Tencent's WeChat Suspends New User Registration for Security Compliance (reuters.com) 15
Tencent's WeChat has temporarily suspended registration of new users in mainland China as it undergoes a technical upgrade "to align with relevant laws and regulations," China's dominant instant messaging platform said on Tuesday. From a report: "We are currently upgrading our security technology to align with all relevant laws and regulations," the company said in a statement to Reuters. "During this time, registration of new Weixin personal and official accounts has been temporarily suspended. Registration services will be restored after the upgrade is complete, which is expected in early August," it added. Weixin is the Chinese name for WeChat. [...] China is in the process of tightening policies towards privacy and data security. It is readying a Personal Information Protection Law, which calls for tech platforms to impose stricter measures to ensure secure storage of user data.
Ok. (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I supposed to be outraged that they are being given new laws and regulations to follow, or should I be happy that it is inconveniencing people in China? Or is it the other way around?
US China relations have always been interesting. The US is firmly against Communist Governments, however China is the worlds most populous country so that brings in a lot of business opportunity. Both countries have conflicting set of national interests, however we are each others #1 trading partner.
It reminds me back when I was a teenager working at my first job at a hardware store. They have corporate magazines that they put in the lunch room, one article was titles "They are rude, unreasonable, and steal from you. But they are your best customers"
We need to be sure while dealing with China that we keep a careful eye on what they are doing, and should protect ourselves as much as we can. However dropping them from the global market would just make things much much worse.
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Am I supposed to be outraged that they are being given new laws and regulations to follow, or should I be happy that it is inconveniencing people in China? Or is it the other way around?
You could just not have an emotional reaction to a news article?
From a tech point of view, the piece I find interesting is that one of the biggest social networks in the world is taking what I assume is a very important part of their user recruitment and monetisation funnel down for 3 days or so. Regardless of the reasons why - I might use this as an example in my own work when a business-type demands 0 downtime to make a significant upgrade....maybe graceful downtime isn't that big of a deal...
Re: Ok. (Score:2)
I like you. Making clear the tradeoffs to US-Sino relations. I think we should be happy. The privacy push here could make things better for US consumers of Chinese tech services. More so, the push by a company which is clearly already aligned with Chinese policy makes it potentially more clear the targeting of data protection is not just for China to pull in the reigns for their advantage. They already have virtually all the control they need of WeChat.
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Under capitalism, people, the environment, the earth, your personal information, are just resources to be exploited till exhaustion or collapse.
Clearly it's much better under Communism.
however we are each others #1 trading partner (Score:2)
IIRC, France and Germany were each other's number one trading partners in 1938...
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You can't drop China from the global market. At best you can divide the world up between you with Europe in the middle.
China will become the world's largest economy in the next few years.
China has been tightening control.. (Score:4, Interesting)
...for a while now. But what I find interesting is still the high number of people willing to post forbidden things and try to bypass the filters.
I guess it is still a really tiny % of the total population, but still interesting, given how harsh the punishments can be.
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The opposite in fact, China has been opening up a bit lately to facilitate better trade with the rest of the world, e.g. so companies can develop Android phones for overseas markets.
Remember that a lot of what you read is nonsense. For example Winnie the Pooh mech is widely available, not banned.
And anyway this has nothing to do with that, this is about collecting less user data to comply with new privacy rules. It's a very good thing.
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different path, same destination. (Score:2)
Let me fix that for you:
"To install back doors, censorship, automatic logging/reporting, and detailed user tracking"
Not that we have it a lot better elsewhere. Here, we have laws that are supposed to protect us from things like that, but they don't work because we either have other "temporary" laws that let them do it, or they just do it anyway and do minimal diligence to hide their activities. (because they know they'll never held accountable)
Different path, sa