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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app.

Does anyone know if this claim is true? I would have assumed this is as simple as serving the not allowed response to any request from a Chinese address range, and it seems like it would be easy to test using a VPN.

(In general, while I don't approve of censorship this seems like an odd hill to die on — the problem is that a repressive government is still sovereign and there aren't exactly many options for a company with such extensive business ties other than complying with that government's laws within its borders)

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I’m the one that “broke” the story the author mentioned as being reported in 2015. At the time, the team at the New York Times reached out to a source at Apple that confirmed that this behavior was intentional: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/technology/apple-is-said-...

iOS disables Apple news based on the mobile country code / network code and not on the name in my experience.

If your iOS device doesn’t have cellular capability or if it is in airplane mode, it uses Ip addresses. This means you can enable airplane mode and connect to a vpn over Wi-Fi and circumvent the censorship.

The mechanism that does this appears to be the same mechanism that disables “global” Apple maps and switches to Apple maps provided by Chinese map maker Autonavi.

I wrote this post at the time the explains the censorship behavior which hasn’t changed.

https://www.larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china...

This blocking happens on the device level? So not even a VPN connection can help?

No, it wouldn’t help. It looks at the country code transmitted by the cell tower you are connected to. The only countermeasure would be to keep your phone in airplane mode.

Yes, when you use a US carrier roaming in China you have a US IP:

>This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network.

Interesting. That seems like it'd be horrible for latency but I guess it works well enough that I haven't heard complaints about it.

Assuming you’re using it to access websites or services with PoPs in US/EU then tunneling traffic via US/EU VPN would add negligible latency, actually would probably improve your latency overall.

It is horrible for latency to use a US carrier roaming in China but without an immediate frame of reference people probably don’t notice. Those roaming with us sims are probably mostly accessing us websites so the latency isn’t going to be much different than accessing the site from local Wi-Fi assuming it’s not blocked. Where it really shows is trying to access Chinese sites in China roaming with a us sim.

If you want low latency roaming in China, state owned China Mobile will sell you a solution for that:

  https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-with-government-help/

Those roaming with us sims

For a moment, I thought you were claiming to be one of a group of Sims.

Just because you have a US IP address, doesn't mean traffic actually gets routed through it.

My limited understanding (from one uni course) is mobile devices get a secondary identifier that the networks use for the actual routing process. While a device may officially identify as having a US IP address, the cell carriers communicate a secondary, current IP address/identifier local to the device's current position.

It's much like how DNS works. You don't route all traffic through a DNS server. You send it a readable name, then communicated directly with the IP address that's returned.

This is how your mobile data traffic is served by your operator:

In 3G/LTE network there are terms called Gn interface, Gi Interface, Gp interface and many others. Gn is to manage your mobility. From Gi you will get local ip address and internet access. From Gp you will be routed to you own cellular operator Gp interface.

When you are on your original cellular operator network, you will be served by Gn and Gi interface for your internet access. When you are roaming, you will be served by Gn and Gp interface of local cellular operator that will forward to your original cellular operator’s Gp. After that it will routed to Gi interface of your original cellular operator.

edited: Gn function

It is pretty horrible for latency. Despite T-Mobile's free international roaming (albeit at reduced speeds), I'll usually get a local SIM card if I'm in the country more than a week because the latency can make it unusable sometimes.

IIRC the carriers do this for billing/metering reasons; otherwise they wouldn't have any idea how much data you're using while roaming, and would have to blindly trust whatever the partner carrier tells them.

This allows both the home and "visiting" operator to charge money. Also there's a (probably expensive) dedicated global network for these operator connections.

What I'd like to see is way for the visiting operator to charge little and route my packets directly to internet. I remember reading that this mode is also supported by the specs

> while I don't approve of censorship ...

I always believed in absolute freedom of expression. I cheered Google when they prioritized values over revenues and abandoned mainland China because of censorship requirements.

But maybe I need to update my beliefs based on new evidence.

When free expression enables disinformation campaigns, when false rumors get amplified into mob violence, when stochastic terror organizes online, maybe the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.

Is it completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from China's policies of censorship and social control?

>When free expression enables disinformation campaigns, when false rumors get amplified into mob violence, when stochastic terror organizes online

Society (and humanity) at large doesn't actually need the internet to do this. You already know about the LA riots in 1991 (and civil unrest before that); that wasn't organized over the Internet and yet was much more destructive than any riot in the US since then.

Cults (Jonestown, scientology), domestic terrorism (the Oklahoma City bombing, among others), and anti-woman violence (Polytechnique) all predate the rise of the mass-market Internet. Meanwhile, as opposed to the crime waves of the 80s and 90s the planet is a significantly safer place than it was then.

Contrast what China did 2 years earlier; they didn't need the Internet to murder hundreds of peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square. Or the concentration camps jailing people simply for existing (and chopping them up for organs), or the Great Leap Forward that managed to kill more people through starvation than there were casualties in WW2 (and other disastrous and unprotestable policies).

That's what policies of censorship and social control get you- people who can't speak up or forget how to cause catastrophe after catastrophe. People who actually have to think once in a while perform better, and people who are better at that tend to bring prosperity wherever they go, so they concentrate in countries where that ability is rewarded the most. Even though members of a more tolerant society mess up, they don't tend to turn into institutional mass murder (whereas that's exactly what happens in unfree societies like China's).

>the side effects of unlimited free expression are too severe for a modern civilization.

This has some truth to it; the 24-hour news cycle should be regulated because the direct result of its existence deludes members of society into thinking it's more dangerous than ever before when the exact opposite is true. But that's about all the truth it has.

There have always been disinformation campaigns. Ironically, you're probably the victim of one right now - the belief that there is some kind of vast "disinformation campaign" active in the west is a conspiracy theory that is routinely shot down by people who investigate the credibility of such claims in the media (e.g. Taibbi, Greenwald).

Luckily, we can read the articles written by people who investigate claims of vast online disinformation campaigns, and discover they are false. That's because there's not much censorship in the west. We can learn that the mainstream, 'official' narrative is false.

In China you'd never read about any claims that contradict the official narrative. You'd maybe suspect there was something wrong with it, but have no good way to prove it.

BTW I don't know what "stochastic terror" is. But you sound pretty scared. Maybe you've fallen victim to it ;)

Educate yourself. Stochastic phenomena are encountered in many forms in technology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)#Stochastic_terrorism

Stochastic terror is the term for a situation where pro-violent rhetoric runs rampant in a community and occasionally one of its listeners "randomly" commits a violent physicial act.

So it's just terrorism then. What kind of lone wolf terrorism isn't accompanied by at least one other person saying they agree with the terrorist's cause? Do we really need a term for this?

The Chinese Communist Party has been imprisoning, torturing, and murdering journalists, researchers, artists, authors. The Chinese Communist Party is running concentration camps.

Yes, it is completely unreasonable to think that there might be something to learn from the Chinese Communist Party's policies of censorship and social control.

Outrageous as the fake news Russian collusion conspiracy theory peddled by the likes of CNN and MSNBC for the last two years might seem, I think rushing to censor them would be the wrong conclusion to draw.

In my opinion this is one of the saddest and most dangerous trends of modern times, the desire to give up any and all freedoms in exchange for perceived safety. We've welcomed 1984 with open arms.

> the desire to give up any and all freedoms

That's not what I said. I said "there might be something to learn".

Maybe my belief in unlimited free expression at any cost isn't the best way.

Must we must allow terrorist recruiting and incitement to violence and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns and targeted intimidation?

It's a slippery slope fallacy to assume that any restriction inevitably leads to relinquishing "all freedoms".

The problem is that slippery slope is not a hypothetical argument in this case. You can be jailed in France, today, for wearing a pro-BDS t-shirt, because it's "hate speech". At the same time, for all the political censorship that Europe has compared to US, it doesn't seem to be doing anything to stem the rising popularity of their extremist parties.

(https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...)

The problem, as usual, is that there's no "we" in "must we allow". You're not actually the person who's going to be doing the allowing - best case, if you live in a non-corrupt democracy, you'll be voluntarily giving that authority to somebody else; and not even to a specific person, but a role. If the bounds of that authority are too specific, it becomes useless in practice because it's easy to avoid its scope. If they are too vague, and the precise bounds are left to the discretion of the enforcers, it just gives them another channel to manifest their biases.

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