Slashdot Mirror
Apple Agrees To Chinese Security Audits of Its Products
itwbennett writes According to a story in the Beijing News, Apple CEO Tim Cook has agreed to let China's State Internet Information Office to run security audits on products the company sells in China in an effort to counter concerns that other governments are using its devices for surveillance. "Apple CEO Tim Cook agreed to the security inspections during a December meeting in the U.S. with information office director Lu Wei, according to a story in the Beijing News. China has become one of Apple’s biggest markets, but the country needs assurances that Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad protect the security and privacy of their users as well as maintain Chinese national security, Lu told Cook, according to an anonymous source cited by the Beijing News."
More countries should be doing security audits on more products.
Since most of their operations are in China (even if de facto), they are essentially a Chinese company. They have to agree.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I thought Apple products were assembled in China? (By chinese spies masquerading as low-wage workers, etc. etc. etc.)
Also, Lenovo.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
If Apple cooperates then how do they know the devices and software are exactly the same thing that Apple sells in China. The thing to do would be to acquire random samples in China and elsewhere jailbreak and then analyze. Never mind that Apple may not include obvious back doors but instead subtle behaviors that can be exploited and also explained away if discovered by outsiders.
When push comes to shove it is all bullshit to use enemy technology. If I was in their shoes I would go for my own hardware and software developed without any input from the outside.
They are probably more interested into breaking into existing I-devices so don't use these things what you want neither the US-G or the CN-G to know. That simple. Nobody is your friend here.
It will enable the Chinese intelligence services to identify more currently unexploited flaws in the security of Apple's products. I doubt they will let Apple know of all the flaws that they find.
I suspect also that Apple could not refuse to cooperate, and I would be surprised if the intelligence services in the USA are not doing precisely the same.
I wonder if the Europeans are regretting the disembowelling of Nokia as a phone manufacturer?
Nokia failed in design and marketing. Why would "Europe" regret that? It's not like "Europe" could have helped a bit. That's just how market works. Besides, the same people are still making phones, only they run MS software now. Nice phones, I have one, good exchange sync, works as a phone, WhatsApp works, nice camera. UI looks better imho compared to iOS and android. Software ecosystem may lack a bit, but everything I need in a phone is available. I have android phone also, but it's sitting on a desk at home because I have no use for it.
Doesn't really matter who spies my phone. I only live for a couple of decades anyways, if someone wants to waste their time spying on me I say good riddance, hope they found it interesting. I'm also sure it doesn't matter one bit who actually made the phone. If some entitity with sufficient funds wants to spy on them they will. IT's not like the information security is too strong on any of those.
Chinese New Year
Chinese Zodiac
Chinese Opera
Chinese Laundry
Chinese Restaurants
Chinese Checkers
Chinese Doll
Chinese Puzzle Box
Chinese Room
Chinese Medicine
Chinese Handcuffs
Chinese Security Audits
The Admin and the Engineer
> the accusations against the US rely on baseless allegations from a cowardly individual.
And the F35 is a good bird :)
I was chatting with friends in China about this article. The immediate and unprompted comment was that this will allow the Chinese clone makers direct access to the coding in the Apple products
Does that include auditing MacOSX (integrated cloud services et al)?
that they won't disclose to us? I don't know if any of you have ever tried to get this info from Apple, but they really don't make it easy. Or possible.
How naive you are. Apple just wants to make money from Chinese market. They don't care about privacy.
What Lu means is really, that you have to give your private key to us, or use the SMn ciphers(Chinese government home made ciphers, whether there are flaws or not, we don't know).
-- one Chinese
...if that means the Chinese government gets to look at Apple's source code while Apple's customers do not.
So, what do we think? Will the Chinese Government use this opportunity to provide valuable input to Apple on security vulnerabilities that they discover to help better secure Apple products? Or will they squirrel away the things they discover to their Intel agencies? My bet's on the latter.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Also, home of industrial espionage would be the USA.
I can't help but think of wooden shoes clogging machinery.
Arguably, the home of industrial espionage would be either the UK or Germany. You need industry before you can have industrial espionage, so it seems like the proper powers for the era.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The mods seem to disagree with you.
Gee, I wonder what the other option was...
"Researching zero days"
Can the US demand to security audit any Chinese product? Can we demand to see the source/firmware of, say, Huwai routers?
The Chinese is most likely doing this as a response to the US banning ZTE and Huawei telecom products in the US. The US government is accusing ZTE and Huawei of building backdoors and other security concerns into their hardware, so China wants to hit back with something equally annoying. China is basically saying that's cool, we can screw with your companies too. Especially since China is a huge market to cell phone makers that most US companies have yet to really tap into. And with a huge growing middle class, the amount of profit for products like iPhone and Android based phones is huge. China is basically holding the iPhone hostage to get better treatment of its companies outside of China.
Wait. Do you mean that Apple has just agreed to allow the Chinese to audit the Chinese-made iPhones that have Chinese malware that the Chinese put in to the iPhones that Apple is shipping from China to China? Next they will be wanting to audit the Chinese-made iPhones that have Chinese malware that the Chinese put in to the iPhones that Apple is shipping from China to the U.S. as well? Before or after the NSA interdicts the Chinese-made iPhones made in China by Chinese and shipped (via some secret stop-off) to the U.S.? Will they audit to make sure that both the Chinese and NSA-installed malware is still present?
I seem to recall tales of trade cities that were quite paranoid about outsiders learning their craft, some of which predated industrialized Great Britain or Germany by a rather large number of years.
Perhaps the most well-known example is Murano, whose artistic glassblowing techniques were held in high esteem by the region. An older example would be Damascus metalworking, and I have vague recollections of similar industrial pride dating back to Egypt.
I'm afraid my memory is not a particularly reliable source, but I believe there were often stiff penalties for trying to export the local expertise. Perhaps someone with a more complete knowledge of history can fill in the details...
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
But what about all those semiconductor chips out of China, which are part of those American drones, which allow Iran to bring them down (when they are illegally overflying their airspace)?
The socialist response to Obama's SOTU:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And the Real Obama:
https://firstlook.org/theinter...