tardigrada

@tardigrada@beehaw.org

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China’s biggest chipmaker SMIC warns of ‘fierce’ competition as it misses quarterly profit expectations ( www.cnbc.com )

SMIC, China’s biggest contract chip manufacturer, is seen as critical to Beijing’s ambitions of cutting foreign reliance in its domestic semiconductor industry as the U.S. continues to curb China’s tech power. SMIC lags behind Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, according to analysts....

tardigrada OP ,

Here's another one: https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/p/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-that-speaks-volumes

tardigrada OP ,

As one user in this thread said, it might be a feature required by the CCP.

Breakthrough promises secure and private quantum computing at home ( www.physics.ox.ac.uk )

The full power of next-generation quantum computing could soon be harnessed by millions of individuals and companies thanks to a breakthrough by scientists at Oxford’s Department of Physics guaranteeing security and privacy. The advance promises to unlock the transformative potential of cloud-based quantum computing and is...

tardigrada OP ,

"Guaranteeing security and privacy" could a strong argument imho.

The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns ( www.smh.com.au )

Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....

Surveilling Alone: In the U.S., home security cameras are booming in an era of rising crime and declining trust. But they’re driving neighbors further apart. ( www.thenewatlantis.com )

Today, a different form of efficient design is eliminating “eyes on the street” — by replacing them with technological ones. The proliferation of neighborhood surveillance technologies such as Ring cameras and digital neighborhood-watch platforms and apps such as Nextdoor and Citizen have freed us from the constraints of...

tardigrada OP ,

@driving_crooner

I was wondering the same, especially as the article doesn't mention any numbers or the like. But I didn't want to change the original title.

Slovenia: Privatised municipal surveillance ineffective to increase security, but good for "spying on innocent citizens walking through the park", group says ( edri.org )

A CCTV company owned by the municipality of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, had sued the Slovenian Data Protection Authority (DPA) in order to block the release of municipal CCTV system data. But the ruling of an administrative court made it clear that making the CCTV system data available is in the public’s interest, not...

"Digital sovereignty": German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein ditches Microsoft for Linux and Open Source alternatives ( blog.documentfoundation.org )

Schleswig-Holstein, the northern German federal state, will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration. With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government...

U.S. government blasts Microsoft for lax security measures in report on Chinese hacks ( www.dhs.gov )

In its report published this week, the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) says that the June 2023 online breach by Chinese threat actors who accessed U.S. government emails right before Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was to visit China, was "preventable"....

Citizen Lab: "Not only the Chinese government, but also US-based firms, are complicit in the political and religious censoring of content on China-accessible platforms" ( citizenlab.ca )

In its submission to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab gives recomnendations to hold Chinese and U.S. firms accountable for their involvement in online censorship and assisting victims of digital abuse and intimidation.

Editing memories, spying on our bodies, normalising weird goggles: Apple’s new Vision Pro has big ambitions ( theconversation.com )

Apple Vision Pro is a mixed-reality headset – which the company hopes is a “revolutionary spatial computer that transforms how people work, collaborate, connect, relive memories, and enjoy entertainment” – that begins shipping to the public (in the United States)....

The Global Green Energy Transition Has an Uyghur Forced Labor Problem, Report Says ( investorsforhumanrights.org )

The solar and electric vehicle industries are critical for the world's urgent transition away from fossil fuels. However, both industries source many of their critical inputs from the Uyghur Region, a region where the Chinese government is systematically persecuting the native Uyghur, Turkic, and Muslim-majority peoples,...

tardigrada OP ,

Forced labor appears to have a broader meaning than slavery as far as I can understand, for example, from the ILO definition or here. But I don't know either.

tardigrada OP ,

Texas wants solar energy but forced labor in China is a concern

While the deployment of affordable renewable energy is great for Texas, the broader solar supply chain is cause for concern. Unfortunately, many solar panel manufacturers are entirely reliant on cheap Chinese materials with opaque traceability and forced labor concerns in the Xinjiang province. The State Department has concluded that since Xinjiang produces 45% of the global polysilicon capacity and a significant amount of silicon metal, much of the global solar supply chain could include inputs made with forced labor from the region.

As a result, U.S. Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in late 2021, creating a rebuttable presumption that all goods, made in whole or in part, from the region contain forced labor and are thus barred from entering U.S. commerce. Customs and Border Protection is tasked with enforcing the law and Congress specifically directed CBP to target polysilicon from Xinjiang. Since enforcement began in June 2022, CBP has detained over $2 billion in goods.

‘Significant security loophole’ found in Google software container system ( therecord.media )

The issue affected Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a system used to deploy, scale and manage how applications are “containerized.” GKE — the tech giant’s implementation of the open-source Kubernetes project — is used widely in healthcare, education, retail and financial services for data processing as well as...

tardigrada OP ,

Google makes billions from targeted advertising every year, don't expect it to improve privacy unless it's forced to by regulation or competition.

Yeah, I have been wondering my whole life that there are so many people believing in 'privacy tools' by companies like Google. This is one of the things that mystifies me most.

Court documents underscore Meta's 'historical reluctance' to protect children on Instagram ( apnews.com )

New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta in December, saying the company failed to protect young users from exposure to child sexual abuse material and allowed adults to solicit explicit imagery from them....

You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds ( gizmodo.com )

For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline. Google disagrees.

OpenAI CEO Altman: future AI depends on energy breakthrough ( www.reuters.com )

Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI....

tardigrada ,

At least to some (large?) extent this is another red herring to distract from other and arguably more important AI topics such as copyright issues as well as legal and ethical issues imho.

tardigrada , (edited )

Amazon has been having problems with books written by LLMs for almost a year, and it doesn't appear to do anything about it. For example:

AI Detection Startups Say Amazon Could Flag AI Books. It Doesn't (Sep 2023)

A new nightmare for writers shows how AI deepfakes could upend the book industry—and Amazon isn't helping (August 2023)

These are just two examples, you'll find many more. But people keep buying there and support this business.

[Edit typo.]

TikTok restricts tool used by researchers - and its critics - to assess content on its platform ( apnews.com )

Among others, the social media company, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has removed certain hashtags from the Creative Center that some online researchers had stored for analysis. They include topics that would be seen as controversial to the Chinese government – such as “UyghurGenocide” and...

tardigrada OP ,

Just something like that?

The activist who’s taking on artificial intelligence in the courts: ‘This is the fight of our lives’ ( english.elpais.com )

The American Matthew Butterick has started a legal crusade against generative artificial intelligence (AI). In 2022, he filed the first lawsuit in the history of this field against Microsoft, one of the companies that develop these types of tools (GitHub Copilot). Today, he’s coordinating four class action lawsuits that bring...

Teslas Have a Minor Issue Where the Wheels Fly Off While Driving, Documents Show ( 1ft.io )

Tens of thousands of Tesla owners have had the suspension or steering of their vehicles — even in practically brand new ones — fail in recent years. Newly obtained documents show how Tesla engineers internally called these incidents “flaws” and “failures.”...

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