Asia Pacific
Since our report in August 2021, we find that Apple has eliminated their Chinese political censorship in Taiwan. However, Apple continues to perform broad, keyword-based political censorship outside of mainland China in Hong Kong, despite human rights groups’ recommendations for American companies to resist blocking content.
Citizen Lab researchers find several encryption vulnerabilities on China’s mandatory app for Olympic athletes, MY2022.
MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
China’s sophisticated filtering system, known as the Great Firewall (GFW), is the region’s biggest impediment to the freedom of information. The GFW is built by the Chinese government and is continuously developed to serve their political interests. In this report, we introduce the design of GFWatch, a large-scale longitudinal measurement platform that informs the public about how GFW censorship changes over time and its negative impact on the free flow of information.
The Hong Kong police recently forced one of the city’s most prominent activist groups to delete its online presence, in a move some fear means that Hong Kong’s digital spaces will move to more closely resemble the mainland.
Senior researcher, Irene Poetranto, discusses a joint report written by the Citizen Lab, OutRight Action International, and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), focused on LGBTIQ website censorship and its impact on LGBTIQ communities.
The Citizen Lab, OutRight Action International, and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) collaborated to conduct research on LGBTIQ website censorship and its impact on LGBTIQ communities. The results indicate the technical and legal obstacles many users have in accessing LGBTIQ news, health, and human rights websites.
In this post, we discuss the significance of the findings from our report analyzing Apple product engraving services and observed censorship.
Within mainland China, we found that Apple censors political content including broad references to Chinese leadership and China’s political system, names of dissidents and independent news organizations, and general terms relating to religions, democracy, and human rights. And across all six regions, we found that Apple’s content moderation practices pertaining to derogatory, racist, or sexual content are inconsistently applied and that Apple’s public-facing documents failed to explain how it derives their keyword lists.
Candiru is a secretive Israel-based company that sells spyware exclusively to governments. Using Internet scanning, we identified more than 750 websites linked to Candiru’s spyware infrastructure. We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.
