21 ms·

WeChat and the Surveillance State

401 points by Markoff 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
0x1997 7y ago
Tiananmen Square, 1989 -- Revisited http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen-square-1989-revisited/ http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen-square-1989-revisited/
anonu 7y ago
In NYC there's been a growing trend towards merchants going cashless. There are bills to prevent this. Losing ability to pay with cash means a loss of privacy and anonymity. The WeChat dominance in payments reminds me a bit of this trend. Luckily some US local governments care about maintaining some level of privacy.
jaryzhang 7y ago
I dont like to aegue blablabla, but to give evidence. Chinese travel abroad to so called freendom countries 100M per year, 99.9999%(I dont know how many 9) return to China. Vote by feet. If Young Chinese now are sitll decieved by so simple and naive words, our next generation will curse us.
werbles1 7y ago
Asshole.
vilifiedtwin 7y ago
Pretty much every country is doing it or will be doing it. Some will do in the open and some will hide it from unsuspecting citizens. It is just how human nature works and it is just another way to maintain power and order. In short, nothing to see here...
xyzal 7y ago
This maybe implies a use case where deepfakes could actually used be to the benefit of society.
- dpflan 7y ago
  Would you mind elaborating this thought?
  - eof 7y ago
    Presumably by creating ai generated personas dissidents could get some manner of protection from this type of surveillance.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Imagine deep faking Party members. I'm sure the state will do so happily to politically assassinate officials that don't fall in line, but imagine if the people started doing the same to the Big Dogs, like to jinping himself. The possibilities are exciting ...
- Swinx43 7y ago
  I honestly see it going the other way. Deepfakes being used to create fake material that falsely incriminates someone. So if they have the biometrics of an account on file already, they would match a fake video circulating the service to that account and presto you are on a watch list.
  - Aelius 7y ago
    I could imagine a "resistance" bombarding wechat with so much garbage that the PRC wouldn't be able to trust intel gathered from it.
    - Swinx43 7y ago
      Now that is an interesting thought. They could incriminate party members and government officials to sow distrust in the ranks. Having seen though how certain groups of the population have been dealt with in China does make me wonder if they would not just round everyone up and send them for “re-education”.
- 7y ago
beager 7y ago
The bit about face recognition and voice imprinting is most certainly being used to populate some database, but it also serves as a CAPTCHA of sorts. Advancements in procedural face and voice generation could create a powerful tool to beat CAPTCHA advancements, and to preserve anonymity against creeping surveillance. Of course, China has hooks into the device manufacturers so doing this is an order of magnitude harder than it already is.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  If posting photos from a 6/4 vigil in Hong Kong got the reporter from zero to the first tier watch list, I have a feeling any biometric mismatches would quickly escalate him to the next tier.
gen3 7y ago
I'm glad this article was written. I think the general public is unaware of how China operates, and through education we can better protect our own civil liberties (and better understand why the China is the way that it is).
- Cypher 7y ago
  I do wonder how long it's going to be before we see WhatsApp and the surveillance state articles.
  - komali2 7y ago
    I dunno. We're not anywhere near the level of China (here in the USA). To achieve that, we'd need 1. The fourth estate to become a government agency (functionally) 2. Facebook to have government agents on-site that employees have to follow the orders of 3. The existence of a "department of cultural well-being" with total authority to regulate art, media, news, etc 4. Laws on the books outlawing esoteric orwellian concepts like "distributing harmful rumors" or "disrupting the cultural well-being of the United States." Certainly any one of those steps would have me in front of the capital with a big bottle of water and a picket sign, ready to settle in for the long one. China is very far removed from us.
    - repolfx 7y ago
      I agree there's a long way between the USA and China for the reasons you mention. Still, something nags at me. The USA has all those things in some less government-oriented sense, not organised by a totalitarian party but by a vaguely defined group of powerful people who all live in the same few cities, who all share the same worldview, who all work extraordinarily hard to keep people they disagree with away from the levers of power and who share this same basic mindset: 1. The press is incredibly uniform in America; all papers take explicit political positions despite their role supposedly being to neutrally inform their readers, and they all supported Clinton in the last election. As a foreigner I frequently encounter astonishing falsehoods about my country in supposedly respectable and internationalist papers like the New York Times. 2. Facebook doesn't need government agents to team up with the press in support of an agenda - activists in its employee and management base will ensure it does that anyway. 3. There's no formal department of cultural well-being, but there is nonetheless an exceptionally strong set of beliefs amongst a tiny group of people (the elites/the establishment/the swamp/whatever you want to call them) which do relentlessly impose on news, art, media, etc. Witness how every superhero movie now contains explicitly woke and feminist storylines. 4. "Distributing harmful rumours" and "disrupting the cultural wellbeing" exists in the west too, we just call it hate speech / trolling. Different terms for the same thing and our social networks have WeChat like policies towards them. Whilst the driving force for this doesn't come from government, and there's no formal party per se, the end results are surprisingly similar on a less extreme scale. And if Clinton had won the policy alignment between the government, Hollywood, Big Tech and newspaper owners would be nearly total: you don't need a totalitarian state when those who have power over information or culture all agree with each other on what must be done anyway.
NotPaidToPost 7y ago
Whatever WeChat's links with policing in China, I believe that they have an equivalent of Face ID to authenticate users. Keeping in mind that WeChat is used as an electronic wallet and almost bank account in China. It would have been better journalism to mention this instead of only going for the angle of state policing. It's likely that WeChat already had the person's biometrics details because of the above. Of course that's less catchy than implying that they requested biometrics details because he had posted about Tiananmen commemorations. (though the end result is likely the same)
- aloer 7y ago
  Apple does not have my faceID biometric details and does not need them outside of my own device. Wouldn’t that make your assumption just as bad?
- nullwasamistake 7y ago
  I've got a bunch of cards and empty bank accounts sitting around, none ever asked for biometrics.
horyzen 7y ago
And yet facebook wants to be more like WeChat[0]. [0]https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256226/facebook-wechat-messaging-zuckerberg-strategy https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256226/facebook-wechat-m...
pixelmonkey 7y ago
Very good article, and the video on that page is a must-watch to understand the perils of a state/tech/media alliance that runs too deep.
vajaya 7y ago
basically Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to talk anything cultural, political, spiritual, religious, etc. If you wanna talk fashion, food, travel, music, and the likes, that's absolutely fine. and it seems Chinese people are perfectly content with it. I heard that wechat is transparent to Chinese authority. Last year, a dozens of college students who are Marxist activists and advocate for workers' right in Shenzhen(yes, that techy wonderland so much applauded on HN) were arrested and disappeared since. Some say the authority can watch their every move via wechat.
- Cypher 7y ago
  Well worker rights is a fantasy in the west too. Google and facebook track our every moves and the NSA can watch over our every move. The scary thing is few journalist are left to talk about it over here.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Where is over here? In all the Western countries I'm familiar with, journalists are free to say bad things about Google and Facebook and the NSA, and it happens with some regularity.
  - ridewinter 7y ago
    Nonsense. I don’t know of a single person afraid to express their political views in western countries, no matter how extreme or bizarre.
    - pishpash 7y ago
      Nonsense. Try expressing some communism or Wahhabism in earnest and see where it gets you. It may not end up being the state apparatus that first gets to you, but the end result is the same. Every society has its boogieman. You're just blind to it.
  - komali2 7y ago
    The NSA can't watch our every move, that's illegal. We learned from Edward Snowden that they do so for some people anyway, illegally. It's bad and wrong. It's not nearly at the level of China. America doesn't have xinjiang reeducation camps for political dissidents that also happens to be full of people charged with the crime of being religious. America isn't harvesting the organs of its prisoners against their will. The consequences of being caught by the Chinese surveillance machine is far, far worse in China than it is in the USA, which really doesn't even have it at the same level.
quotz 7y ago
The West has to be wary of becoming a surveillance state. More often than not tech companies in the West are using China tech as an example of how they should operate. We have to protect our civil liberties. I grew up in a post-communist country in Europe, riddled with corruption and dictatorial tendencies, and it is really not a nice place. It's strange that as technology becomes a bigger part of our society, the more it is used against us.
AFascistWorld 7y ago
https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi-the-bun-chinese-netizens-are-being-jailed-for-chatroom-jokes/ https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi-the-b...
ConfusedDog 7y ago
This is indeed very scary especially now it requires facial recognition part... to sign up for WeChat, you need to have a valid phone number; to use WeChat pay, you got to provide real-name and official ID, bank account, etc. From the WeChat social network, relationships are easily identified. The mere existence of such tool is destine to be misused, regardless who made it. This is what real power looks like.
- throwawe32 7y ago
  This data literally sells for "dime a dozen" from multiple data vendors; I'm guessing the article is mere reactions from the Americans because their our platforms have missed out on the data cow that is China. They have India by the balls though, so that's something.
- srslack 7y ago
  There is practically no difference in these requirements versus what Facebook is requiring. Try to create a Facebook account and they will soon flag your account to require a photo for facial recognition. You can't signup for Facebook without a valid mobile number. And if Facebook does not like the photo you provide for facial recognition, they want a government ID.
  - franciscop 7y ago
    Mmh no? I've been without FB account for 3-4 years, and recently opened a new one from scratch because some friends only use FB and absolutely nothing besides confirming my email was required. Yes, it does suggest that I add my phone, and that I verify my friends, and that blablabla, but nothing else is required for me to add few friends and join a chat.
    - srslack 7y ago
      I'd been without a Facebook account for four years as well, but created one for testing/verifying the behavior of an application we'd recently gotten approved. As far as I'm aware it would not let me create an account without a mobile number to confirm the account. After performing a single action (creating a page), my account was flagged, and thrown into the facial recognition captcha process. See here for many more anecdotes about this process: https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/9r0ijd/you_cant_use_facebook_right_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/9r0ijd/you_can...
educationdata 7y ago
What is more scary is that there are many Chinese Americans using WeChat to connect with family members. There is no doubt some of them work in the U.S. government or other sensitive companies or agencies. By tracking their location alone, the Chinese government can obtain huge amount of data.
- vajaya 7y ago
  should we ban wechat? probably yes. it's a quintessential threat to privacy, freedom, and democracy practice. but are we able to? not at all. All big corporates and even some in government are on their side. China is where money is to make and ruling is to learn.
  - majia 7y ago
    The question is what is the due process to ban wechat. An executive order from Trump? If wechat is banned, should all other Chinese apps and websites be banned because every Chinese company is tied to Chinese government? If someone objects to the ban, should he/she be banned for colluding with a foreign threat? If you go down the slope, then at some point the US will become as oppressive as China. China can't make US more authoritarian, but paranoia can.
  - teknologist 7y ago
    Along with Baidu and all the other sites that have had their American counterparts banned in China. Yes please.
- knolax 7y ago
  It's red scare 2.0 with you people.
dvduval 7y ago
Facebook/Twitter have been used to manipulate politics in many countries. China does not want WeChat to be used in a similar way. Somehow here in the US/West everyone gets the real news?
- komali2 7y ago
  The Chinese government will use WeChat data to arrest and make dissidents vanish. Fakenews is not a threat great enough to justify this. There is no equivalence between what is happening in China and what we are dealing with in the USA.
  - jimclegg 7y ago
    Kind of like the US government using Facebook data/communications to arrest people? Sounds very equal.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Interesting, I hadn't heard that the United States government was wholesale surveilling its population, with no oversight, with an open tap in Facebook data, and using that information to imprison people for thought crimes such as having a religion. False equivalence doesn't pass for me. The USA has surveillance issues, but it isn't the prc.
      - jimclegg 7y ago
        In many ways its worse, PRC doesn't arrest or extrajudicially murder people that have never visited China from what I understand. Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes.
        komali2 7y ago
        > Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes. We certainly don't know this to be true or false, because China hasn't had a Julian Assange yet. What we can work with is available data - China has tens of thousands of thought-criminals in reeducation camps, and is actively killing them for their organs. America has leveraged its extrajudicial international powers twice in recent memory - once for Julian Assange, once for Kim Dotcom.
undercover89 7y ago
Says the news report from the west's surveillance state...
calimac 7y ago
We saw this coming years ago. It’s chilling to see it implemented and modeled so clearly and a tool of efficiency and oppression. It’s verry ccp
ridewinter 7y ago
No, it’s an article by and for anyone with western values. You know, the values that resulted in 99% of the innovations in this world.
- komali2 7y ago
  You can correlate, directly, the "Western value system" with 99% of innovations in this world? Wow! I have questions! 1. What is the west? 2. What is the homogeneous value system of the west, in its entirety? 3. What is list of the inventions this value system? 4. How do we know it was these values that generated these innovations instead of other causes? As you might expect, I am extremely skeptical! I'm particularly curious how you're going to deal what I view as a very non homogeneous concept of "Western values" (it is news to me to hear them lumped together like that), and where you'll draw your border on "The West." For example, surely your West definition must include the Arabian peninsula, for giving us mathematics, 0, and eye surgery. Surely also it must include China for giving us gunpowder and extensive bureaucracy? Oh and Japan for innovations in education systems!
  - ridewinter 7y ago
    Western values: freedom of speech, the ability to remove bad leaders, etc. IMO, all of the historical innovations you mention in the Arabian peninsula, China and Japan happened during periods of relative openness in those cultures.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Interesting - so those values existed well before our modern concept of "the west," in a place we probably wouldn't call "the west" during a period of time when "the west" was very "not open?" For example, during the dark ages, Inquisitions, etc? Why call it "western values?" Why not just specifically refer to the values by name?
      - ridewinter 7y ago
        They are called “western” values because their current form began with the Enlightenment and scientific revolution in Europe and have stuck around since then. But yes they’ve popped up temporarily in other past cultures like Ancient Greece. If you know of a better name than “western values” let me know.
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
The digital war will be won with pencil and paper. Jun 06 2019 Me
komali2 7y ago
I used to hold a kind of naive hope that the ham fisted Party would eventually be replaced with democracy. I remember back in 2011 my friends that were placed in moderately distinguished positions were sending their kids to Canada to collect foreign dual citizenship, fully expecting the collapse of the PRC in their lifetime. But now I think the Party is too good at maintaining itself. It's augmented by technology like WeChat to know exactly what is going on across the whole country. Access to dissident conversations will make it even easier to tailor the kind of subtle propaganda they're getting very good at. Will the PRC just continue to exist as it is, forever? My last remaining hope is for massive power grabs by xi jinping (already happening), followed by government ineptitude as he ages and underlings squabble, followed by chaos upon his death. Beyond that I can't see any way out.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  Maybe one day, if China embraces democracy, it might hope to become as prosperous as India. /s In all seriousness, "democracy" is at this point almost meaningless as a barometer of good governance. There are a lot of spectacularly successful autocracies and a lot of dismally awful democracies. In the broad scheme of things, the CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people. China might one day gradually transition towards democracy in the manner of Singapore, but many Chinese people are rightly fearful of the possibility of the collapse of the CPC. The most common outcome after the overthrow of a dictatorship is chaos and economic collapse, followed by a much worse dictatorship.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    > CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people. Certainly the nation has modernized rapidly. But at what cost? Western media speaks of famines, proxy wars, land grabs, implicit and explicit suppression of anything/anyone different. (Not saying other forms of governing are guaranteed to do better, but at least with democracies power is supposed to be more distributed.)
  - tanilama 7y ago
    Agree. Democracy isn't the end of governance. A dysfunctional democracy is no better than an effective authoritarian government.
netwanderer3 7y ago
I once tried downloading WeChat from Google Play but the registration process required another existing WeChat user that I may know to recommend or vouch for my account first so I couldn't complete it. Strangely enough, a few months later I needed to use it for work and this requirement disappeared. Has this ever occurred to anyone?
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  Maybe the person at work who asked you to use it (or whomever) vouched for you already? I don't know how it works but that would make sense.
- 01100011 7y ago
  Yeah they occasionally get paranoid and clamp down it seems. I had installed it, made an account, then uninstalled it. When I reinstalled, I forgot my password. That flagged my # as suspicious and then it required another WeChat user(who had an account longer than, IIRC, 6 months, and who hadn't validated anyone else lately) validate me before I could continue. A few weeks ago I tried again and all they wanted was a facebook auth to create a new account. I think they're trying to broaden adoption now. Probably a good strategy for a spy app.
Proven 7y ago
The communist thugs know no limits. I honestly can't fathom why one would want to use that piece of shit spyware app.
jorblumesea 7y ago
It's thing like this that I wonder if the the US will always have a bit of an advantage in the coming cold war. Similar to how the Soviet Union gave the West continual propaganda victories, China seems to be replicating the same mistakes. The US has done so many bad things, always seemed to win the propaganda war because the Soviet union was so unequivocally repressive.
- joyjoyjoy 7y ago
  Maybe. But both, the Soviet Union and the US had to offer something. US: Idea of freedom and democracy Soviet Union: Idea of equality and communism. China lacks an ideology that can attract foreigners. Also, in all super powers since Rome it was possible for able people to become a citizen and to be part of it. Even Nazis became American (think von Braun). It is not possible to become a Chinese citizen.
panarky 7y ago
Then came a stage I was not prepared for. "Faceprint is required for security purposes," it said. I was instructed to hold my phone up - to "face front camera straight on" - looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to "Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese". My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face. Afterwards a big green tick: "Approved"
dheera 7y ago
I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it. And I live in the Bay Area. If I don't use it I would basically be locking myself up in a prison where I would never see my friends. Even the majority of my friends who work at Facebook and Google use WeChat to organize social events. Hell, I've visited friends at Facebook's HQ and had to tell them by WeChat that I'm downstairs in the lobby. I personally totally get why this happens, and the network effect is so strong that my first instinct to contact my friends is via WeChat as well. I too organize social events on WeChat, because I know my friends don't really check anything else, so in the process, I too am guilty of propagating this network effect. I still hate the app though. I just don't hate it enough to want to ditch my social life.
- baby 7y ago
  TBF. This is because you only hang out with asian people. I live in the bay too and I don't know many people using wechat :|
  - xenospn 7y ago
    I only use WeChat with my Alibaba suppliers. No one else I know uses it.
  - dheera 7y ago
    Mostly, not only, but in any case I'm not disputing that. I'm just expressing that despite the fact that I use WeChat a lot, and need to use WeChat a lot, I still don't actually like the thing. I just like my friends enough that I will grudgingly use WeChat because "everyone" (in my circle) does.
    - yjhoney 7y ago
      I feel that someone who really respects their privacy should not hang out with friends who don't respect their own privacy. Because inevitably, their friends will post enough material to compromise the privacy of everyone in the circle. A year after I stopped using Facebook actively, all of my friends have stopped hanging out with me. It's just me, my family, and my coworkers.
_hardwaregeek 7y ago
I was explaining what it's like to live in China to someone and it's like explaining a dystopian cyberpunk novel, but with a level of surrealism and just plain absurdity. A Gibson novel filtered through some Philip K. Dick. You have a gigantic surveillance state with unprecedented reach and control...banning people from referencing a cartoon bear. You have a society with an extremely sophisticated cashless economy——beggars will take WeChat Pay——yet no clean water and horrible pollution.
- polskibus 7y ago
  Maybe it's because in reality cashless is easy compared to clean water and no pollution for masses?
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Cashless is also not desired by Americans, many of whom like cash. Stores are fine with taking it (no transaction fees after all), there are zero privacy concerns, and counterfeiting is not really a problem.
    - baby 7y ago
      Never understood that. Living in the UK for example you never have to cary bills. Light wallet, so much more practical, I hate places that only accept cash.
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        What if every store accepted both cash and cards?
        baby 7y ago
        I'd be fine with this as long as you don't have to pay a fee if you're not paying cash (which is often a thing for small shops). Unfortunately this is not the world we're living in :) it's often both cash and cards OR just cash. Berlin is a really good example of that, you always need cash on you which tricks the many tourists who come from countries were cash is not really a thing anymore.
Libelula 7y ago
That's enough for me, I'm uninstalling the app and my Chinese friends better upgrade to WhatsApp or Telegram.
AnthonyWnC 7y ago
Another hit piece by bbc; move along there is nothing to see.
joyjoyjoy 7y ago
Yes. China. I love WeChat I must say. Much better than WhatsApp. Yes, Tiananmen Square. Westerners in China call it "The day when nothing happened". But I also heard different views from Western Politicians that were deeply involved with the Chinese system. The amazing thing is that the students were actually allowed to protest for a long time. The guy in the video is just an asshole. He is harassing normal Chinese people who might get problems. I love Chine. I understand and respect "sensitive" issues. In the end I can not become Chinese and always will be a "tolerated guest".
- heraclius 7y ago
  There is a strange man who shouts “no Brexit” very loudly outside parliament every day. None of the residents like him. He hasn’t been run over by a tank yet. For forty years mothers of disappeared people have assembled in the Plaza de Mayo.¹ They have not been run over by a tank yet. In Belgrade protests have been held for twenty-six weeks against government corruption.² The police have attempted to repress the protests, but not with tanks. A UK student protest in 2011 continued for several months.³ There is nothing strange about protests continuing for a long time. If the party had repressed the protests with tear gas a week after they started, most liberals’ view of the party would have turned out much better than the current view. The point is that using the army on one’s own people is taken to be bad, and repressing that memory is taken to suggest that there is a deeper malaise that creates a general willingness and ability to use such force. As for causing trouble, it is unlikely that those whom the journalist messaged will actually “get problems”; they may be put on a list, but unless they do anything further, they are unlikely to face any consequences. And had they, for example, held a public vigil without the journalist (or tried), they would have ended up in a sticky situation anyway. So I don’t see what’s wrong with the journalists’ actions. As for the view of Chinese, it is up to you to decide what “China” actually is. Of course you should respect the “true China” in some sense, but many will claim to be that—the party, activists, people like me, etc.; at some point you must choose. The events of 6/4 are a reasonable indication of what Chinese unencumbered by excessive government restrictions on expression think, as are today’s in Hong Kong, or the long history of peasant revolts and political strife. The Chinese people’s reaction to “sensitive” issues like the Rape of Nanjing was unstinting resistance to the Japanese occupiers; to the ineptitude of the nationalists the struggle of the People’s Liberation Army; to everyday injustice the sight of the millions of petitions that are the mark not of deference to authority as it exists but loyalty to an ideal of good governance. In attempting to be a “tolerated guest” you necessarily have chosen a China, even as it seems in its simplicity to be the most neutral one. But ultimately all these choices are anything but neutral, and Chinese history would suggest that most Chinese would choose otherwise. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/28/mothers-plaza-de-mayo-argentina-anniversary https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/28/mothers-plaza-... 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/48046387/serbia-rallies-now-among-europe-s-longest-running-protests https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/4804638... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hetherington_House_Occupation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hetherington_House_Occupa...
joyjoyjoy 7y ago
Why so focused on democracy? Is democracy a value by itself? Have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nCSXvCM3ogI/WZhtafxpPoI/AAAAAAAAX70/3-pJ90SPWuksD1bfMnPtVvGzSqJ6Tbh5gCLcBGAs/s1600/Gap%2BCountries.jpg https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nCSXvCM3ogI/WZhtafxpPoI/AAAAAAAAX...
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Just copy the idea of Apple “Find my” as they had for e-wall, wechat .... and reprogram to enhance this. As Leo or is it Smith would say ... “upgrade”. The matrix totally own you.

401 points by Markoff 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

0x1997 7y ago

Tiananmen Square, 1989 -- Revisited http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen-square-1989-revisited/ http://www.unz.com/article/tiananmen-square-1989-revisited/

anonu 7y ago

In NYC there's been a growing trend towards merchants going cashless. There are bills to prevent this. Losing ability to pay with cash means a loss of privacy and anonymity. The WeChat dominance in payments reminds me a bit of this trend. Luckily some US local governments care about maintaining some level of privacy.

jaryzhang 7y ago

I dont like to aegue blablabla, but to give evidence. Chinese travel abroad to so called freendom countries 100M per year, 99.9999%(I dont know how many 9) return to China. Vote by feet. If Young Chinese now are sitll decieved by so simple and naive words, our next generation will curse us.

werbles1 7y ago

Asshole.

vilifiedtwin 7y ago

Pretty much every country is doing it or will be doing it. Some will do in the open and some will hide it from unsuspecting citizens. It is just how human nature works and it is just another way to maintain power and order. In short, nothing to see here...

xyzal 7y ago

This maybe implies a use case where deepfakes could actually used be to the benefit of society.

dpflan 7y ago
Would you mind elaborating this thought?
- eof 7y ago
  Presumably by creating ai generated personas dissidents could get some manner of protection from this type of surveillance.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Imagine deep faking Party members. I'm sure the state will do so happily to politically assassinate officials that don't fall in line, but imagine if the people started doing the same to the Big Dogs, like to jinping himself. The possibilities are exciting ...
Swinx43 7y ago
I honestly see it going the other way. Deepfakes being used to create fake material that falsely incriminates someone. So if they have the biometrics of an account on file already, they would match a fake video circulating the service to that account and presto you are on a watch list.
- Aelius 7y ago
  I could imagine a "resistance" bombarding wechat with so much garbage that the PRC wouldn't be able to trust intel gathered from it.
  - Swinx43 7y ago
    Now that is an interesting thought. They could incriminate party members and government officials to sow distrust in the ranks. Having seen though how certain groups of the population have been dealt with in China does make me wonder if they would not just round everyone up and send them for “re-education”.
7y ago

beager 7y ago

The bit about face recognition and voice imprinting is most certainly being used to populate some database, but it also serves as a CAPTCHA of sorts. Advancements in procedural face and voice generation could create a powerful tool to beat CAPTCHA advancements, and to preserve anonymity against creeping surveillance. Of course, China has hooks into the device manufacturers so doing this is an order of magnitude harder than it already is.

mortenjorck 7y ago
If posting photos from a 6/4 vigil in Hong Kong got the reporter from zero to the first tier watch list, I have a feeling any biometric mismatches would quickly escalate him to the next tier.

gen3 7y ago

I'm glad this article was written. I think the general public is unaware of how China operates, and through education we can better protect our own civil liberties (and better understand why the China is the way that it is).

Cypher 7y ago
I do wonder how long it's going to be before we see WhatsApp and the surveillance state articles.
- komali2 7y ago
  I dunno. We're not anywhere near the level of China (here in the USA). To achieve that, we'd need 1. The fourth estate to become a government agency (functionally) 2. Facebook to have government agents on-site that employees have to follow the orders of 3. The existence of a "department of cultural well-being" with total authority to regulate art, media, news, etc 4. Laws on the books outlawing esoteric orwellian concepts like "distributing harmful rumors" or "disrupting the cultural well-being of the United States." Certainly any one of those steps would have me in front of the capital with a big bottle of water and a picket sign, ready to settle in for the long one. China is very far removed from us.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    I agree there's a long way between the USA and China for the reasons you mention. Still, something nags at me. The USA has all those things in some less government-oriented sense, not organised by a totalitarian party but by a vaguely defined group of powerful people who all live in the same few cities, who all share the same worldview, who all work extraordinarily hard to keep people they disagree with away from the levers of power and who share this same basic mindset: 1. The press is incredibly uniform in America; all papers take explicit political positions despite their role supposedly being to neutrally inform their readers, and they all supported Clinton in the last election. As a foreigner I frequently encounter astonishing falsehoods about my country in supposedly respectable and internationalist papers like the New York Times. 2. Facebook doesn't need government agents to team up with the press in support of an agenda - activists in its employee and management base will ensure it does that anyway. 3. There's no formal department of cultural well-being, but there is nonetheless an exceptionally strong set of beliefs amongst a tiny group of people (the elites/the establishment/the swamp/whatever you want to call them) which do relentlessly impose on news, art, media, etc. Witness how every superhero movie now contains explicitly woke and feminist storylines. 4. "Distributing harmful rumours" and "disrupting the cultural wellbeing" exists in the west too, we just call it hate speech / trolling. Different terms for the same thing and our social networks have WeChat like policies towards them. Whilst the driving force for this doesn't come from government, and there's no formal party per se, the end results are surprisingly similar on a less extreme scale. And if Clinton had won the policy alignment between the government, Hollywood, Big Tech and newspaper owners would be nearly total: you don't need a totalitarian state when those who have power over information or culture all agree with each other on what must be done anyway.

NotPaidToPost 7y ago

Whatever WeChat's links with policing in China, I believe that they have an equivalent of Face ID to authenticate users. Keeping in mind that WeChat is used as an electronic wallet and almost bank account in China. It would have been better journalism to mention this instead of only going for the angle of state policing. It's likely that WeChat already had the person's biometrics details because of the above. Of course that's less catchy than implying that they requested biometrics details because he had posted about Tiananmen commemorations. (though the end result is likely the same)

aloer 7y ago
Apple does not have my faceID biometric details and does not need them outside of my own device. Wouldn’t that make your assumption just as bad?
nullwasamistake 7y ago
I've got a bunch of cards and empty bank accounts sitting around, none ever asked for biometrics.

horyzen 7y ago

And yet facebook wants to be more like WeChat[0]. [0]https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256226/facebook-wechat-messaging-zuckerberg-strategy https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256226/facebook-wechat-m...

pixelmonkey 7y ago

Very good article, and the video on that page is a must-watch to understand the perils of a state/tech/media alliance that runs too deep.

vajaya 7y ago

basically Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to talk anything cultural, political, spiritual, religious, etc. If you wanna talk fashion, food, travel, music, and the likes, that's absolutely fine. and it seems Chinese people are perfectly content with it. I heard that wechat is transparent to Chinese authority. Last year, a dozens of college students who are Marxist activists and advocate for workers' right in Shenzhen(yes, that techy wonderland so much applauded on HN) were arrested and disappeared since. Some say the authority can watch their every move via wechat.

Cypher 7y ago
Well worker rights is a fantasy in the west too. Google and facebook track our every moves and the NSA can watch over our every move. The scary thing is few journalist are left to talk about it over here.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Where is over here? In all the Western countries I'm familiar with, journalists are free to say bad things about Google and Facebook and the NSA, and it happens with some regularity.
- ridewinter 7y ago
  Nonsense. I don’t know of a single person afraid to express their political views in western countries, no matter how extreme or bizarre.
  - pishpash 7y ago
    Nonsense. Try expressing some communism or Wahhabism in earnest and see where it gets you. It may not end up being the state apparatus that first gets to you, but the end result is the same. Every society has its boogieman. You're just blind to it.
- komali2 7y ago
  The NSA can't watch our every move, that's illegal. We learned from Edward Snowden that they do so for some people anyway, illegally. It's bad and wrong. It's not nearly at the level of China. America doesn't have xinjiang reeducation camps for political dissidents that also happens to be full of people charged with the crime of being religious. America isn't harvesting the organs of its prisoners against their will. The consequences of being caught by the Chinese surveillance machine is far, far worse in China than it is in the USA, which really doesn't even have it at the same level.

quotz 7y ago

The West has to be wary of becoming a surveillance state. More often than not tech companies in the West are using China tech as an example of how they should operate. We have to protect our civil liberties. I grew up in a post-communist country in Europe, riddled with corruption and dictatorial tendencies, and it is really not a nice place. It's strange that as technology becomes a bigger part of our society, the more it is used against us.

AFascistWorld 7y ago

https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi-the-bun-chinese-netizens-are-being-jailed-for-chatroom-jokes/ https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi-the-b...

ConfusedDog 7y ago

This is indeed very scary especially now it requires facial recognition part... to sign up for WeChat, you need to have a valid phone number; to use WeChat pay, you got to provide real-name and official ID, bank account, etc. From the WeChat social network, relationships are easily identified. The mere existence of such tool is destine to be misused, regardless who made it. This is what real power looks like.

throwawe32 7y ago
This data literally sells for "dime a dozen" from multiple data vendors; I'm guessing the article is mere reactions from the Americans because their our platforms have missed out on the data cow that is China. They have India by the balls though, so that's something.
srslack 7y ago
There is practically no difference in these requirements versus what Facebook is requiring. Try to create a Facebook account and they will soon flag your account to require a photo for facial recognition. You can't signup for Facebook without a valid mobile number. And if Facebook does not like the photo you provide for facial recognition, they want a government ID.
- franciscop 7y ago
  Mmh no? I've been without FB account for 3-4 years, and recently opened a new one from scratch because some friends only use FB and absolutely nothing besides confirming my email was required. Yes, it does suggest that I add my phone, and that I verify my friends, and that blablabla, but nothing else is required for me to add few friends and join a chat.
  - srslack 7y ago
    I'd been without a Facebook account for four years as well, but created one for testing/verifying the behavior of an application we'd recently gotten approved. As far as I'm aware it would not let me create an account without a mobile number to confirm the account. After performing a single action (creating a page), my account was flagged, and thrown into the facial recognition captcha process. See here for many more anecdotes about this process: https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/9r0ijd/you_cant_use_facebook_right_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/9r0ijd/you_can...

educationdata 7y ago

What is more scary is that there are many Chinese Americans using WeChat to connect with family members. There is no doubt some of them work in the U.S. government or other sensitive companies or agencies. By tracking their location alone, the Chinese government can obtain huge amount of data.

vajaya 7y ago
should we ban wechat? probably yes. it's a quintessential threat to privacy, freedom, and democracy practice. but are we able to? not at all. All big corporates and even some in government are on their side. China is where money is to make and ruling is to learn.
- majia 7y ago
  The question is what is the due process to ban wechat. An executive order from Trump? If wechat is banned, should all other Chinese apps and websites be banned because every Chinese company is tied to Chinese government? If someone objects to the ban, should he/she be banned for colluding with a foreign threat? If you go down the slope, then at some point the US will become as oppressive as China. China can't make US more authoritarian, but paranoia can.
- teknologist 7y ago
  Along with Baidu and all the other sites that have had their American counterparts banned in China. Yes please.
knolax 7y ago
It's red scare 2.0 with you people.

dvduval 7y ago

Facebook/Twitter have been used to manipulate politics in many countries. China does not want WeChat to be used in a similar way. Somehow here in the US/West everyone gets the real news?

komali2 7y ago
The Chinese government will use WeChat data to arrest and make dissidents vanish. Fakenews is not a threat great enough to justify this. There is no equivalence between what is happening in China and what we are dealing with in the USA.
- jimclegg 7y ago
  Kind of like the US government using Facebook data/communications to arrest people? Sounds very equal.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Interesting, I hadn't heard that the United States government was wholesale surveilling its population, with no oversight, with an open tap in Facebook data, and using that information to imprison people for thought crimes such as having a religion. False equivalence doesn't pass for me. The USA has surveillance issues, but it isn't the prc.
    - jimclegg 7y ago
      In many ways its worse, PRC doesn't arrest or extrajudicially murder people that have never visited China from what I understand. Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes.
      - komali2 7y ago
        > Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes. We certainly don't know this to be true or false, because China hasn't had a Julian Assange yet. What we can work with is available data - China has tens of thousands of thought-criminals in reeducation camps, and is actively killing them for their organs. America has leveraged its extrajudicial international powers twice in recent memory - once for Julian Assange, once for Kim Dotcom.

undercover89 7y ago

Says the news report from the west's surveillance state...

calimac 7y ago

We saw this coming years ago. It’s chilling to see it implemented and modeled so clearly and a tool of efficiency and oppression. It’s verry ccp

ridewinter 7y ago

No, it’s an article by and for anyone with western values. You know, the values that resulted in 99% of the innovations in this world.

komali2 7y ago
You can correlate, directly, the "Western value system" with 99% of innovations in this world? Wow! I have questions! 1. What is the west? 2. What is the homogeneous value system of the west, in its entirety? 3. What is list of the inventions this value system? 4. How do we know it was these values that generated these innovations instead of other causes? As you might expect, I am extremely skeptical! I'm particularly curious how you're going to deal what I view as a very non homogeneous concept of "Western values" (it is news to me to hear them lumped together like that), and where you'll draw your border on "The West." For example, surely your West definition must include the Arabian peninsula, for giving us mathematics, 0, and eye surgery. Surely also it must include China for giving us gunpowder and extensive bureaucracy? Oh and Japan for innovations in education systems!
- ridewinter 7y ago
  Western values: freedom of speech, the ability to remove bad leaders, etc. IMO, all of the historical innovations you mention in the Arabian peninsula, China and Japan happened during periods of relative openness in those cultures.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Interesting - so those values existed well before our modern concept of "the west," in a place we probably wouldn't call "the west" during a period of time when "the west" was very "not open?" For example, during the dark ages, Inquisitions, etc? Why call it "western values?" Why not just specifically refer to the values by name?
    - ridewinter 7y ago
      They are called “western” values because their current form began with the Enlightenment and scientific revolution in Europe and have stuck around since then. But yes they’ve popped up temporarily in other past cultures like Ancient Greece. If you know of a better name than “western values” let me know.

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

The digital war will be won with pencil and paper. Jun 06 2019 Me

komali2 7y ago

I used to hold a kind of naive hope that the ham fisted Party would eventually be replaced with democracy. I remember back in 2011 my friends that were placed in moderately distinguished positions were sending their kids to Canada to collect foreign dual citizenship, fully expecting the collapse of the PRC in their lifetime. But now I think the Party is too good at maintaining itself. It's augmented by technology like WeChat to know exactly what is going on across the whole country. Access to dissident conversations will make it even easier to tailor the kind of subtle propaganda they're getting very good at. Will the PRC just continue to exist as it is, forever? My last remaining hope is for massive power grabs by xi jinping (already happening), followed by government ineptitude as he ages and underlings squabble, followed by chaos upon his death. Beyond that I can't see any way out.

jdietrich 7y ago
Maybe one day, if China embraces democracy, it might hope to become as prosperous as India. /s In all seriousness, "democracy" is at this point almost meaningless as a barometer of good governance. There are a lot of spectacularly successful autocracies and a lot of dismally awful democracies. In the broad scheme of things, the CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people. China might one day gradually transition towards democracy in the manner of Singapore, but many Chinese people are rightly fearful of the possibility of the collapse of the CPC. The most common outcome after the overthrow of a dictatorship is chaos and economic collapse, followed by a much worse dictatorship.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  > CPC has done a damned good job of advancing the interests of the Chinese people. Certainly the nation has modernized rapidly. But at what cost? Western media speaks of famines, proxy wars, land grabs, implicit and explicit suppression of anything/anyone different. (Not saying other forms of governing are guaranteed to do better, but at least with democracies power is supposed to be more distributed.)
- tanilama 7y ago
  Agree. Democracy isn't the end of governance. A dysfunctional democracy is no better than an effective authoritarian government.

netwanderer3 7y ago

I once tried downloading WeChat from Google Play but the registration process required another existing WeChat user that I may know to recommend or vouch for my account first so I couldn't complete it. Strangely enough, a few months later I needed to use it for work and this requirement disappeared. Has this ever occurred to anyone?

hunter2_ 7y ago
Maybe the person at work who asked you to use it (or whomever) vouched for you already? I don't know how it works but that would make sense.
01100011 7y ago
Yeah they occasionally get paranoid and clamp down it seems. I had installed it, made an account, then uninstalled it. When I reinstalled, I forgot my password. That flagged my # as suspicious and then it required another WeChat user(who had an account longer than, IIRC, 6 months, and who hadn't validated anyone else lately) validate me before I could continue. A few weeks ago I tried again and all they wanted was a facebook auth to create a new account. I think they're trying to broaden adoption now. Probably a good strategy for a spy app.

Proven 7y ago

The communist thugs know no limits. I honestly can't fathom why one would want to use that piece of shit spyware app.

jorblumesea 7y ago

It's thing like this that I wonder if the the US will always have a bit of an advantage in the coming cold war. Similar to how the Soviet Union gave the West continual propaganda victories, China seems to be replicating the same mistakes. The US has done so many bad things, always seemed to win the propaganda war because the Soviet union was so unequivocally repressive.

joyjoyjoy 7y ago
Maybe. But both, the Soviet Union and the US had to offer something. US: Idea of freedom and democracy Soviet Union: Idea of equality and communism. China lacks an ideology that can attract foreigners. Also, in all super powers since Rome it was possible for able people to become a citizen and to be part of it. Even Nazis became American (think von Braun). It is not possible to become a Chinese citizen.

panarky 7y ago

Then came a stage I was not prepared for. "Faceprint is required for security purposes," it said. I was instructed to hold my phone up - to "face front camera straight on" - looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to "Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese". My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face. Afterwards a big green tick: "Approved"

dheera 7y ago

I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it. And I live in the Bay Area. If I don't use it I would basically be locking myself up in a prison where I would never see my friends. Even the majority of my friends who work at Facebook and Google use WeChat to organize social events. Hell, I've visited friends at Facebook's HQ and had to tell them by WeChat that I'm downstairs in the lobby. I personally totally get why this happens, and the network effect is so strong that my first instinct to contact my friends is via WeChat as well. I too organize social events on WeChat, because I know my friends don't really check anything else, so in the process, I too am guilty of propagating this network effect. I still hate the app though. I just don't hate it enough to want to ditch my social life.

baby 7y ago
TBF. This is because you only hang out with asian people. I live in the bay too and I don't know many people using wechat :|
- xenospn 7y ago
  I only use WeChat with my Alibaba suppliers. No one else I know uses it.
- dheera 7y ago
  Mostly, not only, but in any case I'm not disputing that. I'm just expressing that despite the fact that I use WeChat a lot, and need to use WeChat a lot, I still don't actually like the thing. I just like my friends enough that I will grudgingly use WeChat because "everyone" (in my circle) does.
  - yjhoney 7y ago
    I feel that someone who really respects their privacy should not hang out with friends who don't respect their own privacy. Because inevitably, their friends will post enough material to compromise the privacy of everyone in the circle. A year after I stopped using Facebook actively, all of my friends have stopped hanging out with me. It's just me, my family, and my coworkers.

_hardwaregeek 7y ago

I was explaining what it's like to live in China to someone and it's like explaining a dystopian cyberpunk novel, but with a level of surrealism and just plain absurdity. A Gibson novel filtered through some Philip K. Dick. You have a gigantic surveillance state with unprecedented reach and control...banning people from referencing a cartoon bear. You have a society with an extremely sophisticated cashless economy——beggars will take WeChat Pay——yet no clean water and horrible pollution.

polskibus 7y ago
Maybe it's because in reality cashless is easy compared to clean water and no pollution for masses?
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Cashless is also not desired by Americans, many of whom like cash. Stores are fine with taking it (no transaction fees after all), there are zero privacy concerns, and counterfeiting is not really a problem.
  - baby 7y ago
    Never understood that. Living in the UK for example you never have to cary bills. Light wallet, so much more practical, I hate places that only accept cash.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      What if every store accepted both cash and cards?
      - baby 7y ago
        I'd be fine with this as long as you don't have to pay a fee if you're not paying cash (which is often a thing for small shops). Unfortunately this is not the world we're living in :) it's often both cash and cards OR just cash. Berlin is a really good example of that, you always need cash on you which tricks the many tourists who come from countries were cash is not really a thing anymore.

Libelula 7y ago

That's enough for me, I'm uninstalling the app and my Chinese friends better upgrade to WhatsApp or Telegram.

AnthonyWnC 7y ago

Another hit piece by bbc; move along there is nothing to see.

joyjoyjoy 7y ago

Yes. China. I love WeChat I must say. Much better than WhatsApp. Yes, Tiananmen Square. Westerners in China call it "The day when nothing happened". But I also heard different views from Western Politicians that were deeply involved with the Chinese system. The amazing thing is that the students were actually allowed to protest for a long time. The guy in the video is just an asshole. He is harassing normal Chinese people who might get problems. I love Chine. I understand and respect "sensitive" issues. In the end I can not become Chinese and always will be a "tolerated guest".

heraclius 7y ago
There is a strange man who shouts “no Brexit” very loudly outside parliament every day. None of the residents like him. He hasn’t been run over by a tank yet. For forty years mothers of disappeared people have assembled in the Plaza de Mayo.¹ They have not been run over by a tank yet. In Belgrade protests have been held for twenty-six weeks against government corruption.² The police have attempted to repress the protests, but not with tanks. A UK student protest in 2011 continued for several months.³ There is nothing strange about protests continuing for a long time. If the party had repressed the protests with tear gas a week after they started, most liberals’ view of the party would have turned out much better than the current view. The point is that using the army on one’s own people is taken to be bad, and repressing that memory is taken to suggest that there is a deeper malaise that creates a general willingness and ability to use such force. As for causing trouble, it is unlikely that those whom the journalist messaged will actually “get problems”; they may be put on a list, but unless they do anything further, they are unlikely to face any consequences. And had they, for example, held a public vigil without the journalist (or tried), they would have ended up in a sticky situation anyway. So I don’t see what’s wrong with the journalists’ actions. As for the view of Chinese, it is up to you to decide what “China” actually is. Of course you should respect the “true China” in some sense, but many will claim to be that—the party, activists, people like me, etc.; at some point you must choose. The events of 6/4 are a reasonable indication of what Chinese unencumbered by excessive government restrictions on expression think, as are today’s in Hong Kong, or the long history of peasant revolts and political strife. The Chinese people’s reaction to “sensitive” issues like the Rape of Nanjing was unstinting resistance to the Japanese occupiers; to the ineptitude of the nationalists the struggle of the People’s Liberation Army; to everyday injustice the sight of the millions of petitions that are the mark not of deference to authority as it exists but loyalty to an ideal of good governance. In attempting to be a “tolerated guest” you necessarily have chosen a China, even as it seems in its simplicity to be the most neutral one. But ultimately all these choices are anything but neutral, and Chinese history would suggest that most Chinese would choose otherwise. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/28/mothers-plaza-de-mayo-argentina-anniversary https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/28/mothers-plaza-... 2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/48046387/serbia-rallies-now-among-europe-s-longest-running-protests https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/4804638... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hetherington_House_Occupation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hetherington_House_Occupa...

joyjoyjoy 7y ago

Why so focused on democracy? Is democracy a value by itself? Have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nCSXvCM3ogI/WZhtafxpPoI/AAAAAAAAX70/3-pJ90SPWuksD1bfMnPtVvGzSqJ6Tbh5gCLcBGAs/s1600/Gap%2BCountries.jpg https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nCSXvCM3ogI/WZhtafxpPoI/AAAAAAAAX...

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Just copy the idea of Apple “Find my” as they had for e-wall, wechat .... and reprogram to enhance this. As Leo or is it Smith would say ... “upgrade”. The matrix totally own you.