Life in the People’s Republic of WeChat | Hacker News Reader

Life in the People’s Republic of WeChat

bloomberg.com

64 pointspetethomas36 comments

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Your stock performance, maybe, but certainly not my browser's performance.

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Their balance sheet. Bloomberg is a private company.

Yesterday I was on a voice chat with a friend in Shenzhen for FIVE hours without a hiccup. Imagine how much it would cost on AT&T.

Although it is already hard to picture a WeChat group of 500 members, I just learned that in China, the size of QQ group can have up to 2000 members!

Welcome to the People's Republic of Big Data. :-)

> I was on a voice chat with a friend in Shenzhen for FIVE hours without a hiccup. Imagine how much it would cost on AT&T.

This long has been possible in Skype and other applications.

You mean, a phone call? I don't think those cost me much of anything on AT&T.

Perhaps I'm mistaken but it seems pretty clear that ontouchstart is implicitly referring to long distance charges which for an international call are I assume still expensive for a 5 hour call.

Although perhaps you can correct me on the cost assumption since it has been years since I made any such call via any other means than VOIP.

Anyone know if there's been any sort of security audit for WeChat? I'm basically forced to use it and I'm sure the Chinese government must've put some kind of backdoor in it.

Any such back door would be best implemented in the WeChat back-end servers. You'd never find it by analysing the client app or the communications to and from it.

Besides the fact that on android, the app requires what appears to be every single permission, be aware that all companies dealing in media have a designated Party official liaison who usually sits in the office and has more decision power than the editor in chief.

Based on my experience working and developing in China, I would say I can all but guarantee that the Chinese government is viewing and editing all data as it pertains to wechat. All chatlogs, all private conversations, all financial transactions, all GPS coords for checkin locations, all of it. They may not be doing anything with it, but it's being stored.

Didn't the NSA do the same when it literally split fiber optic cables into their own servers?

WeChat's data retention and user privacy practices have been audited and approved by TrustE as indicated on their Privacy Policy.

If you're really paranoid, you can always install xprivacy, which has on demand approval and API usage logs.

But then the problem is that some apps bug you for location access every half hour (I'm looking at you, WhatsApp) because they don't realize they're being blocked.

At my last job, about 2/3 of the company was in the US and 1/3 was in China. Members of the China IT and Developer teams were always trying to get the US teams to put WeChat on our phones so they could send us questions and we always refused. They thought it was because we did not want them to send us questions after hours, but someone finally told one of the China Developers, while they visiting a US office, that no American would put WeChat on their phone because Americans considered everything WeChat handled to be accessible by the Chinese government. We did not want our calls and messages to be spied on by the Chinese government. We would not even tell them that over the phone because Americans just assumed that the Chinese government listens in on all calls to China.

I think your concern was appropriate, but it reminds me of the corresponding view that many people have that communications software developed in the U.S. will inevitably have backdoors for the U.S. government. That view feels reasonable to them because they know the U.S. government is also extremely aggressive about surveillance capabilities.

I find it sad that we're in an environment where assuaging these concerns can be a complicated and difficult undertaking, and even trying to understand the landscape is a big challenge. Lots of people see it as risky to use technology developed in another country, and while some particular fears and theories are overblown, it's hard to dismiss the overall concern.

I'm curious if they'd take a similar position about using phone calls/SMS or any non-encrypted HTTP communication to UK which are 100% being intercepted.

The US tries to keep its surveillance secret. Seems to me that this makes it unlikely that they'll backdoor apps, because random hackers might reverse engineer the apps and discover and publicize the backdoors. Instead, the US backdoors communications lines and data centers, or uses existing security holes to break into targets.

China doesn't keep its surveillance a secret. They don't go out of their way to publicize it, but they don't seem to care if people know it's there. A backdoor in an app would fit their style better.

I'm aware of incidents of the government deleting my posts and messages. When students in Hong Kong were having a riot over I believe last summer I sent messages and posts, privately and publicly.

My public posts on my discovery wall were removed and my private messages were also deleted. My fiance also noticed lots of generic pro-government messages in her feed at the time.

I don't believe there is a back door, just a connected office.

Sure. you can test it by sending "天安门8964" or “法轮功”, "巴拿马文件李小琳"

A related blog entry by a WeChat dev. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....

Wow, it seems life has changed quite a bit in China than what it was like when I was there (2002-2011). The author mentions that everything is using Wechat for e-payments and QR codes are every where. I wonder with such high rate of adoption and change, how secure every thing is.

2001-present here. Yes, Wechat for e-payments and QR codes are everywhere. How secure are things? Not that dissimilar to the west, which it to say that even high profile companies make stupid mistakes all the time. (Late last year, one international Chinese business made it impossible for me to report an issue trivially exposing vast amounts of highly personal user data.) (PS. I didn't read the article, because Bloomberg's website is so screwed up.)

In Brazil, WhatsApp is an app like this. If WeChat is what WhatsApp may become, it looks Facebook will drag them down. WhatsApp have payments (that nobody use), but some of the features, I believe, Facebook would forbid, like enterprise accounts.

What's the antonym of synergy?

"Anergy"[0], in case you weren't asking a rhetorical question.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anergy#English

It was rhetorical, but it was nice to know. Thanks!

I don't want a chat app to be an operating system. I prefer to have things separated, since that makes them easier to manage(for me). I spent some time performing a penetration test against a service that would hook into WeChat, and found the security atrocious. I wouldn't touch anything related to WeChat so long as I can help it. Haha, this is sort of like the modern-day Emacs.

Man, this site is heavy, I couldn't read this news anymore. Why heavy ads with autoplay on?

When I worked for Bloomberg everything revolved around selling access to eyeballs for the most advantageous price. It didn't matter if no one watched autoplaying videos. Ad sales got booked anyway, no matter how many people actually looked at the ad.

Thankfully ad blocking is a thing. Use an ad blocker; you'll do humanity a favor.

Ha! Finally we found the only one HN user without ad blocking!:-)

Viewed with JS disabled, dind't notice any lags.

Can confirm it actually works great with JS disabled (in Opera 12 no less) – much better than with JS enabled, actually. Really Bloomberg….

I dunno what's wrong but the lady's voice in the video is highly annoying. The content was good though.

She had a little bit of vocal fry at the end of her sentences. That could be it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_fry_register

wechat has a weird issue? design decision? where chat histories aren't synced between devices. I'm pretty shocked it can be used to make payments and appointments yet has such a weird failing.

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