Hacker News Reader

07d046on China is detaining a million Uighur muslims in a secret camp

I'm happy to see more headlines about this, because this doesn't seem to be getting the attention it deserves.

Here is one account from a camp:

> “Xi Jinping is great! The Communist Party is great! I deserve punishment for not understanding that only President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party can help me,” was one of the refrains that a Uyghur woman who was in a centre last fall, was forced to regularly repeat.

> The woman, whose name is not being used by The Globe and Mail for her protection, was put through regular self-criticism sessions. Part of the content was cultural. “My soul is infected with serious diseases,” she would repeat. “There is no God. I don’t believe in God. I believe in the Communist Party.”

> Other content was more explicitly political. Day after day she would say out loud that she was a traitor, a separatist and a terrorist.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-former-detaine...

This story was published yesterday:

> She was one of the most revered academics from the Uighur ethnic minority in far western China. She had written extensively and lectured across China and the world to explain and celebrate Uighurs’ varied traditions. Her research was funded by Chinese government ministries and praised by other scholars.

> Then she disappeared.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/world/asia/china-xinjiang...

07d046on Gear Review: Wahoo Elemnt Bolt

https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000024864-An...

I'm guessing segments just use the elevation data of the activity that they were created from, hence why they can be wildly wrong.

07d046on Gear Review: Wahoo Elemnt Bolt

Strava does this

07d046on Google’s Secret China Project Sparks Fury Among Workers

Because it's collaborating with the Chinese government to oppress the people.

07d046on GE Engineer Linked to China Stole Power Plant Technology, FBI Says

The interesting part, other than fitting into the "Chinese IP theft" narrative, is that:

> [He] removed electronic files with company trade secrets involving its turbine technologies and hid data files in a digital photograph of a sunset. Prosecutors say he then emailed the picture to his email account.

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/08/01/us/ap-us-general...

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes?

07d046on Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

I wonder if Google employees will be as outraged about this as they reportedly were about Project Maven...

07d046on How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies

> Society has to avoid McCarthyism (a 'reds under the bed' panic). This is what China wants and it plays directly into the propaganda. They want false accusations and race based panic.

True.

On the one hand, there needs to be more awareness in the West about the threat of an illiberal and powerful China. It's not so much about China making money with dodgy trade practices, but that it's pressuring the entire world to abide by CCP party lines. For example, it's made many airlines treat Taiwan as part of China, made Mercedes apologise for using the Dalai Lama in advertising, prevented at least one book from being published, and it froze relations with Norway, harming Norwegian businesses, when the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Liu Xiaobo.

On the other hand, opposition to the Chinese Communist Party must not devolve into "Chinese people are bad" racism. Some politicians will be too willing to fan the flames of racism, and the CCP will welcome this, for it loves to portray all opposition as being based on racism.

07d046on How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies

I doubt China would let thousands of Chinese organise a protest in China either...

07d046on How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies

> Has to be kind of disheartening

My impression is that most Chinese students wouldn't have a problem doing this. "Civil rights" aren't really a thing in Chinese thinking, and the "patriotic education" in China does an excellent job at convincing them that the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong are evil, and Tibet and Hong Kong and Taiwan are indisputably part of China.

07d046on How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies

> Occasionally, Chinese intelligence activities in San Francisco burst into plain view. Consider the story—and it is an incredible one, also told here for the first time—of the 2008 Olympic Torch Run.

> ...

> Most brazenly, said former intelligence agents, Chinese officials bussed in 6,000-8,000 J-Visa holding students—threatening them with the loss of Chinese government funding—from across California to disrupt Falun Gong, Tibetan, Uighur and pro-democracy protesters. (They even provided these students with a box lunch.) “I’m not sure they would have pulled out these stops in any other city, but San Francisco is special” to China, said a former senior U.S. official.

It's wild, but the same thing happened in Canberra, Australia. The CCP organised thousands of Chinese students to support Beijing and counter-protest pro-Tibet protesters.

07d046on Choice of search engine on Android nuked by “Anonymous Coward” (2009)

For the young whippersnappers, "anonymous coward" comes from Slashdot, where it was the name for anonymous posters.

07d046on China-based campaign breached satellite, defense companies: Symantec

You can have a very low view of the Chinese Communist Party while being many things that Trump isn't, like a fierce advocate for liberal democracy and human rights and the rule of law.

07d046on The Chinese Communist Party’s fear of its people spells trouble

I've just started reading Silent Invasian: China's Influence in Australia, which made headlines around the world last year when its original publisher decided not to publish it out of fear of what the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies in Australia would react. That China has this sort of influence (see also all the airlines and hotels and other companies that bent over backwards to apologise for listing China and Taiwan as separate countries) overseas already is worrying.

On another note, I don't like the moral equivalency that seems to be popular between China and the US. The "but America does bad things too" response. The reality of America is often ugly, but it was founded and has always preached ideals like democracy and liberty and human rights and the rule of law. America's great failings are generally when it doesn't live up to its own ideals. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party holds none of those ideals, sees the rights of the individual as completely subservient to the needs of the state, and has no qualms with wide scale censorship, jailing human rights lawyers and activists, harvesting the organs of political prisoners, etc.

In my opinion, one of the most unfortunate consequences of China's growing power is that it gives other authoritarian countries cover to abuse human rights. We seem to be seeing it in the Philippines with Duterte, and just last week a US citizen was arrested (and hasn't been released) in Vietnam after being involved in a protest.

07d046on Vietnam’s new cyber security law draws concern for restricting free speech

This law calls for companies like Google and Facebook to store data in Vietnam for Vietnamese people. Presumably the Vietnamese government would then have free access to it.

Would I be right in thinking that Facebook and Google wouldn't comply with this new law, and get blocked instead, like in China?

And how would it be determined who is a Vietnamese user? If I've never been to Vietnam but talk to Vietnamese people on Facebook, could the Vietnamese government get access to my data in the event that Facebook complies with these laws?

07d046on New autoplay policy in Chrome

And then there's Chrome, where you can start typing something in the URL bar, and it comes up with some results immediately, but in the milliseconds before you select a result it changes to something "better" so you go to the page instead. Infuriating.

07d046on StreetLend.com shuts down, citing GDPR regulations

> China is getting more free speech

That's just not true. The West hoped that would be the case when Xi took charge, but it's gone in the opposite direction since then. How many chat apps can you use where the CCP isn't listening in on your conversation? They practice wide scale censorship on their own social media, Western social media sites are blocked, and important sources of information like Wikipedia and the New York Times are blocked too.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/china

> China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tightening its control over the media, online speech, religious groups, and civil society associations while undermining already modest rule-of-law reforms.

07d046on Facebook Container for Firefox

I've been using first party isolation for the last year or so, and I can't think of anything it's broken.

07d046on Facebook Container for Firefox

I used Firefox's containers for about a day, and then I discovered the privacy.firstparty.isolate option (in about:config), which effectively gives every site its own container with no user effort. That, combined with Cookie AutoDelete, seems to work well.

07d046on There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

If I close my eyes, open my mouth and tilt my head back I can hear a hum. Is this The Hum?

07d046on A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy

Because this is Less Wrong, I'll say that they're making a logical fallacy. A prediction was made that Bitcoin would go well, and it did, but the fact that it went well doesn't mean that the prediction was rationally founded.

07d046on Building a Lightroom PC

Interesting idea, but I think there's a variable you're missing, which is the light by which the physical object is illuminated by. The colour temperature and spectral power distribution of the light makes a difference. If you used a custom white balance in your camera you should be able to get the colour temperature close to right (depending on how neutral the camera is), but to calibrate colours you'll need a high quality light source (real daylight is quite good, but varies a lot). At this point, a cheap calibrator is probably easier and far more accurate.

07d046on Building a Lightroom PC

My understanding is that calibrating the monitor only takes the light emitted from the monitor into account, so the environment doesn't matter for calibration. That said, the way we perceive colour varies depending on environmental lighting, so if you want to be particular you should use D50 or D65 lights in the room, especially if you're printing.

07d046on Building a Lightroom PC

I can't imagine spending $6000 on a computer for editing photos and then saying "It also means I don't plan to buy and meticulously use a color calibration device". My computer might not be half as fast, but at least I know my blues are the shade of blue I think they are.

07d046on Zcoin implementation bug enabled attacker to create over 500K Zcoins

I'm under the impression that the general philosophy of cryptocurrencies is that the code is the law. You can do anything that the code will allow you to do, because it's designed so that you can trust the system and not people. It's a small step to say that it's also not the programmers' intent that matters, but the code itself, because it's the code that matters, not people.

(I'm not sure how this relates to courts of law.)

07d046on The New York Times to Offer Open Access on Web and Apps for the Election

The usual narrative is that coverage of Trump and Sanders couldn't be more different, with Sanders struggling for attention while Trump received vast amounts of free advertising. There is a lot of truth to it, but, according to a study:

> Sanders’ media coverage during the pre-primary period was a sore spot with his followers, who complained the media was biased against his candidacy. In relative terms at least, their complaint lacks substance. Among candidates in recent decades who entered the campaign with no money, no organization, and no national following, Sanders fared better than nearly all of them. Sanders’ initial low poll numbers marked him as less newsworthy than Clinton but, as he gained strength, the news tilted in his favor.

And for Trump:

> By our estimate, Trump’s coverage in the eight news outlets in our study was worth roughly $55 million. Trump reaped $16 million in ad-equivalent space in The New York Times alone, which was more than he spent on actual ad buys in all media during all of 2015. In our eight outlets, the ad-equivalent value of Trump’s coverage was more than one-and-a-half times the ad-equivalent value of Bush, Rubio, and Cruz’s coverage, more than twice that of Carson’s, and more than three times that of Kasich’s. Moreover, our analysis greatly underestimates the ad-equivalent value of Trump’s exposure in that it’s based on only eight media outlets, whereas the whole of the media world was highlighting his candidacy. Senator Cruz might well be correct in claiming that Trump’s media coverage was worth the equivalent of $2 billion in ad buys.

It's an interesting read.

http://shorensteincenter.org/pre-primary-news-coverage-2016-...

07d046on The New York Times to Offer Open Access on Web and Apps for the Election

> email scandal

On this topic, I find it mildly amusing that, for all the accusations of bias, it was actually the New York Times that broke the story of Clinton's private email server.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clinto...

07d046on Microsoft Says Russian Hackers Exploited Flaw in Windows

> either because they have some kind of proof (unlikely) or because it serves their global interests (likely)

Is it just me or is Trump making conspiracy theories great again? There's always a fringe that is happy to see a conspiracy in everything (and sometimes they're actually true), but it seems that this sort of thinking is everywhere at the moment.

07d046on McLaren needs Compaq laptops with bespoke CA cards to maintain the remaining F1s

Yeah, but that's one hundred installations worth $10M+ each. It's worth being in the business of supporting them when repair bills can top one million dollars.

http://jalopnik.com/5982805/rowan-mr-bean-atkinsons-insuranc...

07d046on Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

Aren't there a small group of people who essentially control all of Bitcoin with no oversight? There might be a group of 30 very wealthy early adopters, miners, main developers, people who own the communication channels, and other influencers, who have 90% of the influence in what happens with Bitcoin. Real currencies can't boast to being that centralised.

07d046on Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

It sounds like a good idea, but in reality, the sport of road cycling is and always has been extremely heavily dependent on bicycle manufacturers. You could probably make an argument that professional cycling exists mostly for the purpose of selling bikes. At the moment, five of the eighteen WorldTour teams (they're the top level teams) have names like BMC Racing Team and Trek-Segafredo, and I don't think they'd be very happy about everybody riding unbranded bikes.