As I understand it, the social credit score was never actually put into place. It was mentioned once as an idea, and people took that as a commitment to implement it.
Thank you for the correction! I actually never looked much into it, so it was surprising to see how many misconceptions there are about China’s social credit system. Having said that, after looking more into it, saying it was never put into place wouldn’t be entirely correct either, apparently. Some people have been comparing it to the credit score system in the US and it seems quite apt from what I read. It is there, it simply isn’t a centralized system or an all-encompassing entity.
There’s so many more comparisons to be drawn between the US and China than most in the west think, the credit system is a great example of that since a lot of people don’t realize how fucked it is in the US.
Just the idea of permanently ascribing a number to how profitable someone is for banks and dictating what opportunities they can get based off that number is horribly dystopian in itself, but people are so accustomed to it and have so many misconceptions to its purpose that there’s not nearly as much criticism over it as there should be.
Another part of it is the rigid west-east dichotomy that’s still brought up so often even as it’s become increasingly irrelevant in the past several decades, I’d recommend anyone who’s interested check out There Never Was a West, it’s a short read but I think it can be pretty eye opening and puts a lot of the modern day rhetoric about international politics into a broader historical perspective.
That’s a pretty short-sighted read on the UK. We have serious issues with the Tories trying to undermine encryption, but the fact that there are a lot of 30-year-old non-networked CCTV cameras attached to businesses and residences is not really an issue.
The government isn’t forking out to put cameras everywhere though. There are a few in city centres which I’d imagine local councils have to pay for, most are installed by private businesses just to protect their own property.
Though access is limited, they do have the tech thanks to their friends to the north. I can’t find the link, but they have their own Great Firewall implementation
Lol this country has some of the best state sponsored hacking groups and the ability to build nuclear weapon. Its not like they are living under a rock technologically.
The government just doesn’t provide much of anything to its citizens as a form of control.
I’m not saying the expertise doesn’t exist. The point is that so much of our personal information is given up because of how technology is ingrained in our every day lives, so every move you make is recorded somewhere. If the general population doesn’t have that kind of access to technology, then you can’t record their every movement.
Yes, it is a choice. I choose to delete cookies because it is the technique most websites use. Tracking plugins, canvas, webrtc, etc are harder to defend against and if they are all deployed by a tracking site, it is almost impossible to not be unique.
Well, I still disable them. The theory behind them is, that they actually serve a purpose for the function of the site, whereas cookies in general can be used for a variety of actions. Like tracking. Realistically, the site will work just fine without.
Don’t give your TV your wifi password, or an ethernet cable. Turn any cheap “smart tv” into a “cheap tv”. Use your other devices that you already ignored privacy warnings of trust and nobody loses anything.
Okay chief. What do I use to play YouTube videos, local tv news, Netflix or pirated movies on my tv then ? I have to have a laptop or a computer on the side to play the content? That computer has to be able to playback 4k HDR. It also has to use edge to get 1080p out of Netflix (scratch that I have a 4k subscription). It has to consume less or the same then my TV.
I’m curious about what real alternative you got, that is as useful and user friendly as using the android tv directly ?
Buy a chrome cast, fire stick, or roku and stick it in your android TV that isn’t connected to the wifi.
The chrome cast, fire stick, and roku have their own privacy issues associated, but if they were running malware (outside of what we know of those services collecting and selling user data to advertisers) they would have bigger problems.
I did this for the longest time until I realised that because AdGuard works best as a virtual VPN, it is unable to run alongside an actual VPN. Luckily my VPN (and many others) support ad blocking too.
That’s not what I’m talking about. I meant to say that AdGuard on mobile (Android) runs by pretending to be a VPN in order to intercept all connections and filter the ads out of them. This works great to remove ads in apps, etc.
However, because it hooks into the VPN interface you can’t then run another VPN (for example Proton VPN) because Android only allows one VPN to run at any time.
Oh you’re talking about AdGuard VPN not solely the main AdGuard product. Definitely not ideal. It doesn’t offer the same level of features as my current VPN who offers ad blocking anyway. Not to mention a few suspicious quotes from their website:
AdGuard VPN protocol uses the most secure and fast encryption algorithm to date – AES-256
From the very outset, we resolved to develop and deploy an in-house VPN protocol instead of picking a canned solution — that’d be too easy
We are going to make our protocol implementation publicly available in the future. Sadly, right now we don’t have enough time to prepare the project
we collect data about how you interact with our services, how much traffic you’ve used, and for how long have you been using our services
ADGUARD SOFTWARE LIMITED is a company registered in Nicosia, Cyprus, registered office is at Klimentos 41-43, KLIMENTOS TOWER, Flat/Office 25, 1061, Nicosia, Cyprus and acts as the data controller when processing your data
Considering Cyprus telecommunications laws it doesn’t seem like the safest place to headquarter a telecommunications privacy company.
Adguard has been a trusted company in the adblocking space for a very long time, and their CEO and company is quite openly active in the privacy and cybersecurityrealm, so that’s important.
That said, their VPN is a really new product, so there’s a lot of room for improvement.
They do have the best adblocking solution, in my opinion, so if VPN is also needed, they give you something for that. The alternatives are often messy or not totally compatible.
For me, it works great for bypassing geo restrictions, but my threat model isn’t on the extreme end. I got a plan really cheap, so it saves me money over PIA and Windscribe, which i used previously (and sucked for streaming).
I do suggest that everyone find a solution that works for them, regardless of who they go with.
Is Wired out here taking stories from YouTubers? I swear Linus Tech Tips covered this entire thing months ago, saying basically to stick to Fire, Onn or Chromecast devices.
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