In case you only read the headline, it was confirmed to only happen if the device's region was set to China. From the statement:
> To accomplish this task, Safari receives a list of websites known to be malicious from Google, and for devices with their region code set to mainland China, it receives a list from Tencent.
From Apple's statement, Tencent's API functions exactly the same as Google's k-anonymity model, which you can read more about the api[0] and how it works[1] (also via this JAMIA paper[2]).
It worth noting, for some features like hiding Taiwan flag, the logic is to check both system setting and hardware sales region, it will be on if either is true.
On the softer side, shutter sound can’t be muted on the camera app for JP sold iPhones, I can’t find any offical doc (not customer discussion) mentioning it.
edit: there was some doc, just with a vague “shutter sound might be disabled depending on your region” mention.
it's a ridiculous law . You want to take a picture of your sleeping baby without waking her. Sucks to be you. Want to take a picture of your cat or dog without them changing their pose in response to the sound. You can't. Want to take a picture at a wedding without distrubing the mood? Or bad for you. Want to take a picture at a fancy quiet romantic dinner without annoying all the other guests? Can't do it.
In the meantime any pervert (the claimed reason for the law) can use any non-phone camera or for that matter any other camera app than the built in one
Even if there is, it will only be at the beginning. So you can circumvent the intent of the law (e.g. filming the police) by starting to film yourself, pretending to stop and then point the camera at the subject.
I think you are mistaken. There is no formal law AFAIK but it was just an agreement made by companies in Japan. You are free to order a phone outside of Japan. This was a huge issue in Japan when phones started getting cameras and so everyone made a handshake agreement.
In Japan, the difference between formal law and cultural law with respect to their enforcement is often not a distinction worth making (as John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty⁎). Just ask women how interested the police are in dealing with rape or domestic abuse.
Only yesterday I was reading a Reddit thread where someone new to Japan asked whether to inform the police of the apparently violent arguments his neighbours were having and the responses varied from "don't bother, the police won't care" to "make a noise complaint, at least the police will be interested". That's the least scary anecdote I have.
As far as I remember Jphone, the company first heavily advertising camera phones, forced the shutter on its own to preemptively clear itself from any potential issue.
Every phone carrier from there had the choice to forgo the mandatory shutter sound but risk backlash if anything were to happen, as Jphone set a precedent. And they choose the safety move.
When the iPhone came, it would have just been a marketing quagmire to go with a mutable sound.
iOS has the issue that you can not select default apps, unlike Android. So yes you can use a 3rd party app but you can't make it the app that takes pictures when the phone is locked nor can you make it the app that gets launched from the accessible from anywhere control panel. In other words, their is friction using a 3rd party app.
But of course that's also part of the issue. If 3rd party apps don't have to make a sound then what was the point of the law? The perverts can just use a 3rd party app and 99.999% of users have to deal with a stupid for no actual protection.
And someone always finds a way to get a device which can make photos silently. For example by importing it, modding it, using older devices, etc. It is not solving anything. It is simply a stupid law against users.
Ya know, any non-pervert can use those non-phone cameras for all of the use cases you mentioned too... Is taking pictures of your fancy dinner or jumpy pets really so hard to do with a superior and low cost dedicated camera? The results will be superior for a fraction of the price!
Here's the thing you refuse to acknowledge (or perhaps didn't think through before writing) -- when someone is holding a P+S camera or bigger, everyone knows they're taking a picture. But when someone is holding a smartphone, you assume they are not taking a picture because 99.9% of the time phones are not in camera mode.
The point wasn't to ensure that all cameras made noise, it was to ensure that a phone couldn't be used as a secret camera in public.
Seriously, I struggle to parse the logic here: Do you think that creepers are taking actual full size cameras into subways for creepshots? Or are you thinking they're using "Spy Camera" type devices? Because the people the law was meant to deter generally aren't that level of creeper, and their creepshots are a crime of convenience not a premeditated act of sexual assault.
The argument is that the shutter sound inconveniences regular users while doing nothing to prevent the misuse it claims to prevent. Which part did you miss?
I missed the part where every creeper alive circumvents the policy without inconvenience but every other user alive can't.
I require consistency, so either EVERYONE is inconvenienced, or EVERYONE can circumvent it without issue.
The part I missed is the justification for inconsistent and illogical arguments where magically your ability to be inconvenienced is based only on your desire to be a creep.
Refusing human rights is a touchy subject, especially when the violators of human rights pay so well. The corrupting influence of money is becoming more and more widespread. Pretty soon, perhaps the only way to avoid human slavery will be direct payouts to the powerful, as if that isn't slavery already. Perhaps we're already there.
On a recent story (perhaps the most recent popular one on this topic), a former Microsoft employee said they maintained an internal database to keep track of what was necessary for each country. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
No, you'd need to purchase the device outside of China and set the locale to something else.
In the safe browsing example, you'd just lose it completely because it would be replaced by Google's safe browsing list (also used by Chrome and Firefox), which you couldn't connect to from within China. So the end result is the same as turning off safe browsing.
You definitely haven't been in China. Even when they blocked some VPNs, Apple devices are a million times better in China because it has the official app store.
You cannot begin to understand what it means to be forced to use one of those non-Google Play stores. Even if you set your device to English, Firefox will be in Chinese and you get a weird Skype version as well.
I mean it is a pretty interesting experience living Google-free on Android, and you could resort to APKPure to install some stuff like Whatsapp. But honestly, unless you get a Xiaomi phone or equivalent that you can switch to an international ROM, the whole experience is pretty annoying. Spam calls and text blockers on Android are the main highlight though.
If players that big are in the game then no, F-Droid is a dangerous consolidation of power. They really shouldn't sign apps themselves and only sign over reproducible builds.
I really never digged into this, but isn't they already provide an option to do this? [0] And there is even an option to setup verification server [1]. I get it's not perfect, but they have limited resources and someone have to work on such feature full time.
It started as a free speech Twitter alternative aimed at republicans. But along with republicans and free speech activists they've attracted right-leaning extremists that were banned from Twitter for a plethora of good reasons. As a result of those users being left unmoderated, Gab gained a certain reputation.
Gab's apps weren't accepted to either app store, they were booted by several hosting companies, had to switch domain registrar and their stripe account was suspended. Switch to a Mastodon fork is a recent development.
Gab was a platform advocating "free speech" and as is the meme with those types of platforms these days, it was filled by people denying the holocaust and claiming all black people operate better as slaves. The list is not exhaustive, but you get the idea.
To my mind, no good-faith claim that such things do not need to be ostracised exists.
Them being on Twitter is bad, but being on their own platform is arguably worse.
I fully agree with this. It will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy for those arguing against true freedom of speech. When you deplatform a viewpoint entirely, then the people with that viewpoint are going to coalesce onto a much smaller platform, which will end up being an echo chamber for the viewpoints that the rest of the world desires to quash. Then, it will end up becoming an argument to prevent such echo chambers from even forming in the first place, which would effectively make it impossible for smaller players to get an inroad, as they'll just be preemptively accused of being inherently alt-right.
These people don't understand that, when you centralize control over avenues of speech like that, then one day that centralized control can do a 180 and start banning any type of speech, and not just "harmful" or "problematic" speech.
It's literally the same type of tactic that China uses to suppress dissent, just on a different scale (and with a different culture behind it). It's so transparent, yet the prevailing "public narrative" is still highly supportive of deplatforming.
This argument is compelling on the surface, were it not that Europe has had laws against this kind of speech for a fairly long time now and it has made nothing worse. The place where it really is worse is the US, where even people who are not fascists seem to imagine that it is important to give them a "platform".
F-Droid will be blocked by the Great Firewall as soon as it becomes a popular way of circumventing censorship. On top of that, there is a real possibility that most Android phones sold in China are backdoored by the government in some way.
F-Droid allows many ways to update without using its main server - from alternative servers to transfer via NFC/wifi. Perhaps traffic shaping can detect typical F-Droid traffic, but a simple IP block won't do.
Of course there's free software activism in China and there are apps by Chinese developers available via F-Droid. But that doesn't change anything for users who aren't free software activists. They either use the app store preinstalled on their device, or download APKs from their search engine (which often boils down to the same thing).
F-Droid would need coporate backing or SEO to get popular in China, not free software activism.
This seems like a situation where sufficiently effective free software advocacy will be persecuted. Will be interesting to see how it pans out, if at all.
Sideloading would not fix built-in malware that cannot be removed. You would have to flash the device with a ROM like LineageOS, at which point you would have a FOSS (excluding drivers/firmware) system which you can (mostly) trust. F-Droid is a repository / app store of good free Android software apps that you can also mostly trust, which you could then use to add functionality.
There's no zh_US (or zh_UK, etc.), so any mainlander living overseas and still use Chinese as the preferred language on their iPhones will get their IP address sent to Tencent. There's not much difference here.
Average users aren't aware of its existence. Also for a lot of mainlanders living in the US they won't prefer to set their region to US because that means imperial units instead of metrics units.
> To accomplish this task, Safari receives a list of websites known to be malicious from Google, and for devices with their region code set to mainland China, it receives a list from Tencent.
From Apple's statement, Tencent's API functions exactly the same as Google's k-anonymity model, which you can read more about the api[0] and how it works[1] (also via this JAMIA paper[2]).
0: https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/update-api#ch...
1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with...
2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528029/