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Tencent's WeChat Hits 1 Billion Milestone as Lunar New Year Boosts Monthly Active Users (scmp.com)
WeChat hit the milestone of one billion monthly active users during the Lunar New Year in February, a "remarkable number" according to Tencent Holdings chief executive Pony Ma Huateng who disclosed the figure at a Two Sessions media briefing in Beijing on Monday. From a report: The user numbers are up from 980 million in the third quarter of 2017, as reported in Tencent's third quarter results. More than 688 million WeChat users sent or received digital versions of hongbao, the traditional Chinese red packet containing cash and given as a gift during the new year holiday season, pushing the monthly active users of WeChat hongbao to 800 million, Ma revealed on Saturday, as reported by Chinese tech media 36Kr.
Tencent IP addresses also just happen to be the single largest source of brute force SSH attempts on my VPS. Despite reporting this to the email addresses listed in their whois profile, of course, it gets ignored. So any claims of "we don't engage in cyber warfare" coming from China are simply bold-faced lies. You can imagine if Tencent is willing to do this, you know they're harvesting all of the information that they can from your phone and about you. Stop helping the Chinese machine make money.
The Chinese government has shutdown all the major foreign competitors to WeChat in China. Perhaps this means WeChat is the only that gave them a backdoor. Or perhaps it's giving them a chance to grow big enough that they can compete with the foreign giants, and then a backdoor can be added later. Why would I install their software on my phone or laptop? This is a country whose police are so tapped in to everything that find anybody within their borders in a matter of minutes using everybody's CCTV and facial recognition from photos everybody has to provide to the government (e.g. national ID or visas).
To be honest I did use this app a few years ago when I lived in China. But now I'm back in the West there's nobody who uses WeChat, so it went 88 pretty quickly.
Why are we hearing about this?
Because, whether you like it or not, WeChat, or something like it, is the future.
WeChat is like voice, text, Facebook, Instagram, Visa, MasterCard, Venmo, and PayPal, all rolled into one with plenty of additional features.
Many Chinese no longer bother to carry cash at all. Some street vendors no longer accept cash, since 99% of their customers pay with WeChat, and cash raises the risk of robbery.
WeChat has almost entirely replaced SMS text messages in China, and most voice calls go through WeChat as well. Group chats and group voice conversations are seamless, and trivial to set up ad-hoc.
Also, WeChat gives you one centralized app to build up Social Credit, which will come in handy if you ever get in trouble with the government.