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Chinese Schools Are Using 'Smart Uniforms' To Track Their Students' Locations (theverge.com)
"It's as dystopian as it sounds," opines The Verge:
Chinese schools are now tracking the exact location of their students using chip-equipped "smart uniforms" in order to encourage better attendance rates, according to a report from state-run newspaper The Global Times. Each uniform has two chips in the shoulders which are used to track when and where the students enter or exit the school, with an added dose of facial recognition software at the entrances to make sure that the right student is wearing the right outfit (so you can't just have your friend, say, wear an extra shirt while you go off and play hooky). Try to leave during school hours? An alarm will go off....
There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016.
There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016.
Now THAT is what you can truly call -
SpyWear
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No smart uniform needed for a Palo Alto government IT janitor and haiku poem writer to track your kids, film them and make Internet video with them.
You donâ(TM)t have to do that in Beijing - they take pictures of their clothes for you! Oh no! You must mean something else
mandatory tracking implants.
No implant? No food, no travel.
If/when you're detected, you'll probably be detained at a "police" station until you're moved to a nice relocation site under a death sentence.
"Monitoring and surveillance is normal, trust your superiors citizen they will protect you."
Dog collars are next. It's only logical. A mere 'alarm' is no fun. Ain't authoritarianism sexy? Bunch of dirty old men running the government
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There's always one kid in class who reads 1984 and goes "That sounds cool."
I guess they all went to China and became politicians.
... the way the Chinese are taking the concept of an orwellian state further to unseen depths on a biweekly basis, is it not?
Folks we're going to be in some super-bizarre global Cyberpunk society in 2 decades from now if this catches on globally and it ain't going to be half as cool as in a roleplaying game, a Stevenson/Gibson novel or some bladerunner movie sequel - it will just plain suck, big time. I don't want this and neither do you. Talk to you folks about this, we are the opinion leaders when it comes to IT and we need to wake up as many as possible before it's too late.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Apparently, you've never smelled the Santa Clara County whale otherwise you wouldn't complain.
---oh, shit.
I can't help but think that China is creating a guaranteed market for applied AI with their surveillance state the same way the U.S. created a guaranteed market for all sorts of supporting technologies during the cold war.
The result of this will be lots of innovation not just in the AI itself, but in the hardware, and theoretical space as well.
Plus China's AI will be working against people who don't want their Social Credit (or whatever) diminished. In the U.S., AI will be working to figure out when you are most receptive to an ad for Tide Pods. So their incentives are greater and their problems will be more demanding.
I'm not sure how liberal Western democracies (or ordinary Chinese citizens) can win.
Chinese schools embed electronic tracking bracelets in uniforms.
Western companies are just as eager to build these things, and sell them for 'safety' or 'self improvement'.
Social Cooling is becoming a real possibility.
I work at a perfectly ordinary school in the UK. We issue all students with chips - in the form of identity cards. These cards contain a photo of the student and a simple RFID chip. They serve as passes to open doors, as identifiers for paying for lunch, as their library card, and for identifying themselves to the printer-copiers. They are also supposed to be an essential part of our safeguarding procedures, because without these cards any teenager could wander in and pose as one of our students - though in practice this doesn't work so well, because students are constantly losing, forgetting or defacing their cards. The girls in particular often hold the view that their photo is the ugliest thing ever taken, and will scratch it off of their badge rather than allow anyone to glimpse their shameful image. Students also routinely body-slam the doors to force the magnetic locks open, or loiter outside waiting for someone else to come through, because they left their badge at home or lost it. Issuing RDIF badges is a very common practice - schools have been doing it for years.
So some schools in China put the ID chips into the uniform. It's the obvious next step: An identifier that, hopefully, the horrible creatures won't lose or destroy within a week.
The only thing we don't use the cards for is attendance. Too easy to defraud - if we did that then any student could bunk off for the day and just lend their badge to a friend to beep them in. I suppose facial or fingerprint recognition could fix that, if you can get it working reliably.
intestinator.
Their society has rules and if a citizen abides by the rules they progress. If you do not you will be crushed. If you wish to change the rules, then you work within the system to make it happen. In short, state governance operates much like how a company works. Witness the pace of change in China; it can be far more efficient than a multi-party Western democracy.
Only time will tell if it is a better than a Western democracy. However, it's hard to imagine at the moment that any Westerners, Europeans with their Muslim terrorists and Americans with their mass shootings and the like, are really in any position to lecture the Chinese on dystopian futures.
Chinese people are all dirty cheaters anyway so what's the difference if they attend school or not?
Famously, Amazon does the same to their warehouse employees. I've also read several articles where creepily detailed RFID tracking has been used on secondary school pupils in the US. Hell, China probably subcontracted or copied the school systems in the US.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Now just make them willing move away... brain drain. :)
[($)]
They out-capitalisted the USA a long time ago. Capitalism does not imply freedom, or lack of monopolistic power, you know?
No freedom and a single all-encompassing power is actually its natural.conclusion!
Might be Siemens too, you never know. Or a UK firm.
Most likely, the Chinese just copied.it, like with everything they make.
Imagine if Stalin had this! Ohh wait- we have Trump as president even if he's not quite as powerful he'd probably do the same shit and certainly tries to. Not that Hillary would have been any better. I was going to say government schools are literally prisons, but really they are more like concentration camps because while forced and "a building in which people are legally held" against there will it doesn't quite fit the "as a punishment for a crime they have committed or while awaiting trial". However a concentration camp is "a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area". Fits government schools perfectly. Children are a persecuted minority being deliberately imprisoned. We should be abolishing government schools and eliminating laws prohibiting employment of children. We should also eliminate every other government program that purports to "protect" us. Left to my own device I can defend my family just fine.
This story is disgusting and why I'm opposed to drivers licenses, license plates, social security numbers, taxation, and all the other shit they force upon moral people. We're not suppose to be slaves and I won't be registering my child nor sending them to a government indoctrination program. Particularly not one that tracks them and before you think I'm nuts I moved out of a hellish society like that which is described here. I moved from New Jersey to New Hampshire. When I was in school we had ID cards and they made us wear them. They tried to force drug testing on us and so on. Fuck off. You don't own me. I'm talking to you people who voted for the people implementing this shit. I don't care if you are a democrat or a republican or a green because I darn well know you *ALL* vote in favor of it and the handful of people who aren't in favor of it are migrating to NH cause it's the only chance and place where like-minded freedom respecting people are gather and working to avoid this dystopian future that is already here. Most of the people I know have pulled there kids from government schools if they ever entered them into them in the first place (mostly before they moved to NH) and some haven't even registered there kids with the government (it's an interesting yet legal exercise in healthy defiance to refuse to do so when your utilizing a hospital's services to give birth). I also know people who don't have drivers licenses. Unfortunately many of us do have drivers licenses and licenses plates even if some of us have avoided total compliance via legal trickery of a kind. As an example toll roads in MA which track users via license plates are dependent on other states to cooperate with providing addressing information. This comes through Easy Pass and so states that don't have tolls like Vermont don't cooperate and therefore MA can't bill said Vermont registered vehicles for unpaid tolls which MA never provided an opportunity for users to pay (ie because they took down the toll booths and are attempting to force users via tracking systems to pay using other methods of payment like credit cards or sending bills to registered owners via the license plate which can then be paid via check).
Regarding red light cameras I frequently say that if you're automatically caught for any infraction then you are not truly free. I'd say the same here except that in China that's already a given.
... its like having your own specialized ordering system just one hack away
This was always going to happen.
And will continue until one day it explodes.
Or the US, as they do just as much pollution, poisons and enviromental destruction with much less people.... So if you're gonna nuke China, also nuke the US..