Another hit piece by bbc; move along there is nothing to see.
WeChat and the Surveillance State
141–150 of 275 posts
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of like the US government using Facebook data/communications to arrest people? Sounds very equal.
Interesting, I hadn't heard that the United States government was wholesale surveilling its population, with no oversight, with an open tap in Facebook data, and using that information to imprison people for thought crimes such as having a religion. False equivalence doesn't pass for me. The USA has surveillance issues, but it isn't the prc.
5 eyes, Prism, ATT fiber tapping, windows NSA key etc.. And how do you manage to conveniently forget about Snowden revelation?
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#143I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it. And I live in the Bay Area. If I don't use it I would basically be locking myself up in a prison where I would never see my friends. Even the majority of my friends who work at Facebook and Google use WeChat to orga…
"I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it." Genuinely curious - is there a non-app (ie., plain SMS) interface to wechat ? There is a plain SMS interaction layer for groupme and because I host my own phone service at twilio, I have total control over messagi…
The only officially supported alternative is https://web.wechat.com/ which requires scanning a QR code with the phone app to log in.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#144I was explaining what it's like to live in China to someone and it's like explaining a dystopian cyberpunk novel, but with a level of surrealism and just plain absurdity. A Gibson novel filtered through some Philip K. Dick. You have a gigantic surveillance state with unprecedented reach and control...banning people from referencing a cartoon bear. You have a society with an extremely sophisticated cashless economy——b…
Maybe it's because in reality cashless is easy compared to clean water and no pollution for masses?
Cashless means lack of tracking. Naturally, a surveillance state wants a non-cash society.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#145Yes. China. I love WeChat I must say. Much better than WhatsApp.
Yes, Tiananmen Square. Westerners in China call it "The day when nothing happened". But I also heard different views from Western Politicians that were deeply involved with the Chinese system. The amazing thing is that the students were actually allowed to protest for a long time.
The guy in the video is just an asshole. He is harassing normal Chinese people who might get problems.
I love Chine. I understand and respect "sensitive" issues. In the end I can not become Chinese and always will be a "tolerated guest".
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#146I used to hold a kind of naive hope that the ham fisted Party would eventually be replaced with democracy. I remember back in 2011 my friends that were placed in moderately distinguished positions were sending their kids to Canada to collect foreign dual citizenship, fully expecting the collapse of the PRC in their lifetime. But now I think the Party is too good at maintaining itself. It's augmented by technology lik…
Massive power grabs can be a sign of weakness, not strength.
"kids to Canada to collect foreign dual citizenship"
China does not allow for dual citizenship.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#147It's thing like this that I wonder if the the US will always have a bit of an advantage in the coming cold war. Similar to how the Soviet Union gave the West continual propaganda victories, China seems to be replicating the same mistakes. The US has done so many bad things, always seemed to win the propaganda war because the Soviet union was so unequivocally repressive.
Maybe. But both, the Soviet Union and the US had to offer something.
US: Idea of freedom and democracy
Soviet Union: Idea of equality and communism.
China lacks an ideology that can attract foreigners. Also, in all super powers since Rome it was possible for able people to become a citizen and to be part of it. Even Nazis became American (think von Braun).
It is not possible to become a Chinese citizen.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#148Why so focused on democracy? Is democracy a value by itself?
Have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nCSXvCM3ogI/WZhtafxpPoI/AAAAAAAAX...
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#149I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it. And I live in the Bay Area. If I don't use it I would basically be locking myself up in a prison where I would never see my friends. Even the majority of my friends who work at Facebook and Google use WeChat to orga…
"I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it." Genuinely curious - is there a non-app (ie., plain SMS) interface to wechat ? There is a plain SMS interaction layer for groupme and because I host my own phone service at twilio, I have total control over messagi…
I've already deprecated SMS as a form of communication with me, and auto-trash all SMS with an appropriate deprecation warning returned to sender telling them to e-mail me instead. So an SMS/WeChat gateway wouldn't help (it doesn't exist anyway).
But that aside it's less about it being app. It's more that:
- It's a walled garden that is difficult to build plugins upon. About 10 years ago with QQ/ICQ/AIM/MSN/Gtalk/Zephyr I had written plugins for end-to-end encryption, auto rendering of LaTeX equations, remote control of IoT devices, gateways between platforms so a QQ friend could be in a group with an MSN friend, with me as the gateway, automatic translation, and lots of other features. WeChat is feature-wise a HUGE HUGE HUGE step back for me from what I had built for myself back then.
- It only supports signing on from a single device at a time. I never have a consistent device with me, and change devices multiple times over the course of a day. Facebook messenger and E-mail work extremely well if switch devices frequently, and keep all conversation logs on the server so it's easy to continue conversations in another location without carrying a phone around. My only solution with WeChat is to have multiple accounts, one per device, and pull each friend into a group with all of my other accounts. This emulates the functionality of Facebook messenger.
- Too much spying. It constantly scans my Wi-Fi networks, sensor data, installed applications, IMU/GPS, and lots of other things. I run it on a 2nd phone that has LineageOS on paranoid privacy settings and spit back fake sensor data when it tries to do those things. I don't have anything to hide, but they shouldn't be doing that stuff. Also, if you don't give WeChat permissions to certain things, it won't let you login, period. Much different from, say, Facebook, which will let you login but will just be crippled in the features you didn't give it appropriate permissions for.
- The UX downright sucks. You can't group friends or categorize groups, which means your screen is a mess once you join a bunch of groups. You can pin friends to the top, but once you pin enough friends, the chatrooms get pushed down so you can't see them anymore. People use WeChat to organize events via groups, yet it has no event-related features. The result is that you have to swipe through pages after pages of chitchat just to find the time and location, and screen through the chitchat to look for changes in the time and location from what was originally said. It's a horribly inefficient way to organize events. Just one of many problems.
Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The NSA can't watch our every move, that's illegal. We learned from Edward Snowden that they do so for some people anyway, illegally. It's bad and wrong. It's not nearly at the level of China. America doesn't have xinjiang reeducation camps for political dissidents that also happens to be full of people charged with the crime of being religious. America isn't harvesting the organs of its prisoners against their will.…
If we're talking about what a state considers to be marginal groups, you must not compare your own imagined experiences if you're not part of a marginal group. The consequences of being caught by the police as a black man, for example, is far far worse in the US than it is in China or many other places. This is also a much more likely event. You might want to try arousing the suspicions of your own state to see how i…
> The consequences of being caught by the police as a black man, for example, is far far worse in the US than it is in China or many other places.
This claim is almost impossible to evaluate. What do you mean by 'caught'? Are you referring to guilty people being punished in accordance with the law? Innocent people being unfairly targeted for investigation? Or illegal police brutality?