cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15787798
Naomi Wu has disappeared. Perhaps she has been disappeared. That’s not rare in China.
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The proximate cause of her apparent disappearance, as Jackie Singh explains in detail here, was a discovery that Naomi Wu, an experienced coder, had made. It seemed that the cute little cellphone keyboard applications developed by the Chinese company Tencent, and used by just about everyone, were spyware. They could log keystrokes, and did it outside of even very secure applications such as Signal, so things that were sent securely could be “phoned home” by the keyboard app itself.
It seems, though the evidence is coincidental, that this was one too many cats let out of the bag, and the Chinese communist government of Winnie Xi Pooh acted quickly, with the results (probably understated) in the Tweet quoted above.
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The silence has been deafening. People on the internet, especially young, enthusiastic websters, have long been thought unbelievably shallow, in it for whatever they could get out of it, and unwilling to take a stand on something important unless there was profit in it for them. We needn’t think that anymore — now we know it’s true.
What can be done? […] Our government won’t lift a finger even for American citizens or very well known Chinese figures trapped under the thumb of the Disney-character’s evil lookalike, or the Uyghurs, unless there’s some political gain to be had, such as with the tattooed LGBT WNBA player who couldn’t be bothered to leave her dope at home during a visit to Russia.
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China was afraid that silencing Naomi Wu would make the government there look bad. Let’s prove them right.
Last post that I can find by her is on Mastodon, promoting a new electronics book she helped co-author, I think?
But yeah, she has been super quiet since they “clipped her wings”. But she said she would be too. Censorship sucks and I can’t believe we let an entire country get away with it and still did business with them the whole time.
It’s worth reading her part of the description on the book’s listing, provided you can read between the lines.
She also said she can leave, but her partner can’t. She’s sticking it out to support them; what a quality person.
Damn, them lines are so far apart, if you can’t read between them, you’re probably legally blind
It is not clear to me that the country would be less censored now and the people there better off if we had refused to do business with them.
(Just to be clear, I am not saying that we handled China as well as we could have over the last few decades, but hindsight is 20-20.)
Well yes, but think of how much more expensive our lives would be if we couldn’t exploit child labor without having to see it.