Slashdot Mirror

Soldiers had taken telephones from the tourists who were undergoing examination near us and had begun to install a special app called JingWang Weishi that is used in Xinjiang for surveillance of the Muslim population. JingWang sends the police an identification number for the device, its model, and the telephone number of its owner before monitoring all the information that passes through the telephone, warning the user when it finds content that the government deems dangerous. ...

Three years ago, the Chinese government announced that private and state-owned CCTV surveillance systems that use facial recognition would be unified into a shared database that would encompass the entire population by 2020.

Xinjiang, which had also been the site of the first Chinese nuclear weapons tests, was once again chosen as the site of a pilot experiment. This is where the majority of the 20 million CCTV cameras at work in the country are located. ... Now, Chinese police can find and arrest any suspect in a crowd whose facial features correspond with existing data in the country’s grandiose central database in the course of seven minutes or less. ...

CCTV cameras are everywhere: on the roofs of houses, on brackets attached to the walls of buildings, on street lamps, and on metal racks installed specially over the streets for the express purpose of housing cameras. The city is split into square regions, and in order to cross from one quarter into another, every Uyghur must display a plastic ID, hand over any bags or purses to be searched, undergo a pupil scan, and, in some cases, surrender a mobile phone for inspection. The same procedure awaits them at the bank, in the hospital, at the supermarket, and at underground crosswalks. ...

The loyalty point system, which is officially called a “social credit system,” was announced in China four years ago. No one knows exactly how the system works, but it is known that people’s ratings are calculated using the entire mass of information that the government gathers about its citizens. Financial debt, traffic tickets, reprehensible behavior online (including “harmful shopping”), and smoking in public can all affect a person’s score. One can earn points by donating blood, volunteering, or writing an ode to the Communist Party. But they are also easy to lose — playing too many video games or visiting the mosque too often is enough. Visits to unstable regions are also taken into account, as are conversations with less desirable people that are recorded on surveillance video. ...

In Xinjiang, where every resident is almost constantly under surveillance, this futuristic nightmare quickly took on the qualities of a bloody dystopia. The artificial intelligence system that analyzes personal data about people divides society into “safe,” “average,” and “dangerous” citizens. Age, religion, previous convictions, and contact with foreigners are all taken into account. It is very likely that samples of DNA might affect residents’ scores in the near future, as well, if they are not part of the system already.

In September 2016, the first open calls were issued online for genotyping kits to be produced for police use in China, and just two months later, Human Rights Watch announced that DNA sampling had become mandatory in Xinjiang for all those receiving a new passport. Samples are gathered in schools and workplaces, and police officers can also enter people’s homes to take them.

Flashmob on Russian site https://meduza.io/shapito/2017...

Name one American the Russians drone murdered.

I hope, you don't insist on it being done by drones, which Russia does not really have — and what it does have, it uses for intelligence-gathering and artillery-coordination only. But, here, I'll list a few:

• Joseph Stone, an American paramedic who was killed in eastern Ukraine on April 23
• Mark Gregory Paslawsky, the sole American fighting on the Ukrainian side of the war in the east of the country, died from injuries sustained in battle in the town of Ilovaysk on Tuesday.

You can also safely chalk up a sizeable fraction of American deaths in the Middle East to Russians — but we may not know the exact details of their coordinating ISIS and other terrorists against the US for decades...

Now, why is it indicative of anything? Why don't you list the Americans killed by American government — and we'll compare that to the Russians killed by Russia... Ah, you are an American — protected by these people you despise — and not worrying about what Russians do to others? Ok, do you suppose, all an enemy can do is kill? How about spying — on your country? How about lying online with millions of "voices" through hijacked accounts?

GTMO like prisons

Darling, GITMO is a tropical paradise compared to the installations run by the enterprise formerly known as GULAG.

Tell me about the Russian detention without charges + torture program.

What exactly would you like to know?

Now explain why would you rather have the CIA on your stuff?

Because whatever abuse you may accuse CIA of was aimed at the sworn enemies of the US and our allies, not US citizens, however politically active and oppositiony...

The article is kind of useless, it doesn't say what technology is being used to block websites.

This article is a little better. The government keeps a central database of websites that should be blocked (or sometimes just individual pages, from what I understand).

Each ISP (or network operator) is required to download the database of blocked pages, and get updates every day. Many of the ISPs don't have real filtering capability, so they just block the website at the IP level. If they don't block the content (and some don't), then they get a fine.

This thing operates at around 50 gigaflops which puts it around the level of a top of the line 2008 i7. Not bad if it weren't for the $2000 price tag for the desktop model.
Source: https://meduza.io/en/lion/2015...

https://meduza.io/en/lion/2015...

According to this site, it costs $4,000.