0x815

0x815 OP , 1 month ago to news in Latvia Starts Digging Ditches On Its Belarus Border Amid Concerns Of Attack

The report cites Latvia’s public broadcaster LSM, but you’ll find a lot of other sources (although at least some of them refer to LSM, too, or other media sources).

Charter97 is a Belarusian rights organization calling for democratic reforms in the country.

0x815 OP , 1 month ago to news in China's Xi Jinping in Paris: “It’s a slap in the face that Emmanuel Macron is giving us,” say the Uighurs of France

French lawmakers officially recognise China’s treatment of Uyghurs as ‘genocide’ — (2022)

France’s parliament on Thursday denounced a “genocide” by China against its Uyghur Muslim population […] The non-binding resolution, adopted with 169 votes in favour and just one against […] reads that the National Assembly “officially recognises the violence perpetrated by the People’s Republic of China against the Uyghurs as constituting crimes against humanity and genocide”.

It also calls on the French government to undertake “the necessary measures within the international community and in its foreign policy towards the People’s Republic of China” to protect the minority group in the Xinjiang region.

0x815 OP , 2 months ago to news in Staffer of Germany's right-wing AfD arrested over China espionage suspicions

An example how the Chinese government is using espionage in its own country.

10 ‘spy’ cases China’s Ministry of State Security wants you to know about

In most of the world 15 April goes unnoticed. But in China, 15 April is Chinese National Security Education Day.

To mark the occasion, China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) posted a half-hour video on their official WeChat channel titled “Innovation Leads · Forging the Sword of National Security”. WeChat is China’s dominant social media app. Chinese and foreign media also covered the program’s release.

Here is an alternative link to the video posted in the article: invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=z8qdFHT9t3k

0x815 OP , 2 months ago to news in No online shopping, travel: China's punitive measures for 'blacklisted' debt defaulters

I fully agree. One of my former colleagues once said that the only thing which is worse than the capitalism we have in the west is the early-stage capitalism in China.

0x815 OP , 2 months ago to news in Apple pulls WhatsApp, Threads from China app store after Beijing order

Microsoft faces bipartisan criticism in the U.S. for alleged censorship on Bing in China

Microsoft is the subject of growing criticism in the US over allegations that its Bing search engine censors results for users in China that relate to sensitive subjects the state wants blocked.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio has added his voice to criticism of the Redmond software giant for reportedly removing search results from Bing on human rights, democracy, climate change, and other sticky issues within China.

The move follows an earlier call from Democrat Senator Mark Warner for Microsoft to consider shutting off access to Bing in China for the same reasons after a report from Bloomberg claimed the platform was excluding information on certain topics to satisfy Beijing.

Rubio said there was “no defending” such actions, and that “every company doing business in China makes concessions to a genocidal, authoritarian regime.”

0x815 OP , 2 months ago to news in No online shopping, travel: China's punitive measures for 'blacklisted' debt defaulters

Well, maybe plus a portion of George Orwell.

0x815 OP , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to news in No online shopping, travel: China's punitive measures for 'blacklisted' debt defaulters

@min_fapper@[email protected]

The level of control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wielded over the enterprises in China is extremley high, and this is true for state-owned enterprises (e.g., China National Petroleum, State Grid, Sinopec) as well as ‘private’ companies.

The combined assets of state-owned enterprises in China amount to +60 trillion USD, the equivalent of ~80% of the world’ GDP (according to Freeman Chair analyses). This is so as they are strictly shielded from any domestic or foreign competition as well as from any anti-trust regulations. Under Xi Jinping, the level of control has even grown. In 2017, the CCP even amended its constitution to assert that the Party “plays a leadership role” in firms’ decision making processes. All of these state-owned companies operate in strategic industries like banking, telecommunications, utilities, etc.

The increasing level of control and political influence by the CCP is also an issue for formally private companies, however. Private firms benefit from a similar economic system of high state subsidies that often focuse on scale rather than financial health, and -again- a shield from any competition in order to become major domestic and international players (the EV car industry is currently a prominent example, as well as its donestic property market).

When Western firms compete with Chinese firms, therefore, they essentially compete with the CCP rather than an individual rival. The CCP will do whatever it takes (regulation regarding competition, state subsidies) to ensure that foreign firms are outpaced.

As successful this may be for now, it backfires in the long-term. Some weaknesses are evident in the meantime, while others are likely to emerge in the not so distant future. The all-encompassing, centrally-planning state decision maker leads to shrinking company profitaibilty already and may lead to a decline in the rate of innovation in the future. China is already facing scrutiny in Europe and the U.S. over its structural overcapacity in many industries, its hegemonial intentions, and is increasingly struggling with its demographic development of an aging and shrinking population.

As researchers like Nicholas Lardy point out, if China wants to continue its economic success in the next decades, the country needs to open up, and become a more market-led economy. For now it seems it’s heading in the opposite direction.

[Edit typo.]

0x815 , 2 months ago to news in China faces more scrutiny from the West over its aggressive export practices — overcapacity and huge subsidies.

@PoliticallyIncorrect

in the west capitalist systems there are 99% of the population into modern slavery.

It would be helpful if you posted a source for that claim. Where did you get that?

For China, I have one regarding North Korean workers in Chinese seafood processing.

The workers, all of whom are women, described conditions of confinement and violence at the plants. Workers are held in compounds, sometimes behind barbed wire, under the watch of security agents. Many work gruelling shifts and get at most one day off a month. Several described being beaten by the managers sent by North Korea to watch them. “It was like prison for me,” one woman said. “At first, I almost vomited at how bad it was, and, just when I got used to it, the supervisors would tell us to shut up, and curse if we talked.”

Many described enduring sexual assault at the hands of their managers. “They would say I’m fuckable and then suddenly grab my body and grope my breasts and put their dirty mouth on mine and be disgusting,” a woman who did product transport at a plant in the city of Dalian said. Another, who worked at Jinhui, said, “The worst and saddest moment was when I was forced to have sexual relations when we were brought to a party with alcohol.” The workers described being kept at the factories against their will, and being threatened with severe punishment if they tried to escape. A woman who was at a factory called Dalian Haiqing Food for more than four years said, “It’s often emphasized that, if you are caught running away, you will be killed without a trace.”

You’d find a lot more.

0x815 OP , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to news in Twenty Years for Learning the Quran: Uyghur women imprisoned in China for decades-old religious practices, leaked files reveal

@Sunforged

There are many places. One is Ireland.

0x815 OP , 4 months ago to news in Twenty Years for Learning the Quran: Uyghur women imprisoned in China for decades-old religious practices, leaked files reveal

Guess a human rights group in China is not possible for a lack of democracy. That aside, it doesn’t matter where the group sits, the issue is clear here. But, wait, …

0x815 OP , 5 months ago to technology in Amazon- and Google-backed AI firm Anthropic says “general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist” if AI companies had to pay licences for the training material

Data Leak at Anthropic Due to Contractor Error

TL;DR - Anthropic had a data leak due to a contractor’s mistake, but says no sensitive info was exposed. It wasn’t a system breach, and there’s no sign of malicious intent.

0x815 OP , 5 months ago to technology in How an algorithm denied food to thousands of poor in India

The article doesn’t say which classifier algorithm they use in that case in India.

We had a similar incident in the Netherlands last year, for example, with similar problems. There they used Gradient Boosting afaik. But it doesn’t really matter as all these algorithms will yield a high number of false positives. If we use this and blindly trust trust the result in sensitive areas such as social welfare, we cause a lot if harm to iur society.

0x815 OP , 5 months ago to news in Chinese music student convicted in US of threatening pro-democracy activist

Addition: the CCP is actively hiring Chinese people all over the world to control and dissent as Safeguard Defenders says in a report

The consolidation of overseas United Front networks as the providers of services such as consular community assistance may not only give them potential broad access to individuals’ private data, home addresses, and contact information but may also dangerously enhance their function of control over overseas communities and dissenters.

0x815 , 5 months ago to technology in Your next Windows PC may need at least 16GB of RAM

novacustom.com

Or with Coreboot: minifree.org

0x815 OP , 5 months ago to news in Rare footage shows North Korean teens being sentenced in front of hundreds of their peers, getting 12 years of hard labour for watching South Korean videos

<a href="">@petrescatraian</a>

A friend of mine is from Romania, and I know many who lived in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). They don’t talk often about it, but when they do their stories seem absurd, hard to believe sometimes that these things happened, and each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.