Hacker News Reader

>It's nearly impossible to sign up for any Chinese website without giving your mobile phone number to complete the sign up.

No wonder the robocalls and phone scams are overwhelming.

It's essentially the equivalent to western use of e-mail addresses, and e-mail spam was solved by a combination of technical hurdles, deep message inspection, bayesian statistics and penalization of anonymity.

I don't think e-mail spam is solved. It's largely just evolved to a non-competitive market where if you don't go with a major provider you'll forever be battling overzealous spam detection which flags your organization's email as spam. ...And you've lost some anonymity and flexibility.

It's solved for an average person. If you go with a major provider, spam barely exists at all. And even if you go with a smaller provider (like e.g. Fastmail), you barely notice any spam either.

I think he's more referring to the problem, where your email sent from a small(ish) provider is flagged by the big boys as spam.

Google is quite notorious for their ever changing goal posts regarding email reception. And if your mail is flagged as spam (and based on my own experience the AI behind it is not very intelligent) the only thing you get back is an automated response with completely and utterly useless "support" links.

So while spam may be solved on an individual user level, it's certainly not on the meta level.

No, it’s not. My gmail inbox is overflowing with spam to the point that I frequently miss important messages because they’re buried in marketing garbage.

That’s not even counting the business related ham google classifies as spam because the sender doesn’t buy email services from people that specialize in making sure marketing trash hits gmail inboxes.

Counterpoint: my burner gmail for account creation with 30k unread emails, mostly spam. Also so much spam gets into my university email accounts, much of it from predatory journals offering to publish anything and everything.

For the university accounts, I'd say only 80% gets trapped into the spam folder (my gmail is an absolute mess, however), but so does 5% of actual relevant emails and conversations, so I'm forced to inspect my spam folder pretty regularly which kinda defeats the purpose of hiding it from view.

Scammers and spammers aren't using cell phones to make their calls, they abuse VoIP services to do so.

> it's a reasonably measure to counter fraud with real identity tying in with mobile phone number issuance.

Perhaps it achieves the goal, but is it the best approach? Isn't it doubling down on an already problematic scheme? User names and email addresses are more easily swapped than phone numbers, with facial recognition you're locking yourself even more to the phone number, making it even harder to switch when it becomes compromised.

At least here you need a legal address for bank account anyway, so financial institutions can just mail (the dead tree kind) you an unlock code for online banking, this makes a stolen identity far less useful.

There are ways to solve these kinds of problems that don't also feed the surveillance machinery.

True but it will from the first moment go to political motivated move for sure.

I think you gave too much benefit of doubt to the CCP. The CCP can't care less about phone scams and frauds. As a totalitarian state having total control of the society, the government can track down the scammers anytime they want to.

There is no reason to believe the CCP does this to solve the robocalls or phone scams. It would be laughable to think XiJinping and his gangs put this issue on his priority list. The only reason is to locate every individual has a different thought against the government.

I’m curious about one thing here. And maybe someone has ideas.

Both China and Soviet Union (probably others too but I don’t know), pre-liberalization were your typical socialist state with lots of means to control people, so they did but... but people didn’t engage in much petty crime or gang crime.

Those types of crimes were more or less very unusual. But in those same states today with more tools to control people, petty crime and gang-related crime (as well as corruption but that kind of always existed), are through the roof.

And it’s not like either are soft on crime.

So what has given a rise to that criminal activity which for practical purposes didn’t exist before. Is it opportunity? That is there was nothing to gain from it before?

Of course they did. Parents grew up in a former communist country and smuggling in goods, stealing, were all pretty common. The reason you don't hear about it is because if people did those things that would mean that communism is bad and doesn't work. I wouldn't trust the data coming out of a communist country.

During the chernobyl disaster the USSR kept providing false numbers to the world in order to downplay the significance of the event - to the point of sabotaging the cleanup effort and themselves.

Yes they had to fib and lie about production and all their 5-year Plans... but on the other hand most police in those states were unarmed (of course the sentences for being an armed criminal were “prohibitive”)...

There wasn't much organized crime, in the sense of street gangs, in the more urban areas of the Soviet Union. (The various rural provinces, especially in the Soviet-occupied middle east are another story.) There was, of course, plenty of petty crime, smuggling, and un-organized property and violent crime, etc. [1]

The reason for this isn't surveillance or the harshness of punishments.

The reason for it was that when there's an easy default roadmap for your life (School -> Gainful employment), you're not going to drop out of civilized society, and into criminality at the age of 15.

It's not that there's more to gain from criminality now, compared to fifty years ago. It's that there's less to lose. Instead of a social contract that guarantees[2] employment, a shitty apartment, and food on your table, if you just go through the motions, it's a dog-eat-dog-every-man-for-himself world. Unsurprisingly, many people find it easier to drop out of that, and make a living through crime.

[1] Without even mentioning the truly mind-blowing amount of low-level, and high-level corruption that the USSR experienced.

[2] Employment wasn't guaranteed - people had to go apply for jobs, have their employment and social records get checked, there was competition for getting into good jobs, etc - but 100% employment was an official goal of the state. This is not the case in either the West, or the East, anymore.

Thanks I think that explains the carrot portion. The various stick options likely helped too—the various efforts to “eradicate counterrevolutionaries” and decrying leniency and favoring resoluteness and setting goals for executions likely has an impact.

After destalinization, nobody doing law enforcement in the USSR had execution quotas, or was inventing counterrevolutionaries to eradicate.

I would recommend looking up the crime stats for USSR. There's a very big difference between the perception and the reality there.

I would imagine there's also a very big difference between the reported stats and what the reality is

I would imagine there is also a very big differeence between the USSR reported numbers and western estimates. Not sure what the reality you speak of is.

This one https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/03/19/the-prettiest-crime-...

We call them "totalitarian", but that doesn't mean the state actually has total control over society. Society is still made up of people. In totalitarian systems, there's still crime and corruption. They may get harshly punished, but the police still needs to uncover it first, and that takes time and resources, and may not always be easy.

Take the Pooh Bear jokes about Xi. He'd love to be able to stop them, but he can't. There's a limit to how total the government's control can be. And with China's capitalist liberalisation, scams and fraud become more attractive, and possibly harder to track down.

Of course Xi stopped Pooh Bear jokes in public space in mainland China. I am not sure what you are talking about.

CPP police always know the small towns of the most robocall farms and phonescam bases. The reason they do not stop those is because local polices take share from crime money, which also contributes to local economy.

If the CCP gang really wants to stop robocalls and phonescams, they only need to send a task force team from the central agencies. Then they can close all the roads around those small towns and shut down all the phone towers, and then capture all the criminals in a few days. There is no need to use AI for this kind of stuff.

Again, it is simply laughable to think Xi's gang care about robocalls and phonescams. They have too many other things to care about.

> They have too many other things to care about.

If they really had total control, having too many other things to care about wouldn't be a problem. After all, they'd totally control those other things as well. But that "task force team from the central agencies" probably has its hands full securing the little control they have.

Given that they do not have total control, things like combating robocalls and phonescams need to be handled by more mundane countermeasures, like adding bureaucratic requirements to the phone number registration process.

While Xi and his gang might not care, there are over 90 million people in the CCP. There are definitely people in there that care.

Those people are also able to introduce legislation.

It’s laughable to think everyone in a China thinks the same.

I am not sure how to respond to this troll. He/She literally created the account to just make this very weird comment.