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>1. Electromagnetic records that do not operate in accordance with other persons' intention, or gives unauthorized commands which act against their intention, when another person uses a computer.

This makes most software I use punishable by Japanese law.

Heh, yeah. There's no way a programmer can account for user intent, that is, each and every single user's intent. I can't say how many times I've clicked something thinking it would do something else only to be disappointed.
I clicked on the button and my dick did not get 6 inches bigger as advertised; please arrest this man
I had a good chuckle at that, I have not seen one of those ads in many years, I swear it was 90% of the ads in the early 2000's but maybe I don't go on the same kind of sites anymore. I know Newgrounds had some of the sketchiest ads when you think about the age of most people going on that site.
Works just fine for me? What browser are you using?
That is the point. The Japanese approach to creating legal documents is to make them as ambiguous as possible so that they can be interpreted any way the creator likes. This is somewhat true of overbroad legislation in other jurisdictions as well. The authors of the legislation don't want to create a fair and empirical test, what they want is the discretion to arrest anyone they feel has crossed a subjective line.
I thought that was the universal approach of legal documents? cough patents cough.
Sadder yet is that modern browsers let you disable these sort of dialogs. I know Firefox does it, I assume Chrome does as well. Wondering what the browser landscape looks like in Japan if it was serious enough to mandate police force?
IE is still the second-most common browser with 14% of the market after Chrome with 58%
Looks like IE is nice enough to run it in a separate process.
For anyone who wants to try if their browser blocks it:

javascript:for(;;){alert("am%20I%20bloc%20yet?");}

Just copy that into the URL field of your browser (In a new tab, because it will block whatever site you do this from (duh))

Huh, I'm surprised it doesn't have the checkbox to block future alerts. (in chrome, also it stripped the javascript: when pasting)
Yes, chrome seems to automatically strip the javascript: I assume that's a security measure.
Just to remind you all, this is coming from a country whose cybersecurity minister claims to have "never touched a PC in his life".

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026

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Fun fact my waifu confessed she never touched a computer until entering University.

She's terrible at using any technology in general as a result. It's mildly fascinating.

Does your comment really add to the discussion, aside from weirding some people out?
Aside from using the term "waifu" instead of something like "wife" / "SO" / "girlfriend", the comment itself seems fine to me. I've heard stories of low computer literacy in Japan from other sources as well, it is quite interesting.
Well, if I'm not wrong, waifus are fictional characters people take on as a SO of sorts. So it doesn't even qualify as an anecdote, IMO.
Pretty sure that he just tried to use a cute japanese-sounding term to describe his Japanese wife without necessarily knowing what it means.
Wrong in this case. My actual wife is Japanese.

She often gets me to help her out with very, very, very basic things on the computer. She's relatively smart outside of that, speaks fluent English and graduated uni both in Japan and overseas. But it's as if the basic foundation for working out new abstractions on a computer just aren't there. Which is how the discussion came up. I was curious why such a level of computer illiteracy would be present in someone who grew up in the 90s/00s.

People are shocked at hearing about that minister who says he never touched a computer. I was equally shocked when my wife casually told me she never touched a computer until entering University. I wouldn't have thought that to be possible given how much technology I grew up around in the West. I assumed it would have been the same in Japan, but it can't have been.

I guess in a way it doesn't surprise me. On the outside Japan looks like this super technologically advanced country and in reality they still send faxes. It's half stuck decades in the past and halfway planted in the future.

It might be a bit offtopic but I am just wondering, how did you two meet?
I was a regular at a Japanese/English conversation club in my area for many years. She came one time. I sat down and said hello.
You know, when she told me that it weirded me out too. I was like... HOW!!??

I remember growing up in school we always had computers in the classroom and computer literacy programs. It must have meant that at all the schools she attended in Japan growing up they didn't have that. Else there's no way that'd be possible.

Just mildly fascinating. Totally not what I expected. So when the minister in charge of the stuff says he hasn't touched a computer, I can believe it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened in other countries. A lot more people use smartphones and tablets than desktop computers these days.
It adds a new discussion! That discussion is titled, "Is sk0g an overbearing asshole?" Let's jump in and find out what HN thinks!
I find this interesting as I have always thought of Japan as a high-tech nation and thought that especially young people should be very good with computers.
That same minister is launching a cyber attack on unsecured IoT devices to get the country to strengthen its stuff. He seems far the from the worst guy for the job.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tel...

Sounds like a white-hat stuff to me - probing the security and reporting found vulnerabilities to owners. Genuinely curious - why do you write it like this a bad thing? As long as they don't exploit what they find, of course.

Better let good-intended actors do that before ill-intended actors do the same.

I think it’s an awesome thing to do. Heck I think they should push even harder than they’re currently doing. This is the only real way that I see governments can practically enhance average national security.

I wrote that as a way to counter the assumed image of him being incompetent because he himself doesn’t use computers. Perhaps it was unclear.

It will be interesting to see if this is prosecuted. The percentage of prosecuted cases in Japan is much lower than in many other countries. Unless the reporting has got something wrong (always a possibility!) it doesn't seem to get over the bar for quality as I understand it (which, to be fair, is not very well).
Coinhive case IS harmful and they are not that innocent - if "posting Coinhive on their web sites" means "mining use visitors' browsers".
I'd say ads are harmful as well, don't see people fighting those this much.
“People does not fight harmful ads for now“ does not mean coinhive should be added to web sites without users’ consensus.

And It’s more harmful than ads as users know explicitly whether there are ads on web sites and have a choice to not visit them anymore. But silently mining without warning users of that is worse.

But ads are okay to add without users' consensus? Not really.

I wouldn't say mining was explicitly without warning, computer fans usually spun up.

The police started acting long after the website owner removed Coinhive from his website.
That really depends; if it's communicated to the user that, by having the website open, they are mining cryptocurrency for the website owner as a sort of "payment" for being able to use the site, then that's totally ok. If they weren't informed, then it's still just a minor issue, at least compared to large-scale tracking of users that many other sites do.
You're confusing morality with legality. The morality regarding coinhive is a controversial topic, but its legality should still be defined under the rule of law. The Japanese police is acting on dubious legal grounds in arresting coinhive users given the lack of legal precedence and the vague wording of the law. Regardless of our opinions on coinhive, it is still worrying to see the police make arrests for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
I think there are two things here: first is that Japan is so safe that police is actively looking for cases to pursue. I remember reading of police putting (as a trap) a case of beer in an open car at a shopping plaza, monitoring it for a week before finally nabbing a retiree who opened a door (whether to "steal" the beer or just to investigate). In and of itself such safely is, IMO, something to celebrate.

The second is that the justice system is structured so that the state is always right and the criminal system famously has a conviction rate that exceeds 99%. Couple this with the vaguely defined laws (as cited in the article) and the desire by police to find some criminals, somewhere, and the results can be ugly. Dangerous to the bystanders at best, enabling local dictatorial powers at worst. My 2c.

I don't think we can assume that "Japan is so safe that..." from these cases.
We don’t have to assume that Japan is safe. We have statistics for that.
Unless you are a woman.

I was sadly not surprised when I heard from a friend that she had been groped as a preteen in a department store. Worse yet, none of the rest of us were surprised to hear it. It’s normal and unreported.

Likewise, there are some claims I’ve read that the suicide rate is high because of murders treated as suicide by police (who have their own quotas) and age inflation due to relatives who don’t report the death of relatives in order to collect pension funds.

TLDR: Statistics are based on reported crime. It’s safe but not as safe as statistics show.

Sadly, those kinds of misreportings are common in other countries and places too. My own home of New York City has been hit by a number of underreporting scandals. I have no reason to believe they are less common elsewhere than Japan. So I still think national crime statistics provide the best basis for comparison.
Is the punishment for groping on trains still apologising to the victim on a train platform?
I don't know where you've got that idea, but I'm pretty sure gropers go to jail.
From an article mentioned by another poster:

> As for sexual assault, groping and molestation on crowded trains and elsewhere is so widespread (and so unlikely to be reported to the police) that NGOs such as the Osaka-based Chikan Deterrence Activity Centre suggest that almost every young woman experiences it at some point.

https://www.tokyoreview.net/2017/08/myth-japans-bored-police...

That. If you speak with Japanese women (in Japanese) they don’t feel safe at all and they have reason for that. There is a lot of perverts here. One day my girlfriend called because someone opened the door of her appartement. Another friend had a guy pretend to be the gas guy to enter their appartement just to retract when he saw the size of his shoes in the corridor. A female friend (foreigner, well endowed)... groped at the Shibuya crossing, etc. Even male friend have bad stories about guy trying to taxi them somewhere.
> It’s normal and unreported.

There is no question that victims of sexual crimes needs to be heard out more. However, your statement is an exaggeration to say the least. Groping is a frequent and well-documented topic on Japanese news. But as is often the case with sensational topics like crime, it is not as commonplace as you make it sound like.

I also doubt that the people around you were "unsurprised" to hear such things happening to your friend. It's just easy to imagine Japanese people displaying seeming indifference because of the sensitivity of the topic. At times, Japanese people can be reluctant to clearly express their opinions.

The questionable claim is that the arrests in this article happened because Japan is so safe.
No, police looking for a crime when there is none is not something to celebrate.

Your second point is spot on, though.

I think they were saying that it's a cause to celebrate that police in Japan are bored, not the things they do to fill that boredom.
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make. I could have expressed it clearer.
Well, many people would take the first case (no crime, and the police trying to find the smallest bs as crime to pass their time), over a country with lots of crime.

(Sure, there's also the perfect case, no crime, and the police sitting idly, but in the real world we rarely have the "perfect" case, and "no crime/police fishing for people stealing a beer case left as a thief trap" is close enough to perfect).

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and this is a clear example of injustice. It's a slippery slope to effectively say, "we sometimes punish the wrong people, but in return we get a very safe society", because how can you feel safe in a society that may, at any time, randomly select you for punishment? It might not be "crime" per se, but when you're locked up, does it really matter if it's all by the book? Doesn't that mean the book is bad?
Another thing is the lack of understanding, or almost disdain of technicality when it comes to IT among politicians and high ranked officials. The tendency is probably common among politicians everywhere, but Japan is particularly bad as the majority of these committees members have only legal backgrounds and don't even know what HTML is (and their contempt of studying them).
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Give me exemple of foreign politician that know HTML please (besides Taiwan ones). We got got a lot of funding for IT related stuff here from the government.
The 99% figure is a common misconception. Prosecutors in Japan are underfunded, so they only try to convict rock solid cases, among other factors.

This Wikipedia entry seems to flagrantly defy wiki rules but seems more informative for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_J...

isn't prosecuting a prank orthogonal to your argument of only prosecuting rock solid cases?
I think "rock solid" in this case means highly likely to result in a conviction, not necessarily "of great importance."
So far, I haven't heard that any of the 3 people in custody (補導) for these pranks have been prosecuted (起訴).
However, the above link does point out a convention ripe for abuse:

Because suspects are put through continuous interrogation which could last up to 23 days as well as isolation from the outside world, including access to lawyers, both the Japanese judiciary and the public are well aware that confession of guilt can easily be forced.

The Nissan CEO wasn't allowed to see or contact his family/friends for 3 months while he was in jail. Which he spent entirely in solitary.

People without good lawyers and a strong grasp of the law would be far more liable to just give in.

The point the articles continues to make is actually the opposite of what you're implying, the very next sentence says:

Consequently, the court (and the public) take the view that mere confession of guilt alone is never any sufficient ground for conviction.

Instead, for confession to be a valid evidence for conviction, the Japanese court requires confession to include revelation of verifiable factual matter which only the perpetrator of the crime could have known such as the location of an undiscovered body or the time and place the murder weapon was purchased, a fact about the crime scene, etc. Furthermore, to safeguard against the possibility that the interrogator implanting such knowledge into confession, the prosecutor must prove that such revelation of secret was unknown to the police until the point of confession.

I find this fascinating. Specifically, this part:

While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture, a guilty suspect is likely to crack under prolonged interrogation in isolation and make a damning confession. Activists claim that the Japanese justice system (and Japanese public to some extent) consider that prolonged interrogation of suspect in isolation without access to lawyers is justified to solve the criminal cases without risking the miscarriage of justice.

This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me that I cannot pass any judgment on it without knowing its efficacy relative to percentage of false confessions.

The argument of this technique's validity is somewhat undermined in the next paragraph where the authors notes that false confessions still happen, so I'll definitely give you that!

As an aside, as someone upthread alluded to, this is a fascinating example of an article that breaks almost all of the Wikipedia editing rules but is surprisingly informative.. probably more informative than it would have been if it omitted the synthesis and OR

> While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture

This is, of course, untrue; desperate, babbling can be accurate by coincidence; if you do enough torturing of innocent people, you'll get a measurably-different-from-zero rate of accurate, previously unknown information.

> This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me

The desire for sufficient proof of guilt before passing criminal sentence is very similar to the theory of proof underlying the utterly pervasive use of torture in some Western systems in the early modern period (which for serious offenses tended to require clear proof like the two-witnesses-to-the-same-overt-act rule still enshrined in the US Constitution for treason, but allowed weaker indications to be validated by a confession extracted under torture, so long as “freely” confirmed thereafter.)

What about the Yakuza?
Yakuza are tolerated by police unless they cross certain lines. They perform an unpleasant but important function of keeping foreign gangs out.
I am curious: they never cooperated with foreign organized crime? I find it hard to believe.
Well they are reputed to be involved in drug trafficking with other groups outside Japan, but they maintain control over foreign gang activity inside Japan.

Edit: just to clarify, Yakuza is not a single group. There are big differences between the various units. Many of them don’t touch drug trade, some are involved in human trafficking, and others seem to be mainly symbolic.

so, in effect, Yakuza is not that different from other businesses.
Calling them a business describes it spot on.

Afaik they are pretty much to most "corporate" like crime syndicate out there. Complete with charity drives for good PR [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yakuza/yakuza-among-first...

I've always found the relationship between Japan and the Yakuza to be fascinating. You have a country with an ostensibly lawful-good alignment, collectivists with a strong sense of social order and responsibility, where what would be minor drug crimes anywhere else carry hard prison time, and guns and knives are strictly regulated. Actors and politicians with Yakuza ties are scandalized by the media, yet the Yamaguchi-Gumi give out candy to kids for Halloween as if they were Boy Scouts, if the Boy Scouts had merit badges for child porn, human trafficking, money laundering and drugs.

And they're apparently all over the video game industry in Japan, the way the Mafia was all over construction and sanitation in New York during the 1970s. I just kind of assume they made Konami an offer they couldn't refuse when that company recently decided to leave non-mobile games and pivot into pachinko and slot machines.

It’s easy to find their offices in most cities. They’re not hiding. The one in my neighborhood looks like it could be a software company or a bank office. The plaque outside identifies a gang that is centuries old. Many of the homes in the area announce the owner’s rank outside.
I'm Japanese studying cyber security at university, and very nervous now. Sigh.
"This page seemed to have been around since a few years ago, and it appears that there were quite a number of people who posted each other this URL on some particular internet forums. It is still not clear why only these three were arrested by the Hyogo Prefectural Police under such circumstance. They may not have any specific reasons for that."

Maybe the police only wanted to make an example of those three people and discourage the rest of posting the URL.

This decision seems to have been deeply irrational and poorly informed in the first place, so I don't see much of a point in looking for logic in their actions.
I'd like to shed some light on this(and other Japanese tendencies) from a different perspective.

Human societies can be seen as humonculus to the humans that make them up in many ways.

One such way is that societies tend to reflect the broad strokes of Freudian tendencies that the citizens tend towards. The culture reflects the society. Not hard to understand.

In the case of Japan, it is clear after consideration that the society is incredibly super-ego driven. (That correlates to "Parent" driven for you Transactional Analysis folks).

So how that translates to the society is that parental, guiding, cohesive, social, aesthetic, moral rules are favored over Id or Egotistical rules.

In contrast, The United States is a primarily ego-tistical country(Adult-dominant, in Transactional Analysis terms). That's just as fine as a Superego-leaning society, but it is DIFFERENT.

An ego-tistical society will focus on the power of the individual, and will honor rationality and purpose foremost. Group cohesion and like-mindedness will fall to the wayside unless picked up by the superego driven parts of the culture.

A problem arises when any one of the three parts (id, ego, superego) of a culture become too imbalanced in a specific direction. In this case, the parental superego is overriding the will of the individual. The society is asking too hard what they "SHOULD" be like rather than "WHY" they should be like it. "Should" is the heuristic function for superego decisions. "Why" for ego decisions. *

Notice that when a child starts figuring out that they're an individual with choice they start asking "why?" quite often. Sometimes ad nauseum. Why why why why why. The egotistical little buggers. Uncle Sam would be proud.

But that's not a problem for Japan. They have the problem of the child that learned just because they can do something, doesn't mean they should. It's a valuable lesson clearly, but not if you forget why you're doing all of this in the first place.

We create society to empower the individual, and we create the individual to empower society. Lean too hard in either direction and the cycle breaks down, eventually disempowering both the individual and society.

I'm not claiming that either the USA or Japan are leaning "too hard" in either direction, but they are leaning. Lots of apparent insanity has been cropping up in Japanese news lately. The freudian psychoanalyst might try to deduce the imbalanced parts of the patient's psyche that have given rise to such "insanities".

*If you're interested in finding an adjective for a primarily id-driven society like Brazil, you may consider how you would "LIKE" to be.

Yeah I live in a country were we try to balance individual freedom with a social Borg collective. Because neither Japan OR the US are very appealing.

Its bloody hard. Trying to put a square inside a triangle like those children puzzles.

Freudian psychology has been mostly debunked and is not considered a valid tool for analyzing societies.
Ah, then use the Berne Transactional Analysis model. I provided that terminology as well.

Do you have any problems with viewing the world through the `Parent, Adult, Child` simplified lens?

Yes I have problems with viewing the world through the "Parent, Adult, Child" simplified lens. It doesn't have any real scientific backing and doesn't make actionable, testable predictions.
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The only people who think Freudian psychology (and Freud’s more general writings) don’t have value are those people who haven’t seriously studied them.

Not to say that they are 100% true, but there’s a lot of (profound) truth there.

He didn't say it doesn't have value, he said it has been mostly debunked. There is still value in its analysis, despite there being serious issues with a lot of his work
Could you please clarify what value you think Freud's writings have beyond historical interest? I am asking for something which meets the following criteria: 1. non-obvious, 2. supported by actual science, 3. useful in practical terms for dealing with other people.
> 1. Electromagnetic records that do not operate in accordance with other persons' intention, or gives unauthorized commands which act against their intention, when another person uses a computer.

They should arrest every second mobile app developer. They collect data from the phone without permission. And then please arrest Google Analytics developers as well.

Has anyone ever been harmed by Google Analytics? I am skeptical.
Are you implying that a Javascript redirect loop -- something fixed by simply closing your browser -- is actually harming people in some way? Minor annoyance is not harm.
That's precisely the point.

The law doesn't make code which causes harm illegal, it makes code which does not operate in accordance with the user's intention illegal.

Think about that for a second. Think about every program ever written which did not operate in accordance with the user's intention. Literally every bug is punishable by three years in prison.

This is a classic example of legislators saying "We don't understand the problem, so lets just make everything illegal and rely on the police and prosecutors using their discretion to only put the real criminals in prison," followed by the police and prosecutors not using their discretion and putting a non-criminal in prison.

Thank you, I missed the sarcasm. I thought the comment was quoting and agreeing with the law.
I don't have a lot of respect for Japanese police. It seems they while away their time inventing entrapment scenarios, arresting people for pranks, apparently, and measuring car accidents for hours on end, but don't do a damn thing when something serious is going on. For example, there have been several cases in the news over the years where women go to the police to complain that they are being stalked, only to have the police do nothing. Far too often, the woman ends up raped, assaulted, or dead.

The most famous case of the police being a bunch of bumbling idiots (or at least the one that haunts my mind the most) is that of Junko Furuta (which happened right after I first went to Japan in 1989). She was kidnapped, raped by over 100 men, held captive in the house of her abductor, and tortured to death over a period of 44 days. Around the two-week mark of her ordeal, someone told the police they thought a girl was being held against her will in the house. When the police showed up, the perpetrator told them, there's nobody in our house, and the police said that was good enough for them and left. Fuckers! Those two officers were fired, but that isn't an isolated case. Police not doing anything and people being injured or losing their lives seems to happen far more than it should in Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta

The 30th anniversary of Junk Furuta's death is next week, on April 2nd. ALL of her perpetrators are roaming free in Japan.

> raped by over 100 men

I think you mean less than. The wikipedia article that you listed said that "approximately 100 people knew about Junko Furuta's captivity" and that only some of them participated in the rape.

Still, that's quite horrifying.

I'll have to check. I've read a lot about this case and I know there is some conflicting information on the Internet about it. I remember reading on a Japanese site that it was around 100 men who raped her. If I can find an English citation, I'll add it. Either way, what that girl suffered was horrific and it didn't need to be that way, had the police done their job.
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Correction: Junko's death was on January 4, 1989. It is her funeral that was on April 2, 1989.
Finally someone is going to jail for Javascript
So every newspaper with ads that track you can be prosecuted in Japan?