Vulnerabilities in Sogou Keyboard encryption expose keypresses to network eavesdropping.

  • godless@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I live in China and this software is cancerous not just in the encryption failure, it also nestles into a computer like a trojan. Creates 2 fallback installations and will reinstall itself after removal if you reboot in between, unless you get rid of all 3 installations at once, where they are deliberately trying to obfuscate the uninstall button (triple confirmation, swapping the confirm/cancel buttons and button background colors, etc.).

    It’s a nasty piece of crap that come preloaded on any phone (android, at least) and Windows-PC here.

  • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
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    2 years ago

    Alright China shills, you can stop changing the subject to how Google and the US are the “same”.

    The troops advanced into central parts of Beijing on the city’s major thoroughfares in the early morning hours of 4 June and engaged in bloody clashes with demonstrators attempting to block them, in which many people – demonstrators, bystanders, and soldiers – were killed. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded.[15][16][17][18][19][20]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre

    If you lived in China you’d likely not know about this, since people who talk about it go to prison.

    Yeah the US is exactly like this so let’s not talk about the Chinese government being awful to their citizens /s

    • dingleberry@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 years ago

      Simple solution is to block lemmygrad and hexbear in your app. That cuts down quite a few tankies and mainlaind Taiwan shills.

      • Notorious_handholder@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Imagine being in Taiwan and having full access to information about China and the west and still shilling for China. Those types of people should be looking for a dominatrix, not a political philosophy…

        • evilgiraffe666@ttrpg.network
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          2 years ago

          I think they might be using “mainland Taiwan” as a way of saying China - Taiwan is an island which China thinks is “theirs” for some reason.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I mean, ill always say that China is worse than the US. But you can find plenty of examples of the US doing awful things to its people too.

      Like the MOVE bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

      or The Tusla Massacre that involved law enforcement bombing black neighbourhoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

      Or any of the countless of times cops perpetrated mass violence against black people during the civil war era and cracked down harshly on protests.

      Or when the did the same to anti-war protestors during the vietnam war.

      Or the numerous times they experimented on their own citezens such as MK ultra, The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or any of the dozens upon dozens of radiation experimentation, like when almost 1000 pregnant mothers were injected with radioactive iron, causing many miscarriages and cancers(and thats not the only time they injected pregnant mothers with radioctive material to see if it fucked up the baby), or when inserting radium rods up the nostrils of school children and then observing how their health declined, or when they dosed hundreds of inuit with radioactive iodine to see its affects on the thyroid.

      Like I dont think this makes China’s atrocities any more excusable, but the reverse is true to. The US really isnt much better than China.

      • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        Don’t forget operation sea spray! Next time you laugh at someone talking about chemtrails remember the us government actually did chemtrails!

    • Shaggy0291@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 years ago

      The troops advanced into central parts of Beijing on the city’s major thoroughfares in the early morning hours of 4 June and engaged in bloody clashes with demonstrators attempting to block them, in which many people – demonstrators, bystanders, and soldiers – were killed.

      Here’s a video of an interview with Chai Ling recorded on May 28, 1989 with reporter Philip Cunningham. Chai Ling was arguably the most influential leader of the student protesters at Tiananmen Square. In the interview she openly wishes for the soldiers to massacre the students after her instrumental role in blocking attempts by other activists to move the protest back to campuses, all while refusing to sacrifice herself.

      Notable quotes from this interview include:-

      “You, the Chinese are not worth my struggle. You are not worth my sacrifice”

      “The students keep asking what shall we do next? What can we accomplish? I feel so sad, because how can I tell them what we’re actually hoping for is bloodshed - for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people?”

      “Only when the square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united”

      “If we allow the [protesters] movement to collapse on its own, then the government will be able to wipe out all the leaders of the movement”

      Upon being asked if she will stay in the square herself after urging the students to stay she simply responded, “No, I won’t”.

      When the Tiananmen Square incident erupted in violence on June 3rd, Chai Ling escaped from Beijing by train. She was eventually smuggled to Hong Kong via Operation Yellowbird, an MI6/CIA led initiative to extract dissidents who they hoped would form the nucleus of a “Chinese democracy movement in exile”. To my knowledge, no details exist about how and when she made contact with them. She was subsequently invited to study at Princeton on a full scholarship due to her pivotal role in the Tiananmen protests. She studied Politics and International Relations there, eventually picking up an MBA from Harvard. Today, she runs an internet company called Jenzabar that she founded with her husband, the lawyer Robert Maginn, a long time associate of the Republican party, having even served as the chairman of the Massachusetts Republican party between 2011 and 2013. Their company serves more than 1300 higher education institutions worldwide, whom they provide with ERP software.

  • punseye@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    As if other keyboard apps are any different, I don’t think Microsoft bought SwiftKey just for fun?!

  • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Didn’t swiftpad or whatever its called send every key pressed to Microsoft?

    Not a China shill. China is horrible. Microsoft less so as they don’t commit genocide in slow motion. But still, I think this sort of thing is more common than we think.

    Use FOSS.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      What are the best FOSS options for Android keyboard apps? I’ve been struggling with this lately.

      • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        I use OpenBoard (it’s available on fDroid. Maybe the play store too).

        I don’t know if it’s the best but I like it. If you type in multiple languages you do need to hit a “language switcher” key on the keyboard to switch to the autocorrect for that language. A very minor complaint. Otherwise it’s great.

        And it will learn swear words. No more ducking ducks.

          • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            I only dislike it for German. My other languages are Spanish and English, which have the same layout minus one extra key not even used in English. But in German Z and Y change places, so that always trips me up.

            Having to remember to switch to the different language when writing a bilingual email is also annoying and does happen somewhat more often than you’d imagine.

    • Jesus@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      Tencent owns sizeable pieces (and outright owns) of more companies than you can imagine.

      • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        They invest in basically any tech company that is open to investment and willing to accept Chinese investors. To the ccp the data of the west is worth any price.

  • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    What’s the deal with Android “keyboards”? Why is it just an app that you can install? And why can it have more functionality/permissions from the OS beyond just being a local keyboard? As an iOS user this is very bizarre and foreign to me.

    I feel like every time the topic of Android keyboards (again, why is this a thing?) comes up it’s some kind of big spyware thing. Seems like most every app on Android and iOS is spyware anyway, of course.

    • anonion@lemmy.anonion.social
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      2 years ago

      There are some legitimate reasons to have a separate keyboard. I use Keepass2Android’s keyboard to enter passwords from Keepass. This way, there’s direct access to the password database instead of copying passwords/usernames/other fields to the system clipboard.

  • kicksystem@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I don’t get it? Why are they talking in the article about not using the right type of encryption. The problem isn’t the encryption, but the fact that it is sending your keystrokes to the mothership, right?

  • Goodie@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    It’s stories like this that don’t surprise me as much as make me ask: How the fuck do you store and process this much data to get anything useful out of it.

    • toofpic@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      You just save the first 50 digits typed after some email is typed, and you have all the passwords you need!

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        This only applies if a username is a email

        And if it is then what happens when people actually email someone? Autocorrect during login?

        • ultimate_question@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          I don’t think they’re saying that method would yield 100% clean data but it would give you all the “necessary” data with the absolute bare minimum storage requirement. At some point people will log into their email and for most people if you have their email password you have the password they use for everything

  • s20@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    And the Platinum Award for Least Surprising News Headline goes to…

  • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 years ago

    The people here acting like their Gboard doesn’t do the same is so funny.

    Edit : never used nor installed tiktok.

    • Paige (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 years ago

      It probably doesn’t though. Obviously it’s closed source making it harder to tell what’s actually happening, but there’s nothing stopping security analysts from looking at network usage and such. I would imagine that Google doesn’t install a keylogger on every Android phone, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they don’t want the bad publicity and lawsuits when it would inevitably be discovered.

      • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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        2 years ago

        they do collect usage stats by default though.
        which include typed sentences passed through their ai model and words usage counts.
        it can all be turned off and gboard seems to respect these options. it doesn’t access online services unless requested with these options off.