China crams spyware on phones in Muslim-majority province The Chinese government is requiring citizens in Xinjiang province to install spyware on their mobile phones and is enforcing the policy with police spot-checks, according to several online reports. Reflecting a country-wide clampdown on internet usage, users of WeChat in the regional capital of Urumqi received a message on …
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>Prole entertainment straight from the Eric Blair textbook.
Hush now, be nice.
Couple of decades yet before we're ready for "Ow! My Balls!” Or am I too optimistic?
re. China. This is interesting. When you see what our up and coming world superpower is up to with its own citizens. Add in the Spratley Islands and the lack of real popular legitimacy of its government system which doesn't even really believe in Communism anymore, just power. Mix in a dollop of well-justified mistrust of Western powers and sense of past persecutions. Play the foreign and domestic enemies card.
Hope they do sort themselves out into a more mature political system by 2040s or so. This is scary, the USSR was much nastier but had limited economic potential.
And what do you propose we do? Here are some options:
1. Send a strongly-worded letter via the UN for China to ignore.
2. Impose economic sanctions on the world's second-largest economy, upon which we are heavily dependent for both raw materials and manufacturer goods.
3. Attempt military intervention and initiate global nuclear war.
None of these sound like a very good option.
How about a symbolic economic sanction, where we ban all imports of smartphones and feature phones, all mobile phones, from China? This would mean that they would be manufactured in Malaysia and/or Indonesia instead, giving the economies of those countries a lift.
Don't report such things! It gives May and Tories ideas!
Do not worry, they will ignore it.
This is the Chinese effectively acknowledging complete and unconditional surrender in the fight against end-to-end encryption. They have surrendered and are dealing with it the only technically feasible way - by installing endpoint control software.
May is more likely to eat a toad with slug sauce than acknowledge that there is no such thing as a viable encryption backdoor for government use only. So do not worry, she is not going to get the idea out of this one.
I think that in the UK this is called "WinX" or "iPhone" under a program for operating systems that uploads every one of your files to the cloud where they can be accessed by our friends at GCHQ, along with plentiful metadata, such as recording every word you type on your keyboard with WinX unless you opt out.
Opting out probably puts you on a special category for extra monitoring as you've got something to hide.
Safety and security requires total domination of electronic communication by the government, they say.
In my view, the situation described here is similar to movement to, for example, create backdoors in electronics to defeat encryption in other places.
I would say there is no way to stop it. Submission will make us safe.
Safe from what though?
Ploughing a truck through a crowd doesn't really need internet communications does it? Just a chat in the street would be enough.
Like the restrictions on the sale of knives to minors and a ban on certain types of knife hasn't stopped people being stabbed.
We should ban bus stops, walking in the street, build super steel barriers between the road and pavement, discourage people from leaving their houses and watch and listen to every action of the population, then we'll all be safe.
No life or existence but safe.
In the '70s we had the Red Brigade, Bader Meinhoff and the IRA amongst others, I worked at the Daily Express for a while, the alarm used to go off at least a couple of times a week, sometimes for serious threats. We regarded it as a good time to go to the Wig and Pen in Fleet Street for a coffee or a pint, then back to work. I have been in several places where there were bomb threats and was a few minutes ahead of the Old Bailey bomb a couple of years earlier.
Was also one of the 1 in 4 squaddies given real bullets while on exercise in Northern Germany because a white 3 litre BMW with some Red Brigade types had been seen.
Clearly I survived all of that without the PTB eavesdropping on my every word and action, if they had the ability then to do it , it wouldn't have changed a thing because the bad boys would have just found alternatives to communicate with just as they will now.
If this is security theatre I won't be reserving a seat.
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My point AC, is that ploughing a truck through a crowd of pedestrians needs no organising or chat at all. How difficult would it be for a lone loony to bob a delivery truck driver, steal his truck and go to get his 73 virgins?
Lone actors or small groups of people actually TALKING to each other without a tech medium ( I know this is thinking outside the box for some people) in the privacy of their own home/garden/cafe etc, can plan anything without the authorities knowing a thing, so, no disappearing people there then.
Besides it doesn't need a truck in particular, a small car at speed is a lethal enough weapon, ask anyone still alive who has been hit by one.
You can have all of my liberty after I have been hit by a truck, until then Feck Off!
@Chris G In the '70s... ...I worked at the Daily Express... ...the alarm used to go off at least a couple of times a week, ... We regarded it as a good time to go to the Wig and Pen in Fleet Street for a coffee or a pint, then back to work.
in 70s Fleet Street? Pant's on fire much?
One suspects that the Chinese government has taken a look at what's going on in the Persian Gulf, and has taken what they see as proportionate measures, to stop the same thing happening there.
Cleary there are better ways of achieving regional settled living than this. One sincerely hopes that such measures never become unavoidable elsewhere.
Just for the sake of historical interest, one wonders what Oswald Mosley and his Black Shirts would have done with smartphones, social media, and the opportunities offered by Google and Facebook's borked auto news aggregators. All in all I think it's a very good thing that these things didn't exist back then. At the time opinions were divided, and a strong social media campaign might have made a difference.
Couldn't happen here? Well, it kinda has happened in the USA.
If we were to want to keep things rational, we need to keep a high level of cynicism, something a lot of people don't seem to learn these days. A bit like all those gullible students who voted Labour at the last election, sometimes twice, because of an undeliverable promise.
One with the same name, that looks from a casual police perusal to be the real app, but doesn't actually send your data to home base.
For bonus points, create malware that replaces the real app with the fake one, so people have plausible deniability if caught with the fake one that they deliberately installed!
Fasting during Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. This, therefore, is a violation of that portion of the Eternal Law of God as embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America among other places in the laws of other civilized and democratic nations.
It's a pity China has nuclear weapons, as it is clearly overdue for regime change.
A couple of years ago I was travelling to Kashgar overland and the Chinese Visa people said it is harder to get a visa for Xinjiang than Tibet. Once there to say there was a feeling of repression was the understatement of the century.
Anonymous in case I want to go back!
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