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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Is there any niche of vendors somewhat equivalent to free software zealots in Shenzhen? E.g., "you can boot this little keychain thingy without blobs."

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There are another few bunnie blogs [1] on that. The concept is called gongkai. It means open in the sense of IP is shared freely.

1. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

Hm, if that's the case then why don't Western open source hardware projects just send a bilingual tourist over to Shenzhen to muck around until they connect with someone who can give them the docs needed to bootstrap the relevant firmware/drivers for the boards?

My guess: legal concerns. What is legal (or at least tolerated) in China with respect to gongkai is not necessarily legal in the Western world.

I'm just surprised there seems to be no bridge whatsoever between the two.

Like the developer asks, "what's the address to set this bit?" and the tourist responds with whatever it is.

Because that costs money.

Why wouldn't they be able to ask in IRC/Discord/whatever still works in Hong Kong? Or, just have a Taiwanese hacker guy in the group?

Do you know what he's up to?

I remember he was working on some super encrypted FPGA phone ages ago.. and then I haven't hear his name in .. years?

He is still working on it, the precursor, they're just starting development of the messaging app that will run on that dev platform and eventually run on the betrusted final device.

Ah yes. The Precursor is real now, you can read more at https://precursor.dev. As a baseline it can function as a password/authentication token manager, but as another user mentioned we're adding messaging features now.

Another thing I'm working on is IRIS, a non-destructive method for inspecting silicon chips after mounting on a circuit board: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07406 It's part of a long yak-shaving arc to make the Precursor more accessible by migrating from an FPGA-based system to an ASIC.

That is still one of the most interesting reverse engineering blog posts ever. In the 80's I was pretty good at this stuff, especially figuring out various over-the-wire protocols to get hardware to do stuff that it wasn't intended to do. But this is on an entirely different level.

Gongkai sounds like what happens in piracy scenes, or perhaps more specifically the game modding and ROM hacking scene. People innovating and modifying without giving a crap about who-owns-what.

He he, that only tends flow in one direction, from what I've seen.

There's plenty of free software thieves (the GPL violating kind) in Shenzhen. Sadly, there isn't a goddamn thing we can do about it.

Go ahead, try enforcing the GPL in China. They'll just laugh in your face whilst trying to sell you the next shoddy widget on AliExpressazon.

So, exactly like in the West?

False equivalence

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11452/have-th...

How many of those are in mainland China?m

Even the neighboring country of Taiwan is careful about GPL

https://www.leetsai.com/ltp-special-column/legal-issues-that...

Incidentally, don't call Taiwan a "neighboring country" when in mainland China.

It is a neighbor and a separate country though.

I get the impression that Western companies (and Chinese companies with non-disposable brands marketed in the West) can have GPL enforced against them.

For example: https://sfconservancy.org/activities/

I know one of the other dynamics is when the GPL copyright holder is more of a crunchy-granola hippie guru, who might just want to lovingly bring the lost soul into the fold, because they know not what they do.

That's really not a deterrent to the people who know exactly what they're doing.

Personally, I'd like to see copyright holders be less flower-child toward abusers, and more like a Scout who was helping an elderly person across the street, when they were attacked by a group of violent racists. It's not time to turn the other cheek, but to grab a heavy stick.

Yeah, no, they can’t. Plenty of western examples, such as Mikrotik.

> Go ahead, try enforcing the GPL in China.

Naomi Wu has actually done that.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ

The same Naomi Wu that recently was visited by CCP goons who told her to mind her p's and q's? Yeah I don't see this happening again.

How is that relevant to enforcing GPL?

See this peer comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38669000

As far as I know it was because of "reactionary" tweets, not GPL enforcement.

No, it was after she went to a business that violated gpl.

She put it on YouTube and then she got silenced.

Assuming this linked video is accurate, your statement is not quite correct.

https://youtu.be/3p7bl7eFaEo?si=kAXZHfA2lxbXlLv-

It got the attention of the government.

And she doesn't advocate gpl anymore too.

The one doesn't exclude the other.

That's not how autocratic systems work. In any autocratic system you allowed to be somewhat independent. How independent? It depends on you position in hierarchy. But if you cross the line, you will get punished for all your independent actions and even thoughts. There is no "because of this and that". The only thing that matters is that you crossed the invisible line.

ReallySexyCyborg?

Yeah, she tried that and then guess what happened...

> Ok for those of you that haven't figured it out I got my wings clipped and they weren't gentle about it- so there's not going to be much posting on social media anymore and only on very specific subjects. I can leave but Kaidi can't so we're just going to follow the new rules and that's that. Nothing personal if I don't like and reply like I used to. I'll be focusing on the store and the occasional video. Thanks for understanding, it was fun while it lasted.

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/167748080945083596...

She stopped uploading YouTube videos 6 months ago after 7 years.

More here: https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/p/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-t...

That wasn’t anything to do with attempting to enforce the GPL though.

It was all around the same time. A security vulnerability and gpl enforcement are the things she stopped since then.

Except trying to start her business, which she still does.

First off - we don't know why pressure against her increased recently. We just don't. We can make up stories about it, and try to assess their plausibility, but we don't know what really happened.

That said, I think that the evidence we have is against this being notably related to GPL and her defense of it. She published her complaint against MediaTek almost two years before she "got her wings clipped" - the timelines don't really support the GPL issue as being a notable part the matter. Also, the situation for IP protection in China is on an upwards trend (https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/16/china-s-record-on-i...), and part of that is government led. I have a difficult time seeing police give her so much trouble for this.

My preferred theory is that the straw which broke the camel's back was her minimally filtered commentary on the response to the June 2023 Plaza Hollywood Hotel stabbing. Naomi Wu feels strongly - and I believe, reasonably - that this was an anti-lesbian hate crime, and was furious that nobody in media was willing to acknowledge it as such. Male chauvinism and gendered violence, LGBT rights, public questioning of the results of a police investigation, and all in a venue which is easily accessible to foreigners - these are all things which are far more politically sensitive in China than IP compliance.

For some examples of what she was saying, scroll through her comments here: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3ARealSexyCyborg)%20until..., especially this thread: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/166501414504826880... (Twitter account required for both).

Wow, the police sent plainclothes thugs to her home to harass her, and her partner who is an Uygher is banned from leaving the country.

I've known a few people with partners from Xinjiang, only one of them got out eventually. It took wining and dining the police for about 5 years AFAIK. (Source: Was invited to and attended one of said dinners.)

Winnie the Pooh don’t play

I think many Chinese companies freely share code between them, regardless if it's open source or not. They just don't care about licenses and IP the way the West does.

So, if you want to get the source code for X, you just have to learn Cantonese, go there and ask nicely.

As a former good Cantonese speaker, now terrible, let me assure you that there is no way to ask anything nicely in Cantonese. It's a rough-and-tumble, loud, crude, obnoxious gutter language. It's awesome. So much better than Mandarin. There's a reason why Cantonese is always the go-to language for "misc bizarre foreign language spoken by asians in the background" in movies, well that and the very high number of first-rate actors available from Hong Kong's movie industry. It's my favorite language in the world.

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