On January 25, 2021, German politician Bodo Ramelow admitted in the Clubhouse community that he played a mobile game during the anti-Epidemic conference, and the recently popular Clubhouse became the focus of attention again.
Q: Recently, the software Clubhouse has become very popular, and many people have opened their own virtual salons to talk about the world through Clubhouse. However, is Clubhouse a safe and appropriate platform for discussing current political issues?
Li Jianjun: Clubhouse seems interesting, but if you want to use it to discuss political issues, it is definitely not suitable. Clubhouse is based on the API technology provided by Agora, which appears to be an American company, but all of its executives are from China, and its R&D center is also in China, similar to Zoom. Do you think it is safe to discuss politics with software based on SoundCloud technology? If SoundNet cooperates with the Chinese Communist authorities to secretly collect information in the Clubhouse App and then betray you, this possibility exists. Therefore, Clubhouse is not at all suitable for discussing sensitive political issues, unless the company that developed Clubhouse is willing to give up its API technology. But for the Time being, this possibility is very low. So if you want a group of people to discuss politics, you still have to rely on instant messaging software with peer-to-peer encryption, not Clubhouse, whose mechanism is actually quite good, except that SoundCloud itself is hardly reassuring. As with Zoom, I personally still highly discourage its use for sensitive political discussions, mainly because of the Chinese background of the company’s management.
Q: In addition to Clubhouse, there are quite a lot of software that use SoundCloud APIs, which are quite attractive to many software companies because of their low price. Does this mean that the issues arising from Sound.com are potentially widespread threats to the security of Internet users, and even to U.S. national security?
Lee: That’s for sure, because Zoom itself is software, but it’s not part of a network infrastructure like AWS, but SoundCloud is an API, which is actually part of the network infrastructure, and most people wouldn’t know that individual software uses SoundCloud’s API. If Clubhouse hadn’t become a hit recently, people would not have known that Clubhouse had built its API based on Sound.com, and the discovery of the API made Sound.com’s stock price soar. Therefore, it is more dangerous than Zoom because it is too difficult for most people to find out if individual software is using the SoundNet API, and only a few experts are capable of doing so.
I think, based on online security and internet users’ privacy, actually software companies have the responsibility to disclose that they are using the infrastructure services of those companies. In the past, people would trust Google, Amazon and other U.S.-based companies, but now, there are Chinese companies participating in the Internet infrastructure market, and even deliberately set up headquarters in the United States and even go public to hide their eyes and ears. Situations like Zoom are only increasing, and the sound network behind Clubhouse is a major warning sign. For some new software, if the technology and network infrastructure used by the development team is not transparent enough, it is better to take a wait-and-see attitude rather than rush to risk adoption. To a certain extent, open source software is more open and transparent, even though the user interface may be poor, but because open source software generally does not use commercial application interfaces that require fees and closed source code, it can largely avoid the situation of large-scale involvement of Chinese companies.
Q: Recently, a Chrome add-on was sold to an unknown third party by the original author, and then malicious code was added to the program to track the user’s identity and make some fraudulent ad clicks. The incident drew attention, but the identity of the buyer of the program remains a mystery. What kind of background do people usually have to do this kind of thing?
Li Jianjun: In fact, the nature of the program changed dramatically after the takeover, adding malicious code to track the identity of users, which is very similar to the situation in recent years when the Chinese background capital took over the Hong Kong media and changed the nature of the behavior. In addition, the software developed by Chinese companies are very keen to collect users’ privacy. Therefore, it is quite possible that the incident was caused by Chinese background funds buying the software code and then being used for intelligence gathering and fraudulent clicks. Countries like India and Russia have a lot of programming talent and they can write software without spending a lot of money on software companies or specific code.
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