A handful of Chinese ministries have told employees to stop using Apple’s iPhones at work, citing national security risks amid heightened geopolitical tensions with the United States, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The orders were handed down in August to employees at ministries whose portfolios are focused on investment, trade and international affairs, according to five separate sources with knowledge of the situation.
The measures were understood to be aimed at eliminating perceived national security risks from using telecommunication devices made by a US company, sources said.
So are they instead going to use Android phones? Because, I hate to break it to them, Google is also an American company.
Android is open source so it doesn’t matter who makes it. You can audit the code and remove what you dislike. North Korea does the same thing with Linux.
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Yep! It’s the same dynamic with freedom of speech. It’s creates a more open society, but then people can also lie to you and say bad things. Open source == democracy.
This is not a guarantee of security. I wish people would stop parroting this bs about oss
No one said it’s a guarantee by default. But open source means open source… If you have doubts with the code, you can have (in this context) an entire team of developers well versed in cyber security review the code line by line. In other words, you can eliminate any potential backdoors.
No doubt, at a non trivial cost.
There are other projects which have already done this and open sourced their versions as well, so you can look at their security analysis and use their code for your own projects if you want.
That’s the beauty of open source. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
They wouldn’t use a Google version of Android. It’s open source so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had their own fork of it filled with their own changes and removing any Google specific functionality that they would roll out in their own market.
Chinese Android phones that are sold domestically don’t use Google accounts.
They usually come with WeChat or some other ‘everything app’ pre-installed, that you login to with your government issued ID.
No, they just take the AOSP and modify it with their own shit