Hacking Huawei Meet Xeroxing Xiaomi, Battle of Chinese Thieves

Move over Hacking Huawei, there is a new thief in town! Say hello to my little Xiaomi.

For those of you who live in civilized countries with real humans, you probably never heard of Xiaomi. So here is a rundown:

From this site we see that Xiaomi is an Apple clone.

The creeper in charge of Xiaomi is named Lei Jun and he is a pathological Apple fan. A few years back he said he was waiting for Jobs to die so Xiaomi could take Apple’s place.

In any event, Xiaomi has come out of nowhere to be a major cellphone company in China. Not surpringly, such firms usually have communist party backing and of course, Xiaomi’s boss is not only a communist but a member of its legislature as well.

One does not have to tax their mind to figure who Lei Jun is backing. But if you are too dumb to figure it out then let me help you. Take a look at the Xiaomi company mascot, a communist soldier-themed rabbit.

If you look closely at the box the commie bunny is in front of you will see that he represents a pilot from 1921, the year the communist party was founded. Lei’s Red cred could hardly be less inconspicuous.

What has governments concerned is why Xiaomi is stealing customer data and shipping it off to Beijing even as we speak. This has been going on for months now and even in light of all the bad press, Xiaomi phines are still stealing.

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China has a company called Xiaomi which has lit up the cell phone industry. Its business model is to sell cheap smart phones with good specs to select groups at a time. Rather than selling vis traditional means, Xiaomi only sells online. Of course they cribbed this from Dell who had some it decades before, but Xiaomi adds a twist. In order to buy a phone one has to preregister. Yeah, you heard me right, and we are not talking iphones here. This Chinese startup has people convinced that their gear is so good that people in China prepaid just to be put on a waiting list to buy one. They now use this model, called ‘Hunger Marketing’ in southeast Asia as well.

The problem is that Xiaomi has only been selling internationally for less than one year and already Singapore, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong and Vietnam are upset about Xiaomi phones and data theft. F Secure proved that the Xiaomi ‘Red’Mi1S was copying the cyber sitters in Beijing on user data, notes, photos and more. Rather than cease and desist, Xiaomi sat on their hands,

This only served to anger those countries more and now Taiwan, Vietnam and India are considering bans of one kind or the other. The article below speaks to the threat that companies such as Xiaomi pose.

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Informative eight minute video here. The two speakers discuss the dangers of The Indian Airforce using Xiaomi phones. Obviously It is not in India’s best interest to have data of their airforce personnel owned by Xiaomi, a Chinese firm. This danger is compounded by the fact that China has been increasingly pugnacious with all of its neighbors, including India. Aside from this, Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s founder, sits on the communist National People’s Congress. It takes little mental math to figure out where his loyalties lay.