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China's Censors Can Now Erase Images Mid-Transmission (wsj.com)
Eva Dou, reporting for WSJ: China's already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength -- the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them. The ability is part of a broader technology push by Beijing's censors to step up surveillance and get ahead of activists and others communicating online in China (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Displays of this new image-filtering capability kicked into high gear last week as Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo lay dying from liver cancer and politically minded Chinese tried to pay tribute to him, according to activists and a new research report. Wu Yangwei, a friend of the long-jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said he used popular messaging app WeChat to send friends a photo of a haggard Mr. Liu embracing his wife. Mr. Wu believed the transmissions were successful, but he said his friends never saw them. "Sometimes you can get around censors by rotating the photo," said Mr. Wu, a writer better known by his pen name, Ye Du. "But that doesn't always work." There were disruptions on Tuesday to another popular messaging app, Facebook's WhatsApp, with many China-based users saying they were unable to send photos and videos without the use of software that circumvents Chinese internet controls. Text messages appeared to be largely unaffected.
weChat is run by the govt
Sufficient alterations such as running images through a "make it look like an oil painting" can probably get around this kind of detection. Although watch out for that "convert to cubism" option.
The Chinese love it when their government censors them. It's the communist way!
What did Winnie the Pooh ever do to the Chinese government?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/asia/china-winnie-the-pooh-censored.html
When will our friends in China know true freedom?
Are you trolling, or do you really believe that nonsense you just posted? Memo to alleged 'conservatives': Nobody is going to start censoring your stuff -- and if someone did, it would be so-called 'conservatives', not so-called 'liberals'.
Let's take stock, briefly, of what the so-called 'right wing', which tends to be 'Christian', likes to do:
o Anything with swear words in it is strongly frowned upon
o Anything sexy is banned
o Violence? Smoking? Ribald humor? Can't have that, those aren't 'family values', everything has to be kid-safe!
o Blacks? Mexicans? Asians? Minorities of any kind? Anyone who isn't WASP? Viewed with suspicion, as is anything they like, do, or say.
Oh and by the way? Your boy Trump, and his ENTIRE CABINET, are TRAITORS and should be put up against a wall and SHOT -- and YOU MORONS VOTED FOR HIM. Go move to Russia, see how you like it there, idiots.
I wonder: will the Chinese people get tired of this sort of shit and stage a revolution before human-caused climate change kills us all? Or before North Korea starts a goddamned nuclear war? It's a coin flip either way, if you ask me.
...guess it won't be long before this comes to the UK.
For the children, don't you know?
in soviet russia we erase you!
they should totally open-source this code.
this way everybody can start erasing their own picture if taken by 3rd party and posted to facebook etc. without their consent.
call it: "take-back-privacy"
Tell me, how do they intercept the data, figure out what it is - and how they get around disguising the data in so far as possibly stripping out any headers identifying file types, and the like for instance (without which, would seemingly just appear as a string of 1s and 0s).
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
If the story source is pay-walled (and here's an alturnative source), why refer and list the pay-walled link at all? Why not just use the alturnative source as the primary source?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm curious if they've tried steganography to get around censorship? Hiding the photo inside another photo or document?
Or maybe they *are* doing that, and the reason we're not hearing about it is because it's working.
So... never mind...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Tell me, how do they intercept the data, figure out what it is - and how they get around disguising the data in so far as possibly stripping out any headers identifying file types ...
I know one way they could do it. People assume this censorship applies to everybody in China, but it could actually be restricted and implemented in a real low tech way that makes people think it applies to everybody when it only applies to a select few. Imagine a Man In The Middle approach. It seems logical to me that certain users are likely known by the government to post objectionable things from time to time, so if you don't have an exceptionally large number of such people to keep an eye on, you could implement a MITM approach and send all their communications through a central party I'll call a "watcher" who sees the communication in real time and has the ability to pass on the communication untouched and also has the ability to edit out objectionable content before passing it on. Maybe the spied on person only uses WeChat for, say, 30 minutes, so the watcher moves on at the end of that to another user. You could just restrict the watchers to say 100 or maybe 1000 such people and if you make sure they watch the people who consistently post the most objectionable content (yet never advocate overthrown of the government as that would get them arrested and no need to watch them anymore), you could certainly keep tabs on those few individuals They'll figure it out and complain and then everybody assumes that everybody is being watched when in fact you're doing this as low tech as possible with big time human intervention needed and people just assume some massively smart and obtrusive computer program is scanning literally everything. We have had people here on Slashdot who honestly believe the US government has people who read every email sent by every person in the USA, so all it would take is a few Chinese users to complain about this and the government laughs as the sheeple get too scared to do anything controversial and the actual scope of the watching is far lower than suspected.
As I will now demonstrate:
Moderation is not the same as censorship. Learn the difference.
Your post is flamebait, written in response to a troll. Censorship isn't limited to one side of the political spectrum. While the left and the right generally censor different things, both use it when it suits their purposes. Also, the "think of the children" and "family values" excuses for censorship is actually used by both sides.
The right in the United States is dominated by the religious right, which is most likely to support censoring things that are condemned by their religious views. That could include pornography but also things that portray homosexuality in a favorable manner. The left, however, is more likely to support restricting speech that is considered hateful or bullying.
Germany's politics are well to the left of the United States, and they have very restrictive laws against hate speech and things that could be considered hate speech such as Holocaust denial. Communist governments are even farther left, such as China's government. As this article points out, they go to great lengths to censor content that they don't like.
Basically, censorship isn't a left or right issue. Both sides do it when it suits their purposes. Instead of pointing fingers at the left or right, the effort would be much better spent actually opposing censorship and debunking the "think of the children" excuse that's often used.
Draconian laws are no substitute for parents being involved in their children's lives and supervising their activities in a reasonable manner. Perhaps we should hope that automation will help to reduce the amount of time parents spend working and reverse the trend of parents spending decreasing amounts of time with their children. I don't support government-mandated censorship like what's described in the article. However, it might not be such a bad thing if parents could choose to be able to monitor images sent to and from their children's phones and have the option to block them. It might cut down on things like sexting and children being harassed by perverts. However, it should be up to individual parents to decide whether to use such a thing, with absolutely no involvement by the government. If individuals choose to block content, that's their right. It's a problem whenever the government does it, though.
Once again, Mr. Munroe gets it right well before his time.
https://xkcd.com/341/
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I've begun to lose hope that the world will ever realize that censorship is all or nothing - if you support censorship of anything, for any reason, you're implicitly (whether you intend to or not) support censorship of any other thing. If we all, as a populace, reject censorship outright, they can never censor us. If we accept it in any form, it will always grow.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Yet they allow topless pictures of large breasted women in regular newspapers.
By "activists" they mean shills paid by the west and the ignorants they bamboozle who both subvert Chinese culture and government.
>Waaah Chinese culture isn't like my liberal echo bubble, that means it's oppressive
Not everyone deserves a voice. Speaking is for rational proposition, anything irrational is nothing more than animal noise and should be put down one way or another. Let the Chinese decide their way, let us worry about our own problems of speech and rationality.
Most fiction has the apocalyptic AI that takes over be of military origin, but I'm thinking it is going to be a Chinese AI that decides the best way to censor communications is to Kill All Humans.
This is the only correct opinion regarding censorship.
It exists only because some people are too stupid, pink and sensitive to hear 'unsavoury views'. Too goddamned bad. Not only do those people deserve to be offended, but I hope their foetid desires to be the sole Pant-suited Cuntpuff Arbiter of All Things, results in a vicious turnabout and finally explodes in their face, and a time comes when these meek bitches get raped and murdered in the streets like the micro-managing, effeminate filth they are.
Moderation is not the same as censorship.
Is that newspeak?
The left wing in various contexts throughout history can censor things, yes, but here in the US at the moment? The right wing is the one that is in any power. States, federal, media... the struggle is between far right and center. We're debating how much religious organizations are allowed to discriminate against gays and contribute to political campaigns, not whether or not they should be taxed and prevented from addressing politics. There's a ban on federal funds going to health organizations that mention the word "abortion."
The closest thing I can see to left-wing censorship is a handful of relatively powerless college students acting rashly. And in each of those cases, the conservative outrage has been many times greater in magnitude.
Liberals and centrists sitting on the fence and saying "Now now, both sides can be equally bad" when clearly they're not BEING anywhere near equally bad is what's causing us to run into disaster.
Are you sure?
Don't count on it.
And you thought AI was your friend ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's The Doctor, n00b
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I used wechat to communicate with prospective GF in China. messages were always delayed, and sometimes it felt like there were messages that got changed or injected in transmission...
Long story short - someone made damn sure we didn't work out...
The left wing in various contexts throughout history can censor things, yes, but here in the US at the moment? The right wing is the one that is in any power. ...
Riiiight.
It's those conservative right-wingers that use violence as a heckler's veto to chase "progressive" speakers off of college campuses.
Oh, wait, I was wrong.
It's self-styled "PROGRESSIVES" that go around actually engaging in political violence by "punching Nazis". (Well, they try to - the candy-ass metrosexual wimps usually get their asses kicked - just Google "moldylocks gets punched". Oh, wait, I did it for you! BWAA HAAA HAAAA!!!!)
It's "PROGRESSIVES" who go around shutting down speakers they don't agree with for the simple act of daring to say things they don't agree with.
It's "PROGRESSIVES" who glorify political violence - any pay homage to fanatic Islam - by severing the head of President Trump.
So we can conclude that, just like most hard-left idiocy, "progress" involves not just censorship but actual political violence.
And the Right condones blowing up governments that don't agree with them. See :Oklahoma City Bombing.
See? I can equate one person with the whole wing too!
In this application, steganography is probably better. Encrypted data is generally easy to spot and ban - China has already banned VPNs. However, with steganography, you can have what looks like an ordinary picture containing the data for the picture that you actually want to send. Since this looks just like an ordinary image unless they block the transmission of all images it should get through.
I'd be curious to find out what planet you live on.
The same one where the rest of us live on, along with this shining example of a Republican:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh
There have literally been over a thousand cataloged attacks from the right wing since the election.
Attacks from liberals on conservatives have been fewer, the chart one month goes up to ten!
The left wing violence list includes things like "throwing eggs" while the right wing violence list has "throwing acid."
I'm sure there are better sources for this information out there and I'm interested if anyone has any. I just did a quick google search on both.
At any rate, I can't fathom anyone who suggests violent college students are a serious threat. They're far less scary than Islamic terrorists, which are themselves factually less dangerous than armed toddlers. Don't be an asshole racist demagogue and go to the most wildly liberal campus in the united states and you'll have nothing to fear from college progressives.
Or do even! Not a goddamn hair on Milo or Coulters' heads were harmed! Fucking snowflakes...
Ah, yes, those antifa clowns... I think I killed one, once. Can't be sure. Didn't stop to check. He wasn't moving and didn't seem to be breathing anyway. Those collapsible swing batons are great.
I believe the discussion is about current events.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
To be fair, I see the original post. I browse at -1, of course.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There's surely something sexual in such pictures, but it's not porn and it's not genitals. The US has its own obsession on nipples, while hoisting on the world endless lascive postures, ass, sex scenes in movies, scant clothing, simulated murder and rape etc.
But it's "ok" because the media is following some set of decency rules (you may dress and behave like a prostitute but don't show a tenth of an inch of nipple, cunt or penis)
The US has its own weird mores and contradictions. Like, movies and shows may glamorize drug dealers and drug lords and cocaine lifestyle etc. but I don't think I've ever seen ones show people drinking beer on the sidewalks.
So, I suppose the US allows sex, murder, rape but not showing a nipple ; I don't know what the UK allows and disallows exactly but breasts likely are on the technically permitted list.
Don't mess with the new fu-king emperor of China.
10,000 people in Tienanmen Square send shock-waves in the incumbency, Mao took over the country with 400,000, today only a million will do nicely to uproot the fu-king rulers.
In other words, WhatsApp (supposedly offering encryption) is doing it wrong.
Blacks, Mexicans and Asians will soon become the majority in the US. WASPs will become an ever-shrinking minority until they will get wiped out.
You are delusional, the entire educational media IT establishment are left-wing radicals, literally Marx/Stalin disciples. Regardless of the "debate" it's a fact that it's illegal not to make a sodomy cake or call a dude in a dress "she" or not to hand over part of your paycheck for abortions
Islam is not a race, muslims cannot be victims of racism.