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Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

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Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#161

Post by mindslight »

JPKab wrote: post #47
rpmcmurdo wrote: post #37

The irony is that the people complaining about this are the same ones who are gleefully sharing their personal details and narrative on social media, and Facebook in particular. The only difference between mass surveillance in the US and China is that 99% of the US population happily opts in or doesn't care.

I don't disagree with you, but government compulsion makes this a different animal entirely. The bigger context is that in the US, there is SUPPOSED to be a system in which companies can successfully resist government demands (remember that Apple did this to the FBI when they wanted to crack a criminal's phone passcode), whereas in China, that cannot happen. So yes, people give away their data for stupid conveniences…

There is much less "government compulsion" in the US, but in its place is still de facto compulsion. In general, comparisons with the US are difficult because in the US large corporations are given the power of defining much of societal policy.

Saying that "Facebook/Google etc aren't supposed to share the data with the government" only makes sense in some abstract sense of it wasn't supposed to be like this. But power tends to coalesce - the only "supposed to" is in some abstract moral stewardship sense, a responsibility that has been long forgotten by the business community, if it ever existed in the first place. Facebook/Google want to agglomerate data from the financial surveillance bureaus, and the (nominal) government buys the proceeds from both of them in a "free market" transaction. And then on the output/control side, companies use these surveillance databases to weed out "undesirable" customers, with their competitors following in lock step lest they end up with even more undesirables.

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#162

Post by whoevercares »

eznoonze wrote: post #137
azinman2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will they fail? So far they’ve been executing pretty well for the past 20-30 years...

Past 20-30 years as you said. Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. They don't have the same officials now as they did for the past few decades. Check out who the current ruler is and its background. This guy is a hardcore dictator who doesn't want to listen to any idea beside his own. And he's only got an elementary education. That's a recipe for failure.

I have to agree with you. All leaders before him are pretty well educated for their time being.

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#163

Post by nl »

vbezhenar wrote: post #146
aplummer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's to track crimes associated with burner sims. * Not trying to justify it either direction.

I wonder does it help? I'm sure that it's easy to find some homeless person, who don't know you and register SIM for his ID.

It helps a lot.

It isn't for tracking homeless people. It's for building network graphs of calls from burner phones to organised crime people.

Most of the time the burners are useless, but once you have a cluster of them you can automatically do data matching on them all, and sometimes (often!) they got lazy on a couple and used the same identities to buy them.

Once you have a few using the same identity then you track that identity down.

The friction in forcing identification means that lazy criminals at the bottom of the structure at some point forget to do it.

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#164

Post by yorwba »

datashow wrote: post #160
mcv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course Xi stopped Pooh Bear jokes in public space in mainland China. I am not sure what you are talking about. 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 ta…

> They have too many other things to care about.

If they really had total control, having too many other things to care about wouldn't be a problem. After all, they'd totally control those other things as well. But that "task force team from the central agencies" probably has its hands full securing the little control they have.

Given that they do not have total control, things like combating robocalls and phonescams need to be handled by more mundane countermeasures, like adding bureaucratic requirements to the phone number registration process.

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#165

Post by AnimalMuppet »

take_a_breath wrote: post #71
corporate_shi11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has been a champion for real democracies across the world for decades. It has propped up autocracies in the past, but those pale in comparison to its global support for democracy.

America has also disposed of plenty of democratically-elected regimes (Panama, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, etc.). I’m not sure who gets to determine if that ”pales in comparison” to its support of other democracies, but it did happen.

Sure it did, and it's a shame to the US that it happened.

But the US did also prop up democratic regimes. Now, in contrast, China and Russia... did they ever help democracy, anywhere?

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#166

Post by corporate_shi11 »

braythwayt wrote: post #122
kiba wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US schools is about certain school districts, not national policies.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” —Dr. Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail. https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail...

You miss the point of the comment. Comparing the CCP federal structure to a local school district is a laughably inappropriate comparison.

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#167

Post by AnimalMuppet »

eznoonze wrote: post #137
azinman2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will they fail? So far they’ve been executing pretty well for the past 20-30 years...

Past 20-30 years as you said. Past performance is not a guarantee of future success. They don't have the same officials now as they did for the past few decades. Check out who the current ruler is and its background. This guy is a hardcore dictator who doesn't want to listen to any idea beside his own. And he's only got an elementary education. That's a recipe for failure.

From Wikipedia:

> From 1975 to 1979, Xi studied chemical engineering at Beijing's Tsinghua University as a "Worker-Peasant-Soldier student". The engineering majors there spent about 15 percent of their time studying Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought and 5 percent of their time doing farm work and "learning from the People's Liberation Army".

So, university education in chemical engineering, with 20% political content. Still, not "only an elementary education".

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#168

Post by mc32 »

vkou wrote: post #152
mc32 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

There wasn't much organized crime, in the sense of street gangs, in the more urban areas of the Soviet Union. (The various rural provinces, especially in the Soviet-occupied middle east are another story.) There was, of course, plenty of petty crime, smuggling, and un-organized property and violent crime, etc. [1] The reason for this isn't surveillance or the harshness of punishments. The reason for it was that when…

Thanks I think that explains the carrot portion. The various stick options likely helped too—the various efforts to “eradicate counterrevolutionaries” and decrying leniency and favoring resoluteness and setting goals for executions likely has an impact.

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#169

Post by vkou »

mc32 wrote: post #168
vkou wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't much organized crime, in the sense of street gangs, in the more urban areas of the Soviet Union. (The various rural provinces, especially in the Soviet-occupied middle east are another story.) There was, of course, plenty of petty crime, smuggling, and un-organized property and violent crime, etc. [1] The reason for this isn't surveillance or the harshness of punishments. The reason for it was that when…

Thanks I think that explains the carrot portion. The various stick options likely helped too—the various efforts to “eradicate counterrevolutionaries” and decrying leniency and favoring resoluteness and setting goals for executions likely has an impact.

After destalinization, nobody doing law enforcement in the USSR had execution quotas, or was inventing counterrevolutionaries to eradicate.

Re: Chinese telecoms must use "AI and other technical means" to identify phone users

#170

Post by int_19h »

mc32 wrote: post #138
datashow wrote: post #135

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,…

I would recommend looking up the crime stats for USSR. There's a very big difference between the perception and the reality there.
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