A recent Internet industry netizen discovered that the Android system inside his purchased domestic TV set secretly collects information about the user’s various networked appliances, scanning them every ten minutes, and even the neighbors’ networked devices are well known.
Chinese network surveillance systems are ubiquitous and pervasive. Recently, a Chinese netizen familiar with the Internet discovered that his home TV set, equipped with an Android system, was secretly equipped with surveillance capabilities. In an article posted on the V2EX website, “My TV is spying on all connected devices,” the user mentioned that a data service on his TV scans all connected devices every ten minutes, including even his neighbors’ information.
Xing Jian, a former citizen journalist for SixFourTimes.com who is familiar with the Internet, told the station on Tuesday (27) that the Chinese government’s secondary development of the open-source system Android was used in the rural “Xueliang project” to monitor farmers’ homes.
“The Android system is used for the Snow Shine Project to achieve ‘full domain coverage, full network sharing, full time availability, full control’ of public security video surveillance construction networking applications in rural areas and streets and alleys. The application is usually in the form of “spyware” into the user’s cell phone, TV and other Android devices, automatically scan, collect the user’s device model, use information, social and so on uploaded to the official database to achieve network-wide monitoring.”
Internet users found that the home Android TV system every ten minutes to sweep through the family networked devices. (Weibo photo)
Monitors put everyone in China at risk
The above netizen wrote in his article that he previously felt that the TV screen transmission was slow and looked at what background services were on. Found a thing called ‘hooking up data service’ and had no idea what it was for. The article also said that after grabbing the packet research found that the service to hostname, mac, ip, and even network latency time all passed back, but also detect the surrounding wifi SSID name, mac address is also packaged to pass to this gz-data.com domain.
Ltd. (GozenData), which is the first big data company in the field of intelligent big screen in mainland China, covering 103 million smart TV terminals by the end of 2018, accounting for 55% of the total number of devices on the network. .
Xing Jian said the authorities installed Android systems in domestic TV sets, ostensibly to provide TV viewers with richer programming, but in fact.
“Achieving network-wide surveillance further strengthens the rulers’ efforts to maintain stability and creates a social status quo in China where everyone is at risk.”
It is understood that in April 2019, Beijing Hook Data Technology Co., Ltd.’s “Hook Data” has entered into a long-term partnership with Skyworth, Kukai, TCL, Changhong, Konka, Fengxing, Micro Whale, TV Cat, Sanyo, Toshiba, Philips, etc., by implanting SDKs in the system layer in order to obtain smart TV data collection.
Many Chinese mainland netizens feel helpless about the theft of family information, and some leave messages that they are afraid to network their domestic Android TV sets. Others said, “My home, Xiaomi router, keeps requesting the API.miwifi.com domain name once every 3 seconds, don’t know what for, scared.”
Left: Smart devices at home are secretly connected to Android. Middle: Android system is connected to the network and then the data collected is packaged and uploaded. Right: The data is then turned into network code and sent to the Chinese Internet system. (Weibo photo)
The Internet Information Office has punished 100 billion pieces of illegal information last year
In addition to monitoring family information, the CCP has spared no effort in blocking online speech. According to data from China’s Internet Information Office, 100 billion pieces of so-called illegal information were punished cumulatively last year, which translates into an average of 30 million pieces per day. It shut down 18,000 websites and platforms, and focused on purging information that allegedly distorted the CPC’s history and national history.
In response, Mr. Song, a Shanxi legal scholar, said in an interview with the station that the above figures reflect that the authorities are tightening their control over online speech. He said.
“The government is tightening the control of information to the people for the purpose of thought control. She also wants the government’s messages to reach people’s minds and influence their lives, choosing for them which ones are suitable for the people and which ones are not.”
Mr. Song said a free and open cyberspace is one that allows people to access all kinds of information and make their own judgments, while the Chinese government tries to deprive people of their right to free choice.
Citizen journalist Xing Jian believes that the authorities are preventing people from speaking out by restricting online speech. He explained that the Internet Information Office and the propaganda department and Internet police usually jointly control the Internet in China.
“These three mainly use public power to obstruct public opinion monitoring and wash the ground for corrupt officials to maintain their ruling purposes. The Internet Information Office uses letters and stops domain name resolution to shut down public opinion monitoring websites in the country and takes blocking measures for overseas websites; secondly, the propaganda department uses letters and coercion to force website administrators to delete articles they monitor. “
Xing Jian said that for when the above measures do not work, the Internet police will arrest the administrators of the domestic public opinion monitoring websites, and for overseas websites, the authorities will use hacking techniques such as invasion and DDOS to damage the servers.
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