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WeChat and the Surveillance State

bbc.com

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Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#171

Post by baby »

dheera wrote: post #70

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. 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…

TBF. This is because you only hang out with asian people. I live in the bay too and I don't know many people using wechat :|

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#172

Post by aasasd »

tuxxy wrote: post #156
AlexCoventry wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like San Francisco. I don't recognize Boston in that.

It's hilarious to me how many people from San Francisco think America revolves around their overpriced 47 square mile peninsula.

Just recently I noticed that non-Californians on HN now know what it feels like to read English-language internets while not being from the US.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#173

Post by lame88 »

sho wrote: post #159
neuralzen wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met a guy who said he lived in Shenzhen a while, and said that J-walking would get you an automatic deduction from your wechat pay account, assuming you were in front of a camera.

Let me turn that around for you. Would you like it if people who turned or changed lanes without indicating were reliably and automatically fined? Because I sure would. The law is the law. If it's a good law, then its efficient, universal, automatic enforcement should be a good thing. If not - then it's the law that needs to be changed. You're complaining about the enforcement - but what you actually don't like is th…

No I would not like that automatic fine. In theory okay, but in reality it's foolish to separate enforcement from what is being enforced. Moxie explained this well. In short, good luck changing that law.

https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#174

Post by xenospn »

baby wrote: post #171
dheera wrote: post #70

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. 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…

TBF. This is because you only hang out with asian people. I live in the bay too and I don't know many people using wechat :|

I only use WeChat with my Alibaba suppliers. No one else I know uses it.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#175

Post by jdietrich »

komali2 wrote: post #38

I 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…

Maybe one day, if China embraces democracy, it might hope to become as prosperous as India. /s

In all seriousness, "democracy" is at this point almost meaningless as a barometer of good governance. There are a lot of spectacularly successful autocracies and a lot of dismally awful democracies. In the broad scheme of things, the CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people. China might one day gradually transition towards democracy in the manner of Singapore, but many Chinese people are rightly fearful of the possibility of the collapse of the CPC. The most common outcome after the overthrow of a dictatorship is chaos and economic collapse, followed by a much worse dictatorship.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#176

Post by dang »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #157
nomnomray wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love wechat. sticker: gifs and emojis all shares the same sticker format. It has natively features for taking, editing and converting photos and videos directly into stickers. Generally, i find memes work a lot better in wechat. reliability: voice and video calling is buttery smooth. I've taken wechat calls internationally between china, taiwan, us, canada, australia and france. The service is always great even in…

A Slave loves his/her/its master. Blessed and behold, you are totally owned. A totally connected world is hell on earth. Just in case you do not know.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Also, could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#177

Post by dang »

nomnomray wrote: post #161
ngcc_hk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Slave loves his/her/its master. Blessed and behold, you are totally owned. A totally connected world is hell on earth. Just in case you do not know.

people like you make earth hell.

Personal attacks aren't ok on HN and we ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site to heart when posting here, we'd be grateful.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#178

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jimclegg wrote: post #94
komali2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(even if retired) being the key point. The PRC has active bureaucrats working in nearly every info company in the country. They are the Party's Cultural Representative and their word is law. There is no equivalent in the USA, not even close.

Seems like a difference without distinction if the outcomes desired by the government are achieved through retired agents and a variety of pressure points. The illusion of "average citizen control" is more common in USA population than China it seems, whether this control is real is debatable.

The current American government regularly issues proclamations that major news organizations are publishing fake news. It sure doesn't seem like they're achieving their desired outcomes there. Maybe that's not a fair comparison - have any major Chinese companies been able to say "yes, we understand Xi Jinping wants us to do X, but we think he's authoritarian and wrong so we won't do it"?

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#179

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

tuxxy wrote: post #158
joyjoyjoy wrote: post #145

Yes. 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 p…

What is this weird notion of "respecting sensitive issues"? Is that just a polite way of saying, "I don't discuss human and civil rights violations." Why should I respect a person's desire to not hear about their own government's crimes?

What makes the problem so challenging to fix is that it's not an inherently weird notion. I respect sensitive issues all the time; I don't make light of tragedies around people who've recently experienced them, I don't discuss controversial issues at quiet dinner parties, and so on. The Chinese government has just hijacked that entirely natural mechanism to justify driving some conversations out of the public sphere entirely.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#180

Post by _hardwaregeek »

sho wrote: post #155
_hardwaregeek wrote: post #105

I 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…

Oh come on. Pollution is highly localised. Yeah, there's a few bad cities but it's a big place and 99% of it is fine. And no clean water, really? That will be news to the billion plus inhabitants who haven't realised they're dead yet from lack of clean water, sixth sense style. Nit picking aside - that surveillance state is maybe 5 years ahead of the west. I'm continually amazed that western governments have allowed…

How many native Chinese do you know who drink tap water? Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water.

As for pollution, only 84 out of 338 cities reached the national standard for air quality [1]. That's not exactly "a few bad cities". The government has been working on improving it, but they still have a long way to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China#Air_polluti...

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