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.

Comments

Aggressive post processing

[magarity]

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.

Re:Aggressive post processing

[93 Escort Wagon]

Take it a step further, and use steganography.

OMG...

[__aaclcg7560]

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

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

...guess it won't be long before this comes to the UK.

For the children, don't you know?

steganography?

[roc97007]

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...

Re:steganography?

[roc97007]

Well, ok, your questions sound rhetorical, so this will probably be unwelcome, but I think the difference is intent.

In the US it's done for a variety of reasons -- intellectual property, porn, unlawful content, politically incorrect (ahem-facebook), and in China it's specifically targeted at political dissidents. Here we can say Apple (or Microsoft if that makes you more comfortable) is being a dick, I'll use some other service. Over there it's more problematic, because (a) it's the government doing it (yeah, I know, bear with me) *and* (b) it's specifically targeted at anti-government speech. Which we would call, over here, free speech.

So over here someone can post a photo holding the bloody decapitated head of the president... no wait, that's a bad example... no, on further thought, it's a valid example. She was able to post the image without having it deleted by the government. Other bad things happened, but government deletion in transit wasn't one of them.

So, I'd argue, not hypocritical at all. Freedom and privacy are complex issues, and I don't think there's anyone within the sound of my voice that believes we in the US have complete freedom. Whether we should or not would be a lively discussion. But I think we can agree that people in china have much less freedom.

Re:Pay-Walled Source?

[XXongo]

Because the alternative source is not the primary source. It is a mirror of the primary source.

(Also, often the mirrors are on less-robust servers, so it's nice to have the primary source available for when the mirror inexplicably gets slashdotted.)

Re:The UK is going much further to censor the net

[Topwiz]

Yet they allow topless pictures of large breasted women in regular newspapers.

Re:Liberals

[interkin3tic]

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.

Actually Steganography Better

[Roger W Moore]

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.