Comment on Almost all Chinese keyboards have severe security flaws that can be (mis)used for mass surveillance, report reveals

ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because of the complexities of predicting which characters a user may want to type next, especially in logographic languages like Chinese, IMEs often offer “cloud-based” prediction services which reach out over the network. Enabling “cloud-based” features in these apps means that longer strings of syllables that users type will be transmitted to servers elsewhere.

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  • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Must have missed that, cheers

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    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, no hate intended. Sometimes you can actually comment intelligently without reading the article at all.

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• Melkath@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because the world has long since surpassed far beyond 1984 levels of spying on unsuspecting innocent civilians.

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• milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Essentially for predictive text: to make it easier to give good Chinese character suggestions when typing in Pinyin.

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• esaru@beehaw.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Keyboards for typing Chinese can work completely without Internet connection. There’s one in the F-Droid store: Guileless Bopomofo.

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• tardigrada@beehaw.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As one user in this thread said, it might be a feature required by the CCP.

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