Technology

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Emails sent to a Chinese dissident living in the Netherlands over his petition for asylum for his family members detained last year in Thailand were apparently fake, Dutch authorities said Friday.

The announcement was the first public statement from officials in the Netherlands in the unusual case of Gao Zhi, whose family members were stranded for months at a Thai immigration center while en route to the Netherlands and allegedly accused of sending bomb threats.

Based on emails he said he received, Gao at the time alleged that the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service had revoked his family’s visas, which would have allowed them to travel to the Netherlands.

He showed purported screenshots of the emails to the media, including one that ultimately said visas for his family members were revoked as they were being investigated for bomb threats made in Thailand. It remains unclear who sent the emails.

Gao declined to forward the emails to The Associated Press at the time, saying he feared this could jeopardize his family’s asylum case. The AP could not verify the authenticity of his claims.

On Friday, Britt Enthoven, a spokesperson for the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the “message indeed doesn’t seem to be from” the service.

“I cannot give you any further information about the message,” Enthoven said.

Gao, though critical of the Chinese government online, had never been an activist back home. But his story at the time raised concerns that Chinese authorities may have made the bomb threats in the name of Gao’s family to try and control his political activities abroad.

Gao’s wife and two children were traveling to the Netherlands to join him in June and July last year, and transiting through Thailand. His wife, Liu Fengling, and daughter Gao Han were detained by Thai police for overstaying their visitors visa. His son was not detained.

A spokesperson for the Royal Thai police at the time did not respond to AP queries about the case.

Gao turned to public advocacy to try and get his family out, and was helped by Wang Jingyu, another Chinese dissident living in the Netherlands who had gained prominence after being detained in Dubai for questioning the Chinese death toll figures in the 2020 border clashes with Indian soldiers in the Karakoram mountains.

Gao’s family was released last October, but only managed to travel to the Netherlands with a proper visa earlier this month, he said.

Separately, Gao has since claimed that Wang defrauded him of thousands of dollars while allegedly trying to help him during this process — claims that Wang dismissed as “nonsense” in a message to the AP.

Bob Fu, a U.S.-based activist who runs ChinaAid, a Christian rights organization, and who helped Wang when he was detained in Dubai, said that the group was forced to pay thousands of dollars of phone bills Wang allegedly made while in the Netherlands.

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Original article behind paywall

China has long sought to discredit Chinese critics abroad, but targeting a 16-year daughter of a Chinese dissident in the United States by falsely portraying her as a drug user, an arsonist and a prostitute, is an new escalation, one security expert says.

• U.S. Federal law prohibits severe online harassment or threats, but that appears to be no deterrent to China’s efforts.

• "They’re exporting their repression efforts and human rights abuses — targeting, threatening and harassing those who dare question their legitimacy or authority even outside China, including right here in the U.S.,” Christopher A. Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the American Bar Association in Washington in April.

• Mr. Wray said China was exerting “intense, almost Mafia-style pressure” to try to silence dissidents now living legally in the United States, including activities online and off, like posting fliers near their homes.

• Deng Yuwen, a prominent Chinese writer who now lives in exile in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the U.S., has regularly criticized China and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. China’s reaction of late has been severe, with crude and ominously personal attacks online.

• A covert propaganda network linked to the country’s security services has barraged not just Mr. Deng but also his teenage daughter with sexually suggestive and threatening posts on popular social media platforms, according to researchers at both Clemson University and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

• The content, posted by users with fake identities, has appeared in replies to Mr. Deng’s posts on X, the social platform, as well as the accounts of public schools in their community, where the daughter, who is 16, has been falsely portrayed as a drug user, an arsonist and a prostitute.

• Vulgar comments targeting the girl have also shown up on community pages on Facebook and even sites like TripAdvisor; Patch, a community news platform; and Niche, a website that helps parents choose schools, according to the researchers. As soon as these posts are deleted, Chinese trolls switch to new accounts to leave attacking text and language again.

• The harassment fits a pattern of online intimidation that has raised alarms in many countries where China’s attacks have become increasingly brazen. The campaign has included thousands of posts the researchers have linked to a network of social media accounts known as Spamouflage or Dragonbridge, an arm of the country’s vast propaganda apparatus.

• China has long sought to discredit Chinese critics, but targeting a teenager in the United States is an escalation, said Darren Linvill, a founder of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, whose researchers documented the campaign against Mr. Deng.

• Federal law prohibits severe online harassment or threats, but that appears to be no deterrent to China’s efforts.

Archived version

This is the result of an investigation by DoubleThink Lab, a research organization in Taiwan.

Beijing assaults Taiwan with a nonstop barrage of conspiracy theories and lies to undermine people’s faith in democracy — and China’s efforts are getting more sophisticated. Taiwan must do even more to fight back, DoubleThink Lab concludes.

Undermining the ruling Democratic Progressive Party DPP’s electoral chances is only one of the objectives of the CCP’s information-manipulation efforts. There are at least three others:

1. “Selling” the CCP’s governance model to make the prospect of unification more attractive.
2. Inducing anxiety about Taiwan’s strategic situation and making resistance seem futile by flexing the asymmetry in military power with China and eroding faith that Taiwan’s allies will come to its aid.
3. Unraveling the fabric of Taiwan’s democracy by undermining people’s attachment to the status quo, driving polarization, and chipping away at trust in institutions and government.

[...] the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been making significant progress on two of its main objectives. But the news isn’t all bad.

The CCP has utterly failed to sell Taiwanese voters on its governance model. [...] the majority of people in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese, as opposed to Chinese or both Taiwanese and Chinese, and that they overwhelmingly prefer Taiwan’s independent status quo. Furthermore, less than 10 percent view China as trustworthy. Even the Kuomintang (KMT, or Chinese Nationalist Party), Taiwan’s former authoritarian ruling party, took steps to distance itself from Beijing before the election.

Why did the CCP fail in attracting Taiwanese voters to its governance model? No doubt certain hard realities of recent years were simply too difficult to overcome: The CCP government locked covid patients in their apartments and left them to die in building fires; it committed horrific human-rights violations against China’s Uyghur minority and crushed civil society in Hong Kong; and it persistently lobs military threats and engages in diplomatic bullying against Taiwan and others, all while the Chinese economy continues to slide. This makes for a tough sell.

But that is no cause for complacency. CCP-controlled social-media platforms may offer a new avenue for appealing to Taiwanese citizens. Research has correlated TikTok use with increased pro-China views among apolitical audiences and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) supporters, who had previously been independent or swing voters. [...] Additionally, Doublethink’s research on WeChat influencers found that instructions provided to apolitical-content creators in Taiwan trying to sell products to China advise that 10 percent of their feeds should consist of pro-unification content for algorithmic optimization. We believe that the CCP is using its control of lucrative social-media algorithms to encourage influencers to slip what is essentially propaganda into otherwise apolitical content. [...] The CCP’s information-manipulation narratives strike at Taiwan’s democracy in numerous ways: Narratives about government corruption undermine faith in democracy as a system that delivers for society; narratives about election fraud cast doubt on electoral processes and democracy’s legitimacy; and emotionally manipulative content helps to polarize society. Polarization, in turn, can undermine the legislative process — encouraging lawmakers to grandstand for partisan audiences, close space for discussion and concessions, and ride roughshod over democratic processes. [...] In the aggregate, Taiwan’s voters report satisfaction with democracy and trust in electoral processes. [...] The polarization that Taiwan is now seeing has been driven in part by long-running CCP information-manipulation campaigns pushing disinformation and conspiracy theories about government corruption and antidemocratic behavior. [...] [Taiwan's] resilience has rightly been credited to a tireless and dynamic whole-of-society response. Doublethink Lab commissioned an international-elections expert to develop a model capturing the key components of this approach. The result is expressed with the acronym “POWER”: Taiwan’s response is purpose driven, with a diverse range of citizens rallying around an existential threat; organic, driven from the bottom-up and decentralized [...]

• Bing’s translation and search engine services in China censor more extensively than Chinese competitors’ services do, according to new research.
• Microsoft has maintained its heavy censorship of China-based services despite growing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers.
• Chinese tech firms are motivated to censor less severely, experts say.

Bing’s censorship rules in China are so stringent that even mentioning President Xi Jinping leads to a complete block of translation results, according to new research by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab that has been shared exclusively with Rest of World.

The institute found that Microsoft censors its Bing translation results more than top Chinese services, including Baidu Translate and Tencent Machine Translation. Bing became the only major foreign translation and search engine service available in China after Google withdrew from the Chinese market in 2010.

“If you try to translate five paragraphs of text, and two sentences contain a mention of Xi, Bing’s competitors in China would delete those two sentences and translate the rest. In our testing, Bing always censors the entire output. You get a blank. It is more extreme,” Jeffrey Knockel, senior research associate at Citizen Lab, told Rest of World.

Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is "dangerous malware" that's secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Griffin cited research and media reports exposing Temu's allegedly nefarious design, which "purposely" allows Temu to "gain unrestricted access to a user's phone operating system, including, but not limited to, a user's camera, specific location, contacts, text messages, documents, and other applications."

"Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users," Griffin's complaint said. "Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/258478

• At the Public Spaces conference in the Netherlands on June 6th, Alexis Kauffmann from the French Ministry of Education and co-founder of the non-profit software platform FraMaSoft, discussed France’s move towards a comprehensive open source-based education strategy, 2023-2027. The aim is to achieve digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, which are widely used in education systems in other countries.
• “One of the key actions is to offer authoring tools to our teacher and tools based on open source software. No Google Classrooms. Not Microsoft Teams. We have chosen Moodle Elea as a learning management system,” explained Alexis Kauffmann who also pointed to other tools to learn to code and mathematics like Jupyter.
• France uses an app platform with open-source tools like Nextcloud, Big Blue Botton, and Collaboration. They even have their own ‘github’ (owned by Microsoft) called La Forge, where teachers share code.
• “To support this, we have public funds for digital commons, we organise workshops and finance the software, and therefore we can do without Microsoft and Google,” Alexis Kauffmann explained.

“I am not saying it is easy. The biggest obstacle is political courage to resist the lobbyists both at a national and European level,” he said and pointed to other risks like the quality of big tech’s products, being isolated in Europa, and artificial intelligence.

He hopes other European countries will follow suit and quoted The European Council Recommendation on education:

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/200056

• When the US House of Representatives passed the legislation that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok, a popular video app, to an American company or face being banned in the US, citing national security concerns, the Chinese government criticized the move as “an act of bullying.” Yet, ironically, TikTok is also unavailable in China, and it is not an isolated case. For example, Alibaba’s popular messaging platform, Ding Talk, is also unavailable in China, and its local version is called Ding Ding.
• A recent research report on Apple censorship in China, “Isolation by Design,” conducted by the App Censorship project under GreatFire, a censorship monitor group based in China, indicates that more than 60 percent of the world’s top 100 apps in China Apple App stores are either unavailable or inaccessible in China. These apps include Google Maps, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Messenger and Twitter.
• While China has warned the West against economic decoupling, the country’s censorship system is designed for the purpose of isolation, as highlighted by the GreatFire research team.

Aside from the game sector, the App Censorship research team has identified eight sensitive categories from the list of apps banned by Apple in China:

1. Virtual private network – VPN: 240 unavailable apps including Lantern VPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN, Nord VPN.

2. Privacy & Digital Security: 29 unavailable apps including Signal, ProtonMail, DuckDuckGo.

3. LGBTQ+ & Dating: 67 unavailable apps, including Hinge, Adam4Adam, weBelong, and Grindr.

4. News, Media & Information: 170 unavailable apps, including NYTimes, BBC News, and Reuters.

5. Social Media & Communication: 96 unavailable apps, including Skype, LinkedIn, Viber, Damus, and Line.

6. Tibet & Buddhism: 41 unavailable apps, including Himalaya Lib, MonlamGrandTibetanDictionary.

7. Uyghur: 72 unavailable apps, including RFA Uyghur, Hayatnuri, Awazliq Kitap, and UYGHUR MAN.

8. Religion: 144 unavailable apps, including the Bible App by Olive Tree, Quran Majeed, TORAH, JW Library.

A company that verifies the identities of TikTok, Uber, and X users, sometimes by processing photographs of their faces and pictures of their drivers’ licenses, exposed a set of administrative credentials online for more than a year potentially allowing hackers to access that sensitive data, according to screenshots and data obtained by 404 Media.

The Israel-based company, called AU10TIX, offers what it describes on its website as “full-service identity verification solutions.” This includes verifying peoples’ identity documents, conducting “liveness detection” in a real-time video stream with the user, and performing age verification, where a service will predict how old someone is based on their uploaded photo. AU10TIX also includes the logos of other companies on its site, such as Fiverr, PayPal, Coinbase, LinkedIn, and Upwork, some of which confirmed to 404 Media they are active or former AU10TIX clients.

The news comes as more social networks and pornography sites move towards an identity or age verification model, in which users are required to upload their real identity documents in order to access certain services. The breach highlights that identity services could themselves become a target for hackers. The cybersecurity researcher did not distribute the data beyond providing screenshots and some data to 404 Media for verification purposes.

“My personal reading of this situation is that an ID Verification service provider was entrusted with people's identities and it failed to implement simple measures to protect people's identities and sensitive ID documents,” Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity firm spiderSilk, and who alerted 404 Media to the exposed credentials, said.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/181995

• Rivian and Volkswagen Group intend to enter a joint venture to create next generation software-defined vehicle (SDV) platforms to be used in both companies’ future electric vehicles.
• Volkswagen Group to invest an initial $1 billion in Rivian, with up to $4 billion in planned additional investment for a total expected deal size of $5 billion.
• Joint venture is expected to build on Rivian’s industry-leading software and electrical architecture to create best-in-class software-defined vehicle technology platform.
• The tie-up comes as competition intensifies between EV makers and Western countries move to impose tariffs on Chinese imports.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/179692

Archived link

The polyfill.js is a popular open source library to support older browsers. 100K+ sites embed it using the cdn.polyfill.io domain. Notable users are JSTOR, Intuit and World Economic Forum. However, in February this year, a Chinese company bought the domain and the Github account. Since then, this domain was caught injecting malware on mobile devices via any site that embeds cdn.polyfill.io. Any complaints were quickly removed (archive here) from the Github repository.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/176888

GitCode, a git-hosting website operated Chongqing Open-Source Co-Creation Technology Co Ltd and with technical support from CSDN and Huawei Cloud.

It is being reported that many users' repository are being cloned and re-hosted on GitCode without explicit authorization.

There is also a thread on Ycombinator (archived link)

Archived link

Even by conservative measures, researchers say that China's subsidies green-tech products such as battery electric vehicles and wind turbines is multiple times higher compared to the support granted to countriesin tbe European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The researchers conclude that the EU should use its strong bargaining power due to the single market to induce the Chinese government to abandon the most harmful subsidies.

TLDR:

• Quantification of overall Chinese industrial subsidies is difficult due to "China-specific factors”, which include, most notably, below-market land sales, but also below-market credit to state-owned enterprises (SOEs), support through state investment funds, and other subsidies for which there are no official numbers.
• Even when taking a conservative approach and considering only quantifiable factors of these subsidies, public support for Chinese companies to add up to at least €221.3 billion, or 1.73% of GDP in 2019. Relative to GDP, public support is about three times higher in China than in France (0.55%) and about four times higher than in Germany (0.41%) or the United States (0.39%).
• Large industrial firms such as EV maker BYD are offered disproportionately more support. The industrial firms from China received government support equivalent to about 4.5% of their revenues, according to a research report. By far the largest part of this support comes in the form of below-market borrowing.

Regarding electrical vehicles, the researchers write:

China’s rise to the world’s largest market and production base for battery electric vehicles has been boosted by the Chinese government’s longstanding extensive support of the industry, which includes both demand- and supply-side subsidies. Substantial purchase subsidies and tax breaks to stimulate sales of battery electric vehicles (BEV) are, of course, not unique to China but are also widespread within the EU and other Western countries, where (per vehicle) purchase subsidies have often been substantially higher than in China. A distinctive feature of purchase subsidies for BEV in China, however, is that they are paid out directly to manufacturers rather than consumers and that they are paid only for electric vehicles produced in China, thereby discriminating against imported cars.

By far the largest recipient of purchase subsidies was Chinese NEV manufacturer BYD, which in 2022 alone received purchase subsidies amounting to €1.6 billion (for about 1.4 million NEV) (Figure 4). The second largest recipient of purchase subsidies was US-headquartered Tesla, which received about €0.4 billion (for about 250,000 BEV produced in its Shanghai Gigafactory). While the ten next highest recipients of purchase subsidies are all Chinese, there are also three Sino-foreign joint ventures (the two VW joint ventures with FAW and SAIC as well as SAIC GM Wuling) among the top 20 purchase subsidy recipients.

archive.is link

More than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from over 120 universities have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon until the companies end their involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government.

Archived version

Apple has a long-running history of guarding their walled garden by not allowing much interoperability with other standards that are the current norm in the industry, while also going on to reinvent, giving features a novel-sounding name.

Of course, the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) has been successful in making Apple do things that they wouldn't ever do, if it weren't the law to do so.

However, Apple still does its best to gate keep developers who aren't their own, and one such recent incident caught my attention that involves their typical “my way or the highway” approach to things.

Apple Loves to Gatekeep: When Will They Stop?

Posted on X by the UTM project, they revealed that Apple rejected their application for publishing the UTM SE app after a two-month-long review process, citing that “Rule 4.7” of their App Review Guidelines didn't apply to it.

That rule is meant to allow game emulators, mini apps, chatbots, plugins, etc. to be published on the App Store.

The developers of UTM mention that Apple even went the extra step, and disallowed the publishing of UTM SE on third-party marketplaces. They added that:

The App Store Review Board determined that “PC is not a console” regardless of the fact that there are retro Windows/DOS games for the PC that UTM SE can be useful in running.

If you are not familiar, UTM is a QEMU-powered open-source emulator/virtual machine host for iOS and macOS, a popular tool to run alternative operating systems (such as ones based on Linux, or even Windows) on Apple devices.

There's more information in the linked article.

Mozilla has reinstated certain add-ons for Firefox that earlier this week had been banned in Russia by the Kremlin.

The browser extensions, which are hosted on the Mozilla store, were made unavailable in the Land of Putin on or around June 8 after a request by the Russian government and its internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor.

Among those extensions were three pieces of code that were explicitly designed to circumvent state censorship – including a VPN and Censor Tracker, a multi-purpose add-on that allowed users to see what websites shared user data, and a tool to access Tor websites.

The day the ban went into effect, Roskomsvoboda – the developer of Censor Tracker – took to the official Mozilla forums and asked why his extension was suddenly banned in Russia with no warning.

"We recently noticed that our add-on is now unavailable in Russia, despite being developed specifically to circumvent censorship in Russia," dev zombbo complained. "We did not violate Mozilla's rules in any way, so this decision seems strange and unfair, to be honest."

Another developer for a banned add-on chimed in that they weren't informed either.

The internet org's statement at the time mentioned the ban was merely temporary. It turns out wasn't mere PR fluff, as Mozilla tells The Register that the ban has now been lifted.

"In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia," the group declared. "Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.

"We remain committed to supporting our users in Russia and worldwide and will continue to advocate for an open and accessible internet for all."

Lifting the ban wasn't completely necessary for users to regain access to the add-ons – two of them were completely open source, and one of the VPN extensions could be downloaded from the developer's website.