9 ms·

Worried about Huawei? Take a closer look at Tencent

150 points by Ultramanoid 8y ago

Proven 8y ago
I’m not worried about Tencent because the government can’t force me to use it. If Huawei is in telco infra, I must use it. This isn’t to say I wouldn’t worry about other, Western brands.
alias_neo 8y ago
Let's not forget Tencent also owns ~40% of Epic Games. All of those sweet Fortnite hours-played are going to do well for your social credit score.
- icebraining 8y ago
  > All of those sweet Fortnite hours-played are going to do well for your social credit score. On the contrary, Chinese regulators have been forcing gaming companies - including Tencent - to impose playtime limits.
  - alias_neo 8y ago
    Same result though right? The government decides how much gaming you can do. EDIT: Just to be clear, my original comment was sarcastic; gaming is bad for your social credit score under the new system. Just in case you thought I actually meant good.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      > gaming is bad for your social credit score under the new system No it isn't. The idea is popular, probably because it plays into the simple narrative of a totalitarian government doing a single big thing to control everything at once. But the "social credit system" essentially amounts to separate government departments trying to coordinate their actions. Here's the best-informed article I've read so far on the topic: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social...
      - alias_neo 8y ago
        Thanks for the link. Although this may be the case now, we can't just dismiss the fact that any government or service provider can (and will) continue to develop these systems and in the future control and deny more rights and access to services based on people's lifestyles. As the NHS struggles more in the UK, I can imagine a future where your lifestyle habits, bought from banks and retailers are used to decide on your entitlement to care. Insurance companies already use profiling, employers have been guilty of it, even countries using your social media to make decisions on entry. These things will continue to be eroded, and if we just simply dismiss it, because a statement is too "matter of fact" like mine was, were in danger of losing sight of the fact that this is happening everywhere, it just doesn't necessarily have a nice marketing name yet.
zimpenfish 8y ago
Weird “whataboutism” - social media you opt into vs telco network hardware you’d have (presumably) no choice with. Don’t get me wrong - they’re both bad but one is a distinct level up.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  I'd say it's the other way around. You can avoid Huawei devices because it's easy to say "this brand is bad." But he average consumer doesn't know what software Tencent has ties to. You think you're getting North Carolina's Epic Games, but you're also getting Shenzhen's Tencent.
  - auiya 8y ago
    > You can avoid Huawei devices because it's easy to say "this brand is bad." You know for a fact not a single packet any of your devices have sent or received have traversed a Huawei device?
    - huffmsa 8y ago
      I don't. But I did make a conscious decision recently to not buy a phone from them.
      - zimpenfish 8y ago
        It's not just their phones, sadly, they're quite a popular supplier of backend telco equipment. e.g., in the UK, > BT has announced it is in the process of removing Huawei's equipment from the core of its existing 3G and 4G mobile operations
    - everdrive 8y ago
      I think this is a great example of an equivocation that often gets made. A security risk that a company might be able to reliably implement on a large scale, vs. a technical security risk that might only be true in a research lab. ie, a single packet going through a Huawei devices doesn't pose me any threat. Not really. If I signed up for a Tencent service, though, quite a bit of my information would be voluntarily handed to the Chinese government. (and to be clear, there is a real risk to Huawei infrastructure, but it's not the rare possibility that I may never be able to avoid it as I sometimes use the internet.)
shasheene 8y ago
Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, which develops the incredibly popular Fortnite Battle Royale computer game. Epic Games happens to also develop the influential tool Unreal Engine, which is used widely throughout industry to produce interactive 3D applications. Fortnite BR, like other competitive online games, runs anti-cheat software in-order to detect cheaters. Fornite BR happens to use Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye [1] [2]. Anti-cheat software runs with very high privilege. More importantly, with many anti-cheat software, every session a new binary payload is downloaded directly from the internet. Anti-cheat software seems like a great platform to launch targeted malware in-order to achieve a beachhead on a computer network: highly targeted, and effectively undetectable. I would expect most software developers don't sandbox their gaming machines from their work-from-home environments. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_error_easyanticheat_not_installed/dvdng3a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_e... [2] https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7446514/fortnite-cheats-beware-epic-games-buys-game-security-firm-kamu/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7446514/fortnite-cheats-beware...
- Negitivefrags 8y ago
  I think the concept that Tencent is asking Epic to infect your computer with malware is a ridiculous conspiracy theory. I work for a western studio for which Tencent is a majority shareholder, and I can tell you, Tencent hasn't even hinted at wanting any of our data, let harvesting more. As far as I can tell, their motives are simple and capitalistic. Somewhat ironically, it was all the western potential acquiring companies that had agendas that were very ethically distasteful to us. Tencent certainly complies with Chinese laws in china, but can you blame it? Wouldn't you comply with the law of your country?
  - Judgmentality 8y ago
    > I work for a western studio for which Tencent is a majority shareholder, and I can tell you, Tencent hasn't even hinted at wanting any of our data, let harvesting more. How would you know if they did? Most employees have zero interactions with their employer's investors.
DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
I'm really torn between two thougts. Of course this kind of censorship shouldn't happen. What they are doing is wrong and I find it mostly just sad that the Chinese government can't function without such a degree of censorship. On the other side though, people are being warned again and again about centralized platforms, and they never cared one bit. Even with China as a perfect example of how terribly that can go wrong, people just won't believe that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn't be relying 100% on centralized messaging and social media platforms. We can't change the Chinese government; nobody can. It's a political monolith built from the ground up to maintain its own stability above all else. What we can do, however, is the way we think about software; not as something that just seems to grow on trees on its own, but tools that can and will be used for political purposes whenever possible.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > We can't change the Chinese government; nobody can. It's a political monolith built from the ground up to maintain its own stability above all else. People once thought the same thing about Soviet Russia, and they were wrong. The Chinese government can be changed, it's just that none of the actions "we" can do to help with that have any clear path to quick success. I think it'll be more an exercise of doing what one can (like refusing to cooperate with censorship. tying to subvert it, amplifying dissidents, etc.) and waiting. Just to clarify, I'm taking "we" to mean all of us opposed to authoritarianism, across all national boundaries.
  - alexandre_m 8y ago
    That's foolish to believe that. Soviet Russia in the 80s was falling apart after economic stagnation, then the perestroika and glasnost would make it open to critic communism itself, even some events like Chernobyl contributed to some extent. You wouldn't have even dreamed to make Soviet Russia regime fall with "social pressure" under Stalin. China is not regressing nor stagnating, it's peaking. You can't take it out from the inside so easily.
philprx 8y ago
Both Telco equipment and social chat backdoor or interception is possible but: Reach of Huawei (or other manufacturer) potential backdoor is bigger and more business focused than social media and games. So the risk is still great to economy with Telco compromise, but the social and political risk is probably equal or comparable with social media. A bit comparing apples and oranges still, but interesting anyway.
dalbasal 8y ago
The way security and surveillance is developing globally is incredibly worrying. Security establishments are treating domestic companies, infrastructure, data hosting and anything else they can as vectors for intelligence. Legislators are supporting them. No one is taking the higher ground because they're doing it too. Meanwhile, the meatiest cash cows in tech are advertising businesses, and the technologies that make their money are ad-tech, which at this point is extremely adjacent to spy-tech. Facebook's ad-tech, for example, would be very good at narrowing down a list of people likely to go on Hajj... I'm sure tencent's is too. China is more open/public/brazen about their domestic activities (we noticed that your friend went to Mecca) where the US is cagey about domestic operations (eg Snowden). They're more discreet about foreign surveillance, where the US is a little more public. Both are doing both. So are dozens of nations and probably few non state players. Now we seem to have an arm's race, with spooks publicly "outing" rivals and simultaneously demanding (publicly and privately) legislatures and companies improve their access. At best, we get technology and digital culture balkanization. At worst, we get stasi-on-steriods. There doesn't seem to be any meaningful political force pushing in the freedom direction.
- Moru 8y ago
  The political forces that do exist gets actively ignored. People are just happy as it is, getting everything for free and/or conveniently. And "As long as you don't have anything to hide..." is the mantra of today. The thing is, we don't know what we need to hide tomorrow.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    > The thing is, we don't know what we need to hide tomorrow. Or what others, such as journalists and whistle-blowers, need to hide today.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    I think a political force that gets ignored is a contradiction of terms.
- rjf72 8y ago
  In my opinion the sad reality is that societies mostly advance by sticking their finger in their fire. - If not for nukes we'd still be going full-on against each other in war. - If not for Hitler, we'd probably still be engaged in top-down government driven eugenics. Something many do not know is that US "progress" on this topic was an early inspiration for Hitler. And here too the solution will likely be letting things reach their natural climax. It's not difficult to imagine a practically infinite number of extreme scenarios when you have centralized authorities with effectively unlimited informational access on their population and perceived 'enemies' - foreign and domestic. One of these scenarios will eventually play out, at which point this dystopic nonsense can hopefully go the way of government driven eugenics as people realize what this can, and inevitably will, culminate in. Oh no no, governments will only involuntarily sterilize the [not me] people. Oh no no, governments will only use mountains of personal and private information to exploit [not me] people.
bibyte 8y ago
I am wondering how popular WeChat and QQ is outside of China. The most worrying news for me is Tencent investment in Reddit.
- Ultramanoid 8y ago
  > Although WeChat’s primary user base is in China, an estimated 100 to 200 million people outside the country use the messaging service. Among them are millions of members of the Chinese diaspora in countries like Canada, Australia and the United States, but there is also broader expansion in much of Asia. Malaysia is reportedly home to 20 million WeChat users, out of a population of 31 million. In Thailand, an estimated 17 percent of the population has a WeChat account. In Mongolia, WeChat was the second most downloaded application in 2017. Merchants in Myanmar’s Shan state along the border with China have taken up the app and the number of retailers in Japan that accept WePay (mostly when serving Chinese tourists) increased 35-fold last year. Tencent recently purchased a $150 million stake in the news aggregator Reddit and is eyeing an entrance into the online video market in Taiwan, according to Taiwanese officials. Edit : Also, remarkably, there's this : ...once an account is registered with a Chinese phone number, it remains subject to Chinese controls even outside the country. And the article gives some examples about it and how the control is not limited to within China itself.
  - ilamont 8y ago
    I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If the PRC can't control individuals, it controls the platforms, either directly or through proxies. It started with mass media (https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-complexity-and-thoroughness https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-comp...), social media, the Internet (https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china), and telecommunications in the PRC, expanded to "overseas Chinese" communities in Southeast Asia, Australia, and North America (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-03272018113611.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-0327201811...), global tech companies (https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-companies-restrictions/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-...), and now global social media communities (https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexFR6YsiqJ https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexF... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882).
Brain_Thief 8y ago
It seems like every week brings an ever-quickening deluge of this kind of information, whether about some surveillance corporation lying to / exploiting its users or an oppressive government edging ever closer toward a full-on 1984 nightmare scenario (some are just about there). At this point the decision tree facing privacy activists, those concerned with human rights, and those who support the expansion of western moral aspirations is unambiguous. Do you dislike Google fucking up the internet and assisting with totalitarian censorship regimes? Stop using their services. Stop letting them pay you to improve their services. If you're good enough to work at Google, you're uniquely positioned to get another high-paying job somewhere else. Same with the other big offenders. Do you dislike FaceBook's scummy behavior on everything from censorship, to digital stalking of non-users, to psychological experimentation with unwitting human subjects? Stop adding fuel to the fire. Quit. Today. Now. Are you uncomfortable with China's aggressive censorship, human rights abuses, and surveillance? Stop buying shit from them. Stop using their software. Nine times out of ten you don't need it. Exceptions arise, and no one's behavior is perfect. But the 1/10 case where you absolutely MUST use a certain surveillance app or buy a certain widget made by slaves in another country is not an excuse for throwing your hands up and capitulating in the other nine cases you encounter every day.
ataturk 8y ago
It certainly feels like the world is closing in--we have China openly and profligately performing massive censorship, spying, and political repression on nearly two billion people without a wimper of protest from the West. We have clear censorship in the West--New Zealand blocking that video and prosecuting people for watching it. Not sure what to make of that except yeah, that's probably bad for us long term. We have the Australian spy agencies forcing their way into encrypted platforms which has worldwide implications because any firm doing business in Oz is now forced to install backdoors and give up encryption keys, making us all less safe online. I can't even write about all the other examples. But allow me to summarize: The US is falling apart--the southern border is being pruposefully overwhelmed and as soon as those millions of people can become voters, it's all over for the Land of the Free. We're being bum-rushed by an agenda. Somebody, somewhere better grow some balls pretty quick or we're back to serfdom in less than a generation.
CalRobert 8y ago
I was surprised to see them recruiting at Defcon.

150 points by Ultramanoid 8y ago

I’m not worried about Tencent because the government can’t force me to use it. If Huawei is in telco infra, I must use it. This isn’t to say I wouldn’t worry about other, Western brands.

alias_neo 8y ago

Let's not forget Tencent also owns ~40% of Epic Games. All of those sweet Fortnite hours-played are going to do well for your social credit score.

icebraining 8y ago
> All of those sweet Fortnite hours-played are going to do well for your social credit score. On the contrary, Chinese regulators have been forcing gaming companies - including Tencent - to impose playtime limits.
- alias_neo 8y ago
  Same result though right? The government decides how much gaming you can do. EDIT: Just to be clear, my original comment was sarcastic; gaming is bad for your social credit score under the new system. Just in case you thought I actually meant good.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    > gaming is bad for your social credit score under the new system No it isn't. The idea is popular, probably because it plays into the simple narrative of a totalitarian government doing a single big thing to control everything at once. But the "social credit system" essentially amounts to separate government departments trying to coordinate their actions. Here's the best-informed article I've read so far on the topic: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social...
    - alias_neo 8y ago
      Thanks for the link. Although this may be the case now, we can't just dismiss the fact that any government or service provider can (and will) continue to develop these systems and in the future control and deny more rights and access to services based on people's lifestyles. As the NHS struggles more in the UK, I can imagine a future where your lifestyle habits, bought from banks and retailers are used to decide on your entitlement to care. Insurance companies already use profiling, employers have been guilty of it, even countries using your social media to make decisions on entry. These things will continue to be eroded, and if we just simply dismiss it, because a statement is too "matter of fact" like mine was, were in danger of losing sight of the fact that this is happening everywhere, it just doesn't necessarily have a nice marketing name yet.

zimpenfish 8y ago

Weird “whataboutism” - social media you opt into vs telco network hardware you’d have (presumably) no choice with. Don’t get me wrong - they’re both bad but one is a distinct level up.

huffmsa 8y ago
I'd say it's the other way around. You can avoid Huawei devices because it's easy to say "this brand is bad." But he average consumer doesn't know what software Tencent has ties to. You think you're getting North Carolina's Epic Games, but you're also getting Shenzhen's Tencent.
- auiya 8y ago
  > You can avoid Huawei devices because it's easy to say "this brand is bad." You know for a fact not a single packet any of your devices have sent or received have traversed a Huawei device?
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    I don't. But I did make a conscious decision recently to not buy a phone from them.
    - zimpenfish 8y ago
      It's not just their phones, sadly, they're quite a popular supplier of backend telco equipment. e.g., in the UK, > BT has announced it is in the process of removing Huawei's equipment from the core of its existing 3G and 4G mobile operations
  - everdrive 8y ago
    I think this is a great example of an equivocation that often gets made. A security risk that a company might be able to reliably implement on a large scale, vs. a technical security risk that might only be true in a research lab. ie, a single packet going through a Huawei devices doesn't pose me any threat. Not really. If I signed up for a Tencent service, though, quite a bit of my information would be voluntarily handed to the Chinese government. (and to be clear, there is a real risk to Huawei infrastructure, but it's not the rare possibility that I may never be able to avoid it as I sometimes use the internet.)

shasheene 8y ago

Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, which develops the incredibly popular Fortnite Battle Royale computer game. Epic Games happens to also develop the influential tool Unreal Engine, which is used widely throughout industry to produce interactive 3D applications. Fortnite BR, like other competitive online games, runs anti-cheat software in-order to detect cheaters. Fornite BR happens to use Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye [1] [2]. Anti-cheat software runs with very high privilege. More importantly, with many anti-cheat software, every session a new binary payload is downloaded directly from the internet. Anti-cheat software seems like a great platform to launch targeted malware in-order to achieve a beachhead on a computer network: highly targeted, and effectively undetectable. I would expect most software developers don't sandbox their gaming machines from their work-from-home environments. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_error_easyanticheat_not_installed/dvdng3a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_e... [2] https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7446514/fortnite-cheats-beware-epic-games-buys-game-security-firm-kamu/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/7446514/fortnite-cheats-beware...

Negitivefrags 8y ago
I think the concept that Tencent is asking Epic to infect your computer with malware is a ridiculous conspiracy theory. I work for a western studio for which Tencent is a majority shareholder, and I can tell you, Tencent hasn't even hinted at wanting any of our data, let harvesting more. As far as I can tell, their motives are simple and capitalistic. Somewhat ironically, it was all the western potential acquiring companies that had agendas that were very ethically distasteful to us. Tencent certainly complies with Chinese laws in china, but can you blame it? Wouldn't you comply with the law of your country?
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  > I work for a western studio for which Tencent is a majority shareholder, and I can tell you, Tencent hasn't even hinted at wanting any of our data, let harvesting more. How would you know if they did? Most employees have zero interactions with their employer's investors.

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago

I'm really torn between two thougts. Of course this kind of censorship shouldn't happen. What they are doing is wrong and I find it mostly just sad that the Chinese government can't function without such a degree of censorship. On the other side though, people are being warned again and again about centralized platforms, and they never cared one bit. Even with China as a perfect example of how terribly that can go wrong, people just won't believe that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn't be relying 100% on centralized messaging and social media platforms. We can't change the Chinese government; nobody can. It's a political monolith built from the ground up to maintain its own stability above all else. What we can do, however, is the way we think about software; not as something that just seems to grow on trees on its own, but tools that can and will be used for political purposes whenever possible.

ardy42 8y ago
> We can't change the Chinese government; nobody can. It's a political monolith built from the ground up to maintain its own stability above all else. People once thought the same thing about Soviet Russia, and they were wrong. The Chinese government can be changed, it's just that none of the actions "we" can do to help with that have any clear path to quick success. I think it'll be more an exercise of doing what one can (like refusing to cooperate with censorship. tying to subvert it, amplifying dissidents, etc.) and waiting. Just to clarify, I'm taking "we" to mean all of us opposed to authoritarianism, across all national boundaries.
- alexandre_m 8y ago
  That's foolish to believe that. Soviet Russia in the 80s was falling apart after economic stagnation, then the perestroika and glasnost would make it open to critic communism itself, even some events like Chernobyl contributed to some extent. You wouldn't have even dreamed to make Soviet Russia regime fall with "social pressure" under Stalin. China is not regressing nor stagnating, it's peaking. You can't take it out from the inside so easily.

philprx 8y ago

Both Telco equipment and social chat backdoor or interception is possible but: Reach of Huawei (or other manufacturer) potential backdoor is bigger and more business focused than social media and games. So the risk is still great to economy with Telco compromise, but the social and political risk is probably equal or comparable with social media. A bit comparing apples and oranges still, but interesting anyway.

dalbasal 8y ago

The way security and surveillance is developing globally is incredibly worrying. Security establishments are treating domestic companies, infrastructure, data hosting and anything else they can as vectors for intelligence. Legislators are supporting them. No one is taking the higher ground because they're doing it too. Meanwhile, the meatiest cash cows in tech are advertising businesses, and the technologies that make their money are ad-tech, which at this point is extremely adjacent to spy-tech. Facebook's ad-tech, for example, would be very good at narrowing down a list of people likely to go on Hajj... I'm sure tencent's is too. China is more open/public/brazen about their domestic activities (we noticed that your friend went to Mecca) where the US is cagey about domestic operations (eg Snowden). They're more discreet about foreign surveillance, where the US is a little more public. Both are doing both. So are dozens of nations and probably few non state players. Now we seem to have an arm's race, with spooks publicly "outing" rivals and simultaneously demanding (publicly and privately) legislatures and companies improve their access. At best, we get technology and digital culture balkanization. At worst, we get stasi-on-steriods. There doesn't seem to be any meaningful political force pushing in the freedom direction.

Moru 8y ago
The political forces that do exist gets actively ignored. People are just happy as it is, getting everything for free and/or conveniently. And "As long as you don't have anything to hide..." is the mantra of today. The thing is, we don't know what we need to hide tomorrow.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  > The thing is, we don't know what we need to hide tomorrow. Or what others, such as journalists and whistle-blowers, need to hide today.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  I think a political force that gets ignored is a contradiction of terms.
rjf72 8y ago
In my opinion the sad reality is that societies mostly advance by sticking their finger in their fire. - If not for nukes we'd still be going full-on against each other in war. - If not for Hitler, we'd probably still be engaged in top-down government driven eugenics. Something many do not know is that US "progress" on this topic was an early inspiration for Hitler. And here too the solution will likely be letting things reach their natural climax. It's not difficult to imagine a practically infinite number of extreme scenarios when you have centralized authorities with effectively unlimited informational access on their population and perceived 'enemies' - foreign and domestic. One of these scenarios will eventually play out, at which point this dystopic nonsense can hopefully go the way of government driven eugenics as people realize what this can, and inevitably will, culminate in. Oh no no, governments will only involuntarily sterilize the [not me] people. Oh no no, governments will only use mountains of personal and private information to exploit [not me] people.

bibyte 8y ago

I am wondering how popular WeChat and QQ is outside of China. The most worrying news for me is Tencent investment in Reddit.

Ultramanoid 8y ago
> Although WeChat’s primary user base is in China, an estimated 100 to 200 million people outside the country use the messaging service. Among them are millions of members of the Chinese diaspora in countries like Canada, Australia and the United States, but there is also broader expansion in much of Asia. Malaysia is reportedly home to 20 million WeChat users, out of a population of 31 million. In Thailand, an estimated 17 percent of the population has a WeChat account. In Mongolia, WeChat was the second most downloaded application in 2017. Merchants in Myanmar’s Shan state along the border with China have taken up the app and the number of retailers in Japan that accept WePay (mostly when serving Chinese tourists) increased 35-fold last year. Tencent recently purchased a $150 million stake in the news aggregator Reddit and is eyeing an entrance into the online video market in Taiwan, according to Taiwanese officials. Edit : Also, remarkably, there's this : ...once an account is registered with a Chinese phone number, it remains subject to Chinese controls even outside the country. And the article gives some examples about it and how the control is not limited to within China itself.
- ilamont 8y ago
  I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If the PRC can't control individuals, it controls the platforms, either directly or through proxies. It started with mass media (https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-complexity-and-thoroughness https://freedomhouse.org/blog/media-control-china-model-comp...), social media, the Internet (https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china), and telecommunications in the PRC, expanded to "overseas Chinese" communities in Southeast Asia, Australia, and North America (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-03272018113611.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/monitoring-0327201811...), global tech companies (https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-companies-restrictions/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-...), and now global social media communities (https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexFR6YsiqJ https://mashable.com/2016/11/22/facebook-censor-china/#PGexF... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121882).

Brain_Thief 8y ago

It seems like every week brings an ever-quickening deluge of this kind of information, whether about some surveillance corporation lying to / exploiting its users or an oppressive government edging ever closer toward a full-on 1984 nightmare scenario (some are just about there). At this point the decision tree facing privacy activists, those concerned with human rights, and those who support the expansion of western moral aspirations is unambiguous. Do you dislike Google fucking up the internet and assisting with totalitarian censorship regimes? Stop using their services. Stop letting them pay you to improve their services. If you're good enough to work at Google, you're uniquely positioned to get another high-paying job somewhere else. Same with the other big offenders. Do you dislike FaceBook's scummy behavior on everything from censorship, to digital stalking of non-users, to psychological experimentation with unwitting human subjects? Stop adding fuel to the fire. Quit. Today. Now. Are you uncomfortable with China's aggressive censorship, human rights abuses, and surveillance? Stop buying shit from them. Stop using their software. Nine times out of ten you don't need it. Exceptions arise, and no one's behavior is perfect. But the 1/10 case where you absolutely MUST use a certain surveillance app or buy a certain widget made by slaves in another country is not an excuse for throwing your hands up and capitulating in the other nine cases you encounter every day.

ataturk 8y ago

It certainly feels like the world is closing in--we have China openly and profligately performing massive censorship, spying, and political repression on nearly two billion people without a wimper of protest from the West. We have clear censorship in the West--New Zealand blocking that video and prosecuting people for watching it. Not sure what to make of that except yeah, that's probably bad for us long term. We have the Australian spy agencies forcing their way into encrypted platforms which has worldwide implications because any firm doing business in Oz is now forced to install backdoors and give up encryption keys, making us all less safe online. I can't even write about all the other examples. But allow me to summarize: The US is falling apart--the southern border is being pruposefully overwhelmed and as soon as those millions of people can become voters, it's all over for the Land of the Free. We're being bum-rushed by an agenda. Somebody, somewhere better grow some balls pretty quick or we're back to serfdom in less than a generation.

CalRobert 8y ago

I was surprised to see them recruiting at Defcon.