Smartphones with Qualcomm chips were found to send private user information, including IP address, unique ID, mobile country code, back to the U.S. chipmaker, according to a report by the German security company Nitrokey first released on April 25.
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Is this the equivalent of Intel management engine?
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No, IME is a proprietary subchip that has access to what your CPU is doing and virtually never turns off. IME is basically a full backdoor. Qualcomm is doing insecure telemetry that violates GDPR, but it’s not a backdoor.
similar sort of thing from the sound of it
Who would’ve thought…
This is my shocked face 🥱
How about we just list all of the imperial tech giants which don’t have backdoors and who don’t spy on users of their products.
@knfrmity @yogthos That list would be very short, if it would actually have any items.
So many privacy-focused tech-people have focused on software only, because its at least somewhere that they can make a positive contribution, but in all likelihood, something we can’t mess with, the hardware, has backdoors and spying. Everything from CPUs, radios, and even hard drives likely have backdoors.
There’s pretty much no way around that until we get competing non-western-owned hardware industries, which rn, only china and india are attempting.
china isn’t much better - they’re much more notorious for their backdoors.
edit: before (admittedly you all already have) started throwing pitchforks at me for being a glowie, i live in eastern europe, and am an anarchist. i am no way saying that the U.S. has not done it’s fair share of global surveillance - honestly i’m more concerned about the U.S. because they seem to have their claws in about every single service and company. i just don’t think we should be absolving china of all of their wrongdoings just because they’re an enemy to the U.S.
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i don’t know about more notorious.
that may merely be the propaganda we’re exposed to.
but for sure, noone has our back here, we have to have eachother’s back
Sure they are much more notorious, but as it turns out most of the time there is absolutely no reason for that. Just take current hysteria around TikTok, even if it was correct (which I would argue it isn’t) no one cares about all the other apps that we know for sure spy on you and give info to US government (and others).
Hysteria?? There’s undeniable proof that TikTok does a shit ton of data gathering. You fucking tankies always act like China is some ray of utopia and hail Mao and Xi like they’re some kind of deities.
Never said the US Government wasn’t a problem, but why do you act like China doesn’t do shit either?
Tiktok does a ton of data gathering… for the usa.
You seem to have missed the part of the comment you’re responding to where they said:
No one is saying that TikTok isn’t collecting a shit ton of data on its users. They’re pointing out that this has been an ongoing problem with tech that burgers have been using for a long time, but that the burger regime didn’t so much as make a peep until it was a Chinese tech company doing the same thing. You don’t need to be a communist to see the double standards at play here.
notorious to americans maybe… the rest of the world is probably far more wary of the US and for good reason… you dont become the hegemon by playing by the rules you make right?
i live in eastern europe.
Source on that?
BTW here’s the state of western surveillance:
what, you think I don’t know about PRISM? hell, snowden’s leaks were in 2012, NSA’s got a lot more advanced shit now. i’m just trying to say that the enemy of the enemy is not your friend. just because china is an enemy of the U.S. does not absolve china of all of its wrongdoing.
@muad_dibber @knfrmity I think this statement does not apply to open source firmware. Where could the malware hide if everything is open?
In a hidden, 2nd level of firmware ;) . Open source firmware is nice, but there aren’t many companies who put it out in the open, and not many people with the level of technical expertise required of low-level hardware engineers to create it.
@muad_dibber Lately, I saw a broader adoption of open source practices. One big example being:
https://www.techspot.com/news/98604-amd-planning-replace-agesa-firmware-open-source-alternative.html
I wonder if Mediatek is any better. They’re the biggest competition that Qualcomm has right now (except for maybe Samsung’s Exynos), but honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if everyone’s doing this.
It’s almost certain that all telecom companies do this.
hell at&t was secretly splitting fiber to siphon all traffic on their backbone to the nsa back in like 2005 … if they’re going to those lengths you can be sure they’re considering all the other avenues as well
basically if you want to do something privately then don’t use a computer
are there archive pages for cgtn or other such domains? I’m not sure if because behind the office firewall, but I can’t read the contents, just the titles, :( Perhaps both URLs, the original one, plus sort of an archive one…
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Didn’t know about this add-on, I’ll try it. I believe the issue is about geoblocking webpages. Thanks !
There is an archived page: https://archive.is/CpRi0
Even behind a firewall you should be able to look up and archive a page via archive.today or a similar service.
It could well be that your work firewall blocks Chinese and Russian content… It’s becoming ever more commonplace and even celebrated.
The archive URL shared worked fine, thanks !
Btw you can archive a website even if it’s blocked by your ISP/employer