It is obviously a bug / lazy programmer / broken project management. A phone with most of it components bought from China and in one of the many configurations just copied from the supplier's examples there was an URL which was supposed to be changed but didn't.
In other words - a non-story or at most a story about quality issues at the reborn Nokia.
But luckily the URL pointed to China ... so we can make the story about that ... with a big red communist flag, talk about mass surveilliance, human rights, future invasions and so on ...
I don't really think this is because of racism; I mostly just think it is because we are idiots that prefer big hyperboles rather than simple explanations of non-issues.
Huh? It's more than just that; the Android build comes littered with software from an unscrupulous source, even on phones that are supposed to be close to a clean version of Android.
I agree with your assessment that this was likely unintentional, although it doesn't seem like they forgot to change the URL, but rather that the whole component should have been disabled. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19451772
On the off chance that you're a native Chinese speaker, are you able to figure out what the purpose of device self-registration is? My Chinese is unfortunately not good enough to easily find information on it.
In other words - a non-story or at most a story about quality issues at the reborn Nokia.
But luckily the URL pointed to China ... so we can make the story about that ... with a big red communist flag, talk about mass surveilliance, human rights, future invasions and so on ...
I don't really think this is because of racism; I mostly just think it is because we are idiots that prefer big hyperboles rather than simple explanations of non-issues.