Lithuania tells consumers to throw away Chinese-made phones because they have baked-in censorship tools

[frauenfelder]

Originally published at: Lithuania tells consumers to throw away Chinese-made phones because they have baked-in censorship tools | Boing Boing

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[knoxblox]

Chabuduo! /s

[Papasan]

It’s a real “David & Goliath” story.

[Shuck]

Hmm, I suppose this is also likely to be true of the so-called “Freedom Phone.” Not that, I’m guessing, any of them would actually care.

[jhbadger]

Of course other than Samsung making phones in Korea, nearly all phones are “Chinese made” – isn’t the issue more who designed the phone?

[CoffeeStar]

I am kind of tempted by that 4K Xiaomi laser projector.
Yay or nay?

[oyvindjakobsen]

From what I hear it’s decent hardware. But never, ever watch “7 years in Tibet” on it!

[bucaneer]

@jhbadger

isn’t the issue more who designed the phone?

More the specifically, the issue is who controls the software that is installed on the phone. In case of the Xiaomi findings, the dynamic list of 449 (at the time of the study) censored Chinese terms resides in a library called MiAdBlacklistConfig which is used by several apps that come preinstalled in the MIUI flavor of Android (Security, Mi Browser, Downloads, Music, Themes, MIUI Package Installer, Cleaner).