Group items tagged

"The "mountain" of waste electronic and electrical equipment discarded in 2021 will weigh more than 57 million tonnes, researchers have estimated. That is heavier than the Great Wall of China - the planet's heaviest artificial object."

"Twitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations. Chinese bot accounts - not operated by humans - are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script."

"Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok's success - more than 1 billion users worldwide - is combining with well-established fears about social media's data collection practices and concerns over China's geo-political ambitions to generate a background hum of distrust about the app. "As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west," says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University."

"The personal details of millions of voters are believed to have been accessed in an attack by China on Britain's democratic process, ministers will say. MPs and peers are thought to be among 43 people who the government looks set to confirm have been targeted by cyber-attacks backed by the Chinese state. The UK could impose sanctions on individuals believed to be involved in these acts of state-backed interference, one of which was a separate attack on the Electoral Commission in which Beijing accessed the personal details of about 40 million voters."

""The satellite's two-year mission will be to develop 'hack-proof' quantum communications, allowing users to send messages securely and at speeds faster than light," Xinhua reported."

"This effectively ensured that all South Koreans are forced to use Internet Explorer. To this day, OS X and Linux hasn't seen the same degree of adoption in Korea as it has in Europe, China and the United States. It also means that 75% of South Korean netizens use some variety of IE because… Well? They have to. It also means that many South Korean websites are fundamentally less advanced, less user friendly and much less secure than their Western counterparts. The cruel irony is that this government intervention effectively hamstrung an entire industry"

"Mounds of decaying air conditioners, piles of abandoned electronics and tenements built among the trash … Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon has documented the lives of residents of Dongxiaokou, a village outside Beijing and home to a large electronic-waste recycling centre, for a look at life amid the digital ruins"

""China wanted to discuss 'existing and emerging technologies' but the wording insisted on by the US and the UK is that it is only about emerging technologies," said Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, a coalition of robotics experts who are campaigning against the military use of robots."

Firewalls and China....censorship or protection?

"Re/code, a technology news website, was the first to float the North Korea theory last Friday. Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, it said: "Sony Pictures Entertainment is exploring the possibility that hackers working on behalf of North Korea, possibly operating out of China, may be behind a devastating attack that brought the studio's network to a screeching halt earlier this week … The sources stress that a link to North Korea hasn't been confirmed, but has not been ruled out, either.""

"Imagine a world where an authoritarian government monitors everything you do, amasses huge amounts of data on almost every interaction you make, and awards you a single score that measures how "trustworthy" you are."

"Chinese police say they used facial recognition to identify, then arrest a man attending a crowded concert in Nanchang, China's third largest city. South China Morning Post reports that security cameras equipped with the software pinpointed the man out of the estimated 50,000 other people also in attendance at the concert. "

"Xiao Long, or "Little Dragon", is not your typical employee - she's a robot at China's first fully automated, human-free bank branch. As guardian of the bank, she talks to customers, takes bank cards and checks accounts (she comes complete with a PIN pad) and can answer basic questions. After a quick initial chat with Xiao Long, customers pass through electronic gates where their faces and ID cards are scanned. On future visits, facial recognition alone is enough to open the gates and call up customer information."

"If the eCNY is successful, it will give the central bank new powers, including novel types of monetary policy to help the economy grow. In one possibility that economists have discussed, a central bank could program its digital currency to slowly lose value so that consumers are encouraged to spend it immediately."

"Combined with Apple's previous steps, the private relay feature "will effectively render IP addresses useless as a fingerprinting mechanism," Charles Farina, head of innovation at digital marketing firm Adswerve, told Reuters. It would also prevent advertisers from using IP addresses to pinpoint a person's location, he said."

"A Microsoft programme to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with "no security measures", according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company."