> Another major nit I have to pick with HarmonyOS is its lack of access and transparency. Just accessing the SDK and emulator required me to go through an insane process that involved uploading a photo of my US passport and credit card to Huawei’s servers so that I could be approved to access the SDK after a two-day waiting period. Most companies just have a download link. You don’t get to run the emulator locally on your computer, where it could be inspected more thoroughly—instead, it runs remotely on a server in China somewhere, and video of it is streamed to your computer. After we wrote our article, Huawei took down the emulator and blocked “overseas” users from downloading the SDK.
> Just accessing the SDK and emulator required me to go through an insane process that involved uploading a photo of my US passport and credit card to Huawei’s servers so that I could be approved to access the SDK after a two-day waiting period.
My sample size is tiny, ymmv etc. but a few big-Chinese-company-designed products I've bought (DJI drone, wireless security camera) have been like that. Not "thanks for buying the product, please enjoy, there's an app if you want and we value your privacy." Instead it's "you WILL install the app and you WILL give it access to contacts, camera, microphone and everything else, then you WILL create an account on our web site where all of your personal information WILL be stored, and only THEN may you use the thing."
I don't know if it's just my bad luck with these products or if the Chinese market is much more accepting of this kind of invasive authoritarian treatment.
I don't know about "accepting," but China has some very strict "real identity" rules and laws when it comes to accessing just about anything connected to the internet. It is authoritarian.
I tried doing iOS dev years ago. Apple had me fax them my driver's license. You can whine about the FSF all you want but I've never had to do that to use gcc.
This is just one anecdotal experience out of hundreds of thousands. Because of your one bad experience you just dismiss Apple?
I can also provide 1 anecdotal piece of evidence:
I've done iOS dev and published apps in the App Store. Never had to fax my drivers license to Apple.
This has meme potential! Talking about some major corp and hoops one has to jump through to do X, react with "say about the FSF what you will, but..." ; Made my day. What are you even talking about? How is this a meaningful comparison?
It is meaningful, inasmuch as it shows the stark difference between developing for an extremely free ecosystem (in this case, free software using GNU tools) and an extremely closed one, like Apple's, where (apparently, as I didn't know about this, but it is realistic) you have to mail them your driving license. Free software protects you forever exactly from something like this and the FSF has been speaking about this possibility for decades.
It seems there are two emulation environments, one that is remote you need to sign in and verify yourself.
The other is your local simulator no need to sign in or verify.
The local simulator is only for wearables and cameras, if you want HarmonyOS 2.0 devices you need to use the remote simulator.
Edit: Locally you can only run project templates that have [Lite] in their name, maybe in the future they will make other simulators available. Signing up for remote emulation is too much of a effort for me.
If you need to use the DevEco Studio emulator, your HUAWEI ID must pass the identity verification by Huawei. It is recommended that you submit your HUAWEI ID for identity verification review immediately after the registration. For details, refer to Identity Verification.
> uploading a photo of my US passport and credit card to Huawei’s servers
What?! The Chinese government has found the cheapest way of building records on foreign citizens: just ask them to give you their credentials and anything that can be used to impersonate you. They'll do it.
How are people even doing that on purpose? Man, fuck that.
this is a textbook false equivalence. Travelling hinges on the ability to verify your identity. Using a piece of software does not and must not require sensitive documents like a passport.
Look when you have a hostile foreign power destroy your entire business and and force you to retool most of your software stack, you get kinda restrictive with people inspecting your new stack coming from that country.
Fascinating to see how much is 'inspired' by Apple's design and Microsoft's for the document app. I'd feel dirty in so blatantly copying someone else's design, but Huawei doesn't share those concerns. Maybe for good reason.
The problem is that, in general, when a company doesn't respect intellectual property laws or obviously makes use of industrial espionage (and I'm not suggesting either is true for Huawei) they are sending a clear signal that laws do not apply to them.
So as a customer why would I trust any company with my most personal health, banking or own intellectual property if that company sees no reasonable limitations to its behaviour in any other sphere?
The original purpose for branding was to allow customers to identify food products they could trust. The same is true for technology.
IP laws is a fiction. If the US authorities want to enforce rules like "you can't paint your car green because the green color has been patented" they can, but I see no reason why other countries would adopt this nonsense. Besides, countries aren't governed by laws, they only have treaties and agreement between each other that they can enter and leave voluntarily.
I think practically speaking such concerns are way overblown. There are tons of megacorps with lots of very ethically questionable practices (not just tech wrt privacy issues, think about money laundering banks, food and energy companies causing environmental damage). The majority of consumers don't seem overly concerned unless they are very directly victimised by said practices.
Its telling that a comoany can get away with it in another country but not the US. It means that you atleast have some legal recourse with a US company.
I hadn’t even thought of this consciously: that having such disregard for authenticity also could mean they are playing it fast and loose with other, more important topics such as privacy.
You might be the sort of person who takes a principled stand against intellectual property, so not see Huawei's behaviour as inconsistent with protecting consumer privacy?
I don't personally trust Huawei to behave responsibly. But I don't really trust any other company either. Android is basically a Google anti-privacy play.
Western IP law is arguably just a tool to delay Chinese progress (speaking from an international perspective). A Chinese company ignoring it doesn't really tell us much about how the company will behave towards its customers.
> Android is basically a Google anti-privacy play.
Nope. Android is a mobile OS and is pretty well done versus the many other oses it replaced.
> Western IP law is arguably just a tool to delay Chinese progress (speaking from an international perspective)
I'm pretty sure IP law wasn't created to "slow down Chinese progress". It is there to provide an incentive for invention and creativity. The whole point is to grant a limited time where an inventor can profit with minimal competition so it slows everyone's progress. But to say IP law targets China is at best mistaken.
IMO developing countries are hurt by IP mostly. China has shown a way to use market to trade for IPs, which I think countries like India can do, but small developing countries will not be able to follow this example.
In order for developing countries to develop, they have to jump out this loop. With the exponential development of technology, the absolute gap between developing world and developed world will be so huge that they will never have a chance of reaching the same level.
IP law favours incumbents. Ignoring IP law has been the fastest way to secure Chinese prosperity, and that is what they did. It makes sense and it doesn't tell us how a Chinese company will treat their customers.
Note that despite the argument that IP law promotes invention and creativity Huawei is a world leading tech innovator in 4G. Despite obviously having little respect for IP law. They'll probably discover the importance of IP law now that they have taken the lead but it IP law appears to have been more of a hindrance in getting the innovation started.
Western IP law is a tool to protect the livelihoods of R&D departments, which would immediately shutter if competitors were legally allowed to bypass 10 year dev cycles.
> Android is basically a Google anti-privacy play.
That's uncharitable. Android effectively started as a pro-web play: a way to ensure Google could deliver their services to mobile users regardless of what mobile manufacturers wanted (we're talking Nokia and Blackberry, which dominated the sector at the time and, together with phone carriers, could dictate what would or would not get to phones). They later got greedy with data-siphoning, but Apple effectively does the same, they're just a bit shy about over-exploiting it.
I think it is unfair to say Apple does the same. It is night and day between the two platforms when it comes to privacy and I say it as someone who really dislikes Apple’s walled garden.
Yeah of course the same way Western world feels "dirty" because they copied Yoga or patented indigenous herbals or any number of other things?
Perhaps it's time we recognised ideas and concepts are meant to be taken up and extended by other people? That's how humans have progressed these thousands of years. Not by paranoid, corporate silos and NIH syndrome and draconian patents.
> Yeah of course the same way Western world feels "dirty" because they copied Yoga or patented indigenous herbals or any number of other things?
I don't think the comparison holds at all: Yoga is something people do in many different ways, not a specific product, nor is 'the western world' a single entity. When I do Yoga I am not selling my attempt at whatever 'real' yoga is for profit.
This comparison might have made sense, mind you, not much, if I had said that other companies should feel dirty for making tablets after the first one was made.
> Perhaps it's time we recognised ideas and concepts are meant to be taken up and extended by other people?
I agree with this and is a bit stating the obvious. This is, as you say, basically how mankind works.
To be clear I don't think Huawei should be prevented from doing this, I just think it is unauthentic which I don't like. It is purely an expression of my dislike of what they've created not a call to action for some team of lawyers.
Oh sure a specific set of exercise or regime which has a specific effect on body can be a copyright or patent depending on the media and the way they are presented. Like people talking about Ashtang Vinyasa Yoga, Viniyoga, Kundalini Yoga all can be patented in a specific way e.g. [1], obviously need to pay lawyer fee and go to courts to determine later if it can be used to earn money when other party who need to pay do not agree. It waste resources, hamper growth and dissemination of knowledge.
If someone patented the Decimal System or Abacus or Gun powder or Pythogorus Theorem or Fibonnaci Series or Newton patented its laws of motion and anyone using this laws and formula's in any system needs to pay royalty not sure what weird world will be.
Human knowledge stand on the giant shoulders of others and patent and copyright with ever-greening and useless litigation are making it hard and difficult. Can't fathom someone can copyright a rectangle drawing and sue phone companies for launching rectangle phones.
> Human knowledge stand on the giant shoulders of others and patent and copyright with ever-greening and useless litigation are making it hard and difficult. Can't fathom someone can copyright a rectangle drawing and sue phone companies for launching rectangle phones.
How is this even an argument, given that patents expire?
It is an argument given there is a concept of ever-greening. Also most of the time Patent system stifles the innovation it was designed to encourage [1]
Yes. It's because technological progress is fast in general, halting a particular avenue of development down can cause it to never be pursued again.
Technological progress isn't a line, it's a graph. Someone patents an invention and decides to sit on it, and by the time the patent expires, the entire technological environment has shifted around in a way which makes that invention worthless, and follow-up work unlikely to happen. Whereas, were it not for that patent, the invention would had people extending it further, perhaps generating even more immediately useful technologies.
In this way, a patent - in particular, a defensive patent, taken to prevent anyone from developing a technology that endangers your business - is closing off avenues of progress.
Well those companies put a lot of money into design and customer feedback so it isn't much of a leap to think it will still work even on a new "OS", and Huawei doesn't seem to think it's bound by international copyright laws.
Let the best win, isn't that our modern capitalism's answer?
If Huawei is copying they will always lag behind. Still, are they really copying? or are they piecing innovations together into a new improved product?
Give them a break and a chance to bring something new - sanctions and all, it is pretty impressive they have persevered.
> If Huawei is copying they will always lag behind.
I think the cause-effect here is reversed. They are copying because they're behind, in this particular area. No doubt they're vigorously defending their own IP in 5G.
Companies, countries, individual race car drivers all slipstream when they're behind. It's a matter pragmatism and economics, not of morality and principles. Recall that Steve Jobs considered Android itself "a stolen product".
Not only are they cheap, but they are good too. I'm typing this on a Xiaomi Mi 9 SE, which I've had for 2 years now, and it's the best phone I've ever owned - build quality is fantastic (as good as Samsung), it's really fast, and the battery life is amazing - I use it a lot, but only need to charge it every other day.
Well I am not sure if it is the case in the long run. In the last century, furniture used to be robust enough to last decades, and could therefore be given for reuse by your descendants or acquaintances. Ikea furniture tends to breakdown much faster.
After my last trip to IKEA I got a different impression. I get a feeling they are starting to cash in on their brand, you can get furniture with better price/quality ratio elswhere.
So there used to be basically 2 classes of furniture in IKEA. The first is the cheap, university student priced stuff that would break after a year or 2. However this was OK because it was not expected to last ages. Then they had their "higher" class stuff that was made of real wood etc that would last 10+ years easily. What I feel has happened in the last 10 years is that the "higher" class stuff has lost quality and is now made of the same crappy material as the cheap stuff.
A shamefully ignorant article that--like many of the comments here--utterly misses the technical value of HarmonyOS, which I was able to glean in 5 minutes from looking at the official documentation.
HarmonyOS is evidently not a peer competitor with Android or iOS, but a further abstraction layer above these traditional mobile OS. This is obvious in the fact that HarmonyOS has a "kernel abstraction layer" which supports Linux (Android), LiteOS, etc. The heart of HarmonyOS is not in the particular terminal UI or kernel, but in everything in between--specifically the DSoftBus (from "dbus"?) which ostensibly enables first-class distributed computing across devices.
Based on this basic info, HarmonyOS should be viewed more as a "meta OS", which has been bootstrapped by existing OS-as-backend, Android Linux in the context of phones/tablets, but is not strictly dependent on Android Linux.
Smearing Huawei for this technical approach is like smearing Python as a "C clone" or Clojure as a "Lisp or JVM clone". It's shamefully ignorant.
If you read the article Ars Technica points out the direct lies Huawei is telling: "no single line of code is identical to that of Android," and in the linked original piece of reporting, "is completely different from Android and iOS." Huawei's top brass doesn't appear to value truthfully disclosing either the provenance of its software or what it actually is so why should I bother with it?
This is likely taken out of context or a misunderstanding. Or are you implying that DSoftBus, KAS were somehow lifted from Android even though they are kernel agnostic?
> Forking Android is not a big deal, and huge companies like Amazon do it for its FireOS. The difference is that Amazon is upfront about it and says "FireOS is a fork of Android" in the first paragraph of its developer documents. Huawei's developer documents don't reference Android and are mostly pure gibberish—and by that I mean they are paragraphs of buzzwords and circular links that don't actually communicate any technical information about what the OS is or how it works.
One question: IF there is a CHANCE that the entire OS is indeed just a `sed s/Android/whatever/g AOSP/`, is it legal (for a company that large) to do that?
If it is, please call me the creator of RobotOSxxx OS (Which really fuzzwords could not may Android) from now on.
Why wouldn’t it be legal? As long as the fork complies with all software licenses.
This happens all the time by large and small companies, orgs and individuals: Amazons FireOS is an Android fork, Amazons opensearch distro is an elasticsearch fork, LibreOffice is an OpenOffice fork, Mate is Gnome3 fork, Jenkins is a Hudson fork, Google’s blink is a fork of WebKit, etc.
I've been reading Chinese posts on the network, a lots of people are actually debating whether or not the OS is related to (not solidly based on) Android due to the confusion. I'm personally also not sure about the fact too, because there is no source code to confirm that.
Based on my understanding of the copyright law and licenses, in addition to keep the same license, the fork must also display/state the original authors in their copyright declarations. There are also implications on the patent front.
> One question: IF there is a CHANCE that the entire OS is indeed just a `sed s/Android/whatever/g AOSP/`, is it legal (for a company that large) to do that?
Only replacing the string would probably not be enough, but if they also addressed trademarks and copyrighted stuff wouldn't that be more or less that CentOS does ?
I don't think so. But it is a Chinese company so its not the first time where they basically just did a copy and replace. Google doesn't wants to piss off the Chinese govt either by trying to shut down Huawei.
Huawei devices shipped with Android before the US banned them from doing so. Whining that they copied an open-source as product as a result is the height of hypocrisy.
Moving running apps across devices is a big security risk. Look up "Mobile Agent" research on Google Scholar. There are some severe security problems with moving running apps between devices. Foremost is the problem of a compromised host that corrupts the apps and then sends them on their way to attack other devices. It is very difficult to protect your app against a corrupt host operating system. There may be some known solutions to the security problems with mobile agents, but I suspect Huawei spent most of the last two years working on other things instead of rewriting Android from the ground up to provide security for running apps that can jump between devices. Even if they did it is all new and not proven in the field. In fact there is another name for apps that can jump between devices, worms. What a great way for an attacker to spread an infection, worm capability built into the OS! And don't tell me it will all be under user control when the app can popup "click here to listen to your music on your TV!" which is a legitimate reason to allow any app to jump devices.
Huawei has "OS Kernel Lab" in their research division [1] and seems to do real research, including building an OS kernel. I guess they at least tried to ditch Android at a point.
I'm not supporting their PR strategy. Just interesting to see where a corporate research goes.
On the contrary, the way Android forces security best practices, by allowing native code only to be used for implementing native methods, enabling all security mechanisms by default, use containerized applications and moving away from ossified POSIX APIs (except for what ISO C and ISO C++ require) are Android's best features.
It doesn't matter where the users are getting the software when the threat model implicitly trusts the OS vendor and makes it difficult for users to install the OS themselves.
Android phones ship with malware installed as root often with no methods for removing it.
"damage the way the computer works" IMO that includes abusing or denying resources or services on the machine which is very common with preloaded stuff.
Congrats on reverting home computing back to the amiga days then.
I have walked into target, bought androids, pulled them out of the box and connected them to the network over which they would immediately proceed to download gigabytes of malware from the play store.
If you only bother with what software people care about why allow installing code outside of the browser? That would much more effectively eliminate security vulnerabilities.
Ok, well now I can't do most of the stuff I was doing on GNU/Linux without doing it on a machine that someone else is hosting. So that's still a step backward.
It's relevant because when I go to use git on android and iOS I go hunting through the play store and download some closed source wrapper around it, often with libraries that the developer pulled in that they don't fully understand the behavior of.
By dramatically raising the cost of software maintenance (by decreasing interoperability and because of the heavy API churn) these systems make community maintained software rare which forces users to turn to organizations that are unwilling (and sometimes unable) to share information with their users.
I'm certain stuff slips through occasionally, there's the random number generator "bug" that made it into debian a decade or so ago. The rate is fantastically lower than pretty much anything else though.
When you need software that isn't well supported by your OS you're always going to have to apply some degree of care and research. Thinking that any degree of sandboxing or API re-arranging will ever make flinging binaries around safe is extremely naive and counter productive.
Technically, “was” is wrong because the new Nest Hub doesn’t run any part of Android. These are Flutter apps targeted specifically for Fuschia. There’s no evidence yet that they will run Android on top of Fuschia.
>When you enable Pure Mode on HarmonyOS 2, only apps that have undergone the stringent testing for listing in the HUAWEI AppGallery can be installed. And for an even higher layer of security, installed apps are constantly monitored to detect potential risks and security infringements.
At least you can turn the BS down on this one unlike iOS.
The only possible explanation for the way Huawei design their UI is to try and trick the non tech savvy into thinking they're buying something that runs the same software as Apple products.
Well that's exactly my point. They're entire marketing & product strategy seems to be to convince people their stuff has the same reputation / quality as Apple.
I've bought Huawei phones and tablets in the past. I don't care one whit about the default UI. Samsung's sucked for years before OneUI. LG Mobile (RIP) wasn't good either.
The best part of Android is that you can make the interface look however you want.
My building has cameras everywhere, and my internet traffic is passed around for anybody in the Five Eyes community to access as they please. I'm not worried about the China boogeyman knowing what Youtube videos I watched.
> but China doesn't do huge amounts of software development.
It’s actually the first time I rethink whether there is a shortage of developers in China or not. Sheer amount there are tons of developers and the tech industry is pretty huge in China. However most are doing “application development”, definitely lacking experts from several fundamental domains (kernel, cloud backbone, etc).
Another aspect is they earned much less compared to US though still 1-2x for other type of jobs. However, many senior/principal engineers in FAANG still went back because the scope is substantially larger (you oversee 5-10x more headcount normally)
So when I looked at HarmonyOS when it was announced open source it had nothing to do with Android at all. It was much more Fuchsia like. A modern secure microkernel, message passing and it's own javascript engine, very few drivers. Not exciting, just solid. The total opposite to Android or Samsung.
I'm welcoming any competition to the app store duopoly.
I'm excited about Ubuntu Touch [1] as well. It's open source and hopefully does integrate well with Ubuntu Desktop. Would like to see a "Ubuntu App Store" as well.
If I'm not mistaken java can still be used according to the HarmonyOS developer documentation.
Hope they will add a wasm runtime in the future.
Might be interesting to see how a third non western eco system will develop over the year.
But they should release their sdk in the west soon so people might start tinkering.
I am very curious about their JS based UI framework (that is referenced in their 2.0 canary release notes). Have you seen anything on this? (Examples etc.)
You may well be right; I don't know any of the details. The problem is that there don't seem to be any good URLs, by which I mean ones that would provide a good basis for objective, interesting discussion. Maybe one will turn up.
There are just far more JavaScript developers out there than android Java/kotlin developers.
Also if you just distribute the js, the apps would get quite small, so maybe you no longer need an App Store with an explicit installation step but instead you could just browse the apps on the internet like you would browse web pages.
Edit: Locally you can only run project templates that have [Lite] in their name, maybe in the future they will make other simulators available. Signing up for remote emulation is too much of a effort for me.
I think you'll find it's consumers who are actually slaves to Apple and Google. Developers are not particularly happy to use iOS or Android, there is simply no commercially-viable alternative.
Seems like an ad paid for by Google, or a very clear example of servilism and bad journalism. If anything "I have no idea what X is" written with such pride as if the job of a "journalist" is not to understand and report stuff
I am wondering if some company official (or perhaps Communist party official) told the team in charge of HarmonyOS you must come up with a completely new OS that is 100% Android compatible, and that is the reason behind this odd strategy
So "Harmony OS" is official, but I don't get it.
- Their watches run a "LiteOS kernel"
- Their tablets and phones run a Linux kernel
- An "open Harmony" project exists with an actual HOS kernel, but doesn't currently run on any devices
- Yet all of these are somehow Harmony OS?
In all fairness, when you get flagged on HN, dang doesn't come down on you quite as hard as CCP does when you get reported for something they don't like. Giving them your app's business as a hostage does not sound very wise to me.
> And don't most sites have a "tell the mods about something that looks illegal" button? I see a big 'flag' button here.
Traditional moderation systems are built to handle abuse, such as threats, stalking, and spamming. Chinese moderation systems are built differently. As the title "Illegal and harmful information" suggests, they're primarily built around suppressing speech that is deemed politically undesirable. If you're interested in the details, I highly recommend you read the article written by someone who worked at 抖音, China's TikTok [1]. Oftentimes Chinese platforms are extremely responsive to reports about political speech, but are sluggish or do not respond at all to reports about abusive behavior. The Chinese systems are just designed differently, and are usually connected or even run directly by the government. e.g., if you click through on Gitee, you end up on a page run by the "Cyberspace Administration of China" [2].
Yeah, there's been a few pushes, but has been pretty dead for at least a year. They pretty clearly stopped using it for the most part once they were put on the entity list.
> Traditional moderation systems...
I don't really see anything structurally different there versus western site moderation tools. It's totally valid to discuss china's political issues, but the fact that a 'contact the mods' button exists doesn't really further that discussion in a meaningful way.
> Could you expand? Why would Github be fined if they let Huawei on their service?
Because they're on the US's Entity List, which bans US companies from doing business with them without case by case, explicit approval from the US Commerce Department.
> Perhaps. I think the debate is about exactly what is illegal, not about features that allow reporting illegal activity.
Sure, but pearl clutching over a 'contact the mods' button or the fact that they didn't host their code on a US site that they're literally banned from interacting with by the US government doesn't really further that discussion, and in my mind cheapens the valid discussion around actual CCP issues.
> > Could you expand? Why would Github be fined if they let Huawei on their service?
> Because they're on the US's Entity List, which bans US companies from doing business with them without case by case, explicit approval from the US Commerce Department.
Oh wow, I had no idea. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks!
So I guess US companies cannot buy their employees Huawei phones (without explicit approval).
How can not hosting on Github an argument for "censorship first"? Even if Hauwei can use github today, it can easily lost the access when POTUS sign an executive order.
The "Control Panel for Reporting Illegal and Harmful Information." is link to government website for user to report illegal and harmful information. It is a link, not part of gitee website.
It is better translated into "Portal for Reporting Illegal and Harmful Information", the linked website is: https://12377.cn/
Countries have different rules, the world is a diverse place. I know that's hard for some to accept but it's how it is. Is having a button to report crime on your website some horrible end-of-the-world moment?
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. all have these buttons on their site and often don't report actual crimes occurring on their platform to the police in order to protect themselves. Gitee is simply providing a link elsewhere for people who have a problem with content.
A UK man on youtube taught his dog to salute and got arrested for it because people reported it. A pregnant woman in Australia was thrown in jail for organising an anti-lockdown protest on Facebook. Many locals cheered these events on with gusto.
The people who decry the oppression in China, also actively support the suppression of opposing views and jokes back home. Maybe we aren't so different after all.
If you want to rant about Chinese laws without hiding behind the pretext of mobile OS discussion, make a proper HN thread about it or write a blogpost mate.
> Countries have different rules, the world is a diverse place.
Some countries have democratic governments, others have illegitimate ones. Some rules are totalitarian, others are not.
> Is having a button to report crime on your website some horrible end-of-the-world moment?
That it isn't literally the worst thing possible is hardly a convincing argument.
> Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. all have these buttons on their site
Incorrect, as you've just been told.
> A UK man on youtube taught his dog to salute and got arrested for it because people reported it.
A Nazi salute. I guess you forgot that detail.
> A pregnant woman in Australia was thrown in jail for organising an anti-lockdown protest on Facebook.
I don't know the context but that sounds pretty bad. But how does it excuse the CCP?
> The people who decry the oppression in China, also actively support the suppression of opposing views and jokes back home. Maybe we aren't so different after all.
1. It makes a difference what views you believe should be suppressed. Trying to protect democracy and rule of law is fundamentally different from trying to protect the CCP autocracy.
2. The set of people opposed to the CCP autocracy isn't actually identical to the set of people who "support the suppression of opposing views and jokes back home".
> If you want to rant about Chinese laws without hiding behind the pretext of mobile OS discussion, make a proper HN thread about it or write a blogpost mate.
Why, because you want their "rant" to be less visible?
> Some countries have democratic governments, others have illegitimate ones.
Sure, for example it’s not uncommon in the US to ignore the majority vote and choose somebody else for president because of a fundamental design error in its voting rules.
I am against censorship in china in principle. However:
1) in article 2, it says "pornography, lewd conversations, nudity, graphic images and curse words — as well as unauthorized livestreaming sales and content that violated copyright." I think there is a real need for legal framework for content that are harmful for the society. China's online content laws also protects the society from child pornography, fraud, etc. And in the light of the harm of fake news and disinformation can have on the society, as people can see with covid19, there needs to be boundaries with speech. We could have laws govern internet space as well, just like how laws enacted through a democratic process can govern the physical world. As lives are more and more lived in the internet world, we could have laws to govern that world. Though I think there should be a legal due process, like with any law and law enforcement. If my speech is taken down on the internet, let me review the evidence, and let me appeal in a "court", let an independent judiciary judge if I am guilty or not.
2) censorship in china is instituted by the government, no business person could get away with it, they have to operate in that environment. Do the business person or the technologists want to do it? Absolutely not, its a hassle and more work on their part. But to survive in that business environment, they have to do it. These people just want to found these companies and conduct this line of business to earn money and earn a living. These people have families to feed and expensive mortgage to pay. No one wants to get into politics, ideologies. If you really want that every technologists should promote core ideals of freedom and free expression, even under these censorship, these apps in china are already allowing people to spread ideas and access information much better than before. Even under censorship, chinese people still read stories critical of government policies, corruptions, controversies etc that were impossible before the internet age (I read a large number of posts critical of one child policy and government worker implementation of it a few days ago). And the internet is still helping the society change. I wouldn't say these companies are complicit with censorship, because they won't exist if they didn't comply. Chinese government would shut down everyone of these internet services if they won't comply with the rules. And by being available they are still supporting more information accesses then when they weren't available. In my view, in some way, these people behind these companies are victims of the system as well.
Yet as a European I wonder - what with the neofascist takeover attempts powered by post truth and fake news (aka "harmful information") that were successful in Russia, and will probably some day be successful in the US...maybe China is on to something good here?
What if the state itself propagates those "harmful information"? It is a mistake to think that fake news are created spontaneously and that an intervention from above can fix the problem, given that it is plausible to think that they are, in fact, propagated by our media, politicians and state agents.
Also, I'd like to highlight that: 1) Putin has risen to power well before the existence of Internet fake news. Complex factors justify his political existence: economic depression of the country in the 90s; religion; the support of Russian oligarchs; fear of political instability. To say that they were successful in Russia is an oversimplification.
2) They did, however, play a big role in the 2016 US elections :-)
"What if the state itself propagates those "harmful information"
That would be preferable to an enemy doing it, as with the Russia / Trump affair, because your own state has less interest in ending itself than its enemies. Probably close to zero interest.
Um... did you just miss the whole 4 years of Trump administration in US? Or are you just completely oblivious about how all of these structures are already well entrenched in the west?
It's horrifying to see these posts - west has many of those criticized evil structures from China and somehow the conversation still ends up in xenophobia instead of approaches how we can purge these things from our societies.
This also goes for the root comment - notice how they complain about Huawei not publishing their code into western owned corporate repository beholden to western unaccountable laws like DMCA. Also notice how it ignores that iOS, completely censored by a Californian corporation, exists. They just care that these violations of freedoms are happening under a different flag, not that they exist.
It already is successful in the U.S. We just had a coup attempt back in January because an angry mob was convinced that our presidential election was rigged. I don't really know what to do about the misinformation other than systematically destroy the internet: just start smashing routers and cutting cables and don't stop until everything goes back to normal.
This doesn't sound any worse than iOS. If you're worried about personal computing you can rest assured that it died for the average consumer a decade ago.
Personal computing never existed for the average consumer. The computing market was filled with hobbiests, specialists, and those needing a computer for some task. EG, authors typing manuscripts (part time work?).
Since then, the average consumer bought phones with extra fluff on it. They use it as toys, gimmicky things.
During that time of the average consumer buying phones, general purpose computing device use had still grown. It has merely shrunk as the overall percentage of "computing devices owned by people".
Nothing has died. General computing device purchasing and usage is at an all time high..
Yes, there is a difference. I've been in a place where there explain you that the west is just like us, but it is total BS. There is a difference in independent courts, difference in freedom of expression and freedom of protest, there is a difference in a decision being taken by the society and by a small elite that exercise total control over the system. False equivalence is one of the most poisonous arguments that people deploy in order to deflect responsibility.
Acknowledgement is lip service, especially decades after the fact. If they provide significant compensation, then yes. There is hope for better days for China too, but not by portraying them as unmitigated evil. I can't think of any significant nation that has caved to orchestrated, vested moral outrage and said "sorry you guys... we'll hold elections next years and play by your rules henceforth", especially when the very countries asking for this unrepentant about their own past transgressions costing millions of lives (atomic bombs, Iraq invasion etc.)
Social project run by western NGOs I guess?
What is 1.1 billion when the west steals like 2~3 trillion each year since ww2 from the global south.
You can smooth over a lot of mismanagement or save a lot of costs this way.
It also seems the dividend from the colonial days is not enough anymore to keep the West going given their infrastructure seem to crumble every year.
> I can't think of any significant nation that has caved to orchestrated, vested moral outrage and said "sorry you guys... we'll hold elections next years and play by your rules henceforth",
Governments regularly cave in due to protests in democratic countries. It happened in the Netherlands a few months ago, for example.
Moreover, it's fundamentally important the fact that protests exist.
Comparing any western democracy to a dictatorship is the worst form of whataboutism.
> Or perhaps not acknowledging that under the umbrella of democracy the same things happen, is whataboutism.
No. That may be denial, but “whataboutism” is a variant (or, really, just a different name for) the tu quoque fallacy that deflects criticism by accusing the critic of hypocritically ignoring the same action they criticize when committed by a friendly party (or committing it themselves).
A critic denying that a friendly party engages in the act they are criticizing isn’t “whataboutism”. It may or may not be hypcocrisy, denialism, or something else, but its not whataboutism.
OTOH, accusing a critic of whataboutism (and invoking a nonstandard – indeed inverted – definition of “whataboutism” to do it) when they point out whataboutism as a deflection technique, so as to deflect the criticism contained in the original accusation of whataboutism is advanced-level whataboutism.
> the tu quoque fallacy that deflects criticism by accusing the critic of hypocritically ignoring the same action they criticize
I'm not justifying what happens in China, I'm saying that the US democracy spent 65 million dollars of 1948-1970s money to control the politics of a sovereign allied and financed far right terrorist groups that killed hundreds of innocent people and still refuse as of today to release the documents about it.
Sometimes some democracies are simply not better than regimes.
They can be equally bad, you knew if it happened to your country.
So maybe is denial, but maybe whataboutism is the idea that "we did some things, but look at us, we are a democracy, we did it because obviously it was necessary to preserve it, because the others are the real bad ones".
How did they not "acknowledge" it? They did and they do. "They" call it "1989 incident" and despite the Western believe Chinese people are aware of that incident. And yet, most people I have spoken to in my countless trips to China follow the words of Deng Xiaoping that it was worth to sacrifice 3000 lifes for 30 years of stability.
Edit: by the way, it annoys me that I got trolled into posting something totally unrelated within a tech article. Why are all Chinese-related articles turning into exactyly the same direction in the past 3 years? I am tired of that.
> it was worth to sacrifice 3000 lifes for 30 years of stability.
No one knows what China would be like now had the CCP acceeded to the students' demands and liberalised.
Taiwan ended their long period of martial law around the same time too, and for a nation with so much stacked against it, you can hardly say they're doing badly.
You have no idea what you are talking about. No idea.
I have lived in China. Freedom of press and Rule of Law(they don't exist in China) are amazing inventions.
You just don't have an idea how lucky and spoiled you are. I recommend you volunteer helping refugees just to get a glimpse of how the world works outside the West bubble.
It would be cool if we could discuss the technology for once instead of spinning into a geopolitical discussion or meaningless copycat allegations which likely will lead nowhere.
If you want this discussion then you are on the wrong site because it is specifically mentioned in the rules not to do this. This adds nothing of value to the thread but it does add a lot of negatives (and lots of racism).
Yes because software exists in a vacuum? The software is being discussed, and it's a monumental failure that it is hosted and distributed and used the way it is.
"Virtually all Chinese apps are designed from the ground-up to support purging information deemed undesirable" seems like a very biased way of saying "Chinese apps, like pretty much every app anyone writes that features user generated content, have a reporting feature to tell admin about content that they might then delete if necessary."
YouTube has a reporting feature. Does that mean Google engineers are censorship-first, anti-freedom Communists who want to end freedom too?
I like to binge read the comment history when I bump into someone interesting on HN (which happens quite often). I've seen a few people very critical of China but admittedly they were not talking about Huawei specifically. Their comment history does not seem to back up your observation. Could it be something more specific than China in general?
No. You're right. I'm responsible for my comments and in hindsight a few of those were a bit emotionally driven rather than being objective. But I've been downvoted on my factual comments during Asian business hours and only to rise to positive number the following day during Australian hours. I wasn't trying to see how much karma I'd earned. I just happened to notice this trend on a couple of my comments. It's purely anecdotal and I've no data to prove that it's in fact the general case. I don't know how much fact there is to the Huawei case but the secretive govt that CCP is, I'd be very careful about using their services. I don't want my data ending up in their servers to feed into their algorithms.
Essentially useless for me then.