Advox is Global Voices' project reporting on online censorship, surveillance, and digital rights, especially in China, Russia, and authoritarian states.
HN commenters cite it for reporting on state internet control, surveillance apps, and platform failures, used as evidence in debates about Chinese-style information management.
I'll take the apparently unpopular opinion, that it kind of did work like that, and the internet has accelerated our progress into some kind of future Star Trek utopia (hopefully skipping the 2026-2053 nuclear war that they have in their universe).
I don't know how you'd support or discredit such a view but I generally feel like the free flow of information has been overall positive.
Not uniformly so, but even the bad stuff say Nazis, was already there and mostly brought into the sunlight.
I'm reminded of something I saw on the internet long ago, which compared a Time magazine piece about "life in Iran" which was all black and white photos of war murals, and contemporary Flickr photos from Iran, which was just normal people stuff, in color.
Can't find it now, but here's a conversation on Flickr in 2007 that kind of sums up the same thing of "Iranians are normal people, like us", "I know, I'm Iranian":
https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/discuss/72157615594907672/
And here's someone who made a Firefox extension around the same time to work around the attempts to block flickr:
https://advox.globalvoices.org/2007/02/14/iran-flickr-users-vs-the-state/
Iran isn't currently some Disneyland, but would it be better or worse without the internet? I vaguely feel there's been a positive impact.
I know it was fashionable to get excited about the Arab Spring and then fashionable to be cynical about it all, but I feel like in one of those hype cycle things, the long term…
> Silicon Valley feels a bit like the British Emplire at its sunset.
That general premise has been widely forecast at least three or four different prominent times across the last 40 years in Silicon Valley. There was a time in the 1980s that it was supposedly dying. In the early 1990s it was supposedly dead. In 2001 it was supposedly dead.
The sun isn't setting this time either. There is no competition for Silicon Valley anywhere on earth on the horizon.
China does not directly compete with Silicon Valley. The notion that they do, is entirely a myth. China's tech companies are trapped inside of China (that's why Baidu never actually proceeded to challenge Google globally, which used to be widely expected). US tech companies get the rest of the world to play in.
Talent that is drawn to Silicon Valley, isn't going to China instead (plenty of it that is local to China may be staying home in China rather than moving to the US). China is dramatically less welcoming to foreigners than the US is. The US hands out a million green cards per year. It's almost impossible to become a citizen in China as a foreigner.
Not to mention that little problem of China having few human rights, near total state censorship and an aggressive dictatorship that has been rapidly revoking the few rights they acquired. It's so bad, they're banning joke apps in China now, because apparently, according to the Communist Party, jokes are contrary to Socialism. [1]
[1]…
In case if anyone is interested, publicly known face recognition algorithms usually require a photo to have at least 50 px between eyes. The article says that the system used by police has 90% error rate and this is surprisingly poor result.
For comparison, an article about Russian photographer [1] says that he managed to recognise approximately 70% of people he took photo (he was recognising people in the subway to show how different people look in social networks and in real life; useless research in my opinion).
If you would like to check it for yourself, you can try demos like searchface [2] - it has indexed most of the photos from the popular social network vk.com.
I think the laws should be adapted to make face recognition illegal. Otherwise businesses and governments will want to be able to identify the citizens or customers, to collect and sell detailed data about them.
[1] https://advox.globalvoices.org/2016/04/07/the-russian-art-of-meta-stalking/
[2] http://searchface.ru/
This is exactly the same stuff going on in Thailand. Post something on Facebook the gov doesn't like and receive a 6 years[1] to 60 years[2] prison sentence. The new cybercrime billed was just announced with harsh penalties for posting anything that embarasses anybody or damages the image of the country. The junta doesn't give any cares at all anymore and just abducts people who say anything they don't like[3]. You would think that western governments would at least pretend to be strong against this kind of thing.
[1] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/thai-man-jailed-years-facebook-posts-160121064455972.html
[2] https://advox.globalvoices.org/2016/01/25/meet-the-thai-facebook-user-sentenced-to-60-years-in-prison-for-insulting-the-monarchy/
[3] http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/politics/950073/regime-wields-section-44-to-arrest-10-for-political-posts
I have said it before[1][2] and I will say it again:
The Chinese model of online information management has been extremely successful and there is no reason for other rulers to not try to copy it.
India has it in place[3], Russia is trying to do it [4]... and the west has been doing it too and it is done by making it seem like people have free choice of posting infromation but having tech companies remove, hide, shadow-ban, or otherwise limit the spread of information dangerous to the rulers.
This is inevitable and there are no other options.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30510857
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30492226
[3] https://advox.globalvoices.org/2020/02/10/what-do-we-know-about-the-great-firewall-of-india/
[4] https://www.economist.com/business/russia-is-trying-to-build-its-own-great-firewall/21807706
>No backing up your messages to the cloud like WhatsApp or having them loaded from the server like Facebook Messenger.
Their old product QQ has it, the reason they didn't do it on WeChat, I think it's because they have no other choice since:
-They have to make WeChat "presentable" internationally, they means they can't appear to store it since they are beholden to China.
-They need to convey a message that they aren't watching you, but in reality their system needs to be monitored by Chinese police real time[1], since that rules out the option of E2E encryption, the only way is at least appear to be hands off.
[1]https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi-the-bun-chinese-netizens-are-being-jailed-for-chatroom-jokes/