Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industrys most important developments.Chinese worker fined $145K over VPN An unnamed individual in China was fined 1.06 million yuan ($144,907) for using a virtual private network (VPN) to access restricted websites as part of a remote work ...
Third party scraped reports citing a crypto shill site's reporting on a blurry and redacted document from China's equivalent of Facebook is how I get all my accurate and true news about things that really happened.
It's good to show genuine scepticism to what you read, but I can't help but think yours is not particularly honest.
It is extremely clear via auditing the trail of this report that the 'crypto shill site' is negligible to the story. You would have had to go back one step in the chain, stick your fingers in your ears, then ignore everything else from that point onwards to think Coin Telegraph was actually relevant to the reporting of this story.
True or not, here you can find a clear summary, along with screenshots stamped with the seal of the Chengde PD. These screenshots, contrary to your claim, are not at all blurry, and have minimal redaction (to protect the person's privacy).
Given fairly credible and detailed screenshots of a police report, numerous reporting across a number of different websites in both Chinese and English, even a reported GitHub profile of the person in question, I think there's sufficient evidence to believe this is likely a true story.
First of all, if there is a better source then OP should post the better source to begin with. Everyone should be skeptical when presented with a second hand summary of something going through two weak sources.
As for the original source, it's an NED front based in the US so as far as I'm concerned it can be dismissed with no further consideration.
The first link is just quoting the social media post verbatim. Treat it with the same degree of reliability as "this guy said on Facebook/Twitter..."
Second article actually goes out of its way to say how uncommon it is to be punished for circumventing the firewall:
“Climbing the firewall results in punishment” is not the norm
A common misunderstanding among the public about circumvention is that anyone who circumvents the wall will be punished. This is unrealistic for two reasons: first, the public security organs do not have that many law enforcement police; second, the public security organs are not as busy as you think. Most of the time, the punishment for circumventing the wall is to pull out the radish and bring out the mud. There are typical cases where the public security organs take the initiative to go to the external network to arrest people, but the number is very small.
Judging from the 50 cases, only one case adopted the first-level "extreme law enforcement model", that is, the "use of circumvention software is punishable" model. The description of the case was "A certain person used his own mobile phone to use a VPN on the Internet to circumvent the firewall." Wall software, its behavior constitutes the unauthorized use of non-legal channels for international networking." Even so, the actual situation of enforcement may be different from the description of the administrative penalty decision.
Good luck being a developer or do technical support without GitHub, Google, Reddit (Lemmy?) or stackexchange
Or market your product without the possibility of accessing any western social network
If you ever notice, all apps developed in china are similar. Ads at start, invasive tracking using dummy images dropped in /pictures, unnecessary permissions like phone and IMEI, and so on. They literally don't have a way to compare to something else. There's the Baidu SDK, Tencent SDK, aliyun SDK and they are using bad coding practices because they're doing that in isolation
If you ever notice, all apps developed in china are similar. Ads at start, invasive tracking using dummy images dropped in /pictures, unnecessary permissions like phone and IMEI, and so on. They literally don't have a way to compare to something else. There's the Baidu SDK, Tencent SDK, aliyun SDK and they are using bad coding practices because they're doing that in isolation
What kind of shitty apps are you installing? Some of the most popular mobile games in the world are Chinese (Genshin, Honkai, Azurlane, Ark Knights, etc) and none of them do any of this shit.
I went to China recently with a buddy and I loaded a ton of China specific apps onto our phones. Mine was a Samsung and his was an iPhone. Between WeChat, Alipay, Taobao, Amap, DiDi, Dianping, the China Customs Service app and a bunch of other store and region specific apps, literally none of them did anything you described. I also bought a Xiaomi phone in China and migrated all my data over, so I can confirm that these apps don't do anything like that even on a Chinese phone (which, btw, is way more strict with permissions than my Samsung, down to telling me each and every time google maps requested my location).
In addition to that, I have a bunch of apps for stuff from Chinese companies on my phone like Mijia, Fiio, Huawei, Moondrop, etc and none of them do this shit either.
WeChat, taobao, alipay, amap they all do this. Go to watch /pictures on your android with a file manager. You will notice some folders called .gs0 .gs3 and so on.
Inside there are dummy images with tracking data. They do like this because apps on Android don't need an extra permission to drop "images" on /pictures
Those folders are not shown by default because normal file managers on Android hide any file with the name that starts with a dot.
And those dummy images aren't shown in photo galleries also because of another file that's dropped in those folders, .nomedia
You also never saw the ads on the taobao splash screen???? Did you ever opened that app? Not to mention that phone permission is mandatory to use that app for some reason. (And can't do any search until you register your phone number with SMS verification)
Other Chinese apps with ads on the splash screen is Huawei store, mijia, amap
And the Chinese customs app also requires an insane amount of permissions, never gave my European phone number, but a week after entering the country I got a phone call from +8621962110 - who gave them the number? (Don't know what that call was about because answering a phone call in roaming is 2 euro per minute, but from some search on Baidu it looks like it's some robocall from the Chinese police)
It is incredible how overbloated their app are. I have no idea why every app need to integrate a social media feed, and be able book a taxi/takeout or whatever.
They seriously need to have a look at KISS principles.
Capitalists put you in jail for marijuana. They used to put you in jail for alcohol. Hell, child labor is used in capitalist countries. China honestly is an authoritarian mixed economy. But perhaps, even in the USA, authoritarism is preferred.
The difference between democracy and fascism is that the laws are quickly changing due to public opinion in America, but that does not happen in China.