China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones

Post by stepik777 » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 3:04 PM UTC

mrkrabo wrote: post #6

This is interesting. It goes to show how an autoritarian government can fix some problems in a more effective way. You can remove terrorist propaganda from YouTube, but how do you stop the spread of those videos in private platforms or messaging applications? And even if the first version of this spying app only checks for md5 sums, which is arguably useless, I'm sure they're working on something more effective.

Post by stupidstupid1 » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 3:13 PM UTC

jansho wrote: post #44

mrkrabo wrote: post #6

This is interesting. It goes to show how an autoritarian government can fix some problems in a more effective way. You can remove terrorist propaganda from YouTube, but how do you stop the spread of those videos in private platforms or messaging applications? And even if the first version of this spying app only checks for md5 sums, which is arguably useless, I'm sure they're working on something more effective.

Terrorism is so easily thrown around as a blanket term these days. As many others have pointed out, the motivation seems to be more separatist than religious.

Post by yorwba » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 3:18 PM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #47

yorwba wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West does not currently have much of a problem with violent separatism. Maybe someone got into a bar fight over Catalan independence or Brexit, but all recent conflicts I'm aware of were relatively peaceful. If you compare this to the situation in Northern Ireland, I'd say things have gotten much better.

yougoslavian people will beg to differ. Civil war in a european country leading to the partition of the country into multiple states based on ethnic and religious criteria happened in europe just 25 years ago.

Post by 0xcde4c3db » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 3:19 PM UTC

nunobrito wrote: post #31

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Islamic extremism" In Xinjiang region, the concern is more about separatism , which is not terrorism, and which should be a right of any group. > "Anyone criticizing China while permitting their own country to do worse is an hypocrite" One can be critical of their own government while still being critical of others. Even in US, ordinary people don't have much control over the government, in particular over the sec…

Islamic extremism is deeply connected to separatism. That's what the "Islamic State" is all about. You can surely be critical of others, your own government does comparably worse to the same minority without even letting ordinary people know. That is hypocrisy.

Post by toast0 » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 3:24 PM UTC

zython wrote: post #5

>The app reportedly scans for the MD5 digital signatures of media files in the phone, and matches them to a stored database of offending files classified by the government as illegal "terrorist-related" media. What a dumb way to scan for "illegal" content, considering the goverment already controls their portion of the internet. So instead of monitoring who is accessing what they decide to compare checksums of files…