> Why not do this at network or server-side level?

China doesn’t control the network/servers in Lithuania and other countries. Doing it client-side gives them the power to extend their reach.

It almost looks like they wanted to get caught.

They are too powerful to give a damn, they looked at USA and their allies and how they overcome any evil thing they do just by being the strongest country and they said why we can't do the same?

This is really evil shit.

I guess it comes down to, why bother when the simplest solution works?

Make no mistake: As and when they get caught out doing such things, the sophistication of their implementation is bound to increase, in response to it. Money is no object for state-actors and mega-corps.

This has some smell of a compliance issue. I.e. the company gets ordered to block stuff; the order states "this shall be blocked" and provides a list, and then the company does the simplest/cheapest way to comply which is literally checking for whatever was required by the order.

> ...and then the company does the simplest/cheapest way to comply which is literally checking for whatever was required by the order.

An ironic form of chabuduo.

https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...

and then forgets to remove it from other markets.

> the sophistication of their implementation is bound to increase

You're right about this, including with backdoors. Electronics from China must be treated as treacherous computing devices that obey the orders of the Chinese Communist Party.

If the West was sensible, we simply wouldn't buy any electronics from them.

Or manufacturer any product from there...why does the world continue to be stupid on China and pump up their economy by having the majority of their goods manufactured there? Its going to continue to bite us and everyone in the butt.

> why does the world continue to be stupid on China and pump up their economy by having the majority of their goods manufactured there?

Because big companies make lots of profits from it, I imagine.

> Its going to continue to bite us and everyone in the butt.

Yes, unless we change our ways.

Because you actually use the letters C h i n and a in your post and his replies do not.

Because the supply chain for electronics manufacturing, and many other classes of products, is hard to replicate.

Large multinational corporations would love to shift production to Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia or India, where labor is now cheaper than China, but there are logistics obstacles. Apple now manufactures some phones in India, but mostly older models.

> Because the supply chain for electronics manufacturing, and many other classes of products, is hard to replicate.

Software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says. So who controls the software -- including by controlling the hardware the software runs on -- controls the world.

This means that every polity that wants to be truly independent needs to control its computing infrastructure, ideally all the layers of the technology stack from chips to social media. So it would be well worth polities such as the USA or EU putting up whatever level of import tariffs (and other measures) it takes to encourage manufacturers to do these things domestically.

Not that doing so would be that much more expensive anyway. The cost of low-level assembly line labour per iPhone is probably only a few dollars. I'd guess that building them in the USA would only add $10-20 to the cost.

Atoms still matter, and there are blue-collar manufacturing skills the US has lost to China, and most of the low-cost labor alternative locales never had in the first place.

It may not be a state actor. I am the last person to defend the CCP, but as the chinese phones are made by companies that have lots of reason to fear the government, this may be proactive censorship added by the vendor to avoid getting in trouble, and it might even have been accidentally left in foreign models. We don't know the full story yet.

I think the distinction between being compelled by the sword and compelled by fear of the sword is pretty meaningless here. Unless these companies are independently deciding to push this out due to some internal zealous managers that reject the general CCP platform I think it's pretty safe to lay the blame at the feed of the party.

There's also all sorts of pretty reasonable whataboutism to be thrown about here but it's wrong either way.

There's really no difference between the state providing a blacklist, and the state inspiring enough terror that blacklists are compiled. Actually, there is - the latter is far scarier.

> Is it me or is this an extremely clumsy way of doing censorship?

yeah it's literally called MiAdBlacklistConfig, to stop certain ads from displaying in the browser.

So it's developed by the AD department. What do you think.

Yeah. It looks more like some sort of advertisement blacklist and not the broad censorship mechanism it is being interpreted as.

Could really be interesting to see the full list of words.

Maybe it's a "privacy preserving" censorship mechanism.

Censorship in depth.

local, network, and content host

Would people stop calling attention to the fact censorship systems are inherently broken/trivially circumventable?

Last thing we need is to trigger someone into making a better mousetrap.

And why does the code snippets seemingly refer to an advertising api?

Another word for ad is promotion. These sites promote certain groups. The censor believes they profit from this activity. It is not unreasonable for such a censor to understand them as illegal ads.

I’m assuming that’s an effort to mask the true intent.

Or the intent is something other than what the report assumes?

Just to be clear; the (incomplete) code snippets in the report have been through a code mangler. The only names readable are of the api that is actually used.