Chinese Mobile App Companies Are a National Security Risk, Says a Top Democrat (cnet.com) 76
Chinese mobile app companies pose the same national security risk to the US as telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE, Sen. Mark Warner said in an interview. From a report: Recent US legislation largely banned Huawei and ZTE from use by the government and its contractors, due to concerns about surveillance and other national security risks. Now Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is signaling that Chinese app developers may face similar scrutiny from lawmakers, corporate America, and the intelligence community.
Warner's comments follow a recent BuzzFeed News report that popular apps from China's Cheetah Mobile and Kika Tech were exploiting user permissions to engage in a form of ad fraud. Eight Android apps with more than 2 billion total downloads were said to be engaging in a form of app-install ad fraud. Google subsequently removed two of the apps from the Play store and said it continues to investigate. Cheetah and Kika deny engaging in app-install fraud. "Under Chinese law, all Chinese companies are ultimately beholden to the Communist Party, not their board or shareholders, so any Chinese technology company -- whether in telecom or mobile apps -- should be seen as extensions of the state and a national security risk," Warner said in an interview this week with BuzzFeed News. Further reading: Sen. Warner calls for US cyber doctrine, new standards for security.
Warner's comments follow a recent BuzzFeed News report that popular apps from China's Cheetah Mobile and Kika Tech were exploiting user permissions to engage in a form of ad fraud. Eight Android apps with more than 2 billion total downloads were said to be engaging in a form of app-install ad fraud. Google subsequently removed two of the apps from the Play store and said it continues to investigate. Cheetah and Kika deny engaging in app-install fraud. "Under Chinese law, all Chinese companies are ultimately beholden to the Communist Party, not their board or shareholders, so any Chinese technology company -- whether in telecom or mobile apps -- should be seen as extensions of the state and a national security risk," Warner said in an interview this week with BuzzFeed News. Further reading: Sen. Warner calls for US cyber doctrine, new standards for security.
Re: Why such narrow wording? (Score:2)
US is creating its own enemies (Score:2, Insightful)
This applies to China in particular. It's probably mostly paranoid, xenophobia and racism driving it.
Thanks for re-starting the cold-war, dufuses.
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They were required to drop their massive number of tariffs, as well as quit manipulating their money, and instead, they continue to raise tariffs and heavily manipulate their money, as well as subsidize and dump.
The cold war with China was already going on.
And as to Russia, it was Russia that invaded Georgia and Ukraine. Ask the Easter
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Eastern European here.
Get the Fuck Out of East Europe.
Best regards
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So, do you make good money now that you are out of military and working directly for bortnikov?
The answer will surprise you... (Score:1)
Nothing. Nothing at all. For that matter what would stop an actual US citizen from doing the same thing for fun or for profit? Again, it's fucking nothing.
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For example, google for Global IP, and satellites. This is a company designed from the ground up to steal Sat tech. That is one out of many sat companies that are not about sending tech to China.
Now, with that said, obviously security through obfuscation or by nationalism, is not 100% successful .
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Agreed. Proper wording: Mobile apps are a risk.
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Even a retard like Trump isn't entirely wrong about resisting them...
Right? [wp.com]
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He can be right and a hypocrite at the same time.
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The message sent? Words have no meaning.
What about Apple phones (Score:1)
How do we know that the Chinese have not put some machine/hardware level malware in the Apple phones electronics ?
Because of monitoring (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of people (including myself) spend a lot of time with all iPhone networking traffic going through web proxies. We'd especially notice some odd connections going off to China...
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We'd especially notice some odd connections going off to China
No you wouldn't. Those crafty devils are hiding data BETWEEN the bits where you don't normally look. Durn Fernegners!
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Huawei has a big office in Santa Clara, CA. They're so damn secretive over there most employees don't know what projects are done in their own building.
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First off, there's no way to know that it doesn't just not bother sending anything if behind a proxy
Yes, possibly, but there is also Charles on IOS now, which works as a VPN and not a proxy... I don't see anything on there either.
Beyond that, you're assuming it's sending data to China and not to control servers located elsewhere.
I'm looking for odd traffic regardless of destination and try to figure out what it is transmitting.
Basically there are enough people watching here and there that if something were
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Re:What about Apple phones (Score:4, Interesting)
How do we know that the Chinese have not put some machine/hardware level malware in the Apple phones electronics ?
You know this kind of thing doesn't happen, right? There are hundreds of millions of iPhones. So you'd need an enormous, industrial level conspiracy to get extra hardware in them. And all it would take to unravel the biggest espionage operation in world history is for one person to find one strange thing with one phone. The iPhone is the world's most scrutinized product.
It's not even believable enough for a movie script.
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whats wrong with starting a conspiracy theory ?
lets have some fun
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whats wrong with starting a conspiracy theory ?
lets have some fun
It's not fun. People believe that shit and then don't get their kids vaccinated and then their kids die of measles. People believe all kinds of false or exaggerated stories and they make their lives and the lives of the people around them worse.
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Except its not really a conspiracy. This is why Huawei is banned for gov use in the USA. The NSA and CIA have been found to tamper with US equipment in customs on its way to other nations. China has done the same a number of times.
Phones may be different but there is a lot of history of this with other tech.
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Yeah, it's possible to tamper with a few devices. It isn't possible to tamper with a few hundred million devices.
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Someone would find ersatz parts or code in that many devices.
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I never saw any ZTE hate. ZTE got caught transferring technology against export controls, made a deal with authorities to stop it and punish those responsible, and then got caught cheating on the deal [scmp.com].
The historical Huawei hate always seemed weirdly organized though, like someone was orchestrating it.
Corporate controlled hardware... (Score:1)
Is the National Security Risk for (Pick Your Nation).
Maybe when politicians realize that, and start pressuring companies to produce hardware that is end-user or institution controlled and managed, we will finally have some real security that will be immune to the threat of 'chinese mobile apps' or any other corporate apps (like microsoft, facebook, google, yandex, apple (even if they claim otherwise), etc. All of whom have the same or even more invasive levels of access to personal data, before handing over
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Re:Racist undertone. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this really about an ethnic group or is it about one big government versus another big government? I like to think that superpower politics are more subtle than race.
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Re: Racist undertone. (Score:2)
Well, it's a repressive dictatorship, for one (Score:5, Insightful)
Pure racism. Why single out the Chinese when, for example, Facebook does it?
Because Facebook merely wants to sell you ads. China actually is an authoritarian dictatorship.
It's easy enough to blur the two together, but really, it's false equivalency.
He's saying don't shitpost so much (Score:2)
As is excessive Pr0n consumption.
Speaking of which, I think a good explanation for Trump's insane pottymouth tweet-stream is his dumbphone (specially altered smartphone) has been hacked, via a mobile porn site, by the Chinese, and they have a war-room staffed by their greatest state-loyal comedians, carefully crafting Trump's every tweet.
Of course they are (Score:2)
The Play Store has become a cess pool. (Score:1)
Buying paid reviews is common. And it's blatantly obvious, e.g., when one of my apps gets a review with a comment, it tends to be a sentence or two in length; most of the competitive apps in my space have pages of three-word, five star reviews, clustered together. Google does not appear to care. Most tend to be from a single particular country.
It's also worth noting that using the Google Play Store is NOT ALLOWED in China. So when you're a developer there doing this kind of stuff, you're 100% guaranteed
Re: The Play Store has become a cess pool. (Score:2)
US social services are a national security risk (Score:2)
to any other nation than US.
And maybe even to US.
Funny.. (Score:2)
with a proper security model ... (Score:2)
With a proper security model, suspect Android downloads could be sandboxed with permissions to do SFA, and all the IP endpoints it initiates could be thoroughly logged.