Category: Aside

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In western China, thought police instill fear

From the Associated Press:

Southern Xinjiang, where Korla is located, is one of the most heavily policed places on earth.

In Hotan, police depots with flashing lights and foot patrols are set up every 500 meters. Motorcades of more than 40 armored vehicles rumble down city boulevards. Police checkpoints on every other block stop cars to check identification and smartphones for religious content.

Xinjiang’s published budget data shows public security spending this year is on track to increase 50 percent from 2016 to roughly 45 billion yuan ($6.8 billion) after rising 40 percent a year ago. It’s quadrupled since 2009, when a Uighur riot broke out in Urumqi, killing nearly 200 people.

But much of the policing goes unseen.

Shoppers entering the Hotan bazaar must pass through metal detectors and place their national identification cards on a reader while having their faces scanned. AP reporters were stopped outside a hotel by a police officer who said the public security bureau had been remotely tracking the reporters’ movements by watching surveillance camera footage.

The government’s tracking efforts have extended to vehicles, genes and even voices. A biometric data collection program appears to have been formalized last year under “Document No. 44,” a regional public security directive to “comprehensively collect three-dimensional portraits, voiceprints, DNA and fingerprints.” The document’s full text remains secret, but the AP found at least three contracts referring to the 2016 directive in recent purchase orders for equipment such as microphones and voice analyzers.

The extent of the of technical and human surveillance, and punishments that are meted out for failing to adequately monitor family members and friends, is horrifying.1 And while the surveillance undertaken in this area of China is particularly severe, the kinds of monitoring that occur in China is more extensive and ever-present throughout the country than many people who haven’t travelled into China can appreciate. The Chinese surveillance infrastructure is the kind of apparatus that exists to sustain itself, first and foremost, by ensuring that contrary ideologies and philosophies are threatened and — where possible — rendered impotent by way of threats and fear.

  1. While much of the contemporary surveillance is now provided by Chinese-based companies it’s worth remembering that, historically, this equipment was sold by Western companies. ↩
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A Hard Day

Received news that a friend has been diagnosed with (very treatable!) cancer. It’s brought back a wave of pretty negative emotions as I recall the diagnoses that were given to my step-sister and step-mother alike, both of whom passed away due to their illnesses.

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Android to iOS Switch

Watching someone switch from Android and to iOS for the first time is a really interesting experience. The ease of wirelessly transferring data between operating systems (and devices!) and automatic installation/configuration of apps like they’re set up on their iPad is pretty magical. The near-automatic warning that they’re out of iCloud space and thus need to pony up a monthly payment to Apple is the only jarring part of the experience so far; Apple really needs to increase the default amount of storage provided to at least 10GB or so.

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(In)Security and Scruff

From The Verge:

Ashley: And then, you mentioned it in transit, do you store these on Scruff’s personal servers? When it’s on the server, is it encrypted? What kind of protections do you have on the server?

We take a number of steps to secure our network. Encryption is a multifaceted and multilayered question and process. Yeah, I can say that the technical architecture of Scruff is one that we have had very smart people look into. We’ve worked with security researchers and security experts to ensure that the data that’s on Scruff stays safe and that our members can use Scruff with confidence and know that their information isn’t going to be disclosed to unauthorized parties.

This is exactly the kind of answer that should set off alarm bells: the developer of Scruff doesn’t actually answer the specific and direction question about the company’s encryption policies in an equivalently direct and specific way. Maybe Scruff really does have strong security protocols in place but you certainly wouldn’t know that was the case based on the answer provided.

It’d be a great idea if someone were to develop the equivalent of the EFF’s or IX Maps’ scorecards, which evaluate the policies of digital and Internet companies, and apply it to online dating services. I wonder how well these services would actually fare when evaluated on their privacy and security and anti-harassment policies…

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Migration: Accomplished

Since the summer I’ve managed to port over, and re-categorize, over a thousand posts from a previous personal blogging website (Quirks in Tech) that I hosted with Tumblr. While there’s still some stuff to do — fixing up the tagging structure as an example — I’m glad that the most laborious activity has come to an end!

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The Problem of Botting on Instagram

Calder Wilson at Petapixels:

Instagram’s Terms of Use make it clear that botting is a no-no. Over the past couple of years the platform has implemented anti-spam/anti-bot restriction, which does things like prevent accounts from liking too many photos in a short amount of time or commenting the same thing again and again. It’s obvious they oppose using bots ideologically, and it’s very easy to determine who’s using them or not, so why don’t they do something about it?

For one thing, Instagram is killing it right now. Every time Facebook reports their financial earnings, they need to show robust growth in their flagship products; almost just as importantly, they need to show healthy engagement. Growth and engagement are the life forces of Facebook’s stock, and any decrease in either can send shares south.

Now, consider that my @canonbw account was liking over 30,000 photos every month along with thousands and thousands of comments. That doesn’t even include the activity generated from people responding and liking my images/following me in return. If I took every Instagram user I know in my life who doesn’t use a bot, it’s more than likely that my single account generated more “activity” than everyone else over the last year combined.

If we take into account the massive number of people botting everyday all around the world, the number of likes and comments are astronomical. It’s very unlikely that this huge engagement engine will ever be shut down by Facebook Inc. The relationship between Instagram and botters is seemingly symbiotic, but I argue that in the long run, Instagram suffers.

The problems linked with false engagements fuels the life of Facebook as a public company, while turning the actual product space into one that is as demoralizing as Facebook itself. A growing number of academic articles are finding correlations between Facebook use and depression, in part linked to how much content is liked. While Instagram use remains relatively strongly correlated with happiness, will this persist with the growing rise of bots?

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Expenses at University

It’s absurd that I have to carry expenses for multiple months before universities will reimburse me for expenses incurred speaking at their events. It shouldn’t take 160+ days to reimburse speakers who put aside multiple hours to prepare presentations, travel to location, present, etc.

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Supreme Court of Canada to Decide on Protection of Journalistic Material

From CBC News:

The materials at issue relate to three stories Makuch wrote in 2014 on a Calgary man, Farah Shirdon, 22, charged in absentia with various terrorism-related offences. The articles were largely based on conversations Makuch had with Shirdon, who was said to be in Iraq, via the online instant messaging app Kik Messenger.

With court permission, RCMP sought access to Makuch’s screen captures and logs of those chats. Makuch refused to hand them over.

RCMP and the Crown argued successfully at two levels of court that access to the chat logs were essential to the ongoing investigation into Shirdon, who may or may not be dead. They maintained that journalists have no special rights to withhold crucial information.

Backed by alarmed media and free-expression groups, Makuch and Vice Media argued unsuccessfully that the RCMP demand would put a damper on the willingness of sources to speak to journalists.

The conflicting views will now be tested before the Supreme Court.

This case matters for numerous reasons.

First, there has been a real drying up of certain sources, which has prevented journalists in Canada from bringing material to public light. Such material doesn’t just pertain to terrorism and foreign combatants but, also, white collar crime, political scandals, cybercrime issues, and more. The Canadian public is being badly served by the Crown’s continued pursuit of this case.

Second, this case threatens to further diminish relations between the state and non-state actors who may, as a result, be (further) biased against state authorities. It’s important to be critical of the government and especially aspects of the government which can dramatically reshape citizens’ life opportunities. But should the press gallery adopt an unwarranted and more critical and combative tone towards the government there could be a deleterious impact on the trust Canadians have in their government . By extension, this could lead to a further decline in the willingness to see the government as something that tries to represent the citizenry writ large. That kind of democratic malaise is dangerous to ongoing governance and a threat to the legitimization of all kinds of state activities.

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Christmas in Coffeeshops

I’m certain that it’ll eventually drive me mad, but at the moment I’m enjoying the holiday music that’s playing in the coffee shops I work out of. Bring on Christmas and the holidays!

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I’m Not Linking to the Clickbait

The title of an article The Verge put up today — “My $2,000 iPhone X” — is the worst kind of clickbait. The article’s title is misleading (the phone was about $1500) and doesn’t actually inform the reader of the topic (the author bought extra stuff). It’s stuff like this that best exemplifies the bait and switch problems with online writing.

And no: I’m not linking to the clickbait.