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

Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 316 posts

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#191

Post by knolax »

> In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads.

Translation: we looked at satellite photos of random buildings and determined that they were "camps" because of unspecified "hallmarks".

This is literally a Buzzfeed article. One of the people they cite once tried to do something similar by claiming an 800 year old mosque was demolished when it was actually the building next door built in the 90s(by his own admission[0]). In fact it seems they seemed to have been expanding/renovating the mosque[1][2].

[0] https://medium.com/@shawnwzhang/clarification-of-keriya-etik...

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1106/1*_OL9z1ndMVuqZQ7_XxwYLQ.pn...

[2] https://geopoliticsalert.com/keriya-aitika-mosque

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#192

Post by handedness »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #178
gumby wrote: post #170

This was supposedly a problem with a stealth ship designed by Lockheed’s “skunkworks”: against the choppy noise of waves and swell, a blank spot (of no radar return) stood out dramatically.

Cool! Do you have a link?

There's a long-standing concern that stealth aircraft appear as a void against background radiation: https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2020/07/10/russia-received-tec...

More info: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30100/no-passive-radar...

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#193

Post by jandrese »

mzs wrote: post #128

Journalist's thread that explains a bit more of how they did this: https://twitter.com/alisonkilling/status/1298933918620672000 edit: was used in creating this two part story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...

China's social media army is out in force on that Twitter thread. Deflect, Deny, Discredit.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#194

Post by jandrese »

knolax wrote: post #191

> In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads. Translation: w…

They correlated areas with known camps first.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#195

Post by jandrese »

netsharc wrote: post #181
uptown wrote: post #2

You'd think going forward they'll fill in these blank voids with land that works with the surrounding landscape in order to mask these gaps.

They could put cartoon images of "land", like this TV show's overlay on top of a lady wearing Muslim dress: https://youtu.be/17oCQakzIl8?t=270 Interesting how the IMO Chinese "Eh, imma just half-ass it!" mentality (hopefully having visited the country and experienced half-assery, I'm allowed to comment) basically lead to this research work.

The scale was definitely a problem. The article talked about how they had millions of blanked out areas, anything of even the most minor strategic importance was blanked out. It might even be an attempt to stymie this kind of investigation by making the data too noisy.

They definitely screwed up when they made the censoring so easy to spot.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#196

Post by jessaustin »

wh1t3n01s3 wrote: post #177
jessaustin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA's Pacific Ocean imperialism was never really distinguishable from its Western America colonialism. The same racist bastards (as in, the same actual army personnel: Jacob Hurd Smith, Leonard Wood, Blackjack Pershing, etc.) who killed lots of indigenous Americans also killed lots of indigenous Filipinos. The Bud Dajo Massacre was similar to that at Wounded Knee sixteen years earlier, except probably more diabolical…

Let’s not forget the kingdom of Hawaii

Of course, I can't believe I left that out!

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#197

Post by liability »

gumby wrote: post #186
pests wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skunkworks by Ben Rich has the stories and some photos.

That’s where I read this. I always wondered itpfbthat was really why it was cancelled (that’s why I wrote “supposedly”) or if Lockheed simply couldn’t make an adequate ship, being an aircraft company.

This is about the Sea Shadow, right? Lockheed later got a contract for the Freedom class of litoral combat ships, with 10 of the planned 16 currently active and five more fitting out or under construction. Those are being built by a shipbuilding firm, not Lockheed directly.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#198

Post by jandrese »

aminecodes wrote: post #17

The least the EU and US could do is sanction and ban Baidu and other Chinese tech companies responsible for covering up this genocide.

In international politics nobody cares too much as long as you are only killing your own people. No country wants to go to war to save some other country's citizens. Hitler could have finished the Holocaust with little more than an international slap on the wrist if he hadn't also invaded France and Russia.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#199

Post by knolax »

jandrese wrote: post #194
knolax wrote: post #191

> In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads. Translation: w…

They correlated areas with known camps first.

> Of the six camps that we used in our feasibility study, five had blank tiles at their location at zoom level 18 in Baidu,

They "correlated" that out of 6 "camps" 5 of them had missing tiles, which gives you the chance of a blanked out tile give a "camp", but not the chance of a "camp" given blanked out tile.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#200

Post by knolax »

jandrese wrote: post #193
mzs wrote: post #128

Journalist's thread that explains a bit more of how they did this: https://twitter.com/alisonkilling/status/1298933918620672000 edit: was used in creating this two part story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...

China's social media army is out in force on that Twitter thread. Deflect, Deny, Discredit.

Everyone that disagrees with you is a shill. What an enlightened mind you have.

EDIT: reply to comment below.

What's DRP? The existence of real shills doesn't give you free reign to cover your ears and yell shill any time you hear an opposing opinion (I've never seen the people who cry shill do so when it's someone that agrees with them). I could easily call you a shill but that doesn't get us anywhere. Focus on the merit of the argument.

Post reply on HN