Hong Kong’s protesters use AirDrop to spread information to mainland visitors

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

That's not to say that any amount of information would cause the North Korean's to rise up into a (frankly suicidal) armed rebellion, but it will influence opinions inside the country.

Information spreads. Some people defect.

Whether this effort helps is hard to measure. That it's succeeding shows many people are interested and change is possible/desired.

I would highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith for a reset of one's political expectations, especially for countries with resource extraction economies. The mechanics of selectorate theory can be very, very brutal.

My absolute frustration, and reason I'm close to giving up, is I see people posting warning of bad things to come, politically, ecologically, technically, but they do nothing. One person alone usually can't change much. A few can but even getting a few to do anything is nearly impossible. If everyone just wrote a single letter a year to their mp/representative/whatever, even just phoned up a business about excessive packaging, things would start to move.

It's in your hands basically.

I recall he was complaining how Google was vehemently opposed to any kind of "mainlining" IrDA support in Android. He says that Google was ok to support a semistandard API for IrDA just for the Japanese market under agreement that Panasonic would not market such phones outside Japan.

Panasonic laobans scratched their heads for a minute, and sput on that request, deciding to move with their own, self supported APIs.

The old guard, many immigrated from the mainland, strive to one day democratize China. Hong Kong's youngsters say "screw that, let them keep their dictatorship, we just want to be left alone with the freedoms we've got"

Conspiracy theory is one of the strongest forms of propaganda. Alex Jones is dumb but effective. It’s a slippery slope before you start blaming the Jews for everything.

....

The government tried to prevent the mainstream media from showing the pictures but with the Internet this was impossible.

At least until the Internet fell...

It was still all over Cast though. It was encrypted, onion routed, wireless, and distributed. Cast eventually destroyed all the social networks like Facebook and Twitter and left then in the dust like so many Friendsters.

Pictures and videos of small outbreaks spread over Cast like ripples in a vast pond. Except these were more like information tsunamis. They just kept coming.

You would bump a video and send it to your friends only to find another video a few moments later.

Something was happening and we all knew.

You don't expect the speed at first. You can't outrun them. My theory is that the virus evolved to spread through accelerated replication. A long life is not a problem so burning out the body isn't an issue.

When a virus first mutates into an effective form, and the host population is extensive, it’s usually fatal.

The only goal of a virus is replication. If it kills the host but can replicate faster then that’s the strategy that will be selected. Especially when there are plenty of hosts.

And that was the problem with humanity. There are billions of people on the Earth. Most of which live in the cities. None of which have any immunity to H.

Evolution is a bitch.

The “introduction” is necessary, to show consequences that the rule by law in China is lacking independent jurisdiction and respect for constitution, so as to support opposing the extradition into China to face its inadequate legal system—that is, if the legal system in China is on par with elsewhere, there is less reason to oppose extradition into China.

Also, it is much harder to explain abstract concepts such as democracy and rule of law to mainlanders, given the heavy censorship and disinformation (e.g. those peaceful revolution such as Arabic Spring is staged by the US) in China, than to explain concrete examples that affect their daily life such as poisonous milk powder.

And in recent protests in July the focus on true democracy—universal suffrage for both the legislative council and the Chief Executive by 2022—is to address the root cause of all major protests (e.g. anti-national-security-law protest in 2003, anti-restricted-democracy umbrella protest in 2014, anti-extradition protest in 2019), where the government was trying to pass law despite strong opposition in public opinion to serve the interests of Beijing over Hong Kongers. Without addressing the root cause, the lack of accountable democracy, Hong Kongers need a big protest once every five years or so, which is not solving the problem. The focus on democracy in recent protest is to break this infinite loop, and is about the bigger picture.

To downvoters: please explain your rationale so we can have a civil conversation.

Two points on this..

1) Hong Kong citizens have been kidnapped from Hong Kong to the mainland by the Chinese government, for working in a bookstore selling anti-mainland literature. This isn't some theoretical exercise, it's as real as it gets. The extradition law would to some extent legitimize the illegal breach of the two-systems policy.

2) Once in force, the HK gov could easily ram through the anti-sedition bill they've got in waiting or similar "national security" legislation, leaving people vulnerable to being extradited for speaking against the mainland. Second, Beijing is famous for revealing dissidents' "crimes" (real or often fake) committed on the mainland and demanding they be extradited there.

A large majority of the tourists crossing the border in this train station have virtually no idea of the protests. If they do know about the protests, they've likely only read the articles posted by the CCP stating that some of the protests were in favour of the Extradition Law, blaming foreign influences among other lies. There are no articles that depict the protests for what they actually are or what they are fighting for.

When I visit mainland China on my T-Mobile roaming plan I am on some sort of separate subnet that is uncensored and I can continue to access services I cannot use with a China SIM card.

> But news of the protest has been heavily censored in mainland China, with any mention of the mass movement wiped off the Chinese internet.

> Hong Kong’s protesters have therefore turned to Apple’s AirDrop feature to get their message across to their mainland Chinese compatriots. That the messages are written in simplified Chinese—Hong Kongers use traditional Chinese—confirm that the intended audience is Chinese tourists.

You cross the border and, to your surprise, see 250k+ people protesting about freedom. You search Baidu for HK protests as that's your go-to search engine and all you know. What do you think you'll find...?