An exposé recently broadcasted in China has revealed a clandestine network involved in the manufacturing of specialized smartphone motherboards. These devices permit a single operator to concurrently control a multitude of smartphones.
Significance:
The exposure by the longstanding consumer rights program broadcasted by China Central Television (CCTV) marks yet another significant uncovering of corporate misconduct.
Its findings could have substantial repercussions across various Chinese digital industries, encompassing e-commerce, gaming, and social networks.
Ins and Outs:
Manufacturers have been crafting hardware that clusters several smartphone mainboards together, enabling the simultaneous management of the devices when connected to a singular workstation.
The user, from this station, can navigate the network functionalities across the smartphones as if they were individual users with separate online identities.
- The sales rhetoric caught on film claimed one could dominate the online landscape through control of the motherboard systems.
- Utilizing these systems, one could simulate fake e-commerce transactions, create misleading social media statistics, and influence online polling outcomes.
- Investigations uncovered that clients often used these systems to propagate advertising content, simulate user interaction in live streams, and inflate viewership statistics for particular content.
- Evaluations suggest ambitions for large-scale operations, with suggested setups potentially hosting hundreds of thousands of fabricated IPs.
- Cost per unit for these motherboards range between RMB 3,000 to RMB 6,000, where each cluster manages up to 20 individual mainboards.
- Such activities clash with the legal framework stated in China’s Anti-Unfair Competition Law, emphasizing the illegality of disrupting network service operations.
- Three companies came into the limelight due to the exposé, while regional statistics point to a concentrated prevalence of such businesses in Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi provinces.
Broader Implications:
Beyond the motherboard scandal, the program in question has shed light on a spectrum of other unlawful actions within the Chinese market.
These include safety compromises in fire-resistant glass and extinguishers, contaminated food products, dishonest practices on dating platforms, mechanical troubles in automobiles, and deceptive financial service scams.
heh, and we’re surprised why? big corps been cutting corners for ages, nothing new here, people