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An unprotected MongoDB database of 1.8 million women in China has been taken offline after drawing media attention for the inclusion of a data field designating whether the women are "BreedReady." The database was spotted by Victor Gevers, a researcher based in the Netherlands who founded the GDI Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on improving online security.
Interpretations of the database field in Western media swiftly skewed towards the sinister, with The Daily Beast invoking Margaret Atwood's dystopian book The Handmaid's Tale and The Guardian framing the term in the context of Chinese government concern over falling birthrates and the gender imbalance arising from government policies and cultural biases.
In a Twitter conversation with The Register, Gevers said the exposed data has been taken offline thanks to the social media attention his post received. Presently, he doesn't know who owns the data and without that, there's no way to be certain what the "BreedReady" boolean field really means. "We have talked to many people about this one and the majority thinks [it] literally means what it says," he said. "But others say this could be a language barrier thing."
Otto Kolbl, a researcher and doctoral student at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who studies socio-economic development in China, warned against jumping to any conclusions. He suggested "BreedReady" might just be a Chinese developer's bad English for "willing to have a baby," which would not be out of place in a dating app.
BreedReady™ is a good new meme, just waiting to reproduce and be truly born. 👶
Also at The Next Web.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:29PM
That there is rampant, consistent discrimination against hiring women who might have children soon in china.
If I had to guess, this stupid thing was put together by some executive at some dumbass company to create a de-facto blacklist, that's like 5% more subtle than just bluntly asking candidates if they're recently married.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:47PM (1 child)
Isn't there something like 400 million BreedReady women in China ?
(the definition of "ready" might or might not involve consent)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:16PM
Based on the dating app theory, could be Ready as in "moist".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:57PM (1 child)
But a better question is how many are DarwinReady™?
Most Soylents have their DR certification, right?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:59PM
Of course! I've always been told that I would be a great candidate to win a Darwin Award!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:16PM (4 children)
Here they are
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PVYlh66jB5w [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @07:01PM
ohhh yeeeaaahh! oppress me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @09:01PM
That’s better than the official Rammstein video ;)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bJP7Qe41Fk [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:20AM
I wonder how many of them are going commando.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @05:47AM
Is that the kind of parade Trump wanted?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:34PM (4 children)
So all you need is the database of all the women, discount everyone in the BreedReady list, and then you will have found The Unbreedables.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday March 12 2019, @07:00PM (2 children)
Along with the incels, we have a category of "inconceivables". But you keep using that word, and we do not think it means what you think it means.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday March 12 2019, @08:16PM (1 child)
You say your name is Inigo Montoya, and I should prepare to compile?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @08:24PM
"You killed my one-child policy, prepare to copulate!"
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:50PM
Otherwise known as the Untouchables!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday March 12 2019, @07:00PM (11 children)
Looking forward to the Chinese military industrial complex building human breeding-farms where they breed the next generation of the master race. Go army! It might actually be completely feasible in China for all I know and not as controversial as it apparently is here. That said perhaps they should have contemplated this when they had their 1 child policy and girl fetuses were aborted left and right. Oops!
That said I'm far more inclined to believe that this "BreedReady" is more of a translation error or just a really shitty variable name. After all you, or I, normally don't pick super long variablenames that explain everything. That is after all what the documentation is for. I want names that are short and clear to the people that work with the project so I don't have to sit and type out really long things as I write code to work with the data. Somehow "BreedReady" is then a lot better then "WantsToAndAmWillingToHaveABabyRightNow" or whatever the more correct name might have been. Perhaps they should just have put down "Fertile", but then that isn't the same as they actually wants to have a little baby. Also one might not even have to ask that but can just make an assumption based on age unless otherwise specified that there is some kind of medical, or personal, reason for why not.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday March 12 2019, @07:43PM (4 children)
It could just be "of legal age" or something equivalent. Or even "not pregnant". I don't know what the Chinese equivalents of those would be, and they could be short in Chinese. Often there isn't an exact translation word even between English and German, so that the translation from Chinese into English might have a bunch of undesired connotations, and be missing the desired ones, isn't at all unreasonable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday March 12 2019, @07:59PM
Or maybe the programmer hasn't had a date in a very long time and is engaging in some wishful thinking. :)
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday March 13 2019, @01:54AM
Gosh, instead of everyone guessing blindly what this may or may not mean, what about asking a Mandarin/Cantonese speaker what the original form could have been vs. the Engrish version that's being memed out to all corners of the Internet?
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Wednesday March 13 2019, @02:00AM (1 child)
Speaking as a non-Mandarin speaker, the dating app/site explanation sounds the most plausible. Years ago when we did an audit of the software for one of these, there were two flags in the status - for both male and female accounts - "has children" and "wants to have children". The latter could quite easily be engrished into "breedready". It's a simple language issue, not some sinister conspiracy by The Yellow Peril.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:33AM
Maybe that is it... or maybe that is just what the Patriarchy wants you to think‽‽‽
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @08:39PM (1 child)
Well, that's what they already do have, a massive army of pissed off surplus males. They're not super soldiers per se, but when you have a 100 million of them they don't really need to be. Think zerg frenzy.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday March 12 2019, @09:58PM
Zerg frenzy? In the land of Sun Tsu? I believe they know better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_wave_attack [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @12:57AM (1 child)
Yeah I'm gonna go with translation error from the same people that sterilize non-han minorities and have a social credit system that bans people from transport.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:54PM
Why would you ban people from transport?
Could you perhabs in this confusing age of misinformation, provide a source or two by which I can further investigate your claims. I'm not up to date on what horrible things the chinese are up to except being accused of spying through Huawei and hiding spy gear in Apple and Amazon server so well that we still haven't found it.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday March 13 2019, @01:39PM (1 child)
That to me does sound like a super long variable name that explains everything. What more do you need to know? My variable names are always x, y or z, and n for an integer, insensitive clod.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:19PM
Length is perhaps in the eye of the beholder. For me personally "BreedReady" would be to long, but just using X,Y,Z,N or I for anything but a loop counter or something trivial is a tad to short. But say anything beyond 5 characters is probably to many.
Since we don't appear to know yet "BreedReady" could indeed explain it all ... or not. Not that it really matters all that much unless as noted previously you think you just stumbled upon some "secret" chinese forced breeding program for humans.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @08:48PM
The original DB doesn't give the chinese characters, using that literal English term. I suspect what they actually meant was in the sense in which demographers discuss fertility rates. Chinese women under communism are much more empowered than they ever were under the imperial system for millennia. They used to practice foot binding, for pete's sake, to literally hobble their women. Chinese women are also outspoken and do not at all adopt the demure mien their Korean and Japanese peers do.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:07PM (3 children)
Maybe it was supposed to be "BattleReady"?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:23PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:58PM (1 child)
Judo make me a sandwich :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:25PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:20PM (1 child)
If she can cook up a good chop suey, even better.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:42PM
Asking for a friend.
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @12:16AM (1 child)
A Soylent News user database was found online. 90% of us have "BreedUnlikely" set to True.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @12:26PM
But that datafield is not a boolean of; between first period and menopause, but a boolean of pure sadness.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:58AM
Baby quotas. The Chinese have no fear of implementing policy to engineer their population. They've done it before. Baby quotas are coming.