>>For the next 10 months, web access would be almost nonexistent in Xinjiang, a vast region larger than Texas with a population of more than 20 million. It was one of the most widespread, longest internet shutdowns ever.
SpaceX's plans to launch their first set of satellites for their Starlink broadband constellation[1]. Uighers may be the first population to sign up for satellite subscriptions, although the Chinese government is probably looking for ways to extend Great Firewall[2] capabilities to satellites too. Hopefully users can afford the tentative pricing model of $750/year for a Starlink subscription.
Former satellite telecom engineer here, have built high capacity two way C, Ku, X and Ka band earth stations. Two big problems with China:
1. Smuggle rooftop CPE into country? Manufacture domestically in grey market factories?
2. Very low cost for Chinese law enforcement, in Xinjiang, to buy and use portable spectrum analyzers to locate the Tx frequencies coming from a 30cm-50cm sized rooftop phase array antenna, aimed at the sky. To be a viable satellite broadband product it has to have a fairly strong Tx (in EIRP). No matter what band it is in from 10.5 up to 70GHz.
1) The problem with using an ISM band for earth to space is precisely because it's exceptionally noisy. You want the best possible SNR for two way satellite, either direction. With a small satellite that orbits relatively close (LEO to low MEO, compared to geostationary), which will likely have a system architecture composed of numerous focused spot beams... If you were to design a series of spot beam on the satellite body with ISM band antennas aimed at major cities all you would achieve is gathering noise.
2) Not going to help much unless the upstream is so little that's basically useless. The same antenna is used for both Rx and Tx so you still need significant gain to overcome the path loss and have sufficient link budget for the space-to-earth traffic.
With current geostationary-based technology any significant VSAT is easy to spot: If you want to use higher-order modulations and coding, you need gain. Which means you need at least a 1.8 to 2.4m size antenna for a serious earth station. Possibly you're confusing a small VSAT with the Rx-only TVRO type dishes which are everywhere?
Yes, they are easy to spot, and they are being spotted and their owners being jailed/executed/gutted for organs. This does not mean than an enormous amount of wealthy Chinese see their own private internet channel as a status symbol, and manufacturing of creatively styled antenna enclosures being a mid-sized industry here.
I recently traveled to China and went to a fairly remote area dominated by Uyghurs and didn't see anything that would indicate that level of oppression.
They seemed quite free to do what they wanted to between themselves (such as buying a knife) although I imagine their political rights wouldn't be very strong.
If you visited Seoul in 1980s you wouldn't have seen much oppression, either, unless you knew where to look. (I grew up through it, so I know.) You can live a surprisingly peaceful life through some dictatorship as long as you toe the party line and don't get too unlucky. (And if you do get unlucky, you will be quickly removed from other people's lives, so that they can continue the semblance of peaceful lives.)
The Wall Street Journal did a report on life in Xinjiang last year. It demonstrates the security check points, the "study centers", and having to get your kitchen knifes engraved with your ID:
On a meta-note, this seems to apply to every aspect of Chinese surveillance/repression. Every time someone here reports that a website is blocked in China, someone else will reply that it works for them.
Seems to me there is a large public relations push to normalize their authoritarianism in the view of Westerners.
Then you hear about bloggers being imprisoned for pointing out corruption according to the government’s own definitions.
China’s authoritarianism looks attractive when it’s about infrastructure and efficiency, but the underside of it, the collective silencing and destruction of debate, the “blank spots” it introduces into its citizens understanding of history and the world, are truly disturbing.
China’s existential threat is an opportunity or technology which enhances its ability to control citizens but leads, in the long term, to destabilization of the regime. Could be AI, could be something else. But at some point one of these forbidden fruits will poison and what appears to be a manageable, technical problem will become a societal one that no one can control or censor.
>Seems to me there is a large public relations push to normalize their authoritarianism in the view of Westerners.
So, bigger than the push to make it appear worse than it is?
Because that has been a tactic with any competing nation/enemy du jour of the west for over a century...
Not to mention that everything is judged with US-norms and interpreted through US-preferences in all those articles (aside and above the interpretation through their national interests) -- as if, e.g. rugged individualism and puritanism -derived principles is some universal law and e.g. a collectivist spirit, or some religious-derived norms, or other such cultural ways, are by default bad.
Human rights are not US-norms, there are many pitfalls that have been detected in last couple of centuries in the US and in representative democracies all over the world. Supressing freedom of speach, basic economic freedoms, due process... lead invariably to disaster, being it dictatorships, coups, generalized corruption, etc.
There is nothing special with Chinese people that makes dictatorship good for them while it's bad for us.
In the main, they are not. But they are general platitudes, whose interpretation is left to the individual countries, and is subject to the power relations between them.
A country, then, might be seen accusing or even bombing another (supposedly) in defense of those rights, when itself doesn't follow them.
>There is nothing special with Chinese people that makes dictatorship good for them while it's bad for us.
If only it was so simple. First, there are different concepts of what's OK and what's not. A crude example: US people don't like kings. English people are OK with their (but they don't have much power there). Thailand people love them.
Then, there's selective judgement. E.g. the US can have the largest prison population (25% of the world for 5% of it's population), and the most death sentences, mass surveillance programs, arbitrary cop killings, or even torture camps off-site, but it's OK because it has "free elections" (where two parties alternate in power for 50+ years and vote for more of the same -- never mind gerrymandering). Whereas another country is portrayed as some nightmare regime for not having elections, whereas life there might be better in those other terms. Sure, there are people that complaint for all of the above, but they still happen (and have happened for decades), and few judge the government/country in whole for that or say that it must be overthrown/invaded whatever (whereas for other countries, they do).
There's also selective enforcement, e.g. in how Saudi Arabia can be a worse regime for its citizens in all of those aspects, but as an ally it's not scolded for that, nor does it face sanctions/retribution that non-favorable (i.e. competing) countries that face.
Then there's people who have no idea of world history, little understanding of diplomacy, and how fragile states can be, and what local antagonisms and powers are held back even by some "bad" at first analysis regime, that play god, intervene (to bring "democracy") and, even assuming they do that in earnest, they end up causing civil war and chaos (see Libya, Iraq, and so on). So while "There is nothing special with Chinese people that makes dictatorship good for them while it's bad for us", there could very well something special with China as a country, and it's constitution of people's, history, antagonisms, etc, that a change would unleash hell.
If only it was so simple. First, there are different concepts of what's OK and what's not. A crude example: US people don't like kings.
It is so simple because I'm not talking about US people and what they like. Not everybody in a country likes the same things... that does seem like too much simplification btw.
I'm talking about flaws that make a political system a tyranny. And they're the same for every country as History has repeteadly shown.
there could very well something special with China as a country, and it's constitution of people's, history, antagonisms, etc, that a change would unleash hell.
It's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a peaceful transition from dictatorships to democracy. There are many examples: Spain, Portugal, many South American countries, East Europe... most likely cause of hell unleashing is nothing cultural or historic, but money.
The West has been externalizing manufactures to China the same way we've been buying oil from Saudi Arabia. Those regimes are now armored with tons of money from any pressure to open.
> China’s existential threat is an opportunity or technology which enhances its ability to control citizens but leads, in the long term, to destabilization of the regime. Could be AI, could be something else. But at some point one of these forbidden fruits will poison and what appears to be a manageable, technical problem will become a societal one that no one can control or censor.
I don't understand. Can you explain that more? How does AI or other tech create something that cannot be controlled or censored? I can only see, say, facial recognition, being bad for freedom of the Chinese citizens.
Probably the law of unintended consequences. Imagine now that this makes the surveillance of the bureaucracy itself more or less infallible. Someone, or many people, now know which party officials are meeting with which, know who their mistresses are, know the places they are going to hide assets or crimes, know the people bribing them. Now you have a roadmap for corruption of the state.
If that data leaks, is hacked by a state actor and released, or becomes the tool by which bureaucrats seek to manipulate and blackmail each other, it could destabilize the party itself.
I wonder if that kind of authoritarianism can already be qualified as fascism. Declared total unity of state, people and industry? Check. Militarism? Check. Indifference to violence? Check. Concentration camps, mass political persecutions, expansionism? All there.
So the NSA was bad - violated the laws and constitution according to the U.S. Courts, therefore we're already at Hitler? What they did was bad. On the road to Hitler, maybe, but not there yet, surely.
I haven’t found anything in this thread except the most radical and unconfirmed claims which don’t correlate with some result of corporate capitalist applications of the same technologies. Note I say result because the acts and perpetrators themselves would unsurprisingly differ in various societal structures. The sacrifices and misplacements are plenty congruent in effect and affect to warrant acknowledgement. The tone of PR and response to PR, the latter being a measure a couple degrees insulated by public interpretation, presents as nearly identical. I find nothing intriguing or enticing about observing these Huxleyan scenarios so if anyone can refute this angle, please share.
Repression in Urumqi will likely be an order of magnitude more intense than in smaller municipalities around the province. The CCP is still working off their own revolutionary playbook from the 30s and 40s, when they effected change through organization. The "right to assemble" is one of the most feared rights in China.
Enforcing QR codes on knives is one thing. The real weapon is forbidding all social media apps except for (the thoroughly government monitored) WeChat.
People can still use other apps, though it's getting tougher, but there are still other options, and if people really care more about privacy they may get a proxy and use Telegram.
I've been to Xinjiang also (Urumuqi and other parts of Beijiang). I didn't see a Uyghur get beat up or anything, but this was (a) way back in 2006 before the riots of 2009 and (b) I don't think we would notice much as tourists even IF there was something going on.
Beijing used to have a lot of Uyghurs before the 2008 Olympics, but they were mostly all driven out and not allowed to return after the event.
"Beijing used to have a lot of Uyghurs before the 2008 Olympics, but they were mostly all driven out and not allowed to return after the event."
Any source on that? You can still easily see Uyghurs' barbecue stalls and restaurants in many cities including Beijing. Though security check on stations has strengthen since 2009 riot.
Well, I was living there at the time, and lived in Beijing from 2007 to 2016, I saw it happen. It was no secret either, the gov was open about the evictions. The chuan places took a super long time to recover, and it still isn’t what it was like in 2007, especially in northwest Beijing where most of migrants used to live.
Which is sourced from a New York Times _opinion_ piece without any documentation or second sourcing to back it up. I'm comfortable putting this in the "dubious" and/or "overblown anecdote" bin unless evidence shows otherwise.
Thank you for finding that! Why didn't Engadget or the New York Times put that photo into the article? Engraving kitchen knives with your ID number sounded like hyperbole. Nothing proves it like a photo or video. Same with articles on security or privacy compromises -- you need an actual exploit before (most) people take it seriously.
Typically pieces written directly by experts - instead of by journalists interviewing experts - are placed in the opinion section. The author of that piece is a historian from Georgetown who wrote a book about the region.
If you were in a remote area of Xinjiang, are you sure that the locals were Uighurs and not ethnic Kazakhs? To an outsider the populations are easy to confuse, but the Kazakhs are not under the same restrictions that the Uighurs are.
I wonder if this will trigger space warfare, which might push nations to invest more into space, and maybe we'll finally become space-faring species in my lifetime!
The risk of Kessler Syndrome is being exaggerated a lot on HN. These new, very large satellite constellations aren't in stable orbits, they only last for a few years before decaying naturally. So even if every satellite there were to be destroyed by some magical event, the debris would re-enter the atmosphere within at most a couple of years. It would be quite bad if geostationary orbits became unusable, but there are way fewer satellites there, and GEO is becoming less important for many of its traditional applications (e.g. communication, see for example the spacex starlink project which just had its first two test satellites launched, or planet labs' constellation of small and cheap imaging satellites). Much of this is due to a reduction in launch prices and a focus on many small and cheap satellites, instead of few large and expensive ones.
>Uighers may be the first population to sign up for satellite subscriptions
I doubt most people there are willing to pay a significant premium for uncensored internet. And this is assuming that the government doesn't ban/crack down on "illegal" satellite internet.
Satellite based broadband surely is something hard to restrict, and would be nice option for Uighers. But before we declare it as the solution to problem we need to think through any risks that it can pose. There aren't going to be many providers of satellite based broadband which means prices would be high due to lack of competition. There is also the issue of traffic snooping by US government, especially if US companies going to be sole player in this field.
SpaceX's plans to launch their first set of satellites for their Starlink broadband constellation[1]. Uighers may be the first population to sign up for satellite subscriptions, although the Chinese government is probably looking for ways to extend Great Firewall[2] capabilities to satellites too. Hopefully users can afford the tentative pricing model of $750/year for a Starlink subscription.
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/spacexs-starlink-satellite-internet-its...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall