Vulnerabilities in Sogou Keyboard encryption expose keypresses to network eavesdropping.
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.
It’s time to switch to Linux!
I mean the CCP is aiming to have people use Kylin? If the government and the entire populace starts using Linux instead we’ll just see the same BS on Linux instead. It’s not an OS/platform issue, but an issue of bad actors.
On the plus side maybe then it’ll finally be the year of the Linux desktop.
monkeys paw curls
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Don’t worry, there is also a Linux version.
Oof
Then they’ll install the Linux version. People here are so indoctrinated, they like it.
Do people generally try to circumvent it? Are they too scared to uninstall it? Or do they just not care?
Worse. They think it’s useful.
Why? Useful for safety and security of the society?
Edit: Why downvotes? I’m trying to put myself in their shoes, it’s not how I view it lol
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I thought we are talking about a keyboard app?
Yeah, wtf is that equivalency?
“Why do people smoke”
“Well some people like to eat at restaurants or watch movies with their friends so”
Haha, exactly my thought
It was a “what about” analogy. It compares a app that steals data without the users consent and the other one is the keyboard app. Both seem to be wanted by consumers despite the steeling parts.
Yeah but a social media platform has completely different qualities. Therefore the reasons for people how and why they use them will be completely different. Also the keyboard app is forced on the phones by the state while the use of social media platforms is optional. Just too many different factors at play here imo.
Some weird downvotes, and I want to know too. Why does a keyboard app mean anything to anyone? The keyboards included on iOS and latest Android versions are great.
Don’t know about this keyboard or Chinese, but a language specific feature might be one of the reason.
I use SwiftKey and I love how it supports multilingual autocorrect and prediction for Indonesian and English without needing to switch between keyboard language.
iOS built in keyboard supports multilingual typing for some languages, but not Indonesian.
I assume people love it also because some specific feature that doesn’t exist in the stock keyboard.
Be careful jumping the firewall.
Sure. Foreigners aren’t really sanctioned though, that’s more of a risk for the locals. But even then usually only if they want to get someone disappeared and don’t have anything substantial against them.
This is one of my favorite things about kbin over Reddit. So neat to see gifs in chat.
They’re viewable on Lemmy too!
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Not voyager yet
And my axe!
It just appears as a static image on Infinity. I had to tap on it to go fullscreen and start playing it. Though the app is still in beta, that might change.
It works on Sync
Thunder as well.
Dumb question, but how do you view the kbin page? I’m using Sync
I was talking about gifs
Reddit added the same functionality some time ago, I’m a bit sad it’s a thing here too but oh well. People seem to like it. My favourite thing about reddit was it being text-based though
I wish they were smaller, like maximum twice the size of an emoji, maybe bigger for gif type images.
You could have gifs on Reddit too
Through New Reddit, which was objectively awful.
If you think that’s a kbin thing, you’ve not used reddit in years, you haven’t looked at anything lemmy, etc.
It’s viewable in Memmy for lemmy as well, also been on Reddit for years just not used much due to the culture there dog piling it all the time.
How are you seeing gifs in kbin? All I’m seeing is a url link to the gif and have to click the media icon button next to the URL For it to load… is there a setting I need to enable to load pictures/gifs automatically?
I’m guessing it’s your app. I’m viewing through desktop and it works fine.
I wish there was a setting to get rid of them in the app I use, hate inline images and gifs
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Just for one thing, Chinese companies are required to have CCP members in their leadership.
I mean like the FBI buys all that data without a warrant anyways… So st least we pretend its not happening but like were practically looking in a mirror
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So in China the CPC forces companies to have CPC members in their leadership, but in the USA companies bribe and coerce our leaders to do whatever they want. The US government allows companies in the US surveil everyone and everything with great intensity, and in return all of them will turn over that information to the government anyway… So companies in both countries partake in surveillance on people, but the CPC imposes oversight onto the company while US companies impose oversight onto the government. (or more accurately, businesses and the government work together to the benefit of business)
idk, if we had a state run by a communist party, it would be pretty cool if they forced workers on to the board of Exon, Norfolk Southern, or Raytheon etc
I wanted to ask if you were born yesterday but I’ll try to be more educative than sassy.
All companies in China exist purely with the blessing of the political party. No approval, no company. Everything is done by their books.
And in US is other way around, every political party has blessing of companies.
What are the best FOSS options for Android keyboard apps? I’ve been struggling with this lately.
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OpenBoard - every other keyboard app is ducking shirt
FlorishBoard
F-Droid says the app hasn’t been updated in the last 14 months. Is the project still worked on? It says beta on the website.
Yes.. The pitfalls of FOSS is that some dude is working on it when they have free time. I’ve been using it for 2 years and can’t say I mind… would like to have the word suggestions, though.
Thanks for the recommendation. This comment is typed using a freshly installed florisboard keyboard :)
Seconded. I use Gboard because it has the same functionality but I have to sandbox it and restrict all internet access via firewall. I still don’t trust it and would prefer a FOSS alternative with the same functionality.
How do you do that?
Not OP, but this can be managed with Datura firewall on CalyxOs
wants to do something
needs to be an IT major
Welp, guess I’ll choose between China and Microsoft, then.
You can sandbox an app using Shelter. You can block the internet access of that app using NetGuard. Both apps are available on F-Droid and easy to setup. No special OS needed but I strongly recommend GrapheneOS to avoid backdoors.
Thank you vm! NetGuard is awesome. I will test Shelter.
Glad to help. Consider dropping the NetGuard dev some coin, he’s doing incredible work. He also develops FairEmail which imho is the best IMAP email app in existence.
I’m partial to thumbkey. It even has a Lemmy community: !thumbkey@lemmy.ml
OpenBoard with Gesture
Using FlorisBoard right now, no auto correct but you’ll adapt
Think you mean SwiftKey which Microsoft just introduced bing AI into that you can’t turn off. I 100 percent assume they now use all your typing data to train their ai too. They won’t even let you use themes without logging in to an account so I again assume they also tie data to accounts.
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The people here acting like their Gboard doesn’t do the same is so funny.
Edit : never used nor installed tiktok.
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.
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.If you mean by “collect usage stats” train their AI model on-device and send the training result to Google, then yes. If you mean that the actual words get sent to Google’s servers, then no. There was a study shared recently that looked into this. Only metadata about what’s typed is sent. That’s not nothing of course, but it’s not what Tencent does at all.
E: Found it.
Thank you for this. This is much more reasonable of a privacy critique than falsely claiming Google is using a keylogger. I heard Grammarly was doing something similar and deleted my account. I’m changed the settings, but will continue using Gboard because I like the combined emojis.
If you have any evidence that it does, it would be big news. Please share.
I mean he’s not wrong, but also not really the same thing. Gboard does send a substantial amount of data about the things you typed to google. It is supposedly anonymous, but they do this to get anylitics, and they use this data to improve the suggestions given to you.
There has been at least one article where someone intercepted the data leaving from Gboard and found it’s either unencrypted or just hashed into something like base64. This was a while back so things hopefully changed.
While google does try not to phone home users passwords, how can you tell what is and isent private?
Even if i had it, do you honestly think i would waste my life to be completely forgotten and left to rot for disclosing it like Snowden. Yep, no one will ever reveal anything after that shit show.
ok.gif
The big issue is Google isn’t owned by the state.
I mean… Does It change anything? They are owned by a board of directors that want profits over anything else
Of course it change, at least the authorities have to buy from companies with public money instead of getting for free.
Man, Snowden wasted his entire life to tell you USA literally spy on everything you do and when caught their answer was : yeah, so what you gonna do about it, maybe you should do the same.
Instead they are about to be their own state.
Btw, companies are absolutistic by default.
no they are just compelled by the state and secret courts which is totally different obviously
They are the state at this point. So same thing.
No one is acting. It doesn’t do the same. There you have it.
Did you read it ? Can you share the part with relevant info. I tried to read it but it kept going abouts how Gboard and the Microsoft keyboard both gather huge amount of data and yet that both are opaque and you can’t know what data is sent to the server backend.
Also, ever heard of 5,9 and 14 eyes ?
Oh shit, Google is sending my stuff to China?
It depends. Ever heard of databrokers ?
Google doesn’t sell to data brokers. Not yet at least. They have a competitive advantage they will lose if they sold their data (our data) to third parties, especially third party resellers. If/when they begin circling the drain, that may change.
Total false take, don’t just say your suspicions like they are facts.
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.
You just save the first 50 digits typed after some email is typed, and you have all the passwords you need!
This only applies if a username is a email
And if it is then what happens when people actually email someone? Autocorrect during login?
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
Yep, I only reacted to a “new requirement”: save space :)
They weren’t describing a use case for every single type of situation.
I could be wrong, and this is a generalization of any country you can name, but my impression is data is stored on everyone so when they decide someday to look you up they already have all the data collected. It’s not really processed until needed.
And in hopes of it being useful later, when processing power is better.
Hey GovGPT8, please rank the 10 citizens most likely to organize protests if we institute curfews.
Exaaaactly
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And how can autosuggest / autocorrect be so bad with so much training data
Did you ever see how an average person types? It’s not the amount of data that is the problem. We have too much dumb data!
The real answer is compute power. At the moment it’s very expensive to run the computations necessary for big LLMs, I’ve heard some companies are even developing specialized chips to run them more efficiently. On the other hand, you probably don’t want your phone’s keyboard app burning out the tiny CPU in it and draining your battery. It’s not worth throwing anything other than a simple model at the problem.
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China being China, no surprise here.
Wait till you hear about US
Yo dawg, we heard you like whatboutism, so we put some whataboutism in your whataboutism
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Wait til you hear about whataboutism lawl
what’s your purpose?
I mean in life…
The Xzibit begins to compound itself. Soon there is so much whataboutism compressed into other instances of whataboutism that the singularity has formed. Faintly, all you can make out above the constantly repeating “Yo dawg, we heard…” is the whoosh of the empty air spinning around inside OP’s head. And suddenly, with a cacophonous roar there is nothing but silence. And then, triumphantly, a yellow sickle and hammer emblazon themselves against a red background as the Soviet National anthem plays. OP is at peace.
“whataboutism” is so thought terminating. Context matters… There is a reason why you (or anyone in the US/anglosphere) are constantly being presented with negative stories about China, while the USA (the country you actually live in and are subject to) does the exact same stuff. US congress literally dedicated $300 million to propagandize against China… literally more than China spends on its military in a year.
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US as in USA as in United States of America, I believe
As if other keyboard apps are any different, I don’t think Microsoft bought SwiftKey just for fun?!
Really? Isn’t this kind of thing scandalous enough to tank companies?
It’s in their EULA read their terms of services
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And gboard or SwiftKey don’t?
Every single time something sketchy is happening in Chinese tech a Lemmy user will slide the conversation and accusations to American tech. It’s a rule.
Is not about American/Chinese government, is about privacy. ANY company or government storing your data can be extremely problematic in the future.
Yeah the Sogou Keyboard send data to Tencent, the same thing happens or could happens with others proprietary keyboards in the future. How about trying a FOSS one?
It’s absolutely about the American/Chinese government, I don’t see comments forum sliding into Chinese tech on every post about Google.
But no, swift and gboard don’t send your data to the American government.
There’s also a dangerous misconception around here that FOSS == privacy safe. It doesn’t.
There is also a differece between invading your privacy and compromising your security. Both are bad, but one is much worse at least in my view. Keylogging and then sending those keystrokes back to base with a dodgey custom rolled encryption framework is not just a breach of privacy.
Well, we have actual evidence here of dodgy shit happening, but what about this other thing I assume is also happening based on absolutely nothing? See, both just as bad!
Gboard doesn’t at least. It does send some stuff but not keystrokes
It sends whole words instead!
Any data you submit to Google is stored and analysed. That’s different from sending keystrokes as they happen though.
I’m all for criticising invasive data use and collection which Google is definitely guilty of. It’s not the same as keylogging though which is not just a privacy concern but a pretty serious security one as well. Also we have actual evidence here of Tencent doing this which makes a difference to me at least.
I’m not sure if that’s true. You know, it’s Google. Every keystroke in your gmail email is analysed, so can’t imagine gboard is any different to them.
We can’t know for sure if they’re not open source
While GBoard is closed source, they have documented that they use federated learning. Meaning their model is generated on-device and only the inferences are sent to Google.
That being said, I use OpenBoard.
Plus it also has the feature where you can drag on the space bar to move the letterhead!
I prefer OpenBoard, it doesn’t send keystrokes to any server
The fork even has support for swipe, autocorrect, word prediction, clipboard management, etc, and is way more lightweight than Gboard and the rest. Zero reason to use anything else at the moment.
What’s the fork? I’ve been using Florisboard beta (ehich is also opensource) and pretty happy with it. The only things I miss is swipe for dictionary words
https://github.com/Helium314/openboard
Important to note that you need to install a library from inside the app’s settings to enable swipe typing. Ctrl+F “enable gesture typing” on the Github page to see where to get it.I loaded the library but couldn’t see a toggle to turn it on.
Uhhh it’s pretty blatant.
OpenBoard Settings > Gesture Typing > Enable Gesture Typing
Not if you block internet connection at system level. I think it can be done if GBoard in installed as an user app, not as a system one.
Might as well just use Open Board.
Of course. My “problem” is that I need to write in 3 languages at the same time and switching languages manually in Open board is a bit cumbersome, while in GBoard it happens automatically.
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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?
In a surprise to absolutely nobody, China spies on their people.
And everyone’s people
TIL this only happens in China
As opposed to which country?
Oh wow, who would have ever thought they’d do that? What a fucking surprise.
I feel like there should be a Lemmy version of everything now
I recommend free and open source software for everyone. Everything on this list is curated to feature the best alternatives to common proprietary software (according to Linux Cafe):
https://gitlab.com/linuxcafefederation/awesome-alternatives/-/blob/master/README.md
This list is good free, open source (FOSS) Android keyboards:
https://github.com/offa/android-foss#-keyboard
I think the best two are Simple Keyboard and AnySoftKeyboard. Simple Keyboard is pleasant to use, but is missing a several advanced features. ASK would be perfect if the swipe typing worked (it’s currently listed as beta, and is mostly actuate, but unfortunately when it does make a mistake fixing it is almost painful).
Finally, try to get comfortable going to alternativeto.net when you get frustrated with software. Worst case scenario you get frustrated with different software for a bit and switch back. Of course it notes the price and license model for each alternative.
ASK would be perfect if the swipe typing worked (it’s currently listed as beta, and is mostly actuate, but unfortunately when it does make a mistake fixing it is almost painful).
It crashes for me so often that I finally gave up using it.
Also there was a weird bug of where if you were working on a long document, towards the bottom of the document all of a sudden it will drag you all the way up to the top of the document, so then you had to scroll all the way back to where you were before, at the bottom of the document.
I use Florisboard
Even lemmy has privacy problems if you don’t know.
Explain please :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/144clka/warning_lemmy_federated_reddit_clone_doesnt_care/ Though it says misleading title, there is some truth to that (read the article)
That seems less of an article and more of a hit job. I’d be more comfortable believing what was said in that blog if it was substantiated by other more well-known media sources.
Also it seems like it would go against the EU laws for deleting account data, which they would have to implement.
Lets see, I hope they do.
These findings underscore the importance for software developers in China to use well-supported encryption implementations such as TLS instead of attempting to custom design their own.
lol.
The writer out here acting like this wasn’t an intended feature lol
And this is the only point of the article. Idk what all these other comments are on about, but this article is outlining lack of standardized protocols that made the software vulnerable to network eavesdropping.
This doesn’t point to a big CCP conspiracy, it’s just bad design.
What a shocker!
And the Platinum Award for Least Surprising News Headline goes to…
