> To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app.
Does anyone know if this claim is true? I would have assumed this is as simple as serving the not allowed response to any request from a Chinese address range, and it seems like it would be easy to test using a VPN.
(In general, while I don't approve of censorship this seems like an odd hill to die on — the problem is that a repressive government is still sovereign and there aren't exactly many options for a company with such extensive business ties other than complying with that government's laws within its borders)
Does anyone know if this claim is true? I would have assumed this is as simple as serving the not allowed response to any request from a Chinese address range, and it seems like it would be easy to test using a VPN.
(In general, while I don't approve of censorship this seems like an odd hill to die on — the problem is that a repressive government is still sovereign and there aren't exactly many options for a company with such extensive business ties other than complying with that government's laws within its borders)