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WeChat and the Surveillance State

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Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#181

Post by [deleted] »

theseadroid wrote: post #74
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 there's a third option aside from continue the state quo or convert fully into a democracy? Maybe the party can evolve into something that's more and more benevolent to the people it governs? As a Chinese who emigrated because of the many social problems of China, I'm not sure switching to democracy right now will be beneficial for regular Chinese. You've all heard stories about how bad mannered Chinese tourist…

[deleted]

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#182

Post by rahimnathwani »

whatshisface wrote: post #135
polskibus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because in reality cashless is easy compared to clean water and no pollution for masses?

Cashless is also not desired by Americans, many of whom like cash. Stores are fine with taking it (no transaction fees after all), there are zero privacy concerns, and counterfeiting is not really a problem.

Cash doesn't have direct transaction costs, but:

- it needs to be manually reconciled at the start/end of each shift

- staff can steal it

- robbers can steal it

- it takes time to count out change (and to ensure you have enough small bills and coins)

- it takes time to deposit it at the bank

- it costs money to deposit it at the bank (even if Walmart is ok accepting cash for an iPad, I'm guessing Apple requires Walmart to pay by bank transfer)

I'm not sure about the US situation but, the last time I checked, UK banks charged 0.3%-0.5% for accepting a cash deposit from a business customer.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#183

Post by baby »

whatshisface wrote: post #170
baby wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never understood that. Living in the UK for example you never have to cary bills. Light wallet, so much more practical, I hate places that only accept cash.

What if every store accepted both cash and cards?

I'd be fine with this as long as you don't have to pay a fee if you're not paying cash (which is often a thing for small shops).

Unfortunately this is not the world we're living in :) it's often both cash and cards OR just cash. Berlin is a really good example of that, you always need cash on you which tricks the many tourists who come from countries were cash is not really a thing anymore.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#184

Post by rahimnathwani »

lame88 wrote: post #173
sho wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

There is a position between yours and sho's.

Sure, if every federal crime were enforced through automatic fines, this could be a mess due to the complexity of the law.

But what's your objection to a fine for changing lanes without indicating?

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#185

Post by whytaka »

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…

I doubt GP is complaining about the law itself. The question is always more about humans, systems, corruption, and power. Omnipresent surveillance is incredibly powerful, frighteningly so. And we all know human systems are corrupted over time. The question is, can an all powerful corrupt human system be overturned?

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#186

Post by rgbrenner »

eunos wrote: post #85
chvid wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think China take will the path to democracy most other democratic nations have taken including my own: As the middle class eventually grows big enough it will demand and get political influence ultimately creating democratic institutions (formal freedom of speech, parliaments, elections, referendums) as we have it in the west. It is easy to focus on a single news story and forgetting that China is a much freer soci…

Having said that is there any way to combine democracy and a single party fully embedded to the Government?

Sure.. right now there's a selection process for the National Congress... just make it so anyone can run for that position (and maybe the Central Committee too). Then hold free and fair elections in each province.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#187

Post by sho »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #180
sho wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

> Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water

100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point? Not like it's poisoned with heavy metals?

As for pollution, of course they have a long way to go, but the dystopian picture you paint is hardly fair. It's not perfect but you make it sound like Blade Runner 2049. It's not. I live in Bangkok right now and it is WAY worse than Shenzhen or Shanghai. But I never hear Thailand invoked in one of these "pollution hell" threads.

Look, what you said isn't technically incorrect but your level of hyperbole irked me. I always come across as defending China or something in these threads but I'm not really, I just want it to be fact based. China is not THAT bad. Yes, I know a lot of Chinese people, and they express no pressing desire to leave. It is very far from the worst place on earth to live.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#188

Post by rahimnathwani »

dheera wrote: post #149
rsync wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/Zep…

From what you've written, it sounds like:

- you are comfortable writing code

- you want to interact with WeChat friends on >2 devices (not just phone+web, phone+desktop or phone+tablet)

- you would like a synchronised history of your WeChat interactions

You could probably build something close (but not the same) as what you need using https://github.com/Chatie/wechaty

It's made for writing bots, but you could use it to write a gateway. And have each of your devices communicate via that gateway.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#189

Post by paulryanrogers »

jdietrich wrote: post #175
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 mig…

> CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people.

Certainly the nation has modernized rapidly. But at what cost? Western media speaks of famines, proxy wars, land grabs, implicit and explicit suppression of anything/anyone different.

(Not saying other forms of governing are guaranteed to do better, but at least with democracies power is supposed to be more distributed.)

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#190

Post by lame88 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #184
lame88 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

There is a position between yours and sho's. Sure, if every federal crime were enforced through automatic fines, this could be a mess due to the complexity of the law. But what's your objection to a fine for changing lanes without indicating?

I had no objection to that fine. I had an objection to the an automatic mechanism to do it, or to perfectly enforce any law, no matter how trivial, Simply because these kinds of things don't happen in a vacuum; the mechanisms built toward these ends will not be limited to being used toward that one end. For example maybe there's cameras everywhere to enforce this law. But then there's cameras everywhere. I highly recommend that article I linked if you have not read.

Edit 1: I realized what you meant with your question so disregard the first sentence. Edit 2: Also, it's worth stating that it follows that these concerns are completely independent of the complexity of the law.

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