I’m more interested in the ways you can subvert a nation covertly by adjusting the algorithm.
Up weighting/down weighting content that exacerbates a rival nations problems or promotes the virtues of its own
Up weighting/down weighting content that exacerbates a rival nations problems or promotes the virtues of its own
But AirDroid gives you full remote access to your Android device through a web browser. Including messages (reading/sending/receiving), camera (taking photos/videos, and accessing existing photos/videos), and full access to files. It's used widely (even by corporate IT) to transfer files between Android devices and PCs over Wi-Fi.
It's a very functional app with remote access to millions of devices, and just like Huawei there are of course a steady stream of major security vulnerabilities. These may be plausible-deniable "bugdoors", or just sloppy practices introducing major vulnerabilities than happen to be exploitable by independent researchers and nation states.
The issue is that it's developed by a company based in China and thus very closely linked with the Chinese Communist Party and given what we know about the CCP, it's almost certainly regularly being used by the Ministry of State Security and People's Liberation Army for to exfiltrate specific highly valuable files eg, private messages, VPN and SSH keys.
It seems strange there's no debate on banning AirDroid when it poses a far greater immediate threat than TikTok.