In 2020, China heads into 1984

In 2020, China heads into 1984

TECH
In 2020, China heads into 1984

China will have 626 million CCTVs installed by 2020. That's close to one for every two people in the country. By the end of 2019, any application for Internet access will require first having your face scanned. In 2020, if you want to surf the web you will first have to pass a facial recognition process. If you are recognised and your social score is high enough you will be able to connect. This directive comes from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Technology.

- No, this isn't the plot of a sci-fi movie but the latest efforts by the Chinese authorities to keep their less compliant citizens off the internet. The real question is, now that China is going down this path, who will follow? North Korea has very few people connected to the internet to start with, so they're already well ahead of China on this one. It's scary to think of the lengths they'll go to to maintain complete control over their population.

- In related news, by the time you read this China and Russia may have signed a treaty targeting "illegal internet content". This should have happened during the annual internet governance conference that the Chinese government has run for several years in Wuzhen. The trend in both countries has been to pass increasingly restrictive laws on what people can post on the internet and how users can access it. China has a huge effort dedicated to censoring information, as evidenced by its banning of Winnie the Pooh because leader Xi Jinping's appearance was compared to the character. This kind of processing extends to real time deletions as evidenced by anything about Chinese dissident and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. Try that search in China and see what comes up.

- Russia wants to be more like China but it doesn't have the technical infrastructure as yet. To date, the Russians have no international firewall but they are working on one. VPNs without proper approval have already been banned but this is difficult to police. This year, Russia passed a law requiring all internet traffic to be funnelled through government-controlled exchanges, a necessary first step in clamping down. Expect them to look more and more like China as time passes.

- Twitter claims it was all just an accident that allowed advertisers to use private info to generate targeted advertising. This was based around email and phone numbers provided for security authentication, which Twitter indicated it doesn't consider to be personal information. Then it matched uploaded marketing lists to individuals. The social media giant seems to be taking the position that these things just happen sometimes. It doesn't look good for Twitter.

- Apple is also caught in the crosshairs due to the most recent in a series of concessions to Beijing, that is, removing any references to Taiwan in the localised version of iOS 13, including an emoji representation of the Taiwanese flag. The US NBA sports organisation also made headlines for apparently grovelling to China; a team manager tweeted support for Hong Kong, triggering a series of apologies. There are some workarounds like changing the default keyboard for the emoji, but quite a few users expressed their displeasure with both actions. Apple now has a long history of kowtowing to China.

- It has been a while since I looked into hard drive technology but new ten platter units claim storage of up to 20TB by 2021. 18TB could be available as soon as mid-2020. Both storage sizes assume no improvement in storage density before then so it may be even better. Taking a quick look back in time, I remember using the original Winchester drive, named after the Winchester 30/30 rifle. This was the first "hard" drive for the PC. I remember it as holding as little as 5 MB of storage in a full height format. A quick check online, however, tells me it was 30 MB, so perhaps my memory is not as good as those original drives.

- Laugh of the week is brought to you by Samsung, more specifically their smart fridge line. The Internet of Things-connected fridge comes with a 21.5-inch screen and three cameras that show you what's inside, even on your mobile phone, in case you want to grab something from the shops on the way home. The Samsung Family Hub also supports music, video and TV entertainment along with stale food detection. Not in the brochure was the bad security certificate notification that popped up at a recent demo in a store in the UK. Anyone using a computer regularly will have seen these before, but it was an amusing read this week.

- Another one for memory lane is a recent release from Symantec that raised an issue with an update to their Endpoint Protection Client. This caused a Windows kernel exception also known as the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Multiple business users were affected. Ah, memories.

James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.

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