Me neither. It's just a white background with pastel hues. XiaoMi isn't doing anything out of the ordinary when it comes to "borrowing ideas".

Private use is different. Parent anon is talking about proper licensing, with future access to Google's code base at stake. Official releases by XioaMi has not and will continue to not have Play Store access in compliance with Google's terms. That's probably fine for them, since most of China don't use the Play Store anyway.

Again, comparing two unlike qualities. China's tactics in cracking down on terrorism in its western provinces is very much something you would criticize (if you also criticize the US's tactics). That would be a comparison of like with like. Again, the locking down of sensitive political information is our frame, e.g. criticism of policies, posting of data which contradict official released data, etc.

Idiot. China censors curse words as well, that would be your frame of reference. In order to compare the US and China with regard to censorship of information on the internet, e.g. sensitive political topics, you would not be able to use this frame of reference.

It seems like you don't know the Chinese constitution also outlines free speech as a right.

The people in China who are wary of this are those of the Slashdot mindset -- your spiritual and intellectual compatriots who want the same thing as you do, privacy and to be left alone by government. Instead of standing up for friends and allies, there are those on Slashdot who would stand up for government. I don't get it. Are your minds warped somehow? Are you all so tolerant of others that you forget who you should be tolerant of?

What do you think about VPN providers in the UK which US citizens sometimes use to bypass copyright restrictions? Are they violating US sovereignty? Are they imposing their morality on Americans?

Probably western Sinophiles who can't distinguish between government and people. Regular Chinese people have no respect for these Chinaboos.

That's like saying non-US vpn providers are forcing their concept of right and wrong on Americans. The tools are made available, the doors are unlocked. People willingly use the tools, and willingly walk through the doors on their own.

If people still didn't believe there were political/governmental shills on /., the knee-jerk whataboutism posts on every article about a non-US country should very clearly dispel that belief.

No one forces anyone to use free software.

That's what they're already doing -- they're using this tool for themselves. It so happens that this tool is developed internationally but that has nothing to do with its use. You would have it only be a Chinese coding effort?

A government's claims about what the public wants is accepted at face value, with few if anyone speculating on why, and many coming to the government's defense to explain away the controversy with an implicit acknowledgement that gov and public are indeed aligned. This is rare here in Slashdot land, which is why it stands out so much.

Anti-establishment pro-disruptive technology Slashdot suddenly become strict stickers of "Da Law"
And all it took was for the issue to involve a non-US city.

What happened to all the voices in those past Lyft/Uber threads talking about how stupid it was that some US cities were thinking of limiting these startups, or that taxi companies wanted to strike? What happened to those angry tirades about government-business collusion, regulatory capture, and backwater anti-competitive provincialism? Are those just presumed to be impossible elsewhere?

This doesn't seem like an issue of "democracy vs totalitarianism" -- it's only about the emergence of hierarchies for group decision making. Democratic republics and dictatorships all have decision making hierarchies, it's just that one set of decision makers is chosen by and has the support of the people (most of them anyway), while the other set choose themselves and is forced on the people.