2y ago

China orders government workers to stop using iPhones amid heightened tensions with US

www.scmp.com

China orders ministries to stop using iPhones amid heightened US tensions

A handful of Chinese ministries have told employees to stop using Apple’s iPhones at work, citing national security risks amid heightened geopolitical tensions with the United States, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The orders were handed down in August to employees at ministries whose portfolios are focused on investment, trade and international affairs, according to five separate sources with knowledge of the situation.

The measures were understood to be aimed at eliminating perceived national security risks from using telecommunication devices made by a US company, sources said.

26 comments

I think it makes sense theoretically, but the problem is that the Chinese alternatives are probably full of deliberate security holes which are needed to get information from everyone to the CCP but can also be used be other people to get information from the Chinese.
- I'm sure the Government can go tell a company to remove the backdoors on Government devices:
  Remove all the backdoors and we'll buy phones for each of our 100,000 employees and award your company a ¥3 gazillion support contract. But if we find out the NSA hacked our phones then there'll be big trouble, Mao Zedong-style.
  
  But the higher ups still want to spy on the lower ones.
- Sounds interesting. Do you have a source?
So are they instead going to use Android phones? Because, I hate to break it to them, Google is also an American company.
- Android is open source so it doesn't matter who makes it. You can audit the code and remove what you dislike. North Korea does the same thing with Linux.
  
  This is not a guarantee of security. I wish people would stop parroting this bs about oss
- They wouldn’t use a Google version of Android. It’s open source so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had their own fork of it filled with their own changes and removing any Google specific functionality that they would roll out in their own market.
- No, they just take the AOSP and modify it with their own shit
- Chinese Android phones that are sold domestically don't use Google accounts.
  They usually come with WeChat or some other 'everything app' pre-installed, that you login to with your government issued ID.
- Which billion dollar company? Apple, or the Chinese Government?
- I don't know why people keep posting these huge images...
  But I've been blocking the people that do it often and it's really improved the Lemmy experience, highly recommend. Not just because they're annoying, but it was also used as an attack vector for malicious code a few weeks ago
  
  Using sync, there's the option to disable embedded images in comments. It's made an amazing difference in browsing quality. Comments don't get blocked, you can still read and participate in discussions without having to scratch your eyes out
  
  You are scrolling in the web, or some mobile client?

26 comments