Tech giants will block Kazakhstan’s web surveillance efforts again
engadget.com
engadget.com
UPD: it makes me sad so many Uighur people detained in camps, it is like living in 12th century, how this is happening in 21st century, beyond my understanding. People seem to forgive anything if they can get things little cheaper
The UN is simply a forum for countries to meet and discuss international affairs. It is not a global governing body, and wields no power not authorized by its constituent member nations.
Yes there would be massive supply socks if we lost access to the Chinese market but they would stabilize (at a higher price) in time. This is different than something like a modern CPU which China cannot produce at any price.
No doubt these whispers are spread deliberately to serve as a disincentive for attack, just like the ghost stories about automated retaliation ("Dead Hand," etc) during the Cold War / MAD era. In this case: "If you attempt to do X in order to acquire Y, a robotic, dispationate, automatic force will see to it that Y is destroyed before you can get to it. Therefore acquisition of Y is no longer a good incentive for X."
I find it amusing that everyone suddenly hates capitalism now that the Chinese are good at it.
So when you look at all of that together, it really is something that the "free world" should be worried about.
Most of the tech that China profits off of was developed in the west. Efficiency needs discovery for progress.
China and Russia gain strength in network effects of growing illiberal alliances, and taking the smaller fish helps.
Every year the old world order crumbles a little more.
because human nature hasn't appreciably changed between the 12th century and today
"You now have a better standard of living and can afford a car and a bigger, warmer place to live to live than one/two hundred years ago, and yet you're still a servant, except that instead of a serving a crown that can the skin off your back, you serve massive conglomerates that can take the skin off your back."
It has always been true that the strong one was able to impose on a weaker one and that strong ones had to tolerate themselves up to a point.
It is true in private life as well as in foreign relations.
And I'm not saying they should cover it. They're free to do what they want. But claiming to be activists against tyranny and oppression while ignoring china is very hypocritical.
Where are the calls for boycotts? Where are the kneeling sportsman? Where are the protests?
So, succinctly:
1) Ultimately, what happens in another country is that country’s problem. Sometimes we ought to intervene, but the bar needs to be very high. Intervention most of the time leads to outcomes ranging from bad to catastrophic.
2) I am entitled to participate in how my country is run, and I owe to future generations to help improve it as much as I reasonably can.
I’ll let you piece 1 and 2 together.
Since when are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla examples of "Western democracy" ( as if that is some monolithic entity..)? They are private companies, and can do as they like within the legal frameworks they operate in.
Of course everyone is impotent taking actions against big, powerful, rich, heavily armed, strategically important countries. Who can say anything to China, and even more mundane - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, ffs, USA, UK, France, etc. and try to impose it? War is out of the question ( your population would probably be against it, and attacking nuclear powers isn't really a good idea; for the non-nuclear powers, they're still heavily armed, so you're still looking at a costly military affair), and economic sanctions will probably be more crippling for your country than them, and will probably strengthen their dictators' position ( country X is our enemy and doesn't want us to succeed!).
The UN isn't the world police, and can't be. It's based on all countries participating together, and complying to rules set together. The consensus can't work against countries with veto powers ( but they wouldn't have joined otherwise), or against dictators that don't care or can find a workaround/allies that will support them anyways, thus making UN decisions impossible or inapplicable.
What do you think can any world leader do? Would you support your country, whichever it is, going to nuclear war against China to free the Uighurs and kill millions in the process? Would your fellow co-citizens when that means a crash of the economy, massive job loses, serious lack of all sorts of products, not to mention all the dead and maimed soldiers? If you think a trade war might work, it probably won't, and would still heavily impact the world's economy, with countries with debts to China and Chinese-operated companies/infrastructure being caught in the crossfire.
Be realistic. The only thing that can stop China is China itself.
Why this sentiment is not applied to Russia then? instead of making sanctions, countries can say, only thing that can stop Russia is Russia itself, same should have been applied to war in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and any other war happened in 20th century.
If you turn deaf to world, world will make you deaf.
I think economy almost survived huge pandemic, this proves taking radical actions is possible, yes it will impact lots of people, but end result could be best for humanity. I know people individually can not boycott Chinese products, because more people, more difficult to come to consensus, there will be excuses anyway. But, western government can come to consensus and decide not to buy anything, literally anything from China, this will hurt really hard everyone (people living in China, in big economies and everyone else). If this action will take place, then history will remember it and anyone who wants to work against human rights will know there will be huge hurting actions.
I think you underestimate China's contribution to the global economy and overestimate the will of the average Western citizen to suffer for human rights in a faraway country.
Because China is literally 10x the GDP of Russia. The West, and particularly the USA, is willing to give up what it gets from Russia because it would have little impact. The same can not be said about China.
What if their leaders started dying mysteriously until the country changed? No need for war.
It's because Kazakhstan tries to man-in-the-middle attack all their citizens by making them install a government-issued root certificate, which is easy to defend against. (Just don't trust the certificate.) If they used an IP-based blocklist to filter all traffic (like China), that would be much harder to counter.
As for sanctions, I haven't seen any proposed against Kazakhstan over their human-rights record (including suppression of their own Uyghur minority).
Because they are a major world power. What has anyone done to stop our invasions of iraq, afghanistan, etc? What has anyone done about Britain/France and their invasion of libya? What has anyone done about Russian annexation of crimea or the EU's "annexation" of ukraine? Has nothing to do with trade. Even if we stopped trading with china, we aren't going to attack china.
> Thank you UN for not being able to do your job!
The UN was created by the US, Britain, France, Russia/Soviet Union and China primarily to prevent wars between US, Britain, France, Russia/Soviet Union and China. They are the 5 permanent security council members with veto powers for a reason. So the UN has actually done its job well if you understand why the UN exists.
> UPD: it makes me sad so many Uighur people detained in camps
What people? You mean the terrorists/separatists? By "camps", you mean prisons/detention centers? Why aren't you crying over the libyans, syrians, kurds, etc?
> People seem to forgive anything if they can get things little cheaper
And everyone is getting a bit tired of the "uighur" propaganda. The top comments here are literally propaganda. What happened to your lies of genocide? Funny how you people talked about "genocide" and now are beaten down to "camps". What happened to genocide? Can't really pull of that lie anymore when the uighur population has increased 10X?
The chinese had detention centers for uighur terrorists/separatists for nearly 20 years now. Why are you all off a sudden "upset"? And stop hijacking threads that have nothing to do with china or uighurs to peddle your disinformation.
China has also been using forced labor as part of regular punishment for less dangerous crimes like prostitution and drug use for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai which does make it look like political calculation that the current campaign to get companies to stop using forced labor is limited to Xinjiang instead of all of China, or the rest of the world, for that matter.
That doesn't mean that declaring everyone arrested a terrorist or separatist is any less propagandistic. There are plenty of perverse incentives to arrest people on trumped-up charges. Here's an article about the war on drugs in Yunnan: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef... illustrating how the police are incentivized to polish their arrest quota, of drug addicts in that case. It's unlikely that police in Xinjiang are acting with any more precision and accountability in the war on terror than their colleagues in Yunnan in the war on drugs.
> What happened to your lies of genocide?
It's also possible that the person you're replying to never believed in the "genocide" story, but nonetheless thinks that arresting thousands of people based on mere suspicion of terrorism is unjust and unnecessary. Not everyone sorts neatly into one of two factions.
Of course not. Propagandists know the propaganda they are spreading is false. Especially something as absurd as uigher genocide.
> but nonetheless thinks that arresting thousands of people based on mere suspicion of terrorism is unjust and unnecessary.
No. I doubt that.
> Not everyone sorts neatly into one of two factions.
Propagandists do... I love the role you are trying to play. It's a bit obvious, but a welcomed distraction.
If everyone who says something untrue is a propagandist who doesn't believe their own lies, then there's little reason to debate, since then everyone would know the truth, even if some may deny it. I rather think that most people who spread propaganda do so unwittingly, because they earnestly believe that they have some information that is both true and important.
> I love the role you are trying to play. It's a bit obvious, but a welcomed distraction.
I have some trouble noticing how I am perceived by others, so could you tell me what that role is? Am I the incorrigible idiot who thinks there are no bad people, only good people making mistakes? The mediocre mediator who believes the truth is always found in the middle between two extremes? The compulsive contrarian who'll find a reason to disagree with anyone? The perfidious propagandist who serves up a watered-down version of the same lie if the previous one didn't catch on? The annoying alliterator for whom words are toys and the truth a bendy reed?
It’s more like 21st century where people of color and members of marginalized communities are forced to live in ghettos. No financial stability, prejudice, and violence.
You mean poor people.
And sadly, most americans take the worlds inaction as a sign of those issues not being that bad.
My PR background tells me that this is a weighed decision - Condemning Kazakhstan will yield a considerable amount of media attention with very little opportunity cost. Whereas doing the same to China would get you fired as a PR professional.
Kazakhstan population 15 million, GDP 179.3 billion USD
China population 1393 million, GDP 14,342.90 billion USD
You might be onto something here.
If the Kazakh government implements the same control methods China has implemented, big tech companies will use the same excuses to remain at a distance. Local competitors will recreate any service that's not available on the Kazakhnet in the same way China has a local competitor for every type of social media or any app in general.
Why not distribute a modified Firefox browser if you want to spy on your citizens? Should be fairly doable and doesn't need any Big Tech blessing.
To be clear I am not advocating this.
I've always assumed that every nation has atleast one under their control to allow MITMing .
There's two ways to deal with certificate pinning. The first is to apply SNI sniffing (which will work until eSNI makes its way into more software) to determine that a certain domain is related to a certain, permissible service and bypass the decryption filter. This can be coupled with certificate validation to prevent domain fronting.
The second method requires rooting the device and using a tool like Frida to automatically disable any validation checks. On Android and iOS there are special APIs to do certificate pinning but not all apps leverage them.
Many apps will also work fine if you install the CA to the system partition instead of using the user store. App developers often don't know that certificate authorities are even a thing that can be managed by the user, let alone that the set can be extended, so most apps use the default setting, which has been to only trust system certificates. This was changed back during the release of Android 7, before that time all apps defaulted to trusting user-installed certificates.
The third option, which any company or government can take to get off easily, is to blame the app for trying to break your righteous surveillance and to leave the apps broken. Netflix can be made to work any time, all they need to do is release a patch that disables certificate pinning, so if the government can get the public to blame the apps, they get off scot free.
The first method works transparently to applications. The second requires physical access to the device and rooting the OS, which can be impossible. The third only works if the people you're surveilling take your side. I'd guess they pick option 1 or 3.
Annoyingly, many telemetry providers seem to have implemented cert pinning because I can no longer inspect the traffic flowing to telemetry endpoints from my phone without rooting it. That's quite a pain in my opinion. I'm fine with being unable to see my bank's traffic, but I want to know why the MS launcher is uploading kilobytes of information every minute instead of just deleting it entirely. That's the downside of being a power user, of course; the features I want cannot be made available to the general public in good faith because bad governments and companies will abuse them.
They are straight up and honest. I wish more governments were like that.