Technology

59148 readers

2260 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

471

Apple Removes WhatsApp, Threads, Telegram, and Signal from China App Store, says it complied with orders from the Chinese government (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

71 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China.

The New York Times similarly wrote that "a person briefed on the situation said the Chinese government had found content on WhatsApp and Threads about China's president, Xi Jinping, that was inflammatory and violated the country's cybersecurity laws. The specifics of what was in the content was unclear, the person said."

"These apps and many foreign apps are normally blocked on Chinese networks by the 'Great Firewall'—the country's extensive cybersystem of censorship—and can only be used with a virtual private network or other proxy tools," Reuters wrote.

"For years, Apple has bowed to Beijing's demands that it block an array of apps, including newspapers, VPNs, and encrypted messaging services," The New York Times noted yesterday.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I assumed the Chinese government had a back door in that version of iMessage.

I’d be glad to be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah you'd be wrong. Apple is very open about how the security model works - which is similar to Signal and fully encrypted. The only way to decrypt a message is with physical access to one of the sender/recipient's devices.

Their claims about how it operates have been confirmed by open source developers reverse engineering the protocol (e.g. Beeper).

There is one workaround — device backups can be accessed and depending how you backup, your message history is likely in there (you can do encrypted backups, but that means data loss if you forget your password or an attacker changes it on you which would happen, lots of money in a ransomware attack like that). However even then – all your other devices show a popup message if you restore from a backup - warning that a "new device" has access to your messages.