“Apple has accepted the Chinese government’s… demands, allowing the government to run network safety evaluations on its products, Beijing News reported on Wednesday,” Liu Jiayi reports for ZDNet.
“A spokesperson for the country’s Internet and Information Office, who was present at the meeting last December in the US between Apple’s chief executive officer Tim Cook and director of the Chinese office Lu Wei, told Beijing News that Cook has assured that Apple will fully cooperate with the Chinese government to have its products inspected for security concerns,” Jiayi reports. “According to the spokesperson, Lu said to Cook that China is one the biggest markets for Apple, and the country is willing to open up to technology giants, but that the prerequisite is products such as the iPhone, iPad, and Mac must ensure users’ information safety and privacy, as well as national security.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
as long as doesn’t allow “as well as national security” here, whatever. China has no Bill Of Rights.
Apple has nothing to hide and everything to gain.
Apple’s *customers*, on the other hand…
Not surprisingly the Chinese characters for “security concerns” and “steal your ideas” are identical.
heh. I don’t remember whether it’s a Chinese or Japanese character, but the pictogram-word for “trouble” shows two women under one roof.
ah ! the proverbial camels nose….
somewhere down the line, the contest between marketshare / profitability and propriety shall come into conflict.
wanna bet how that is going to work out?
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
thats a very cheneyesque, rumsfeldian and wolfowitzian perspective.
not a healthy world view generally speaking,
f “healthy world views”…it’s hardly Cheney, Rumsfield or Wolfowitz, it’s attributed to the fourth century theologian, Ambrose.
i didn’t credit them with its authorship, merely alluded to the road that adherence to that viewpoint has led us down.
we somehow managed to defeat fascism, greater east asian co-prosperity sphere-ism and even prevail over communism, largely without lowering ourselves to the barbarity of those regimes.
although our participation in the firebombing of dresden and curt lemays firebombing of tokyo don’t exactly leave us with squeaky clean hands.
whatever.
The concern is more about complying with “as well as national security” rather than customer’s privacy (which Apple already does better than everyone else).
This won’t be the end of this, I speculate.
I remember years back when China discovered a Boeing bought for government use was found embedded with spy equipment:
Telegraph Jan 2002:
“CHINA claims to have found almost 30 surveillance bugs, including one in the headboard of the presidential bed, on a Boeing 767 that had just been delivered from America to serve as President Jiang Zemin’s official aircraft.
The aircraft has been sitting on a military airstrip north of Beijing, unused with much of its upholstery and many of its fittings ripped out, since October when Chinese test pilots detected a strange and unfamiliar whine emanating from its body.
A search of the twin-engined aircraft, which was manufactured and fitted out in America, yielded 27 devices, according to Chinese officials, hidden in its seats, lavatory and panelling.
Beijing believes that the bugs were planted by the Central Intelligence Agency while the aircraft was undergoing conversion work in San Antonio, Texas.
The CIA refused to respond to the report. Bill Harlow, the spy agency’s spokesman, said: “We never comment on allegations like these, as a matter of policy.” The White House used almost identical words, saying: “We never discuss these types of allegations.”
———
Don’t flame me I’m just cutting and pasting an article. (I first read about this incident years ago in a book about spying. ) Perhaps with the NSA tinkering with phones the Chinese have a right to be paranoid? The Chinese of course do similar stuff , they even try hacking attacks against Canada (where I live now) — I mention this as Canada with 30+ million pop. assumed as a threat to a country with 1 billion shows the level of paranoia…
Have a right!?
It’s not about rights or being paranoid, it’s about trust and once broken you know what to do afterwards.
With all the reports of what the NSA has done it’s no surprise you want to double check what you let into your house.
the prerequisite is products such as the iPhone, iPad, and Mac must ensure users’ information safety and privacy
Meanwhile, every month, we learn about a new Internet attack on Chinese citizens from… Their Own Government. Sheesh.
China is hacking its own citizens’ iCloud accounts
China police inadvertently admit to buying malware to spy on citizens
Dear China: Why do you put up with this abuse?
“Dear China: Why do you put up with this abuse?”
some of them don’t
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the guy who did the ‘BirdsNest’ Olympic stadium frequently protests against the government. They tried to bribe him by offering him lucrative government posts but he refused. He protested the Sichuan earthquake deaths, in consequence he was put in jail and threatened, then they bulldozed his new million dollar art studio complex…
When they released him his friends said he was completely shaken , he said he got off lightly as he was high profile, some of his other friends disappeared. still he won’t give up. Recently he had a show at Alcatraz Prison USA! Unable to travel he had his art pieces shipped secretly in small pieces to the USA , the show in a prison was of course another form of protest against the Chinese govt.
(btw his internet accounts were some of those hacked by the Chinese govt.)
Apparently there tens of thousands of protests a year in china (I read one report of 60 thousand a year) protests a year in China against the govt (usually local government abuses like corruption) , polluting industries, for workers rights, destruction of farmland etc.
Remember the dude who stood in front of those tanks in Tianamen?
On the other hand the vast majority just carry on their lives as China is actually doing reasonably ok economically in spite of the ‘excesses’ of their government, the per capita income is 3-4 times higher than democratic India.
There are ‘elections’ in china although one party. You can vote I believe for you local Communist Party candidate.
But I agree that China needs great government improvement.
—
(lived and worked in Asia for some years and still travel there. Never been to mainland china but visited Hong Kong a few times and Singapore and Taiwan . Know people who worked in China for years though)
Thanks for your perspective Dave!
Talking about meanwhile? The US NSA spies on its citizens without requiring Internet attacks. Sheesh.
“Dear China: Why do you put up with this abuse?”
Dear US: Because you have been unable to put up with similar abuse you go through.
As I say to people fed up with citizen abuse in the USA: It can be a lot worse. But what’s going on is part of why the colonies revolted against the royalist Brits. Crooks abound, abusing US citizens from both inside and outside #MyStupidGovernment. Speaking up and speaking ‘truth’ (as we see it!) to power is one way to stop the stupidity and get back to the USA as intended.