Monday, April 1, 2019

Visa, Mastercard, Huawei and spying

In the days before smart-phones if I wanted to develop a ubiquitous mechanism of spying on people I would probably start with an electronic payment system that tracked everything that people bought and where.

This is not an original thought - and there is a reason why Visa and Mastercard cannot crack the Chinese market.

But the Chinese government and its (compromised or stupid) proxies in the West tell us we should open ourselves to Huawei (which provides a much better mechanism for spying).

I would normally bet that wouldn't happen - but given the quality of Western political leadership these days nothing much would surprise me.

Just making an obvious observation that I have not seen elsewhere.




John

9 comments:

  1. Still searching for the April Fool's joke in the text above.

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  2. Nice to see you getting with the program John.

    The level of global corruption is staggering,and been going of for decades, you will see shortly, and Trump has a hand in exposing all of it, from Iran to Venezuela and everywhere in between.

    One more thing, Comey, Mueller and Rodestein are all good guys.

    Muller was not going after Trump he was going after the crooks.

    Oh and are Australians waking up to this tax evasion yet?

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-30/sixty-nine-millionaires-paid-zero-tax-in-2016-17/10954888

    Go Trump!

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  3. It's worth noting that efforts to prevent the use of strong encryption are secondary, but significant additional risk. Frankly, I find it bizarre that the 5G "standard" doesn't include encryption at the coms layer... even though the amount of information that could be gleaned from simply traffic analysis is extremely significant.

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  4. China has proven its technology from facial recognition technology to credit system, nothing can surprise us more.

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  5. There is a reason smarthphones have become the hub of Chinese life and why the platforms there have been allowed to permeate into every market vertical - communications, payments, transportation, etc.

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  6. You guys are all missing the much, much bigger picture: global money laundering on a scale never seen, perhaps as much as $2T a year.

    Also, Mrs.Clinton has more power then anyone realizes.

    You are all getting lost in the weeds with encryption blah blah blah, who do you think paid who billions to get business done?

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  7. I would think that it is worth looking at the spying issue more broadly. Its not like the option is "be spied on by Chinese" vs. "retain privacy". It is more like "Who do you want to be spied on by". I would think the Snowden story ... both the initial disclosures and the lack of any meaningful change in the US (not to mention Australia) tell us all we need to know about this.

    Phrased that way, I really don't see why for someone in Australia (like me) it is any worse to be spied on by Xi's people than being spied on by Trump's (or May's). For most things, Xi's people are the least likely to care ... so it is arguably better.

    Since the ship on "spying" has pretty much sailed, lets take that situation as given (how many Alexa or Google Assistant enabled devices do you have in your home?) and see what we can get out of the fact that SOMEONE will be spying ALL THE TIME. For a start, A better/cheaper 5G system seems better than nothing.

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  8. Don't forget the Chinese made trains and buses. And household appliances... those smart fridges, they see everything!!

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  9. I use a dumb phone; few people know the number. But just in case: I LOVE Chinese food!

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