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Comment by kkzz99 | Hacker News Reader

This is no different then me being a German owning an Android or Iphone, which is going to ping back home to some servers in the US.

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No, Xiaomi is crazier, they send something every 5 seconds once the phone is awake and every app of their built in app suite will do the same. I've observed this with a dns filter app. I've owned many phones and I've never seen anything this crazy

fake news

Right, buy a Xiaomi phone and install this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dnsfilter.andr...

thanks

Yeah their android skin is literal malware (and I don't say that lightly, it is impossible to get rid of most of the apps, it installs random stuff constantly, will stop some features from working if you disable unrelated stuff, and is filled with ads). It also has that weird "chinese sales app" aesthetic that is common to banggood, AliExpress and even creality cloud. But you can't beat the price for the hardware, and it's super straight forward to just wipe out the OEM ROM since they allow for bootloader unlocking.

The funny thing you can't block the requests unless you want to drain the battery because ...behold... there is no backoff logic when the connection fails so it goes into an infinite loop lol

The custom roms were not an option since i needed google's safety net feature but i got a different phone eventually

"Both iOS and Android...transmit telemetry data to their motherships even when a user hasn’t logged in or has explicitly configured privacy settings to opt out of such collection. Both OSes also send data to Apple and Google when a user does simple things such as inserting a SIM card or browsing the handset settings screen. Even when idle, each device connects to its back-end server on average every 4.5 minutes...In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/android-sends-20x-mo...

1.3TB? Their research seems flawed because I'd notice this on my phone bill.

They said collectively, meaning across the entire fleet of phones deployed.

The quote above made it a bit unclear, they measured it at 1MB vs 52kB per device:

> When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period. In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB.

Yes, Germany's government is no different than China's in regards to data abuse.

There’s a difference between a foreign adversary and a foreign ally who’s subsidizing most of your defense.

For a German, both of those are both foreign adversaries and foreign allies, at the same time. One is not "better" than the other.

Yes, one is not better than the other until there’s a security issue in Europe that actively threatens the EU. Then miraculously Western Europeans will suddenly remember that the US is an ally. This is exactly why many US voters are growing tired of subsidizing the EU’s defense.

I guess your media conveniently skips the part where joining NATO means destroying your own long range weapons. This is what they forced Bulgaria to do and they made a very big deal out of it.

I'm not American, but here you can read some extensive American reporting on it: https://nonproliferation.org/bulgaria-reaffirms-plan-to-dest...

What you're skipping over is that the reason the US asked for their destruction is that having a NATO ally with weapons that violated the INF treaty with Russia wouldn't have been good idea.

Thanks for the link but surely you are not implying this is what the general public over there is being fed

Yes, Russia and the US are equivalent.

"Ally". The US has not exactly always been friendly to Europeans.

To be fair, there weren't tons of reasons for the US to be friendly with Germany, historically speaking.

We have subsidized your defense for decades now which is a big reason how entitlements like socialized healthcare was able to work in the EU despite not having the long term birthrates to cover it. It’s a much bigger gift than cheaply produced goods. Also every time there’s a mess in Europe, we have to clean it up without getting paid unlike the CCP with their low cost goods. The cost in blood and taxes would be much easier to swallow for Americans if there was at least some gratitude from the Western Europeans.

> Also every time there’s a mess in Europe, we have to clean it up without getting paid

You're too high on your own supply if you really believe this to be the case... The reason Europe has proper healthcare is because the US has a huge army? Give me a break...

Please, start provide some actual backing by numbers of what you're saying if you're gonna try to spread propaganda around here.

https://www.euronews.com/2023/11/30/record-increase-in-eu-mi...

It’s simple. You have finite resources and you have to choose where to spend those resources. The EU has chosen healthcare and pensions which leaves almost nothing for defense. Guess who has to make up for the shortfall?

> We have subsidized your defense for decades now which is a big reason how entitlements like socialized healthcare was able to work in the EU despite not having the long term birthrates to cover it.

No, socialized healthcare works in Europe because its cheaper than the US system, massively so. The US just chooses to waste extra money to assure that large segements of its population lack access to quality healthcare.

Having hostile neighbors you either need to spend real % of GDP to protect yourself or have a powerful ally , any other way of thinking is delusional. So yes, your medicine goods are at least partially sponsored by US

> Also every time there’s a mess in Europe, we have to clean it up without getting paid

No, you don’t have to but you choose to because it’s good for your business.

In my opinion, the US is as much a foreign adversary as China. The US isn't subsidizing defense, its occupation and hegemony.

One reason Germany has been able to afford more entitlements for its citizens like socialized healthcare is due to the fact that it virtually had no defense expenditures for decades. We can say the same for most of Western Europe. The US has subsidized the defense of the EU for decades.

As for occupation, I wonder what Germany did in the 20th century to merit it?

You really have to understand and look at the numbers, and also model the economics of what you're writing about, to get a sense of how wrong you are. May i suggest you start on this big quest by looking up how inflation gets imported and exported?

Yes, tell me why I am wrong instead of just alluding to it

Not in a post, but here's a few books for you: Seignorage on a global reserve currency: read "the global minotaur", the story of oil: read "Oil, Power, and War" by Matthieu Auzanneau, and for completeness: "The brothers" by Stephen Kinzer.

That’s not telling me why. You’re simply using a distraction because you’re unable to summarize the main ideas of those books

unwilling: no time! Happy Holidays! :-)

No one is forcing the USA to keep it's European military bases, and no one is forcing the USA to spend 3.5% GDP on its defense budget. You do that out of your own free will. And you spending that amount of money on military, has no bearing on whether you could have free health care or not, the obstacles to that are purely political.

You will get what you wish sooner than later because our defense spending is unsustainable and we won’t have a choice in the end. We’re starting to see the cracks with terrorists hijacking cargo ships without repurcussion.

Oh yeah , and what happened to Europe , when they pray to share more money to Ukraine because EU was eating cheese , drinking beer and not thinking about defense , maybe except Poland . And meanwhile also let corrupt themself and give away their energy market to Russia . Oh well Russia bought lots of weapons on this money to start attacking EU

So I guess for most of Europe and the US you would be right. Thankfully that's just a relatively small part of the world though. If anything, all things considered having the US as your adversary is much much more risky. so outside of US vassals/allies, I think picking China as your poison in terms of spyware is the least risky option. China might like to pretend they are on the same level as the US but they absolutely cannot project their strength (or meddle in domestic affairs of other countries ) in any similar way.

exactly

China is actively helping Russia. They’re not neutral, and they’re not simply opportunistic like India. I don’t how much clearer it needs to be aside from China invading Taiwan.

As an individual, most threat I have will be from my own govt. and politicians/police by simple virtue of overlap and the authority they have to mess my life. So given choice, I'll prefer minimum additional info to my govt.

Assuming you are German, then: The US liberated your country from fascism, saved half of your country from 50 years of soviet occupation, rebuilt your country with the Marshall Plan after your country started two world wars that killed 100 million people, and now defends your country from genocidal russian aggression because your country is too cheap/lazy to meet your NATO defence spending obligations.

If you can trust the US to defend you from Putin, you can trust the US to handle your data. China doesn't have that relationship with Germany as far as i'm aware

Maybe we shouldn’t have done that, if they’re not at least a bit grateful.

Social media makes me want to withdraw behind our oceans. Let them hate us for free, at a distance - no reason we should subsidize them if they don’t even like us

If only you would stay at home. Unfortunately, you keep interfering in the rest of the world. Of course those you steal from and bomb hate you.

Agreed! We will stop bailing you out. Please remember this next time you ask.

It was primarily the USSR that liberated us from fascism, while the USSR stopped its occupation of east Germany, the US never stopped. And wasn't it Christina Nuland that said "Fuck the EU" while instigating the Ukraine Coup? Wonder why we should trust the US when it has been one of the worst "Allies" we ever had...

> while the USSR stopped its occupation of east Germany, the US never stopped

What do you mean by this?

Presumably they mean the 40 army bases the US maintains in Germany[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_ins...

But that's not what occupation means. Consider that the US has military bases in the UK too, but nobody could say with a straight face that the US is occupying the UK.

occupying is also subsidizing defense spending...

USSR sponsored Nazi gave them all kind of goods and attacked Poland and Finland in the begging of war . After that occupied half of the Europe , and when anyone tried to escape communism they kill them violently. What a liberators. Oh and US was sponsoring USSR during the war as well , once they switch from being a Nazi ally

US has all the rights to say fuck the EU because despite all the investments people there are still as blind and don’t want to look into reality like before WW2. Let’s send billions of dollars to a country where every day on tv they discussing how to invade EU, sure let’s do it . Lets reduce the number of troops and cut military spendings while same country is doing through rapid militarization , oh yeah that’s very smart , sure . But someone said fuck EU while throwing away billions to make at least more weak your direct enemy. What a bad ally

You sound like one of these Russian tools claiming that “Russia never liberated Western Europe from nazis so that means nazis are fine in Western Europe and Russia must liberate Western Europe”. Read less friggin’ Russian propaganda.

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