

Chinese government dropping phone calls if forbidden words are said - kouiskas
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/03/china-cuts-off-calls-for-prote.html

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JonnieCache
I was under the impression that running realtime voice-recognition on all the
open phone lines at any one moment would require so much computing power that
there would be no way you could hide it?

You'd need datacentre after datacentre after datacentre, surely?

Also, state of the art voice recognition is still flakey in a silent, echo
free room using a condenser mic. Imagine how flakey its going to be going over
chinese copper and GSM codecs. False positives ahoy! Even the chinese govt.
has a maximum acceptable false positive rate for this kind of thing.

I haven't believed in this rumour all my life so far when it's been the US
govt. claimed to have been doing it, and I don't believe it now that its
switched to being the chinese govt. Not without some evidence.

It doesn't even make logical sense. Assuming you could actually do this, why
cut the calls off? Why not record them as part of wider evidence gathering?

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Retric
You could do fairly accurate real time voice recognition in 2000 on a home PC.
Accuracy was and is an issue, but you only need to tag interesting
conversations / people not perfectly transcribe everything. Now finding the
lowest cost per FLOP is complex but to be safe let's say 1k of computing can
decode 10 phone calls or 100$ / call. Now the amount of time people spend on
the phone varies a lot, but let's call it 5% of the time on average to be
safe. Edit: each call uses 2 people. Thus somewhere around 1 billion people *
.05 / 2 * 100$ = 2.5 billion you could buy the hardware to transcribe
everyone's phone calls in china. As to hiding things you could keep the
computers anywhere so it would be fairly easy to hide.

PS: I would assume you could probably do it for a lot less but these numbers
where just to show it's possible. Doing something like this in the US for ~750
million is going to be vary tempting, but I think the manpower costs for false
positives may be the real issue.

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JonnieCache
My point wasn't that it isn't possible. I mean, who's gonna make that bet,
especially on this website.

It was more that it would be impossible to do without it being flamboyantly
obvious that you're doing it. I was referring to 'hiding' in terms of infosec
as opposed to 'hiding' in terms of physically stashing away the boxes.

If they were doing it, we'd have heard from an engineer involved somewhere
along the line, as opposed to rumours originating from paranoid citizens.

~~~
endtime
>If they were doing it, we'd have heard from an engineer involved somewhere
along the line,

If they were doing it in the US, sure. In China? I have my doubts.

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zkoch
I live in China, so I did a quick test with my coworkers. 4 people. Two phone
calls each. Each conversation we dropped the word 'protest' in both English
and Chinese. No magical dropped calls for us.

~~~
mcherm
Thank you. Actual data... it's a powerful thing.

~~~
mentat
Yes, a sample size of two is certainly significant... If you want data it's
going to take more than that.

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yahelc
I think AT&T has this same policy. I'm not sure why 'Hello' is a forbidden
word, though.

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arkitaip
If this actually is true: silly bureaucrats, don't they know that this month's
word for protest is obedience?

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LostInTheWoods2
Dear Chinese Government (and other petty dictatorships):

Your time is coming to an end. You can try to initimidate, and beat down
dissent all you want. But in the end, freedom will prevail. But to hell with
it, Neo said it better:

"I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid.
You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I
didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you
how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going
to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a
world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or
boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a
choice I leave to you."

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ceejayoz
This would be pretty useless, even if true.

"We're having the happy fun obedience rally at six PM."

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tgrass
MYTH <http://shanghaiscrap.com/?p=6481>

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smokeyj
Who writes the software that enables phones to be tapped into? Even the U.S
taps into phones, how is this feature protected? I imagine code has to be
written to allow someone to listen in your convo, is that IN the droid OS or
iOS?

~~~
JonnieCache
Wiretapping isn't done in the handset. As the name suggests, it happens on the
wire. At the exchange, in actuality.

~~~
d2zo
See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156>

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xster
The british arrested scholars for acquiring al qaeda literature. Cutting a
phone call is quite child play in comparison but there's no sense of western
ethical superiority mocking the british so it's less fun.

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goombastic
There must be a way to overload the system. A protest named like verb maybe?

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d2zo
tl;dr:

A->B: "pickles is the new word for f-r-e-e s-p-e-e-c-h. free speech."

<forbidden word detected: free speech. call terminated>

B->A: "So, we were talking about pickles... "

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tyng
From the article, I can't tell whether the word "protest" is filtered, or
Shakespeare is filtered - two anecdotes don't make a conclusive evidence.

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shareme
I have a question..

In the Middle East forbidden words and topics get their own 2nd secret
language to avoid censorship.

I assume that in China the same cultural effect is in play so what idiot would
use the full non allowed words?

The story sounds somewhat questionable..

That is why in the Middle East class are recorded and not dropped as everyone
is using a 2nd secret language to talk about forbidden subjects.

