How Apple is paving the way to a ‘cloud dictatorship’ in China
hongkongfp.com
hongkongfp.com
> The Chinese state relies upon private enterprise to implement social credit and extend its tentacular reach. Top-tier concerns like Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent, Baidu, the mobility-on-demand service Didi Chuxing, and the massively popular dating site Baihe either contribute significant elements of the system’s architecture or incorporate its rulings into their services.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/china...
I'm not at all arguing Apple is right to do this (in a moral sense. Certainly it's right in a purely financial sense); just that it's one small part of a much broader issue.
(EDIT: removed gratuitous complaint about clickbait headline; you guys have convinced me I was wrong. As long as I'm here, though, I really do recommend reading the Atlantic link above; it does a good job showing the context in which this is happening)
But I would be shocked if the other major players (Facebook, Google, etc) aren't also participating in this; it seems to be the price of entry if they want to continue doing business there.
Check out Operation Aurora.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-amazon-cloud/amazon...
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/08/apple-fbi-unlock-texas-s...
And I believe their recent moves to weaken iOS security are related to this.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/oops-apple-has-seriously-weaken...
The China thing is related to this "move towards helping authorities", too. They're all connected. I don't know what or who convinced Tim Cook to give in and stop defending his customers' privacy against governments (at least compared to what was originally promised), but it's pretty clear that's what's happening here. I think we should expect more such moves from Apple in the future.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/01/16/icloud-i...
As for "but everyone's doing it" - come on, haven't we moved on from accepting such weak excuses? I thought Apple was a leader in the industry, paving the way for positive progress. Apple's mantra is "we challenge the status quo" and "we think different". Not "I guess we'll do whatever everyone else is doing."
If they keep this up, the answer to Simon Sinek's "WHY does Apple exist?" may soon become "We exist only to make money and nothing else", rather than inspire anyone.
Many large tech companies are having to retrofit their systems to deal with the privacy laws of the EU.
Germany also is in a league of its own in terms of its privacy laws.
Either way I don’t think much of it matters because I think the intelligence community probably has ways even around the privacy laws.
The other errors they have had lately on the other hand do seem malicious, but I suspect either serious fuckups on engineer side, or people being paid/blackmailed by intelligence agencies to introduce backdoors.
FaceTime is mediated by a central service, iMessage is moving to cloud services, iCloud backup is focused on, while iTunes sync is deemphasized.
Perhaps I worded that poorly. I had hoped that saying "I am not at all arguing that Apple is right to do this" made clear that I didn't intend that as an "excuse"; rather as "context".
Nextel had the same issue when direct connect exploded and the police discovered it wasn’t tappable.
Every vendor folds.
As for me, I'm happy that Apple will at least transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China, which would not be the case with Xiaomi or another local company that would fall over backwards to please the government.
> I'm happy that Apple will at least transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China
Why do you believe it is transparent? Can you link to something showing they "transparently defend user rights to the greatest of their ability in China"? Otherwise in the absence of being able to provide this transparent proof, will you admit it is not transparent?
> “Apple says the handover is due to new regulations that cloud servers must be operated by local corporation. But this is unconvincing. China’s Cybersecurity Law, which was implemented on June 1 2017, does demand that user information and data collected in mainland China be stored within the border. But it does not require that the data center be operated by a local corporation.”
It’s common knowledge that the more authoritarian the country, the bigger the disconnect between the law and the truth-on-the-ground. I think it’s very likely that a party organ spoke to Apple and made it plain that “hand it over, or you’re out”. Which still has plenty of troubling implications, but criticism focused on Apple going beyond the letter of the law is disingenuous: the letter of the law is nothing in China.
The question I'm then moved to ask is this: who cares, so long as the data is e2e encrypted?
This is about compliance, yes, but we can't ignore the political implications of this change.
Otherwise iCloud Keychain which houses credentials for non-Apple sites would be exposed. I can't imagine the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon etc just sitting back and allowing Apple to compromise their sites in the name of Chinese expansion.
It would surely amount to the biggest security compromise in history if this was the case.
In my iCloud Keychain is the credentials for EVERY website that I have basically ever signed it into. It has credentials for internet banking, work email and VPN, AWS and Google Cloud etc. Just for me it is over 250 websites. It even stores SSH keypairs.
If the Chinese government had the ability to access those for all Chinese iCloud users (and roaming tourists ?) that would a seriously big deal.
I was addressing the "closed source software" aspect, because some level is trust is required in the server for key distribution regardless of source availability.
You can manage and operate a data centre without needing the keys to the HSM.
China can have all the encrypted blobs of my data they want. I have to assume that unencrypted information has always been available to the CCP on request, even more readily than it is to US law enforcement.
Many care because Apple's motives and principles wrt privacy are often used as a reason to choose them. That they haven't stated publicly that they are complying but disagree (like they have in other instances) makes many wonder whether Apple is honest about their motives and principles. I understand the critical among us know it's all about the money, but others do want to know why Apple publicly states its beliefs in one case and not the other (again, not about compliance, just about public disagreement).
This is not completely correct. Legally you can operate at least a joint venture (JV), a limited company (有限公司), or a representative or branch office for a foreign company (分公司 or 代理公司). When operating a limited company, they may be Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprises (WFOE, known as a "woofie"), also categorized as "foreign invested" (外资).
What's actually stored on iCloud by iOS that's sensitive besides those two things that people couldn't store in other places? App backups?
I'm assuming that the Chinese government already has access to everything that goes over any cellular network in China.
WSJ: "Why the iPhone Is Losing Out to Chinese Devices in Asia"
Google link: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Why%20the%20iPho...
[1]https://qz.com/1195908/apple-q1-2018-record-breaking-earning...
For China's whole smartphone market, 2015 saw 2% growth, 2016 was 11% growth, 2017 was negative 4%. It's likely their market has reached saturation. 2017 should have seen a big jump in sales due to a replacement cycle, given the near zero growth in 2015. Most of the domestic Chinese brands will die off soon, leaving three or so dominant players to go up against Samsung and Apple.
So apart from defending Apple's employees (DACA, LGBT etc) they don't really get let politics get in the way of business.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/14/china-end-conversion-the...
https://www.economist.com/news/china/21731405-quack-treatmen...
Politically, as a nation China certainly has the right to self-governance and storing user data inside the country is not an unreasonable request.
The Hong Kong Free Press is probably well meaning - we'd all like more freedom and less government rules - but also may be more holistically perceived as a group with an axe to grind as Hong Kong is being forced to adapt to Chinese rule, journalism is under pressure the world over and Hong Kong's GDP was recently surpassed by Shenzhen, which three decades ago was a fishing village.
Things are changing. This is just a phase.
China invented whuffie, but in the most dystopian and fascist way possible.
-- Edit with citations as requested. (I'm not asserting that this social pressure is universal or even common yet.)
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/ She explained how to boost my score. “They will check what kind of friends you have,” she said. “If your friends are all high-score people, it’s good for you. If you have some bad-credit people as friends, it’s not nice.”
[1] https://theconversation.com/chinas-social-credit-system-puts... “Since last December, the National Development and Reform Commission and Central Bank of China began to approve pilot plans to integrate big data with the Social Credit System. As one of China’s first pilot provinces, Guizhou province was selected to showcase a government-led experiment of a big data-empowered Social Credit System.”
Australia, for example now lowers your credit score if you pay bills late. But it doesn't (yet?) penalize you for who you associate with.
Citation needed. I live in China, and not a single person I know takes the Zhima Credit score even remotely seriously. It's treated like a joke, or at worst like one's astrological sign. Many older people I've met don't even know about it. Chinese people aren't stupid, they're not going to let some easily gamed virtual points influence their decisions.
Why is Apple submitting to all the demands of the Chinese government?
The perfect world where Apple tells China what to do doesn't exist. Ok. We know that.
Now what? Bail? Why? Stick around and play by the rules and play the game and maybe someday make 1% positive difference? Seems like the lesser of two evils to me.
So it’s not the lesser of two evils, it’s just participation in evil for profit.
Most of us do. We don't have much of a choice. We could choose to earn so little that we don't have to pay much or anything in taxes or move elsewhere but, well, we want to live better that or live in a specific area.
Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.
> Furthermore, Apple has a responsibility to respect the choices of other people. If China had a democratically elected government that choose to intercept all communication crossing its borders, I think Apple would have a moral obligation to either respect that or not do business there. The present government is in power partly because the previous government was so bad that the peasants preferred the Communists, so you could even argue that the present government is there by the will of the people, in some limited sense. We can't just force other people to have our standard.
I don't really disagree with this, but I'm not sure what it has to do with what I posted. Not doing business with a group of people because you disagree with how they want that business done is completely unrelated to "forcing other people to have our standard".
Yes.
> Why is Apple submitting to all the demands of the Chinese government?
China is Apple's second or first largest market, depending on the quarter.
I am not sure how you can know that. I am actually sure Apple would have lost some market but not much and there could have been stuff they could do to let it happen rather than now just giving up everything to any authoritarian government.
Maybe Apple could have gained some respect and then market share if they would have stood firm. With this new management, Apple has become just focused on business (income) not what they were known to be passionate about.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/why-f...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
Also twitter and Snapchat.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/23/google-ch...
They have Android phones but no Google services on them. They do sell ads there but to companies targeting Chinese people outside of China.
That's very different than banning a famous, physical product.
The Chinese government doesn't play that respect game. Apple's stock holders also would never allow Apple to exit China without a huge hit (~50%) in their valuation. It isn't hard to see that Apple is stuck in China whether they are passionate about it or not.
I don't think ANY company can afford to leave China these days. Google only got away with it because they weren't making much on search in China.
The evidence certainly seems to suggest that China's government is willing to ban foreign tech companies for the benefit of the ruling party. Is there any evidence the Chinese government would hesitate to ban Apple if Apple undermined their authority?
I think there's a moral case for Apple refusing to serve China, but I think they would have to face the likely consequence that China would simply kick them out of the country.
Money, and continued market dominance.
> In other words, once the agreement is signed, GCBD — a company solely owned by the state — would get a key that can access all iCloud user data in China, legally.
What user data will this decrypt? Are iMessage and FaceTime still safe?
Could happen unknowingly when you send an iMessage to, say, a gmail address, which unlike a phone number offers no clue where the user is.
Gmail addresses can be used as Apple IDs, which means the iMessage messages travel inside Apple’s iCloud services.
Seriously, i know - free trade horray- and all that. But our politicians see WeeChat rise and shine- while all we got for opening our markets are outstanding taxes. (Not).
Also, I wouldn't call nokia as part of the "internet industry".
Compared to the US and China, europe has performed rather poorly. Europe has hundreds of millions of more people than the US and yet lags far behind the US.
Where is europe's facebook, google, microsoft, amazon, netflix, etc? At least china has their baidu, alibaba, tencent, etc.
The most prominent tech company in europe is SAP and they are more of a software/database/etc company than an internet company.
Europe has to get its act together and get in the game.
2) Spotify, Soundcloud, Skype, Shazam, Deliveroo, King, Rovio etc. And there are hundreds of second tier internet sites looking at this list from 2013:
Skype was sold off to two different US technology giants.
ARM was swallowed up by Japan.
King was eaten by a US company. As was Mojang.
These are all smaller success stories however. They're equivalent to fourth tier US successes, far below the second tier US companies like Adobe, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Airbnb, Priceline.com, Uber, etc.
The parent comment was correct. Europe nearly entirely missed the Internet/Web software business, the mobile software business, the cloud business, and now they're being left far behind in artificial intelligence (save for a few bright spots, such as in Britain, none of which has yielded commercial outcomes of large consequence).
Germany is almost single handedly keeping Europe competitive in the robotics field. And the largest tech company in Europe for the last decade, has been SAP.
Look at this list and compare it to companies like King and Soundcloud:
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Adobe, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Oracle, Activision Blizzard, Salesforce, Priceline, nVidia, Dell, IBM, VMWare, Texas Instruments, Micron, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, HP Inc, HP Enterprise, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, eBay, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Workday, Western Digital, Electronic Arts, Palantir, AMD, Autodesk, Lam Research, ServiceNow, WeWork, Lyft, Dropbox, Splunk, Marvell Technology, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Microchip Technology Inc, NetApp, Juniper, Seagate, Symantec, VeriSign, Slack, Grubhub
And that's ignoring dozens of other companies in the US tech sector with market caps between $2 billion and $20 billion.
"Nokia smartphones were #3 in the UK for the quarter and in the Top 5 in Russia, Vietnam and most Middle Eastern markets"
It’s a false dichotomy. The government is helping Apple PR, following their fuck up that spilled the beans that they’re all spying together.
Big companies operate at the mercy of the government, in the US and China both. “state owned” is irrelevant when all the phones are tapped, as they are in the United States now.