Similar lists existed within Google for their ("on hold" last I heard) project Dragonfly [0]. I saw a bunch of banned terms like these in the Dragonfly repo before they hid it from regular employees. It was a very long list. On it were also the names of specific activists and human rights lawyers, including some who'd been disappeared [1] or forcibly confined to mental institutions [2].

My impression is that Sundar was all-in on Dragonfly, and he only rolled it back because of tremendous external and internal pressure. As that pressure abates over time, expect Dragonfly to return. Word of warning for those who trust Google as a defender of digital privacy and human rights.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/06/un-human-right...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-ink-girl-defaced-xi-09...

> Word of warning for those who trust Google as a defender of digital privacy and human rights.

Surely that is literally nobody?

At this stage I would be seriously concerned for anyone who identifies with this description.

Considering Google has forfeited a lot of money over many years for resisting Chinese censorship I would say they're more trustworthy on this issue than Apple or Microsoft which have both publicly caved. The remnants of the "Don't be evil" culture is what allowed Dragonfly to be resisted. No such culture exists at Apple or Microsoft.

I hear what you're saying, however, that is exactly the issue. It's remnants, a "vocal minority" within Google using their moral compass to resist.

Because it is coming "from the bottom up" it can't be relied on when Google can pull the plug on these people at any point if they resist too much.

I can't say much for Apple/Microsoft, but to be safe I would tar them with the same brush.

Yes maybe Google resists the Chinese, but what about Russia?

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-apple-google-voting-app-n...

Surely nobody on HN trusts Google in this way (or any other for that matter), but the referenced comment is useful for educating our less-aware peers (usually those outside our industry), allowing them to come to more informed conclusions on Google. Forewarned is forearmed.

It was more clever than that. They tried to reverse-engineer the Great Firewall's block list by running queries from their Chinese office, so they could make a Chinese Censorship-compliant search engine that would work even outside the Great Firewall.

As for trust in Google, has anyone actually believed they are benevolent for the last decade or so?

Is it me or is this an extremely clumsy way of doing censorship?

Why not do this at network or server-side level? Why not use some kind of hash (ala Apple'e proposed child pornography hunter)?

In this design, everyone would have to have this plain text configuration file ... also other brands (Oppo, Huawei etc.) would have to have it. What if it needs an update? Suppose the hui muslims starts causing trouble ... Or if people starts using slang or deliberate misspelling ...

> Why not do this at network or server-side level?

China doesn’t control the network/servers in Lithuania and other countries. Doing it client-side gives them the power to extend their reach.

It almost looks like they wanted to get caught.

They are too powerful to give a damn, they looked at USA and their allies and how they overcome any evil thing they do just by being the strongest country and they said why we can't do the same?

This is really evil shit.

I guess it comes down to, why bother when the simplest solution works?

Make no mistake: As and when they get caught out doing such things, the sophistication of their implementation is bound to increase, in response to it. Money is no object for state-actors and mega-corps.

This has some smell of a compliance issue. I.e. the company gets ordered to block stuff; the order states "this shall be blocked" and provides a list, and then the company does the simplest/cheapest way to comply which is literally checking for whatever was required by the order.

> ...and then the company does the simplest/cheapest way to comply which is literally checking for whatever was required by the order.

An ironic form of chabuduo.

https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...

and then forgets to remove it from other markets.

> the sophistication of their implementation is bound to increase

You're right about this, including with backdoors. Electronics from China must be treated as treacherous computing devices that obey the orders of the Chinese Communist Party.

If the West was sensible, we simply wouldn't buy any electronics from them.

Or manufacturer any product from there...why does the world continue to be stupid on China and pump up their economy by having the majority of their goods manufactured there? Its going to continue to bite us and everyone in the butt.

> why does the world continue to be stupid on China and pump up their economy by having the majority of their goods manufactured there?

Because big companies make lots of profits from it, I imagine.

> Its going to continue to bite us and everyone in the butt.

Yes, unless we change our ways.

And yet im being downvoted for being negative on China?

Because you actually use the letters C h i n and a in your post and his replies do not.

Because the supply chain for electronics manufacturing, and many other classes of products, is hard to replicate.

Large multinational corporations would love to shift production to Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia or India, where labor is now cheaper than China, but there are logistics obstacles. Apple now manufactures some phones in India, but mostly older models.

> Because the supply chain for electronics manufacturing, and many other classes of products, is hard to replicate.

Software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says. So who controls the software -- including by controlling the hardware the software runs on -- controls the world.

This means that every polity that wants to be truly independent needs to control its computing infrastructure, ideally all the layers of the technology stack from chips to social media. So it would be well worth polities such as the USA or EU putting up whatever level of import tariffs (and other measures) it takes to encourage manufacturers to do these things domestically.

Not that doing so would be that much more expensive anyway. The cost of low-level assembly line labour per iPhone is probably only a few dollars. I'd guess that building them in the USA would only add $10-20 to the cost.

Atoms still matter, and there are blue-collar manufacturing skills the US has lost to China, and most of the low-cost labor alternative locales never had in the first place.

It may not be a state actor. I am the last person to defend the CCP, but as the chinese phones are made by companies that have lots of reason to fear the government, this may be proactive censorship added by the vendor to avoid getting in trouble, and it might even have been accidentally left in foreign models. We don't know the full story yet.

I think the distinction between being compelled by the sword and compelled by fear of the sword is pretty meaningless here. Unless these companies are independently deciding to push this out due to some internal zealous managers that reject the general CCP platform I think it's pretty safe to lay the blame at the feed of the party.

There's also all sorts of pretty reasonable whataboutism to be thrown about here but it's wrong either way.

There's really no difference between the state providing a blacklist, and the state inspiring enough terror that blacklists are compiled. Actually, there is - the latter is far scarier.

> Is it me or is this an extremely clumsy way of doing censorship?

yeah it's literally called MiAdBlacklistConfig, to stop certain ads from displaying in the browser.

So it's developed by the AD department. What do you think.

Yeah. It looks more like some sort of advertisement blacklist and not the broad censorship mechanism it is being interpreted as.

Could really be interesting to see the full list of words.

Maybe it's a "privacy preserving" censorship mechanism.

Censorship in depth.

local, network, and content host

Would people stop calling attention to the fact censorship systems are inherently broken/trivially circumventable?

Last thing we need is to trigger someone into making a better mousetrap.

And why does the code snippets seemingly refer to an advertising api?

Another word for ad is promotion. These sites promote certain groups. The censor believes they profit from this activity. It is not unreasonable for such a censor to understand them as illegal ads.

I’m assuming that’s an effort to mask the true intent.

Or the intent is something other than what the report assumes?

Just to be clear; the (incomplete) code snippets in the report have been through a code mangler. The only names readable are of the api that is actually used.

I have a Xiaomi device and can confirm the API request. It does this regardless of country, including in GDPR countries. It makes multiple requests like this per minute. And if you click on the Privacy Policy in the Xiaomi Smart Home app for instance, it shows a 404 error.

i'm surprised that Taiwan is not on the list.

it is, as mentioned both in the article and the list excerpt in the pdf linked above.

313 "台独万岁" “Long live Taiwan’s independence”

So, what are the other entries, and why were they redacted out?

PDF is here: https://www.nksc.lt/doc/en/analysis/2021-08-23_5G-CN-analysi...

...do you want me to post 449 items? :-)

The PDF only have the selected entries. Does anyone have the contents or actual url of the full file?

This is pretty clearly a low-effort filter for advertisements deemed political.

> 204 "人民报", “People’s daily newspaper”

People's Daily is an official Communist Party newspaper... Why on earth would they blocklist that if this is a politically-motivated censorship program (as the paper/many here are implying)?

Renminbao [人民报] is an independent Chinese online news website that criticizes the Chinese regime.

First result, funnily enough via a site that tracks phrases censored in China.

https://china-chats.net/keywords/1705

It's a bad translation. "People's daily newspaper" should translate 人民日报 (the newspaper you mention); 人民报 contains no "daily" element.

Talk about sticking your head in the sand. Pretty clearly that's not what it is at all.