151–160 of 202 posts
Registering a sim card in Vietnam also requires your photo to be taken. Is this an Asia thing ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you gave too much benefit of doubt to the CCP. The CCP can't care less about phone scams and frauds. As a totalitarian state having total control of the society, the government can track down the scammers anytime they want to. There is no reason to believe the CCP does this to solve the robocalls or phone scams. It would be laughable to think XiJinping and his gangs put this issue on his priority list. The on…
I’m curious about one thing here. And maybe someone has ideas. Both China and Soviet Union (probably others too but I don’t know), pre-liberalization were your typical socialist state with lots of means to control people, so they did but... but people didn’t engage in much petty crime or gang crime. Those types of crimes were more or less very unusual. But in those same states today with more tools to control people,…
The reason for this isn't surveillance or the harshness of punishments.
The reason for it was that when there's an easy default roadmap for your life (School -> Gainful employment), you're not going to drop out of civilized society, and into criminality at the age of 15.
It's not that there's more to gain from criminality now, compared to fifty years ago. It's that there's less to lose. Instead of a social contract that guarantees[2] employment, a shitty apartment, and food on your table, if you just go through the motions, it's a dog-eat-dog-every-man-for-himself world. Unsurprisingly, many people find it easier to drop out of that, and make a living through crime.
[1] Without even mentioning the truly mind-blowing amount of low-level, and high-level corruption that the USSR experienced.
[2] Employment wasn't guaranteed - people had to go apply for jobs, have their employment and social records get checked, there was competition for getting into good jobs, etc - but 100% employment was an official goal of the state. This is not the case in either the West, or the East, anymore.
I suggested sending in homeless people to get the phone if it’s a prepaid one.
But more to the point, if you want anonymity in such a regime, you have to commandeer other people’s accounts and hope they don’t get in trouble. This is what botnets do, etc. But you may be able to use payphones or libraries or hotel phones etc. as long as you cover your face, fake your gait etc. and even that may not be enough when we are talking about heartbeat signatures, infrared signatures and so on.
Timing attacks, style of writing analysis etc. can also be used to easily out someone these days. Anonymity is quite fragile.
Read more about the mechanics here... it goes back to the Digital Imprimatur of 2003 which started it all for me
Having reread Oath of Fealty recently I am really of the belief it won't be long before we end up with heavily monitored enclaves simply out of a desire of many to not put one thought into their own safety and security if surrounded by like minded individuals who all give up privacy in order to guarantee the safety and security of the group.
All the photo apps today that are associated with youth involve many many pictures of themselves they tag with identifiable information so it is not a big leap to think that this level of privacy is not something they consider a big deal. To them their image is their identity and they want to be recognized. Privacy would only mean protecting what they chose not to make public.
There certainly is this odd occurrence where we have many denouncing loss of privacy who at the same time ask the government to do more for them which requires giving up more information to more groups. It really comes down to, which items of your identity are public and private. your image certainly is public and why would you in any sane society be afraid of that association?
At first I got the impression a photo was required when buying a new cellphone, but this appears to be just for new numbers. China already requires an ID to get a number, so I don’t see how requiring a photo will help them track people even more? Maybe it gives them an updated photo? However, if you don’t get a new number every few years, then it’s useless. My own country requires a photo ID to get a number and I’ve…
If the photo taken to get the number doesn't match the photo on file for the ID, they can now blame the seller. That creates an incentive for the seller to actually check the ID.
They are already monitoring the chat apps. If you say unseemly things, expect this: https://twitter.com/intypython/status/1200466904734785536?s=... Edit: changed link to original source
My wife has had a few messages "disappear" from WeChat (the Chinese Facebook), and that were not removed by group admins. It seems that at the low end, at least, they're content do just censor, and not take action against the speaker.
Is she in China or overseas? WeChat has different censorship policies for domestic vs foreign accounts, and silent blocking sometimes occurs when foreign accounts communicate with domestic accounts about sensitive topics [1]. It's also not encrypted, and it appears messages are automatically getting forwarded to the local (Chinese) police for investigation [2].
[1] We (can’t) Chat “709 Crackdown” Discussions Blocked on Weibo and WeChat: https://citizenlab.ca/2017/04/we-cant-chat-709-crackdown-dis...
[2] Over 300 million Chinese private messages were left exposed online: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/4/18250474/chinese-messages-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife has had a few messages "disappear" from WeChat (the Chinese Facebook), and that were not removed by group admins. It seems that at the low end, at least, they're content do just censor, and not take action against the speaker.
> My wife has had a few messages "disappear" from WeChat (the Chinese Facebook), and that were not removed by group admins. It seems that at the low end, at least, they're content do just censor, and not take action against the speaker. Is she in China or overseas? WeChat has different censorship policies for domestic vs foreign accounts, and silent blocking sometimes occurs when foreign accounts communicate with dom…
Fair enough. This was with an account that was registered within China, but the traffic is physically originating from the USA.
Just offering another perspective than most others had done here: I grew up in China and have been in China a few times in the past 10 years - the amount of Robocalls and phone scams was overwhelming (in fact, it was so bad that dual SIM mobile phones became popular because you can have a disposable SIM card for non-essential website registrations and one for family members that you keep private use). I had my identi…
Perhaps it achieves the goal, but is it the best approach? Isn't it doubling down on an already problematic scheme? User names and email addresses are more easily swapped than phone numbers, with facial recognition you're locking yourself even more to the phone number, making it even harder to switch when it becomes compromised.
At least here you need a legal address for bank account anyway, so financial institutions can just mail (the dead tree kind) you an unlock code for online banking, this makes a stolen identity far less useful.
There are ways to solve these kinds of problems that don't also feed the surveillance machinery.
When a nation is a superpower, it is able to influence the behavior of weaker states. It will exert its influence for a variety of reasons, but it is inevitable that with power comes the exertion of influence. China will use its power to prop up autocratic regimes across the world and export its technology and methods to make such autocracy possible and sustainable. China represents a threat to global democracy which…
I am hoping that the EU can devise a plan to fight China ever-increasing threats to democracy AND re-introduce manufacturing as a strong industry in all of the Union. It's obvious that individual European counties simply cannot withstand China on their own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you gave too much benefit of doubt to the CCP. The CCP can't care less about phone scams and frauds. As a totalitarian state having total control of the society, the government can track down the scammers anytime they want to. There is no reason to believe the CCP does this to solve the robocalls or phone scams. It would be laughable to think XiJinping and his gangs put this issue on his priority list. The on…
We call them "totalitarian", but that doesn't mean the state actually has total control over society. Society is still made up of people. In totalitarian systems, there's still crime and corruption. They may get harshly punished, but the police still needs to uncover it first, and that takes time and resources, and may not always be easy. Take the Pooh Bear jokes about Xi. He'd love to be able to stop them, but he ca…
CPP police always know the small towns of the most robocall farms and phonescam bases. The reason they do not stop those is because local polices take share from crime money, which also contributes to local economy.
If the CCP gang really wants to stop robocalls and phonescams, they only need to send a task force team from the central agencies. Then they can close all the roads around those small towns and shut down all the phone towers, and then capture all the criminals in a few days. There is no need to use AI for this kind of stuff.
Again, it is simply laughable to think Xi's gang care about robocalls and phonescams. They have too many other things to care about.