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posted by martyb on Thursday July 09 2020, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the communication-wants-to-be-free dept.

Millions Losing Access to Internet

Millions losing access to internet:

Millions of people look set to lose access to the free and open internet as China’s control over Hong Kong increases.

A new law was ushered in by Beijing last month that gave China sweeping powers over opposition against itself, both within its borders and outside of them, which could put people in jail for years if they commit vaguely defined political crimes.

The controversial national security law was used to make arrests within hours.

[...] Hong Kong police now have sweeping powers to order social media platforms and publishers to remove content, as well as ban the platforms altogether.

Undefined “exceptional circumstances” also give police the right to seize and search electronic devices.

A number of tech companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Zoom have said they’re pausing the review of law enforcement requests for data or stopping it altogether while they assess the impact of the new law.

[...] Tech companies and many others have been balancing a desire to uphold support for Hong Kong independence during recent protests with the desire to avoid annoying the Chinese government and losing access to its market of 1.4 billion, increasingly upwardly mobile citizens.

Hong Kong Downloads of Signal Surge as Residents Fear Crackdown

Hong Kong downloads of Signal surge as residents fear crackdown:

The secure chat app Signal has become the most downloaded app in Hong Kong on both Apple's and Google's app stores, Bloomberg reports, citing data from App Annie. The surging interest in encrypted messaging comes days after the Chinese government in Beijing passed a new national security law that reduced Hong Kong's autonomy and could undermine its traditionally strong protections for civil liberties.

The 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China came with a promise that China would respect Hong Kong's autonomy for 50 years following the handover. Under the terms of that deal, Hong Kong residents should have continued to enjoy greater freedom than people on the mainland until 2047. But recently, the mainland government has appeared to renege on that deal.

[...] The New York Times reports that "the four major offenses in the law—separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign countries—are ambiguously worded and give the authorities extensive power to target activists who criticize the party, activists say." Until now, Hong Kongers faced trial in the city's separate, independent judiciary. The new law opens the door for dissidents to be tried in mainland courts with less respect for civil liberties or due process.

This has driven heightened interest among Hong Kongers in secure communication technologies. Signal offers end-to-end encryption and is viewed by security experts as the gold standard for secure mobile messaging. It has been endorsed by NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden.

[...] Bloomberg has also reported on the surging adoption of VPN software in Hong Kong as residents fear government surveillance of their Web browsing.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Friday July 10 2020, @03:48AM

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Friday July 10 2020, @03:48AM (#1018957) Homepage

    When I was working at the IBM Speech Group circa 2000 I heard that a Chinese national was caught copying all the source code of IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition software to send to China. Not sure what happened to her in the end...

    Of course, what goes around comes around:

    Westerners smuggled silk worms from China (despite a death penalty):
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire [wikipedia.org]
    "In the mid-6th century AD, two monks, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, successfully smuggled silkworm eggs into the Byzantine Empire, which led to the establishment of an indigenous Byzantine silk industry. This acquisition of silk worms from China allowed the Byzantines to have a monopoly of silk in Europe."

    US American then took British textile technology illegally (relative to Britain's laws):
    https://sites.google.com/a/imagineprep.com/theindustrialrevolution/inventors/samuel-slater [google.com]
    "Known as the “Father of American Industry” Samuel Slater was an American Industrialist. He brought British textile technology to America. Slater established tenant farms and towns around his textile mills. He has built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island. Without drawings or models, he continued to build machines, doing much of the work himself. By December 20, 1790 Slater had built carding, drawing, and roving machines. He was born June 9, 1768 in Belper, Derbyshire, England. He brought the Industrial Revolution to the United States from Great Britain. It was illegal to export textile technology such as parts, designs, sketches; he memorized the construction plans for the Arkwright factory. He did not tell anyone of his plans of leaving including his family. When he was at the docks, he told the authorities that he was a farm laborer."

    And now the USA wants (in theory) to prevent technology it developed from going to China... I say in theory because (ignoring what happens in the USA) it just seems stupid (regardless of contracts or laws) to hand over all your manufacturing know-how to Chinese factories if you really wanted to keep it secret... Or even to keep US citizens continually learning how to make things better since if you only have a theoretical knowledge of manufacturing it can be hard to design good things...

    And even back around 2000 there were good FOSS efforts like CMU's Sphinx for Voice Recognition (if maybe not quite as good and likely tuned with less speech samples then IBM's ViaVoice was then).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Sphinx [wikipedia.org]
    "In 2000, the Sphinx group at Carnegie Mellon committed to open source several speech recognizer components, including Sphinx 2 and later Sphinx 3 (in 2001). The speech decoders come with acoustic models and sample applications. The available resources include in addition software for acoustic model training, Language model compilation and a public domain pronunciation dictionary, cmudict."

    And now there is Mozilla's effort: https://voice.mozilla.org/en [mozilla.org]
    "Common Voice is Mozilla's initiative to help teach machines how real people speak. Voice is natural, voice is human. That’s why we’re excited about creating usable voice technology for our machines. But to create voice systems, developers need an extremely large amount of voice data. Most of the data used by large companies isn’t available to the majority of people. We think that stifles innovation. So we’ve launched Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open and accessible to everyone."

    Maybe the biggest issue in all this is that the game of "Go" is popular in China compared to the game of Chess in the West. Go cultivates a much longer term perspective in many ways... And the Chinese leadership mostly has science and engineering backgrounds whereas the US leadership is mostly lawyers...

    The deeper issue on living in peaceful harmony is the one I discuss here:
    "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
    https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
    "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

    --
    The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
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