Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request • Hacker News Board

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#331

Post by augustt » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #326

throwaway0613 wrote: post #118

Bear in mind that Zoom is a Chinese company — the founding team is Chinese; the core engineering and ops teams are largely in Suzhou and Hangzhou. So, while they are incorporated in the US and have significant presence in their HQ, their ties to China are stronger than the more-commonly-discussed outsourced-engineering sort of relationship.

When will this meme die? Zoom is NOT a Chinese company. It is incorporated in and headquartered in the US. Like any American company ever, it follows US laws in the US, and local laws in other companies where it operates. End of story. Yes their culture certainly has stronger cultural internal ties to China, due to the number of Chinese employees, but what has that got to do with anything? At the end of the day, they…

When will the meme that hating an organ harvesting totalitarian government == racism die?

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#332

Post by pphysch » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

deathgrips wrote: post #69

joyfulmantis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that your country knows best and that your countries companies can feel free to ignore other countries laws while operating in them is -- imperialism.

Call it whatever you want, I'll take the imperialist country that doesn't censor activists' accounts.

I too have forgotten about Snowden and Manning, the latter of which has undergone extensive psychological torture at the hands of the US military government.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#333

Post by silentsea90 » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #327

gonehome wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but this is the mistake they’re acknowledging with a promise to build out the system to only suppress the mainland China citizens specifically. My point is that this is not acceptable either.

>Yeah, but this is the mistake they’re acknowledging Out of interest, did they fix their "mistake" and reinstate the accounts?

Afaik, they have reinstated the accounts

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#334

Post by pphysch » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #103

pnako wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which country would that be? Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc. Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.

It's no cop out - businesses don't hold a monopoly on violence. They can't summarily remove the right of travel and speech (by jailing someone). A Nazi getting banned from Facebook isnt comparable to a human rights lawyer being stuck under house arrest for years.

A whistleblower being disappeared or psychologically tortured is perhaps a fairer comparison to what goes on under Freedom & Democracy.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#335

Post by 6AA4FD » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

totony wrote: post #175

6AA4FD wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a problem with twitter hiding trump's tweets and new zealand banning the christchurch shooter's manifesto, there's no inconsistency. There's also room for applying your own standard of free speech vs hate speed across international borders: I might say that the protestors in china were exercising free speech for political change, while trump's speech has no important theoretical or political content and i…

I think the parent is right in that free speech is not an absolute and has geographical restrictions. Most western nations restrict free speech mostly by broadly defining some forms of speech as hate. Saying hate speech laws and free speech are consistent with each other is disingenuous considering one exists to limit the other. I can understand the argument that hate speech is a fair restriction, but one must conced…

I should clarify: most americans think everyone is entitled to some right called "free speech" but there are philosophical justifications of this that cut across the boundary between ideas and acts (kind of hard to summarize it) that exclude a lot of speech acts from "free speech" [0]. I was trying to say that it's not inconsistent to apply a single framework for free speech across national borders or despite companies like twitter blocking trump's tweets because there are theories of speech rights that work that way.

[0]: There is an interesting paper on this called 'A Theory of Freedom of Expression' by Thomas Scanlon that can do a better job of explaining it. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2264971?seq=1

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#336

Post by ciguy » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

anewdirection wrote: post #309

ciguy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Amazon have their own dedicated fiber between DC sites, but there was evidence that the NSA was still tapping it at some points. So they added encryption between the sites as an extra safeguard.

Not quite, they allowed NSA explicitly, and now they have their own decryption keys. Whereever did you get the idea google hid data from the nsa?

From people I know working Data Center Ops at Google. They were super pissed about the NSA tapping at the time and steps were definitely taken to further encrypt their data in transit.

Of course executives at Google may have handed over a set of keys to the NSA after this was done. If I had to bet I would say that the NSA has more than one way to get whatever data they want from any of the top tech companies. Either via stealing, insiders or coercion they have many options.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#337

Post by pphysch » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #204

NicoJuicy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm against China here. But people should realize that the US law is almost forced to every online company/user.

1. Fuck the US government. 2. Fuck the Comunist Party of China. I don't fear for my life when saying the first statement, I've said it in the past on US soil. And I'm saying it right now on a US-based website. People fear for their lives when making the second statement, esp the Chinese. People wouldn't even be able to read it as it would get quickly censored. For this reason alone this whole discussion is completely…

One of the governments you mentioned has been under constant pressure of regime change & other geopolitical oppressions for 75+ years, the other is the one orchestrating said regime changes. It's not surprising that one is more defensive than the other in this regard. Is that activist a real Chinese citizen or part of a CIA campaign bent on massive destabilizion? Everything is on the table.

The US is also far more developed in its methods of political suppression. The voice of the common citizen is virtually absent in D.C. yet the population continues to play along. McCarthyism is ancient history in US politics. Such brutish displays are no longer as effective or required. But the US recently got a taste of how seamlessly the MIC can amplify its violent oppression of citizens, even as they struggle to manage a public health crisis.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#338

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

joyfulmantis wrote: post #64

So are you saying that companies operating in New Zealand shouldn't follow New Zealand law to ban the Christchurch shooter's manifesto?

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23506965)

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#339

Post by stale2002 » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #89

GhostVII wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is fair to say that the laws in the US are objectively better than in China. The US does not put hundreds of thousands of people in camps because of their religion, or heavily censor the internet, or kill hundreds or thousands of civilians to suppress pro-democracy protests.

You’re on shaky ground there. The US does imprison more of its citizens on a per capita basis than any other comparable nation. The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be. I’ll stop there.

If you honestly believe that laws in China aren't worse than US law, then I don't know what to tell you...

I think that most people can obviously see who has the worse laws, regarding things like censorship.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#340

Post by WeNeedDemocracy » Sat, Jun 13, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

Is Eric Yuan Chinese? I sometimes wonder if Chinese entrepreneurs could be hedging to make sure that the Chinese government would have mercy over them in a time where China overtakes USA.