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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

According to Tim Cook, China is becoming Apple's biggest Market. Microsoft software is similarly entrenched in China. There is no way those companies will do anything that jeopardizes that relationship.

I salute Google. For all its forgivable flaws, it stands alone among large corporations in protecting free speech. And the nerve to pull out of the largest internet market on the planet. Kudos.

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Your browser, or trusted cert provider, should just have a clear policy that once trust is broken, according to well defined rules, the cert is auto-revoked with no appeal. Then it is only a matter of executing the policy, not an ex post facto political game.

If your trusted source does not have such a policy, drop them.

Do you have any suggestions about where to look for such a "trusted source"?

I fear my comfortable life with iOS/Android/OSX/Windows/mainstram-Linux OSen at my bidding in various devices and niches, would need to change radically to approach that ideal.

That's because everything is growing in China, including probably Android and Chromebooks. Google just had the guts to do the right thing.

Android in China is AOSP or 3rd Party forks, NOT google android.

There are no google services in china, so it's definitely an easier stand to take for Google than for its competitors doing business there.

It's the reverse; there are no Google services in China because they already took a stand.

When the Chinese government demanded to be able to sniff all traffic, Google fought back, refused to play cozy enough with the government, and gave up its chance at a foothold.

There's a whole wiki article on this mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Ending_of_self-ce...

Google is inaccessible in China. It's banned by Great Firewall.

It's not really banned or inaccessible. But connections are severely throttled down.

It really is inaccessible.

> it stands alone among large corporations in protecting free speech.

As seen in the last few years, Google has a fairly cozy relationship with the US government and intelligence community, so I don't think they're doing this just to "protect free speech". Besides, breaking SSL goes well beyond free speech (e.g. industrial espionage etc).

Really? Everything I've read suggests Google does its best to resist subpoenas, takedowns, etc. Meanwhile, Microsoft was caught red-handed installing backdoors. What am I missing about Google "cozying up to" the US gov?

> breaking SSL goes well beyond free speech (e.g., industrial espionage etc)

So we should thank them for protecting us against that as well?

See this for what I meant: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

> So we should thank them for protecting us against [compromising SSL] as well?

I'm just saying they have a much wider interest in keeping SSL reasonably secure than just to "defend free speech".

I know it's a bit off topic but I would seriously love to have been a fly on the wall when Apple secured a deal with the likes of China Mobile. There must be conditions attached to access to the largest carrier in the world that just happens to be owned by the Chinese state - especially for a US company with their data collection abilities.

There certainly are. Iphones smuggled into mainland form Hong Kong are sold at a premium. Whatever the reasons for that are among the conditions that Apple must have conceded to to sell legally in the mainland.

The business is between Apple and Chinese people, not between Apple and CNNIC or its evil spawn. They have no reason to keep that rogue root of CNNIC's to protect its users for greater good.

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