541–550 of 648 posts
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What about Yandex and vk?
That's what I meant by writing: "Russians also have copy-cat versions of many western sites/services that are more popular than original ones". vk == Facebook, Yandex == Google.
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This claim gets made a lot, especially by China's government in it's "four great modern inventions" marketing campaign. [1] I don't get it. None of those are Chinese inventions. They're all technologies China adopted really fast. It's a testament to market size, development speed and certain idiosyncrasies about Chinese demographics, etc. But it has nothing to do with invention or innovation. [1] http://www.chinadail…
What's worth more, inventing something or commercializing it? It sounds a bit like USA vs Israel. Israel invents a lot while the US commercializes on a bigger scale. If the US isn't very good at developing new products because of burdensome regulations, small market size, slowness, demographics, etc. then maybe it's just not very good at technology. Other countries are bad at technology because of poor education, acc…
And hasn't been "successfully commercializing inventions, no matter who invented it" been a staple of the US economical success for decades, nay, over a century?
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It's way more powerful than WhatsApp, too (location based chats, payments, etc.). And, of course, it's not E2E encrypted; just the opposite, you can assume that it's being wiretapped/monitored. Thus, please don't install it.
I just wondering, for normal people, what kind of information you concerned to not be monitored, seriously? I knew most western take the privacy higher than anything. But for most normal people living outside of US, they really don't care. You would say they are dumb, but they care more about food, entertainment than the privacy, and liberal. To be honesty, nobody in China cared WhatsApp be blocked or not. As maybe 9…
What are normal people in your books? People who don't care what happens to non-violent political dissidents because they themselves are well aligned with their owners? That's not normal, you have to break a human child to get those results.
A child raised by illiterates and being only among them might never care about reading nor writing. So? Does that raise the value of illiteracy in my eyes? Not at all, not one bit. They're still missing out in ways I can't even explain to them.
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Not to speak for Heinlein's fictional character, but I'd add to the list things like "decide what is right and wrong, what is good and bad". Some people think the group they belong to give them value, I think individual human beings make up groups and give them value. If most people don't care about things I find important for reasons I can articulate, that's just more people to have a discussion with. But just the fact that they are many is about as important as if someone saying something is skinny or obese. I don't multiply the value of an opinion by someone's body weight or how much money they have, and likewise I don't multiply it by how many people have an opinion.
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> Then why take the trouble of blocking something so small and unimportant? ;) China would rather be in control of tracking/surveillance internally, rather than let it be done by foreign companies and nations. Thats all
WhatsApp doesn't do surveillance, it's end to end encrypted. Foreign surveillance is not the reason they block these services and you know it.
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> China's not blocking out the sharing of ideas though. Until a few months ago, Andrew Ng worked at Baidu! Ok they are bottlenecking data... As I've already mentioned this is an extremely inefficient way to share data. Sharing data using physically present word of mouth is a lot more expensive and slower than sharing it instantly via an open internet connection.
Peak Hacker News "Sharing data using physically present word of mouth is a lot more expensive and slower than sharing it instantly via an open internet connection."
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In FinTech in particular, China is years ahead [1]. WeChat Pay had 100m users in 2014. [1] https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2171739...
This claim gets made a lot, especially by China's government in it's "four great modern inventions" marketing campaign. [1] I don't get it. None of those are Chinese inventions. They're all technologies China adopted really fast. It's a testament to market size, development speed and certain idiosyncrasies about Chinese demographics, etc. But it has nothing to do with invention or innovation. [1] http://www.chinadail…
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Then why block it?
Because it's not under control, which against Chinese government's philosophy.
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If Chinese start an economic and cultural expansion which includes PRing their culture, movies, tech, products and building special relationships with developing world in Asia, Africa, south American and Europe they may end up being the globalization leader.
That is going to be tough. A whole generation of Chinese see the west as cool and to be emulated. I have a hard time seeing a whole generation of Europeans and Americans wanting to emulate the Chinese, Japan, maybe. China, not so much.
US is no longer a country to be emulated. It's a country to fear (for what they can, and do, to other countries) and a country to pity (for what it does to its own citizens).
China, OTOH, looks more and more cool now. A lot of things that made them seem evil turned out to be exaggerations and propaganda, and while their politics still wouldn't make me feel safe starting a business there, they seem to be the only country on the planet that seems to think and execute long-term. It's something the West is no longer able to do.
Hell, the Chinese currently seem to be the only nation on the planet who seriously care about fixing the climate issues.
China has a great opportunity now to win plenty of foreign mind share. I wonder if they'll go for it, and if we start seeing more pro-Chinese propaganda.
What the long-term effects will be: China's ruling class further cement their power at the cost of China's innovation and future growth. Interesting and useful things are made when people able share and consume information. e.g. Jack Ma's US visit exposed him to Yahoo. Ma Huateng was clearly inspired by his exposure to ICQ. The list goes on. The same thing happens in the West but it happens a lot more often since the…
That is totally wrong. If you think that China lacks innovation then you clearly have never been there. China is one of the most dynamic capitalistic countries in the world and there is no shortage of innovation. Even if then they have 1/3rd the innovators as the US, they still have 40% more innovators than the U.S. Innovation will just happen within the context of Chinese political constraints. The real threat is no…
I was going to ask who are China's Hannah Arendt et al., but I think that answers it then. So, no meaningful innovation as far as I'm concerned. Just widgets and refining processes and extracting resources and moving money. In the conversation of minds about ideas and ways to live, that's like one hour in one afternoon. It's like a hamster wheel some are forever trapped in. Another revolution of the wheel isn't progress or innovation. Kind of like taking heroin isn't like seeing your child cure cancer.. it's a shit substitute that attaches to receptors that can be used much more meaningful. It's kind of tragic that the best one can say about China is that it repeats the mistakes of the West, without even something like popular rock music, not to mention the Blues. Innovation? Who is the Chinese Jimi Hendrix? Bill Hicks? Not that the man eating machinery of the US can take credit for people who emerged in spite of it, and I bet there's a lot great underground stuff in China (there is Chinese punk, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fseb62y_Vmc ). But on the shiny toothpaste commercial level it's being discussed here? There's nothing, there's a gaping, howling absence of anything worth any of the murder and destruction of the mind entailed by totalitarian control. None of those "achievements" justify even a single peasant clubbed to death. Those who don't know that, in the West or East or on the moon, are still just cavemen in jet planes.
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The CCP congress is next month. They have always cracked down on censorship before it. Their 5-years plan for 2016-2020 is about transitioning from the basic industry to more advanced industry and services. They want more research, they want more IT. Chinese IT workers are very critical of the Great Firewall and depend on VPNs to do a lot of things. I think many are realizing that the Firewall is a handicap, but it i…
Problem is that, from past experiences, censorship were rarely alleviated even after the event it was supposed to serve. Situations deteriorated year by year. First it was TCP reset by keyword, then came the DNS poisoning, and then the blockage of whole IP ranges for Google, Facebook, twitter and other User-generated-content sites. Unregistered VPNs are expected to be the next. Global leadership would be all but mira…
Hitting VPNs, however, is challenging a status-quo: before that they were tolerating that tech-savvy users could access internet outside China. It could be believed that they would let the people with enough of a legitimate reasonto pay for it access the outside.
I have the impression that there are more channels for official complaints than we often believe as westerners. I think that they will receive criticism from the whole IT sector. They want to develop international collaborations, this is directly at odds with the censorship of all chat platforms that are not controlled by the CCP.