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Comment by t1234s | Hacker News Reader

With Motorola being owned by the Chinese company Lenovo can these new devices be used in secure environments? I remember when Lenovo took over making ThinkPads they were banned in some secure environments because of Lenovo links to CCP.

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At this point in time, esp. given the raving lunacy of the US White House, those of us outside the "West", wonder the same thing about US companies.

Honestly I’d prefer Chinese backdoors over western ones. China is still a land far far away and I couldn’t care less about what they’d do with my data, unlike western alphabet boys who could freeze my accounts and assets for ”wrongthinking” in the future.

THIS so much! I'm more at risk from the US and my own (UK) government than the Chinese, and in answer to the questions below: - No I don't know anyone from or in China - I'm highly unlikely to go anywhere near China (or fly over it, around it) - I'm poor

So unless my local Chinese takeaway is classed as Chinese soil, I'll more than happily buy my phone from there

Most phones are already made over there anyway so know knows what kind of backdoor, listening devices are coded into the chips they put into 'Western Company's' phones.

Just make sure you don't have any family in China and don't plan to transit through HK anytime in the future.

One has to be careful when flying. Your flight's origin or destination might not be in China, and may not even be through Chinese airspace, but if there is an in-flight emergency, an airport in China might be the closest landing spot.

Occasionally, they'll "stage" an in-flight emergency, forcing a landing in China and arrest you.

The US invented it.

This isn't something the average random GrapheneOS user needs to worry about.

Doing this has a non negligible political cost. They would only do it for a high value target. If you're that person, you're presumably aware.

The person(s)* this has happened to, was/were not aware.

* I only recall one news report of this happening years ago.

I've been saying this for years and people thought I was going insane.

Iphone is made by Chinese companies too. Same with Tesla. A lot of those components made by purely Chinese companies and yes can be trace to individuals who are CCP. It is extremely hard to source another purely away from any Chinese connections. If you say the main company is USA, you seems to ignore how the pager exploding setup was done. Go into any IT rooms in USA and you audit it as zero from China even if you ignore Taiwan as recognized by American law as part of China. We can't buy anything truly made non-China. Even F35 has some components (and that is official, unofficial we dont know) made in China. Google want to sell Motorola to American companies, not even Pentagon or NSA bother back then. Think about it, how hard to engineer a backdoor exactly same components (say capacitor) or motors during shipment for those phones.

The true reason you can't trust a Chinese company, and other countries can't trust US companies, is the Western patent regime that allows various companies to sit on patents for absurd amounts of times, preventing others from selling you completely clean hardware on which every piece of software can be replaced.

Good point. It's a good thing that, say, Google is notoriously independent from the US government, and has never had any ties to it whatsoever.

You might want to add /s tag to it.

This isn't Reddit.

No worries, the team Literal is alive and well on HN..

The whole point about having an open platform from boot is you don't have to trust it. You run your own code from first power on.

Is it possible that it's backdoored, have a secret opcode / management engine? Probably, but that goes to everyone, as it's not practical to analyze what's in the chip (unless you're decapping them and all)

I don't know what secure environments you're talking about, if it's an airgapped system then you should be secure even when what's inside 'tries to get out'.

Korean and western made stuff guarantee to have such thing. CNC devices in Russia stopped working. Even NVIDIA gpu has back door according to China and NVIDIA had to settle this matter behind the scene with China government. At this point, your phone is 100% backdoorable by western government. The only thing protect you is you are non-threat and too small to be bother with.

>Even NVIDIA gpu has back door according to China and NVIDIA

They never said or claimed that. They rised concerns and asked about _possible_ backdoors the same way the west does about china e.g. Huawei.

Is there documentation that GrapheneOS Pixels or iPhones are backdoored by governments to the extent that any person can be targeted?

No? Okay.

Depends on what environment you mean. Chinese secure environments would see a Chinese OEM as an advantage vs. Google Pixels. In the US yeah you'd want a Pixel.

European tech is in shambles and everyone else is barely holding it together outside of tech.

> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo

That's the entire point of verified boot with custom keys, you don't need to trust Motorola or Lenovo. You can control what runs from the first boot, the threat model for a compromised supply chain is different from a backdoored chip. If you are worried about the latter that applies to every manufacturer including Google & Apple.

what does "secure environment" mean?

Not OP but I guess it’s where the threat model includes worrying about the foreign government actors. Like US infrastructure, government contracting or some major tech companies.

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