Comment by firebaze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by firebaze | Hacker News Reader

I use a Huawei matebook D14 as my personal device. Its primary use is in a WiFi-network (as in 99% of the time). Since I also use MS devices in the same network I log all IPs being accessed from my network (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wire...)

I'll leave the log results of accessed IPs as an exercise to the reader. Hint: no chinese/russian IP addresses are being accessed.

I'd guess a lot more people use Huawei devices (before they were outlawed) than explicitly using a Xiaomi browser.

And a lot of people didn't forget Snowden.

Addendum: I use a MacBook pro (32gig, I7) and a Win10 pro work device (32gig, I7) as well. Neither contacts China or russia. Both of them submit ~10x of unknown traffic than the Huawei device.

I don't want to paint the chinese dictatorship as "good", not at all. But I do want to remind that the US is - as experienced by an EU consumer - worse. Not now, but maybe in the future, at least according to collected data.

> Hint: no chinese/russian IP addresses are being accessed.

As Snowden revealed, the NSA itself is way above that playing field. They (quite unsurprisingly) use IPs in the respective country, or just false-flag IPs in "enemy" countries. And the data is not actually sent as plain packets but tacked in the form of metadata onto normal, innocent packets going elsewhere. Then servers on intermediate hops exfiltrate that data. And none of it might happen if you're not actually targeted.

That of course underlines your main point. I don't see "sends nothing to foreign IPs" as an argument though.

I suspect that your point is that "a Chinese device doesn't mean it's reporting to China." I think it's good not to make this assumption.

That said, I also think it's incredibly naive to think that a collection system wouldn't make use of a local proxy to mask the ultimate destination of the information. It's such a trivial task to do, and provides a host of benefits to obfuscate and sow doubt as to where the data is going and will be ultimately used for.

I'm not assuming that "it must be reporting back to China through a proxy!", but rather, the absence of certain national IPs in that list shouldn't be used to rule out scenarios either. An idea scenario for me would be that the device didn't call back period, or if it did, it did so to endpoints that could be authenticated and audited.

It's incredibly naive to assume NSA/* doesn't do the same, even if that affects your daily life as a human/business owner about as much.

I despise the chinese government - may it concern Uighurs or the treatment of Tibetans. Still I have a hard time believing none of my data collected by google is used by the US administration, which, as we know, is not always lead by a trustful person. Still, if I had to choose whom to embargo, I'd definitely choose china/russia.

Since it's so easy to cheat traffic, there are two options: only china/russia needs to cover traffic, or ...?

The difference between china and US collecting data is one is evil one is not but in reality that kind of data collection is unethical no matter who is doing it.

To some of us there is not much difference.

Which is which? I'm very curious.

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