News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

genwhsbvce

Re:Decompiled 2022 Beijing Olympics Apps on Friday January 28, 2022 @03:23PM (#30119839)
The last time I looked at this sort of thing it was claimed that a Chinese phone manufacturer had spying and censorship functionality on a phone that turned out to be part of its ad network. Specifically the phone manufacturer had an ad network that ran inside of certain applications on the phone that they sold access to and they didn't know server-side what an affiliates advertisement was going to be, so they implemented client-side filtering of the advertisements to prevent things like porn adverts and so forth.

Looking through this list, I'm fairly certain that this is something like that because it also includes a bunch of Chinese government entity names that clearly would not be censored in China and also includes a lot of terms relating to pornography.

Re:Decompiled 2022 Beijing Olympics Apps on Friday January 28, 2022 @03:23PM (#30119831)
The last time I looked at this sort of thing it was claimed that a Chinese phone manufacturer had spying and censorship functionality on a phone that turned out to be part of its ad network. Specifically the phone manufacturer had an ad network that ran inside of certain applications on the phone that they sold access to and they didn't know server-side what an affiliates advertisement was going to be, so they implemented client-side filtering of the advertisements to prevent things like porn adverts and so forth.

Looking through this list, I'm fairly certain that this is something like that because it also includes a bunch of Chinese government entity names that clearly would not be censored in China and also includes a lot of terms relating to pornography.

So the round about point is "88 event" likely refers to a specific string in an advertisment that was once loaded by an affiliate and found to be undesirable for one reason or another and not any sort of specifically political event or similar.

Re:Decompiled 2022 Beijing Olympics Apps on Friday January 28, 2022 @03:19PM (#30119784)
It's pretty likely this isn't a ban list at all in the traditional sense but rather something more like the recent phone debacle which turned out to be a case where the chinese phone manufacturer also ran an ad network and the way its affiliates program was structured it didn't actually know what advertisement it was displaying on the server side, so it included functionality to inhibit undesirable advertisements-- which is pretty standard form.

As a result, while the publicised list included things that the CPC may seek to censor, the full list showed that it was mostly porn filtering and similar and included blocks for advertisements from the CPCs main newspaper (people's daily). Briefly looking through the illegal words list, it looks very much the same and also includes a wide range of Chinese government entities and so its likely not censorship functionality in the way you'd expect but more likely things the company would prefer not to advertise to users.

I've asked the original poster for more information, specifically for which classes contain the functionality he suspects but have gotten no response-- my suspicion is that he just read the strings of the program and made some assumptions, e.g. "monitor thread" probably doesn't mean what he thinks it does but I can't discern because I can't get a clear statement about what he thinks just screenshots with red arrows and him pointing to a decompiled application telling me to read it without referencing what exactly inside contains the suspect functionality.