This is over a developer accessing GitHub? WHAT THE FUCK?
The land of the free
I don’t think China has ever even tried to pretend it’s the land of the free.
Some china fans seem to think it is
Eh the authoritarian capitalists who love the CCP generally seem to embrace the fact that China is authoritarian - they see it as a good thing!
I think that we in the west sometimes fall into the trap of believing that our core values of freedom and democracy are supreme and are what all people across the world want to achieve and should aspire to.
Maybe a lot of people in China think that a strong centralised government guiding the economy and most aspects of people’s lives is the sign of a healthy society and they are happy with it. Maybe they think it’s we who are sick because we don’t like the state being too involved in our lives. To them, perhaps it’s complete insanity.
Idk, I might be talking complete bs. I just think that different people have different values and there’s no right answer to how society is set up.
O.o Did you just confuse America with China?
It’s a lemmy user base joke
The ever aging battle of living in a digital world with global reach whilst being forced to live and comply within the lines drawn in sand.
Not sand, pencil, and the rich have all the erasers. But yeah no, good luck out there, it’s a totally fair and even playing field, trust!
Wow, this is so well articulated and to the point.
Third party scraped reports citing a crypto shill site’s reporting on a blurry and redacted document from China’s equivalent of Facebook is how I get all my accurate and true news about things that really happened.
It’s good to show genuine scepticism to what you read, but I can’t help but think yours is not particularly honest.
It is extremely clear via auditing the trail of this report that the ‘crypto shill site’ is negligible to the story. You would have had to go back one step in the chain, stick your fingers in your ears, then ignore everything else from that point onwards to think Coin Telegraph was actually relevant to the reporting of this story.
True or not, here you can find a clear summary, along with screenshots stamped with the seal of the Chengde PD. These screenshots, contrary to your claim, are not at all blurry, and have minimal redaction (to protect the person’s privacy).
Given fairly credible and detailed screenshots of a police report, numerous reporting across a number of different websites in both Chinese and English, even a reported GitHub profile of the person in question, I think there’s sufficient evidence to believe this is likely a true story.
But you do you.
First of all, if there is a better source then OP should post the better source to begin with. Everyone should be skeptical when presented with a second hand summary of something going through two weak sources.
As for the original source, it’s an NED front based in the US so as far as I’m concerned it can be dismissed with no further consideration.
Ah, you’re one of those. Nuf sed.
I’m sorry we can’t all be credulous stooges of American imperialism living on stolen land like you.
Against Chinese imperialism and their absurd historical claims to steal land?.
Hmm… To debate with a conspiracy theorist or not… Such a difficult choice.
You know what, let me try something different…
You win this debate! I concede! Although I am not an American and don’t live in America, I am a stooge of the American imperialists! And yes, like the other 8.1 billion people on the planet (sans you, of course), I live on stolen land! Have mercy!
You know you can’t take in information wholesale, right? News corporations have their biases. So do individuals. When talking about countries regarded as foreign adversaries, most of these reports about an unnamed individual tend to be bullshit.
Did you even read the comment chain you’re responding to? You know, the one where I said it is ‘good to show genuine scepticism’? Or the one after that, where I linked the ‘unnamed’ individual’s alleged GitHub?
I am not the one being overly trusting here. I think it is ‘likely’ that this story is true. I researched it, looked at the significant amount of evidence, and I am still not 100% convinced. That is far more than what I can say for you people replying to me en masse who all assume the story must be an American plot with absolutely no evidence to back up this claim.
Ugh, I need to figure out a way to unsubscribe from replies to a post. You people are bonkers.
You can be a stooge for American imperialism without being actually American
Going by their username I’m guessing they’re from Australia, a country that famously has never been a stooge of American imperialism
And yes, like the other 8.1 billion people on the planet (sans you, of course), I live on stolen land! Have mercy!
Engaging in genocide minimization to own the socialists.
drink your own piss and die, dumbass
The NED is directly and openly an arm of the CIA, an organization which has contributed to and participated in the politically driven murders of human being numbering in 7 digits.
If you can’t find a source that doesn’t link back to them, the story is bullshit and you’re falling for American state-sponsored disinfo.
Inventing conspiracy theorists was the most intelligent thing the US state department ever did.
Pointing out the CIA does active psychological operations on it’s own population is seen as crazy and unbelievable by the average person in the West.
For the credulous, I ask this. How many times has Kim Jong Un been reported dead now in the media? Do you really think that was just an accident every single time, or do you think someone might have an agenda?
lmao lib
people who don’t uncritically swallow state dept propaganda are bad, actually
deleted by creator
The first link is just quoting the social media post verbatim. Treat it with the same degree of reliability as “this guy said on Facebook/Twitter…”
Second article actually goes out of its way to say how uncommon it is to be punished for circumventing the firewall:
“Climbing the firewall results in punishment” is not the norm A common misunderstanding among the public about circumvention is that anyone who circumvents the wall will be punished. This is unrealistic for two reasons: first, the public security organs do not have that many law enforcement police; second, the public security organs are not as busy as you think. Most of the time, the punishment for circumventing the wall is to pull out the radish and bring out the mud. There are typical cases where the public security organs take the initiative to go to the external network to arrest people, but the number is very small.
Judging from the 50 cases, only one case adopted the first-level “extreme law enforcement model”, that is, the “use of circumvention software is punishable” model. The description of the case was “A certain person used his own mobile phone to use a VPN on the Internet to circumvent the firewall.” Wall software, its behavior constitutes the unauthorized use of non-legal channels for international networking." Even so, the actual situation of enforcement may be different from the description of the administrative penalty decision.
fuck ccp, stupid cunts
why is this a blog spam article badly copied from the original source at https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/china-dev-fined-salary-vpn-10m-ecny-airdrop-asia-express/ ?
That’s hardly the original source. The second paragraph of that article links to another source again.
indeed, original source is the wrong term, but at least it’s an english derivation of it, which was only copied by the link in this post
There’s a coin telegraph logo on the top of the website so I guess is some licensed syndicated content
it is indeed somewhat attributed, but it still very much looks like scraped content.
a very strong indicator is the inclusion of
Subscribe The most engaging reads in blockchain. Delivered once a week.
Email address
SUBSCRIBE
at the end, which on cointelegraph’s page is separate from the content and provides a sign-up form.
Good luck being a developer or do technical support without GitHub, Google, Reddit (Lemmy?) or stackexchange
Or market your product without the possibility of accessing any western social network
If you ever notice, all apps developed in china are similar. Ads at start, invasive tracking using dummy images dropped in /pictures, unnecessary permissions like phone and IMEI, and so on. They literally don’t have a way to compare to something else. There’s the Baidu SDK, Tencent SDK, aliyun SDK and they are using bad coding practices because they’re doing that in isolation
They’re shooting in their feet
If you ever notice, all apps developed in china are similar. Ads at start, invasive tracking using dummy images dropped in /pictures, unnecessary permissions like phone and IMEI, and so on. They literally don’t have a way to compare to something else. There’s the Baidu SDK, Tencent SDK, aliyun SDK and they are using bad coding practices because they’re doing that in isolation
What kind of shitty apps are you installing? Some of the most popular mobile games in the world are Chinese (Genshin, Honkai, Azurlane, Ark Knights, etc) and none of them do any of this shit.
I went to China recently with a buddy and I loaded a ton of China specific apps onto our phones. Mine was a Samsung and his was an iPhone. Between WeChat, Alipay, Taobao, Amap, DiDi, Dianping, the China Customs Service app and a bunch of other store and region specific apps, literally none of them did anything you described. I also bought a Xiaomi phone in China and migrated all my data over, so I can confirm that these apps don’t do anything like that even on a Chinese phone (which, btw, is way more strict with permissions than my Samsung, down to telling me each and every time google maps requested my location).
In addition to that, I have a bunch of apps for stuff from Chinese companies on my phone like Mijia, Fiio, Huawei, Moondrop, etc and none of them do this shit either.
WeChat, taobao, alipay, amap they all do this. Go to watch /pictures on your android with a file manager. You will notice some folders called .gs0 .gs3 and so on.
Inside there are dummy images with tracking data. They do like this because apps on Android don’t need an extra permission to drop “images” on /pictures
Those folders are not shown by default because normal file managers on Android hide any file with the name that starts with a dot.
And those dummy images aren’t shown in photo galleries also because of another file that’s dropped in those folders, .nomedia
You also never saw the ads on the taobao splash screen??? Did you ever opened that app? Not to mention that phone permission is mandatory to use that app for some reason. (And can’t do any search until you register your phone number with SMS verification)
Other Chinese apps with ads on the splash screen is Huawei store, mijia, amap
And the Chinese customs app also requires an insane amount of permissions, never gave my European phone number, but a week after entering the country I got a phone call from +8621962110 - who gave them the number? (Don’t know what that call was about because answering a phone call in roaming is 2 euro per minute, but from some search on Baidu it looks like it’s some robocall from the Chinese police)
I just tried this with both my Xiaomi and my Samsung using both first party and third party file managers. Xiaomi showed 3 .gsX folders despite it being absolutely full of Chinese apps that I loaded on. Samsung with the same method had zero.
Why are all Chinese apps like this?
and the situation drastically improved since android 10, before they created dozens of directories because they pretended full memory access
those .gsx directories contains “images” that are just tracking data. For example taobao drops a “picture” in /pictures/.gs9/ccdcwdc that contains your unique tracking id. Alipay then using the same aliyun sdk accesses that “picture” and can match the user activity between the two apps.
Just because now is “just three folders” does not make it better. They’re still exploiting android sandboxing with the intent of tracking the user activity without consent
All three gsX folders were empty by the way, and that doesn’t explain why the samsung was squeaky clean. By your own admission this is no longer the case on newer versions of the apps and android, so you should at the very least go back and edit your post to put it into past tense.
Also, your assertion was that all Chinese apps are similar, so 3 out of dozens makes your statement demonstrably false.
did you use the apps or just install them? Of course they’re empty if you just installed them.
i repeat the statement, all chinese apps are similar, look for example mijia and meidi smart home, they’re basically identical, like “there’s only one way to make a smart home app”
I use dozens of chinese apps and i can totally distinguish immediately when the dev is chinese.
I didn’t say it’s no longer the case in the newer version of the apps. It’s mitigated on newer versions of android, because they’re exploiting the OS in order to trace users, which should not happen.
I used all of them because I got my new phone a few days into the trip and used it for the remaining week or so I was there. I’m still using Chinese apps on a daily basis now, so why are they all empty?
Let’s talk about your other claims as well. Irrelevant permissions? Zero. Ads on boot? Hardly everything since most of the utility apps don’t have ads at all.
i repeat the statement, all chinese apps are similar, look for example mijia and meidi smart home, they’re basically identical, like “there’s only one way to make a smart home app”
All American apps are similar. Look for example Twitter and Threads, they’re basically identical, like “there’s only one way to make a social media platform”
I use dozens of chinese apps and i can totally distinguish immediately when the dev is chinese.
Well I’m sorry my digital caliper sense isn’t as developed as yours. I’ll strive to be better.
I’m glad someone else sees this problem. Thanks for writing it out.
It is true that there are some pretty impressive apps made in China. Genshin impact is honestly some kind of black magic, how they made it so well optimized for mobile. That tends to be the exception though, not the rule.
It is incredible how overbloated their app are. I have no idea why every app need to integrate a social media feed, and be able book a taxi/takeout or whatever.
They seriously need to have a look at KISS principles.
Yes and no, it’s bad for humanity, great for the CCP.
With a machine gun
They got fined for doing their job basically. Sick shit.
And there is still a lot of people, especially on lemmy, basically worshipping China and other communist countries.
and other
communist countries. Authoritarian dictatorships.Just because they slap socialist or communist on the country name doesn’t make it so.
Capitalists put you in jail for marijuana. They used to put you in jail for alcohol. Hell, child labor is used in capitalist countries. China honestly is an authoritarian mixed economy. But perhaps, even in the USA, authoritarism is preferred.
whataboutism
I’m not trying to defend America but they don’t put you in jail or fine you for using a VPN (yet).
Yeah, no leadership and fuck capitalism is the target
The difference between democracy and fascism is that the laws are quickly changing due to public opinion in America, but that does not happen in China.
People have been smoking Marijuana since the 60’s and it’s still a federally illegal drug at the level of heroine. Laws don’t change quickly in the US at all.
I never said laws change quickly.
Marijuana use only recently became publicly accepted by the majority of people. As a result, it is now completely legal in many states and will likely soon be legal federally.
This kind of thing would never happen in China.
I am not sure that is a positive trait about the USA.
