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China Pilots a System That Rates Citizens on 'Social Credit Score' To Determine Eligibility For Jobs, Travel
Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens -- such as lawyers and journalists -- will be more closely monitored. From a report on MIT Technology Review:
Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step." The Journal claims that the system will at first log "infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules" but will be expanded in the future -- potentially even to Internet activity. Some aspects of the system are already in testing, but there are some challenges to implementing such a far-reaching apparatus. It's difficult to centralize all that data, check it for accuracy, and process it, for example -- let alone feed it back into the system to control everyday life. And China has data from 1.4 billion people to handle. |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| Lisa Gansky |
Cities are ripe for redesign, and many are already well on that path. Cloud-based networks that provide easy and inexpensive access to and tracking of services like transportation, energy, waste management, bill pay, citizen engagement and more are testing and enriching their services. |
| Anne Campbell |
Ending up-front fees should make it far easier for all students to go to university as they will no longer have to pay up to /1,125 out of their loans at the start of each year. Student loans will also rise to meet average living costs. |
| Lisa Gansky |
The mobile Web, location-based services, inexpensive and pervasive mobile apps, and new sorts of opportunities to access cars, bikes, tools, talent, and more from our neighbors and colleagues will propel peer-to-peer access services into market. |
| Freda Adler |
The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes. |
| Lisa Gansky |
Insurance and funding traditionally drive capital investment. But in a world based on access, not ownership, the duration, value, cost and extent of financial services is distinctly different. |
| Robert Darnton |
It simply is not true that everything is now on the Internet, but it is true that the digital resources available through the Internet have enormous potential for education and even for self-empowerment of individuals. |
| Joel Salatin |
From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems. |
| Godfrey Gao |
Sometimes I read that I'm not 100 per cent Chinese, because I don't look all that Chinese. That's a strange one - I am Chinese. |
| Anant Agarwal |
A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities. |
| Rick Baker |
I enjoy doing digital work. I enjoy sculpting digitally. I've had my digital sculptures on covers of the top digital magazines. |
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Hebei, a Northern Chinese Province, Unveils an App That Triggers a Notification When You're Near Someone in Debt
China is gearing up to launch a social credit system in 2020, giving all citizens an identity number that will be linked to a permanent record. Like a financial score, everything from paying back loans to behaviour on public transport will be included. One aspect of this social credit system is a new app in the northern province of Hebei. From a report:
According to the state-run newspaper China Daily, the Hebei-based app will alert people if there are in 500 metres of someone i...
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HealthCare.gov Portal Suffers Data Breach Exposing 75,000 Customers
Sensitive information belonging to roughly 75,000 individuals was exposed after a government healthcare sign-up system got hacked, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said on Friday. The agency said that "anomalous system activity" was detected last week in the Direct Enrollment system, which Americans use to enroll in healthcare plans via the insurance exchange established under the Affordable Care Act -- also known as Obamacare. A breach was declared on Wednesday. It's unclear why the agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, chose to not announce the incident sooner. Officials said the hacked portal is used by insurance agents and brokers to help Americans sign up for c...
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Russia's Anti-VPN Law Goes Into Effect
A Russian law that bans the use or provision of virtual private networks (VPNs) will come into effect Wednesday. The legislation will require ISPs to block websites that offer VPNs and similar proxy services that are used by millions of Russians to circumvent state-imposed internet censorship. It was signed by President Vladimir Putin on July 29 and was justified as a necessary measure to prevent the spread of extremism online. Its real impact, however, will be to make it much harder for ordinary Russians to access websites ISPs are instructed to block connections to by Russian regulator Roskomnadzor, aka the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media. The law is just one part of a concerted effort by t...
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Russian Trolls Tried -- and Failed -- To Push Divisive Content On Vaccines (fortune.com) 190
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 25, 2018 @10:34AM from the thinking-of-the-children dept.
Russian trolls "seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society," according to a new study shared by long-time Slashdot reader skam240. "The topic became another issue the Russian trolls seized upon to widen existing rifts in America and turn citizens against each other," reports NBC News.
But Fortune reports there's more to the story:...
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Having trouble using your google play credit out of the country? Here's what I heard works:
1. Download Android Studio and create a virtual phone in the AVD manager
2. Connect to VPN in country where google thinks the credit belongs
3. Start up the phone and connect your google account
For some reason it doesn't seem to work from a real phone even with a VPN...
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China Is Building The Ultimate Surveillance Tool: A DNA Database Of Every Adult Resident In Troubled Xinjiang Region
from the purely-for-scientific-decision-making,-of-course dept
It's no secret that the two regions most affected by China's strict controls are Tibet and Xinjiang, the vast and troubled Western region where the turkic-speaking Uyghurs form the largest ethnic group. Earlier this year, we wrote about one fairly extreme surveillance technique in Xinjiang: a requirement for every vehicle there to be fitted with a tracking device. Now Human Rights Watch reports that an even more intrusive surveillance measure is being implemented for the region's 24 million inhabitants:
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Facebook breach put data of 50 million users at risk
The vulnerability had to do with the social network's "view as" feature.
Facebook on Friday said a breach affected 50 million people on the social network.
The vulnerability stemmed from Facebook's "view as" feature, which lets people see what their profiles look like to other people. Attackers exploited code associated with the feature tha...
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Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary[1] approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."[2] In the 21st century, the term is often used in a rather loose way to imply "control of any system using technology."
Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed incorporates a closed signaling loop—originally referred to as a "circular causal" relationship—that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in the system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change. Cybernetics is relevant to, for example, mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and s...
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Woman Wins $10,000 For Reading Fine Print of Terms and Conditions of Travel Insurance Policy
Georgia high school teacher Donelan Andrews won a $10,000 reward after she closely read the terms and conditions that came with a travel insurance policy she purchased for a trip to England. Squaremouth, a Florida insurance company, had inserted language promising a reward to the first person who emailed the company. NPR reports:
"We understand most customers don't actually read contracts or documentation when buying something, but we know the importance of doing so," the company said. "We created the top-secret Pays to Read campaign in an effort to highlight the importance of reading policy docum...
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[Socrates] And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?
[Glaucon] Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.
[Socrates] And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue --how eager he is, how...
This post is a comment.
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