Technology

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• Research from Infyos has identified that companies accounting for 75 per cent of the global battery market have connections to one or more companies in the supply chain facing allegations of severe human rights abuses.

• Most of the allegations of severe human rights abuses involve companies mining and refining raw materials in China that end up in batteries globally, particularly in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China.

• “The relative opaqueness of battery supply chains and the complexity of supply chain legal requirements means current approaches like ESG audits are out of date and don’t comply with new regulations. Most battery manufacturers and their customers, including automotive companies and grid-scale battery energy storage developers, still don’t have complete supply chain oversight," says Sarah Montgomery, CEO & co-founder, Infyos.

• Supply chain changes are needed to eliminate widespread forced labour and child labour abuses occurring in the lithium-ion battery market, Infyos added.

There is an interesting study (May 2024), also linked in the article: When Online Content Disappears

Historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days.

However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy – many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion.

"The risks are manifold. Not just that technology may fail, but that certainly happens. But more important, that institutions fail, or companies go out of business. News organisations are gobbled up by other news organisations, or more and more frequently, they're shut down," says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a tool that collects and stores snapshots of websites for posterity. There are numerous incentives to put content online, he says, but there's little pushing companies to maintain it over the long term.

Despite the Internet Archive's achievements thus far, the organisation and others like it face financial threats, technical challenges, cyberattacks and legal battles from businesses who dislike the idea of freely available copies of their intellectual property. And as recent court losses show, the project of saving the internet could be just as fleeting as the content it's trying to protect.

"More and more of our intellectual endeavours, more of our entertainment, more of our news, and more of our conversations exist only in a digital environment," Graham says. "That environment is inherently fragile."

LFS = Looking For Service

TL;DR: can you recommend me a service to send myself emails at a later date that works like a time capsule so that the email can not be deleted or seen by someone else (except the service provider obviously)?

LT;MR(= Long Text; Might Read): Lately I've been trying to pay attention to the passage of time by celebrating the solar-events (summer/winter solstice and autumn/spring equinox).

For this years autumn equinox celebration I would like myself and my guests to send ourselves an email that arrives a week before next years spring equinox to our own email addresses.

The prompt will be: What would you like to do more of this coming summer?

I understand many common email clients/providers support this natively but it's my understanding those emails end up in specific folder so they are easy to find and subsequently read and/or delete which negates the idea I want to accomplish.

So, I'm looking for a service to store and send those emails to me and my guests in time for next years spring equinox.

Thank you 🥰

How are they retaining staff?

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High-tech CCTV, super-accurate DNA-testing technology and facial tracking software: China is pushing its state-of-the-art surveillance and policing tactics abroad.

Delegates from law enforcement across the world descended this week on a port city in eastern China showcasing the work of dozens of local firms, several linked to repression in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

China is one of the most surveilled societies on Earth, with millions of CCTV cameras scattered across cities and facial recognition technology widely used in everything from day-to-day law enforcement to political repression.

Its police serve a dual purpose: keeping the peace and cracking down on petty crime while also ensuring challenges to the ruling Communist Party are swiftly stamped out.

During the opening ceremony in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, China's police minister lauded Beijing's training of thousands of police from abroad over the last 12 months -- and promised to help thousands more over the next year.

An analyst said this was "absolutely a sign that China aims to export" its policing.

"Beijing is hoping to normalise and legitimise its policing style and... the authoritarian political system in which it operates," Bethany Allen at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said.

[...]

"The more countries that learn from the Chinese model, the fewer countries willing to criticise such a state-first, repressive approach."

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Tech giant Huawei said its "Public Safety Solution" was now in use in over 100 countries and regions, from Kenya to Saudi Arabia.

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The United States sanctioned SDIC Intelligence Xiamen Information, formerly Meiya Pico, for developing an app "designed to track image and audio files, location data, and messages on... cellphones".

In 2018, the US Treasury said residents of Xinjiang "were required to download a desktop version of" that app "so authorities could monitor for illicit activity".

China has been accused of incarcerating more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang -- charges Beijing vehemently rejects.

[...]

Several delegations expressed interest in learning from the Chinese police.

"We have come to establish links and begin training," Colonel Galo Erazo from the National Police of Ecuador told AFP.

"Either Chinese police will go to Ecuador, or Ecuadorian police will come to China," he added.

One expert said that this outsourcing of security is becoming a key tool in China's efforts to promote its goals overseas.

[...]

"China's offers of police cooperation and training give them channels through which to learn how local security forces -- many either on China's periphery or in areas that Beijing considers strategically important -- view the security environment," [Sheena Greitens at the University of Texas in the U.S.] said.

"These initiatives can give China influence within the security apparatus if a threat to Chinese interests arises."

[Corrected broken link.]

(Seeing as I already posted an AI-is-dangerous article, here's one that shows the benefits of AI.)

Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine — until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed.

While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program.

The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch.

"There's lots and lots of other scenarios where patients' conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier," she said. "It's not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it's actually enhancing your nursing care."

As investors weigh OpenAI’s valuation, they might consider the humble paperclip. A cautionary tale about corporate profit maximizers building a robot that so excels in producing the office supply that it wipes out humanity might seem far-fetched. But a single-minded capitalist could make the economically rational decision to bear such a risk. As OpenAI races towards a fundraising that could value it at $150 billion, the implicit promise is that gains enormous enough to make that danger thinkable are on the horizon. That itself underscores the barriers to growth.

The paperclip story goes like this. One day, engineers at ACME Office Supplies unveil a hyper-sophisticated AI machine with one goal: produce as many paperclips as possible. The incomparable silicon intellect chases this task to the furthest extreme, converting every molecule on Earth into paperclips and promptly ending all life.

Profit-hungry OpenAI investors like Microsoft might be assumed, like ACME, to only value short-term gains, inviting the risk that they build their own Paperclip Maximizer. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, says that he is mindful of the risk. His company’s structure is meant to limit bad incentives, capping profit available to investors. Such protections are worth an asterisk now: a ceiling on profit was set in 2019 at a 100 times return for initial investors. OpenAI initially expected to lower it over time. Instead, the company's latest fundraising now hinges on changing that structure, including by removing the cap, Reuters reported.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2895443

Archived link

Over the past decade and a half, the Chinese techno-authoritarian state has deeply entrenched itself in the day-to-day lives of citizens through the use of highly sophisticated surveillance technology. Two of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance equipment, Hikvision and Dahua, have revolutionized the industry and exported their products to hundreds of countries worldwide.

Chinese citizens are required to use their ID when engaging in various activities, from signing up for WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging app, to using super-apps like Alipay or WeChat Pay for tasks such as public transport, online shopping, and booking movie tickets.

This extensive network allows the government to track citizens’ everyday activities and create detailed profiles, effectively establishing a Panopticon state of censorship and repression.

The most prominent feature of China’s surveillance state is its extensive network of facial recognition cameras, which are nearly ubiquitous. The Chinese government launched a programme known as Skynet in 2005, which mandated the installation of millions of cameras throughout the nation.

This initiative was further expanded in 2015 with the introduction of SharpEyes, aiming for complete video coverage of ‘key public areas’ by 2020.

The government, in collaboration with camera manufacturers such as Hikvision and Dahua, framed this as a progressive step towards developing ‘smart cities’ that would enhance disaster response, traffic management, and crime detection.

However, the technology has been predominantly employed for repressive purposes, reinforcing compliance with the Communist Party of China.

[...]

Although many of the ‘threats’ identified by this system may turn out to be false alarms, the omnipresent vigilance of the state ensures that even the slightest dissent from citizens is swiftly suppressed.

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China has become the first known instance of a government employing artificial intelligence for racial profiling, a practice referred to as ‘automated racism’, with its extensive facial recognition technologies specifically identifying and monitoring minority groups, particularly Uyghur Muslims, who have been subjected to numerous human rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

[This inlcudes] mass detentions, forced labour, religious oppression, political indoctrination, forced sterilisation and abortion, as well as sexual assault.

In Xinjiang, an extreme form of mass surveillance has transformed the province into a battleground, with military-grade cyber systems imposed on the civilian population, while the significant investment in policing and suppressing Uyghur Muslims has established Xinjiang as a testing ground for highly intrusive surveillance technologies that may be adopted by other authoritarian regimes, and the Chinese government has been known to collect DNA samples from Uyghur Muslims residing in Xinjiang, a move that has drawn widespread international condemnation for its unethical application of science and technology.

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The Chinese government has adeptly formulated legislation that unites citizens and the state against private enterprises. Laws such as the Personal Information Protection Law and the Data Security Law, both enacted in 2021, impose stringent penalties on companies that fail to secure user consent for data collection, effectively diverting scrutiny away from the state’s own transgressions.

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Archived link

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Apparently, AMD has placed a long black sticker on the lower left corner, seemingly to remove mentions of Taiwan. That appears to be convenient timing as the new 7600X3D chips are slated for release in China on September 20, and the country has a history of forbidding mentions of Taiwan on product packaging.

The hidden text shows the origin of the Ryzen processor: “AMD processors are diffused and/or made in one or more of the following countries and/or regions: USA, Germany, Singapore, China, Malaysia, or Taiwan.”

[...]

We can surmise that the company is doing this to soothe Beijing’s ruffled feathers, which claims Taiwan is part of China and has previously slapped import restrictions on products mentioning Taiwan as the place of manufacture.

It isn’t the first time that AMD has seemingly acquiesced to the demands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In January, it removed the ‘Diffused in Taiwan’ silkscreen from the Ryzen 7000 chips. Although the company says it did this to standardize production with the products from its Xilinx acquisition, it does have the convenient side effect of keeping Beijing happy.

[...]

This recent change — adding a sticker that covers ‘Taiwan’ on the box — doesn’t seem to have any other reason except to address the CCP’s likely complaints.

The Chinese company nearly doubled its emissions in 2023, according to its own report, making it the biggest polluter in the industry.

In 2023, the fast fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos advertised the company’s trendy styles on social media, garnering billions of views.

At every step, data was created, collected, and analyzed. To manage all this information, the fast fashion industry has begun embracing emerging AI technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine-learning applications — essentially, pattern-identification algorithms — to measure customer preferences in real time and predict demand, which it then services with an ultra-fast supply chain.

As AI makes the business of churning out affordable, on-trend clothing faster than ever, Shein is among the brands under increasing pressure to become more sustainable, too. The company has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 25 percent by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions no later than 2050.

But climate advocates and researchers say the company’s lightning-fast manufacturing practices and online-only business model are inherently emissions-heavy — and that the use of AI software to catalyze these operations could be cranking up its emissions. Those concerns were amplified by Shein’s third annual sustainability report, released late last month, which showed the company nearly doubled its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023.

“AI enables fast fashion to become the ultra-fast fashion industry, Shein and Temu being the fore-leaders of this,” said Sage Lenier, the executive director of Sustainable and Just Future, a climate nonprofit. “They quite literally could not exist without AI.” (Temu is a rapidly rising e-commerce titan, with a marketplace of goods that rival Shein’s in variety, price, and sales.)

[...]

The U.S. administration is cracking down on cheap products sold out of China by companies such as Temu and Shein by saying that companies are no longer exempt from tariffs simply by shipping goods that they claim to be worth less than $800.

U.S. President Joe Biden would no longer exclude these “de minimis” imports from tariffs under a proposed rule released Friday to tax all imports if they’re covered under Sections 201 or 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, or Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Importers mainly from China have used the de minimis exemption for shipments of $800 or less to flood the U.S. market. The number of these shipments has jumped from 140 million annually to over 1 billion a year, according to a White House statement.

The action comes at a delicate moment for the world’s two largest economies. The United States has tried to lessen its reliance on Chinese products, protect emerging industries such as electric vehicles from Chinese competition and restrict China’s access to advanced computer chips. For its part, China has seen manufacturing and exports as essential for driving economic growth as it has struggled with deflation following pandemic-related lockdowns.

South Korea’s military recently removed about 1,300 Chinese-made surveillance cameras installed at bases, concerned about potential security risks, Yonhap news agency reported on Friday, September 13, citing an unnamed military official.

The cameras were designed to be connected to a specific server in China, but no actual data was leaked, Yonhap said.

They had been supplied by a South Korean company, with their Chinese origin determined during equipment inspections earlier this year, the report cited the official as saying.

The cameras were not used for guard operations such as along the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, but for monitoring training groups and perimeter fences at bases, the report said.

South Korea’s defense ministry said on Friday it is in the process of collecting the foreign-made cameras and replacing them with others. The ministry declined to confirm where the cameras were made.

Last year, Australia’s foreign minister said its defense and foreign ministries were removing surveillance cameras made by Chinese-run firms from their facilities after reports that the technology posed a security risk.

Archived version

• Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL) identified a campaign targeting individuals connected to the upcoming US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference, as indicated by the lure document uncovered during the investigation.
• The campaign involves a ZIP archive containing an LNK file that mimics a legitimate PDF registration form for deception.
• When the LNK file is opened, it executes commands to drop a lure PDF and an executable in the startup folder, establishing persistence.
• Upon system reboot, the executable downloads additional content and executes it directly in memory, effectively evading detection by the security products.
• The first-stage loader triggers a second-stage loader, which downloads, decodes, and compiles C# code in memory, avoiding the creation of traceable files on disk.
• Once the compiled code is executed, the malware exfiltrates sensitive data back to the attacker’s server via web requests designed to blend in with normal traffic, making detection more difficult.