Once you get a bit deeper, you realize the whole "we are mostly Han Chinese" (Google says 91%!) is a total farce. They is just too much genetic and cultural diversity across 1+ billion people to call them a single ethnicity. Conservatively, I would say it is more like 250+ ethnolinguistic groups within the Han Chinese. Indonesia is about 1000+, but it is an island nation, so there will naturally be much more ethnolinguistic groups.
Gordon Chang has been making this prediction for almost a quarter century. Will it happen before or after the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world??
My experience in China was that the police were a bit on the bureaucratic side but otherwise far less obtrusive than in the US.
They divide their police forces into civil police and armed police. The civil police tend to be bored looking middle aged guys lounging around in guard booths at museums. They don't have weapons. The only armed police I saw stood at attention at the airport except when they had a changing of the guard ceremony.
As near as I can tell, China only allows immigration if they think that will benefit China. They've been pushing hard on academic scholarships and, in recent years, they've managed to shift net visits from the US to China.
They also seem to be pushing really hard on increasing the number of visiting African scholars. That's likely straight out of the US playbook; they see China as a rising power and want to make sure that their emerging leaders were educated in China and have ties to China.
Isn't it the case that Chinese police don't need to be as visible because everyone fears what they can do, and doesn't commit crimes? A bit like how Iran has to send in military force to kill 50k protestors, but the UK can just spread a few messages that people will be arrested, and then they don't protest.
As near as I can tell, there are essentially 2 kinds of laws; laws that people agree with and laws that they don't.
For the second type, governments often have trouble enforcing them consistently so they often try to compensate by making the punishments harsher (eg mandatory minimum sentencing). As near as I can tell, that tends to fail miserably.
Our government here has been shooting people in the streets and that hasn't stopped protesters from pouring out.
When you see a bunch of people peacefully following laws the most likely explanation is that they just think those laws are reasonable.
I think the issue there is just that people in the UK have less immediate cause to protest than people living under the Iranian regime. The idea that British people are more afraid of their police than Iranians seems a bit wacky.
A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban.
They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
Well, yes, China doesn't have open media for its citizens. Chinese people will on average be less well informed about China, even accounting for the extent of Americans who choose trashy propaganda channels.
(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
Given that they're regularly labeled as "pro democracy protests", I'd venture to say that most people outside the Great Firewall don't know much about it either.
Ni juede zhongguoren bu zhidao tiananmen square 1989 de shihou zuole shenme?
That's HSK2 being generous, if you had to plug it into Google Translate, how can you say you know more than the people who speak the language and live there?
western arrogance is truly astounding. somehow people who consume 0 chinese media and cant speak a lick of the language somehow are intricately aware of not only chinese media, but chinese society.
but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN darling naomi wu.
You could even say that many foreigners are better informed about the US than US citizens are about the US, but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of the current administration so that's already over one in three who don't understand the basic functioning of government or the economy.
I think foreigners tend to be better informed than the locals wherever you go.
As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people.
In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town.
edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.
Yeah, it took me a moment to clue in, but I think maybe "expat" is the more common term there.
In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.
If they honestly informed customers about the tradeoff between security and convenience they'd certainly have far fewer customers. Instead they lead people to believe that they can get that convenience for free.
> tradeoff between security and convenience they'd certainly have far fewer customers
What? Most people, thinking through the tradeoff, would 100% not choose to be in charge of safeguarding their own key, because they're more worried about losing everything on their PC, than they are about going to jail. Because most people aren't planning on doing crime. Yes, I know people can be wrongly accused and stuff, but overall most people aren't thinking of that as their main worry.
If you tell people, "I'll take care of safeguarding your key for you," it sounds like you're just doing them a favor.
It would be more honest to say, "I can hold on to a copy of your key and automatically unlock your data when we think you need it opened," but that would make it too obvious that they might do so without your permission.
They're not doing them a favor. They're providing them a service.
Trust is a fundamental aspect of how the world works. It's a feature, not a bug.
Consider that e.g. your car mechanic, or domestic service (if you employ it), or housekeeping in hotel you stay, all have unsupervised access to some or all of your critical information and hardware. Yet, these people are not seen as threat actors by most people, because we trust them to not abuse that access, and we know there are factors at play to ensure that trust.
In this context, I see Microsoft as belonging to the cohort above for most people. Both MS and your house cleaner will turn over your things to police should they come knocking, but otherwise you can trust them to not snoop through your stuff with malicious intent. And if you don't trust them enough - don't buy their services.
Their main business offerings are privacy and security. The fact that they were able to pull customers away from Google shows that switching costs are low.
Your reputation is your moat. If you ruin it by acting like Google, you're filling your own moat.
Terrorist attacks and perverts are every government's excuse to crack down on freedom. Refusing to comply with an authoritarian government like India's is a plus in my book.
Of course, if you or your family are not the victim of a terror attack, you may not care if others are impacted by it.
After 9/11, USA did the biggest crackdown on terror, including domestic security overhaul such as stringent security checks in airports, more pervasive surveillance, etc.
And this was for fraud investigation, not even a terror investigation case.
Every nation responds to repeated terror attacks in a similar way. Increased surveillance, increased scrutiny, increased vigilance, retaliatory strikes.
What do you expect? Let terror attacks happen, try not to prevent them, try not to retaliate at terrorist networks and nests?
You live in a cosy idealistic world, if you think that terrorism can be handled by ignoring it or its mechanisms of communication.
Please stop defending terror supporter companies, with such illogical statements.
You have no clue what idealism means.
An ideal world is one where no terror attacks happen.
Proton has been actively campaigning against police and government in a terror prone region. Proton is openly encouraging terrorists to evade scrutiny.
If you support terrorism under any pretext, then we are done here.
you're using a false dichotomy to hold the conversation hostage. it's possible to want to stop terrorism without handing a blank check to an authoritarian state.
I will respond to a quote with another famous quote:
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
The only ways to prevent terror attacks is by either going deep undercover into terror organisations, or by doing surveillance and investigation on suspected terror links.
What case discussed above? You have not discussed any case here.
And the links I shared in my original comments show a dangerous situation, not a "case".
Proton has been actively campaigning against police and government in a terror prone region. Proton is openly encouraging terrorists to evade scrutiny.
Proton (or any legitimate company, for that matter) has no business doing subversive activities in terror sensitive areas like J&K. If they do, then they need to face the repercussions.
If anything this enhances Proton's reputation. If so called "terrorists and perverts" trust it to the point they rely on it for their own security, then it's worth serious consideration. Nobody wants to use cryptography that some indian government can subvert.
Next time there is a mass shooting or terrorist bomb blast in your neighborhood, I hope you can look at a poster of Proton VPN on your bedroom wall, and feel safe.
And then when you find out the police are going door to door to investigate the terror attack, you should start distributing printouts of an ad of Proton VPN urging locals on how to evade police/government scrutiny via Proton VPN.
See how that works out for you. You will be arrested as a terror sympathiser.
No surprises why.
It's because terrorists use VPNs to evade scrutiny, and the last thing that any respectable company or civilian should be doing is to openly associate themselves with terrorism, which is what Proton has done.
Proton (or any legitimate company, for that matter) has no business doing subversive activities in terror sensitive areas like J&K. If they do, then they need to face the repercussions.
Total bullshit. If people start shooting and bombing, then you pick up your weapons and you kill them.
You don't get to mass "scrutinize" random citizens by eavesdropping on their private communications just because terrorists might be hiding among them. If you do this, you are the terrorist and anyone who resists you has the moral high ground. Cryptography and anonymization technology are merely one of many forms of self-defense against your tyranny.
> because it was found that terrorists and perverts were using it for terror communications and digital sexual abuse.
Lol, nondescript "terrorists and perverts" are the laughingstock of Western politics. Eyes roll whenever someone justifies drastic action on vague terrorism/perversion accusations: https://youtu.be/ud9zBKJJQe4
My bigger concern is Modi's international reputation for exacerbating crime statistics to manufacture consent for authoritarian policy. We've seen our fair share of that here in America and it's not a positive influence on national politics. So much so that we can't trust our own email providers to be secure.
People living in glass houses should not throw stones on others.
I am going to use your own words to show you the mirror now..
Your America and its democratically-voted (even if we can call gerrymandering such) orange dictator have become the "laughingstock of Western politics".
The "war on terror" excuse to do wars for oil, was coined by "Western politic(ian)s", "exacerbating" to "manufacture consent for authoritarian policy".
Recent example: Venezuela. It is pure greed and evil for a rich nation to seize a struggling country for its oil (struggling because of sanctions to prevent it from selling its oil legally). "Eyes roll whenever someone justifies drastic action on foreign nations based on vague pretexts/accusations".
Older example: Did the USA/NATO ever find those "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq? Oh wait, the WMDs were there, because they brought them there.. to wage that war.. war not on terror... but war for oil. They didn't find any WMDs, but they certainly quickly found those rich oilfields, and then systematically looted them.. and finally set them on fire, when retreating.. from the war they started.. knowing that without that precious oil, the natives of that desert land will struggle to limp back to normalcy, especially with a Western puppet as a "democratic leader" for "positive influence on national politics".
Such tactics are not "a positive influence" on the world, because the world hates bullies. And thieves.
They are defending terrorism, because they are blindly defending Proton, which is openly supporting terrorism in India.
Proton has been caught red-handed openly supporting subversive activities in a known terrorism hotspot.
After the Pehelgam terror attack (one of the deadliest terror attacks in the world, in recent memory - 26 tourists were gunned down in a tourist spot by jihadi terrorists) in Jammu & Kashmir, the police and anti-terror military task force did a sweep to find the terrorists. VPN and internet services were temporarily disabled in the incident area to prevent the terrorists from communicating with their handlers in Pakistan.
This was Proton's tweet after this terror attack tragedy: "In Jammu and Kashmir, police have been conducting random stops and house-to-house checks inspecting mobile phones to enforce a local ban on VPNs. A reminder that Proton VPN's mobile app has a "Discreet icon" setting to help disguise it."
Someone sent hoax bomb threats to 13 private schools in India using Proton Mail. The local government sought the ban of Proton Mail due to (again) Proton not complying with the security investigation.
The only reason Proton's services have not been completely banned in India yet, is because the Swiss authorities intervene on its behalf to prevent the ban.
After India's new cyber security laws went into effect, it was only Proton which pulled its servers from India, rather than comply with Indian government for such serious investigations.
Please note there are other Email and VPN providers operating in India, and they do the needful in complying with lawful investigations for safety of civilians and minors.
The best measure I can think of is per capita prison population. It's not great because it doesn't directly address fairness but it's likely related.
Two countries, with roughly the same "fairness" of courts, should, ceteris paribus, have roughly the same per-capita prison population. By that measure, China would be slightly on the fairer end 92nd lowest out of 224.
I don't remember if HK does the same thing but China divides their police into two groups. The more common type are basically public safety officers. They are unarmed but I saw a few places where the had plastic riot shields and catch poles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_catcher#/media/File:Mancat... The armed police are only called out as needed.
The airport had a two of military guys standing at attention with rifles. They looked like a couple of wax figures until I saw them do a formal changing of the guard.
I don't know if anyone has assembled data on actual court records. How often are police charges prosecuted? How often do they go to trial? What percentage end up getting convictions? What are the average sentences?
It would also be good to decide what we're comparing it to. A rich white person in the US can expect a very different level of fairness than a poor black person. Is a random Chinese person's experience more like the rich white persons' or the poor black person's?
I'm the customer, not the product.
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