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“There’s a transnational repression happening on our community,” said Simon Cheng, founder of the group Hongkongers in Britain.

TeleSign generates a “reputation score” and sells its services to various clients like TikTok, Microsoft or Salesforce. TeleSign secretly received the mobile phone data from BICS, a Belgian company that provides interconnection services for many mobile phone companies, the NGO says.

Chinese-made surveillance cameras are in British offices, high streets and even government buildings - and Panorama has investigated security flaws involving the two top brands. How easy is it to hack them and what does it mean for our security?

Fatima al-Shawarbi, who is from Al-Ahsa province and believed to be under 30, reported to have used her anonymous Twitter account to highlight the plight of the Howeitat – a tribe whose members have been forcibly displaced for the Neom megaproject – women’s rights, and calling for a constitutional monarchy.

“Terrifying experience travelling alone”, she tweets.

Judge James M. Moody Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock said the law both discriminated against transgender people and violated the constitutional rights of doctors. He also said that the state of Arkansas had failed to substantially prove a number of its claims, including that the care was experimental or carelessly...

Amidst the war outbreak, numerous Russians experienced miscommunication with their close ones, resulting in family disputes, workplace conflicts, and strained friendships due to divergent perspectives. In interviews conducted by The Insider, people recounted their accounts of clashes with parents who resorted to threats of...

The Riigikogu, Estonia’s Parliament, passed a new law which legalizes marriage for same-sex couples, thus becoming the first post-Soviet country to do so. That this happened in the month of June, which is generally when most Pride parades take place around the world, is also highly symbolic and poignant.

Using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects, a team of researchers says. “The tails of the original content distribution disappears,” writes co-author Ross Anderson from the University of Cambridge in a blog post. “Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge...

It’s the first time that citizens have approved a net-zero law in a direct vote. In all, 59.1% of voters approved the government’s new climate and innovation law. The government and all major parties, except for the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, had called to vote in favour of the bill.

“The emperor only values his throne and will do anything to protect it, while all others are mere resources to be exploited,” writes Aleksandar Đokić, a Serbian political scientist and former lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow. “In other words, the Russian empire is knowingly throwing its own people, people of its own...

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city became the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council. They viewed the power shift and diversity as a meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. This...

The Commission also intends to “reflect this decision in all relevant EU funding programmes and instruments”. A report finds that the current situation would create a clear risk of persisting dependency on high-risk suppliers in the internal market with potentially serious negative impacts on security for users and companies...

This book and also Brave New World should be on every school curriculum.

On 9 June, executives at Ujazdowski Castle, a museum in Warsaw, expressed their “concern and astonishment” after the Chinese ambassador entered the museum and demanded the exhibition by Chinese artist Badiucao to be closed down. On 12 June, Yao Dongye visited the museum a second time to repeat his demand. Chinese-Australian...

Skochilenkos lawyers began presenting proof of her innocence. They weren’t able to question the prosecution’s experts, as they both failed to show up to the court hearing, saying that they had both ended up in a hospital. But the defence still has a lot of unanswered questions towards the experts. They are now planning on...

Instead of the classic hat-throwing, flower-holding, and joyful smiles, Chinese students opted for defeated poses (with many literally just ‘laying flat’), apocalyptic backgrounds, or purely sarcastic shots where they are seen throwing their graduation thesis....

After being scammed into thinking her daughter was kidnapped, an Arizona woman testified in the US Senate about the dangers side of artificial intelligence technology when in the hands of criminals.

Perhaps most controversially, the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information, a newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ODNI, reveals. Were the government to simply demand...

While smoke from devastating wildfires in Canada blanketed much of the US, forcing millions to stay indoors, lobbyist Steve Milloy told Fox News there is “no health risk” associated with inhaling such polluted air. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time—no public health emergency,” he said. " This is...

In a video posted online, Lt Col Roman Venevitin, who called himself the “already former commander”, also accused Wagner soldiers of stealing arms, forcing mobilised soldiers to sign contracts with Wagner, and attempting to extort weapons from the Russian defence ministry in exchange for releasing kidnapped (Russian)...

Many foreign companies released statements about leaving Russia soon after the invasion of Ukraine. Almost a year and a half later, it can be stated that only a small part of foreign companies left Russia. According to calculations made by the Kyiv School of Economics, only 7% of Western companies halted all operations in...

At least 150 tons of oil have been released into the Dnipro River with the risk of further leakage of more than 300 tons. This may lead to the Nyzhniodniprovskyi National Nature Park, which comprises more than 80 000 hectares of protected land, to disappear.

Bluetooth, AirDrop and such file-sharing services are crucial tools in China, where the so-called Great Firewall has resulted in one of the mostly tightly-controlled internet regimes. In recent years, anti-government protesters have often turned to AirDrop to organise and share their political demands. For instance, some...

Posts from fake accounts claimed: “The UAE’s commitment to being the perfect host for Cop28 is a testament to its leadership in tackling climate change,” and that Cop28 president Al Jaber, who is also CEO of the state oil firm, is “the ally the climate movement needs”. Others retweeted or reposted UAE government tweets...

In 2020, the EU members resisted pressure back then from the US for an outright ban on Chinese telcos and agreed instead on the implementation of a ‘toolbox’ of security measures. It enabled member states to either restrict or exclude high-risk 5G vendors such as Huawei from core parts of their telecoms network. By now,...

Here’s a brief summary, although you miss something if you don’t read the study (trigger warning: stats):...

A George Washington University research team created a novel formula that demonstrates how, why, and when hate speech spreads throughout social media. They found that hate speech ripples through online communities in a pattern that non-hateful content typically does not follow. Researchers hope the formula can serve as a tool...

'Operation Fox Hunt’ trial started in New York City.

Hong Kong’s US and EU consulates light candles to mark Tiananmen crackdown anniversary. hongkongfp.com/…/in-pictures-hong-kongs-us-and-eu…

Scores of police were stopping people to search their belongings and question them. By late afternoon local time, reporters witnessed at least eight people taken away by police in vans – including Alexandra Wong, a well-known pro-democracy activist better known as Grandma Wong. The 67-year-old was carrying flowers as police...

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will require Amazon to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards to settle charges the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule).

Stumbled upon this on Mastodon.

The removal of the memorials in Hong Kong came after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong, leading the local government to essentially ban public commemorations of the 1989 killings. The 2,000-square-foot display includes newspaper clippings, letters written to protesters who were sent to jail, a...

Manahel al-Otaibi, a 29-year-old certified fitness instructor and artist who frequently promoted female empowerment on her social media accounts, was accused by Saudi authorities of using a hashtag – translated to #societyisready – to call for an end to male guardianship rules.She has not yet been convicted or sentenced and...

Erin O’Toole says the Canadian spy agency informed him that Beijing’s campaign used social media, specifically the Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat. “My parliamentary caucus and myself were the target of a sophisticated misinformation and voter suppression campaign orchestrated by the People’s Republic of China,”...

While many analysts believe – or perhaps hope – that western countries would not weaponise hunger against China in the event of a conflict with Taiwan, the war in Ukraine has shown that energy is highly likely to be hit with sanctions. And unlike Russia, with its vast reserves of natural gas, China is dependent on other...

The court dismissed the claim and used the word “bogus” to describe the quotes and citations the US attorney provided, which were sourced from ChatGPT. “Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations.” The judge further claimed that certain cases referenced...

Stories told to children who lived under the Russian occupation in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province were designed to terrify them. When the fast-approaching Ukrainian forces came into Kherson, people added, they would hurt anyone who had been in contact with the Russians. The web of lies were often spun by the children’s...

A dozen poor countries are facing economic instability under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign loans, much of them borrowed from China under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). An analysis has found paying back this debt is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open,...

Yevgeny Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of its regular troops, had been killed over several months in the fight for Bakhmut.

Alexander Shiplyuk, head of Siberia’s Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM), is suspected of handing over classified material at a scientific conference in China in 2017. The 56-year-old maintains his innocence and insists the information in question wasn’t classified and was freely available...

The daughter of Nikolai Gusev, director of the Vympel Design Bureau, which designs and produces the missiles used by the Russian army, has been living in Florida since 2021. The 20-year-old student Natalia Guseva rents an appartment in Miami for $3,500 a month, while a year of study at the University of Miami costs the family...

The hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Xinjiang surveillance created a system of digital enclosure that is part of the structure of dispossession that confronts Uyghurs, but the regime in Beijing wants the data of the colonized, too, a researcher says. This collection of data has significant consequences for the...