Vulnerabilities in Sogou Keyboard encryption expose keypresses to network eavesdropping.

  • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      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.

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        mainland Taiwan

        You must mean West Taiwan. Sadly they refuse to acknowledge the authority of Taiwans government.

      • Notorious_handholder@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        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
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          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.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        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!

    • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • godless@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    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.

  • punseye@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 years ago

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

  • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 years ago

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

      • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        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.

  • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        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.

  • Goodie@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        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
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          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

  • kicksystem@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    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?

    • Jesus@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 years ago

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

      • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        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
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      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.