We Chat, They Watch

Post by Aperocky » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

dstryr wrote: post #217

yumraj wrote: post #90

Honestly curious: knowing what everyone knows, why would any person who is not of Chinese origin, use WeChat? What's the use case?

While inside China, it is virtually impossible to work in any capacity, in any field, without using WeChat. Outside China, it is the most reliable means of communication to people without access to unrestricted internet. This has become even more difficult within the past year with the blocking of Shadowsocks proxies. You are unlikely to have friends with the ability or knowledge to install v2ray+vmess+websocket+tls…

Post by arcticbull » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #222

arcticbull wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the ban may not be perfect, but as a Canadian, I can say unequivocally: I don't need perfect to be the enemy of good. There's no reason to possess these weapons any more than there's a reason to possess nuclear warheads. The next bill can ban more, fix the bugs, etc, but the flag has been planted: there's no room for those weapons in Canada. A huge number of people have wanted to ban weapons like these since Eco…

PAL/RPAL holders, or weapons stolen from them, account for virtually no gun crimes in Canada. Essentially all are carried out with illegal weapons smuggled in from the US. Therefore, the ban is ineffective in serving its mandate, punishes law abiding, statistically harmless individuals needlessly and saddles the taxpayer, of which only 60% of households in Canada are, with yet more debt for nothing. It has also set a…

Post by sheepdestroyer » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #196

kibwen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not a single social network that has begun to require phone verification because of the risk of "toxicity or hate speech". It's all to fight spam and to better track user activity (and, if we're being charitable to them, perhaps to stymie deliberate propaganda/fake news).

This. A service I built+run started getting overrun with bot users. The signup CAPTCHA didn’t help because they’d sign-up for accounts using humans - then after that’s done they’d copy their access tokens to the bot users. We couldn’t use a CAPTCHA for every operation on the platform. But by requiring a real phone number that we verify (by placing a TTS phone call - not an SMS - as processing received TTS calls is mu…

Post by mrcodedude » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #227

fiblye wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of China, we're pretty lucky that we can just register for random sites like HN with nothing more than a username and password and start talking. Every Chinese site I've ever used requires phone number or ID verification. Most of them only allow Chinese-registered phones, meaning it's absolutely impossible to communicate with Chinese people from the outside world, aside from a very small number of carefully v…

> Every Chinese site I've ever used requires phone number or ID verification Frankly, this happens a lot in the West these days, too. Take OKCupid, for instance. And the third-party doctrine.

Post by wolco » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

pmachinery wrote: post #220

softwarejosh wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah i literally dont get why the guy brought up race, they should be bringing up shit like video game companies making their black characters white to sell to china. or how about the basic example of blizzards fumbling of the pro hong kong competition winner last year

> i literally don't get why the guy brought up race They brought up race because they were replying to a racist conspiracy theory amounting to them running Hollywood and pushing their agenda. Hacker News is one of the few sites - others being Stormfront, Daily Stormer, 8chan - where that kind of shit still flies.