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Chinese Data Breach Exposes 'Breed Ready' Status of Almost 2M Women
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agolol priorities remain same
- close04 8y agoThe usage of "Breed Ready" gives me goosebumps. Feels like the dystopian future is here.
- docdeek 8y agoIn discussions on reddit yesterday some people suggested this was merely a bad translation of ‘child rearing age’. If so, the bottom end (youngest) of 18 seems to make sense and is a lot less dystopian than it might otherwise read.
- cazum 8y agoThe list only includes single, widowed or divorced women, so in that regard the list has been created from a bit more filtering than just age. EDIT: to your point however, being married would not preclude a woman from being "breed ready" as we understand the phrase. So clearly there is some missing context needed to really understand what that column represents.
- dymk 8y agoThe government tracking when a woman is able to bear a child isn’t made less creepy at all by slightly changing the translated name.
- mc32 8y agoThey’re not sure who owns the database.
- rscho 8y agoYes it is. Do you think the US doesn't maintain similar statistics based on age? The data including more fertility indices, such as health issues or similar would be another story.
- dymk 8y agoOh great let’s see your actual proof, thank you.
- wgerard 8y agoHere you go: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/childbearing/20120817_cspan_childbearing_slides.pdf https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/childbearing/20120817_... Took 5 seconds to find on google. Unless you're going to move the goalposts.
- dymk 8y agoHow about you just post proof of your claims instead of throwing out “just google it!”, so the discussion isn’t lowered even further from when HN used to expect citations? Also aggregate statistics aren’t the same as this database. What the CN government is doing is far creepier. Individual personal entries.
- wgerard 8y ago> What the CN government is doing is far creepier. Individual personal entries. Yes, thankfully there are no systems in place for the US government to verify/track someone's age (and thus infer their ability to bear children).
- diminoten 8y agoNo, because that allows for an asymmetrical attack on a conversation, where a person can demand evidence, despite there being readily accessible information at the demander's fingertips, forcing the other person in the conversation to spend much more time than the time it took to request the information. You're asking someone else to do your legwork, and it's a form of trolling. Prove you care about this topic to the person you're talking to by doing some cursory research.
- avar 8y agoThe time of women's puberty and menopause is a key health metric for a given population. If it's moving up or down something's likely to be very wrong (e.g. exposure to pollution, hormones in the food/water supply). It would be negligent not to track it for health reasons. There seems to have been something shady going on here. I won't comment on that, but the government tracking this isn't per-se strange or unwarranted.
- CPLX 8y agoOf course it is. Governments collect vast databases of statistics about all manner of attributes of their population as a matter of course. They even keep track of things like which sexually transmitted diseases people have, and how much money they earned.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI'd bet dollars to donuts that insurance companies in the U.S. are tracking similar data.
- golem14 8y agoDepends, no? If the translation is "women between 18 and 40", it's harder to be upset about it, because US census data clearly has similar information.
- mikeash 8y agoThis is a great example of how different translation styles can convey completely different meanings. We should keep in mind not to trust the connotations of any translated phrase. Heck, we can barely trust the overt meaning.
- class4behavior 8y agoNot the users but the Guardian article the thread was linked to. In the comments on Reddit you constantly watch the few who read the article collect karma for explaining the very same points to those who didn't. Besides, in the US the census collects the same kind of data, it just probably hasn't used with an agenda. Among EU members, on the other hand, data protection laws often disallow the collection of such information.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lookACamel 8y agoI saw a different explanation which is that it's a bad translation of "has had children".
- glasslion 8y agocould be. that's my first guess.
- duxup 8y agoBeyond that we often track / talk about people who are in their "prime working years". That doesn't mean the government is planning to round them up and put them to work.
- mc32 8y agoWhile the breach is a reminder that people don’t have good security practices, piling on or focusing on the words ‘breed’ and ‘ready’ shows how eager journalism is to jump on something that isn’t quite fleshed out. First, they don’t know if it’s governmental or otherwise, second they’re not sure if the words are mistranslations or a shorthand categorization. The government is concerned the population drop will happen too fast and are also concerned some men will have issues finding a partner due to previous reproductive policies. These latter issues are socially graver issues that could be discussed at length but the article instead decided to focus on speculation.
- heavenlyblue 8y agoOr it's simply western propaganda working well enough?
- mc32 8y agoMost of the West would not care much (about a foreign government knowing who’s reproductive and not, unless it leads to forced reproduction for the motherland). It looks more like journalists wanting to score points. They state they don’t know who owns the database. As of now it’s all speculative. For all we now it could be about reproductive health. I bet Kaiser-Permanente knows who is reproductive or not for at least a subset of their patients.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hart_russell 8y agoAre you suggesting the Chinese govt doesn't enact overreaching policies such as the social credit system?
- heavenlyblue 8y agoI am suggesting it works both ways. I also believe it's a relatively healthy dynamic.
- 8y ago
- ElBarto 8y agoThis is clutching at straws... The anti-Chinese propaganda is too obvious on this one, sorry.
- potatofarmer45 8y agoI think I play too much Starcraft that when I see "Breed Ready", I immediately think I must've forgotten to morph workers or overlords.
- curiousjorge 8y agough
- ralusek 8y agoClearly China has been communicating with Korea.
- zxcvvcxz 8y agoAs a country becomes wealthier, it has to be very careful that the women are still motivated and capable of reproducing at or above replacement rates. Otherwise you might be stuck importing unskilled immigrants from different cultures. These are big concerns to China.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago> you might be stuck importing unskilled immigrants This is actually considered the regular flow of first world countries. Third world country birth rates become larger and larger to boost and enable larger economies while first world countries require less people to get things done. In the West, three or four children is a large family while in four or five is normal in African Nations.
- shaki-dora 8y agoLove how you’re justifying the demeaning of women as mere incubators by an appeal to xenophobia.
- ralusek 8y agoOr, as the case with the US, we import skilled immigrants. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Sergei Brin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, Andrew Viterbi, Stephen Wolfram, among others, seem like pretty good gets for the US.
- zxcvvcxz 8y agoHow do you know other native-born Americans wouldn't have started these businesses? The business conditions and technological readiness were ripe for talented and driven individuals, it just happened to be these fellas.
- ralusek 8y agoI'm not sure we have any evidence to indicate that the universe works that way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 8y agoMongoDB is the premier example [1] of why software should be "secure by default" [2]. 1. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mongodb%20unsecured&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mongodb%20unsecured&sort=byPop... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_by_default https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_by_default
- ratling 8y agoMongoDB has for years been the premiere example of 'what not to do.'
- umvi 8y agoFrom your [2]: > Security by default, in software, means that the default configuration settings are the most secure settings possible, which are not necessarily the most user friendly settings. The hard part is making it both secure by default but also developer (user) friendly. If you make it so that it is super secure by default, but onerous just to get your product setup because of all the security overhead developers are going to get frustrated and either disable all the security or use a competitor's (less secure) product that is easier to setup and you are back at square one. There are so many options out there that if you try to launch a product (DB, webserver, etc.) and it's really hard for the developer to get started ("step 1, before you can try out this webserver, first register an account with Let's Encrypt") nobody is going to use it. It's not an easy problem to solve because people are inherently lazy and want results fast. Security done right is the opposite of that in its current state.
- kijin 8y agoWhen it comes to databases, either 1) listening on localhost by default or 2) requiring a non-obvious password would seem to strike a decent balance between security and usability. But MongoDB is web scale! Nobody is going to run it on localhost only! So the default (until 2.6) was to listen on all interfaces by default. AFAIK Elasticsearch still listens on all interfaces by default. Does this choice make life any easier for the developer who is just beginning to learn how to use it? I dunno, most of my development work takes place on localhost. I probably won't even notice if a newly installed database only listens on localhost.
- syntaxing 8y agoYou're better of following the Twitter with the guy that discovered this (I do not have the link on hand but will post when I get to my laptop). He explains why this is not usual and concerning. He goes through unsecured MongoDB (US or China) to see what people are up to.
- sinxccc 8y agoThis definitely can't be a database from any Chinese government organization. Look at the screenshot from tweet carefully and you can find it store "photo" on fbcdn.net. Which totally blocked by firewall of China.
- Fricken 8y agoI wonder if Plenty of Fish has a larger or smaller database of breed ready females.
- zachguo 8y agoProbably just an unsecured database of a dead matching/marriage app...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hurr_durr 8y agoAll these articles about "dystopian China" and how evil they are end up just being mostly clickbait. Folks around here sure seem to enjoy these kinds of stories though.
- sky_nox 8y agoI read on Reddit that it was a bad translation of "has had children". We don't know who owns the database. It might be from a life insurance company.
- undoware 8y agoa fun game to play is to guess how many of the commenters here on HN who think this is defensible have a uterus and/or are women. I guess this mostly seems fine to those who are not even potentially affected, as usual.