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by chvid 2646 days ago
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.
2 comments
nkozyra 2646 days ago
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.
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chvid 2646 days ago
Why do you assume they (the presumely Chinese provider of the component) are unscrupulous?

To me it is obvious that it is Nokia that is sloppy and having quality issues.

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nkozyra 2646 days ago
Why do you assume it's simply laziness? Regardless, it's not good.
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chvid 2646 days ago
Why is there a Chinese flag in the article and not a Finnish flag?

Because it gives more attention.

The real story here is that the venerable brand of Nokia now is being used to sell sub-quality phones.

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nkozyra 2646 days ago
Because the service and server in question are in China? Look I understand being skeptical of the narrative, but that's where the data was going.

Nokia isn't being shielded in the article.

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yorwba 2646 days ago
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.

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chvid 2646 days ago
I don't speak Chinese. And you are right; it looks like something specific to China Telecom that should be completely removed.
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