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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

In case you only read the headline, it was confirmed to only happen if the device's region was set to China. From the statement:

> To accomplish this task, Safari receives a list of websites known to be malicious from Google, and for devices with their region code set to mainland China, it receives a list from Tencent.

From Apple's statement, Tencent's API functions exactly the same as Google's k-anonymity model, which you can read more about the api[0] and how it works[1] (also via this JAMIA paper[2]).

0: https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/update-api#ch...

1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with...

2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528029/

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It worth noting, for some features like hiding Taiwan flag, the logic is to check both system setting and hardware sales region, it will be on if either is true.

Is there documentation to show which features, like this, are based on hardware sales region?

On a recent story (perhaps the most recent popular one on this topic), a former Microsoft employee said they maintained an internal database to keep track of what was necessary for each country. I’ll see if I can dig it up.

It’s a touchy subject so usually not documented.

On the softer side, shutter sound can’t be muted on the camera app for JP sold iPhones, I can’t find any offical doc (not customer discussion) mentioning it.

edit: there was some doc, just with a vague “shutter sound might be disabled depending on your region” mention.

it's a ridiculous law . You want to take a picture of your sleeping baby without waking her. Sucks to be you. Want to take a picture of your cat or dog without them changing their pose in response to the sound. You can't. Want to take a picture at a wedding without distrubing the mood? Or bad for you. Want to take a picture at a fancy quiet romantic dinner without annoying all the other guests? Can't do it.

In the meantime any pervert (the claimed reason for the law) can use any non-phone camera or for that matter any other camera app than the built in one

>it's a ridiculous law

It's par for the course. Laws in response to moral panics tend to suck and inconvenience reasonable people while having simple workarounds.

1st, it's not law.

2nd, if you are in Japan pretty much everyone is used to the shutter sound.

Is there a shutter sound if you take a video?

Even if there is, it will only be at the beginning. So you can circumvent the intent of the law (e.g. filming the police) by starting to film yourself, pretending to stop and then point the camera at the subject.

The intent of the law was to dissuade upskirt photos on trains, not filming the police, if I recall correctly.

There is always some bullshit moral outrage used as the excuse to make laws that are really there to protect existing institutions of power.

I think you are mistaken. There is no formal law AFAIK but it was just an agreement made by companies in Japan. You are free to order a phone outside of Japan. This was a huge issue in Japan when phones started getting cameras and so everyone made a handshake agreement.

I think it’s worse than that.

As far as I remember Jphone, the company first heavily advertising camera phones, forced the shutter on its own to preemptively clear itself from any potential issue.

Every phone carrier from there had the choice to forgo the mandatory shutter sound but risk backlash if anything were to happen, as Jphone set a precedent. And they choose the safety move.

When the iPhone came, it would have just been a marketing quagmire to go with a mutable sound.

In Japan, the difference between formal law and cultural law with respect to their enforcement is often not a distinction worth making (as John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty⁎). Just ask women how interested the police are in dealing with rape or domestic abuse.

Only yesterday I was reading a Reddit thread where someone new to Japan asked whether to inform the police of the apparently violent arguments his neighbours were having and the responses varied from "don't bother, the police won't care" to "make a noise complaint, at least the police will be interested". That's the least scary anecdote I have.

⁎ Probably not about Japan specifically :)

Example: The gentlemen's agreement to end competition

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

Ya know, any non-pervert can use those non-phone cameras for all of the use cases you mentioned too... Is taking pictures of your fancy dinner or jumpy pets really so hard to do with a superior and low cost dedicated camera? The results will be superior for a fraction of the price!

Here's the thing you refuse to acknowledge (or perhaps didn't think through before writing) -- when someone is holding a P+S camera or bigger, everyone knows they're taking a picture. But when someone is holding a smartphone, you assume they are not taking a picture because 99.9% of the time phones are not in camera mode.

The point wasn't to ensure that all cameras made noise, it was to ensure that a phone couldn't be used as a secret camera in public.

Seriously, I struggle to parse the logic here: Do you think that creepers are taking actual full size cameras into subways for creepshots? Or are you thinking they're using "Spy Camera" type devices? Because the people the law was meant to deter generally aren't that level of creeper, and their creepshots are a crime of convenience not a premeditated act of sexual assault.

The user you're replying to said "other camera app". They meant apps, not a full sized camera.

So, they're complaining that creeps can use apps to take pictures but regular people can't?

Their whole argument boils down to regular users not being able to download an app from the app store?

Wow. You're right, I assumed their argument was a lot better than that. Oof.

The argument is that the shutter sound inconveniences regular users while doing nothing to prevent the misuse it claims to prevent. Which part did you miss?

I missed the part where every creeper alive circumvents the policy without inconvenience but every other user alive can't.

I require consistency, so either EVERYONE is inconvenienced, or EVERYONE can circumvent it without issue.

The part I missed is the justification for inconsistent and illogical arguments where magically your ability to be inconvenienced is based only on your desire to be a creep.

> where magically your ability to be inconvenienced is based only on your desire to be a creep

Where the hell did this come from?

Just use a third party camera app. At least, this works on Android. Does this not work on iOS?

iOS has the issue that you can not select default apps, unlike Android. So yes you can use a 3rd party app but you can't make it the app that takes pictures when the phone is locked nor can you make it the app that gets launched from the accessible from anywhere control panel. In other words, their is friction using a 3rd party app.

But of course that's also part of the issue. If 3rd party apps don't have to make a sound then what was the point of the law? The perverts can just use a 3rd party app and 99.999% of users have to deal with a stupid for no actual protection.

But it isn’t a law. Just something that the carriers agreed to do.

And someone always finds a way to get a device which can make photos silently. For example by importing it, modding it, using older devices, etc. It is not solving anything. It is simply a stupid law against users.

For example Facetime banned in UAE

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204170

Refusing human rights is a touchy subject, especially when the violators of human rights pay so well. The corrupting influence of money is becoming more and more widespread. Pretty soon, perhaps the only way to avoid human slavery will be direct payouts to the powerful, as if that isn't slavery already. Perhaps we're already there.

Pride watchface is locked on russian watches even if region is set to US.

If I was based in China, could I just set my region to be somewhere else in order to bypass this?

...or just disable safebrowsing?

No, you'd need to purchase the device outside of China and set the locale to something else.

In the safe browsing example, you'd just lose it completely because it would be replaced by Google's safe browsing list (also used by Chrome and Firefox), which you couldn't connect to from within China. So the end result is the same as turning off safe browsing.

Locale region, not language. Important distinction. For example I don’t believe Tencent would be used in Hong Kong (zh_HK).

They already started censoring the emoji keyboard in HK, this would be even easier to justify as it is "protecting the user".

There's no zh_US (or zh_UK, etc.), so any mainlander living overseas and still use Chinese as the preferred language on their iPhones will get their IP address sent to Tencent. There's not much difference here.

There is zh_US in Apple universe: on iOS/Mac language identifier depends on Language (zh) and Region settings (US).

So, if you set Traditional Chinese for language and United States for region (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma...), [[NSLocale currentLocale] countryCode] (which Apple compares to "CN" for this feature according to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21242628) will return US, and [[NSLocale currentLocale] localeIdentifier] will return zh_US.

localeIdentifier also returns some other interesting things, e.g. mine is "en_US@currency=EUR", because I customized Region formats.

Average users aren't aware of its existence. Also for a lot of mainlanders living in the US they won't prefer to set their region to US because that means imperial units instead of metrics units.

What do you mean they are not aware of it? Selecting language AND country is the first action when setting up an iPhone.

(Can't argue with the second point.)

Oh I guess I misremembered. Sorry. The last time I setup a Mac to non en_US was a lot of years ago (I never used iOS devices).

s/device's language/region/

They seem to be different settings and you can have Chinese language with (for example) US region.

Thanks, done.

Someone should run a proxy on the Google’s model to get around the blockage.

Maybe Apple themselves should do it?

Yes, this would certainly be allowed in China. /s

If google can’t get around the blockage, another organization wouldn’t last long either.

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