10 ms·

Soros at Davos: China's social credit system and Big IT are mortal threat

91 points by _red 8y ago

howlingfantods 8y ago
I remember some weeks ago, I sent over a picture of the Chinese President as Winnie the Poo (a popular meme at the time) to some friends on WeChat. It showed up as sent in my WeChat but my friends confirm it never actually reached them. Maybe 10 minutes later, it had been deleted from the chat logs on my phone as well.
- perfmode 8y ago
  Was it a bit for bit copy of a circulated image? Or a screenshot? Because it’s possible to ship a bloom filter to detect banned images without breaking e2e encryption
  - pascoej 8y ago
    If e2e encryption is on one extreme, wechat is on the other. You have to link your account to a government id if you are the owner of a large group chat.
  - howlingfantods 8y ago
    I’m pretty sure there’s no e2e encryption in WeChat. I communicate in WeChat with the assumption that everything I write can be read by censors.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hedora 8y ago
    You can also block screenshots, scaled, noises, recolored, cropped, occluded images, but you have to send a larger model to the device. That’s not the point though. The point is that the expectation moving forward with these platforms is that you police yourself, or the machine learning algorithms will do it for you (and also ban you from mortgages, airplanes, employment, etc, if it has to intervene too frequently). Facebook does (in a very limited way) this by upranking posts it thinks will boost engagement. LinkedIn is a bit further down the slippery slope, since it’s able to influence hiring decisions (and is joined to the MS Office 365 cloud, presumably). Amazon Now had some related screwup recently where it redlined minority neighborhoods in a bunch of cities, since it used spending habits to predict they’d be less profitable.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      > Facebook does (in a very limited way) this by upranking posts it thinks will boost engagement. Facebook (and Twitter, and Patreon, and countless other firms) will block you from posting if you post something that they regard as violating their policy. And "what is against policy" is a fuzzy enough line that "don't use Winnie the Poo pictures to make fun of the effin' President of the country" is a lot clearer than that. You may agree with the policy or not, you may think it's misguided, but WeChat is a private firm, and private firms aren't restricted by anything like the First Amendment. They provide services to you at their pleasure.
_bxg1 8y ago
"At the center of his anti-China argument was the concept of a centralized database of personal information called a "social credit system." While Soros acknowledged that such a set-up doesn't yet exist..." But it does in China, right? I've read many articles about it and I could swear they weren't just future-looking.
- howlingfantods 8y ago
  There's currently no one 'social credit score' in China. There's some local government pilots and some private enterprise "credit scores." The ones you hear about often are stuff like Alipay's Sesame Credit, which gives you a score based on your activities in Alibaba's app ecosystem. Currently, Sesame credit is pretty harmless, and gives you discounts on online orders or financial products if your score is good. The danger is that the national government will soon get its ducks in order and hoover all this data into one overarching national credit score and use that to police behavior.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    I guess the main thing I've heard about is the debtor-shaming. But I've also heard of people being restricted from social services like transport based on random stuff like not exercising enough (as tracked by a smartwatch). Maybe that was just hearsay.
    - c1sc0 8y ago
      I’ve seen the debtor shaming first hand. Access to transport & payment is getting harder and harder without a mobile phone.
  - tallanvor 8y ago
    Well, there's the one that blocks people from flying or even taking trains.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Or it's a pilot program is some province where 0.01% of Chinese live and the reports make it like it's everywhere...
diminish 8y ago
How is George Soros perceived in USA and West Europe? Any comments?
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#Conspiracy_theories_and_threats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#Conspiracy_theori...
  - olivermarks 8y ago
    if you have 14 minutes this US MSM 60 minutes spot from 1996 is a good representation of the mistrust a lot of the centre and particularly the right have about Soros https://youtu.be/QSyczwuTQfo https://youtu.be/QSyczwuTQfo Since then he is synonymous amongst nationalists with open borders and supposedly funding them
  - ghtrytttttnsa 8y ago
    It's certainly true that powerless people don't talk in Davos, and the globalist ideas of Soros are not a secret. Nothing more is really needed to despise him and the rest of the global elite. Speaking against China is nice, but president Trump is one of the pioneers in this category and he was hated for it (chinese money can buy a lot of media influence).
- Wohlf 8y ago
  He's the boogeyman for people on the right, much like the Koch brothers are the boogeymen for the left, at least in the USA.
  - gadders 8y ago
    Yeah, I think your view of Soros depends on your view of his policy positions.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
    That's a fair assessment whether you're on the right or left!
candiodari 8y ago
It's funny how privacy protections are turning out. Every week or so we see the same pattern repeat. The BIG problem with privacy is government data sharing. Medical records, police records, travel records, financial records, ... we keep hearing stories of real people really getting hurt because of these data sharing agreements. And yet all we hear about is Google data sharing, Facebook data sharing. And when it comes to problems with that, we hear about a few commercial disputes. And yet in law the situation is that we are protecting against the second case, with everywhere exceptions for the first case. And while I'm happy for such protections, I feel protections against government data sharing (especially against them sharing mistakes/inaccuracies/out of date info) would have much more positive results.
- bawana 8y ago
  and you cannot sue Uncle Sam. Furthermore, govt data is being withheld from public access because of the shutdown - yet those fat congressmen and senators continue to draw paychecks upwards of 200k.
- loudmax 8y ago
  My feeling is that there will be more and more data sharing and we're going to have to reorganize our society around the assumption of transparency. Cheap cameras connected to the cloud will continue to proliferate and face recognition software will get better and more widely available. Trying to prevent big corporations and the government from using data about people is going to be an uphill battle, and probably hopeless. If you start from the assumption that massive amounts of data on people will be collected and exist, I don't see how you successfully keep it all secret without turning into a police state. The solution will be to make this data available to everyone. Not just government and the financially powerful, but everyone. Some types of activities should remain private, especially when it's practical to do so. Encryption works, so conversations can be private so long as all participants agree. Certain types of medical records should be kept private, and some types of legal records where few people are involved. But general activity that falls outside of the bands that society has deemed worthy of special protection should be considered public. Travel records? Forget it, that stuff's all over the place. As far as financial records, society has an interest when large sums of money are involved. IMHO we'd be better off if privacy and wealth were inversely correlated.
bawana 8y ago
I dont get it. We are concerned over IP theft. Meanwhile China has the Great Firewall and mass surveillance apparatus. Then you get their vice president saying ' I cannot control my unruly children who vandalize American businesses' So doesnt their IT infrastructure and super snooping ability figure out who are the transgressors? Why dont they round up ten of the worst and deport them and the assets of their companies as a show of good faith? Is it because we are doing the same? or is it because the offenders are 'too big to punish'?
- koboll 8y ago
  If you actually think China is worried about its nationals' theft of foreign IP, I have a Great Wall I'd be interested in selling you.
- asdf333 8y ago
  because it benefits china for their 'unruly children' to be stealing tech secrets from the US.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  > Then you get their vice president saying ' I cannot control my unruly children who vandalize American businesses' He is lying. > Why dont they round up ten of the worst and deport them and the assets of their companies as a show of good faith? Why do they need to show good faith? U.S. businesses don't go to China for good faith, they go to make money. China will do whatever it wants, right up to the very edge of what will harm their economic growth.
whyever 8y ago
Here is a talk that looks a bit closer at the different social credit systems in China: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system
fixermark 8y ago
My personal prediction for the US is that Americans will continue to rail against Chinese-style government oversight of a social credit system while supporting private institutions that de-facto create the same system without government oversight, laws to mandate the information in the datasets pass a smell-test for truth, etc. We already have financial credit reporting agencies and private organizations scraping datasets for mugshots, court cases, and legal sanctions; couple that with some social media datasets and you've got a potential employer's dream tool for candidate screening. America tends to run so hard from the risk of a Big Brother scenario that they end up smacking into Snow Crash without even realizing it.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  These moral/technical equivalency memes I don't think hold water. Nobody in the US is going to censor your email so that if you say something about Trump it gets magically deleted. Court cases and mugshots are public information and a matter of transparency. When you murder someone, well, that's part of the deal. That's very different from the government measuring other, minute aspects of your life and making it public to everyone. If your social media posts are marked private - which is your choice - then for the most part they're not going to be available to arbitrary 3rd parties, moreover, there are definitely social media solutions you can use that don't share anything. There is an ongoing war over your information mostly for advertising by the way (not hiring) and hopefully some legislation will take care of that, and some dialogue over NSA/Snowden type things. Thankfully, there are actually laws, warrants, judges in the mix. Surely we have to judge China's actions from a completely different angle, as they have their own history, social system etc. - but the equivalency arguments just don't work. I think if you tried to text someone a message about Obama, and it was magically deleted by the US government, it would send shivers down your spine, and however political or not you were, you'd be signed up for the first protest/action - as would most of us. We all have some concerns about our system but it's manageable - what's happening in China is right out of a novel. Also note that 'it's just begun'. This is possibly only the first tranche. The de-facto objective may be to leverage tech to it's max - the result is effective total control over everyone's lives.
  - 8y ago
throwpromisea 8y ago
I think it's refreshing that finally someone with some notoriety speaks out openly against the threat of a dictatorship/authoritarian China paired with sentient technologies. Even if it's Soros. Most people are too tied to the corporation "benefits" to speak out against the evil Chinese government and its arms Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba. Even though many countries have now banned Huawei (US, Japan, UK, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan), and others are thinking of banning (Canada, Germany, Poland), most aren't openly castigating China with exception of US and Taiwan. And even then, even though the US president is one of the few individuals that is openly confrontational with the Chinese regime, he still sometimes offers a conciliary tone. Even muslim countries like Pakistan and Malaysia that suffer from their religioius brothers imprisoned by the millions, raised a few outbursts but then went silent.
GreeniFi 8y ago
We make a big hoo-ha about “social credit”, but I would argue that western financial credit scores function (or will function) in a very similar way given the amount of data some of the third party credit score providers pull and can pull in. The threat is huge because pretty much everyone needs credit to buy a home, and if you’re not a good boy or girl, that possibility will be taken from you. And here’s the dark feeling: Facebook profile and use creates a personality profile. Personality profile is valid credit-score data. That data was possibly stolen from FB. If so, your financial credit score (and by axiom social credit score) is now available to anyone who will pay for it. I’ve been particularly aware of this, because as a self-employed entrepreneur, my credit score has taken a pummeling - I think largely due to erratic cash flow. I see it as a long term threat to risk-taking. Basically, the lesson is clear: by seeking to change things, as entrepreneurs do, you’re not being a good boy or girl.
bb101 8y ago
What's the end game for China, and indeed the world? One dystopian preview is Ma Boyong's award winning short story "City of Silence", published as part of Ken Liu's Invisible Planets. One can also read it at https://web.archive.org/web/20120221185906/http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/tuesday-fiction-the-city-of-silence-by-ma-boyong/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120221185906/http://worldsf.wo... and https://web.archive.org/web/20120229091732/http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/tuesday-fiction-the-city-of-silence-by-ma-boyong-part-two/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120229091732/http://worldsf.wo... Edit: added part 2.
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  The end game seems to be moving more and more toward armed conflict between China and the US. I honestly don’t see both societies continuing their current trajectories without running headlong into each other. Perhaps it will just be another cold war and we’ll see who’s economic system blinks first.
  - turtlecloud 8y ago
    That is the narrative they are trying to push. IMO it is more a case between the globalists and the non-globalists. Some groups of people want it to be an interconnected world with 1 society.
  - boznz 8y ago
    You mean armed conflict between some dick politicians in China and some dick politicians in the US in which everyone else but them will suffer. History has taught us nothing.
arcaster 8y ago
With Soros himself being the exception to the definition of a "mortal threat"?
lyrachord 8y ago
Some comments show that there are 2 many deformities.

91 points by _red 8y ago

I remember some weeks ago, I sent over a picture of the Chinese President as Winnie the Poo (a popular meme at the time) to some friends on WeChat. It showed up as sent in my WeChat but my friends confirm it never actually reached them. Maybe 10 minutes later, it had been deleted from the chat logs on my phone as well.

perfmode 8y ago
Was it a bit for bit copy of a circulated image? Or a screenshot? Because it’s possible to ship a bloom filter to detect banned images without breaking e2e encryption
- pascoej 8y ago
  If e2e encryption is on one extreme, wechat is on the other. You have to link your account to a government id if you are the owner of a large group chat.
- howlingfantods 8y ago
  I’m pretty sure there’s no e2e encryption in WeChat. I communicate in WeChat with the assumption that everything I write can be read by censors.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hedora 8y ago
  You can also block screenshots, scaled, noises, recolored, cropped, occluded images, but you have to send a larger model to the device. That’s not the point though. The point is that the expectation moving forward with these platforms is that you police yourself, or the machine learning algorithms will do it for you (and also ban you from mortgages, airplanes, employment, etc, if it has to intervene too frequently). Facebook does (in a very limited way) this by upranking posts it thinks will boost engagement. LinkedIn is a bit further down the slippery slope, since it’s able to influence hiring decisions (and is joined to the MS Office 365 cloud, presumably). Amazon Now had some related screwup recently where it redlined minority neighborhoods in a bunch of cities, since it used spending habits to predict they’d be less profitable.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > Facebook does (in a very limited way) this by upranking posts it thinks will boost engagement. Facebook (and Twitter, and Patreon, and countless other firms) will block you from posting if you post something that they regard as violating their policy. And "what is against policy" is a fuzzy enough line that "don't use Winnie the Poo pictures to make fun of the effin' President of the country" is a lot clearer than that. You may agree with the policy or not, you may think it's misguided, but WeChat is a private firm, and private firms aren't restricted by anything like the First Amendment. They provide services to you at their pleasure.

_bxg1 8y ago

"At the center of his anti-China argument was the concept of a centralized database of personal information called a "social credit system." While Soros acknowledged that such a set-up doesn't yet exist..." But it does in China, right? I've read many articles about it and I could swear they weren't just future-looking.

howlingfantods 8y ago
There's currently no one 'social credit score' in China. There's some local government pilots and some private enterprise "credit scores." The ones you hear about often are stuff like Alipay's Sesame Credit, which gives you a score based on your activities in Alibaba's app ecosystem. Currently, Sesame credit is pretty harmless, and gives you discounts on online orders or financial products if your score is good. The danger is that the national government will soon get its ducks in order and hoover all this data into one overarching national credit score and use that to police behavior.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  I guess the main thing I've heard about is the debtor-shaming. But I've also heard of people being restricted from social services like transport based on random stuff like not exercising enough (as tracked by a smartwatch). Maybe that was just hearsay.
  - c1sc0 8y ago
    I’ve seen the debtor shaming first hand. Access to transport & payment is getting harder and harder without a mobile phone.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  Well, there's the one that blocks people from flying or even taking trains.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Or it's a pilot program is some province where 0.01% of Chinese live and the reports make it like it's everywhere...

diminish 8y ago

How is George Soros perceived in USA and West Europe? Any comments?

ceejayoz 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#Conspiracy_theories_and_threats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#Conspiracy_theori...
- olivermarks 8y ago
  if you have 14 minutes this US MSM 60 minutes spot from 1996 is a good representation of the mistrust a lot of the centre and particularly the right have about Soros https://youtu.be/QSyczwuTQfo https://youtu.be/QSyczwuTQfo Since then he is synonymous amongst nationalists with open borders and supposedly funding them
- ghtrytttttnsa 8y ago
  It's certainly true that powerless people don't talk in Davos, and the globalist ideas of Soros are not a secret. Nothing more is really needed to despise him and the rest of the global elite. Speaking against China is nice, but president Trump is one of the pioneers in this category and he was hated for it (chinese money can buy a lot of media influence).
Wohlf 8y ago
He's the boogeyman for people on the right, much like the Koch brothers are the boogeymen for the left, at least in the USA.
- gadders 8y ago
  Yeah, I think your view of Soros depends on your view of his policy positions.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
  That's a fair assessment whether you're on the right or left!

candiodari 8y ago

It's funny how privacy protections are turning out. Every week or so we see the same pattern repeat. The BIG problem with privacy is government data sharing. Medical records, police records, travel records, financial records, ... we keep hearing stories of real people really getting hurt because of these data sharing agreements. And yet all we hear about is Google data sharing, Facebook data sharing. And when it comes to problems with that, we hear about a few commercial disputes. And yet in law the situation is that we are protecting against the second case, with everywhere exceptions for the first case. And while I'm happy for such protections, I feel protections against government data sharing (especially against them sharing mistakes/inaccuracies/out of date info) would have much more positive results.

bawana 8y ago
and you cannot sue Uncle Sam. Furthermore, govt data is being withheld from public access because of the shutdown - yet those fat congressmen and senators continue to draw paychecks upwards of 200k.
loudmax 8y ago
My feeling is that there will be more and more data sharing and we're going to have to reorganize our society around the assumption of transparency. Cheap cameras connected to the cloud will continue to proliferate and face recognition software will get better and more widely available. Trying to prevent big corporations and the government from using data about people is going to be an uphill battle, and probably hopeless. If you start from the assumption that massive amounts of data on people will be collected and exist, I don't see how you successfully keep it all secret without turning into a police state. The solution will be to make this data available to everyone. Not just government and the financially powerful, but everyone. Some types of activities should remain private, especially when it's practical to do so. Encryption works, so conversations can be private so long as all participants agree. Certain types of medical records should be kept private, and some types of legal records where few people are involved. But general activity that falls outside of the bands that society has deemed worthy of special protection should be considered public. Travel records? Forget it, that stuff's all over the place. As far as financial records, society has an interest when large sums of money are involved. IMHO we'd be better off if privacy and wealth were inversely correlated.

bawana 8y ago

I dont get it. We are concerned over IP theft. Meanwhile China has the Great Firewall and mass surveillance apparatus. Then you get their vice president saying ' I cannot control my unruly children who vandalize American businesses' So doesnt their IT infrastructure and super snooping ability figure out who are the transgressors? Why dont they round up ten of the worst and deport them and the assets of their companies as a show of good faith? Is it because we are doing the same? or is it because the offenders are 'too big to punish'?

koboll 8y ago
If you actually think China is worried about its nationals' theft of foreign IP, I have a Great Wall I'd be interested in selling you.
asdf333 8y ago
because it benefits china for their 'unruly children' to be stealing tech secrets from the US.
snowwrestler 8y ago
> Then you get their vice president saying ' I cannot control my unruly children who vandalize American businesses' He is lying. > Why dont they round up ten of the worst and deport them and the assets of their companies as a show of good faith? Why do they need to show good faith? U.S. businesses don't go to China for good faith, they go to make money. China will do whatever it wants, right up to the very edge of what will harm their economic growth.

whyever 8y ago

Here is a talk that looks a bit closer at the different social credit systems in China: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system

fixermark 8y ago

My personal prediction for the US is that Americans will continue to rail against Chinese-style government oversight of a social credit system while supporting private institutions that de-facto create the same system without government oversight, laws to mandate the information in the datasets pass a smell-test for truth, etc. We already have financial credit reporting agencies and private organizations scraping datasets for mugshots, court cases, and legal sanctions; couple that with some social media datasets and you've got a potential employer's dream tool for candidate screening. America tends to run so hard from the risk of a Big Brother scenario that they end up smacking into Snow Crash without even realizing it.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
These moral/technical equivalency memes I don't think hold water. Nobody in the US is going to censor your email so that if you say something about Trump it gets magically deleted. Court cases and mugshots are public information and a matter of transparency. When you murder someone, well, that's part of the deal. That's very different from the government measuring other, minute aspects of your life and making it public to everyone. If your social media posts are marked private - which is your choice - then for the most part they're not going to be available to arbitrary 3rd parties, moreover, there are definitely social media solutions you can use that don't share anything. There is an ongoing war over your information mostly for advertising by the way (not hiring) and hopefully some legislation will take care of that, and some dialogue over NSA/Snowden type things. Thankfully, there are actually laws, warrants, judges in the mix. Surely we have to judge China's actions from a completely different angle, as they have their own history, social system etc. - but the equivalency arguments just don't work. I think if you tried to text someone a message about Obama, and it was magically deleted by the US government, it would send shivers down your spine, and however political or not you were, you'd be signed up for the first protest/action - as would most of us. We all have some concerns about our system but it's manageable - what's happening in China is right out of a novel. Also note that 'it's just begun'. This is possibly only the first tranche. The de-facto objective may be to leverage tech to it's max - the result is effective total control over everyone's lives.
- 8y ago

throwpromisea 8y ago

I think it's refreshing that finally someone with some notoriety speaks out openly against the threat of a dictatorship/authoritarian China paired with sentient technologies. Even if it's Soros. Most people are too tied to the corporation "benefits" to speak out against the evil Chinese government and its arms Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba. Even though many countries have now banned Huawei (US, Japan, UK, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan), and others are thinking of banning (Canada, Germany, Poland), most aren't openly castigating China with exception of US and Taiwan. And even then, even though the US president is one of the few individuals that is openly confrontational with the Chinese regime, he still sometimes offers a conciliary tone. Even muslim countries like Pakistan and Malaysia that suffer from their religioius brothers imprisoned by the millions, raised a few outbursts but then went silent.

GreeniFi 8y ago

We make a big hoo-ha about “social credit”, but I would argue that western financial credit scores function (or will function) in a very similar way given the amount of data some of the third party credit score providers pull and can pull in. The threat is huge because pretty much everyone needs credit to buy a home, and if you’re not a good boy or girl, that possibility will be taken from you. And here’s the dark feeling: Facebook profile and use creates a personality profile. Personality profile is valid credit-score data. That data was possibly stolen from FB. If so, your financial credit score (and by axiom social credit score) is now available to anyone who will pay for it. I’ve been particularly aware of this, because as a self-employed entrepreneur, my credit score has taken a pummeling - I think largely due to erratic cash flow. I see it as a long term threat to risk-taking. Basically, the lesson is clear: by seeking to change things, as entrepreneurs do, you’re not being a good boy or girl.

bb101 8y ago

What's the end game for China, and indeed the world? One dystopian preview is Ma Boyong's award winning short story "City of Silence", published as part of Ken Liu's Invisible Planets. One can also read it at https://web.archive.org/web/20120221185906/http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/tuesday-fiction-the-city-of-silence-by-ma-boyong/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120221185906/http://worldsf.wo... and https://web.archive.org/web/20120229091732/http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/tuesday-fiction-the-city-of-silence-by-ma-boyong-part-two/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120229091732/http://worldsf.wo... Edit: added part 2.

joejerryronnie 8y ago
The end game seems to be moving more and more toward armed conflict between China and the US. I honestly don’t see both societies continuing their current trajectories without running headlong into each other. Perhaps it will just be another cold war and we’ll see who’s economic system blinks first.
- turtlecloud 8y ago
  That is the narrative they are trying to push. IMO it is more a case between the globalists and the non-globalists. Some groups of people want it to be an interconnected world with 1 society.
- boznz 8y ago
  You mean armed conflict between some dick politicians in China and some dick politicians in the US in which everyone else but them will suffer. History has taught us nothing.

arcaster 8y ago

With Soros himself being the exception to the definition of a "mortal threat"?

lyrachord 8y ago

Some comments show that there are 2 many deformities.