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Who are you, and why are you seeming to post these sources multiple times? This is pure conspiracy theory through "news" sources that have highly dubious credentials. HN shouldn't be fueling this kind of unsubstantiated speculation.


Epoch times is a newspaper created by the Falun Gong cult FYI.


They're still okay for anything not related to Falun Gong, I think.



My god, what are we spreading here? This is pure conspiracy theory through "news" sources that have highly dubious credentials.

HN shouldn't be fueling this kind of unsubstantiated speculation.


> My god, what are we spreading here?

Putting aside whether or not the claims are true, why are you reacting as if this is particularly damaging or shocking? It's factual that Beijing does seek to censor and control information everywhere in China, and it's factual that they're currently attacking CUHK.


The only purpose of this "story" is just like the goals of Russian-fueled (or whoever) fake planted news -- to confuse and prevent people from having a clear understanding of what's going on.

You advocate for allowing unsubstantiated news to be spread just because it fits into your view of what China admittedly has done in the past?

Couldn't this story have been spread by the protestors to get people on their side with fake motivations?


> You advocate for allowing unsubstantiated news to be spread just because it fits into your view of what China admittedly has done in the past?

I didn't say that. My comment was about your reaction.

> your view of what China admittedly has done in the past?

My view? The past?

> Couldn't this story have been spread by the protestors to get people on their side with fake motivations?

That very well could be. And if so they should keep that up. A Beijing supporter being upset about fake news and propaganda is giving me the giggles.


I'm no Beijing supporter. I would hope that anyone, regardless of what they think about any country or place, respects that news should contain the truth and not open themselves up to manipulation regardless of which side it favors.


In that case you could have left out the "My god, what are we spreading here?" which seems overly dramatic to me.

You could also have substantiated "This is pure conspiracy theory through "news" sources that have highly dubious credentials." by expanding on what makes those news sources so dubious they deserve scare quotes, since not everyone will be familiar with them.

Attributing the actions of one user to the whole community as in "HN shouldn't be fueling this kind of unsubstantiated speculation." isn't great either.


Most US outlets are not reporting on this part of the story of the siege of CUHK university.

If the police seize control of the university, they can monitor / filter all traffic. The whole city can go dark.


So please add a link or 2 that does talk about the story? The wikipedia link just describes the infrastructure.



Who are you, and why are you seeming to post these sources multiple times? This is pure conspiracy theory through "news" sources that have highly dubious credentials. HN shouldn't be fueling this kind of unsubstantiated speculation.


"If the police seize control of the university, they can monitor / filter all traffic. The whole city can go dark."

I don't think that is true at all - at least not for the last 15 years.

Almost everyone co-located in HK is in a totally different physical location than the University (such as iAdvantage or HKCOLO, near LOHAS Park) and have independent connections outbound to the world.

We, for instance, are physically located inside HKCOLO and have a direct connection to he.net in Fremont, CA. If you traceroute rsync.net in Hong Kong, you typically don't leave he.net.

I'm not sure how seizure (or even shutdown) of the University would affect infrastructure at iAdvantage or HKCOLO or Dyxian, etc.


The posting of this link with this title does not seem to adhere to HN guidelines, even though I see your intentions. I think it will soon be removed/moderated, but meanwhile, I did want to pose a technical question.

I feel that the monitoring of traffic is unlikely. To clarify, this is not about taking a pro-China side, but more on technical aspect. Most modern web traffic happens in some form of encryption (most commonly https/ssl) and some are end-to-end encrypted (various messenger apps). Filtering is certainly possible/likely (just like the great firewall), but monitoring seems difficult (in the case of https traffic) or impossible (in the case of end-to-end encryption... hopefully impossible at least?). There'd have to be hardware-level/low-level trojans planted in individual devices to make that possible. Which isn't to say it's unlikely (from what we've heard in the past few years), but only that it's unlikely to happen with just a hostage of HKIX.


China almost certainly has the ability to perform aggressive SSL interception given their investment in the great firewall. Almost all apps will either fall victim to it, or if they correctly use pinning, simply not load (and cause their users to swap to other apps).


The unique value proposition of bots is that they're embedded inside groups of people, as naturally as group chat. I think we'll be seeing more of this trend in the coming year.


Not that AliExpress is much better with counterfeit, but it is the "fresh" contender to the West. There might be a movement away from Amazon's core business as AliExpress / Ali* expand here.


I doubt it... most of the counterfeit junk on Amazon is just Ali products and sellers leaking over.


Yeah, but at higher prices. You might as well just buy straight from the source on Ali and skip Amazon altogether.


That is not a great solution for consumers. People don't want cheaper counterfeits - they want the real thing. Ali doesn't do this better than Amazon.


I think you're missing the point. The point is you're going to get crappy counterfeits on Amazon, so it's better to just buy them on Ali where you'll get them cheaper.

If you want the real thing, don't buy on Amazon.


In fact, Ali does let you choose the seller of the item, and lets you contact him as much as you want before the transaction. So, no, Ali does this better than Amazon.


Well yeah... if I wanted to buy cheap counterfeits; most of the time I don't.


Then Amazon probably isn't a good place for you to shop.


Protocols are very important (R.I.P. XMPP). The article argues for bots to be the protocols that stitch the services back together, but we still need a standard for these bots to operate within...


The example about Uber as truly "getting" the power of cross-platform distributed bots in the US is spot on.


Here's a rebuttal to the original piece, The Tyranny of Tyranny: https://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine


> The omnipresent problem which Joreen confronts, that of elites, does not find solution in the formation of structures.

"Structure" covers a wide spectrum though, from formal and rigid, to unwritten or very simple and mutual rules. I think despotic and alienating structures being bad doesn't make structure as such any more bad than, say, a bad book would make books in general bad.

I personally like the concept "order within liberty" a lot:

> You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!

by Gustav Landauer, who also said/wrote:

> One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another.

And I think the article you linked kind of agrees with that, even:

> While, ultimately, a massive force of women (and some men) will be necessary to smash the power of the state, a mass movement itself does not a revolution make. If we hope to create a society free of mate supremacy, when we overthrow capitalism and build international socialism, we had better start working on it right away, because some of our very best anti-capitalist friends are going to give us the hardest time. We must be developing a visible women's culture, within which women can define and express themselves apart from patriarchal standards, and which will meet the needs of women where patriarchy has failed.

Whether you call it culture or structure or organization, everybody seems in agreement that just wandering off and doing your own thing all the time will not yield great results, though one might argue about details. Is that impression wrong?


I read the first part of that, and skimmed the rest. It does not seem particularly convincing.


I'm somewhat worried about this upcoming wave of bots replacing jobs. There seem to be 2 paths forward:

1. Star Trek outcome: People will have time to pursue interests outside of their job.

2. Mad Max outcome: Money and resources are hoarded by the people who own the bot industry, everyone else suffers.

3. ??


3. Kafka outcome: we all get bureaucratic meaningless jobs digging holes for others to fill.


The inability to monitor their whole network for scam advertising might cripple facebook's dominance as their main revenue source becomes less trusting but the scale of their operations relies on that consistent revenue:

More on the ad scams: http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/say-no-to-the-dress


I doubt if, if only because the entire web and even offline world is equally filled with ad scams too. Go look at anything advertised via taboola our outbrain. :-/


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