RE: https://mastodon.opencloud.lu/@BrideOfLinux/117169649204918442

You've likely used this but didn't know it...

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #AfternoonShow

Talking Heads:
  🎵 Heaven

#TalkingHeads

▶️ 🪄 Automagic 🔊 show 📻 playlist on Spotify

▶️ Song/Cover on Bandcamp:

Talking Heads - Heaven (TELL N...

I left potatoes in the ceiling.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:yc54nj2zlnqrdotewpkbrauy/post/3mu3rcfkzfx2a

"The system is now vastly more complex. Aside from the ubiquitous cameras, it is not possible to move around a city on any form of transport or pay for anything without the apps, and they always know who and where you are. In Yangzhou’s Geyuan 个园, a lovely traditional courtyard garden of rock and bamboo, you need to watch a video advertisement and scan your face to get toilet paper. Once only: the dispenser remembers who you are and won’t give you seconds. Some parts of Beijing look like a spoof science fiction film about a surveillance state: we visited a friend in a part of Haidian District where there are a lot of government buildings and housing compounds. There are horizontal bars above the street every 50 meters, each bar holding more than a dozen different cameras—we counted them. Our friend pointed out the different types: that one reads license plates, this one is for facial recognition of pedestrians, this one scans the faces of people inside cars, that one is used for gait recognition, who knows what that odd-looking one does? His apartment complex gate no longer had security guards: During the pandemic they were replaced with face-scanners that admit only registered residents.

The ever present surveillance must be one factor behind the remarkable improvement in public manners everywhere we went in China. Very little spitting, no jostling to get off planes, people seem to respect personal space much more than they used to. But it’s not just the cameras and facial recognition software. One friend in his fifties in Beijing said that the pandemic had changed everyone, but also that his parents’ generation were mostly dead or housebound—“they all had really rough manners because of the way China was when they were young.” WeChat and the other apps also mean there’s far less need for physical queues, and no point in jostling to get ahead if you are in one."

https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/postcard/app-life-china

#China #Surveillance #Privacy #Algorithms #Automation #PoliceState

"The system is now vastly more complex. Aside from the ubiquitous cameras, it is not possible to move around a city on any form of transport or pay for anything without the apps, and they always know who and where you are. In Yangzhou’s Geyuan 个园, a lovely traditional courtyard garden of rock and bamboo, you need to watch a video advertisement and scan your face to get toilet paper. Once only: the dispenser remembers who you are and won’t give you seconds. Some parts of Beijing look like a spoof science fiction film about a surveillance state: we visited a friend in a part of Haidian District where there are a lot of government buildings and housing compounds. There are horizontal bars above the street every 50 meters, each bar holding more than a dozen different cameras—we counted them. Our friend pointed out the different types: that one reads license plates, this one is for facial recognition of pedestrians, this one scans the faces of people inside cars, that one is used for gait recognition, who knows what that odd-looking one does? His apartment complex gate no longer had security guards: During the pandemic they were replaced with face-scanners that admit only registered residents.

The ever present surveillance must be one factor behind the remarkable improvement in public manners everywhere we went in China. Very little spitting, no jostling to get off planes, people seem to respect personal space much more than they used to. But it’s not just the cameras and facial recognition software. One friend in his fifties in Beijing said that the pandemic had changed everyone, but also that his parents’ generation were mostly dead or housebound—“they all had really rough manners because of the way China was when they were young.” WeChat and the other apps also mean there’s far less need for physical queues, and no point in jostling to get ahead if you are in one."

https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/postcard/app-life-china

#China #Surveillance #Privacy #Algorithms #Automation #PoliceState