This is over a developer accessing GitHub? WHAT THE FUCK?
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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!
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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