Xiaomi smartphones are a threat warns IAF

[Siva]

As per the report by The Sunday Standard the IAF – Indian Air Force have issues warring with reference to any Chinese smartphone including Xiaomi. They say it is a threat and one should avoid it.

Xiaomi was in the news before for the same Security Threat. IAF has claimed that Xiaomi devices were sending private data from the smartphone to server in China. The CERT-in Indian team also mentioned that the smartphone indeed was sending data to servers in China.

Xiaomi, I believe have taken this seriously, they did mention about how serious they are when it comes to user privacy and now the Latest Post by Hugo Barra on Google+ will answer most of your questions as to as to why the smartphones are sending data to servers in China specially with reference to Mi Account, Cloud Messaging and Mi Cloud services.

Now these services do need a sever which incidentally is in China and when you use these services no doubt your data will be stores on these servers. The problem with China is that the Chinese government can legally access the data from these servers when and if required – does not matter if its Chinese company or foreign company.

Hugo Barra has not specifically mentioned about the security issues pointed out by IAF, but they have decided to migrate their servers out of china to Amazon AWS – this will include the Mi-Accounts, cloud services and messaging. So technically the smartphones will soon communicate with servers outside China.

What’s more Hugo has plans to go local that means they will have the servers in India in 2015. There is also news about Xiaomi interested in the Android One project, they want to manufacture Android One smartphones.

Source: The Sunday Standard

 

[greatsadiq]

Hugo Barra Posted On His FB Profile Just One Hour Ago

>> We're moving your data! <<

User experience is hugely important to us. As a global Internet company, we really care about speed and we're also fully committed to storing our users' data securely at all times.

In early 2014, we kicked off a massive internal effort to expand our server infrastructure globally in order to better serve Mi fans everywhere.

Our primary goal in moving to a multi-site server architecture was to improve the performance of our services for Mi fans around the world, cut down latency and reduce failure rates. At the same time, it also better equips us to maintain high privacy standards and comply with local data protection regulations. This is a very high priority for Xiaomi as we expand into new markets over the next few years.

This server and data migration process is taking place in three phases.

>> PHASE 1: E-commerce migration

Earlier this year, our e-commerce engineering teams started migrating our global e-commerce platforms and user data for all international users from our Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in California (USA) and Singapore. We also began using Akamai's global CDN infrastructure to speed up static page loads.

This migration process will be completed by the end of October and will benefit users in all of our international markets — Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan. Users are already experiencing website speed boosts of at least 30% in markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and as much as 200% in India.

>> PHASE 2: MIUI services migration

We have also recently started migrating our MIUI services and corresponding data for all international users from our Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in Oregon (USA) and Singapore. This migration includes Mi Account, Cloud Messaging and Mi Cloud services. We are expecting to complete this migration by the end of 2014, with some parts being completed even sooner (e.g. Mi Account servers by the end of October).

With this migration, we are expecting to cut network request latency for users in India by up to 350ms, and users in Malaysia to experience 2-3x faster Mi Cloud photosync.

>> PHASE 3: Going local

In 2015, we are planning to take on a new challenge to further improve the performance of our services for users in large and fast-growing markets such as India and Brazil.

In these markets, where Amazon AWS services aren't yet available, we will be working with local data center providers to set up our service infrastructure. Once that has been completed, users in these markets will be much closer to their data and enjoy even faster speeds by connecting to local servers.

We will continue to keep everyone posted!

Hugo
(on behalf of the Xiaomi infrastructure teams)