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China Pilots a System That Rates Citizens on 'Social Credit Score' To Determine Eligibility For Jobs, Travel (technologyreview.com)
Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens -- such as lawyers and journalists -- will be more closely monitored. From a report on MIT Technology Review: Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step." The Journal claims that the system will at first log "infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules" but will be expanded in the future -- potentially even to Internet activity. Some aspects of the system are already in testing, but there are some challenges to implementing such a far-reaching apparatus. It's difficult to centralize all that data, check it for accuracy, and process it, for example -- let alone feed it back into the system to control everyday life. And China has data from 1.4 billion people to handle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... and violating family-planning rules
So, in effect, you're f*cked twice.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Gotta wonder if they will have a system to challenge wrong data behind their 'no fly' list.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
After all, this is the perfect wrong-think system. Refuse to engage in political correctness or say something like "there are only 2 genders" or "free speech is an inalienable right" and you can have other things granted by the state taken away. Considering the triggered snowflakes going around these days, I'm sure they'd love it as well. Anyone want to take bets on the first western university to follow up and try implementing a system like it? A coercing version of no-platforming to boot perhaps?
Om, nomnomnom...
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
We are getting there. Thanks for the warning, George. Too bad nobody listened.
Coming soon to a country near you.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
> The politicians shoot the citizens. No. The politicians order the army to shoot the citizens. And the army obeys.
Extra Credits Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Papers please!
While Cory Doctorow wrote about an interesting social currency, I'd not like to be judged on how I judge... I also don't want an always-on internet feed inside my head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Anyone want to take bets on the first western university to follow up and try implementing a system like it?
That's the thought I had as well; if it ever gains a foothold in the US it will happen at some Slowflake U first.
I am sure for all of you who work in an organization with some sort of performance monitoring method can tell. It is rather easy to hack the system. Where people are paying more attention to beating the numbers then actually trying to achieve the goals these metrics are meant to measure.
Lines of code: short lines, with blank comments and a lot of extra line breaks.
Time to close ticket: Get a ticket do the most basic fix and close it without verification.
Time to respond to a call. Pick up the phone then hang up.
Metrics can be hacked so people are working on the metrics. Causing the system to break down.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And oddly people continue to shout, rather than being listened to in a hidden manner.
:-)
This is why I do not participate in things like Facebook. This is a wealth of information about what you do that is freely out there for the government to use for this kind of activity. They don't even have to have a listening device in your house, people voluntarily put all of this up there for them to parse and monitor on a daily basis. This is what the government (and never mind your future employer) will use to make the determination about where your loyalties lie.
Of course then what does posting nothing on these sites say about you as well then?
Just so you know, making ridiculous attempts to turn an issue into an absolute binary is actually counterproductive in the long term for you. Gun control, like many issues, is not an absolute binary of "Total Freedom" or "Complete Ban". There are many, many reasonable positions in between, and just because I may happen to think that we shouldn't have fully automatic weapons available in vending machines on the street corner doesn't mean that I want some draconian style gun ban. When you treat considerations and measures that are arguably reasonable with hysterical responses that conflate them with total gun bans, all you're doing is pushing those people towards that very viewpoint. It may not be immediate or even fast, but at some point some of them will start to say "you know, what would be so bad about that anyway, if the only alternative is something I already think isn't so great?" It's the same thing with so many other issues, too.
Not every suggestion about regulation of guns, gun sales, or the like is a slippery slope intended to turn us into Britain or Australia, never-mind China. It's certainly fine to disagree there, or for that matter, to disagree with Clinton on things she proposes - but is it that much to ask for calm and rational opposition and discussion, let alone opposition to things she's -actually- proposing rather than what Right Wing media claims she wants to but won't talk about?
This seems like a system tailor built to create a class of angry disenfranchised citizens.
Good luck China, you're going to need it because I can't think of a better way to foment an insurgency.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
This is nothing but big government doing what it does best - helping its people. Instead of allowing the people to make their own decisions, it is making the correct decisions for them. And why not? The smartest people run the Chinese government. You can't be any geek off the street and join the Communist Party. You have to be smart and capable, and only the cream rises to the top. Why shouldn't these people be able to run society? I see people on Slashdot all the time bemoaning how stupid people ruin everything. See: Donald Trump voters. Things would be SO much better if we smart people just had to power to change things.
Isn't eliminating negative outcomes and ensuring positive outcomes one of the major arguments in favor of big government? This is what China is doing. Oh, it eliminates personal freedom? The personal freedom that Chinese people never had at any point in history? You mean "freedumb". Because people who bitch and moan about freedom all the time are precisely the ones who make such consistently wrong decisions. Why shouldn't the government step in and help them? Isn't that why we established governments in the first place?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's bad enough I can't afford anything, now I'm a chatbot? Fuck you!!!!
You could make some money passing the Turing test for other chatbots?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Just give everybody in China a membership to Amazon Prime? Save all that time keeping track of people.
In a US where there is a broadly sweeping and growing generational consensus that government should: ...you're fooling yourself.
- provide all healthcare
- protect everyone from any conceivable harm whether practical, realistic or not (from terrorists to pedophiles), - even from their OWN CHOICES - and at literally any expense
"Any government powerful enough to give the people all that they want is also powerful enough to take from the people all that they have."
Famously NOT said by T.Jefferson, but pretty damned good comment nonetheless.
-Styopa
I'd like to see people from China commenting. I take it their culture and history are quite different to the West. They see themselves as a civilisation and there is a lot of nuance around morality and ethics. To our ears, as the post tag says, this is all quite *strange* But when you have a growing middle class of what, 250 million? and a desire to reduce corruption at all levels, this whole social capital thing might make more sense... just not in a way we understand. I mean, as a Westerner I just think, Brazil (the film) and ludicrous bureaucracy. But to Chinese, it might work in a different way.
Good to see China catching up to the West!
More inspiration for Theresa May and her gang of clueless peeping toms. You'll see a similar system in the UK by 2020.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Do you honestly think armed Chinese citizens could stand up to their government? For that matter, do you think Americans could stand up to theirs?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's not hard to see what the idea is there. Citizens ought to be compelled via this social credit score to conform to a cookie cutter mold that is for the benefit of the state. The most precious things we have as humans is our humanity. And our humanity is based on the diverse individuality that we all contribute to the world. When you take that humanity away, there is truly nothing left to live for. Your life becomes predetermined by the state prior to your being born which makes you wish you hadn't been born at all. In the immortal words of Patrick Henry: "Give me liberty or give me death".
China would be better served by making their entire population sterile and manufacturing humans via cloning technology to meet their fascist leaders' expectations
We'll make great pets
The same people will react in horror to this - but at the same time disapprove of the right-to-be-forgotten that the EU has applied to Google et al. You can't have it both ways, either we have a forgetful society (the same that has happened throughout all of history, and is widely considered essential to personal freedom) or you let things be remembered forever and applied to your "reputation".
As imperfect as the right-to-be-forgotten is, I'd rather have it that not. We need to understand that just because we now *can* record everyone's every discretion for all of time, we mustn't.
Some aspects of the system are already in testing, but there are some challenges to implementing such a far-reaching apparatus. It's difficult to centralize all that data, check it for accuracy, and process it, for example -- let alone feed it back into the system to control everyday life. And China has data from 1.4 billion people to handle.
Don't worry, it won't take long. Just like in Soviet and DDR, there won't be any testing for accuracy.
New to /. maybe, but this was revealed over a year ago. Extra Credits did a pretty good video covering the dystopian system from a game developer point of view.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
So when are you gun nuts going to start standing up to your government? What are you waiting for? Bullshit. No one is afraid of your peashooter. They have much bigger peashooters.
I would normally consider the piloting of a system to be early adopters doing some final testing before it becomes widely available.
I expect the UK government will have already placed their order as it probably dovetails nicely with their recent snoopers' charter (which seems to include backdoors to encryption in the small print according to the Reg; someone has probably submitted that to Slashdot by now).
In fact, there have been more gun control laws passed these past three years than in the entire history of the nation combined. Are we safer? Definitely not.
Oh please, this is just plain dumb. Obviously, you must be extremely young, because guns are easier to get and much more ubiquitous than they have been in a long time, and the laws are much more relaxed. Go back to the 70s: legal concealed carry didn't exist back then, and states that are now open-carry were not. It's easier and cheaper than ever to get an AR-15 rifle and all the accessories you could possibly want for it. Now they're even trying to legalize suppressors. The variety of guns you can get now is overwhelming too; back then it was mainly just crappy revolvers; now there's an endless array of guns of all types, many specifically designed for concealed-carry.
Black Mirror S03E01
And sesame credit. This is exactly as terrifying as it sounds. I hate to be this much of a cynic, but While we really shouldn't doing business with a country that does this sort of thing we're not gonna give up out phones to do it
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Don't try to outsmart them. Any "system" you try to impose will be corrupted and subverted. You merely create a class of specialists who figure out how to extract the maximum benefit from such a system at the expense of everyone else. Doesn't matter what it is - capitalism, feudalism, communism or bureaucracy. You think you are doing a good thing but you are not. My philosophy of government is: LESS is MORE.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Make sure you know where your mustard is, citizen! Fight the power!
MeowMeowBeenz
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's supposed to be a warning, not a playbook.
Nope, no sig
We are also seeing A Chinese Elite fleeing China.
Either because most of their wealth is based in Taiwan or Hong Kong, or because they simply don't like Authority Figures outside of their own family.
We are also seeing them staying, because things like Security is far easier to operate in a segregated 2nd world state.
>"The power elite"
Which one? Wall Street Co? Parts of the Bildenberg group? Tax Heaven Swindlers?
I don't think there is what you think there is.
There is also a legitimate risk of The Powerful Elite being unable to set its foot inside China after some point, because the economic infractions might stack up.
Then again, this is China, families already have some form of Citizen score.
Kind of like how you can be arrested in Florida with no justification from the officer besides, "Resisting Arrest Without Violence".
The circular logic *alone* makes my head hurt. It basically gives the police authority to arrest anyone for anything at any time, then justify it if challenged by claiming the person they arrested gave them so much as a dirty look.
Net worth determines what people you can hang around with, what neighbourhoods you can live in, how safe your residence is, how much comfort and security you enjoy when traveling, which clubs you can join, what schools your children can go to and what their prospects are, what medical care you can have, what your life expectancy is, how likely you are to have your legal rights respected (or enforced), and (to some extent) how the authorities treat you.
Scary if you look at it this way eh? Only ... we all accept it. It's how our society works. The only difference is: scores aren't determined by the state.
If we were building The Matrix. Otherwise, it's a monumentally bad idea.
Of course being in or a relative of a Government Employee basically supersedes this ranking system.
Depending on your state, suppressors are and have been legal for quite some time. They are expensive and you have to jump through a few additional hoops to obtain one, such as setting up a trust or getting written approval from the chief of police, but I know several people who own them.
I remember hearing about something like this a year ago.
It gets worse, your friend's scores affect your score, meaning that people with low scores will become shunned and isolated.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Over and over we have seen asymmetric warfare by untrained citizens with second-hand small arms working against the most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen. Over and over and over.
Uhm. What? Over and over we have seen asymmetric warfare by untrained citizens with second-hand small arms barely able to even annoy the most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, armed forces which are more operationally constrained than any occupying force in history, to the point they are forced to act like nothing more than unusually well-armed police.
At no time have the operations of the most powerful armed forces in the world retreated or even lost anything significant without the express order of politicians. Bombers roam the skies with impunity. Tanks roam the streets with impunity. Even foot soldiers by and large go where they like, intrude where they like, arrest whom they like. The only times they have trouble, it's because the politicians have forbidden them to roam the streets in tanks.
Make no mistake, if Americans once again resort to civil war, it will be total war.
"...should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility."
Such orders have not been given since World War II, and the results are enlightening:
We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.
Letter, Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, December 24, 1864.
We're living in a post-factual world they say. Sure. Just like the Confederate states were. It's a lovely, comforting world to be sure. Right up until the truth shows up on your doorstep on the point of a bayonet.
They called it.
Extra Credits: Sesame Credit
This signature is false.
And the sooner we realize this the better. What you refer to as "Power Elite" are just the water carriers. America has a ruling class, and they do not reside in DC.
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So you do as you're told, and it's OK today. But the definition of "correct" changes, and you retro-actively become a bad guy. I'm retired. I remember back when I was a kid that people who were against racial discrimination (against black people) were "goddam liberals". Nowadays, people who are against racial discrimination (against white people) are muhf***ing fascist racist nazis... and, even worse, "deplorables".
Brendan Eich made a contribution to a political campaign that was supported by the majority of Californian voters; i.e. Proposition 8 passed in 2008. He was never accused of harrassing homosexuals. Yet, a few years later he was hounded out of a CEO position for that political contribution.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Goodness.....
PLEASE powers that be....make sure this is one thing we do NOT import from China to the US.
I think the US already has it. It's called the No Fly List and they're trying to use it to take away some constitutional rights.
Second class citizenry. What could possibly go wrong. If only that was the basis of Trump's illegal immigration stance.
If the crime rate has plummeted, shouldn't the mass shooting rate have plummeted too?
You. Are. Wrong. Definitely in California you are misinformed.
Or does my having to pay a registration background check fee to buy ammunition next year mean "easier to get" .
I haven't seen that. There are lots of people who think that we should provide quality health care to everyone without overly onerous personal cost, which is not the same thing. The US has the most expensive health care in the world per capita, and it's not anywhere close. The difference between US health care costs and the next highest (Switzerland) would pay for Spain's health care. You think the F-35 is wasteful? If we had a health care system as expensive as the second most on the planet, we'd save more than the cost of the F-35 program every two years.
We also have unimpressive public health stats for such a wealthy country, and all sorts of issues caused by the expense of health care. US businesses are less competitive because they often have to finance their employee's health care. We have lots of bankruptcies caused by high individual medical costs. We have a less healthy workforce.
The two groups have little to do with each other. All sorts of people want the government to protect them against some stupid threat that isn't worth worrying about. The insignificant threats to sacrifice money and civil liberties to (often ineffectively) protect against vary some from group to group.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Move next door to Arizona. California has always had strict gun laws.
It all depends on how you count the stats. If you look at the fact that some of the mass shootings, like the Orlando night club and San Bernadino were terror attacks, yes, they have.