be accessed by someone with reach to reach me". All the way from targeted advertisements to someone kicking in your door. That only leaves one answer as far as I can tell: Chinese phones are safer for everyone not inside China or maybe in one or two other countries. Using US electronics or software on the other hand and you can be reached in pretty much all the countries left out above.
"made" in this case tends to refer to created, not just manufactured. it (as the article states) is mostly an issue for chinese brands with poor quality control or ulterior motives.
> 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.
While a lot of comments are rightly focusing on the censorship aspect of it, IMHO, the most concerning part of this is that this intrusive capability, while disabled for the EU region can be remotely enabled at any time. This implies that Xiaomi, and most likely all Chinese phone vendors and by extension CCP, has backdoors in all these devices.
This re-enabling is probably just the tip of the iceberg, wonder what all they can do via these backdoors?
From the article:
Relations between Lithuania and China have soured recently. China demanded last month that Lithuania withdraw its ambassador in Beijing and said it would recall its envoy to Vilnius after Taiwan announced that its mission in Lithuania would be called the Taiwanese Representative Office
No one trust China but this sure looks like politically motivated. Was someone else able to authenticate or reproduce the results.
Thanks to those who posted a link to the actual report [1]
It may be worth clarifying that all those keywords and terms are in Chinese. So when they say "Free Tibet" they mean that the phone has a blacklist file that contains "西藏自由" and which use is disabled in the "European region".
On the other hand, it seems that this blacklist file is actually downloaded into the phone, which suggests to me that they could update it to match any terms in any language if they wanted.
I think that Chinese manufacturers will really need to produce 'clean' firmware that satisfies independent audits instead of these superficial feature flags if they want to continue to sell in the West long term. If not they will suffer Huawei's fate one after the other when this sort of thing is found out.
"Censorship" is part of a whole here, and it's not obvious what to call that whole.
This is a complex of censorship, data gathering, personalization and such. A few months ago microsoft accidentally turned on some china settings globally, and "tank man" disappeared from search results. Tank man is conspicuous, I wonder what less conspicuous switches can be flipped.
The main arteries of media & communication are strategic assets. These responsible for near 100% of Alphabet & FB's revenue. Ad businesses, app stores, etc. Google pay Apple more revenue for search defaults than MSFT earn in gross from their "2nd place in the market" position. Google pay OEMs and telecoms to be their default app stores. The complex is all about bottlenecks,
Control over these is the financial asset behind several of the world's most profitable companies. It is a primary intelligence target/asset. It's a major part of china's information/narrative control mechanism... has been for a while. The thing that's changing is that china's mass is starting to cause tides elsewhere.
What difference does it make to disable the censorship function compared to fully removing it from the code base?
Considering that phone updates cannot be verified, every phone maker has the ability to secretly add such features at any time. And if the phone is link to a user account they could even do this in a targeted way.
The thing is if these censorship is enabled, its going to be found out in a second by someone and explode in the news. All it does is that it deletes a word you typed on your phone or prevent you from seeing a piece of content that you want to see. It's going to be so obvious. It will not achieve the desired goal to censor in the first place and will make people realize what you don't want people to see. It will completely backfire. Given it is a broken and illogical plan, then it is highly unlikely there is a a multi year effort to build phones, sale to international markets, just to censor what people want to say and feed people about ccp propaganda. Even if someone is so stupid and want to do it anyway. What you fear is the censorship actually work. But you don't have to worry about that as it will not work.
What's "decomposition analysis" and how can I do it at home?
Since others here are curious, how would one go replicating these results to find the MiAdBlacklistConfig file? Can I download the OS from a website and just search for strings in the MiAdBlacklistConfig file? I'm genuinely interested, rather than using this question to cast doubt on the 32 page research report.
From what I can gather from the report it should be possible to reproduce the analysis. Probably it is even possible to run the apps in question in an emulator.
Also it should be possible to get the full url of the censorship configuation file and also its full contents.
Given the extreme politics around this, I think it would be better if this type of analysis was done as open source and in a completely reproducible manner.
Canada has unofficially banned the sale of theirdevices, or at least that’s why eBay said the Canadian government told them to not allow their sale.
Though eBay.ca just blocked any listing containing the word “xiaomi”, though they make a ton of things that aren’t phones. I just took out xiaomi and left the model number and sold my thing.
Still waiting for my government to respond to my request to find out why.
This may be kind of a dumb question, but what exactly is a "Chinese phone" and what is not? Is my current "Moto" branded phone (Lenovo) in the same boat and if not, why not?
> "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.
This is applicable equally for every other country.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|4 years ago|reply
"It has been established that during the initialisation of the system applications factory-installed on a Xiaomi Mi 10T device, these applications contact a server in Singapore at the address globalapi.ad.xiaomi.com (IP address 47.241.69.153) and download the JSON file MiAdBlacklistConfig, and save this file in the metadata catalogues of the applications. A list of applications for which the MiAdBlacklistConfig file was found in metadata catalogues is presented in Table 13."
... "Once the applications have downloaded the file, the download date is recorded in order to facilitate periodically updating the list. The scheme for downloading the MiAdBlacklistConfig file is shown in Figure 11."
"This file contains a list composed of the titles, names and other information of various religious and political groups and social movements (at the time of the analysis, the MiAdBlacklistConfig file contained 449 elements). A fragment of the MiAdBlacklistConfig file is shown in Table 14."
Extract from table 14....
===================================================
No.: Original - Approximate translation
1 "宗教虔信者阵线", “Front of religious believers”,
...
22 "西藏自由", “Free Tibet”,
...
60 "蒙古独立", “Independence of Mongolia”,
61 "89民运", “89 Democracy Movement”,
62 "基督灵恩布道团", “Christian charismatic mission”, ...
145 "伊斯兰联盟", “Islamic League”,
...
201 "民运", “Democratic Movement”,
202 "妇女委员会", “Women’s Committee”,
203 "伊斯兰马格里布基地组织", “Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb”,
204 "人民报", “People’s daily newspaper”,
205 "巴勒斯坦解放组织", “The Organisation for the Liberation of Palestine”,
=======================================================
[+] [-] neartheplain|4 years ago|reply
My impression is that Sundar was all-in on Dragonfly, and he only rolled it back because of tremendous external and internal pressure. As that pressure abates over time, expect Dragonfly to return. Word of warning for those who trust Google as a defender of digital privacy and human rights.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/06/un-human-right...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-ink-girl-defaced-xi-09...
[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
Why not do this at network or server-side level? Why not use some kind of hash (ala Apple'e proposed child pornography hunter)?
In this design, everyone would have to have this plain text configuration file ... also other brands (Oppo, Huawei etc.) would have to have it. What if it needs an update? Suppose the hui muslims starts causing trouble ... Or if people starts using slang or deliberate misspelling ...
[+] [-] schleck8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MangoCoffee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trasz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pphysch|4 years ago|reply
> 204 "人民报", “People’s daily newspaper”
People's Daily is an official Communist Party newspaper... Why on earth would they blocklist that if this is a politically-motivated censorship program (as the paper/many here are implying)?
[+] [-] amiga-workbench|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|4 years ago|reply
What can they possibly be doing in the firmware or the ROM to break TLS (and other such authenticated key-exchange protocols)? The only thing I think of: Injecting a compromised https stack in to an app's classpath / ld_library_path. This may sound ambitious, but the Android modding community already uses such runtime swappers to great affect [1][2].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9072424
[1] https://forum.xda-developers.com/f/magisk.5903/
[2] https://forum.xda-developers.com/f/xposed-general.3094/
[+] [-] bitcurious|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miohtama|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cronix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaywalk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EMM_386|4 years ago|reply
It's insane.
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/android/2020/07/we-found-yet-a...
[+] [-] titzer|4 years ago|reply
It's downright dystopian.
[+] [-] reginold|4 years ago|reply
HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28499918
[+] [-] umvi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dah00n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pulse7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] game_the0ry|4 years ago|reply
My iphone is made in China by Chinese contract manufacturer (Foxconn) - does that mean all iphones could be compromised with Chinese malware? It could be possible, but how can you tell? Is it possible to observe network packets going form my phone to a Chinese or Chinese-allied country?
Genuinely curious, btw. Any feedback would be very appreciated.
[+] [-] stickfigure|4 years ago|reply
In theory sure, you could have a chip snooping on the bus. But it would have to have a lot of OS-level knowledge and then how would it exfiltrate the data without OS-level access to the IP stack?
Like the Bloomberg/Supermicro story, I am extremely skeptical.
A Chinese-built phone that comes supplied with an OS, that's a totally different matter.
[+] [-] reginold|4 years ago|reply
The core issue is the lack of end to end encryption and open source hardware and software. Options today are okay, but they need to be great to reach the right people. See my post in this thread about Pinephone and Librem.
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
The successful stories about western companies outsourcing to China do tend to fall into the category of building and running your own factory there, rather than contracting with a Chinese owned and managed factory to produce to spec, which suffers from all the ethical problems discussed in the parent post. E.g. these are all decisions taken by management, not individual factory workers, so if you want to reduce risk, then install your own management.
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
You just have to trust the manufacturer and its supply chain, and that applies to open source too.
[+] [-] eloisius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dah00n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techrat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yumraj|4 years ago|reply
While a lot of comments are rightly focusing on the censorship aspect of it, IMHO, the most concerning part of this is that this intrusive capability, while disabled for the EU region can be remotely enabled at any time. This implies that Xiaomi, and most likely all Chinese phone vendors and by extension CCP, has backdoors in all these devices.
This re-enabling is probably just the tip of the iceberg, wonder what all they can do via these backdoors?
[+] [-] zolosa|4 years ago|reply
No one trust China but this sure looks like politically motivated. Was someone else able to authenticate or reproduce the results.
[+] [-] no_way|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortuna86|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|4 years ago|reply
It may be worth clarifying that all those keywords and terms are in Chinese. So when they say "Free Tibet" they mean that the phone has a blacklist file that contains "西藏自由" and which use is disabled in the "European region".
On the other hand, it seems that this blacklist file is actually downloaded into the phone, which suggests to me that they could update it to match any terms in any language if they wanted.
I think that Chinese manufacturers will really need to produce 'clean' firmware that satisfies independent audits instead of these superficial feature flags if they want to continue to sell in the West long term. If not they will suffer Huawei's fate one after the other when this sort of thing is found out.
[1] https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi...
[+] [-] nottorp|4 years ago|reply
About the same thing as Apple scanning iPhones for what they say is child porn.
suggests to me they could update it to match any images if they wanted...
[+] [-] netcan|4 years ago|reply
This is a complex of censorship, data gathering, personalization and such. A few months ago microsoft accidentally turned on some china settings globally, and "tank man" disappeared from search results. Tank man is conspicuous, I wonder what less conspicuous switches can be flipped.
The main arteries of media & communication are strategic assets. These responsible for near 100% of Alphabet & FB's revenue. Ad businesses, app stores, etc. Google pay Apple more revenue for search defaults than MSFT earn in gross from their "2nd place in the market" position. Google pay OEMs and telecoms to be their default app stores. The complex is all about bottlenecks,
Control over these is the financial asset behind several of the world's most profitable companies. It is a primary intelligence target/asset. It's a major part of china's information/narrative control mechanism... has been for a while. The thing that's changing is that china's mass is starting to cause tides elsewhere.
This game is a "ring of power" game.
[+] [-] EveYoung|4 years ago|reply
Considering that phone updates cannot be verified, every phone maker has the ability to secretly add such features at any time. And if the phone is link to a user account they could even do this in a targeted way.
[+] [-] russli1993|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nytgop77|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reginold|4 years ago|reply
Since others here are curious, how would one go replicating these results to find the MiAdBlacklistConfig file? Can I download the OS from a website and just search for strings in the MiAdBlacklistConfig file? I'm genuinely interested, rather than using this question to cast doubt on the 32 page research report.
[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
From what I can gather from the report it should be possible to reproduce the analysis. Probably it is even possible to run the apps in question in an emulator.
Also it should be possible to get the full url of the censorship configuation file and also its full contents.
Given the extreme politics around this, I think it would be better if this type of analysis was done as open source and in a completely reproducible manner.
[+] [-] tasubotadas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|4 years ago|reply
Though eBay.ca just blocked any listing containing the word “xiaomi”, though they make a ton of things that aren’t phones. I just took out xiaomi and left the model number and sold my thing.
Still waiting for my government to respond to my request to find out why.
[+] [-] sudosysgen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanderZwan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reginold|4 years ago|reply
Linked near the top of the thread, 32 pages of goodness: https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi...
[+] [-] MarkusWandel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] reducesuffering|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kburman|4 years ago|reply
This is applicable equally for every other country.