I will pass on that, thanks.
I’ve been hearing that people are also indoctrinated to be always suspicious, to report everything, “dissidents”, spy on foreigners etc. And that then people out them or dox them on weibo and then police comes for them because police is supposedly following online discussions and communities. Is that true?
Also the great firewall of China is now present even in Hong Kong, that’s so sad.
Believe me, these days I don’t get to say half the things I want to say on our social media like Twitter because I already know that there will be some sad idiot to purposely take everything out of context and call for my head.
And I’ve asked my friends too. We all autocensor ourselves, no matter the political and moral views. We all experience the same things online.
On the other hand, I’m curious why do we even have a need to say anything on twitter? It’s not like we are any experts or really need to say anything. We all lived just fine before twitter. I’d say it’s the design of the network an we are all victims and being played.
It takes fortitude to speak up, which I tend to avoid doing because I don’t want to get people into trouble. I warn my social circles to be more careful to avoid persecution, even if they are on the outside and think it is safe. It isn’t. It is on the news: the pro-democracy / West-friendly are pursued to the ends of the earth. Maybe they won’t meet a horrible end like those still in the country but they are definitely being harassed and reminded of their place. I think this is the closest I will come in terms of commentary. It is likely enough to indict me.
@randompeople Welcome to the forum! Thanks for sharing and good luck. I am glad you aren’t a bot. 
In before the bots. 
I believe the pixls website can be fully accessed in China.
When I was a student, it was ten to twenty years ago, I have nerver told to spy on anyone. But after I graduated from university, about ten years ago, the situation had changed. There are many evidence appears on the internet.
Few hours ago, my twitter account was hacked. I had to reset my passwword and relogin. I don’t know why. But I guess the cybercops do this to me. Actually, about one year ago, my phone call to my elder sister was intterupted. She told me that she heard some noisy. But I didn’t heard anything. And I guess some words I talk would be masked. So I tried to say some specific words. When I said the word Hangkong(in Chinese), my sister told me that she heard the noisy sound again. So I think the goverment should had been monitoring my family for long time. I criticize goverment time to time on my messenger, I have 5 weibo accounts and 4 wechat accounts banned. I think they saw my comments by monitoring my communication.
One time I was threaten by the other group member who come from China, he told me I was going to be caught in a few days beause of my messge sent on RiotIM(called Element now) group. I don’t know if he is a cop. But I has been frightened truely. I tried to delete files in my computer as many as possible for preventing the cop to charge me. But finally nobody came to my house to catch me. Thanks god.
If I run a compony in the future, I would worry about the money that it would be confiscate if it is too much.
The US goverment also monitors everyone, but I think their people can sue the goverment. You want to sue the goverment in China? No way. If you do that, you can’t win them, sometimes you would be put in jail for years. It’s totally different.
I am a human being. Be easy. 
That depends. The goverment of China own the hackers, but they would not hack everything.
IMHO, the proper sentiment here is that in comparison to China, the US Federal Government operates with respect to law and order with a focus on human rights and political freedoms. Conversely, in comparison with the United States, the Chinese Communist Party operates almost entirely without respect to law, order, human rights, and political freedoms. Take the plight of the Uighur ethnic and religious minority as an example. The system is corrupt to the core, and the ban on Huawei, Xiaomi, and other device brands produced by the Chinese military has less to do with potential individual security flaws, and more to do with not allowing US persons to conduct financial transactions which would benefit the Chinese military and give aid and comfort to those that would defend the Uighur status quo.
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Man, in Yugoslavia it was the same thing. Not on Internet, in real life of course but essentially the same thing. If you have too much, it gets taken away from you.
If you spoke critically about the regime, you’d be sent to an bare island prison (our equivalent of the gulag). That island is actually 20km from the island I live on. I’ve heard stories that prisoners would have to plant a tree and be responsible for it to grow otherwise they’d be tortured. The thing is, there’s no soil there, just rocks. And there’s no shade there so prisoners would have to stand over that tree during the day so that the sun doesn’t kill the tree. But then a prisoner would die from sun exposure.
At the same time, most people here say we lived better back then so there you have it xD
But then again I can’t even imagine how it must have been in SSSR, Romania, Bulgaria and those countries that were really radical communists living under Stalins boot. Thank god we never had to deal with him and our leaders rejected Stalin right away.
Yes, absolutely. The Chinese Government gets to do ridiculously terrible things without proper criticism because of its economic strength. I completely concur with that. I just consider it paramount to also be critical, vocally, about the problems with respect to the same values, that exist in the US and elsewhere. Too often when the rare criticism of the Chinese Government happens, the “virtues of the West” are uncritically praised at the same time - that just devalues said criticism, no matter how much “worse” China acts. Someone being worse doesn’t justify acting bad.
The US publicly and generally do support human rights and respect for the law. That’s obviously a good thing. My problem is that they do not act on it on a really large scope. They actively hinder any investigations into war-crimes, they murder suspects without any rule of lawaround the world (also killing unrelated civilians in the process), …
I’d consider the EU as acting a bit better, but it isn’t good either. There’s documentation of their border agency being involved in push-backs of refugees at sea, and nothing happens.
And then there’ Switzerland (just mentioning because I am Swiss), which is definitely a world-leader in hiding problematic aspects of it’s policy. Problems here are mostly in “hosting” problematic companies and money (and money-laundering) - which aren’t so visible and simple, but have really bad consequences too. And we are about to remove state funding from charities that give political statements, like “it’s a good idea to enact a law that allows holding companies responsible for human rights violations”, because obviously that’s none of their business (attention: irony).
Anyway, in my non-expert opinion as an end user you should really not be worried about hardware attacks. Those are way too expensive, difficult and thus valuable to increase the risk of loosing 0-days (undetected backdoors) by distributing them widely. Critical infrastructure and interesting targets are another topic. Most people anyways give away metadata freely and voluntarily every minute through the applications we use.
on the one hand, It's true that they at least inform you that they are taking any data. Although this doesn't make it easier. It may even be the other way round, people start to have concerns. But this hardly applies to "ordinary" people :slight_smile:
65,550 requests just from one carrier, yeah it does. You can’t make that many request with all of them having reasonable suspicion. If at least a portion of those people were legitimate bad actors posing a security threat, Spain would now be in ruins already.
Telco report is from 2015. Prison population in spain in 2014 was 66,857 and in 2016 61,526 which is a pretty nice drop.
If those requests were made out of legitimate concerns I’d predict there would be at least some increase in the prison population in the year 2015.
What I suspect they did is without any suspicion of a crime for any one particular person used telcos to identify protesters in bulk so they can track them and try to find out if there are any bad actors and in that process infringing other’s rights because they didn’t have any suspicion against them. And someone in Vodafone was got tired of that and wanted us to know what is happening, I guess.
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I have no intention or interest in playing down the nasty stuff done by China but just a few bulletpoints to show that “rule of law” is very much dependent of the rule and the law. So in itself worth very little.
- War criminals pardoned (mercenaries, not even proper soldiers)
- The refusal of acknowledging international law regarding war criminals
- The whole illegal dragnet surveillance exposed by Snowden
- The legal loop hole of Guantanamo Bay. Legal in only the most technical sense.
- Waterboarding as somehow legal because “it’s not torture when we do it”
- The discrepancy in Police and state repression of demonstrations depending on political views rather than risk assessments and intelligence.
- Gerrymandering, legal but outrageously antidemocratic
The list could of course go on forever.
It’s been proven so many times that the law is a pretty supple and flexible thing and always in the hands of the powerful and the nation state. So are human rights and political freedoms.
I forgot an interesting thing with the US situation. Private companies can be used to circumvent limitations on state powers. Parking apps used by ICE to track immigrants etc. The agencies are allowed to buy what seems be be any data for sale as long as they don’t do the collecting themselves. When like in US and perhaps China the state and police have such insanely high budgets the lines between private and state get real blurry, furry and cozy. The two countries are similar in that way.
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Amen. USA is a living proof of how democracy is actually fragile even in 21. st. Something that we thought we nailed by now in the west is being challenged. Mostly by the emergence of new technologies.
We’re in a new and unexplored digital age that we can’t point to any history to learn from and it seems we always have to learn the hard way.
It always seems that with every new thing people first try to take advantage of it, then society collapses and then we rebuild on a newly found knowledge and implement rules to “ensure” for it to never happen again. And even if the breakdown of society is predictable, it’s only just a theory until it actually happens.
It’s the same thing with everything. Atomic bomb, chemical weapons, slavery, exploration, pollution, food industry, deforestation, banking, trading, holocaust, eugenics, Internet.
Basically we’re now in the age of information warfare and I don’t mean Alex Jones and Infowars but this is a real military term. Our minds are being influenced in all kids of ways online. To make money, to get votes, to get support, to deny support, to love, to hate, to confuse, to scare and most importantly to misinform.
Basically anyone with an agenda and money can start achieving his goals by influencing world’s society trough social media and the rest of the web. And if he’s crafty even news channels will pick it up and go with it.
One day, if we’re not careful, this will lead to a collapse of western society. Could be moral, could be political, could be economic etc. But I guarantee you it’ll happen because everyone is more focused on taking advantage and wielding the power than containing it, regulating it and focusing it on good.
And we can predict the outcome, but nobody will lift a finger until it actually happens and when, in the famous words of William Daniel Jones, shit hits the fan.
Does anyone watch series The Expanse? It’s as SciFi series where Earth, Mars and the asteroid belt colonizers couldn’t find a common language and were so divided that they stared to fight for it’s independence and then force its rules upon each other depending on who was stronger at the time.
If we continue on this path politically and morally, I’m afraid we’re heading for that kind of future if we can even get to that.
In the past these large divides would be solved with a world war and a large destruction after which everyone grows closer and comes together. Only problem is, the next one would likely be nuclear. We would all be wiped out. So it probably won’t happen. Then again where does this human tension and divide go? It’s bound to release itself somewhere. I just hope it won’t be at you or me.
That sounds not good. I thought you’re in UK or the US. It seems that I was wrong. All I can say is be careful. I think Mao Zedong was more horrible than Stalin, my grandfather was dead beause of him about 70 years ago. Mao gave orders to kill about 1500 thousands of people at that time, my grandfather was of those people. Even my father had never seen my grandfather. And my grandfather had nerver seen hisown father too, beause hisown father died of the civil war. It’s inconvenience to talk about the more detail. I’ll try to change the world in the future.
I think I’m politically in a better spot then US or UK are at the moment. We’re not so “woke” so everybody is very humble. You really have to o something horrible to someone for them to hate you. In US/UK I think everybody hates everybody, even if they see each other lol. Idk, I’m hoping someone here from US can say that that’s not true. They are stronger economically but lack in everything else. Culturally and geographically I think I’m in a perfect spot.
It’s about small things. I wake up every day and drink perfectly healthy water from the tap in my home. How many Americans or UK persons can say that? I go into the town and I know everybody. Wherever I go is clean and untouched. But I don’t earn nearly enough as I would in the US/UK with the same or even much worse job. That’s one downside.
Just changing your country will do I think 
I don’t know much about your country.
If I don’t criticize our so called goverment, pretending nothing has happened, I would live being happier like many other people in China.
I enjoyed the Expanse but its heroes are still simplistic and actually survive. In the real world, the real heroes aren’t and don’t. Those in power always get their way. In the true north, we supposedly have excellent values and are a place worth immigrating to. Little do people realize we have zero accountability for anything. There is not a time when anyone truly owns up to their mistakes. I am not just talking about the government and organizations; this is endemic in the populace as well. Sorry is an excuse not an apology. Nothing happens after a sorry and usually you don’t even get to hear the sorry. It is just business as usual, or worse, more oppression now that someone broached the matter.
We in the West are a laughing stock to the rest of the world. While our morality is technically sweet, our lives don’t reflect the freedom and harmony promised. In fact, our words ring hollow. DT only exposed that for my southern neighbours. And what do our nations say? Once we get rid of DT and his ilk from our countries, things will be peachy!? Well, no. You’ll end up with people who will hide the truth rather than flaunt it with other truths, albeit good. Anyway, I went down the rabbit hole. Sorry.
I agree with you absolutely.
China is pretending to be the biggest friend to my country right now. They are trying to enter EU trough us but Germany said NO, so China is shifting to Serbia. But then Trump said NO. I’m amused to see what they do next xd
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