The most popular Chinese keyboard app which is used by more than 450 million monthly users sends every key typed to Tencent in China.

citizenlab.ca “Please do not make it public”: Vulnerabilities in Sogou Keyboard encryption expose keypresses to network eavesdropping - The Citizen Lab

In this report, we analyze the Windows, Android, and iOS versions of Tencent’s Sogou Input Method, the most popular Chinese-language input method in China. Our analysis found serious vulnerabilities in the app’s custom encryption system and how it encrypts sensitive data. These vulnerabilities could...

Vulnerabilities in Sogou Keyboard encryption expose keypresses to network eavesdropping.

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459 comments

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
- Simple solution is to block lemmygrad and hexbear in your app. That cuts down quite a few tankies and mainlaind Taiwan shills.
  
  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...
  
  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.
  
  no one tell this guy what happened to the native taiwanese
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
  
  "Yes, but history..." they will say.
  And in history China used to be the opium export market of the Brits so by historic rules it has to be that again. I guess they'll say "but that's different".
  
  Tbf, it was theirs - until it wasn't. At this point, it is a bit like the British were insisting that the US was theirs.
  
  The history of Taiwan is quite a bit more complex than that, but the PRC (current government in mainland China) has never controlled Taiwan - it was never theirs.
  Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1894 until 1945 when Japan was forced to hand it over to the ROC (the successor government to the Qing dynasty, which was the last time you could argue China controlled the island - the Qing managed to almost fully colonize it before losing it to the Japanese, although a lot of the mountainous parts of Taiwan were still mostly autonomous at that time and inhabited by aboriginal Taiwanese who continued to resist the Qing rule)
  The ROC takeover of the island is also seen as another colonization by many Taiwanese as well - the descendants of the Qing era colonists who were mostly Hokkien speakers from Fujian, while the ROC migration in 1949 was mostly Mandarin speakers from wider China, who fairly brutally imposed their rule over the island (see 4 decades of martial law, etc.)
  ROC managed to reform itself over time, and Taiwan is now a vibrant democratic country which is forging its new national identity where most people would prefer to be left alone to control their own affairs.
  
  You've got it backwards - Taiwan (the Republic of China) actually used to control the mainland before the Chinese civil war that resulted in the modern-day government (the People's Republic of China) taking control. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
  
  "Taiwan" was never the administrative centre of China, come on. Some of the Chinese ruling classes fled there after the revolution. It's like saying the capital of Germany was always Bonn.
  
  Sorry, bad phrasing. I intended to say "The current government of Taiwan"
  
  There's a bunch of Taiwanese people who would welcome Chinese rule. I don't know why.. The CPC sucks my balls
  
  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…
  That's kind of the history of humanity regarding religion. To some degree when the religious prophets were alive it make sense, but hundreds of years later it's a story book (or oral tradition) and people still strive for the authority.
  We haven't really had that many teachers like Carl Sagan who describe the history and our favoring of authority - inability to question them. It's pretty weird, as they often aren't attractive or good speakers, but you see people just accept almost anything they say. I mean in the USA I witnessed so many people who would trust Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones kind of blindly, and there is some mechanism at play that humanity in total seems to keep engaging.
  
  Been using lemmy for a few days and I am already feeling the need to do just that.
  
  How so? I've been using since the API blackout and not seen any content from either instance.
  
  A must have on apps to be able to block/filter instances
  
  Wtf is up with hexbear?
  
  If I understand correctly, hexbear is where the refugees ended up after Reddit banned r/ChapoTrapHouse.
  
  Check it out for yourself !main@hexbear.net
  
  mainland Taiwan
  You must mean West Taiwan. Sadly they refuse to acknowledge the authority of Taiwans government.
- No one is saying Google massacred protestors, but if you're gonna be against keyboard apps spying on you it should be irrelevant who they're spying for. Criticizing shitty things American companies do doesn't make you a China shill and calling everyone who does it a China shill is intellectually dishonest.
  
  claiming that the dozen people in this thread falsely equating what China is doing to the things that happen in the US -- ignoring that they are very different, and ONLY considering that they are moving attention away from the posted article -- is not so much "intellectually dishonest" as it is an intentional lie with a goal. Good bye.
  
  Kinda funny how your own username partially contradicts your argument.
  
  "It's different when it's dystopian dictatorships that were nominally communist in the 70s"
  
  When did I say it was different? It's basically the same thing.
  
  Sorry that was unclear. I was agreeing with you.
- 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.
  
  The US really isnt much better than China.
  The world ain't just good or bad and there's various degrees of "bad". The fact that many US people can even talk about this stuff makes them already just ever so slightly better for many outsiders. This is how it is, neither country is "good" but they align more with western ideals than an authoritarian state which for many of us is bad by default...which it is of course. :)
  
  Don’t forget operation sea spray! Next time you laugh at someone talking about chemtrails remember the us government actually did chemtrails!
  
  As bad as those two linked incidents were, they weren't exactly government sanctioned. Police sanctioned, sure, and the government should do more to reign that shit in, but comparing them to Tiennamen is disingenuous at best.
  The Chinese government hates letting its citizens have a voice.
  
  I gave plenty of other examples that were government sanctioned, and the treatment of black people during civil rights was government sanctioned. And going back further you have slavery and the genocide of natives that were government sanctioned. Ofc its not a 1:1 parallel with tiennamen.
  
  Shills gonna shill
  
  I tend to lean into accepting that ‘the US government has done some pretty horrific shit too’ camp, but I don’t do it as a way to shill for China, because fuck that authoritarian place. But it is dumb not to recognize massacres like Kent State, Tulsa, or the systematic genocides of First Nations peoples.
  Tiananmen Square really isn’t the best example to use as an example of how China isn’t like the US. There’s plenty of much more insidious dystopian shit happening in China every day to use than that.
  
  Yeah exactly my point.
  
  this article isn't about the US. I believe there is a reason so many in so many threads like that do what you're doing and worse. THE TOPIC IS NOT THE US, STOP TRYING TO MAKE IT THAT WAY
  
  Jesus Christ, this thread is cursed.
  Circling back to the article: it would be easier to name software that doesn't collect your data and send/sell it to your respective government. The point being made in this thread is that it isn't just a China problem. If you think you're safe from government observation just because you don't live in China, I have bad news for you.
  
  If you think you’re safe from government observation just because you don’t live in China
  I think you know without doubt that this is something NO ONE ever ever ever said. You know this. And yet still -- you want to make this about the united states. Maybe you can explain a way that this got brought up without China shills infecting the thread?
  Because the article is not about the US. It's not.
  
  I didn't mention the US.
  The article makes it sound like it's UNUSUAL that a phone app is spying on its users and sending user data to the government. It's not an exception, it's the rule. People pointing this out are doing you a favor, because the article's framing would otherwise lead you to believe this is a China problem and not a tech problem.
  
  no, people who do this are shilling for China and/or tiktok. we all know this.
  and yes the raw keyboard data going directly from your fingers to the government is not something that likely happens in the US, so either way this is a false equivalence.
  
  I'm not defending China.
  the raw keyboard data going directly from your fingers to the government is not something that likely happens in the US, so either way this is a false equivalence.
  Again, I never mentioned the US.
  What does it matter if the data is routed to the government server first or second? Blanket data collection is nefarious no matter who is doing it, but it landing in the hands of any government is dangerous. It isn't somehow less dangerous just because it hits a private server first (although it's harder to tell spying is happening, so in that respect it may be worse)
  E2E encryption should be standard across all tech platforms in every country, full stop.
  
  yeah, Snowden probably wouldn't be really into the idea that we shouldn't talk about what China is doing it because "everyone else is too".
  
  I think it's a response to how there are so many CHINA BAD articles. You could take each article as isolated, but there is the idea of manufacturing consent and it's how people develop negative feelings towards particular things after seeing so many negative articles about them.
  
  Well, you can post all the bad shit the US has done.
  China IS A BAD ACTOR on the international, national, regional, and Municipal levels. The whole state apparatus is corrupted.
  
  It's a lot more quick for me to point out that it's not unique to China. The way you phrase the second part of your post is as if China is unique in this sort of corruption. The US is just as corrupt, plus it has a lot more influence around the world thanks to the sheer amount of resources it controls.
  
  And it's completely beside the point.
  
  China IS bad. Changing the subject isn't the reaction of an unbiased person.
  
  I’m not trying to change the subject from China to the US, I’m trying to point out that the example of Tiananmen Square is not the best example to use as a distinguishing factor for China vs the US when there are numerous examples of the US commuting similar atrocities throughout its history.
  The current and active oppression and genicide of the Uyghurs.
  The brutal silencing of political and ideological ‘dissidents’.
  The openly dystopian social credit system being developed.
  The suppression of free speech and self-expression.
  There is a long list of examples to pull from that set China apart from the US.
  
  "China’s Orwellian Social Credit Score Isn’t Real"
  https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/
  "China’s Social Credit System Is Actually Quite Boring – A supposedly Orwellian system is fragmented, localized, and mostly targeted at businesses"
  https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/
  
  It's called Whataboutism. Very common deflection tactic.
  
  yep
  
  Do you even know what the word shill means?
  Like wtf do you think I'm trying to sell?
  
  it seems you're selling that idea that China = USA as to minimize bad actions by China.
  
  Thats not really a thing you sell and I literally start my comment with
  I mean, ill always say that China is worse than the US
  So it seems you really just cant cope with the fact that the US is a bad guy as well.
  
  ideas are sold every day. maybe there is a reason you want to focus on the US instead? hmm weird no that can't be true at all.
  
  Imagine thinking China is worse than the US when the US killed something like a million Iraqis, and that's just one of the many war the US was waging in the last 30 years while China checks notes attacked nobody in that timeframe.
  
  I think the distinction between China and the US is how they directly treat their own citizens. Arguments could be made that they're both equally shitty in that regard, but in different ways.
  
  The US imprisons 4x more people per capita. And China lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years. How are they equally shitty?
  
  Yeah right, let me ask the Uyghurs how they’re doing real quick
  
  Let's see how the western press thinks things are going:
  https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9
  The panic that gripped the region a few years ago has subsided considerably, and a sense of normality is creeping back in.
  Best bit:
  Behind him, a drunk Uyghur man was yelling. Alcohol is forbidden for practicing Muslims, especially in the holy month of Ramadan.
  “I’ve been drinking alcohol, I’m a little drunk, but that’s no problem. We can drink as we want now!” he shouted. “We can do what we want! Things are great now!”
  Cheers!
  
  Have… have you read the rest of the article? It’s fucking terrifying. It’s basically saying “this place went from a concentration camp to a prison”, and even then that’s what a random foreigner saw and has been told by the government. We don’t know if that’s the truth, and even if it was that’s still pretty fucking bad.
  
  Yeah but have you seen what they used to write?
  There's this passage:
  Uyghur activists abroad accuse the Chinese government of genocide, pointing to plunging birthrates and the mass detentions. The authorities say their goal is not to eliminate Uyghurs but to integrate them, and that harsh measures are necessary to curb extremism.
  Regardless of intent [...]
  They're actually doing the false balance thing. When was the last time the western press was fence sitting this much about this issue?
  China eased up on their crackdown, which is good, but the western press went so far above what they could prove, they're now walking back. Actually more like dropping the story: When was the last time you saw a new article about Xinjiang and not some social media echo?
  
  The authorities say their goal is not to eliminate Uyghurs but to integrate them
  They’re actually doing the false balance thing.
  When even the "false balance thing" includes relaying an admission of cultural genocide, you know the reality is really fucking bad.
  
  The OHCHR Report isn’t even a year old. And if a country was actively committing genocide I’d guess they wouldn’t really make it easy to have constant news about it.
  
  Two years ago, that shit used to be in German newspapers every month or so. Haven't seen anything in like a year now. Also, pretty sure the UN report didn't allege genocide, which is what the media here was claiming back then.
  Heck I remember one of my friends was under the impression that there was ethnic cleansing and some major refugee movements, despite the media never actually alleging that. But when they hear the word "genocide" over and over, that's what people imagine.
  
  In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
  The report details the second, third and fourth of those acts. It effectively qualifies as genocide.
  
  There's plenty of evidence of China trying to improve the living conditions for Uyghurs in Xinjiang and in the rest of China (poverty alleviation, affirmative action programs for university students, the crackdown against hate speech on social media, ...). So imprisoning some people based on some vague "extremism score" and then seemingly releasing them after some months doesn't show intent to impose living conditions in order to destroy a group. It shows intent on crushing separatism.
  Preventing births is true for everybody in China, how does that show an intent to destroy a particular group? It doesn't.
  So we're left with "serious bodily or mental harm", which can be explained just as well by an intent to suppress separatism and religious extremism. Literally every war causes some nationality "serious bodily or mental harm" far worse than what China is doing, and we don't call every war a genocide, do we?
  
  But those were brown people so they dont count - Americans probably.
- Sir this is a Wendy's
  Or more specifically, a thread about a phone keyboard.
  But it is true that Google and Microsoft phone home with your key strokes. That's how they develop their predictive typing and autocorrect.
- If you can't see the fundamental intertwining of Google (or any other fortune 500 company) and the US State, then you should really start looking harder. Lobbyists, revolving door membership, corruption, tax writeoffs, corporate power being used to influence day-to-day life, really, US companies' control over the US state is pretty similar to the Chinese State's control over Chinese Companies. I just don't think corporations should be in charge like y'all seem to.
  
  I think it's weird how so many of you want to stop talking about China and shift focus to the US.
  
  It actually makes sense that Americans should talk a lot more about the shitty state of things in the US rather than the propaganda about China used to distract them.
  It also makes sense that Chinese should talk a lot more about the shitty state of things in China rather than the propaganda about the US used to distract them.
  That just leaves everybody else, looking at both countries and people in them doing the equivalent of measuring the length of turds and fighting for which one is the shortest, pointedly ignoring it's all shit.
  
  yeah I really do, because the average annual US foreign conflict is worse than the wildest liberal exaggeration of the worst thing China has ever done
- That's false equivalence.
  China killing protesters and silencing dissidents does not make it OK for Google or anyone else to spy on you.
  
  yeah no shit. The point is that they aren't equivalent, trying to make them so is a destructive distraction
  
  This thread is about an app that spies on you, it is absolutely relevant to want to talk about other apps that do the same thing.
  The "yH bUt ChInA iS EvIl" rhetoric is an irrelevant distraction from the topic at hand.
  
  That's not what is being pointed. In China, you don't have freedom of information. They are authoritarian, borderline totalitarian. Yeah, Google spy and the US spy on us but to say America/Google is just as bad is the false equivalence.
  
  I'm not saying that America/Google is just as bad. I'm saying that in a thread discussing apps that spy on you, that talking about non-Chinese apps that also hoard your data is absolutely relevant and shouldn't be trumped or silenced by a "yh, but China is evil tho" type comment.
- 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.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/5__ESiklA1A
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  What even is your point? Does one protester's desire for violence justify the Chinese government's violence?
  
  Straight up disgusting attempt to dismiss what happened at Tienanmen square. Gee I wonder what your opinion on the chinese govt is.
  
  I haven't stated an opinion either way. I've simply provided additional context to a historical event you chose to bring up. Why do you feel the need to respond to it in such a kneejerk manner and ascribe my motives? Does the context I've provided make you feel uncomfortable in some way?
  I have neither dismissed nor denied that a terrible incident happened at Tiananman square on the late hours of June 3rd 1989. I wish for those responsible for plotting and catalysing the incident to face justice for their crimes.
  
  you and the others feel it's the best use of time to call out how the US is just as bad. That is telling.
  
  If you're asking for my personal opinion then I'd say the US is a great deal worse than anything China has done since they took their country back, actually. It's not even remotely close.
  What's "telling" is the way people such as yourself latch onto anything the western media has to say about America's geopolitical rivals, in spite of any and all the evidence to the contrary; regardless of the credibility of any of the sources. I mean, are you honestly just going to lap up whatever western media outlets tell you? The guys that told you Iraq undeniably had WMDs? The cynical scum bags who banged the drum about Gaddafi and have subsequently shrugged their shoulders while Libya now wallows with open air slave markets? Those are your respectable sources? You're going to hang off of every word from weirdo crooks like Adrian Zenz, born-again Christian "China experts" who publicly declare they're on a mission from God to defeat communism in China? That's the sort of "impartial" source you're prepared to die on a hill for? Or maybe its teenagers speculating over satellite photography they pulled up from Google maps?
  Here's something I find telling; that you won't engage whatsoever with the point I raised in response to you trying to grandstand over the Tiananmen incident; that you swivelled on a dime from gleefully using a massacre as a political football to clutching your pearls that someone dared to bring information to the table that contextualises that event into something more than the simplistic good vs evil narrative you were going for. Do yourself a favour and actually listen to what Chai Ling has to say; it's been independently verified and held up in a libel case she brought against the journalists when it came to light, so you can rest assured its legitimate. Stop and think about what it really means for the student leader of those killed at Tiananmen to outright admit they were trying to get their supporters massacred after actively blocking attempts to disperse peacefully. Consider the potential significance that she was literally extracted out of her country by the intelligence services of China's biggest geopolitical rivals. If you're genuinely appalled with all the death from this event, don't you think she and her benefactors have something to answer for? Or do you suppose its the place of the United States or Great Britain to stir up trouble in other countries, to dictate who should be in charge there and how their countries should be run?
  
  Fascinating stuff, I enjoyed reading this thread. I don't agree that the US has been worse than China, but you do make some very good points.
  
  yeah I don't have time to debate people who are only interested in downplaying something really fucked up. Sorry -- I won't read this.
  
  No, what you don't have time for is confronting inconvenient truths that fly in the face of your political agenda.
  Again, as previously stated I am not downplaying this incident. It happened and it was terrible. If you're not really just a coward ducking my point (Which I think you are) and you actually think that's the case then I challenge you to point out how I'm doing so. This was a serious incident and many people died; don't you think that the people who actively provoked the confrontation between students and soldiers should face up to what they've done?
  
  You're just salty that the Western backed color revolution failed in China. You would have loved to cheer the West on in sucking the country dry the same that it did with Russia after they fell for the Western lies. Just compare the life expectency graphs between Russia and China after 1989:
  
  You’re just salty that the Western backed color revolution failed in China. You would have loved to cheer the West on in sucking the country dry the same that it did with Russia after they fell for the Western lies.
  Then how come discussion of Tienanman Square is discouraged, if not banned, instead of being widely extolled as successful defiance of the West? Clearly, unless Xi is actually a US plant, the government does not want discussion of it.
  
  Because this issue is used as a battering ram to weaken the Chinese government. The West keeps talking about there being a 'Tiananmen Massacre' where unarmed students were killed even though behind closed doors US diplomats admit there was no bloodshed on TIananmen. It is really hard to defend yourself against those accusations which are false when the other side doesn't need to produce any evidence whatsoever. What is provable are the deaths of the soldiers and maoists fighting in street battles outside the square but that was not a massacre and funnily enough the West also doesn't like to talk about those deaths
  
  Alright, I'll contend that. Your source is thorough enough.
  Personally I still see the deaths outside Beijing in the streets to be incredibly problematic and fairly emblematic of the anti free speech/protest position by the government -- but I recognize a lot of the specific rhetoric with Tienanman is about killing unarmed students. I see why this is an important distinction, it was just never a real distinction in my mind. Thank you for the clarity.
  
  “China’s life expectancy is great and didn’t suffer at all even from the pandemic!”
  Source: China
  
  I know right? It's amazing what proper governmental response and civic mindedness of the populace can do.
  See also: Vietnam, Korea, New Zealand
  
  literally no clue wtf you're raving about, but I'm sure it's pro-China propaganda..

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