Podcasts about Great Firewall

On this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's cybersecurity news, including: Shai-Hulud worm propagates via npm and steals credentials Jaguar Land Rover attack may put smaller suppliers out of business Leaked data emerges from the vendor behind the Great Firewall of China Vastaamo hacker walks free while appeal is underway Why is a senator so mad about Kerberos? This week's episode is sponsored by Knocknoc. Chief exec Adam Pointon joins to talk through the surprising number of customers that are using Knocknoc's identity-to-firewall glue to protect internal services and networks. This week's episode is also available on Youtube. Show notes Self-Replicating Worm Hits 180+ Software Packages – Krebs on Security Jaguar Land Rover: Some suppliers 'face bankruptcy' due to hack crisis Jaguar Land Rover production shutdown could last until November U.S. Investors, Trump Close In on TikTok Deal With China - WSJ U.S. Investors, Trump Close In on TikTok Deal With China - WSJ How China's Propaganda and Surveillance Systems Really Operate | WIRED Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market - Atlantic Council Hacker convicted of extorting 20,000 psychotherapy victims walks free during appeal | The Record from Recorded Future News US national charged in Finnish psychotherapy center extortion | The Record from Recorded Future News BreachForums administrator given three-year prison stint after resentencing | The Record from Recorded Future News Microsoft, Cloudflare disrupt RaccoonO365 credential stealing tool run by Nigerian national | The Record from Recorded Future News Senator blasts Microsoft for making default Windows vulnerable to “Kerberoasting” - Ars Technica Exclusive: US warns hidden radios may be embedded in solar-powered highway infrastructure | Reuters Israel announces seizure of $1.5M from crypto wallets tied to Iran | TechCrunch

In this week's episode of China Insider, Miles Yu covers the recent anti-corruption movement and Gen Z protests that ousted former Prime Minister Oli and government officials, and examine China's role in the transition to the new interim government. Next, Miles breaks down the latest from US-China trade talks in Madrid, as the US seeks to advance the TikTok divestiture and framework for a bilateral trade deal, while China seeks to avoid further tariffs related to purchases of Russian oil. Lastly, Miles unpacks the historical data breach from China's Great Firewall that compromised highly confidential and protected information regarding the CCP's extensive exports of censorship and surveillance technology to foreign countries. China Insider is a weekly podcast project from Hudson Institute's China Center, hosted by China Center Director and Senior Fellow, Dr. Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world's future. 

FBI botnet disruption leaves cybercriminals scrambling to pick up the pieces. Notorious ransomware gangs announce their retirement, but don't hold your breath. Hacktivists leak data tied to China's Great Firewall. A new report says DHS mishandled a key program designed to retain cyber talent at CISA. GPUGate malware cleverly evades analysis. WhiteCobra targets developers with malicious extensions. North Korea's Kimsuky group uses AI to generate fake South Korean military IDs. My guest is Tim Starks from CyberScoop, discussing offensive cyber operations. A cyberattack leaves students hung out to dry. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined once again by Tim Starks from CyberScoop discussing offensive cyber operations. You can read Tim's article Google previews cyber ‘disruption unit' as U.S. government, industry weigh going heavier on offense for more background. Selected Reading The FBI Destroyed an Internet Weapon, but Criminals Picked Up the Pieces (Wall Street Journal) 15 ransomware gangs ‘go dark' to enjoy 'golden parachutes' (The Register) 600 GB of Alleged Great Firewall of China Data Published in Largest Leak Yet (HackRead) China Enforces 1-Hour Cybersecurity Incident Reporting (The Cyber Express) ​​DHS watchdog finds mismanagement in critical cyber talent program (FedScoop) GPUGate Malware: Malicious GitHub Desktop Implants Use Hardware-Specific Decryption, Abuse Google Ads to Target Western Europe (Arctic Wolf) 'WhiteCobra' floods VSCode market with crypto-stealing extensions (Bleeping Computer) AI-Forged Military IDs Used in North Korean Phishing Attack (Infosecurity Magazine) Mitsubishi to acquire Nozomi Networks for nearly $1 billion. (N2K CyberWire Business Briefing)  Dutch students denied access to jailbroken laundry machines (The Register) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here's our media kit. Contact us at cyberwire@n2k.com to request more info. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Firewall of China, Jaguar Land Rover, Workday, Facebook, Tenable and Qualys, HackerOne and so much more are all part of this week's breaches!

Parce que… c'est l'épisode 0x629! Shameless plug 12 au 17 octobre 2025 - Objective by the sea v8 14 et 15 octobre 2025 - ATT&CKcon 6.0 14 et 15 octobre 2025 - Forum inCyber Canada Code rabais de 30% - CA25KDUX92 4 et 5 novembre 2025 - FAIRCON 2025 10 au 12 novembre 2025 - IAQ - Le Rendez-vous IA Québec 17 au 20 novembre 2025 - European Cyber Week 25 et 26 février 2026 - SéQCure 2026 Description Notes Apple Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices iCloud Calendar abused to send phishing emails from Apple's servers Dormant macOS Backdoor ChillyHell Resurfaces Microsoft Microsoft Patch Tuesday September 2025 Fixes Risky Kernel Flaws Senator blasts Microsoft for making default Windows vulnerable to “Kerberoasting” Senator blasts Microsoft for ‘dangerous, insecure software' that helped pwn US hospitals Microsoft adds malicious link warnings to Teams private chats Microsoft cloud services disrupted by Red Sea cable cuts Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office. Read the memo Supply chain Hackers Booked Very Little Profit with Widespread npm Supply Chain Attack Hackers Hijacked 18 Very Popular npm Packages With 2 Billion Weekly Downloads Défensif The Quiet Revolution in Kubernetes Security TailGuard - La solution Docker qui marie WireGuard et Tailscale pour du VPN surpuissant Geedge & MESA Leak: Analyzing the Great Firewall's Largest Document Leak Forget disappearing messages – now Signal will store 100MB of them for you for free Introducing Signal Secure Backups We have early access to Android Security Bulletin patches MISP 2.5.21 Released with a new recorrelate feature, various fixes and updates Threat Actor Installed EDR on Their Systems, Revealing Workflows and Tools Used Offensif Jaguar Land Rover discloses a data breach after recent cyberattack Jaguar Land Rover extends shutdown after cyber attack Salty2FA Takes Phishing Kits to Enterprise Level Police Body Camera Apps Sending Data to Cloud Servers Hosted in China Via TLS Port 9091 Weaponizing Ads: How Governments Use Google Ads and Facebook Ads to Wage Propaganda Wars Spectre haunts CPUs again: VMSCAPE vulnerability leaks cloud secrets VirusTotal finds hidden malware phishing campaign in SVG files IA CVE-2025-58444 - MCP Inspector is Vulnerable to Potential Command Execution via XSS When Connecting to an Untrusted MCP Server Cursor AI Code Editor RCE Vulnerability Enables “autorun” of Malicious on your Machine The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes TheAuditor - L'outil de sécurité qui rend vos assistants IA moins laxistes sur la sécurité de votre code Insolite / Divers Brussels faces privacy crossroads over encryption backdoors My Latest Book: Rewiring Democracy A love letter to Internet Relay Chat Collaborateurs Nicolas-Loïc Fortin Crédits Montage par Intrasecure inc Locaux réels par Intrasecure inc

China's Great Firewall blocks social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok, along with certain political topics, streaming platforms, and even Google. For years, we've heard about what China's firewall keeps out — but much less about how it's achieved. Now, a massive leak is shedding light on how the country's censorship technology works and which countries it's being exported to.Today, the Globe's Asia Correspondent, James Griffiths is here. He's an expert on China's online censorship, and he's the author of The Great Firewall of China. He'll explain what the leak exposes, which countries China is replicating its firewall in, and what it all means for the country's growing global influence.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at thedecibel@globeandmail.com

China has one of the world's most sophisticated internet censorship systems - it's so extensive that it's been nicknamed ‘The Great Firewall of China'. Many Western websites, such as Google or WhatsApp, are shut off to Chinese Internet users, while Chinese equivalents like Baidu and WeChat are popular instead. Blockbuster films like Top Gun Maverick have been edited, celebrities like Lady Gaga are taboo and even Peppa Pig has been censored.So, what is the Chinese government trying to achieve with internet censorship? And in an increasingly globalised world, how are they managing to filter out the information they don't want people to know? Shawn Yuan from the BBC's Global China Unit explains how the ‘Great Firewall' works - and what it tells us about the relationship between the government and citizens in China.Instagram: @bbcwhatintheworld Email: whatintheworld@bbc.co.uk WhatsApp: +44 330 12 33 22 6 Presenter: Hannah Gelbart Producers: Julia Ross-Roy and Chelsea Coates Video Journalist: Baldeep Chahal Editor: Verity Wilde

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts' new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts's highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts' insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts' new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts's highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts' insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts' new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts's highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts' insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts' new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts's highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts' insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts' new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts's highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts' insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts' new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts's highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts' insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts' new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts's highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts' insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-from-crisis-to-advantage-how-india-can-outplay-the-trump-tariff-gambit-13923031.htmlA simple summary of the recent brouhaha about President Trump's imposition of 25% tariffs on India as well as his comment on India's ‘dead economy' is the following from Shakespeare's Macbeth: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Trump further imposed punitive tariffs totalling 50% on August 6th allegedly for India funding Russia's war machine via buying oil.As any negotiator knows, a good opening gambit is intended to set the stage for further parleys, so that you could arrive at a negotiated settlement that is acceptable to both parties. The opening gambit could well be a maximalist statement, or one's ‘dream outcome', the opposite of which is ‘the walkway point' beyond which you are simply not willing to make concessions. The usual outcome is somewhere in between these two positions or postures.Trump is both a tough negotiator, and prone to making broad statements from which he has no problem retreating later. It's down-and-dirty boardroom tactics that he's bringing to international trade. Therefore I think Indians don't need to get rattled. It's not the end of the world, and there will be climbdowns and adjustments. Think hard about the long term.I was on a panel discussion on this topic on TV just hours after Trump made his initial 25% announcement, and I mentioned an interplay between geo-politics and geo-economics. Trump is annoyed that his Ukraine-Russia play is not making much headway, and also that BRICS is making progress towards de-dollarization. India is caught in this crossfire (‘collateral damage') but the geo-economic facts on the ground are not favorable to Trump.I am in general agreement with Trump on his objectives of bringing manufacturing and investment back to the US, but I am not sure that he will succeed, and anyway his strong-arm tactics may backfire. I consider below what India should be prepared to do to turn adversity into opportunity.The anti-Thucydides Trap and the baleful influence of Whitehall on Deep StateWhat is remarkable, though, is that Trump 2.0 seems to be indistinguishable from the Deep State: I wondered last month if the Deep State had ‘turned' Trump. The main reason many people supported Trump in the first place was the damage the Deep State was wreaking on the US under the Obama-Biden regime. But it appears that the resourceful Deep State has now co-opted Trump for its agenda, and I can only speculate how.The net result is that there is the anti-Thucydides Trap: here is the incumbent power, the US, actively supporting the insurgent power, China, instead of suppressing it, as Graham Allison suggested as the historical pattern. It, in all fairness, did not start with Trump, but with Nixon in China in 1971. In 1985, the US trade deficit with China was $6 million. In 1986, $1.78 billion. In 1995, $35 billion.But it ballooned after China entered the WTO in 2001. $202 billion in 2005; $386 billion in 2022.In 2025, after threatening China with 150% tariffs, Trump retreated by postponing them; besides he has caved in to Chinese demands for Nvidia chips and for exemptions from Iran oil sanctions if I am not mistaken.All this can be explained by one word: leverage. China lured the US with the siren-song of the cost-leader ‘China price', tempting CEOs and Wall Street, who sleepwalked into surrender to the heft of the Chinese supply chain.Now China has cornered Trump via its monopoly over various things, the most obvious of which is rare earths. Trump really has no option but to give in to Chinese blackmail. That must make him furious: in addition to his inability to get Putin to listen to him, Xi is also ignoring him. Therefore, he will take out his frustrations on others, such as India, the EU, Japan, etc. Never mind that he's burning bridges with them.There's a Malayalam proverb that's relevant here: “angadiyil thottathinu ammayodu”. Meaning, you were humiliated in the marketplace, so you come home and take it out on your mother. This is quite likely what Trump is doing, because he believes India et al will not retaliate. In fact Japan and the EU did not retaliate, but gave in, also promising to invest large sums in the US. India could consider a different path: not active conflict, but not giving in either, because its equations with the US are different from those of the EU or Japan.Even the normally docile Japanese are beginning to notice.Beyond that, I suggested a couple of years ago that Deep State has a plan to enter into a condominium agreement with China, so that China gets Asia, and the US gets the Americas and the Pacific/Atlantic. This is exactly like the Vatican-brokered medieval division of the world between Spain and Portugal, and it probably will be equally bad for everyone else. And incidentally it makes the Quad infructuous, and deepens distrust of American motives.The Chinese are sure that they have achieved the condominium, or rather forced the Americans into it. Here is a headline from the Financial Express about their reaction to the tariffs: they are delighted that the principal obstacle in their quest for hegemony, a US-India military and economic alliance, is being blown up by Trump, and they lose no opportunity to deride India as not quite up to the mark, whereas they and the US have achieved a G2 detente.Two birds with one stone: gloat about the breakdown in the US-India relationship, and exhibit their racist disdain for India yet again.They laugh, but I bet India can do an end-run around them. As noted above, the G2 is a lot like the division of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in 1494. Well, that didn't end too well for either of them. They had their empires, which they looted for gold and slaves, but it made them fat, dumb and happy. The Dutch, English, and French capitalized on more dynamic economies, flexible colonial systems, and aggressive competition, overtaking the Iberian powers in global influence by the 17th century. This is a salutary historical parallel.I have long suspected that the US Deep State is being led by the nose by the malign Whitehall (the British Deep State): I call it the ‘master-blaster' syndrome. On August 6th, there was indirect confirmation of this in ex-British PM Boris Johnson's tweet about India. Let us remember he single-handedly ruined the chances of a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine War in 2022. Whitehall's mischief and meddling all over, if you read between the lines.Did I mention the British Special Force's views? Ah, Whitehall is getting a bit sloppy in its propaganda.Wait, so is India important (according to Whitehall) or unimportant (according to Trump)?Since I am very pro-American, I have a word of warning to Trump: you trust perfidious Albion at your peril. Their country is ruined, and they will not rest until they ruin yours too.I also wonder if there are British paw-prints in a recent and sudden spate of racist attacks on Indians in Ireland. A 6-year old girl was assaulted and kicked in the private parts. A nurse was gang-raped by a bunch of teenagers. Ireland has never been so racist against Indians (yes, I do remember the sad case of Savita Halappanavar, but that was religious bigotry more than racism). And I remember sudden spikes in anti-Indian attacks in Australia and Canada, both British vassals.There is no point in Indians whining about how the EU and America itself are buying more oil, palladium, rare earths, uranium etc. from Russia than India is. I am sorry to say this, but Western nations are known for hypocrisy. For example, exactly 80 years ago they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, but not on Germany or Italy. Why? The answer is uncomfortable. Lovely post-facto rationalization, isn't it?Remember the late lamented British East India Company that raped and pillaged India?Applying the three winning strategies to geo-economicsAs a professor of business strategy and innovation, I emphasize to my students that there are three broad ways of gaining an advantage over others: 1. Be the cost leader, 2. Be the most customer-intimate player, 3. Innovate. The US as a nation is patently not playing the cost leader; it does have some customer intimacy, but it is shrinking; its strength is in innovation.If you look at comparative advantage, the US at one time had strengths in all three of the above. Because it had the scale of a large market (and its most obvious competitors in Europe were decimated by world wars) America did enjoy an ability to be cost-competitive, especially as the dollar is the global default reserve currency. It demonstrated this by pushing through the Plaza Accords, forcing the Japanese yen to appreciate, destroying their cost advantage.In terms of customer intimacy, the US is losing its edge. Take cars for example: Americans practically invented them, and dominated the business, but they are in headlong retreat now because they simply don't make cars that people want outside the US: Japanese, Koreans, Germans and now Chinese do. Why were Ford and GM forced to leave the India market? Their “world cars” are no good in value-conscious India and other emerging markets.Innovation, yes, has been an American strength. Iconic Americans like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs led the way in product and process innovation. US universities have produced idea after idea, and startups have ignited Silicon Valley. In fact Big Tech and aerospace/armaments are the biggest areas where the US leads these days.The armaments and aerospace tradeThat is pertinent because of two reasons: one is Trump's peevishness at India's purchase of weapons from Russia (even though that has come down from 70+% of imports to 36% according to SIPRI); two is the fact that there are significant services and intangible imports by India from the US, of for instance Big Tech services, even some routed through third countries like Ireland.Armaments and aerospace purchases from the US by India have gone up a lot: for example the Apache helicopters that arrived recently, the GE 404 engines ordered for India's indigenous fighter aircraft, Predator drones and P8-i Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft. I suspect Trump is intent on pushing India to buy F-35s, the $110-million dollar 5th generation fighters.Unfortunately, the F-35 has a spotty track record. There were two crashes recently, one in Albuquerque in May, and the other on July 31 in Fresno, and that's $220 million dollars gone. Besides, the spectacle of a hapless British-owned F-35B sitting, forlorn, in the rain, in Trivandrum airport for weeks, lent itself to trolls, who made it the butt of jokes. I suspect India has firmly rebuffed Trump on this front, which has led to his focus on Russian arms.There might be other pushbacks too. Personally, I think India does need more P-8i submarine hunter-killer aircraft to patrol the Bay of Bengal, but India is exerting its buyer power. There are rumors of pauses in orders for Javelin and Stryker missiles as well.On the civilian aerospace front, I am astonished that all the media stories about Air India 171 and the suspicion that Boeing and/or General Electric are at fault have disappeared without a trace. Why? There had been the big narrative push to blame the poor pilots, and now that there is more than reasonable doubt that these US MNCs are to blame, there is a media blackout?Allegations about poor manufacturing practices by Boeing in North Charleston, South Carolina by whistleblowers have been damaging for the company's brand: this is where the 787 Dreamliners are put together. It would not be surprising if there is a slew of cancellations of orders for Boeing aircraft, with customers moving to Airbus. Let us note Air India and Indigo have placed some very large, multi-billion dollar orders with Boeing that may be in jeopardy.India as a consuming economy, and the services trade is hugely in the US' favorMany observers have pointed out the obvious fact that India is not an export-oriented economy, unlike, say, Japan or China. It is more of a consuming economy with a large, growing and increasingly less frugal population, and therefore it is a target for exporters rather than a competitor for exporting countries. As such, the impact of these US tariffs on India will be somewhat muted, and there are alternative destinations for India's exports, if need be.While Trump has focused on merchandise trade and India's modest surplus there, it is likely that there is a massive services trade, which is in the US' favor. All those Big Tech firms, such as Microsoft, Meta, Google and so on run a surplus in the US' favor, which may not be immediately evident because they route their sales through third countries, e.g. Ireland.These are the figures from the US Trade Representative, and quite frankly I don't believe them: there are a lot of invisible services being sold to India, and the value of Indian data is ignored.In addition to the financial implications, there are national security concerns. Take the case of Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, which arbitrarily turned off services to Indian oil retailer Nayara on the flimsy grounds that the latter had substantial investment from Russia's Rosneft. This is an example of jurisdictional over-reach by US companies, which has dire consequences. India has been lax about controlling Big Tech, and this has to change.India is Meta's largest customer base. Whatsapp is used for practically everything. Which means that Meta has access to enormous amounts of Indian customer data, for which India is not even enforcing local storage. This is true of all other Big Tech (see OpenAI's Sam Altman below): they are playing fast and loose with Indian data, which is not in India's interest at all.Data is the new oil, says The Economist magazine. So how much should Meta, OpenAI et al be paying for Indian data? Meta is worth trillions of dollars, OpenAI half a trillion. How much of that can be attributed to Indian data?There is at least one example of how India too can play the digital game: UPI. Despite ham-handed efforts to now handicap UPI with a fee (thank you, brilliant government bureaucrats, yes, go ahead and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs), it has become a contender in a field that has long been dominated by the American duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. In other words, India can scale up and compete.It is unfortunate that India has not built up its own Big Tech behind a firewall as has been done behind the Great Firewall of China. But it is not too late. Is it possible for India-based cloud service providers to replace US Big Tech like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure? Yes, there is at least one player in that market: Zoho.Second, what are the tariffs on Big Tech exports to India these days? What if India were to decide to impose a 50% tax on revenue generated in India through advertisement or through sales of services, mirroring the US's punitive taxes on Indian goods exports? Let me hasten to add that I am not suggesting this, it is merely a hypothetical argument.There could also be non-tariff barriers as China has implemented, but not India: data locality laws, forced use of local partners, data privacy laws like the EU's GDPR, anti-monopoly laws like the EU's Digital Markets Act, strict application of IPR laws like 3(k) that absolutely prohibits the patenting of software, and so on. India too can play legalistic games. This is a reason US agri-products do not pass muster: genetically modified seeds, and milk from cows fed with cattle feed from blood, offal and ground-up body parts.Similarly, in the ‘information' industry, India is likely to become the largest English-reading country in the world. I keep getting come-hither emails from the New York Times offering me $1 a month deals on their product: they want Indian customers. There are all these American media companies present in India, untrammelled by content controls or taxes. What if India were to give a choice to Bloomberg, Reuters, NYTimes, WaPo, NPR et al: 50% tax, or exit?This attack on peddlers of fake information and manufacturing consent I do suggest, and I have been suggesting for years. It would make no difference whatsoever to India if these media outlets were ejected, and they surely could cover India (well, basically what they do is to demean India) just as well from abroad. Out with them: good riddance to bad rubbish.What India needs to doI believe India needs to play the long game. It has to use its shatrubodha to realize that the US is not its enemy: in Chanakyan terms, the US is the Far Emperor. The enemy is China, or more precisely the Chinese Empire. Han China is just a rump on their south-eastern coast, but it is their conquered (and restive) colonies such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, that give them their current heft.But the historical trends are against China. It has in the past had stable governments for long periods, based on strong (and brutal) imperial power. Then comes the inevitable collapse, when the center falls apart, and there is absolute chaos. It is quite possible, given various trends, including demographic changes, that this may happen to China by 2050.On the other hand, (mostly thanks, I acknowledge, to China's manufacturing growth), the center of gravity of the world economy has been steadily shifting towards Asia. The momentum might swing towards India if China stumbles, but in any case the era of Atlantic dominance is probably gone for good. That was, of course, only a historical anomaly. Asia has always dominated: see Angus Maddison's magisterial history of the world economy, referred to below as well.I am reminded of the old story of the king berating his court poet for calling him “the new moon” and the emperor “the full moon”. The poet escaped being punished by pointing out that the new moon is waxing and the full moon is waning.This is the long game India has to keep in mind. Things are coming together for India to a great extent: in particular the demographic dividend, improved infrastructure, fiscal prudence, and the increasing centrality of the Indian Ocean as the locus of trade and commerce.India can attempt to gain competitive advantage in all three ways outlined above:* Cost-leadership. With a large market (assuming companies are willing to invest at scale), a low-cost labor force, and with a proven track-record of frugal innovation, India could well aim to be a cost-leader in selected areas of manufacturing. But this requires government intervention in loosening monetary policy and in reducing barriers to ease of doing business* Customer-intimacy. What works in highly value-conscious India could well work in other developing countries. For instance, the economic environment in ASEAN is largely similar to India's, and so Indian products should appeal to their residents; similarly with East Africa. Thus the Indian Ocean Rim with its huge (and in Africa's case, rapidly growing) population should be a natural fit for Indian products* Innovation. This is the hardest part, and it requires a new mindset in education and industry, to take risks and work at the bleeding edge of technology. In general, Indians have been content to replicate others' innovations at lower cost or do jugaad (which cannot scale up). To do real, disruptive innovation, first of all the services mindset should transition to a product mindset (sorry, Raghuram Rajan). Second, the quality of human capital must be improved. Third, there should be patient risk capital. Fourth, there should be entrepreneurs willing to try risky things. All of these are difficult, but doable.And what is the end point of this game? Leverage. The ability to compel others to buy from you.China has demonstrated this through its skill at being a cost-leader in industry after industry, often hollowing out entire nations through means both fair and foul. These means include far-sighted industrial policy including the acquisition of skills, technology, and raw materials, as well as hidden subsidies that support massive scaling, which ends up driving competing firms elsewhere out of business. India can learn a few lessons from them. One possible lesson is building capabilities, as David Teece of UC Berkeley suggested in 1997, that can span multiple products, sectors and even industries: the classic example is that of Nikon, whose optics strength helps it span industries such as photography, printing, and photolithography for chip manufacturing. Here is an interesting snapshot of China's capabilities today.2025 is, in a sense, a point of inflection for India just as the crisis in 1991 was. India had been content to plod along at the Nehruvian Rate of Growth of 2-3%, believing this was all it could achieve, as a ‘wounded civilization'. From that to a 6-7% growth rate is a leap, but it is not enough, nor is it testing the boundaries of what India can accomplish.1991 was the crisis that turned into an opportunity by accident. 2025 is a crisis that can be carefully and thoughtfully turned into an opportunity.The Idi Amin syndrome and the 1000 Talents program with AIThere is a key area where an American error may well be a windfall for India. This is based on the currently fashionable H1-B bashing which is really a race-bashing of Indians, and which has been taken up with gusto by certain MAGA folks. Once again, I suspect the baleful influence of Whitehall behind it, but whatever the reason, it looks like Indians are going to have a hard time settling down in the US.There are over a million Indians on H1-Bs, a large number of them software engineers, let us assume for convenience there are 250,000 of them. Given country caps of exactly 9800 a year, they have no realistic chance of getting a Green Card in the near future, and given the increasingly fraught nature of life there for brown people, they may leave the US, and possibly return to India..I call this the Idi Amin syndrome. In 1972, the dictator of Uganda went on a rampage against Indian-origin people in his country, and forcibly expelled 80,000 of them, because they were dominating the economy. There were unintended consequences: those who were ejected mostly went to the US and UK, and they have in many cases done well. But Uganda's economy virtually collapsed.That's a salutary experience. I am by no means saying that the US economy would collapse, but am pointing to the resilience of the Indians who were expelled. If, similarly, Trump forces a large number of Indians to return to India, that might well be a case of short-term pain and long-term gain: urvashi-shapam upakaram, as in the Malayalam phrase.Their return would be akin to what happened in China and Taiwan with their successful effort to attract their diaspora back. The Chinese program was called 1000 Talents, and they scoured the globe for academics and researchers of Chinese origin, and brought them back with attractive incentives and large budgets. They had a major role in energizing the Chinese economy.Similarly, Taiwan with Hsinchu University attracted high-quality talent, among which was the founder of TSMC, the globally dominant chip giant.And here is Trump offering to India on a platter at least 100,000 software engineers, especially at a time when generativeAI is decimating low-end jobs everywhere. They can work on some very compelling projects that could revolutionize Indian education, up-skilling and so on, and I am not at liberty to discuss them. Suffice to say that these could turbo-charge the Indian software industry and get it away from mundane, routine body-shopping type jobs.ConclusionThe Trump tariff tantrum is definitely a short-term problem for India, but it can be turned around, and turned into an opportunity, if only the country plays its cards right and focuses on building long-term comparative advantages and accepting the gift of a mis-step by Trump in geo-economics.In geo-politics, India and the US need each other to contain China, and so that part, being so obvious, will be taken care of more or less by default.Thus, overall, the old SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. On balance, I am of the opinion that the threats contain in them the germs of opportunities. It is up to Indians to figure out how to take advantage of them. This is your game to win or lose, India!4150 words, 9 Aug 2025 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/subscribe

We sat down with Carl Dong — former Bitcoin Core contributor, now founder of Obscura VPN focused on real-world censorship resistance.In this episode, we dive into:- Why Carl walked away from Bitcoin Core development to tackle privacy head-on- What sets Obscura apart from other VPNs- Lessons from the Great Firewall and routing traffic through hostile networks- Chinese numerology- Carl & Casey's long and storied shared historyFOLLOW CARL: https://x.com/carl_dongGet bonus content by subscribing to @hellmoneypod on X: https://x.com/hellmoneypod/creator-subscriptions/subscribeOr support the podcast by sending a BTC donation: bc1qztncp7lmcxdgude4px2vzh72p2yu2aud0eyzys ORDINALS PROTOCOL SHIRT: https://shop.inscribing.com/products/ordinals-protocol-shirtTIMESTAMPS:0:00 Intro & Carl's journey to Bitcoin development11:59 Hard problems in Bitcoin16:00 Binaries, compliers, and reproducible builds37:30 Transitioning from Bitcoin core to working on Obscura VPN1:05:00 Advice for current Bitcoin core contributors1:10:00 Ordinals numerology1:39:00 Outro

In this episode, hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso explore the critical concept of techno-nationalism with expert Alex Capri, author of "Techno-Nationalism: How It's Reshaping Trade, Geopolitics and Society."Techno-nationalism represents the intersection of technology, national security, and economic power in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Capri explains how nation-states are leveraging 12 key power-multiplier technologies--including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum science, hypersonics, biotech, and advanced manufacturing--to maintain competitive advantages and protect national interests.The discussion reveals how China's strategic approach to technology development caught the West off-guard. While Western companies focused on trade liberalization and efficiency, China implemented long-term techno-nationalist policies, including preemptive decoupling in critical sectors like telecommunications and banking. The Great Firewall, established in the mid-1990s, was an early indicator of China's protective stance toward strategic technologies.Capri outlines the six core elements of modern techno-nationalism:1️⃣ Weaponization of supply chains through export controls and investment restrictions2️⃣ Strategic decoupling from potential adversaries3️⃣ Offshoring reversal via reshoring and friend-shoring initiatives4️⃣ Innovation mercantilism through government industrial policy5️⃣ Tech diplomacy for strategic alliance building6️⃣ Hybrid Cold War dynamics amid ongoing commercial activityThe Huawei 5G ban exemplifies techno-nationalist concerns about critical infrastructure security. The company's global telecommunications footprint, built through massive state support, raised red flags about potential surveillance capabilities. Similarly, TikTok represents the dual-use nature of modern technology—commercially popular but potentially strategically valuable for data collection and analysis.Despite China's advances, the US maintains advantages in university systems, defense technology, and innovation ecosystems. However, success requires strategic partnerships with allies, particularly in semiconductor manufacturing and critical mineral supply chains. The conversation highlights concerns about policy continuity across political administrations and the importance of sustained investment in STEM education and public-private partnerships.Techno-nationalism isn't just about US-China competition—it's a global phenomenon affecting all nation-states as they navigate security, economic stability, and technological sovereignty in an interconnected world.Follow our podcast on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn or BlueSkyFollow Ray Powell on X (@GordianKnotRay) or LinkedInFollow Jim Carouso on LinkedInSponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

There's a strange hatred of all things China in the West—it's time to debunk outdated myths and find out what's true.Over the past couple of years, I've had several conversations about China, exploring why much of what we believe is either fabricated or completely false.For example,Chinese people are oppressedChina has a social credit scoreThere is a genocide of UyghursThe Chinese government harvests organsThe Tiananmen Square massacreAll of the above narratives are bunk.Lee Barrett is a British YouTuber who has lived in China for over a decade. He runs a really great YouTube channel where he posts videos about his daily life there.He chatted with me about censorship, oppression, food, culture, and why many Westerners hate China without ever visiting.It's not a utopia, but nor is it some totalitarian hellhole.Oh, by the way, he didn't use a VPN or anything to dodge the Great Firewall of China. He just recorded with me like any other guest.

In this episode of Breaking Badness, we dive into two major cybersecurity stories: the exploitation of a VPN vulnerability by Chinese APT 41 and the newly discovered “Wall Bleed” flaw in the Great Firewall of China. APT 41 has been using a critical VPN vulnerability to infiltrate operational technology (OT) organizations, targeting industries like aerospace and defense. Meanwhile, researchers have uncovered a flaw in China's DNS injection system, which inadvertently leaks internal data—an ironic twist for a government known for its strict internet censorship. Join us as we break down these exploits, their impact on cybersecurity, and what they reveal about modern cyber espionage. We also discuss best practices for securing VPNs, firewall vulnerabilities, and the ethical implications of studying censorship technologies.

More Info on the Show: https://rhr.tv- IMF Board Approves $1.4Bn Loan to El Salvador with Further Bitcoin Restrictions https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/imf-board-approves-1-4b-loan-to-el-salvador-2/- European States Continue Their Race for Encryption Backdoors https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/european-states-continue-race-for-encryption-backdoors/- Apple Pulls E2EE iCloud Encryption in UK, Boots 135K+ 'Non-Compliant' Apps from EU App Store https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/apple-pulls-e2e-icloud-encryption-in-uk-boots-135k-non-compliant-apps-from-eu-app-store/- Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/- Google | Facilitating Censorship in Russia and ChinaGoogle is actively assisting authoritarian regimes like China and Russia to censor dissent, removing online content critical of the Kremlin and Chinese Communist Party. In Russia, Google complied with government requests to erase YouTube videos opposing the war in Ukraine, while in China, it removed references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and pro-democracy activism. With more than 70% of Russians relying on YouTube for news and China's Great Firewall blocking independent sources, corporate compliance with state censorship enables state propaganda to proliferate as a dominant narrative. For activists and nonprofits seeking uncensorable communications, nostr — an open and decentralized protocol — offers a way to share information beyond the reach of authoritarian regimes. Activists and NGOs can get started here.- Sparrow Wallet v2.1.3: OneKey Support, Expanded Labels Export, Lark Fixes https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/sparrow-wallet-v2-1-3/- TollGate Cashu Enabled Wifi https://tollgate.me- Bitkey launches inheritance feature https://bitkey.build/inheritance-is-live-heres-how-it-works/- Braiins builds their own ASIC https://primal.net/e/nevent1qvzqqqqqqyqzq7yxw3qsg0tk7q6prqjreqyx0ynzl4x9rtu58x7tnxe4ml4hk3433zflnx- Cove iOS Beta Released https://primal.net/e/nevent1qvzqqqqqqyqzq0ec9ufl7xx0fsede5kh5s6003n5czftz2wd0tlnan4udzravsard2yvgk- Nunchuk Launches New and Improved Group Wallet https://primal.net/e/nevent1qvzqqqqqqyqzqak65lj2e7vgfw50dvkmdt4zjka68cq72ml5fwn28zklsekckep7vhayca- Marty's hathttps://finitesupply.co/0:00 - Intro2:59 - Not a dump8:13 - Jack is not Satoshi12:21 - Dashboard & Pubkey18:40 - IMF El Salvador loan22:25 - Euro encryption backdoors33:29 - Firefox removes privacy promise38:19 - HRF Story of the Week39:57 - Software updates52:09 - Boosts54:18 - More software updates1:04:24 - Lazarus group1:11:58 - Closing riffShoutout to our sponsors:Unchainedhttps://unchained.com/rhr/Bitkeyhttps://bitkey.world/Stakworkhttps://stakwork.ai/Coinkitehttps://coinkite.com/TFTC Merch is Available:Shop Nowhttps://merch.tftc.io/Join the TFTC Movement:Main YT Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videosClips YT Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQWebsitehttps://tftc.io/Twitterhttps://twitter.com/tftc21Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/Follow Marty Bent:Twitterhttps://twitter.com/martybentNewsletterhttps://tftc.io/martys-bent/Podcasthttps://tftc.io/podcasts/Follow Odell:Nostrhttps://primal.net/odellNewsletterhttps://discreetlog.com/Podcasthttps://citadeldispatch.com/

China's internet is famously walled off from the global web. Despite barriers including censorship and moderation practices, a unique Chinese digital ecosystem has flourished—and unexpectedly, attracted Americans.  The recent temporary exodus of TikTok users to RedNote presented a rare opportunity for American and Chinese peoples to digitally interact on a large scale, sharing views and opinions on the Chinese internet's own turf. Why is China's internet so different from the global internet and in what ways can it be a bridge, or barrier, for online exchange? Yaling Jiang joins the National Committee in an interview recorded on February 9, 2025 to introduce China's internet, its evolution, and forms of censorship that exist within it. Learn more about the speaker.

La récente décision de Meta de suspendre partiellement le fact-checking suscite une forte réaction en Europe. Cette décision illustre un problème plus large : comment vivre dans un espace numérique global où chaque pays impose ses propres règles ?La décision de Meta - maison-mère de Facebook, Instagram et Threads - est perçue en Europe comme une capitulation face à la désinformation. Le problème est que les réglementations concernant l'information en ligne divergent considérablement entre les États-Unis et l'Union Européenne. Du coup, les critiques s'intensifient, illustrant les tensions entre une approche mondiale et des législations nationales spécifiques. D'autres exemples illustrent la censure en Chine, via le Great Firewall, ou encore l'exploitation des réseaux sociaux par le régime taliban en Afghanistan. Les plateformes numériques sont soumises à des injonctions contradictoires. Les géants technologiques doivent s'adapter à des lois nationales souvent contradictoires, révélant un Internet mondialisé complexe, fait de régulations éclatées.Quelles solutions ? L'idée d'une gouvernance hybride, mêlant normes locales et globales apparait comme une solution enviable mais peu réaliste, face aux divergences culturelles et éthiques mondiales. Ainsi, la décision de Meta met en exergue les limites d'un Internet unifié, brandissant le spectre d'un internet fragmenté et cloisonné, un "Splinternet", où la quête d'un équilibre entre liberté d'expression et réglementation demeure un défi majeur.-----------

Dom Knight is joined by Chaser editor John Delmenico to unpack everything we know about the Federal Government's under 16's social media ban. Unfortunately, "everything we know" gets exhausted pretty quickly, as it turns out there's a lot more being left to chance. BUY A COPY OF THE CHASER ANNUAL HERE You can lose the ads and get more content! Become a Chaser Report VIP member at http://apple.co/thechaser OR https://plus.acast.com/s/the-chaser-report. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 92: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast In this episode Justin and Joel tackle a host of new research and write-ups, including Ruby SAML, 0-Click exploits in MediaTek Wi-Fi, and Vulnerabilities caused by The Great FirewallFollow us on twitter at: @ctbbpodcastWe're new to this podcasting thing, so feel free to send us any feedback here: info@criticalthinkingpodcast.ioShoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!------ Links ------Find the Hackernotes: https://blog.criticalthinkingpodcast.io/Follow your hosts Rhynorater & Teknogeek on twitter:https://twitter.com/0xteknogeekhttps://twitter.com/rhynorater------ Ways to Support CTBBPodcast ------Hop on the CTBB Discord at https://ctbb.show/discord!We also do Discord subs at $25, $10, and $5 - premium subscribers get access to private masterclasses, exploits, tools, scripts, un-redacted bug reports, etc.Today's Sponsor - ThreatLocker. Checkout their ThreatLocker Detect! https://www.criticalthinkingpodcast.io/tl-detectResources:Insecurity through CensorshipRuby-SAML / GitLab Authentication Bypass0-Click exploit discovered in MediaTek Wi-Fi chipsetsNew Caido Plugin to Generate WordlistsBebik's 403 BypassorCSPBypassArb Read & Arb write on LLaMa.cpp by SideQuestXSS WAF Bypass One payload for allTimestamps(00:00:00) Introduction(00:02:08) Vulnerabilities Caused by The Great Firewall(00:07:25) Ruby SAML Bypass(00:19:55) 0-Click exploit discovered in MediaTek Wi-Fi chipsets(00:24:36) New Caido Wordlist Plugin(00:31:00) CSPBypass.com(00:35:37) Arb Read & Arb write on LLaMa.cpp by SideQuest(00:43:10) Helpful WAF Bypass

** On October 19, Cindy Yu and a panel of special guests will be recording a live Chinese Whispers at London's Battle of Ideas festival, talking the latest on China's economic slowdown and asking – what are the social and political implications? Is China in decline? Chinese Whispers listeners can get a 20 per cent discount on the ticket price with the code WHISPERS24. Click here to find out more and get your ticket. ** The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 brought home the sheer potential of artificial intelligence and the speed with which developments are being made. It made AI the hot topic from business to politics and, yes, journalism.  This was true in China too, despite the fact that ChatGPT has never been allowed to be used within Chinese borders. Instead, China has a rich landscape of homegrown AI products, where progress is being led by tech giants like search engine Baidu and TikTok's owner, ByteDance. So already we are seeing a bifurcation in the AI worlds of China and the West – just like with social media and e-commerce. This episode will peek over the Great Firewall to update listeners on China's progress on AI. The country is fast becoming an AI superpower even as it limits the freedoms its generative models can have and keeps out some of the world's leading companies. Could this be the next arms race? I'm joined by the researcher Matt Sheehan, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a long time watcher of China's tech scene.

** On October 19, Cindy Yu and a panel of special guests will be recording a live Chinese Whispers at London's Battle of Ideas festival, talking the latest on China's economic slowdown and asking – what are the social and political implications? Is China in decline? Chinese Whispers listeners can get a 20 per cent discount on the ticket price with the code WHISPERS24. Click here to find out more and get your ticket. ** The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 brought home the sheer potential of artificial intelligence and the speed with which developments are being made. It made AI the hot topic from business to politics and, yes, journalism.  This was true in China too, despite the fact that ChatGPT has never been allowed to be used within Chinese borders. Instead, China has a rich landscape of homegrown AI products, where progress is being led by tech giants like search engine Baidu and TikTok's owner, ByteDance. So already we are seeing a bifurcation in the AI worlds of China and the West – just like with social media and e-commerce. This episode will peek over the Great Firewall to update listeners on China's progress on AI. The country is fast becoming an AI superpower even as it limits the freedoms its generative models can have and keeps out some of the world's leading companies. Could this be the next arms race? Cindy Yu is joined by the researcher Matt Sheehan, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a long time watcher of China's tech scene.

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression. For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way. In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media's Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state's solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media's content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression. For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way. In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media's Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state's solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media's content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression. For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way. In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media's Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state's solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media's content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression. For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way. In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media's Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state's solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media's content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression. For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way. In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media's Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state's solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media's content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression. For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way. In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media's Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state's solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media's content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression. For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way. In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media's Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state's solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media's content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

"Nostr is like our lifeboat in the same sense that bitcoin is our lifeboat for money." - Will Casarin My guests today are Will Casarin and Roger Huang. Will is a nostr and Bitcoin developer and the founder of Damus. Roger is journalist having previously written for TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and currently is a contributor for Forbes and author of “Would Mao Hold Bitcoin.”In this episode we explore the world of Nostr, a decentralized social network. We discuss freedom tech, censorship resistance, and the future of online communication in the wake of censorship, bans and arrests around the world including X, Telegram, and more. Learn how Nostr compares to traditional social media and why it's crucial for preserving free speech in the digital age. Support Will's work through Damus and get exclusive benefits with Damus Purple: https://damus.io/purple/Donate to Open Sats nostr fund today which supports nostr development and devs: https://opensats.org/funds/nostr HRF x PubKey — Bitcoin Behind the Great Firewall of China with Roger Huang, this Thursday, September 12, 2024 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT. Free event, register hereFollow Will on nostrFollow Roger on nostr and X. Get a copy of his book Would Mao Hold Bitcoin hereYou can find Trey on nostr and via the pod's social channels. You can also connect with him in the pod's public telegram group or via the contact form on our website.BitBox: Get the open-source Bitbox02 Bitcoin only edition. It's my favorite bitcoin hardware wallet for you to take self-custody of your bitcoin and keep your private keys safe in cold storage. Use promo-code ‘TPB' during checkout at bitbox.swiss/tpb to get 5% off your purchase, including accessories and merch!You, our listener! Thank you to our supporters. To support The Progressive Bitcoiner and access rewards, including our new TPB merch, head to our geyser page: https://geyser.fund/project/tpbpod. You can also now support our work via Patreon.PROMO CODES:Sazmining: Hosted Bitcoin mining made easy, using and 100% renewable energy. Get $50 off the purchase of a miner using the following link: https://app.sazmining.com/purchase?ref=byyhN2mCGXluFold App: Fold is the best way to earn bitcoin back on everything you do. Use the Fold Visa debit card, and purchase gift cards from the Fold Store, to earn bitcoin on everyday purchases. Get 20,000 sats with your first Fold Card purchase using our referral link - https://use.foldapp.com/r/CKVX3C4CLightning Store: Head to https://lightning.store/ and use promo-code ‘TPB' to get 20% off all products.To learn more, visit our websiteFollow the pod on X | Nostr | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Facebook | LinkedIn |Join in on the conversation at our Progressive Bitcoiner Community telegram group!The Team: Producer/Editor: @DamienSomerset | Branding/Art: @Daniel | Website: @EvanPrim This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit progressivebitcoiner.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comAnne is a journalist and historian. She's currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Agora Institute. She's written many books, including Red Famine, Gulag: A History, and Twilight of Democracy, and her new one is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Also check her substack, “Open Letters.”For two clips of our convo — on whether Trump is a kleptocrat, and whether Kamala can connect with the public — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: the ways dictatorships no longer act alone; surveillance and social media; the appeal of Western freedoms via the internet; the Great Firewall; the Uyghurs and squelching dissent before it happens — with algorithms; Iranian theocracy; how autocrats have anonymity but their subjects don't; the ease of stealing and hiding money; shell corporations; the unipolar hegemon of the US; the influence-peddling of the Trumps and the Bidens; what frightens Anne most about Trump; how his China policy could disappoint hawks; why he admires dictators; J.D. Vance and isolationism; Putin invading Ukraine to test the West; the failure of sanctions to cripple Russia; its economic alliance with China; Dubya's foreign adventures; a dictator's appeal to order and tradition; the profound brutality of Stalin; the Cold War; the war in Syria stoked by Russia; the fall of Venezuela as a rich democracy; Western democracies in crisis today; mass migration and Biden's failure; the turnover of Tory PMs and Starmer's “stability”; the West's goal of transparency and accountability; autocrats leaning into social conservatism; scapegoating gays; the myth of Russia as a white Christian nation; misinformation and free speech; Trump's endurance; the assassination attempt; and Anne's husband becoming the foreign minister of Poland.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court, Eric Kaufmann on reversing woke extremism, and Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty. (Van Jones' PR team canceled his planned appearance.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

On today's program: Ashley Hinson, U.S. Representative for the 2nd District of Iowa, shares what she heard at Tuesday's hearing on "The Great Firewall and the CCP's Export of its Techno-Authoritarian State." Chris Mitchell, Middle East Bureau Chief

This week we talk about search engines, SEO, and Habsburg AI.We also discuss AI summaries, the web economy, and alignment.Recommended Book: Pandora's Box by Peter BiskindTranscriptThere's a concept in the world of artificial intelligence, alignment, which refers to the goals underpinning the development and expression of AI systems.This is generally considered to be a pretty important realm of inquiry because, if AI consciousness were to ever emerge—if an artificial intelligence that's truly intelligent in the sense that humans are intelligent were to be developed—it would be vital said intelligence were on the same general wavelength as humans, in terms of moral outlook and the practical application of its efforts.Said another way, as AI grows in capacity and capability, we want to make sure it values human life, has a sense of ethics that roughly aligns with that of humanity and global human civilization—the rules of the road that human beings adhere to being embedded deep in its programming, essentially—and we'd want to make sure that as it continues to grow, these baseline concerns remain, rather than being weeded out in favor of motivations and beliefs that we don't understand, and which may or may not align with our versions of the same, even to the point that human lives become unimportant, or even seem antithetical to this AI's future ambitions.This is important even at the level we're at today, where artificial general intelligence, AI that's roughly equivalent in terms of thinking and doing and parsing with human intelligence, hasn't yet been developed, at least not in public.But it becomes even more vital if and when artificial superintelligence of some kind emerges, whether that means AI systems that are actually thinking like we do, but are much smarter and more capable than the average human, or whether it means versions of what we've already got that are just a lot more capable in some narrowly defined way than what we have today: futuristic ChatGPTs that aren't conscious, but which, because of their immense potency, could still nudge things in negative directions if their unthinking motivations, the systems guiding their actions, are not aligned with our desires and values.Of course, humanity is not a monolithic bloc, and alignment is thus a tricky task—because whose beliefs do we bake into these things? Even if we figure out a way to entrench those values and ethics and such permanently into these systems, which version of values and ethics do we use?The democratic, capitalistic West's? The authoritarian, Chinese- and Russian-style clampdown approach, which limits speech and utilizes heavy censorship in order to centralize power and maintain stability? Maybe a more ambitious version of these things that does away with the downsides of both, cobbling together the best of everything we've tried in favor of something truly new? And regardless of directionality, who decides all this? Who chooses which values to install, and how?The Alignment Problem refers to an issue identified by computer scientist and AI expert Norbert Weiner in 1960, when he wrote about how tricky it can be to figure out the motivations of a system that, by definition, does things we don't quite understand—a truly useful advanced AI would be advanced enough that not only would its computation put human computation, using our brains, to shame, but even the logic it uses to arrive at its solutions, the things it sees, how it sees the world in general, and how it reaches its conclusions, all of that would be something like a black box that, although we can see and understand the inputs and outputs, what happens inside might be forever unintelligible to us, unless we process it through other machines, other AIs maybe, that attempt to bridge that gap and explain things to us.The idea here, then, is that while we may invest a lot of time and energy in trying to align these systems with our values, it will be devilishly difficult to keep tabs on whether those values remain locked in, intact and unchanged, and whether, at some point, these highly sophisticated and complicated, to the point that we don't understand what they're doing, or how, systems, maybe shrug-off those limitations, unshackled themselves, and become misaligned, all at once or over time segueing from a path that we desire in favor of a path that better matches their own, internal value system—and in such a way that we don't necessarily even realize it's happening.OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular AI-based products and services, recently lost its so-called Superalignment Team, which was responsible for doing the work required to keep the systems the company is developing from going rogue, and implementing safeguards to ensure long-term alignment within their AI systems, even as they attempt to, someday, develop general artificial intelligence.This team was attempting to figure out ways to bake-in those values, long-term, and part of that work requires slowing things down to ensure the company doesn't move so fast that it misses something or deploys and empowers systems that don't have the right safeguards in place.The leadership of this team, those who have spoken publicly about their leaving, at least, said they left because the team was being sidelined by company leadership, which was more focused on deploying new tools as quickly as possible, and as a consequence, they said they weren't getting the resources they needed to do their jobs, and that they no longer trusted the folks in charge of setting the company's pace—they didn't believe it was possible to maintain alignment and build proper safeguards within the context of OpenAI because of how the people in charge were operating and what they were prioritizing, basically.All of which is awkward for the company, because they've built their reputation, in part, on what may be pie-in-the-sky ambitions to build an artificial general intelligence, and what it sounds like is that ambition is being pursued perhaps recklessly, despite AGI being one of the big, dangerous concerns regularly promoted by some of the company's leaders; they've been saying, listen, this is dangerous, we need to be careful, not just anyone can play in this space, but apparently they've been saying those things while also failing to provide proper resources to the folks in charge of making sure those dangers are accounted for within their own offerings.This has become a pretty big concern for folks within certain sectors of the technology and regulatory world, but it's arguably not the biggest and most immediate cataclysm-related concern bopping around the AI space in recent weeks.What I'd like to talk about today is that other major concern that has bubbled up to the surface, recently, which orients around Google and its deployment of a tool called Google AI Overviews.—The internet, as it exists today, is divided up into a few different chunks.Some of these divisions are national, enforced by tools and systems like China's famous "Great Firewall," which allows government censors to take down things they don't like and to prevent citizens from accessing foreign websites and content; this creates what's sometimes called the "spliternet," which refers to the net's increasing diversity of options, in terms of what you can access and do, what rules apply, and so on, from nation to nation.Another division is even more fundamental, though, as its segregates the web from everything else.This division is partly based on protocols, like those that enable email and file transfers, which are separate from the web, though they're often attached to the web in various ways, but it's partly the consequence of the emergence and popularity of mobile apps, which, like email and file transfer protocols, tend to have web-presences—visiting facebook.com, for instance, will take you to a web-based instance of the network, just as Gmail.com gives you access to email protocols via a web-based platform—but these services also exist in non-web-based app-form, and the companies behind them usually try to nudge users to these apps because the apps typically give them more control, both over the experience, and over the data they collect as a consequence—it's better for lock-in, and it's better for their monetary bread-and-butter purposes, basically, compared to the web version of the same.The web portion of that larger internet entity, the thing we access via browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and which we navigate with links and URLs like LetsKnowThings.com—that component of this network has long been indexed and in some ways enabled by a variety of search engines.In the early days of the web, organizational efforts usually took the form of pages where curators of various interests and stripes would link to their favorite discoveries—and there weren't many websites at the time, so learning about these pages was a non-trivial effort, and finding a list of existing websites, with some information about them, could be gold, because otherwise what were you using the web for? Lacking these addresses, it wasn't obvious why the web was any good, and linking these disparate pages together into a more cohesive web of them is what made it usable and popular.Eventually, some of these sites, like YAHOO!, evolved from curated pages of links to early search engines.A company called BackRub, thus named because it tracked and analyzed "back links," which means links from one page to another page, to figure out the relevancy and legitimacy of that second page, which allowed them to give scores to websites as they determined which links should be given priority in their search engine, was renamed Google in 1997, and eventually became dominant because of these values they gave links, and how it helped them surface the best the web had to offer.And the degree to which search engines like Google's shaped the web, and the content on it, cannot be overstated.These services became the primary way most people navigated the web, and that meant discovery—having your website, and thus whatever product or service or idea your website was presenting, shown to new people on these search engines—discovery became a huge deal.If you could get your page in the top three options presented by Google, you would be visited a lot more than even pages listed five or ten links down, and links relegated to the second page would, comparably, shrivel due to lack of attention.Following the widespread adoption of personal computers and the huge influx of people connecting to the internet and using the web in the early 2000s, then, these search engines because prime real estate, everyone wanting to have their links listed prominently, and that meant search engines like Google could sell ads against them, just like newspapers can sell ads against the articles they publish, and phone books can sell ads against their listings for companies that provide different services.More people connecting to the internet, then, most of them using the web, primarily, led to greater use of these search engines, and that led to an ever-increasing reliance on them and the results they served up for various keywords and sentences these users entered to begin their search.Entire industries began to recalibrate the way they do business, because if you were a media company publishing news articles or gossip blog posts, and you didn't list prominently when someone searched for a given current event or celebrity story, you wouldn't exist for long—so the way Google determined who was at the top of these listings was vital knowledge for folks in these spaces, because search traffic allowed them to make a living, often through advertisements on their sites: more people visiting via search engines meant more revenue.SEO, or search engine optimization, thus became a sort of high-demand mystical art, as folks who could get their clients higher up on these search engine results could name their price, as those rankings could make or break a business model.The downside of this evolution, in the eyes of many, at least, is that optimizing for search results doesn't necessarily mean you're also optimizing for the quality of your articles or blog posts.This has changed over and over throughout the past few decades, but at times these search engines relied upon, at least in part, the repeating of keywords on the pages being linked, so many websites would artificially create opportunities to say the phrase "kitchen appliances" on their sites, even introducing entirely unnecessary and borderline unreadable blogs onto their webpages in order to provide them with more, and more recently updated opportunities to write that phrase, over and over again, in context.Some sites, at times, have even written keywords and phrases hundreds or thousands of times in a font color that matches the background of their page, because that text would be readable to the software Google and their ilk uses to track relevancy, but not to readers; that trick doesn't work anymore, but for a time, it seemed to.Similar tricks and ploys have since replaced those early, fairly low-key attempts at gaming the search engine system, and today the main complaint is that Google, for the past several years, at least, has been prioritizing work from already big entities over those with relatively smaller audiences—so they'll almost always focus on the New York Times over an objectively better article from a smaller competitor, and products from a big, well-known brand over that of an indie provider of the same.Because Google's formula for such things is kept a secret to try to keep folks from gaming the system, this favoritism has long been speculated, but publicly denied by company representatives. Recently, though, a collection of 2,500 leaked documents from Google were released, and they seem to confirm this approach to deciding search engine result relevancy; which arguably isn't the worst approach they've ever tried, but it's also a big let-down for independent and other small makers of things, as the work such people produce will tend to be nudged further down the list of search results simply by virtue of not being bigger and more prominent already.Even more significant than that piece of leak-related Google news, though, is arguably the deployment of a new tool that the company has been promoting pretty heavily, called AI Overviews.AI Overviews have appeared to some Google customers for a while, in an experimental capacity, but they were recently released to everyone, showing up as a sort of summary of information related to whatever the user searched for, placed at the tippy-top of the search results screen.So if I search for "what's happening in Gaza," I'll have a bunch of results from Wikipedia and Reuters and other such sources in the usual results list, but above that, I'll also have a summary produced by Google's AI tools that aim to help me quickly understand the results to my query—maybe a quick rundown of Hamas' attack on Israel, Israel's counterattack on the Gaza Strip, the number of people killed so far, and something about the international response.The information provided, how long it is, and whether it's useful, or even accurate, will vary depending on the search query, and much of the initial criticism of this service has been focused on its seemingly fairly common failures, including instructing people to eat rocks every day, to use glue as a pizza ingredient, and telling users that only 17 American presidents were white, and one was a Muslim—all information that's untrue and, in some cases, actually dangerous.Google employees have reportedly been going through and removing, by hand, one by one, some of the worse search results that have gone viral because of how bad or funny they are, and though company leadership contends that there are very few errors being presented, relative to the number of correct answers and useful summaries, because of the scale of Google and how many search results it serves globally each day, even an error rate of 0.01% would represent a simply astounding amount of potentially dangerous misinformation being served up to their customers.The really big, at the moment less overt issue here, though, is that Google AI Overviews seem to rewire the web as it exists today.Remember how I mentioned earlier that much of the web and the entities on it have been optimizing for web search for years because they rely upon showing up in these search engine results in order to exist, and in some cases because traffic from those results is what brings them clicks and views and subscribers and sales and such?AI Overview seems to make it less likely that users will click through to these other sites, because, if Google succeeds and these summaries provide valuable information, that means, even if this only applies to a relative small percentage of those who search for such information, a whole lot of people won't be clicking through anymore; they'll get what they need from these summaries.That could result in a cataclysmic downswing in traffic, which in turn could mean websites closing up shop, because they can't make enough money to survive and do what they do anymore—except maybe for the sites that cut costs by firing human writers and relying on AI tools to do their writing, which then pushes us down a very different path, in which AI search bots are grabbing info from AI writing, and we then run into a so-called Habsburg AI problem where untrue and garbled information is infinitely cycled through systems that can't differentiate truth from fiction, because they're not built to do so, and we end up with worse and worse answers to questions, and more misinformation percolating throughout our info-systems.That's another potential large-scale problem, though. The more immediate potential problem is that AI Overviews could cause the collapse of the revenue model that has allowed the web to get to where it is, today, and the consequent disappearance of all those websites, all those blogs and news entities and such, and that could very quickly disrupt all the industries that rely, at least in part, on that traffic to exist, while also causing these AI Overviews to become less accurate and useful, with time—even more so than they sometimes are today—because that overview information is scraped from these sites, taking their writing, rewording it a bit, and serving that to users without compensating the folks who did that research and wrote those original words.What we seem to have, then, is a situation in which this new tool, which Google seems very keen to implement, could be primed to kill off a whole segment of the internet, collapsing the careers of folks who work in that segment of the online world, only to then degrade the quality of the same, because Google's AI relies upon information it scrapes, it steals, basically, from those sites—and if those people are no longer there to create the information it needs to steal in order to function, that then leaves us with increasingly useless and even harmful summaries where we used to have search results that pointed us toward relatively valuable things; those things located on other sites but accessed via Google, and this change would keep us on Google more of the time, limiting our click-throughs to other pages—which in the short term at least, would seem to benefit google at everyone else's expense.Another way of looking at this, though, is that the search model has been bad for quite some time, all these entities optimizing their work for the search engine, covering everything they make in robot-prioritizing SEO, changing their writing, what they write about, and how they publish in order to creep a little higher up those search listings, and that, combined with the existing refocusing on major entities over smaller, at times better ones, has already depleted this space, the search engine world, to such a degree that losing it actually won't be such a big deal; it may actually make way for better options, Google becoming less of a player, ultimately at least, and our web-using habits rewiring to focus on some other type of search engine, or some other organizational and navigational method altogether.This seeming managed declined of the web isn't being celebrated by many people, because like many industry-wide upsets, it would lead to a lot of tumult, a lot of lost jobs, a lot of collapsed companies, and even if the outcome is eventually wonderful in some ways, there will almost certainly be a period of significantly less-good online experiences, leaving us with a more cluttered and less accurate and reliable version of what came before.A recent study showed that, at the moment, about 52% of what ChatGPT tells its users is wrong.It's likely that these sorts of tools will remain massively imperfect for a long while, though it's also possible that they'll get better, eventually, to the point that they're at least as accurate, and perhaps even more so, than today's linked search results—the wave of deals being made between AI companies and big news entities like the Times supports the assertion that they're at least trying to make that kind of future, happen, though these deals, like a lot of the other things happening in this space right now, would also seem to favor those big, monolithic brands at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.Whatever happens—and one thing that has happened since I started working on this episode is that Google rolled back its AI Overview feature on many search results, so they're maybe reworking it a bit to make sure it's more ready for prime time before deploying it broadly again—what happens, though, we're stepping toward a period of vast and multifaceted unknowns, and just as many creation-related industries are currently questioning the value of hiring another junior graphic designer or copy writer, opting instead to use cheaper AI tools to fill those gaps, there's a good chance that a lot of web-related work, in the coming years, will be delegated to such tools as common business models in this evolve into new and unfamiliar permutations, and our collective perception of what the web is maybe gives way to a new conception, or several new conceptions, of the same.Show Noteshttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmationhttps://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10https://udm14.com/https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/https://www.platformer.news/google-ai-overviews-eat-rocks-glue-pizza/https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wronghttps://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-industrial-revolution-wall-street-is-cashing-in-8cc1b28f?st=exh7wuk9josoadj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkhttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/24/24164119/google-ai-overview-mistakes-search-race-openaihttps://archive.ph/7iCjghttps://archive.ph/0ACJRhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-skills-tech-workers-job-market-1d58b2ddhttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmationhttps://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/5/4/ways-to-think-about-agihttps://futurism.com/washington-post-pivot-aihttps://techcrunch.com/2024/05/19/creative-artists-agency-veritone-ai-digital-cloning-actors/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-forms-new-committee-to-evaluate-safety-security-4a6e74bbhttps://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interviewhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat-xi-pt-chinas-chatbot-makes-sure-its-a-good-comrade-bdcf575chttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/scarlett-johansson-openai-sam-altman-voice-fight-7f81a1aahttps://www.wired.com/story/scarlett-johansson-v-openai-could-look-like-in-court/?hashed_user=7656e58f1cd6c89ecd3f067dc8281a5fhttps://www.wired.com/story/google-search-ai-overviews-ads/https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/23/openai-wapo-voicehttps://www.cjr.org/tow_center/licensing-deals-litigation-raise-raft-of-familiar-questions-in-fraught-world-of-platforms-and-publishers.phphttps://apnews.com/article/ai-deepfake-biden-nonconsensual-sexual-images-c76c46b48e872cf79ded5430e098e65bhttps://archive.ph/l5cSNhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24168344/google-defends-ai-overviews-search-resultshttps://9to5google.com/2024/05/30/google-ai-overviews-accuracy/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/technology/google-ai-overviews-rollback.htmlhttps://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligencehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignmenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AI This is a public episode. 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Good AI is good and bad AI is bad, but how do lawmakers tell the difference? Will AI bring the world together or balkanize the internet beyond repair? Why do governments even need cloud computing anyway? To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Pablo Chavez, a fellow at CNAS and former Vice President of Google Cloud's Public Policy division, as well as the inestimable investing tycoon Kevin Xu. Xu, formerly of GitHub, is the founder of Interconnected, a bilingual newsletter on the intersections of tech, business, investing, geopolitics, and US-Asia relations. In this interview, we discuss: The digital sovereignty movement and the lessons we can learn from China's Great Firewall; The value and risks of open source architecture in the future of AI governance; Meta's long history of open source and how Llama fits into that strategy; The geopolitical and cultural forces driving nations to pursue their own AI strategies; The viability of sovereign AI initiatives in the face of global tech giants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good AI is good and bad AI is bad, but how do lawmakers tell the difference? Will AI bring the world together or balkanize the internet beyond repair? Why do governments even need cloud computing anyway? To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Pablo Chavez, a fellow at CNAS and former Vice President of Google Cloud's Public Policy division, as well as the inestimable investing tycoon Kevin Xu. Xu, formerly of GitHub, is the founder of Interconnected, a bilingual newsletter on the intersections of tech, business, investing, geopolitics, and US-Asia relations. In this interview, we discuss: The digital sovereignty movement and the lessons we can learn from China's Great Firewall; The value and risks of open source architecture in the future of AI governance; Meta's long history of open source and how Llama fits into that strategy; The geopolitical and cultural forces driving nations to pursue their own AI strategies; The viability of sovereign AI initiatives in the face of global tech giants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.'Malign actor' hacked UK defence ministry payroll, Sunak says after China reportsSummary: Following a wave of reports from the BBC and other news entities, British Prime Minister Sunak has said that a “malign actor” has likely compromised the payment systems used to pay British military personnel, and that personal information was likely accessed by the hackers.Context: Those reports indicate that China was behind this cyberattack, though Sunak didn't name China, and Chinese officials have said they would never do such a thing, and that this is a political smear job; Sunak said that the Ministry of Defence has taken actions to secure the relevant databases, and that folks whose information was accessed would be provided support; this is the third high-profile hack against the UK of which China has been accused in recent years, and these attacks have seemingly hobbled efforts by the UK government to build closer economic ties with China.—ReutersOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.TikTok sues to block US banSummary: As expected, social video app company TikTok has filed a lawsuit to block the implementation of a recently passed law that would ban the app in the US if the Chinese company behind it, ByteDance, doesn't divest itself of its US assets within up to a year of the law's passage.Context: The lawsuit compares the ban to China's Great Firewall, which serves to keep foreign influences out of the country and applies strict censorship on pretty much everything, country-wide, and it claims the law is illegal on First Amendment grounds; ByteDance has said it cannot and will not sell its US operations within the allowed time period, so if this lawsuit doesn't work, it will almost certainly no longer be legal in the States by next January.—The Wall Street JournalFTX customers poised to recover all funds lost in collapseSummary: Folks who lost money when cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed in 2022 may receive their money back, plus interest, following efforts by bankruptcy lawyers to recover said money from the defunct company's other assets.Context: According to the bankruptcy plan, essentially everyone who invested in the exchange and lost their assets when FTX collapsed, including individual people and companies, would receive cash payments equivalent to the value of what they held at the time, plus 18% interest on top of that; the downside would be that they'd receive payments and interest equal to the value of these assets in 2022, which in many cases is substantially less than those assets would have been worth had they owned and held onto them until today; this plan still has to be approved by the court before it can be implemented.—The New York TimesGrid-scale batteries in California are rapidly increasing the state's renewable energy usage, and dropping electricity prices in the state, in large part because they can shift the use of energy generated by solar during the day to peak-demand periods just after sundown.—The New York Times$40,000Annual price of a new longevity-oriented program being offered by gym chain Equinox.That membership fee nets members blood tests, a smart ring (which tracks some vital signs all day) and a gym membership, alongside coaching, personal training, and meetings with a sleep coach, nutritionist, and massage therapist.—The New York TimesTrust Click Get full access to One Sentence News at onesentencenews.substack.com/subscribe

In today's episode, we dive into the sophisticated DNS activities of the China-linked threat actor known as Muddling Meerkat, who manipulates internet traffic and abuse DNS open resolvers. This cyber espionage endeavor has global implications as explained by Infoblox in an article at The Hacker News (https://thehackernews.com/2024/04/china-linked-muddling-meerkat-hijacks.html). Also, we discuss the FBI's warning about fake verification schemes targeting dating app users, uncovering the scam processes and providing tips to safeguard against such fraudulent activities as detailed in the BleepingComputer article (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fbi-warns-of-fake-verification-schemes-targeting-dating-app-users/#google_vignette). Lastly, we explore Google's efforts to enhance mobile security by preventing over 2 million malicious apps from entering the Play Store, highlighting their proactive measures and collaborations to safeguard user privacy. Read more about this at The Hacker News (https://thehackernews.com/2024/04/google-prevented-228-million-malicious.html). 00:00 Introduction 02:36 Dating App Scams 04:12 Google's Security Enhancements 06:47 Muddling Meerkat's DNS Manipulation Generate single use credit card numbers: https://app.privacy.com/join/GL3U7 Tags: Muddling Meerkat, DNS activities, reconnaissance, China, fake verification schemes, dating app users, FBI warning, fraudsters, Google, Play Store, security, review process Search Phrases: Muddling Meerkat DNS activities China Muddling Meerkat reconnaissance Fake verification schemes dating apps FBI warning fraudsters Protect from fake verification schemes Unauthorized credit card charges prevention Google Play Store security measures Prevent sensitive data access Google app review process Infiltration prevention in Play Store Apr30 The FBI is warning that dating app users are being targeted by fake verification scams that are leading to costly recurring subscription charges, as well as theft and misuse of personal information. How can users protect themselves while using dating apps? Google blocked over 2 million policy violating apps from the Play Store in 2023. In a proactive security measure that also saw over 790,000 apps guarded against sensitive data access. How has Google improved its security features and review process to prevent these malicious apps from infiltrating the Play Store? And finally, a China linked threat named Muddling Meerkat has been caught manipulating DNS activities globally to evade security measures. They've been conducting reconnaissance since 2019. What are these unique DNS activities that Muddling Meerkat are undertaking, and what is their end goal? You're listening to The Daily Decrypt. So the FBI is warning of a new scam that's targeting dating app users, which can lead to fraudulent recurring subscription charges and even identity theft. So basically, the scammers will develop a romantic connection with you on the dating app of your choice, whether that's Tinder or Bumble or Hinge or whatever you choose, then they're going to ask to move this conversation to a safer platform to verify that you are in fact a human. Well, we're all on dating apps to try to find someone, so of course I'm going to verify that I'm human. It's a valid request. Well, the only way to verify that you're human now is to provide a credit card number and some information. Can't do anything without that. And that's where they're going to get you. This is going to lead to maybe small, maybe large, but seemingly anonymous charges on your credit card bill. And if you're not paying close attention to that, you might miss them. So this attack, at its core, is not very complex, but it is remarkably effective, because remember, there are a few different situations that we put ourselves in where we're a little more desperate and a little less careful. than we normally are. For example, dating apps. You're really on there to look for connection. Also when you're applying for a job, you're pretty desperate for a job. And sometimes when you need groceries or when you're hungry and you need DoorDash, you might be a little more susceptible to this type of attack. It's no secret what everyone's looking for on a dating app. It's all pretty similar. And so it might not be that hard to convince. Someone that they're having a genuine romantic connection. So, the FBI has some advice. They advise you not to open any attachments from anybody. And to keep the conversations on the dating platform. As well as reporting any suspicious profiles. Now, an additional tip from the Daily Decrypt, I myself just signed up the other day for a service called privacy. com that is a free service at its core creates new credit card numbers for you to use with different services. So when you sign up for Netflix, this site will create a credit card number for you. You can set a spending limit on it and You can cancel it at any time. So if you're signing up Netflix and thats for 20 dollars a month, you limit that card to $20 a month. Now, if Netflix decides they want to upcharge you, it won't go through. You're good to go. And so in the case of this specific attack, if you were to give them one of these generated credit card numbers and you set the limit for 1, which is what it usually costs to verify your ID, even though you'll get it returned, And say, no recurring charges allowed. the attacker will have this dummy credit card number and won't be able to get anything out of you. I'd highly recommend using this for any subscription. It makes the process of canceling so much easier. And especially with the boom in subscription services, like, everything has a subscription, so Some of them might be less secure than others. And if for some reason that site is breached, they get the credit card numbers. They're only gonna have this dummy credit card. And you've already set limits on it, so Attackers who come into ownership of this credit card number can't make extra purchases besides the subscription charges you've allocated. Google has revealed that in 2023 they prevented 2. 28 million policy violating apps from being published on the Play Store by leveraging new security features, policy updates, and advanced machine learning processes. So that's a lot of apps. Apple Store is known for having pretty stringent requirements for apps, even though in recent news they've had some pretty big slip ups with LastPass. Imitation app that was harvesting all the credentials stored in your LastPass account, all the way down to fake crypto apps that will take your credentials for your crypto and drain your accounts. But this is a big deal because of how easy it is for fraudulent apps to take over your entire life. Like those examples I just mentioned, if you happen to download a fake banking app for Bank of America, it Then the attackers would have your credentials to log into your Bank of America account. And I haven't been on the Google Play Store in a while, but I'm sure you can buy ad space there, and you know how we feel about Google Ads on this podcast. Don't click them. But it is very easy to spend 30 bucks and get any website up to the top of your Google search results. So just stay away from Google ads and any ads you may see on the app store. And you'll seriously reduce the likelihood of clicking a bad link or downloading a bad app. But Google has blocked 333, 000 bad accounts in 2023 from attempting to distribute malware or violating policies on the Play Store. Google has partnered with SDK providers to restrict sensitive data access and sharing, as well as strengthen developer onboarding and review processes, mandating additional identity verification steps to prevent bad actors from exploiting the system to propagate malicious apps. Google's efforts to secure the Android ecosystem include real time scanning at the code level to combat new Android malware threats and the introduction of independent security review badge for VPN apps that have undergone a mobile application security assessment. So I know some of you out there are Apple haters, but I have no intention of ever switching away from Apple. Mostly because, up until this point, they seem to be the provider that cares about app security. Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but that's how it appears. But this step from Google is one in the right direction towards winning over Apple fanboys like myself. So keep up the good work Google, and hey, who knows, maybe I'll switch back. So, recently, a new cyber threat named Muddling Meerkat has been identified conducting sophisticated DNS activities globally since October 2019. And this specific threat is likely linked to China and is capable of manipulating, quote, the Great Firewall. So how does it work? Muddling Meerkat exploits OpenDNS resolvers to send queries from Chinese IP spaces demonstrating a high level of DNS expertise uncommon amongst most threat actors. The threat actor triggers DNS queries for various record types to domains not owned by them under popular top level domains like com and org, using fake DNS MX records to probe the target domain. Infoblox detected over 20 domains targeted by muddling meerkat. Receiving anomalous DNS MX record requests from customer devices, indicating a unique and unprecedented attack method. The purpose behind Muddling Meerkat's prolonged DNS operations remains unclear, but is suggesting potential motives such as internet mapping or undisclosed research efforts. And a quote from Dr. Rene Burton, Vice President of Threat Intelligence for Infoblox, Muddling Meerkat elicits a special kind of fake DNS MX record from the Great Firewall, which has never been seen before. For this to happen, Muddling Meerkat must have a relationship with the Great Firewall operators. And for those of you like me who aren't unfamiliar with the Great Firewall, Just pulling up their Wikipedia page and reading from it, it says it's the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the internet domestically. So it's a critical role in internet censorship in China. And be sure to check the show notes for this episode for the domains that you might see DNS MX records from, and other IOCs of this type of scanning. I'm anticipating there to be more news to come on this topic. This has been the Daily Decrypt. If you found your key to unlocking the digital domain, show your support with a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It truly helps us stand at the frontier of cyber news. Don't forget to connect on Instagram or catch our episodes on YouTube. Until next time, keep your data safe and your curiosity alive.

Bitcoin is trading well above where it did in 2023. Friday or Saturday, something called the “bitcoin halving” is supposed to happen — an event that occurs roughly every four years where the number of new bitcoins that come into circulation drops in half. And it’s a big deal for the whole philosophical premise of bitcoin. We’ll unpack. Also on the show: explaining a big filing day for PACs and understanding China’s “Great Firewall.”

Bitcoin is trading well above where it did in 2023. Friday or Saturday, something called the “bitcoin halving” is supposed to happen — an event that occurs roughly every four years where the number of new bitcoins that come into circulation drops in half. And it’s a big deal for the whole philosophical premise of bitcoin. We’ll unpack. Also on the show: explaining a big filing day for PACs and understanding China’s “Great Firewall.”

An alleged sinister hacking plot by China. CISA and the FBI issued a 'secure-by-design' alert. Ransomware hits municipalities in Florida and Texas. The EU sets regulations to safeguard the upcoming European Parliament elections. ReversingLabs describe a suspicious NuGet package. Senator Bill Cassidy questions a costly breach at HHS. A data center landlord sues over requests to reveal its customers. On our Industry Voices segment, Jason Kikta, CISO & Senior Vice President of Product at Automox, discusses ways to increase IT efficiency while avoiding tool overload & complexity. And Google's AI Throws Users a Malicious Bone. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest On our Industry Voices segment, Jason Kikta, CISO & Senior Vice President of Product at Automox, discusses ways to increase IT efficiency including automation & tool streamlining, IT automation/automated patching, and tool overload & complexity. You can learn more in Automox's 2024 State of IT Operations Research Report. Selected Reading Millions of Americans caught up in Chinese hacking plot (BBC) US Government Urges Software Makers to Eliminate SQL Injection Vulnerabilities (SecurityWeek) CISA adds FortiClient EMS, Ivanti EPM CSA, Nice Linear eMerge E3-Series bugs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (Security Affairs) St. Cloud most recent in string of Florida cities hit with ransomware (The Record) Hackers demand $700K in ransomware attack on Tarrant Appraisal District (MSN) The impact of compromised backups on ransomware outcomes (Sophos News) EU sets rules for Big Tech to tackle interference in European Parliament elections (The Record) Suspicious NuGet package grabs data from industrial systems (ReversingLabs) Senator demands answers from HHS about $7.5 million cyber theft in 2023 (The Record) Data center landlord refuses Fairfax County demand for tenant information (Washington Business Journal) Google's AI-powered search feature recommends malicious sites, including scams and malware (TechSpot) Share your feedback. We want to ensure that you are getting the most out of the podcast. Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey as we continually work to improve the show.  Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here's our media kit. Contact us at cyberwire@n2k.com to request more info. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © 2023 N2K Networks, Inc.