China's Apple iPhone Ban Appears To Be Retaliation, US Says (bloomberg.com) 53
The White House, weighing in for the first time on concerns about a Chinese backlash against Apple, said it is monitoring reports of a growing government ban of iPhones and believes the move is a reprisal against the US. From a report: "It seems to be of a piece of the kinds of aggressive and inappropriate retaliation to US companies that we've seen from the PRC in the past," said John Kirby, the council's spokesman, referring to the People's Republic of China. Bloomberg News reported this month that China plans to expand a ban on the use of iPhones to a plethora of state-backed companies and agencies, a sign of growing challenges for Apple in the country. Several Chinese agencies have begun instructing staff not to bring their iPhones to work.
But the situation grew more muddled Wednesday, when Beijing pushed back on reports about iPhone restrictions while also raising concerns about security problems with the device. "China has not issued laws and regulations to ban the purchase of Apple or foreign brands' phones," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. It marked the government's first comments on the issue, but didn't seem to refer directly to workplace bans of the device.
But the situation grew more muddled Wednesday, when Beijing pushed back on reports about iPhone restrictions while also raising concerns about security problems with the device. "China has not issued laws and regulations to ban the purchase of Apple or foreign brands' phones," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. It marked the government's first comments on the issue, but didn't seem to refer directly to workplace bans of the device.
Wait WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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We operate under a capitalist system in America. That means we want free and open competition as long as there is profit, and sanctions when there isn't profit.
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... a ban on the use of iPhones
The same iPhones that are .... manufactured in China?
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So the USA attacks the Chinese, puts up serious road blocks to slow their advancements
We "attacked" them? Moral equivalence much? Setting aside the very obvious issues with China's trade policy, theft of IP, and other ways that they refuse to play by the rules, have you paid any attention at all to Xinjiang? Hong Kong? Tibet? The stuff we know about is bad enough. How bad are the actions they've successfully kept under wraps? Have you observed the threats made on a seemingly daily basis against Taiwan? Does it bother you at all that they're trying to claim wide swaths of internationa
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Nobody in this conversation claimed the USA is innocent. What you've got there is a straw man fallacy. I reject the premise that I can't call out ongoing evil because I don't live in a completely innocent society. Such a thing does not exist on this planet. If you compare the modern day USA to modern day China, it's not even close. If you want to compare the USA to Sweden or Finland, yeah, the US has some work to do, but all three of those countries and dozens of others are better places to be than t
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> Nobody in this conversation claimed the USA is innocent.
Nobody claimed China was innocent.
> What you've got there is a straw man fallacy
That's how I read your comment : "have you paid any attention at all to Xinjiang? Hong Kong? Tibet? The stuff we know about is bad enough. How bad are the actions they've successfully kept under wraps? Have you observed the threats made on a seemingly daily basis against Taiwan? Does it bother you at all that they're trying to claim wide swaths of international wate
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If American government can ban Huawei products, China surely has the rights to ban any product of an
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Come off your high horse already. Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan, and the list goes on. Whatever China did, US is matched that many times over, not counting all the proxy wars and meddling in other countries affairs. Torturing prisoners of war, invading countries half way across the world under false pretenses - WMD and get Osama much? Osama was in Pakistan by the way, not in Afhanistan.
If American government can ban Huawei products, China surely has the rights to ban any product of any US company.
The USA has been involved in hundreds of coups d'etat, regime changes, annexations and other aggressive invasions of other countries, ever since its first; the annexation of Hawaii and deposing of its legitimate government, in order to help US sugar plantations.
China? Maybe half a dozen. In its entire 5000 year history.
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If you're such a huge fan, why don't you emigrate there? Once you get there, go online and start talking about one of those "maybe half a dozen" bad things they've done and let me know how it works out for you. You can sit here and call out every real and imagined bad action in American history, completely free of consequence, and you still want to play this bullshit whataboutism game?
Seriously, go visit China and start talking about the plight of the Uyghurs. Mention the Dalai Lama. Or Tiananmen Squa
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None of that changes the fact that I can praise, condemn, or otherwise discuss him in my country without a one way ticket to a labor camp. I don’t really have a vested interest in the Dalai Lama. Dude licked a child’s tongue, lol. I do have a vested interest in free speech though.
Here’s some more free speech: Xi Jinping looks like Winnie-the-Pooh.
I’ll wait for you to try and rationalize the censorship of that. The PRC is low key ass. I’m sorry y’all hate the USA so
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If American government can ban Huawei products, China surely has the rights to ban any product of any US company.
They absolutely can. And they can enjoy the shitty little closed society that will be the end result. Weird thing, autocracies suck at innovation, because autocracies can't tolerate free thinking, and you can't have innovation without free thinking. The cult of Winnie the Pooh won't allow for economic reforms every person with a brain says they need to make, including the CCPs own experts, and that's just the beginning of the suck they're going to experience if they stay on this course.
It would be amusi
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US spying is equally bad, placing spy chips in Cisco networking equipment, secret hard drives in photo copiers, hacking the phones of leaders of supposed "allies".
US interference in other countries politics is equally bad.
US has Extraordinary rendition too..gitmo comes to mind, held outside of the US legal system against international law
Trust me, the USA is far from innocent, in spite of what you are told / believe.
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Trust me, the USA is far from innocent, in spite of what you are told / believe.
I like how you closed with this when I said we're far from perfect in the post you're replying to. The US was literally built with slavery. You think you're telling me a damn thing I don't already know? I'd still rather here live than under the fucking Chinese Communist Party. So would you. You just won't give me the satisfaction of admitting it.
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Care to provide a link to the comment where I claimed America was some amazing force for good? Can any of you actually respond to the shit I'm saying instead of making up stuff I'm not? Y'all might also note that I said The West in my first post, it was not limited to the United States. I define "The West" pretty broadly, to include Japan, South Korea, and other liberal societies, but if you want to limit it to the classical definition, it still includes a lot more than the United States.
America has and continues to do more harm in the world than China.
Is that why m
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Is that why millions of people are so desperate to come here? Because we're so horrible?
Maybe it's because you screwed up their countries and now they are trying to get away from the mess you caused. That's certainly the case for many coming form South America, where the War on Drugs and sanctions on socialist governments have had huge detrimental effects.
The US isn't alone in that, in Europe we have a lot of people fleeing wars and other situations we had a hand in creating. The ones coming from Iraq and Afghanistan can blame the US too. European responsibility is mostly in Africa. A lot of r
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Don't forget inappropriate.
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Bloomberg is a CIA mouthpiece which has been legally allowed to do domestic propaganda since Occupy Wall Street.
Why do you think Americans are suddenly at each other about -ism's?
Divide and conquer.
The lawless elites laugh all the way home.
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So the USA attacks the Chinese, puts up serious road blocks to slow their advancements , but they are "Aggressive" when they retaliate against US actions ?
In other words, actions have consequences. If you're going to play in the big boy playground, you'd best be ready for them.
I think China are overplaying their hand. Their "high tech" industries are dependent on either technology from the west (Europe included) such as modern avionics, jet engines, et al or imported almost complete and assembled in China such as their high speed trains.
All they're doing is saying "government cant buy iphone", if they tried to implement a general ban in China people wou
Bully says (Score:5, Insightful)
Bully says "no fair, he hit me back"
their next move is just to ban iphone/electronic manufacturing for the USA and watch trillion dollar companies evaporate before wall st. eyes.
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That's the real issue here. China has always been an ADVERSARY because of its communist government. Allowing US and other western companies to set up shop in China was just a crisis waiting to happen. Let this be a lesson, let communism wither on the vine.
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"why are companies looking at Vietnam" - because we have not learned or damned lesson yet, that's why. Outlaw US manufacturing in communist and totalitarian governments already. It's not freakin' rocket science. You want to play in the world economy then step up and free your citizens.
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their next move is just to ban iphone/electronic manufacturing for the USA and watch trillion dollar companies evaporate before wall st. eyes.
And kill the golden goose? Imagine the megacities of China... empty, with no work for workers to do.
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Except that Apple is not the US government. Indeed, Apple has had its own bouts of hostile relations with Washington... remember when the FBI was demanding Apple write in a backdoor to iOS so they could spy on iPhone users?
The more apt analogy here would be if, after the bully punched you in the nose, you snuck into his backyard and kicked his dog.
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China is being restrained because their policy is to be a stable, reliable trading partner. They portray the US as forcing its ideals on countries it does business with, and of being unstable because the government changes every few years and policies get reversed.
If China shut down iPhone manufacturing it would undermine their claim that China is a good, reliable place to do manufacturing, and that the CCP doesn't do trade wars or ideologically motivated attacks on trading partners.
There must be a limit so
Sailboat crew with an iphone story (Score:1, Insightful)
I had a lot of crew from around the world on my sailboat in Mexico. One of these crew said they worked in their countries military, in intelligence. They were taught to always cover the cameras on an iphone before doing anything with it. He said the camera takes a photo every time you unlock it or answer it. This was 2019 BC (Before Covid)
Not sure if it was true, but it was interesting.
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Re:Sailboat crew with an iphone story (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure if it was true, but it was interesting.
It's not. Your acquaintance has no idea what they're talking about. I wouldn't take seriously anything that came out of their mouth, least of all the claim that they worked in military intelligence. In the unlikely event that claim is true, it could mean "I fetched coffee", "I was 007 himself", and everything between those two extremes. Guess which extreme is more likely?
I can introduce you to people who make a living exploring the internals of iOS. Some work in or adjacent to law enforcement. They get to explain, in a way that can survive cross examination, digital chain of custody to tech luddites serving on juries. Others are security researchers looking for holes, white hats mostly, but a few gray hats too. None work for Apple or have any vested interest in Apple's success or failure. iOS is a closed system but there have been tons of jailbreaks over the years, including ones that remain viable on current iOS versions (albeit on older hardware). The internal workings are well known and have been widely studied. If what that person claimed was true it'd be on the front page of Slashdot, the evening news, and every person on the planet would know about it in short order.
Any device with a camera or microphone on it is a potential intelligence threat. If I want to give your acquaintance the benefit of the doubt, they attended a security briefing and wildly misunderstood what was being communicated to them. Malware is a thing. So are insider threats. That's why SCIFs [wikipedia.org] exist and personally owned phones (along with other electronic devices) are forbidden inside of them.
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Now, now, let's be fair. Just because the vast majority of people serving on juries don't understand (and don't want to) what's going on under the hood of a smartphone, that doesn't make them a Luddite. Luddites were weavers who violently opposed automated looms because they were afraid of losing their jobs. The people you're denigrating simply don't understand that technology and see no need to. These folks can do their jobs as jurours quite well if they consider t
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It was not intended as an insult. My comment was already too long without adding in your paragraph about juror technical knowledge, and 'luddite' was the best word that popped into my head, lol
Point is, it's no small matter to distill the inner workings of any operating system into an easy to digest format for non-techies. Now do it in a court room against a halfway competent defense attorney who simply needs to establish reasonable doubt, ideally for every juror, but one will suffice....
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They were taught to always cover the cameras on an iphone before doing anything with it. He said the camera takes a photo every time you unlock it or answer it.
You mean for FaceID? Hardly a revelation. Did he say anything helpful on what happens to those photos?
If there's no real evidence that the photos are stored where others can find them then it's not a real threat. If there is a real threat then software updates could be a fix, as could phone cases that simply cover up the cameras. I might like an iPhone case that has little doors to cover the cameras. It means I'm not taking photos accidentally of something I'd rather others not see. I don't mean anyth
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What might be cool is a physical switch which powers off the cameras and mic. Not just covers, but if the devices are hard-powered off, there isn't much software can do to get around it, although between GPS, using Wi-Fi as "radar", and other sensors, one can still get a lot of intel on the surroundings the device is in.
what about the microphone (Score:2)
>> They were taught to always cover the cameras on an iphone
That is not enough.
You also need to neutralize the mike, GPS, fingerprint sensor, perhaps also accelerometers, etc....
Microphone gives more information sometimes than cameras.
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It's an exaggeration, but with a grain of truth. Some security and military orgs don't allow smartphones to be turned on, or even carried into their facilities.
The turned on part is due to worries over malware. The at all part is because some modern phones, particularly iPhones, continue to make Bluetooth transmissions even when turned off. It's part of Apple's "find my device" network, the same one used by AirTags. You can locate your phone even when it's off... And so can anyone else with a Bluetooth rece
Slashdot Categories (Score:5, Funny)
Why doesn't Slashdot have a "Really? No Shit?" category? There are tons of "stories" that would fit perfectly.
No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
This is just posturing.
Wealthy Chinese status symbol (Score:2)
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I can see China pushing patriotism as a thing, where one uses a domestic brand to support the people, or something like that. China has one thing that the old Soviets didn't have, and that is an insane surveillance net. If they start stuffing people into work camps for even the smallest thing, like their North Korean neighbors do, the middle class will toe the line.
It isn't that the Chinese love Huawei, but they really don't like having them and their family be sent to the organ markets.
Xi: (Score:1)
"But the mean sleepy guy started it!"
Free market economics (Score:2)
Retaliation (Score:2)
True, iPhone ban is China's retaliation for US retaliation of banning Huawei
the audacity (Score:2)
who the fuck the US believe they are that affords them the right to say the retaliation is "Inappropriate" ???