Many Chinese-Americans have no choice when they need to communicate with family and friend living in China. No outside communication tools allowed in China.
Every Chinese site I've ever used requires phone number or ID verification. Most of them only allow Chinese-registered phones, meaning it's absolutely impossible to communicate with Chinese people from the outside world, aside from a very small number of carefully vetted services like WeChat.
But I fear the rest of the world looked at China and thought, "Wow, we should've done that a long time ago!" Accounts I registered about a decade ago now demand I confirm an email and sometimes a phone number. Email accounts I've had half my life lock me out unless I link it to my phone number and prove my identity. Some services ask for a fucking ID card scan, which prompts me to just drop the service. Some things I've used in the past only accept US phone area codes, which having left the US, means those services are now completely inaccessible to me.
China says it's for state security. They're at least kind of honest that their intention is to keep the population in check and watch their every movement. The rest of the world says it's for personal security. Then another day passes and another heap of phone numbers, names, SSNs, and addresses leak and another identity is stolen.
I've never heard it phrased this way before, dangerous indeed.
That doesn't enter the equation for what I would imagine is 99.99% of users.
It's the erosion of privacy in the name of a) "Safety"
and
b) convenience
The average person of the world has shown that they will trade virtually anything for the perception of convenience, or "safety".
Look at the most recent gun ban in Canada for an obvious example; An act riddled with nonsense, already acknowledged to be completely ineffective at preventing gun crimes, pushed through by a minority government during a pandemic to the applause of a large part of the populace there in exchange for the false perception of "safety".
The most frightening thing is just how effective it is.
The next bill can ban more, fix the bugs, etc, but the flag has been planted: there's no room for those weapons in Canada.
A huge number of people have wanted to ban weapons like these since Ecole Polytechnique [1] -- and probably much further back. We've been lucky to have few enough such mass murders to remember many by name, and it also makes them horrifying enough that we're not going to sit back and pray the crime away. The Liberal Party (currently in power) ran on banning these weapons. Then they banned the weapons. They did the job they were elected to do.
I don't think that's a good example tbh.
[edit] Let's be super clear when you say "pushed through by a minority government during a pandemic" -- you're seeming to imply that the minority is somehow strong-arming the majority. That's the exact opposite of how that works in the Canadian parliamentary democratic system. A minority government is in a very weak position and can be removed at any time. If this was at all controversial the next confidence motion would be swiftly defeated and the government would fall. A minority government wouldn't do something like this without absolute confidence.
Unlike a majority government a minority government must rule by consensus or face immediate removal. I think they normally don’t even make it past the 3 year mark.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_Polytechnique_massacre
Therefore, the ban is ineffective in serving its mandate, punishes law abiding, statistically harmless individuals needlessly and saddles the taxpayer, of which only 60% of households in Canada are, with yet more debt for nothing.
It has also set a very dangerous precedent in Canada as to how "unpopular" rights, not explicitly in the Charter, can be stripped by the pen stroke of a populist.
But HN, and this topic in particular, is not the place for this discussion. Good luck to you when the political pendulum swings.
To be fair, if it's not in the charter, it's not a right. You are of course correct re the pendulum and unpopular privileges.
1. > I don't need perfect to be the enemy of good. There's no reason to possess these weapons any more than there's a reason to possess nuclear warheads
Slipper slope don’t you say? Quite a lot of guns on that list were not even available in Canada or would be available. Furthermore, we have some of the strictest gun laws around.
What you said above to me sounds like we also need to just ban McDonalds and others from Canada too - considering obesity kills more Canadians than gun deaths no?
2. > The next bill can ban more, fix the bugs, etc, but the flag has been planted: there's no room for those weapons in Canada.
Have you by chance gone throw the process of getting a PAL? Our issue is not responsible gun owners - it’s the access to illegal guns coming from south of the border and this bill did absolutely nothing to stop it. It was political theater at the end of which a minority of citizens were affected (and they probably didn’t even vote in for the Libs anyways)
> it also makes them horrifying enough that we're not going to sit back and pray the crime away
By not dealing with the influx of guns from the south - we are literally doing JUST that further more at the cost of law abiding gun owners too.
And of course, you can eat McDonalds safely in moderation without developing obesity, but you can't really get shot safely or in moderation without developing death.
Re 2: I have not tried to get a PAL, though I do understand it to be quite an arduous process.
Re 3: Indeed more should be done to keep weapons on the US side, however I don't think there's any reason we can't do both things at the same time.
> but you can't really get shot safely or in moderation without developing death.
I think 50 Cent offers a counterpoint.
Guns in general (both in the US and CA) have more self harm / accidental deaths to the owner than to others - If we wanted to reduce deaths by firearms, this is the number to watch out for. Which is why I brought it up. Far more people die due to drunk driving than firearm related deaths.
What I’m saying is that this issue has an significant amount of focus for an insignificant amount of return in Canada. (Again I’m referring to legal firearms).
2. I brought up PAL because just like we need a license to drive a car safely and the consequences of not having one and driving a car are serious, the same applies to guns as well.
3. > Indeed more should be done to keep weapons on the US side, however I don't think there's any reason we can't do both things at the same time.
I agree that we can do both at the same time - I don’t see anything being done about it though. I pointed (and feel) that this is why it makes this entire bill pointless.
I live in Toronto and have family in Scarborough - both places where firearm related deaths and crimes have kept going up YoY. (One of the people who died in the Nova Scotia’s shooting was a part of my interns family - a family that does have firearms btw - and yet they are against the bill). That said, I’ve yet to hear of crimes committed by PAL holders. This law has done nothing to keep us safe (or even relatively safer) while taking away a lot more.
Further, as a taxpayer - the buyback is going to cost quite a bit while our deficit is through the roof due to COVID. And I’d rather we not spend money for show when it is much needed elsewhere.
If you extrapolate what's been happening in China regarding the internet to electronics in general and the rest of the world, the logical extreme is total surveillance, internet censorship, and eventually loss of direct control over the devices that you own. (Only a terrorist or dissident would want to install their own OS!) (Sideloading? What's wrong with the app store?) (Who needs admin anyway?) (Tor? Isn't that the network run by all the sexual predators?)
Only a cultural norm of protecting all possible personal rights at nearly any cost, even those you don't personally value or agree with, is likely to successfully stand against such an outcome. The reason is that any particular person isn't likely to make use of (or even feel strongly about) most of the rights and privileges available to them. Put another way, it's your job to protect your neighbor's rights and your neighbor's job to protect yours.
I've yet to see any valid reasons to possess drugs or alcohol. With guns, there is at least the justification of self defense.
>and pray the crime away.
Is that not what is being done with all crimes (drunk driving, but also many assaults) associated with alcohol?
There are two ways government can work. You can either have it where you have to justify to the government why you should have something, or you can have it where the government can justify why you should not have something. The former is far worse. The latter only works if the logic used is consistent, else it is really the former in disguise.
People always seem to want the former when it comes to guns, but the latter when it comes to things they personally like which have been associated with government restrictions. Why is the double standard held so openly?
For recreation, therapy, socialization, experimentation, mysticism, or just because it's my own damn body.
> With guns, there is at least the justification of self defense.
That would be fine if gun violence wasn't a thing.
How many fist fights, rapes, harassment, spouse and child beatings, car crashes, on the job accidents, chronic illness, and early deaths must society be forced to accept just so people with disposable income can enjoy a nice red wine with their meal?
Seems pretty selfish.
Are they correct or are they missing something core enough to the issue that makes poor implementation and almost assured outcome?
And for bans in general, there are many bans that went poorly yet people still generally approve of a ban, even when it has unintended costs, as long as they have a strong dislike of the item being banned.
For example, CSA image bans have a history of being used to restrict freedom (such as the recent attack on encryption) and great personal cost to individuals (any kids who get caught up in laws that didn't make exceptions for kids committing the criminal acts), and they can largely be judged as a failure (from police and news reports of how the problem continues to grow worse). Yet such laws have extremely widespread support, more than most any other law I can think of, to the extent where even reasonable rollbacks of the existing to attempt to fix some of the current problems can kill a political career.
Reasoning that equally applies to guns.
>That would be fine if gun violence wasn't a thing.
Drug violence is also a thing.
So in conclusion, it appears there is a double standard being applied here. I suggest getting to the root of that, as otherwise all arguments can easily be dismissed as coming from someone who is applying a double standard (which is a version of special pleasing, a logical fallacy, and thus invalidates any logical basis for their views).
A service I built+run started getting overrun with bot users. The signup CAPTCHA didn’t help because they’d sign-up for accounts using humans - then after that’s done they’d copy their access tokens to the bot users. We couldn’t use a CAPTCHA for every operation on the platform.
But by requiring a real phone number that we verify (by placing a TTS phone call - not an SMS - as processing received TTS calls is much harder for the bot makers to automate) - but also looking-up the phone number’s SS7 info to prevent people from using Skype, Google Voice, and Twilio users - all commonly used by bot operators.
(Legitimate users that want an account but can’t make it past our bot screen can still contact us directly to be set-up - and to-date no-one has done this or complained about the (admittantly user-hostile) verification process.
It's highly likely that prospective users just leave when encountering your restrictions and having their phone numbers rejected.
Just an anecdote, but I rarely give out my non-Google Voice number on sign-up forms. I don’t want my mobile in a database to be spammed.
If a phone number is required on sign-up, and my Google Voice doesn’t work, I usually pass. Whether for personal or commercial use.
Does that really work? I'd like a service like that for my personal phone.
I think that _is_ being very charitable. Way too much in fact.
The thing with Chinese censorship is that people living under it either don't care about it or are fully aware of it. It's very much in the open.
On the other hand, Facebook/Instagram, Microsoft, Google, etc all start requiring your phone number for verification or some other valid reason, reeling and locking you in, and before you know it not only one entity but any entity willing to pay for your data has access to it.
We should of course be outraged at both approaches.
Also, is removing fake news/propaganda not censorship solely because it's not the government doing it? Because if that's the case, Facebook and Google only really started removing fake news _because_ governments started to apply pressure on them.
Who is that being charitable to? The Chinese government also censors to stymie deliberate propaganda; it's just that in their case we typical HN posters happen to be on the side the propaganda that is being censored is for, whereas in our case we are on an opposing one.
I'm not convinced by the usual counterargument that "China blocks true information whereas we block fake news". There doesn't to seem to be anything qualitatively different between a cartoon of Liu Xiaobo ascending to heaven from a Chinese prison and most of the examples on https://www.cbsnews.com/media/russian-ads-on-facebook-a-gall... (which I assume is meant to be a sample of deliberate propaganda that we want FB to block); both tend to contain some kernel of factual statements that are probably not contentious (you can probably get official documentation that Liu was jailed and died in China, too), but the point is not in this content but in an exhortation that the reader should feel about them in a particular way and translate this feeling into support for a particular political movement.
(I spent a good few minutes trying to come up with a politer response than the following. I failed.)
Bullshit.
I keep seeing this “free speech” slippery-slope claim. It’s simply not true. I don’t know of a single mainstream or even semi-mainstream us or eu-based site that demands PII to stock “hate speech”. They ask for two main reasons:
1. Money. A confirmed “real” user is worth more.
2. Anti-abuse/spam. The sites are tired of dealing with bots.
Frankly, this happens a lot in the West these days, too. Take OKCupid, for instance. And the third-party doctrine.
Indeed. I am very appreciative to wechat that I can keep in touch with my family and friends and enjoy the technology. By valuing my freedom and the freedom of my Chinese contacts, I do not communicate sensitive materials on wechat. The freedom is only ensured within boundary so know thy boundaries. I have plenty of channels to enjoy my western freedom. Whether we should impose our western freedom upon "Chinese freedom"? That is a good question. Fortunately that is not a question I need to resolve.
It is illuminating that those who try to exercise their western freedom on the Chinese domain is helping China to the opposite of their goals. If you have that honorable goal, do your due diligence of educating yourself with the right technology.
Most of the profitable industries in China are state-owned where most of their staff are part of or have some connections with communist party. It is not easy for the unprivileged people to make a living in China. These unprivileged people have a high likelihood to become scammers. Therefore, ID verification is a way to prevent scammers.
Despite of the security reason, there is not way to find out how companies handle personal data. Chinese legal system has no respect to personal data.
Additionally, Chinese education system encourages obedience and penalises people who distrust/challenge the authority. Simply because the authority can easily find another to replace you given the fact that there are 1.3 billion Chinese people. Therefore, people live in China have no choice but to accept whatever is given by the authority.
You could maybe try registering your own server, but do you want to have the possibility of questionable messages being saved on a server that you own when dealing with Chinese authorities? Any "oops, sorry" goes out the window when they think you're actively dodging filtering to that extent.
If you're inside China and care about your safety, you would think twice about sending "questionable" messages even on the most secure channel because you're still physically vulnerable to rubber hose cryptanalysis.
If anybody messages you or your family/friends receives something suspicious something and the Party suspects you're intentionally avoiding their watchful eye with a custom mail server, I think you might end up worse off. All it takes is one goofball finding a vulnerability in your system and dropping a joke image or bit of text to royally screw you.
Furthermore, while it's nice in theory to deploy your own servers and get all of your friends and family to exclusively chat through your homemade application, it's very unlikely. WeChat is basically an OS all its own these days. It's a social network, chat app, payment app, shop, and more. People are incredibly reluctant to give up convenience unless they're very motivated and technologically inclined. And for people inside of China, getting a VPN or non-Chinese messenger is quite difficult thanks to locked down app stores and most people communicating only through phones.
I don't use Facebook and won't budge on that issue. My parents won't use anything that's not Facebook. If they won't take 10 seconds to register for anything else, then they certainly won't want to deal with anything I'd try to scrap together. The end result is that I make a VOIP call to their phone about once a month and they ask me to just give up and use Facebook at some point. It's probably a similar situation with most people wanting to leave XYZ terrible messenger.
> most major domains outside of China are blocked
I don't think this is true; GFW works in a disallow-list fashion and domains have to be explicitly blocked (which is why people do keyword attacks[0]).
But I believe that GitHub is not blocked yet just because it is not "major" enough because it is used almost exclusively only by programmers.
If non-programmers started to use it more, I believe it will get banned.
Except VPNs are illegal in china. If a site is banned in china. Using a VPN to circumvent the law is breaking the law.
Email is not secure.
So what if email is insecure, neither is Wechat. And encrypted email is still a thing.
There is a big difference between countries with independent judicial systems, and China where judges are below the local party secretary.
Chinese laws are decoration. What actually counts is what the party decides.
Just because there isn't "the party" making decisions in the US doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of flexibility in when and how the law is applied. It just gets left up to the local sheriff or prosecutors.
But that doesn't mean that the legal system in the facist dicatorship of China is comparable in any way to a proper democratic judiciary.
Chinas system is an unconstitutional state by definition.
It's also worth noting that a cellular connection that is roaming is not generally subject to the restrictions the firewall imposes.
The government opening up businesses to connect to services such as facebook or twitter to promote china businesses and so on is just the government giving permissions.
But for the every-day citizen, the use of a VPN is technically illegal as it circumvents the law.
people downvoting you are morons downvoting for technicality, while you are right
On big CCP reunions (next one at the end of may), they somehow block most of the VPN for several days, so they have the capacity to do it. But it never last so long, I feel they use it a bit like a pressure cooker, to release pressure when people are getting upset.