#House of Huawei

[justforbooks]

House of Huawei by Eva Dou

A fascinating insight into a Chinese telecoms giant and its detractors

Huawei is not exactly a household name. If you’ve heard of it, you either follow the smartphone market closely – it is the main China-based manufacturer of high-end phones – or else consume a lot of news, because the company is at the centre of an ongoing US-China trade war.

But this enormous business is one of the world’s biggest producers of behind-the-scenes equipment that enables fibre broadband, 4G and 5G phone networks. Its hardware is inside communications systems across the world.

That has prompted alarm from US lawmakers of both parties, who accuse Huawei of acting as an agent for China’s government and using its technology for espionage. The company insists it merely complies with the local laws wherever it operates, just like its US rivals. Nevertheless, its equipment has been ripped out of infrastructure in the UK at the behest of the government, its execs and staffers have been arrested across the world, and it has been pilloried for its involvement in China’s oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

Into this murky world of allegation and counter-allegation comes the veteran telecoms reporter Eva Dou. Her book chronicles the history of Huawei since its inception, as well as the lives of founder Ren Zhengfei and his family, starting with the dramatic 2019 arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, at the behest of US authorities.

Dou’s command of her subject is indisputable and her book is meticulous and determinedly even-handed. House of Huawei reveals much, but never speculates or grandstands – leaving that to the politicians of all stripes for whom hyperbole about Huawei comes more easily.

At its core, this book is the history of a large, successful business. That doesn’t mean it’s boring, though: there’s the story of efforts to haul 5G equipment above Everest base camp in order to broadcast the Beijing Olympics torch relay. We hear about the early efforts of Ren and his team, working around the clock in stiflingly hot offices, to make analogue telephone network switches capable of routing up to 10,000 calls; and gain insights into the near-impossible political dance a company must perform in order to operate worldwide without falling foul of the changing desires of China’s ruling Communist party.

Dou makes us better equipped to consider questions including: is this a regular company, or an extension of the Chinese state? How safe should other countries feel about using Huawei equipment? Is China’s exploitation of its technology sector really that different to the way the US authorities exploited Google, Facebook and others, as revealed by Edward Snowden?

Early in Huawei’s history, Ren appeared to give the game away in remarks to the then general secretary of the Communist party. “A country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army,” he argued, making the case for why the authorities should support his company’s growth. “Its software must be held in the hands of the Chinese government.”

But for each damning event, there is another that introduces doubt. The book reveals an arrangement from when Huawei operated in the UK that gave GCHQ unprecedented access to its source code and operations centre. US intelligence agencies seemed as able to exploit Huawei equipment for surveillance purposes as China’s. While Huawei’s equipment was certainly used to monitor Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, it was hardware from the US company Cisco that made China’s so-called Great Firewall possible.

Anyone hoping for definitive answers will not find them here, but the journey is far from wasted. The intricate reporting of Huawei, in all its ambiguity and complexity, sheds much light on the murky nature of modern geopolitics. The people who shout loudest about Huawei don’t know more than anyone else about it. Eva Dou does.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[liu-yu-xin]

who are the idols you think are purely in it for the money? me personally i think v (although idk much about bts he’s just untalented and an attention whore) and chenle

i think most of them are in it for the money and if they already have money then they are in it for the fame (and for a lot of male idols its also fucking the girls....) i feel like there are only a handful of idols who are in it for the love of the game and actually enjoy the craft of singing and dancing. i can't speak on any of the bts guys idk anything about them (im not even sure which one V is lol) but chenle is rich enough that im pretty sure hes in it for the fame like hasnt his parents been paying for him to be on stage and on camera since he was a toddler or something? hes not even a nepo baby its purely daddy throwing money at shit until they got lucky lol -> the esther yu/taylor swift model of achieving stardom

[emirphotoblog]

Huawei p30 pro

Taken by Emir Gegić

Old cottage on Gazivode lake near city of Tutin and Novi pazar.

[collapsedsquid]

Equally clear are Trump’s preferred means of getting what he wants in world politics. The former and future president is a strong believer in using coercion, such as economic sanctions, to pressure other actors. He also subscribes to the “madman theory,” in which he will threaten massive tariff increases or “fire and fury” against other countries in the firm belief that such threats will compel them into offering greater concessions than they otherwise would. At the same time, however, Trump also practices a transactional view of foreign policy, demonstrating a willingness during his first term to link disparate issues to secure economic concessions. On China, for example, Trump displayed a recurring willingness to give ground on other issues—the crackdown in Hong Kong, the repression in Xinjiang, the arrest of a senior executive of the Chinese tech company Huawei—in return for a better bilateral trade deal. Trump’s foreign policy track record during his first term was decidedly mixed. If one looks at the renegotiated deals for the South Korea Free Trade Agreement or the North American Free Trade Agreement (rebranded as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA), his attempts at coercion produced meager results. The same is true with his summitry with Kim Jong Un. But one can argue that this might have been because of the rather chaotic nature of the Trump White House. There were plenty of times when Trump seemed at war with his own administration, often leading to the characterization of his more mainstream foreign policy advisers (such as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster) as the “adults in the room.” The result was a lot of personnel churn and inconstancy in foreign policy positioning, which degraded Trump’s ability to achieve his aims. That should not be an issue for Trump’s second term. Over the past eight years, he has collected enough acolytes to staff his foreign policy and national security team with like-minded officials. He is far less likely to meet resistance from his own political appointees. Other checks on Trump’s policy will also be far weaker. The legislative and judicial branches of government are now more MAGA-friendly than they were in 2017. Trump has indicated numerous times that he intends to purge the military and bureaucracy of professionals who oppose his policies, and he will likely use Schedule F—a measure to reclassify civil service positions as political slots—to force them out. For the next few years, the United States will speak with one voice on foreign policy, and that voice will be Trump’s.

I feel that this piece by Drezner is contradicting itself, Trump administration did not and will not speak with one voice, having more people like him is not what he does, he appoints people to rattle the cage and then tries to swoop in personally in a sort of good cop/bad cop thing. Or maybe he just doesn't really care if they speak with one voice.

[yellow-yarrow]

rich american influencer living in LA: in 5 years we will all be online 24/7 in the metaverse, our smart fridges will become sentient, we won't even leave the house because of amazon same day delivery. your roomba will become sentient

easter european blue collar worker whose most "smart" device is their huawei android phone: hey man how's it going

[raspberry-arev]

IWBFT x Detroit Become Human: Jimmy's Story

The previous Detroit AU post has like 10 notes maybe, but does that stop me? NO!

I am delighted to post this! I mean, I regret the hand-lettering, my busted Huawei tablet is not built for a calm experience lol. Sorry for any decline in legibility. Jimmy is an android in the Ark, an android boyband, but his software slowly crumbles until he breaks out of it and escapes before the TV appearance.

Angel is human, but being herself, she decides to help. And Piero is not related to Jimmy, but he works as "Grandpa" in the business of getting deviants to safe houses/countries. (Only later have I learned that Jimmy's granddad is tall and slim and professor-y... which is funny because the way I imagine him is basically identical to one of my professors.)

[mariacallous]

The U.S. secretary of commerce is recovering from a fractured tailbone, but she doesn’t know how it happened.

“I have no idea!” Gina Raimondo says with an exasperated sigh when I ask, before pointing to the donut pillow that she’s about to sit down on for our interview. She adds, “I’m only telling you because I don’t want you to think I’m weird.”

We meet late on a Friday morning in July in Raimondo’s office on the fifth floor of the Department of Commerce—one of Washington’s largest government buildings, located just off Pennsylvania Avenue and across the street from the White House complex.

For the past three-and-a-half years, the proximity between the two buildings has been more symbolic than ever. The Commerce Department has been thrust to the forefront of what is arguably President Joe Biden’s biggest geopolitical priority: winning the technological race against China and ensuring U.S. economic and military primacy.

That includes cutting off Chinese access to advanced semiconductor chips through ever-expanding export controls while also ensuring that more of those chips are made in the United States and allied countries; spearheading the development and regulation of artificial intelligence; and even looking ahead to the implications of advanced quantum computing through the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As one individual put it at a recent gathering in Washington conducted under the Chatham House Rule, the Pentagon is probably “jealous” of the Commerce Department’s centrality to U.S. national security.

Raimondo acknowledged her department’s outsized influence but disagreed that the overriding sentiment is that of jealousy. U.S. Defense Secretary “Lloyd Austin has called me his battle buddy,” she said, adding that she sees herself as “connected at the hip” with the military and intelligence communities.

“We’re at the red-hot center of national security and economic competitiveness,” Raimondo said. “Some of that is because technology is in the middle of everything, and some of it, I think, is just the way in which I have managed this place.”

That centrality is why I wanted to sit down with Raimondo. I wanted to know more about how she balances the need to protect national security interests with the department’s mandate to promote U.S. economic growth and competitiveness—and her role in repositioning the department for those shifting priorities.

Raimondo’s familiarity with technology predates her political career. In 2000, she co-founded Point Judith Capital—the first venture capital firm in her native state of Rhode Island. The experience influenced her “a lot,” she told me.

“I like to be with entrepreneurs. I love it. I miss it. That’s what I did,” she said. She then lowered her voice to nearly a whisper, as if she was telling me a secret: “So many people in government just play it safe, worry about their job—you’re not going to get anything done that way. Don’t be afraid to speak up, don’t be afraid to try for something big. Have impact. Judge yourself on impact.”

Raimondo decided to take that approach into politics, being elected as Rhode Island’s treasurer in 2010 before becoming the state’s first woman governor in 2015. She served in that position until Biden named her to his cabinet—making it through the Senate confirmation process despite opposition from some Republicans who accused her of being soft on China.

It would be harder to make that claim now. Raimondo has been the target of Chinese hackers and memelords, who see her as the face of the Biden administration’s anti-China tech policies.

Some of them took that literally, superimposing her images on fake ads for Chinese tech giant Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which was released during Raimondo’s visit to Beijing last year. The phone is powered by a relatively advanced 7 nanometer chip—designed and made in China—that was previously thought to be beyond Beijing’s capacity to build due to U.S. export controls.

“I was there. I saw the billboards; my face on the billboard with the Huawei phone—my kids sent me the [memes], saying ‘Mom, this is terrible!’ because it’s all over TikTok,” Raimondo said, mentioning another major Chinese tech platform that Washington is trying to ban. “They were not subtle.”

In keeping with Raimondo’s credo of judging oneself by impact, I asked what impact the export controls on China have had, and how successful the Biden administration’s “small yard, high fence” approach to cutting off Beijing’s access to critical technologies has been.

“I’m smiling, because yesterday I had a meeting with my team, and I’m pushing them hard to share data with me on the effectiveness of our export controls, and we have a little study ongoing where I’m trying to collect the data,” she said, “because that’s really the question you’re asking, like, ‘show me, show me.’”

That data is still a work in progress and hasn’t been made public yet, but Raimondo laid out her case for why she believes that the United States remains in the lead: China may have put a 7 nanometer chip in Huawei’s phone (the smaller that number, the more advanced the chip—the iPhone 15 Pro, for example, is powered by a 3 nanometer chip), but there still isn’t evidence that it can produce those chips at scale. And they’re a far cry from the 2 nanometer chips that will soon be made in Arizona by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company—the global industry leader—thanks to subsidies from another big Commerce Department-led initiative, the CHIPS and Science Act.

U.S. artificial intelligence models are also more advanced than their Chinese rivals, which “wouldn’t be the case” if it weren’t for export controls on the chips needed to train those models, Raimondo said.

“However, I think it’s very dangerous to assume that it’s inevitable that we’ll stay ahead. I think that’s an arrogant viewpoint,” she said. “I feel good about where we are, but literally every single day, we should be on the edge of our seat.”

Determining the size of the yard—how many and what kinds of technologies should be subject to U.S. export controls to China—and the height of the fence—how strong those export controls should be—has been a challenge. It’s a tricky place to be in for a department whose official purpose is to be the “voice of business in the federal government” in a country that prides itself on the openness that fosters technological innovation. China, with more than a billion people, has been a coveted and lucrative market for U.S. companies for years, but it is also now undisputedly the United States’ biggest geopolitical rival.

Nvidia, the California company that designs advanced semiconductors that are essential to training artificial intelligence models, is making new chips that it can continue selling to China without flouting the export controls. And the Semiconductor Industry Association, a leading trade group, has urged the Commerce Department to “reduce burdens” on chip exports even as it praises efforts to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to U.S. shores.

“Excessive and unilateral export restrictions stifle the ability of American companies to compete with foreign competitors that do not bear the same export-related administrative and bureaucratic burdens,” the association writes on its website.

The Commerce Department’s initial export controls on semiconductor sales to China in October 2022 drew a critical line in the sand and set the tone for the Biden administration’s broader China policy. They were further tightened a year later to include a broader swath of chips, and additional restrictions are reportedly in the works.

“I struggle with this. It’s hard to know exactly where to draw the line,” Raimondo said. “I’ve tried hard to bring strategic thinking to the BIS so it’s not whack-a-mole,” she added, referring to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees export controls. “That being said, China’s not standing still and technology’s not standing still, so when we learn that now they can take less sophisticated equipment or less sophisticated chips and maybe use more of them to do bad things, well, then we’re going to change.”

Could there be a point where the yard gets too big, and the fence gets too high? On the latter, it’s a firm no. “There’s not a point where the fence gets too high, because China is constantly trying to get around the fence,” she said. “Yes, the yard could get too big, [but] I don’t think we’re there yet, I really don’t. [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s civil-military fusion strategy makes it hard, because everything’s militarized. He could walk into any company at every minute and take whatever he wants.”

Raimondo engages frequently with the executives and businesses working on artificial intelligence, chips, and other next-generation technologies—and by many accounts is popular with them—but she said that those conversations have increasingly been less rosy than one might expect. “It’s not easy for me to go to Intel, and Applied Materials, [and] Lam, and tell them I’m going to take away hundreds of millions of revenue,” she said, listing three leading U.S. semiconductor companies. “But sometimes commerce has to take a back seat to national security.”

That industrial policy approach, driven by technology and defined by competition with China, has set Raimondo apart from her predecessors.

“Previous Commerce secretaries have thought of themselves as the voice of business—I don’t think of myself quite as the voice of business; I think of myself as a force for economic competitiveness,” she said. “The dynamism of our economy directly relates to our ability to lead in the world,” she added. “It’s not a huge shift …but it’s enough of a shift to matter.”

Beijing isn’t the only place where Raimondo is the face of the Biden administration’s tech policies. She’s been front and center in building the global partnerships needed to help sustain the fight against China, racking up frequent flyer miles with trips to Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

“I’m very purposeful about my travel—the team doesn’t like it because we don’t do anything fun,” she said. “I’ve been to the UAE [United Arab Emirates] for meetings without staying in a hotel … we fly, we do a lot of work, we get back on the plane.”

She’s also been Washington’s lead representative at new forums such as the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, aimed at aligning trans-Atlantic approaches to tech regulation, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Forum, which attempts to do the same with a dozen countries in that region. It’s emblematic of another one of the administration’s priorities: shoring up bilateral and “minilateral” relationships.

Raimondo said those relationships are indispensable. “If you’ve got the best idea in the world, really the most brilliant thing in the world, [but] you don’t have buy-in from a broad cross-section of people and you haven’t built coalitions, you will fail,” she said.

Building those coalitions has become easier in some ways and trickier in others. While most of the democratic world is increasingly aligned on the threat posed by China and the need to reorient supply chains away from the world’s second-largest economy, everyone wants those supply chains to run through their soil, and many countries are heavily subsidizing industries such as semiconductors to make it happen.

I asked Raimondo how she deals with concerns about a so-called subsidy race to the bottom.

“Open collaboration and discussion,” she said. “We literally sit down and say, ‘this is how we’re spending our money.’ … I’ve been pleasantly surprised [by] the extent to which other countries have been willing to sit down with us because they don’t want to waste their money, either.”

A shared recognition of the realities of the chip supply chain also helps. More than half of all semiconductors—and more than 90 percent of the most advanced ones—are made in Taiwan, the small island off China’s coast that is an ever-more-precarious geopolitical hotspot. “We as a world are so dangerously dependent on Taiwan that there’s room for duplication,” Raimondo said.

It’s a similar story on artificial intelligence (AI), not just with other countries, but also with the private sector as well. One example is the recent $1.5 billion investment by Microsoft into G42, the UAE’s top AI company, which included an “intergovernmental assurance agreement” that the Commerce Department was heavily involved with on the U.S. side, according to multiple sources who spoke to Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity. That agreement mandated, in part, that G42 remove Chinese technology from its systems, including equipment from companies such as Huawei and Chinese cloud computing firms, the sources said. Microsoft is now reportedly backtracking on parts of that deal due to concerns around G42’s exposure to China. (Microsoft declined to comment, and G42 did not respond to a request for comment.)

Raimondo declined to comment on that deal but pointed to the UAE as an example of the sort of carrot-and-big-stick approach that the U.S. is deploying. “With respect to advanced technology, yes, we want them to pick a side … because the power of this technology in the wrong hands, in the hands of a dictator or autocrat, is too great,” she said. “I don’t twist anyone’s hand—you pick the UAE or wherever—we have the best, we want you with us, you should be with us, but these are the rules if you want to be in our ecosystem.”

Could that lead to the kind of resentment that often accompanies U.S. actions abroad or unilateral efforts to build a consensus, even with allies and partners?

“I would say yes and no. I’m in the thick of this right now with the Japanese and the Dutch,” Raimondo said, referring to the two countries that have a virtual duopoly over the equipment used to make advanced chips. Last year, Washington struck a deal with both countries to restrict the sales of that equipment to Chinese companies, but a proposed further tightening of restrictions will reportedly exempt key allies, including both Japan and the Netherlands.

“When I talk to my counterparts from Korea, Japan, Europe, they are sensitive to denying national champions revenue, and I respect that,” Raimondo said. “But don’t do it because we’re asking you to. Do it to protect the people of your country.”

It’s a message that key allies thus far appear to be on board with. “They have their own national security interests to do it,” she said. “We’re in the same boat. Now, it’s a little easier because America’s economy is bigger, and we have a lot of companies, but still, at the end of the day, it’s country first, profit second.”

It’s been an action-packed three-and-a-half years, and Raimondo has the customary mix of regrets and satisfaction ahead of the Biden administration’s term ending in a few months with the November election. On balance, she feels good and is happy to celebrate some big wins.

“When I started this job, the Commerce Department budget was $9 billion, and because of our work with Congress and the president’s leadership, it’s now like $150 billion,” she said, referring to the total funding for the Commerce Department appropriated by Congress in fiscal 2021 versus the total resources available to the department now. The latter has been bolstered in large part by the $53 billion set aside for semiconductor manufacturing by the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as major investments in broadband access and the creation of nearly three dozen new “tech hubs” around the United States.

Raimondo rattles those off as a checklist that she intends to get through by the end of this year. “The chips team didn’t exist when I got here, and now I have 200 people working for me on chips who are some of the brightest minds in America,” she added. “We’re never done, and I’m not saying it’s perfect, but as I assess we are more secure than we were because of our efforts.”

Her main regret is one that she has repeated several times throughout her tenure, including previously to Foreign Policy: the need for resources and funding commensurate with the department’s vastly expanded purview. The Bureau of Industry and Security still has a budget of around $200 million, which is the “cost of one fighter jet,” she said, repeating an analogy she has used in the past. The bureau’s budget for its core export control functions has “been flat for more than a decade, and we need help—we need more.”

As she continues to work with Congress to get those funds, the bipartisan legislation passed so far and the global alliances that Raimondo has built are what she hopes will prevent a potential second Donald Trump administration from unwinding Commerce’s most impactful policies, she said.

“When you have a statute, that’s more durable than an executive order,” she said. “And then, honestly, the other thing is [that] I’m moving as fast as possible.”

Would she continue to serve in another administration if asked?

“I love this job—it’s been an honor of a lifetime to serve. President Biden is an extraordinary leader, and I would be honored to stay in the job,” she said, “but I won’t work for just any leader. I have to work for someone I believe in and who’s principled.”

Our conversation took place two days before Biden announced that he would not seek reelection, instead endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party’s nomination. But with rumors of that eventuality already surfacing, I asked if she’d serve another Democratic president.

“Yeah,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I think it’s a fantastic job, and there’s so much more to do.”

But she prefaced all that with a clear response barely a second after I asked my question: “I will not work for President Trump.”

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote next week on an annual defense bill that includes just over $3 billion for U.S. telecom companies to remove equipment made by Chinese telecoms firms Huawei and ZTE from American wireless networks to address security risks.

The 1,800-page text was released late Saturday and includes other provisions aimed at China, including requiring a report on Chinese efforts to evade U.S. national security regulations and an intelligence assessment of the current status of China's biotechnology capabilities.

The Federal Communications Commission has said removing the insecure equipment is estimated to cost $4.98 billion but Congress previously only approved $1.9 billion for the "rip and replace" program.

Washington has aggressively urged U.S. allies to purge Huawei and other Chinese gear from their wireless networks.

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel last week again called on the U.S. Congress to provide urgent additional funding, saying the program to replace equipment in the networks of 126 carriers faces a $3.08 billion shortfall "putting both our national security and the connectivity of rural consumers who depend on these networks at risk."

She has warned the lack of funding could result in some rural networks shutting down, which "could eliminate the only provider in some regions" and could threaten 911 service.

Competitive Carriers Association CEO Tim Donovan on Saturday praised the announcement, saying "funding is desperately needed to fulfill the mandate to remove and replace covered equipment and services while maintaining connectivity for tens of millions of Americans."

In 2019, Congress told the FCC to require U.S. telecoms carriers that receive federal subsidies to purge their networks of Chinese telecoms equipment. The White House in 2023 asked for $3.1 billion for the program.

Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell said funding for the program and up to $500 million for regional tech hubs will be covered by funds generated from a one-time spectrum auction by the FCC for advanced wireless spectrum in the band known as AWS-3 to help meet rising spectrum demands of wireless consumers.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Object permanence

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

#20yrsago DVD licensing cartel sued under anti-trust http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-01/20/content_410667.htm

#20yrsago You’re a sucker if you believe no-DRM, no-release threats from Hollywood https://memex.craphound.com/2005/01/24/youre-a-sucker-if-you-believe-no-drm-no-release-threats-from-hollywood/

#15yrsago Secret copyright treaty: how we got here, what you can do https://thecommandline.net/2010/01/20/danny_obrien_acta/

#10yrsago Making, gender, and doing https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/

#10yrsago How to fix copyright in two easy steps (and one hard one) https://locusmag.com/2015/01/cory-doctorow-a-new-deal-for-copyright/

#10yrsago GOP senator who boasted about her family’s self-reliance received $460K in federal subsidies https://districtsentinel.com/despite-campaigning-pork-cutting-family-living-within-means-sen-ernsts-kin-took-460000-farm-subsidies/

#5yrsago Jamie Dimon is a (highly selective) socialist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT9mzlC9rcU

#5yrsago Wells Fargo’s ex-CEO will pay $17.5m in fines and never work in banking again (but he is still very, very rich) https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2020/01/23/wells-fargo-ex-ceo-john-stumpf-banned-banking-fined-17-5-m/4555993002/

#5yrsago Youtube’s Content ID has become the tool of choice for grifty copyfraudsters who steal from artists https://memex.craphound.com/2020/01/24/youtubes-content-id-has-become-the-tool-of-choice-for-grifty-copyfraudsters-who-steal-from-artists/

#5yrsago The Guardian has outed the true identity of the mysterious founder of the Base, a white nationalist terror group https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/23/revealed-the-true-identity-of-the-leader-of-americas-neo-nazi-terror-group

#5yrsago The case for replacing air travel with high-speed sleeper trains https://theconversation.com/could-sleeper-trains-replace-international-air-travel-130334

#5yrsago Canadian “protesters” at Huawei extradition hearing say they were tricked, thought they were in a music video https://thebreaker.news/news/paid-protest-meng/

#5yrsago London cops announce citywide facial recognition cameras https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21079919/facial-recognition-london-cctv-camera-deployment

#5yrsago Arizona HOA threatens residents with fines for posting critical comments about its board https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/gilbert/2020/01/23/gilbert-val-vista-lakes-homeowners-association-orders-residents-delete-online-posts/4548736002/

#5yrsago Bipartisan consensus is emerging on reining in Big Tech https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078903/podcast-house-antitrust-chairman-cicilline-tech-monopoly-vergecast

#1yrago How lock-in hurts design https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

[whatthefuckisasweep]

insane that it took a tiktok ban for americans to realize that in so called “communist china” they have great walkable infrastructure with countrywide bullet train access, affordable housing with no property taxes/vehicle taxes, a less pronounced homeless crisis (despite the fact they have WAY more people), practically no gun violence, cheaper groceries, and very advanced technology that is banned in the US (Huawei phones, etc). oh, and ofc that Chinese people are just… normal people.

its funny also because if a bunch of chinese people randomly moved to English tiktok from Douyin and started speaking Mandarin, I’m not so sure the Americans would be so welcoming. At least now a lot of people are learning Mandarin and subtitling their videos in both languages!!!!! thats exciting

[orangameelectronics]

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[firespirited]

Took a longer trip today, to the local stream: past the closest vineyard and through some pines.

It was early morning and very windy so my photos of the dogs are too dark or blurry. I did get a great video of Talia doing zoomies off-lead, sis has been working on recall and it's finally working! I'll need to compress on PC before attempting to upload.

We met Ultra and owner who live two houses over on the way back. Tried to grab a pic but he wanted fuss instead 🩷.

I've been on some lovely walks lately but at like 6am, so fantastic dawn cloud photos... and photos of Lily that look like a vague grey blob despite her being adorable in the moment.

Feel much safer with a phone that keeps it's charge! It's one of those things that had been weighing on me without really knowing it.

Still adjusting phone timers and alarms for my every 3h meds. I've got kitchen timers in my room: it's a case of remembering to look before I go + finding apps that don't use ridiculously unintuitive controls to enter the numbers: starting with the seconds not the hour but sticking the numbers into the hour or vice versa, scrolling for 15 seconds to add 30 minutes... What ever happened to punching a number in the slot or analog clocks dials? *shrug*

The built-in Huawei clock has alarms that have to be turned off before your phone is switched off and the timer has a constant loud tick tick sound that can't be disabled. Terrible design choices 😬. I wasn't impressed by how limited google clock's options are either.

I find it funny how clocks and timers are often quite hard to work out on various electronics that promise to make life easier while never adopting the standard you'd find on any old digital clock with 3 buttons. I've given up on the microwave, it's been in Portuguese and the wrong time since the last power cut 😂.

[collapsedsquid]

TikTok and other tech giants have faced criticism for their energy use. Back in July, a report from the FT found that the electricity use of large companies — including Microsoft, Oracle, LG, Huawei, Amazon, and Dell — was making it harder to build more homes in London. Due to the electricity grid running out of capacity, the report stated that the capital could face a ban on new housing projects until 2035.

Gotta choose between tiktoks and housing

[wolfliving]

The "Digital Silk Road" and the Chinese IoT

*Sort of.

(...)

Precisely what activities fall under the umbrella of the DSR has not been officially disclosed, but all known projects work to integrate the hard and soft infrastructures underpinning next-generation IoT capabilities. Examples include 5G antenna and base stations, fiber optic cables, data centers, smart city initiatives, and e-commerce platforms. Across the board, Beijing has encouraged tech companies to deepen cooperation with recipient countries. Some of the flagship companies that have joined the project are state-owned enterprises such as China Telecom and Unicom, as well as ostensibly private operators like China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, and Dahua. The common denominator among these actors is a commitment to consolidating China’s presence in emerging markets and developing economies. 

Over the past decade, Beijing has been able to build a parallel technological ecosystem that challenges Western-dominated norms. While this Initiative has the potential to enhance digital connectivity in developing economies, it also provides Beijing with a mechanism that can be used both to test its surveillance technology in third countries and to train these countries’ leaders on how to leverage the information that they collect. In a 2018 report, Freedom House cited a seminar on “Cyberspace Management for Officials from Countries Along the Belt and Road Initiative” that was repeated this year.  It saw foreign officials visit the offices of a Chinese company that uses a big data toolkit to track negative public sentiment in real time and promote positive opinions of the government.

This style of surveillance and public opinion “guidance” is consistent with some of the other projects DSR sponsors have exported to third countries. In Venezuela, for example, PRC tech giant ZTE has been closely working with authorities to develop a system that can monitor citizens and, most importantly, their voting preferences.

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