No joke.
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Even Huxley and Orwell couldn’t imagine this kind of mass surveillance.
It’s China, so we cannot do anything but praying that we won’t have the same in the near or distant future (We have similar but not as serious. It’s called Visa, MasterCard and American Express and KYC nd AML and of course FB and G).
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Wow. I had no idea it had got to that point. I’ve seen some articles about the face recognition software but this is something entirely different.
@_ilap Your right about the services and software, especially FB.
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Yah I’ve been considering going with an Ubuntu phone OS for a while…I’m probably going to try it out soon:
FB was just reported to have deleted a dozen or so political pages on their platform…
Yes I know, they’re a “private” company and saying my political opinions on Facebook is the equivalent of yelling them in your bedroom while you’re trying to fall asleep.
FYI, Gab does not do this.
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I followed Ubuntu Touch, among a lot of other technologies, and I predicted their failure (I was almost certain >90%). There were certain signs that can predict the future outcome. It reminds me the Mark S. statement. He predicted some insane number of the Ubuntu penetration by 2017 back sometime in 2012 (cannot recall exactly when and what, really). How come?
There was not any good SDKs, GUI development system, the old chunky Gnome (from late 1990), they used C/C++, the Unity (wet dream of Mark S.) etc.
I thought that elementary OS could do some difference, as they are focused on the most important thing the UX and Design. But, they really struggled in Engineering part of the development. They did not use, would say have no clue, any of the design principles/patterns (SOLID, IoC etc, etc) etc, but a bunch of soulful/eager amateur, who made a nice looking OS.
But, that’s not enough to build a reliable OS. So, back in 2012, I wrote some solid Linux framework in Vala for eOS, (despite I am not a Developer) which had some very good/novel features (even Google use heavily these design principles these days) such as Dependency injection (IoC), MvvM/MVP, 2D animation framework (property animation, timeline, keyframe), Data- bindings and validations etc., to get the Design and Engineering part of the development closer to each other and which can drastically save time (and other thing,s unit testing, etc.) in development.
But, decided to not push that framework as those principles are not easily can be digested (it needs deep CS) by some eager volunteers.
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there’s also this promising phone… available for pre-order. https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Though it’s unlikely it will reach Android’s popularity, I hope they get enough momentum to be able to sustain the business and continue to sell the product.
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It reminds me to the good old days, OpenMoko.org, ooh and yes LG Prada the first real smartphone before iPhone, yep half year before.
I hated and still hate Apple (Monster) Inc. (despite I switched from Linux/OSF to Apple).
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Its not just facial-recognition software the idea with this is to create a full on point system where everything from how much time you spend at home, your opinions, who you spend time with (friends), what information consume on the internet, what games you play, what you buy and say will be measured and given points accordingly. These points will have an affect for you to get loans, get a job, welfare and even use things like public transport or be able to fly out of the country.
This will eventually result in complete control without accountability, there will be no possibility of revolution in such a country since it can never be formed or take root as it can be stopped in its immediate tracks. There will be no accountability for government and they will be able to get away with literally anything.
This is collectivism, you as an individual do not matter.
Your worth/reward in society will not be determined by your actions but who you know and how much sucking up to the powers that be you are willing to do
This is what liberals in all western countries are marching us toward when fighting things like free-speech and free markets which is already going on all over Europe where people are being fined and jailed for speech - coming to a town near you…
US is one of the last battalions there is, and unfortunately its going on here too, new inventions like “hate speech” whatever that is, many people agree that this should be criminalized… while a big battlefront also being censorship from private companies, which was never foreseen by our founding fathers…
Inciting violence or any criminal/illegal activity is already illegal and should be. But anything else, should constitute free speech - and it is more important than ever that people stand up for that regards to family, friends and anyone you come across.
Educate people, every right you give away will eventually be used against no matter how good your intentions are with throwing them away - History is clear on the consequences of this, again and again. It took thousands of years to establish the unique western societies we have - they were not the norm, they were a giant exception in history - and we are about to throw all of that away.
Freedom can be scary, and I understand why people always look to government to solve their problems, but it is not the answer… Regardless of your intentions, You will be greatly disappointed by the result. Large government is a lot scarier than freedom.
The best entity to take care of You, is You.
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Ha! with that track record I hope you are bullish on Cardano!
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Thanks for that link I may pre-order one.
I still have a Nokia 808 the last of the Symbian phones BTW.
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I would have to agree.
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The point system really is terrifying. One little example is the cameras that take pictures of jay walkers, deduct points and publicly shame people. The system scares everyone into submission and promotes informing on one another. It’s worse than the depictions in 1984.
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It’s good that this experiment is happening in a country that I do not live in. It was bound to be tried somewhere. What this will do hopefully is show what a bad idea this is so that other nations can explicitly exclude this kind of setup in their constitutions.
Yeah Switzerland is good, I like Switzerland. Though they did compromise themselves when they caved to the US regarding banking privacy.
I thought you could still open anonymous bank accounts in Switzerland? Guess I must’ve missed the announcement that they caved