Tag Archive for: Walled

China’s assault on Big Tech’s ‘walled gardens’

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China’s months-long regulatory campaign targeting the tech sector is taking aim at a common practice that leading industry players deploy to foil rivals — blocking external links, which regulators consider anti-competitive.

For years, large Chinese internet companies from e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group to social media giant Tencent Holdings have used various means to block their users from sharing links to posts and products on other companies’ platforms. These techniques set up what are known as “walled gardens” to protect the creators’ own digital ecosystems, stymie rivals’ growth and prevent users from spending their cash elsewhere.

Now authorities vow to tear down the walls to promote connectivity among different internet platforms, a move to protect users’ rights and market competition. But it may shake the tech giants’ long-valued growth models.

At the same time, there is no unanimity among Chinese regulators on how the walls should be dismantled, as some are concerned that completely open connectivity will increase the difficulty of supervision, one industry source said. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) wants healthy growth of the internet industry, while the cybersecurity regulator focuses on content security, and the public security department is concerned about online fraud, another person close to the matter said.

At a Sept. 9 meeting, the MIIT pressed executives from leading tech titans including Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and Baidu to dismantle link blockades. Companies were ordered to submit plans by Sept. 17. The ministry has been pursuing a campaign since July to crack down on online misconduct including pop-ups, data collection and link blocking.

“We will urge related companies to follow requirements and open up links to each other’s instant messaging platforms step by step,” Zhao Zhiguo, the general director of MIIT’s Information and Communication Management Bureau, said at a press conference shortly after the meeting. Blocking links “messes up users’ experience, harms their rights, and disrupts the market,” Zhao said.

How the three largest internet platform operators — Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance — will open their system is the…

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‘Fortnite’ Maker Targets Apple’s ‘Walled Garden’ in Courtroom Fight Over App Store

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In its courtroom battle with

Apple Inc.,

AAPL 0.53%

Epic Games Inc. is questioning a core tenet of the iPhone maker’s App Store business: that its success relies upon rigorous policing of the platform.

Apple for years has said its rules and vetting process for apps protect users from malicious software and abuse, work that helps justify the up to 30% cut it takes of digital transactions there. In documents and testimony in a lawsuit being argued this month before a federal judge in Oakland, Calif., Epic has said Apple’s contentions don’t hold up to scrutiny.

The App Store’s business model, which has been called a “walled garden” due to the company’s tight controls, faces rising criticism from a host of developers, from

Spotify Technology SA

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to

Facebook Inc.

Epic and others are seeking to undermine Apple’s rationale for its control of third-party software on its more than one billion iPhones, claiming the operating system is what keeps users safe, not the App Store review process. Epic contends others could safely vet apps if allowed to create their own app stores.

“To justify its walled garden, Apple needed to convince those locked in and those locked out that the wall served some higher purpose, something more than profitability—and so Apple security justification was born,” Katherine Forrest, an Epic lawyer, told a judge this past week during the start of the trial, expected to last most of May.

Apple strongly disputes Epic’s claims that it is a monopoly and defends its app-store rules as a way to provide users with a safe, private and reliable place to download software. Apple says customers would be opened up to harm without its controls.

Epic and other app developers want to change Apple’s control over the third-party software on more than one billion iPhones; ‘Fortnite’ on an iPhone in 2020.



Photo:

CJ…

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Apple’s Increasingly High Walled Garden Helps Hackers Avoid Capture

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A new report highlights how despite Apple’s increasingly high walled garden ecosystem, hackers are finding more ways inside.

According to a new exposé from MIT Technology Review, Apple’s effort to increase security in both hardware and software is experiencing a downside — the Cupertino company’s walled garden approach is making it easier for hackers to hide.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at the cybersecurity watchdog Citizen Lab. “You’re going to keep out a lot of the riffraff by making it harder to break iPhones. But the 1% of top hackers are going to find a way in and, once they’re inside, the impenetrable fortress of the iPhone protects them.”

Marczak’s primary concern is that as Apple builds increasingly locked-down devices, it’s becoming more difficult for security researchers to discover hacking activity:

He argues that while the iPhone’s security is getting tighter as Apple invests millions to raise the wall, the best hackers have their own millions to buy or develop zero-click exploits that let them take over iPhones invisibly. These allow attackers to burrow into the restricted parts of the phone without ever giving the target any indication of having been compromised. And once they’re that deep inside, the security becomes a barrier that keeps investigators from spotting or understanding nefarious behavior—to the point where Marczak suspects they’re missing all but a small fraction of attacks because they cannot see behind the curtain.

And while Apple regularly updates its devices with software that fixes security flaws, these same updates can also hinder the various tools used by security researchers:

Sometimes the locked-down system can backfire even more directly. When Apple released a new version of iOS last summer in the middle of Marczak’s investigation, the phone’s new security features killed an unauthorized “jailbreak” tool Citizen Lab used to open up the iPhone. The update locked him out of the private areas of the phone, including a folder for new updates—which turned out to be exactly where hackers were hiding.

Faced with these blocks, “we just kind of threw our hands…

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Kids Can Hack Apple’s Walled Garden, All While Windows Becomes Hackers’ Curse

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Microsoft investing big in security Ironically, all these news of Apple devices being so easy to hack come at a time when Microsoft is … And in the case of today’s Mac exploit, you’re not exposed if you have already disabled the Guest account and …
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