Information/Technology - 40. page

Many of Hong Kong’s “anti-extradition law” protesters use a Hong Kong based online discussion forum, LIHKG, to mobilize and organize their actions. LIHKG announced around 6 am on Sunday that the “LIHKG has been under (un)precedented DDoS attacks for the past 24 hours. We have reason to believe that there is a power, or even a national level power, behind the organization of such attacks as botnets from all over the world were manipulated in launching this attack.”

“The enormous amount of network requests has caused Internet congestion and has overloaded the server, which has occasionally affected the access to LIHKG. The website data and members’ information have been unaffected.”

In addition, British media quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Telegram, a U.K. based instant messaging service, recently detected that Hong Kong or the mainland Chinese government may have uploaded a large number of phone numbers to the application, trying to identify the demonstrators using its matching function. Telegram software will automatically match the members of the communication group by phone number. The Chinese government only needs to ask the local telephone company to find out the true identities of the Telegram users. It is unclear whether the Chinese government has successfully identified the demonstrators.

Telegram is working on a fix to allow the users to disable the matching by phone number, so as to protect the privacy of Hong Kong protesters.

Source: Radio Free Asia, August 31, 2019
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/htm/hk-apps-08312019091610.html

Chinese cities are perhaps the most closely monitored places in the world. It is predicted that, by 2022, on average every two people in the country will be covered by a surveillance camera. The city of Chongqing currently has 2.6 million monitoring devices, or an average of 168 cameras per thousand people, higher than any other city in the world.

China plans to finish installing a social credit system by 2020. Surveillance monitors are becoming a weapon for creating so-called “smart cities” and “efficient governments.” On the streets of Shanghai, when a traffic violation occurs, the camera will immediately capture and broadcast the faces of the offenders in public, to the surprise of many foreign tourists.

The South China Morning Post quoted the British research firm Comparitech, which stated that, in the ranking of most monitors allocated to each thousand people, eight cities in China made it to the top 10. The top 10 are Chongqing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jinan, London (UK), Wuhan, Guangzhou, Beijing, and Atlanta (USA). Chongqing leads the world with 168.03 monitors per thousand people, followed by Shenzhen, with every thousand people covered by 159.09 cameras.

It is generally believed that China currently has about 200 million surveillance cameras. It is predicted that the number of cameras in China will grow by 213 percent by 2022 and reach 626 million. On average, about every two people will be within the sight of a camera.

Source: Central News Agency, August 20, 2019
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/201908200039.aspx

Chinese companies develop about 60 percent of the world’s free VPN (virtual private network) programs and 90 percent of them have security risks. The overseas website “Top10VPN” published a survey last week, and indicated that 77 percent of the popular VPN programs have potential risks.

According to “Top10VPN,” potentially risky VPN programs have been downloaded 210 million times from the Google App Store, while the figure at the Apple’s App Store reached 3.8 million times a month. Although “Top10VPN” has already brought up the issue to Google and Apple regarding this issue and also reported that 80 percent of the free VPN programs in the app store violate Apple’s own data sharing regulations,  nevertheless, neither company seemed to care to look into the problem.

Ten years ago, the Chinese government installed a national firewall making many famous websites inaccessible in China, such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook. In order to access blocked foreign websites, many Chinese netizens try various circumvention methods, among which VPN is a stable technology.

One IT professional involved in the VPN business told the Taiwan based Central News Agency that Chinese companies’ practices of launching VPN businesses or acquiring overseas VPN operations began in 2015. After China took over the VPN companies, it has been more and more difficult for the Chinese people to circumvent the Great Firewall. Deutsche Welle also reported the worrisome fact that many VPN operators chose not to tell their customers about the information of their parent companies.

Because it is very difficult for Chinese authorities to completely block netizens from accessing overseas websites, one interviewee told Radio Free Asia, “So the Chinese government has adopted the smartest approach. If it can’t stop the users’ needs, it creates a management model that can (put people) under surveillance. This is the main reason behind the proliferation of Chinese made VPNs in major app stores.”

Source: Radio Free Asia, August 21, 2019
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/meiti/ql1-08212019065631.html

Xinhua recently reported that, according to statistics that the National Internet Emergency Center provided, a total of 3,517 mobile apps offered at 314 mobile app stores were ordered to be removed from the stores. These malware apps were carrying out malicious activities across critical sectors such as financial services, daily life support, and managing payments. Such illegal behavior typically includes stealing personal information, distributing junk messages, pushing unwanted commercials, spreading fraudulent information, and even deducting fees from users’ accounts without permission. The Center captured over 2.83 million malware instances across the Chinese network, which represents an 11.7 percent year-over-year increase. China currently has a netizen population of 817 million.

Source: Xinhua, July 28, 2019
http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2019-07/28/c_1124808400.htm

The Sunday when there was a two million people parade in Hong Kong opposing the extradition law has drawn widespread attention from the world’s media, but not from those in China. Although almost all major media such as the Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, and The Wall Street Journal gave significant coverage to the news, in mainland China the story is strictly prohibited. A netizen told Radio Free Asia that someone sent a parade video to his circle of friends in Beijing and another netizen immediately stopped it. In order to avoid the censorship, some netizens sent the Hong Kong parade pictures upside down.

In Yuncheng city of Shaanxi province, the local police summoned one netizen because he forwarded the parade pictures. The interviewee said, “The media in China is not allowed to report this. The person who forwarded the video was summoned (to the police station). I have a friend who was summoned for forwarding the videos. His phone was also confiscated.”

A civil rights activist in Changde city of Hunan province told RFA that the Hong Kong’s Sunday parade exceeded the 1.5 million people in 1989. The scene was touching. However, the mainland people can only see it when they use technology whose purpose is circumvention such as VPN.

Source: Radio Free Asia, June 17, 2019
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/gangtai/ql2-06172019083657.html

Xinhua recently reported that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which is a branch of the Chinese State Council, just published a proposal seeking public comments. The proposed new regulation will restrict domestic personal information from flowing out of China. The new regulation will require a government security assessment before individuals can provide personal information to service providers outside of China. The CAC justified the new requirement in the proposal on the basis of national security. Among the personal information included are an individual’s name, birth date, national ID number, address, and phone numbers. The required government assessment is established at the province level. The scope of the new regulation also covers the information used in contracts involving foreign parties. Domestic Internet-based service providers that facilitate the process of moving domestic personal information outside should keep a good no-breach record and should establish a full history of activities that result in personal information being sent out for at least five years.

Source: Xinhua, June 13, 2019
http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2019-06/13/c_1124618601.htm