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China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

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Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#151

Post by vtail »

Zak wrote: post #115
jackgavigan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream. It wouldn't surprise me if a Western government (probably the UK's) considers introducing legislation to require exactly this in the not-too-distant future, most likely under the guise of preventing the spread of extremist propaganda. If they do, companies like Facebook and YouTube will face a choice between acceding to the new regula…

Germany has recently started requiring identity verification of this sort to obtain prepaid phone service. I was shocked to learn that, and find it frighteningly close to what China is doing.

In Russia, where there is a similar regulation, the solution is simple: find a homeless person with a passport, pay him to register a new mobile phone number under his name. There are also companies selling already registered phone numbers.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#152

Post by jbhatab »

gergdgdfg wrote: post #125

I grew up in China and came to the U.S. more than 10 years ago. What I have been seeing is the decline of the United States. That's said, I'm worrying about China a lot more. I think it's on track to repeat the mistakes it had done before. You often see articles here saying China will surpass the States in A.I. and science. I doubt it. I doubt a country without freely accessible information will be competent. I doubt…

"Who will be replacing the States?"

I don't understand why there needs to be a replacement? I feel as though the United States isn't declining but information is spreading equalizing the equation globally. Sure there are political issues that cause back and forth, but I feel we are moving more towards a global culture with aligned goals faster than ever before.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#153

Post by jjeaff »

guscost wrote: post #140
gergdgdfg wrote: post #125

I grew up in China and came to the U.S. more than 10 years ago. What I have been seeing is the decline of the United States. That's said, I'm worrying about China a lot more. I think it's on track to repeat the mistakes it had done before. You often see articles here saying China will surpass the States in A.I. and science. I doubt it. I doubt a country without freely accessible information will be competent. I doubt…

I'm cynical about a lot of things, like our dysfunctional mess of a government, a Fortune 500 saturated with exploitative bullshit, and the silly summer-camp that college has turned into. And people have been telling me about the decline of America for my whole life (admittedly not a long life). But I think they are just overwhelmed with worry because we have access to so much information, and I think America easily…

On almost any metric I can find, the US is getting better and better. The only decline the us is experiencing is a decline in growth "rates" which is predictable for any mature economy.

Crime is lower, standard of living is higher, poverty is less... That's not to say the us doesn't have a lot of problems, but overall, it is objectively better than before.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#154

Post by xfer »

Zak wrote: post #115
jackgavigan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream. It wouldn't surprise me if a Western government (probably the UK's) considers introducing legislation to require exactly this in the not-too-distant future, most likely under the guise of preventing the spread of extremist propaganda. If they do, companies like Facebook and YouTube will face a choice between acceding to the new regula…

Germany has recently started requiring identity verification of this sort to obtain prepaid phone service. I was shocked to learn that, and find it frighteningly close to what China is doing.

The same was(probably is?) true in India. I couldn't get a prepaid SIM without identification.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#155

Post by coldtea »

losteric wrote: post #142
coldtea wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whereas there's no opposition from "the right" against the Nazis for examples?

Obviously most of the right is against Nazis, but the modern conservative faction seems to draw a much higher ratio of violence and fascist rhetoric than the left. When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equiva…

>When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.

Does it though? Because I found the majority of the media except niche-oriented ones like FOX and Breibart do not fit that profile.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#156

Post by wyager »

jawbone3 wrote: post #83
wyager wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of how the only people in the US to ever be successfully censored from the public internet for political (as opposed to legal) reasons are far-right websites? This literally happened in the last week; domain registrars (the only gateway the public has to critical public DNS infrastructure) decided to voluntarily censor various far-right websites citing "hate speech" as their justification. There is, evi…

Right, there was nothing political at all about the supression of wikileaks and torrent sites, it was just legal proceedings...

Wikileaks hasn't been censored at all; they're even still present on Twitter (unlike any far-right-leaning personality).

Wikileaks has been immorally persecuted in many ways, but direct censorship is not one of them.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#157

Post by JohnTHaller »

coldtea wrote: post #135
neya wrote: post #5

There are a dozen popular live streaming apps in China where one can simply just stream what you're doing to everyone on the site and people can just watch them for hours. You can think of it like Instagram stories or Snapchat per se. Or even Facebook live. This isn't some western media propaganda. I tried one of them very recently (I don't want to give them any undeserved marketing), they allowed me to sign up and t…

> Only the Chinese government can get away with something unbelievable like these regulations The US and EU have tons of those sort of things. Patriot Act? Mass surveillance programs? Required ID to get a mobile connection? UK's largest number of CCTVs on any place on earth? Heck, in the US they can trial you as an adult at 15 and send you to war at 17 but you need to be over 21 and show ID to drink a beer at a bar..…

I don't recall having to use my passport before posting online here in the US.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#158

Post by notyourwork »

nwjtkjn wrote: post #118
notyourwork wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree with that answer. I just tried signing up to test this and after submitting was asked for a phone number to verify. The first form didn't require a phone but after that it redirected to a page with a link to https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/114129?hl=en&ctx=... that referencing GSuite verification.

I feel like this is a very recent change; I've definitely created "burner" gmail accounts in the past and I don't remember providing my cell phone number.

Yep, same here. For me it had to be at least 5 years ago.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#159

Post by agumonkey »

neya wrote: post #5

There are a dozen popular live streaming apps in China where one can simply just stream what you're doing to everyone on the site and people can just watch them for hours. You can think of it like Instagram stories or Snapchat per se. Or even Facebook live. This isn't some western media propaganda. I tried one of them very recently (I don't want to give them any undeserved marketing), they allowed me to sign up and t…

Few years ago I spent time on Omegle. I got to speak with Chinese guys. Their first question was often about how we liked China (maybe invested in national pride, or worried).

I love most asian things so I could gladly list much many things I liked from China. Even after that happy introduction, the discussion went into "you know China is not all good" then listing a few problems. So far nothing surprising. But then a weird silence occured and all of a sudden, the other user started to nervously type "nono, forget it, I said nothing; oh my god .." * user disconnected *

that's what real lack of freedom of speech is.

Re: China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting

#160

Post by CryptoPunk »

avaer wrote: post #84
jackgavigan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream. It wouldn't surprise me if a Western government (probably the UK's) considers introducing legislation to require exactly this in the not-too-distant future, most likely under the guise of preventing the spread of extremist propaganda. If they do, companies like Facebook and YouTube will face a choice between acceding to the new regula…

You can't fix this with tech. No amount of decentralized web will help if ID is legally required to post things. Torrenting, encryption, and similar will simply be made illegal, since that's required for enforcement. Many of the established lobbies would support that, for the usual justifications. You can only fix this by not letting the law start on this crazy slippery slope.

While I agree that it's critically important to not get on the slippery slope of laws that restrict internet freedom, I think a decentralized internet infrastructure would make censorship significantly more difficult for governments to impose.

Without centralised gatekeepers, the only viable way to censor the internet is to enforce laws on end-users, which is a daunting task for any government.

And technologically, at least two of the necessary elements for a global meshnet are here: protocols for decentralized addressing and routing, like cjdns >1, and protocols for peer-to-peer electronic value transfer between nodes, like Raiden >2. The only major missing piece of the technological puzzle, AFAICS, is a technology for cheaply deploying telecommunication backbone links.

>1 https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...

>2 https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden/blob/master/README....

DISCLAIMER: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.

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