* Android needs to know if a wifi network is working, since many wifi networks are broken and connecting to them degrades the user experience.

* Normally it does that by connecting to google.com, and if the connection succeeds, assume wifi is good to go.

* Google.com is blocked in china, meaning wifi would be broken in China.

* To fix this, Samsung has replaced google.com with qq.com in china.

* Samsung also needs to add a new DNS server to resolve qq.com, in case the network doesn't provide a DNS server and androids default of Google DNS is used (which is also blocked in China). Adding it last means it won't be used unless other DNS servers are broken.

Overall, this behaviour seems like the simplest and most logical fix Samsung could put in place to enable their users to use phones in China.

They could have run their own servers (but that would also have privacy issues), or they could have removed captive portal/bad network detection, but that probably would have broken some apps and led to unhappy users.

I can't see any other real fix in this case, and I certainly don't see any malicious intent in any of their actions.

This is exactly what Apple does, and they even include some fallback domains in case apple.com doesn't resolve. Samsung's design seems less like the most logical solution than it does the laziest solution.

Maybe. But also probably shortest path, least amount of risk and resource investment.

The more likely scenario is that they came up with what they thought was a good-enough solution and just moved on without really considering the knock-on effects.

That is laziness.

[0]: https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/china-great-fi...

GFW-compatible fallbacks are worth worrying about in HK, though, because in normal times there is a massive amount of cross-border travel between HK and SZ. Combine that with grey market HK phones being smuggled onto the mainland to avoid tax, and it's a pretty good bet that any phone destined for HK will makes its way across the border at some point.

If you roam on the mainland with a HK SIM you actually hop the GFW automatically, but most people swap SIMs at the border so that isn't reliable.

This is quite interesting. So GFW is applied by ISPs exclusively on domestic SIMs? Does this mean any international SIMs on roaming hop the GFW?

It does not explain why they do it in HK.

HK is not China.

114 is the mainland China number for an equivalent of the yellow pages. Phone number lookup.

The designers of a network built to withstand nuclear bombardment had a wide-eyed view of human nature?

The protocols weren’t naïvely designed. They were designed against the threats of the day. The threat model has changed, making the protocols look childishly optimistic in the way someone walking into a modern battlefield with a wooden shield and sword might .

It's daft, and it oversimplifies the motives, goals, and characters of a hell of a lot of really great people. Sometimes military/defense applications is one of the best ways to guarantee funding. DARPA is even considered "defense" because it was decided that something like "those damn commies" being first to orbit a satellite happening again was unacceptable, and a technological lead was deemed a critical cornerstone of the United State's national defense strategy.

That that lead has been completely sacrificed in the last 60 or so years to foster increasing globalization in the foolhardy belief of winning over the communist bloc through capitalist flexing notwithstanding, the people who have been pushing the envelope have not by any stretch been some sort of series of diabolical Dr. Strangelove's. Quite the contrary in fact. It's just so easy for techies to get caught up in the pedantism of historical record they completely lose sight of the rest of humanity going on around them.

This is factually incorrect. ARPA, DARPA’s predecessor, predates America’s spacefaring ambitions.

--Wikipedia article for DARPA

ARPA may have existed, but was clearly found wanting, and not necessarily under the umbrella of the Department of Defense.

Although there have been some less-than-optimal implementations in some protocols, in general the internet protocols were designed by people with their eyes open.

The protocols were designed to resist centralized control, and have been very successful.

You should read specifically about how tcp/ip was developed, not technically, but the people behind it and their motivations.

DNS is a singular centralized namespace.

HTTP(s) bakes an authoritative server into the name of every object.

Sure there are counterexamples - TCP doesn't require router state, UDP lets users skip the OS protocol stack, DNS could be even more centralized.

But the basic protocols weren't really designed to resist much of anything. Their decentralization arose out of administrative concerns (site A should be able to administer its own names without coordinating with B and C) and engineering concerns (E2E principle) rather than power relations (powerful C can force its will onto the relationship between A and B). Designing to resist against the latter takes public key cryptography, which was nascent and too computationally expensive prior to the past few decades.

IP addressing is not centralized.

DNS has a distributed common namespace with lots of delegation.

HTTP is peer to peer.

The easiest book to read about the personalities and history of this stuff is probably "the innovators" by walter isaacson.

If I compare the networking we came up with to the other types of networks available in the day the ip protocols were invented, I think what we have is remarkable.

Surviving nuclear war isn't quite the same thing.

As Uncle Ben would say: with great power comes great responsibility. Technology created a lot of power in a short time. Humans haven’t had enough time to gently learn how to be responsible with it yet. Hopefully we don’t blow a hand off.

    * Natural selection works everywhere, on individuals and societies. They compete even after survival is secure
    * Intelligent creatures need social order and specialization to become industrial
    * There will be administrative/ruling specialties because flat organizational hierarchies work for ants and bees but not when work and global coordination becomes complex
    * Social order installed, tech attained
    * Absolute power corrupts absolutely
    * ET gulag, end of space travel, everyone is busy making war and pleasing dear leaders

My first thought is this could be a non-malicious but perhaps not fully thought out bugfix: wi-fi connection status detection sporadically fails behind the GFW when queries to google don't resolve, let's pick a similarly dominant site on the other side of the firewall as an alternative. Apparently someone at Samsung then noticed and decided to use a Samsung .cn site instead in the latest patch.