South Korea bans new DeepSeek AI downloads | Hacker News Reader

South Korea bans new DeepSeek AI downloads

bbc.com

36 pointsErikun15 comments

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For those confused about the download ban - it's about the DeepSeek mobile app, not weights

Title should probably be updated then.

BBC has changed their title to “S Korea removes Deepseek from app stores over privacy concerns” now.

If the title wouldn't have been changed from the original, it would have been clearer.

That is the original title on the BBC article, they changed the title after I posted it here.

Ah, fair enough.

I find it incredibly funny how there's a 1:1 parallel between the way states rally hypocritically around "good" countries and "bad" countries (allies & rivals, i.e. US says Israel good no matter what, Russia bad no matter what) and privacy concerns. It feels like the exact same arbitrary line: When China does it, bad privacy. When Silicon Valley does it, "necessary" privacy.

Once you see it, it gets really annoying really fast.

Especially in a third party country where there is no good reason to pretend to think Meta or whatever are in the patriotic yay Fooland#1 woho-team.

The encryption failures in the app like choosing 3DES and null IVs point heavily to these decisions being made so the Chinese govt can snoop all of the traffic.

I am unaware of anything similar happening with competitors.

There is always a threat, but so far this is the closest thing we have seen to a smoking gun.

I might be totally wrong about this, but I thought that South Korea and Japan have taken steps to have friendlier relationships with China, while maintaining ties with the USA?

EDIT: for what it is worth, I just asked Gemini Flash 2 and ChatGPT this question and indeed according to these “sources” my perception seems correct.

South Korea is a US puppet regime, so those friendly relationships only extend as far as the US will allow it. The moment they need something, like say helping them paint China as a devious infectious entity bent on world domination, or that the DPRK is full of backwards nitwits who are dominated by an insane dictator, the South Korean government bends over backwards to comply.

How much methylene blue do I have to snort to reach this level of enlightenment?

Is this really hypocrisy?

I think our intelligence agencies have a self-consistent worldview, they are on one side, the other guys are an another side, and they are trying to beat the other side, so they try to gather intelligence while not letting the other side gather intelligence.

Like, in a war, one would never say “you keep shooting at me, but when I try to shoot back, you take cover—hypocrisy!” It’s just the nature of competition to try and make advantage for yourself.

(I happen to disagree with this worldview, not because it is hypocritical but because I think it is still bad to violate your own citizens privacy even if you have a good excuse).

But you added that framing - this article is about South Korea.

And if you don't understand why South Korea might have concerns about it's big neighbour China and consider them a bad actor, well .... maybe your simplistic view of good and bad countries is a representation of your own world view.

You are not wrong. I have consistently seen here attempts being made by "neutral" audience to show anything related to China or Russia in bad light, and anything significant by the West or other G7 nations is shown and pushed as a good thing. I have compained this very hypocricy here twice before, only for my comments to be flagged.

You are not wrong for calling this site to have been infilterated by western hypocrites.

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