Slashdot Mirror
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
This is what the American left has in store for us. All content must be deemed safe and inoffensive before transmission.
Of course, they are the arbiters of what is safe.
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?
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!
What the hell was Obama's UN AMBASSADOR doing violating the US Constitution and using the NSA to spy on US citizens?
But hey, let's bust on China.
Or Russia. Think of some way to blame all this on Russia.
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
As I will now demonstrate:
I voted for Donald Trump and I am pleased with his job as President.
Now watch what happens.
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.
Bunch of jaundiced, bucktooth chinks pouring over your personal business.
Fuck China. Sneaky mongoloid pieces of shit.
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.
In the later part of the 20th Century, Brit adults gradually gained access to tame vanilla hardcore pornography for the first time. It is now conveniently forgotten, but the British parliament banned British adults from every form of explicit sexual material while they had the power to do so. Every form- no matter how vanilla- every single form. And the BBC and every other major organistaion in Britain backed this total sexual censorship "for the children". The police backed it. The NSPCC backed it. All major church organistaions backed it. Total sexual censorship of British adults.
Then came European satellite that Britain tried and failed to block because of non-perverted European attitudes to sex and trade. And then came the internet, of course, and the British Deep State howled in impotence- and swore to one day return Britain to total censorship.
While sick neo-liberal slashdot demonises China and Russia over Internet censorship, the real deal is coming next year in Britain. The NSPCC (a faux child 'protection' charity that has never exposed a single government run child facility over abuse, but has taken children from innocent parents and subject those kids to horrific abuse in the name of 'examinations') is partnering with the BBFC (the film censorship board that banned all explicit sexual material when it was still technically possible to do so) to form the new Internet Censorship body that will decide which sites are permitted on britain's new 'whitelist'.
Only web sites on the whitelist will be accessible in the UK from next Spring. And the UK has no 'freedom of speech' laws so any site with any content not liked by 'the great and the good' in the UK will be banned.
Yes, VPN will bypass the censorship. An no- the British government doesn't care about the motivated minority who'll use VPNs. When all explicit porn was illegal in the UK, a motivated person could easily bypass the ban. But motivated people are ALWAYS motivated- a constatnt in any society that no sane advanced police state targets. The Deep State in the UK is focused on the great unwashed majority- the newspaper readers- the BBC watchers- the 'academy school' parents. This mass of idiots causes the minority to keep its head down- so minimising the influence of independent thinkers. And if the minority isn't influential, the British Deep State doesn't care about them.
Access to sexual content will collapse to a handful of carefully regulated vanilla commercial outlets run by literal British gangsters with significant political influence in London. One of these gangsters owns a major UK paper and TV station. And these gangsters have a commercial reason to see their 'competition' shut down- so they are already co-ordinating with the NSPCC and BBFC.
Most explicit porn (of a vanilla nature) is illegal on UK broadcast TV channels- so the permitted internet sites will be forced to go 1980s soft-core within a few years by law. And then the British deep state will have rolled back control of adult human sexuality for most people back to where it was nearly 50 years ago.
It gets worse. The British 'example' (and the software/hardware systems that implement the censorship) will be exported to every nation that is not West Europe, Japan or the USA. It's the old Empire trick of "if the British people think it's right it must be really good". The free uncensored internet for ordinary peeps outside of the USA will die.
PS for those dribblers saying it won't happen- it already has once before in the UK. Go research the video tape revolution, and the total censorship of pre-recorded tapes introduced once again by a partnership between the NSPCC and BBFC when Thatcher intoduced complete 'whitelist' laws for videos in Britain.
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.
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.
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.
Are you sure?
Don't count on it.
And you thought AI was your friend ...
-- 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...
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.
But what about Russia? I thought we hated Russia and loved china and muslims? My head hurts. Can't keep up.
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.