Cure53 Audit of Chinese ‘Police App’

A friend was in China on business recently and the local corporate It department told him they were installing government required monitoring software so that he could vpn back to the US office. This might have been a misunderstanding as that guy isn't very technical, have you heard of this?

>Putting Xinjiang on your itinerary would likely result in your visa being refused anyway

1. get a multiple entry visa

2. say you're going to shanghai or whatever on the application

3. go to Xinjiang on your second visit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven. The idea hasn't changed much in two thousand years: the ruler that rules well is the ruler that deserves to govern. If the ruler rules badly enough, they'll be overthrown.

The "Duty" vs "Right" thing is ancient. You can see the earliest form of this "duties" concept underpinning the all the abrahamic religions, even in all salvation-oriented religions. You have a duty ultimately to the "godhead", from which all other duties derive.

The concept of universal rights was the refinement of this and only fully emerged during the enlightenment era in Europe. But it was there in a less explicit, more rudimentary form in classical Greece, too.

It's a choice, really. What kind of world do you want to live in? A world where we recognize basic human rights as x-y-z (from which we can determine what duties we have toward each other, for sure) Or a world that we left behind for very good reasons.

There is haggling to be done on the specific words though; I'm going to dispute that care of the elderly is tied to the Western conception of rights. The Western concept, particularly in places like France and the Anglosphere, is tied freedom of action and from interference that came about when the monarchies were de-toothed. A good classic benchmark of what rights look like, the US Bill of Rights, only guaranteed a level of protection from government and law enforcement as opposed to saying that people deserved some standard of comfort or whatever.

Care of the elderly is a recognition of the fundamental importance of individual dignity and the value of character. This is an inherent quality of individuality, as opposed to a right which is somewhat granted by an external entity [^]. Claiming people have a 'right' to someone else taking a positive action on their behalf isn't a universal Western value, or if it is it is reasonably modern. The idea is old, but historically it probably had a different name (likely tied in with religious community, for example).

[^] You can be denied your rights, but you can't be denied the fact that you are in individual with dignity and importance.

A right implies a duty on others. A duty implies a right of the person you have to the duty to.

The duty formulation is good because it makes clear the cost of the right - it's like avoiding the passive voice in writing (compare 'everyone has the right to food' with 'those with food have a duty to feed those without' - the first is meaningless without the second). The rights formulation emphasizes that the reason for the duty resides in the person to whom the duty is owed, not the person who must perform the duty, and even if the performer changes, the duty will remain.

Elsewhere in the thread, the point is made that the prevalence of right formulations in western society mainly came about as western society went through successive limitings of the power of monarch and government, and the rights of the people against all governments present and into the future were enumerated. I don't know if this is true, but it seems plausible. It also provides a possible explanation for why authoritarian regimes might prefer a duty based view, and would certainly try to avoid accepting a philosophy that limited their power over their people.

Having said all that, big chunks of chapter 2 of the Chinese constitution read just like a Bill of Rights. http://en.people.cn/constitution/constitution.html

I stopped subscribing to universal human rights, at least as defined by the UN, when the lobbyists got a hold of them and began adding things like IP protections as "human rights."

We now need DRM and can't have fair use because it violates the new human rights....

Hard to say from an outside perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

Certainly worth a read and would be very interesting to compare what we class as democracy and accountability country by country from a neutral perspective. Though I'm not aware of any such articles of comparison.

> What accountability does the Chinese government have?

Presumably, they need to answer to their president.

Very importantly an independent and strong judicial system.

There's the question of culture. I'd be really happy to have an opinion about my country from a China inhabitant...

I should travel there once, just to see it for myself...

A lot of good that accountability did Kim Dotcom, or the brown-skinned people being blown up by drones, or the hundred thousand civilians killed in Iraq after America brought about regime change. Over the past century America has interfered far more in other countries' affairs than China ever has. A cynical way of putting it: China's government oppresses its own people, America's government oppresses everybody but its own people. As someone neither American nor Chinese I feel China's far less likely to come along and bother me when I'm minding my own business than America is.

>> And ?

There's no "and". According to what you wrote, we're thinking the same thing :-)

It's sometimes helpful, actually. Virtually any comment critical of Google gets downvote aggressively. I suspect that's a lot of Googlers reading Hacker News (who drank the coolaid) rather than an intentional astroturf campaign, but in either case, I've noticed a comment like that tends to help. It prevents the kneejerk "You criticised my employer/community/ego, so I'll downvote you" reaction, and sometimes leads to a bit more critical thought.

You mean the one which (still) runs Gitmo?

Or perhaps we should get our law enforcement to help out. But then who would we have to do the very important work of putting kids in cages on the border?

I think you're making the mistake of viewing Google and the US military as autonomous entities. We have 7 billion people in the world. Organizational structures, whether governmental, corporate, or otherwise are abstractions generally designed to keep people happy, healthy, organized, and productive. Systems define how those abstractions interact.

Most bad systemic behaviors come from those interactions.

It makes sense to understand good and bad behavior on an individual level (e.g. an person who spends 3 years at Google and then moves on to Facebook for 6 months, finds it doesn't work out, and gets a job at Apple). It makes sense to understand how organizational structures interact to cause healthy behavior or oppressive behavior at an overall level. It usually makes very little sense to look at individual organizations without looking at the overall systems they operate in.

At this point, Google seems to do a lot of bad in the world. That's not a criticism of Google the organization. It legally can't do otherwise. The CEO of Google has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, while the regulatory regime makes the behavior it's engaging in do exactly that. The trick is to fix the ecosystem around Google so it can do good. That's actually a place where Googlers and similar could do a lot of good, if they can get past the ego issues which lead to defensiveness like from the post like yours.

I'm guessing you're a Googler (or similar) who missed the point. Privacy has value even without the threat of being thrown into a camp, and mass surveillance is a human rights violation even without that. But just to get facts straight:

The US government can and does get data from Google through both instruments like national security letters and subpoenas. If it decides you're in need of prison:

* There may be a trial before one gets thrown into a prison camp. That's true. The Justice System is relatively fair to anyone who can afford to spend $300,000 on lawyers without worrying about the cost. That's the top-1-percenter population. If you're a Googler, you're probably at the lower-end of this.

* For most middle-class families, a criminal prosecution is guaranteed bankruptcy. Whether or not you defend yourself successfully depends on how quickly you run out of money.

* For most lower-class families, the outcome is usually a plea bargain, where you do get thrown into a prison without trial.

Before making comments like yours, you might want to read a book like "The New Jim Crow," and look up statistics on what your own power structures are doing (and specifically, both statistics on the number of people in prison and anecdotes for how they got there).

Exactly, sit outside the police station/wherever just nearby spin up wireshark in monitor mode and you have a stream of personal info on the owners of those scanned phones

But they aren't transmitted over public wifi. They are transmitted inside of some kind of private network, given that they are transmitted to a server in the 192.168/24 range