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from the cats-and-mice-and-maps-oh-my! dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The “Be Water” nature of Hong Kong’s protests means that crowds move quickly and spread across the city. They might stage a protest in the central business district one weekend, then industrial neighborhoods and far-flung suburban towns the next. And a lot is happening at any one time at each protest. One of the key difficulties for protesters is to figure out what’s happening in the crowded, fast-changing, and often chaotic circumstances.
Citizen-led efforts to map protests in real-time are an attempt to address those challenges and answer some pressing questions for protesters and bystanders alike: Where should they go? Where have tear gas and water cannons been deployed? Where are police advancing, and are there armed thugs attacking civilians?
One of the most widely used real-time maps of the protests is HKMap.live, a volunteer-run and crowdsourced effort that officially launched in early August. It’s a dynamic map of Hong Kong that users can zoom in and out of, much like Google Maps. But in addition to detailed street and building names, this one features various emoji to communicate information at a glance: a dog for police, a worker in a yellow hardhat for protesters, a dinosaur for the police’s black-clad special tactical squad, a white speech-bubble for tear gas, two exclamation marks for danger.
Founded by a finance professional in his 20s and who only wished to be identified as Kuma, HKMap is an attempt to level the playing field between protesters and officers, he said in an interview over chat app Telegram. While earlier on in the protest movement people relied on text-based, on-the-ground live updates through public Telegram channels, Kuma found these to be too scattered to be effective, and hard to visualize unless someone knew the particular neighborhood inside out.
“The huge asymmetric information between protesters and officers led to multiple occasions of surround and capture,” said Kuma. Passersby and non-frontline protesters could also make use of the map, he said, to avoid tense conflict zones. After some of his friends were arrested in late July, he decided to build HKMap.
As a crowdsourced map, anyone can post time-stamped updates after logging in through a simple verification process via Telegram. A small team of moderators then fact check the post against live streams, news outlets, and administrators of other trusted Telegram groups. Once verified, the post gets a checkmark. Users who post false or unreliable information have their entries removed, and may be booted from the platform. To minimize security risks, Kuma is the sole administrator of the HKMap domain. They also use Project Galileo—a free cybersecurity service provided by internet security firm Cloudflare to at-risk public interest websites—to block malicious IP addresses and to protect the website against network attacks. According to Kuma, HKMap has had as many as 200,000 unique users in a single day, and more than 10,000 registered users who, in addition to contributing updates, can up- and down-vote posts on the map.
While speedy because of its crowdsourced nature, the fact that almost anyone can post on HKMap means a small amount of incorrect information inevitably slips past moderators. ”There are always speed-accuracy trade-offs,” said Kuma.
Luckily, another citizen-mapping initiative called 103.hk helps to make up for accuracy, even if it lacks the speed of HKMap. Unlike the dynamic and interactive nature of HKMap, 103.hk pushes out a single static map as a photo file. During protests, a new map is published on its website and distributed to various Telegram channels multiple times an hour. The map is color-coded to distinguish between protesters, thugs, and police, with darker shades reflecting the density of the crowd. It also uses arrows to show crowd speed, and icons to identify things like protester barricades and first-aid stations.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 05 2019, @04:54PM (7 children)
The whole idea of protests of this sort, in which people hold signs, march around in the streets, and make lots of noise, never seemed all that effective to me. Protestors are on one side, and the minions of peace, order, and authority are on the other side. That's bad. Ideally, law enforcement and protestors should be on the same side. Otherwise, even if the protestors stay disciplined and peaceful, it's too easy for authorities to pull successful false flag operations and make the protestors look like vandals and thugs. Often, they don't have to do anything of the sort. Plenty of opportunistic real thugs and criminals about to take advantage of mayhem. At best, it's a publicity stunt.
What could be far more effective, because it's much better targeted, is the boycott. For example, original moveyourmoney.org website. Trouble is, boycotts are rarely big enough to really hurt. I wonder how many people opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline still buy gas from the oil companies that use the pipeline?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05 2019, @05:45PM (3 children)
But this is but a prelude to either a massacre or a revolution that sees Hong Kong split from the mainland for good. Given the impotence of the US, UK, and other powers in either enforcing the 49 year treaty, or in helping retain HK's independence by force, I don't see this ending in any way other than the destruction of Hong Kong and its reenslavement by the Party.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday September 05 2019, @10:03PM (1 child)
To be fair to the US and the UK, they don't really have much room to move with Hong Kong.
They have agreed that Hong Kong is part of China, and telling the Chinese they're doing it wrong won't help.
China's problem is that Hong Kong is a major financial hub, and if they get things badly wrong that financial business could easily move to Bangkok, or Manila or somewhere. (Those are just examples, pick your own city. Singapore maybe).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @12:06AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/business/hong-kong-business-extradition.html [nytimes.com]
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/04/asia/hong-kong-protests-withdrawal-intl-hnk/index.html [cnn.com]
Billion dollar deals have already fallen flat. Protesters are not placated. Further escalation could cause the entire experiment to unravel.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday September 06 2019, @05:13AM
Do you mean the 49 year old of the 50 year treaty?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 06 2019, @04:22AM (1 child)
What other sort of protest is there? Else it's just theater confirming the authority's spin on things. When the authorities do wrong and are untouchable, what recourse is there? There wouldn't be these kinds of numbers out there, if the optics of rabble versus order were the only thing that mattered.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday September 06 2019, @05:15AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krD4hdGvGHM [youtube.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Informative) by http on Friday September 06 2019, @05:21AM
If boycotts weren't big enough to really hurt, US states wouldn't be freaking out and passing anti-boycott laws to punish businesses who don't want to do business with Israel (BDS).
Boycotts are why pretty much nobody under 40 knows what apartheid means. They work.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.