Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WeChat and the Surveillance State

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 275 posts

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#261

Post by komali2 »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #240
repolfx wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, how do you see that China has been stable? In the 20th century it's been conquered in an invasion, then went through a communist revolution and fought a civil war that split itself in two. The governments have been replaced repeatedly. It has such severe racial and civil unrest in its western regions the PRC built huge concentration camps and 'disappeared' millions of people into them as the only way to keep th…

> Well, how do you see that China has been stable? Hard to say. China's society has been around since after the unification, 221BC (post-waring-states, the qin dynasty). It may have gone back further, to the shang dynasty (~1500 BC) but that was probably a period of conflict throughout. But does conflict in itself negate continuity of society? But a) my knowledge of chinese history is minimal, and b) most important,…

> But does conflict in itself negate continuity of society?

Perhaps we should ask the tens of thousands of families and cultures that were wiped out in endless war?

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#262

Post by komali2 »

theseadroid wrote: post #113
NicoJuicy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. And when we talk about China = all the stuff that has been going on lately, comments here are not pro Xi mostly.

Thank you for being curious. What I found offending on HN is people who are cool-headed within their own domain can be irrational and quick to conclusions when it comes to issues related to China. We all know the project management tree swing cartoon[1]. We can almost replace the project with China within this cartoon lol. 1. http://www.zentao.pm/file.php?f=201712/f_2a1ca764ce384a33d05... edit: I read some of your ot…

India has a big population and doesn't throw thousands of falun gong and Uighurs into reeducation camps, harvesting their organs at whim.

India has a big population and doesn't threaten the sovereignty of democratic nations like Taiwan.

I'm happy to acknowledge the good things happening in China and the advancements its made since the cultural revolution (of which my partner's mother can tell you stories of from her time in labor camps), but not when the objective is to try to sweep under the rug the massive crimes against humanity China is doing, right now.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#263

Post by rahimnathwani »

yjhoney wrote: post #256
rahimnathwani wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if someone were to devise a mechanism to detect and prosecute people changing lanes without indicating, with the following properties? - perfect accuracy (no FP; no FN) - automated enforcement via a fine, without knowing the identity of the perpetrator (just assume it's possible; I know it's hard) - no potential for the device or underlying technology to be used or repurposed for any other form of surveillance o…

> Would such a system (and automated enforcement) be OK? Yes. But as you pointed out, `automated enforcement via a fine, without knowing the identity of the perpetrator` is hard. And as others have pointed out, Point 1 and Point 3 are also difficult to accomplish. Question for you is, are you okay for the government to roll out a mechanism to detect and prosecute people changing lanes without giving you any guarantee…

We mostly agree.

I'd be happy to compromise a bit on point 1. I could accept a high (20%) false negative rate. If the fine were small enough then I'd be OK with a small number of false positives (as long as they're randomly distributed, not hammering one person who happens to live near a faulty camera).

I wouldn't want to compromise on point 2 or 3, particularly for this example (catching impolite drivers).

But what if the example were about a highly accurate system for detecting kidnappers or people traffickers or something? It seems harder for me to argue against enforcement on the grounds of privacy or slippery slope.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#264

Post by repolfx »

komali2 wrote: post #260
repolfx wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree there's a long way between the USA and China for the reasons you mention. Still, something nags at me. The USA has all those things in some less government-oriented sense, not organised by a totalitarian party but by a vaguely defined group of powerful people who all live in the same few cities, who all share the same worldview, who all work extraordinarily hard to keep people they disagree with away from the…

> As a foreigner I frequently encounter astonishing falsehoods about my country in supposedly respectable and internationalist papers like the New York Times. This is news to me - do you have examples? I'd be very interested in learning more. >activists in its employee and management Those are citizens, not government officials. And right now I'd be inclined to say that the average bay area Facebook employee's desire…

The last article I read on Brexit in the NYT started by claiming the British economy was shrinking, and went downhill from there. As far as I can tell Americans are receiving a completely garbled view of anything EU or Brexit related.

Also although I'm not Russian, see practically anything related to Russia, Russian Twitter bots, etc.

right now I'd be inclined to say that the average bay area Facebook employee's desires align very little with that of the federal executive branch of the USA, so this point doesn't work for me

I think you missed my point, because I did say in my post "if Clinton had won, the alignment between government and the Hollywood/big tech/etc nexus would be complete". But she didn't win, so you're right, to some small extent they're different. That said, the executive is so huge in America that even a guy like Trump is very limited in how much he can steer it.

I was also very careful to say that the things I'm comparing are not on the same scale, so, your last paragraphs are merely making points I already concede. I am not claiming the USA and China are the same, I clearly stated they aren't, but it's important to reflect on the similarities. After all the Chinese regime is not primarily enforced by the actual executive branch, but rather by regime loyalists in positions of power in so-called private industry as well. It's not people who directly report to Xi Jinping censoring WeChat. It's WeChat employees themselves who try to guess what might be ideologically compatible, or what might be "best for Chinese harmony".

A far-reaching ideology that has the explicit support of the power structures creating communication services, art, culture, news and sometimes government, and which considers censorship ("deplatforming" in western NewSpeak) to be an important and legitimate tool for preventing the spread of rumours ("hate") is definitely something to sit up and take notice of.

Finally, I'd remark that modern feminism has nothing to do with promoting equality for men and women. Quite the opposite.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#265

Post by repolfx »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #247
repolfx wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, stability is not well defined. I guess I'd define it as a period of time without wars or non-peaceful transfers of governmental power. Your knowledge of Chinese history seems pretty good to me! By the invasion I didn't mean the opium wars, I was referring to the Sino-Japanese wars in which Japan essentially conquered most of China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasion_of_Manchuria China has probably h…

Nice reply, thanks, upvoted. Pinning anything down is a bugger but I'll accept your definition of "without [civil] wars or non-peaceful transfers of governmental power". It's pretty good. (just to be a complete bastard, do 'the troubles' of northern ireland count as civil war?) My knowledge of chinese history is an illusion. I've always found the culture interesting and the 2D & 3D art/sculpture much more elegant tha…

The Troubles certainly got pretty close and are the best rebuttal to the idea of British stability, yes. And that unfortunate partition of India thing.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#266

Post by dang »

repolfx wrote: post #229
jdietrich wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

If you keep doing ideological flamewar on HN we are going to ban you. Breaking the site guidelines will eventually get your main account banned as well.

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

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#268

Post by komali2 »

jimclegg wrote: post #95
komali2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In many ways its worse, PRC doesn't arrest or extrajudicially murder people that have never visited China from what I understand. Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes.

> Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes.

We certainly don't know this to be true or false, because China hasn't had a Julian Assange yet.

What we can work with is available data - China has tens of thousands of thought-criminals in reeducation camps, and is actively killing them for their organs. America has leveraged its extrajudicial international powers twice in recent memory - once for Julian Assange, once for Kim Dotcom.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#269

Post by theseadroid »

komali2 wrote: post #262
theseadroid wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for being curious. What I found offending on HN is people who are cool-headed within their own domain can be irrational and quick to conclusions when it comes to issues related to China. We all know the project management tree swing cartoon[1]. We can almost replace the project with China within this cartoon lol. 1. http://www.zentao.pm/file.php?f=201712/f_2a1ca764ce384a33d05... edit: I read some of your ot…

India has a big population and doesn't throw thousands of falun gong and Uighurs into reeducation camps, harvesting their organs at whim. India has a big population and doesn't threaten the sovereignty of democratic nations like Taiwan. I'm happy to acknowledge the good things happening in China and the advancements its made since the cultural revolution (of which my partner's mother can tell you stories of from her…

What you are saying is India has a better human rights record than China. But at the end of the day what exactly is human rights? To you it's the ability to speak freely, to nordic countries it can be free education, free healthcare, and even free internet connections. But to a poor country, what is the most important human right? It's be able to be fed! It's not die!

According to world bank data, China had 755.8 million people living on less than $1.9 a day in 1990. In 2013 it's 25.2 million.

What about India? There are still 268 million people earning less than $1.9 per day in 2011 and data are not collected afterwards[1]. More than doubled the infant mortality rate[2].

Now I believe you live in SFBA. There are ton of mainland Chinese working at AMZ, at FB, at Google, etc. Tons of them in Chinese grocery stores. Go ask them if they think India is better than mainland China to live. Now that they live freely away from mainland China's propaganda, go ask them if they care about the massive crime you are talking about to the degree they would want a government overthrown and have a government similar to India's.

Again my point is there are huge problems about PRC. Still, it would be highly unlikely that the solution is what you, a nonexpert, proposed. I believe there are westerners who understand the problems better than me. But they've spent years of effort studying the issues. Not like you or even me who just read some news articles and think we knew better. Thinking about it it's almost like climate change. Everyone has a say to it no matter what experts think.

1 http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/CHN http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/IND http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/RUS http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/BRA look up some other third world countries as you see fit.

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mo...

I'll not monitor this thread anymore but I've sent you a msg we can talk there.

Re: WeChat and the Surveillance State

#270

Post by yjhoney »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #263
yjhoney wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would such a system (and automated enforcement) be OK? Yes. But as you pointed out, `automated enforcement via a fine, without knowing the identity of the perpetrator` is hard. And as others have pointed out, Point 1 and Point 3 are also difficult to accomplish. Question for you is, are you okay for the government to roll out a mechanism to detect and prosecute people changing lanes without giving you any guarantee…

We mostly agree. I'd be happy to compromise a bit on point 1. I could accept a high (20%) false negative rate. If the fine were small enough then I'd be OK with a small number of false positives (as long as they're randomly distributed, not hammering one person who happens to live near a faulty camera). I wouldn't want to compromise on point 2 or 3, particularly for this example (catching impolite drivers). But what…

> what if the example were about a highly accurate system for detecting kidnappers or people traffickers or something?

That is always the argument for total surveillance state. In Singapore, crime rates are close to 0, but to be effective it means no privacy and everybody is monitored. I'm not okay with this.

Post reply on HN