Comment by tomp 10 months ago
What are you gonna buy? Chinese tech? Iranian tech? Russian tech?
Who do you want to be able to spy on you and compromise your hardware?
Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
> Who do you want to be able to spy on you
I buy chinese IP cameras. China cannot block my bank account / employment / communications.
Agreed.
All this fearmongering about telegram and tiktok is weird.
China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting.
So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to privacy afforded to me in the constitution, and US companies can be forced to comply with the government in secret- much in the same way we consider that China does it to even part-owned China based companies.
The concern over tiktok is not that Xi’s autocratic regime is surveilling you, but manipulating the algorithms in its large social media market share to foment anti-American (& anti-Israeli) sentiment.
Russia seems totally capable of doing that just by paying people and using bots.
My concern with tiktok is that it rots your brain like television, but far more effectively because it's rapid fire content constantly tuned to the individual user to keep them hooked on it. It's an instant gratification machine, effectively a drug, that fries people's attention spans. It has people spending hours a day consuming vapid short-form nonsense, and alters their psyche to make them less effective in other endeavors even when they aren't distracted by the app (particularly school, since it hits children particularly hard.)
The medium is the message.
Isreal is doing just fine, drumming up dissent, based on it's behavior alone.
I'm not sure why influence should be illegal. What about books and movies? Or even schools and universities? American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXm-NYyWEAA1jNs?format=jpg&name=...
If you believe in freedom of speech, you should also accept that people, including foreign people, may try to influence you. China doesn't believe in freedom of speech so they censor foreign sources of influence. Does America really want to go down that path?
> Especially as, being a non-US citizen I have no right to privacy afforded to me in the constitution
Say what? Ok, there is no explicit "right to privacy" anywhere in the US Constitution, but that applies equally to citizens and non-citizens. Whatever is in the Constitution applies to everyone regardless of citizenship, with only a few exceptions. And those exceptions don't have much to do with anything you might refer to as privacy. (They're about whether state governments can mess with you. And were I a non-citizen, it's the states that I would be worried about, given that many of them are actively trying to make things harder for non-citizens.)
Unreasonable search and seizure, in particular, applies to everyone. The courts have repeatedly affirmed this.
Unless you're talking about non-citizens outside US borders, or crossing them? That's much murkier.
The constitution does not exclusively apply to US citizens is the good news.
The bad news is that there is no explicit and broad right to privacy in the constitution. You are protected by the fourth amendment requiring a warrant for searches and seizures, but the court has ruled that, citizen or not, if a third party like Meta willingly hands over your info, it’s fair game. L
> my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
Why do people engage in this sort of larping, like they're secret agents or intellectuals that may be hunted at any moment by the grey suits in western governments?
We know it's not true for this person in particular because one click on their HN profile tells you their real name. I stopped there, but I'm sure there is plenty of additional info available with 3-4 more clicks. If they were really so afraid of government reprisal like this larping suggests, maybe they'd attempt to be at least a little pseudo-anonymous.
The actual fact is that 99.9999999999% of us are boring and will remain boring no matter what kind of comments we write on HN. It wouldn't hurt to touch grass once in a while.
> So, the less I give to US companies, the better.
and all of a sudden, you're interesting.
"You have no privacy, get used to it!" -Scott McNealy
Scott was not saying "you should have no privacy"; he was making a statement of fact. That was nearly two decades ago, and he was prescient and right.
> China can decide what it wants from me- I have no plans to visit or engage with regime; however my life is dependent on the US not thinking of me as interesting
If you have something of interest to Beijing and you’re doing something shameful or illegal in America, and they have evidence, they have leverage. This is human asset development 101.
Most people don’t have skills or information relevant to a foreign state. But some do, and for them being mindful about not giving a foreign adversary blackmail leverage is prudent.
Swiss sounds reliable, but a Swiss communications company was also bought and compromised by the CIA since the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
> US/EU/Israel
A bit of a false bundle there.
The two groups are more like US+Europe+China on one hand and 'misc' on the other. Most people get by without depending on the technology from the 'misc' group at all.
This kind of incident will hurt the Israeli tech sector individually, not some imagined US/EU/Israel tech grouping.
Until you look at the cybersecurity industry players. Many big players are based in Tel Aviv
Many of those that aren't based in Tel Aviv probably have R&D offices in Tel Aviv, as do many of the tech behemoths which you use every day.
Exactly. Our concept of sovereign states has become outdated by advances in technology. Up until maybe 1990 even second-tier countries could make just about anything indigenously. It might be a little worse and a little more expensive, but still good enough. Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment. (We might outsource some of that to save money but the latent capability and capital reserves are there.) Even with nuclear weapons, India, Russia, UK, and France are only partially sovereign. Other countries can barely even pretend anymore, and their freedom of action will continue to evaporate barring some drastic realignment of the geopolitical order.
> Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment.
Not arguing, but I think China still relies on Russia for jet engines - though it’s making great efforts to become self-sufficient there.
(Edit: high performance / high technology jet engines)
Yes, China has struggled with the metallurgy necessary for advanced turbine engines. They seem to have made significant progress recently.
https://www.twz.com/air/our-best-look-yet-at-chinas-j-20a-fi...
Russia is no longer a reliable supplier. They need all the engines they can make for domestic use, including replacing war losses and building airliners to service domestic routes. Production is down because all the foreign technical experts left.
The USA has extensive rare earth mineral deposits and mining is expanding.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/14/rare-earth...
I am not aware of chinese or iranian devices exploding and killing people. Spying is not worse than spying and killing. I do not get how do you get the conclusion that US/EU/Israel is as good as it gets if you are a random citizen not from any of these mentioned countries.
Yeah but if you’re dealing with hardware with any kind of Israeli involvement, do you really want to open every single customer unit to make sure one of the capacitors hasn’t been swapped for C4? I think that’s what the poster was indicating. At first I thought yesterday’s action was deviously impressive. Now I’m starting to think it’s actually shortsighted and bizarre. It’s a declaration of war on Lebanon, and obviously a declaration of a war they think they can win, but no good can come of this action.
Israel and Hezbollah have been at war since October 8, when Hezbollah started firing guided rockets at Israel.
They have been at war since they were founded in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War
There has been a UN-brokered ceasefire since the later 2006 war. Minor issues have occurred since then, but October 8 was the first major escalation between the two in almost twenty years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
> It’s a declaration of war on Lebanon
A few observations:
1. This is an attack against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. The two entities are tightly coupled, but they are not the same.
2. Israel and Hezbollah are already at war. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced because of Hezbollah ongoing rocket and missile attacks. Israel has retaliated in various ways.
TLDR: you can argue that this is an act of war against Hezbollah. But it is not a declaration of war, and it is not against Lebanon.
For a more accurate analogy, imagine if Conservative Party were a terrorist organization with its own military, took direct orders from Iran, had claimed for itself all of Wales, and had been firing thousands of missiles into France without cooperating in any way with either the British government or army.
Then imagine that France predictably shoots back, and takes great care to specifically target members of that terrorist group.
In this more accurate analogy, would you still say that France declared open war on Britain? I would say no - that the terrorist group is the one that declared war; and that France is clearly engaging in acts of war against that terrorist group, which happens to be embedded in a host country, like a parasite.
What if the pockets of IRA members had exploded (yes, I know. Say 40 years ago when they were doing their share of bombing)? Does anyone seriously dispute that Hezbollah is a proxy army for Iran?
I think your comparison stops holding wage as,soon as you mention the Conservative Party. They just aren’t the same thing as Hezbollah.
> US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
I imagine China is just as good in pretty much every way.
How does a Bay Area tech site, when Bay Area tech has sooo many individuals who originally came to the USA as students but then couldn't go home due to tiananmen, have this kind of 'enlightened thought' on China, day in and day out?
Too much interaction with falun gong.
Regardless, I'm talking about competency. I don't endorse any particular state, culture, or ideology.
I believe the point GP makes is not that China is a good place. More like that we are oblivious to all the points that make our own place pretty bad too.
On one hand, you can claim that it's a well-known propaganda technique (e.g. the soviets using "...And you are lynching negroes" as a rebuttal to anything). But on the other hand, the most satisfying way to avoid that form of propaganda would probably be to fix our own flaws rather than calling whataboutism.
I mean American's seem like about the most 'bring our flaws out into public and deal with them' society I have ever interacted with. Daterape is no longer acceptable. The entire way men treat women has changed in my lifetime. How we respond to domestic violence has completely changed (we don't just ignore it). LGBT+ rights have greatly changed. Race relations have completely changed (they may need work but they are so much better than the 80s where people rampantantly used the N word at work, in social situations).
The average American is much more aware of our issues, not China's. Our own place isn't pretty bad just because we have past history nor ongoing problems. It's a matter of 'what are we doing to change and improve', and are we willing/free to bring up problems that need changing, and does our societies structure allow change? Or does society pound down those nails that dare stick out? Every society is a flawed human constructed stumbled into not intelligently/humanely designed. The American systems is the most dynamic/flexible of all the ones I have been exposed to. There are more liberal ones, but less dynamic and flexible (no free speech laws in the UK which might cause the lack of reflection that you lament). There are more conservative ones that are again less dynamic/flexible.
Look - I agree. But at the same time, I've seen what the Bay Area puts out, and their product designers are more concerned with designing the next cigarette than improving anyone's life or ensuring domestic security. The US is currently relying on contractors that are asleep at the wheel.
Plainly speaking, China already took our iPhone manufacturing and our electric car business. They've got the chops, the supply chain and the export network to keep doing that for everything from the JSOW to the Harpoon missile. Unless the US makes a serious effort to invest in domestic R&D, our Bay Area vanguards are going to spend more time jerking off than participating in a healthy defense business.
Unless you are a slave there, or from Tibet, or say anything wrong.
Has China ever blown up thousands of pagers in someone else's country?
No but they run "re-education" internment camps for their own people (estimated up to 1.8M people) in their own country:
That is a bizarre standard but I would argue China’s fueling the US’s fentanyl crisis is far worse.
No. But does China have a horrible record on human rights and abuses? Yes. Have they been ethnically cleansing the Uyghur population for years now? Yes. Not to mention bullying and threatening all neighbors across the region. Just read about the recent worries over ZMPC cranes. The CCP will and has infiltrated private companies as a vector to spy on other countries. Maybe they haven't blown up pagers like this, but they've done other things that should make anyone skeptical of buying sensitive equipment from them.
Oh wow, a country BULLYING its neighbors. Imagine a country doing that. Luckily, the US never does something like that. Or imposes sanctions on a country half a world away, sanctions which the entire world has to adhere to unless they want to lose US trading all together.
Some of these talking points fall apart upon typing them, let alone posting.
I don't think so, but neither have the US or EU to my recollection.
China is the one major power that doesn't seem to engage in extraterritorial assassinations, so by default I'm more inclined to at least trust that the Chinese state won't ever decide to activate a kill switch against me.
Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world? Aren't there numerous Canadians of chinese origin that China has abducted? I see news articles of Canadians being arrested for assisting China in these abductions fairly often lately.
> Isn't China the one country that actively sets up their own police forces all over the world?
The US does the same thing and worse, just look for the very long arm of their FBI and Secret Service when it comes to what they allege to be “cyber-crime”. A decade or so ago I was visiting my company’s ISP one morning when I manage to stumble just as some US federal agents were doing their thing among the server racks. I live in Bucharest, Romania.
Critical of actual court cases filed by the Canadian government? Are you saying the Canadian court system is pushing an anti-China narrative?
Of course FVEY/CSIS would push anti PRC narrative. PRC's espionage behavior basically translates to "using words", it's so mild vs what others majors are doing that it needs to be characterized as "over seas police stations" to make it seem extra threatening, when it's bottom barrel espionage activity. MSS handlers using words to leverages / intimidate, to convince people to return to PRC on their own accord, i.e they're not abducting anyone let alone extrajudicial assassinate. Like the solution to countering these activities is to say... naw I'm good.
No, I'm pretty sure the US does more of that than China.. Or if not "police forces" then just straight-up military presence.
AFAICT, that's mostly propaganda. What makes them "police" centers exactly? They do not have police men in them, don't have jails, no one has been convicted of a crime in relation to them, etc. Not sure what you mean by "abductions" but if you are referring to the Canadians who was arrested on Chinese soil, one of them admitted to espionage and is even suing the Canadian government for involving him against his will.
They are called secret police centres in Canada because of the actions they pose, and the threats they make. They'll threaten to kidnap you and extrajudicially extradite you to China, they'll threaten your relatives in China, they'll force you to stop behaviours considered inappropriate by the CCP, they'll try to recruit you as a spy.
To the Chinese Communist Party, the Han ethnic group belongs to the Chinese State, and everything anyone of this ethnic background does is their business.
Not accurate: https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-country-reports-on-human-...
Examples of Extraterritorial killings and abuses listed (edited for more relevant source)
Could you clarify? I see some reports of extraterritorial assaults, as well as harassment (particularly including threats against relatives within Chinese territory), but couldn't find examples of extraterritorial killings, at least with my best attempt at ctrl-f.
I'm sorry, but this is definitely not true. Have you heard about Chinese police overseas or China prosecuting "their" citizens outside of China?
Wait til you learn about this place called Tibet.
Right afterwards, you can learn about the place called Haiti. Or Cuba. Or Venezuela. Or heck, Mexico. Oh, Vietnam. North-Korea. China. Japan. Wait until you learn about Chile. And do not forget to look up the meaning of 'Jakarta is coming'
BTW, before someone screams whataboutism: adjusting your worldview according to facts and applying your moral standards to all countries is not whataboutism. Its a prerequisite to being able to morally condemn any action.
> US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.
EU maybe, but US/Israel are as good as it gets? PRISM? Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
> Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.
Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
But if I lived in either one of those places... whooooa boy. I'd have to be a different person to not get in trouble. And I wouldn't call myself much of an activist or pot-stirrer, really. I feel bad for people who want to show public dissent of their government in China or Russia but can't (or do, and end up in jail), and for people in marginalized groups that the government doesn't like.
> > Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy. > > Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.
I sort of get this PoV, but on the other hand…
If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
>The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.
The US government literally steals cash money from its citizens and faces no repercussions whatsoever. If you carry cash with you in the US, you're in absolute danger of having it confiscated by the police as "drug money" and never seeing it again. You can claim the US has "legal safeguards", but until they're actually tested, it's just a supposition.
> If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.
You should look up how Israel actively fishes LGBT palestinian people using fake dating site accounts, and threatens to out them in order to force them to contribute intelligence.
The US is clearly not that compromised. But they're not exactly clean either, considering some of the stuff that happened in central America.
> They have no free elections unlike US.
The US is a two party system with many hereditary politicians. How free do you think your elections really are?
> They have no free press unlike US.
How did the US news report on Snownden, Assange and others the US government does not like? The US press is an oligopoly that does barely any real reporting. Theoretical freeness does little here.
> They have no independent judiciary unlike US.
Which is more than happy to shield the executive from any consequences. Qualified immunity makes this separation meaningless.
> They both rank poorly on the corruption index unlike US.
According to western definitions of corruption that conveniently do not include corporate lobbying, revolving door relationsships between politics and industry, backdoor laws via trade deals and all the other shadyness that has effectively taken over so-called democracies. But sure, pat yourself on the back for being less likely to get out of a speeding ticket by slipping the officer some cash.
How many hereditary politicians do you think there are in the US, and how much power do you think they have?
Hey I used to believe this myself. But then just realized that this too is propaganda. Insider trading by congress? Lobbying? Judges accepting gifts from billionaires? Abortion? At least in China/Russia women that need urgent reproductive care can get it without risking death.
Because they are just as bad as the US but don't pretend otherwise. Also because the US has gone into aggressive conflicts a lot more than those 2 countries put together.
> Because they are just as bad as the US but don't pretend otherwise.
Just as bad in what way?
> Also because the US has gone into aggressive conflicts a lot more than those 2 countries put together.
How are you defining aggressive conflicts, and at what point do you start counting?
Thy was what, 40 years ago? China has their great firewall set up today, never mind their social credit systems, automated CCTV citizen tracking systems, etc. Russia has people accidentally falling out of hospital windows or drinking polonium tea. I don't think this is at all comparable.
I know that this is rhetorical, but I'm sure an analysis of which country is least likely to leave you exposed to the issues mentioned above could be done. I suppose it also depends on who "you" are, and the threat of communications compromise vs drawing the ire of whoever Israel decides to attack through you. I'm sure there are plenty of countries that would rather be bugged by the Chinese or Iranians than be complicit in a way that opens them to actual armed conflict.
This is another danger of letting Israel swing its sword around without any sort of real condemnation from the US/West: the rationale for geopolitical multi-polarity increases in legitimacy. Pax Americana ends because allying with us doesn't save you from being used as a tool for ends like this. If speculation is correct that Taiwan is involved... Woof.