Information/Technology - 25. page

An article on the website of the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur described a hacking competition, secretly organized by the Chinese government, which offered a reward of $200,000 to anyone who could hack into an iPhone. The competition finally paid off.

In November 2018, a Chinese hacker managed to find a way to intercept information on an iPhone remotely. A few months ago, the U.S. security authorities informed Apple of the information. A May 6 article published in the MIT Technology Review magazine detailed the above process. However, it did not reveal the channel through which the Chinese hacker gained the access. The article commented that, since 2018, Chinese hackers have stopped participating in the annual international hacking competition held in Vancouver, Canada, which is a side event of the Computer Security Conference. It is clear that Beijing believes that the findings of Chinese hackers should be used by China’s security apparatus. Starting in 2018, Beijing has been holding a competition called the Tianfu Cup Chinese Hacking Competition. A hacker named Qixun Zhao won the first Tianfu Cup prize for successfully hacking into the iPhone. He named his discovery “Chaos” and the Chinese media praised his work, calling it “the perfect remote jailbreak of the iPhone.” Two months later, Apple quietly patched the loophole. During this two-month gap, it was possible that the Chinese security authorities had monitored all iPhone users, especially those of Uyghurs. Research by the U.S. government and Google shows that the findings by Chinese hackers provided a great deal of assistance to the Beijing government’s mass surveillance of Uyghurs.

Source: Radio France International, May 15, 2021
https://rfi.my/7OpC.T

Well-known Chinese news site NetEase (NASDAQ: NTES) recently reported that the Chinese Nation Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC, also known as the State Internet Information Office) just published the draft Automobile Data Safety Administrative Regulations for public comments. The proposed regulations will ban cross-border transfer of any data collected through an automobile camera or other sensors. This new move is expected to cause damage to Tesla’s operation in China. Modern electric automobiles, like market leader Tesla’s, are usually equipped with various sensors like GPS receiver, camera, radar, sonar, and lidar. Typically, these sensors generate a large amount of data that will be uploaded to the manufacturer’s database servers. These data can be coupled with the owner’s personal information for storage. Though Elon Musk promised not to provide data to any government, yet Tesla is after all an American company. It is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government, which can turn the promise into an empty promise. China has banned Tesla in some government areas as well as some military areas. The new regulations require approval before data leaves China and consent from the owner. Also, even approved data needs to remove personally identifiable information such as human faces. An analyst expressed the belief that China is worried about national security if sensitive data falls into the hands of the U.S. government.

Source: NetEase, May 13, 2021
https://www.163.com/dy/article/G9TIETVK0511838M.html

Well-known Chinese news site Sina (NASDAQ: SINA) recently reported that, ever since the last batch of a shipments of 120 million high-end chips from Taiwan last December, Huawei’s mobile phone sales have been in freefall, income growth reached a record low and cash flow reached a seven-year low. Huawei’s board changed its strategy from “technology orientation” to “survival orientation.” In addition to getting into the cloud computing business, Huawei is partnering with Chinese-owner Seres, an electric vehicle and component manufacturer headquartered in Santa Clara, California, to make electric vehicles (EVs). Huawei’s online shopping site recently presold 3,000 Seres EVs in two days, while Tesla China was combating questionable consumer complaints. Starting in June 2020, Huawei conducted a re-organization and established the structure of an EV branch. The Huawei Smart Car Solutions Business Unit (BU) now has nine departments, including Architecture and Integration; Strategy and Development; Policy, Standards and Patents; Marketing; MDC (Mobile Data Computing); Quality Control and Operations. The BU branch plans to have three product lines: Smart Driving, Smart Cabin, and Smart Automobile Cloud. All heads of the departments of this BU come from Huawei’s top leadership team. The initial BU has around one thousand staff members and the goal is to expand to five to six thousand. Huawei also aims to produce a world-leading car operating system to compete against Tesla, Apple and Google. However, the company is facing a difficulty in finding manufacturing partners in the EV industry.

Source: Sina, April 30, 2021
http://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/csj/2021-04-30/doc-ikmxzfmk9802173.shtml

Recently, a Chinese netizen discovered that his home TV, equipped with the Android system, was secretly carrying out surveillance capabilities. In an article posted on the V2EX website, a discussion platform for designers and developers, he mentioned that a data service on his TV scans all network devices every 10 minutes, even including his neighbors’ information.

As he felt the transmission of the TV signal was slow, he decided to look at the background services that were running. He found something called ‘Gozen Data Service,’ about which he had absolutely no idea.

“I found that this thing scans my household’s network devices every 10 minutes, sending back the information including hostname, MAC (Media Access Control), IP addresses, and even the network latency time. It also detects the surrounding WiFi SSID (Service Set Identifier) names, and MAC addresses packaged and sent to the domain name gz-data .com.”

“In other words, with the information such as whatever smart devices or cell phones are physically at home, anyone who is connected to the WiFi, and the name of the neighbors’ WiFi networks, were collected and uploaded all the time. Are we sure this is not a spy service?”

Gozen Data is a Chinese company specializing in big data service in large smart TV’s, reaching over 100 million smart TV terminals made in China and accounting for 55 percent of the market. As of April 2019, Gozen Data entered into a long-term partnership with a long list of Chinese and Western companies including Sanyo, Toshiba, and Philips, by the implanting of an SDK (Software development kit) in the TV’s operating system so as to collect smart TV data.

Xing Jian, a citizen journalist who is familiar with the Internet technology, told Radio Free Asia that the Chinese government had modified the open-source Android system and used it for the “Xueliang Project (雪亮工程),” an IT network to surveil people living in the rural area.

The “Android system repurposed for this ‘Xueliang Project’ was able to achieve the networking of public security surveillance videos. The application usually intrudes into cell phones, TVs and other Android devices in the form of ‘spyware,’ automatically scanning and collecting the information such as device model, usage, and social media and transferring the data to the government databases.”

Source: Radio Free Asia, April 27, 2021
http://https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/meiti/ql1-04272021042034.html