144596534
submission
hackingbear writes:
Residents in the Canadian province of New Brunswick first learned of the investigation last week after a leaked memo from the province’s public health agency asked physicians to be on the lookout for (neurological) symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). For more than a year public health officials have been tracking a “cluster” of 43 cases of suspected neurological disease in the province with no known cause. Despite the initial similarities, screening produced no confirmed cases of CJD, a rare, fatal brain disease caused by misformed proteins known as prions. Only a single suspected case was recorded in 2015, but in 2019 there were 11 cases and 24 in 2020. Researchers believe five people have died from the illness. Health officials have refused to disclose the precise locations of the cases.
144084370
submission
hackingbear writes:
The Wall Street Journal reports that China’s government is restricting the use of Tesla Inc.’s vehicles [partially paywalled, alternative source] by military staff and employees of key state-owned companies, citing concerns that the data collected by the cars could be a source of national security leaks, according to people familiar with the effort. The move follows a government security review of Tesla’s vehicles, which Chinese officials said raised concerns because the cars’ cameras can constantly record images, the people said, as well as obtain various data such as when, how and where the cars are being used, and the contact list of mobile phones that are synced to the cars. The government is concerned that some data could be sent back to the U.S., the people said. The move appears to a retaliation against U.S. restrictions on the use of communications equipment made by a slate of Chinese companies including Huawei Technologies Co., the Chinese tech giant that Washington has labeled a national security threat over fears it could spy for Beijing—allegations which Huawei denies and which base more on overheating US-China rivalry than actual evidences.
142529676
submission
hackingbear writes:
Efforts to ban TikTok under then-President Donald Trump were put on ice, as the Department of Justice signaled in a new court filing that the Biden administration is backing off the pressure on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app. Citing imminent national security concerns, Trump had attempted to force the sale of TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, to American companies Oracle and WalMart. If no deal was reached, Trump said TikTok would be effectively blacklisted in the U.S. In September, Chinese state media called Trump's crusade against TikTok "daylight robbery." Since the Trump administration, the US government has pushing the narratives of national security threats posed by Chinese entities, ranging from social media apps like TikTok and WeChat to 5G leader Huawei, without revealing concrete evidence. The White House is undertaking a wide-ranging probe into how Chinese-owned technology companies could potentially pose a risk to Americans' privacy and data security, though American agencies were caught conducting industrial espionage of its own.
141323734
submission
hackingbear writes:
People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, said on Wednesday that any non-bank payment company with half of the market in online transactions or two entities with a combined two-thirds share could be subject to anti-trust probes, potentially dealing another blow to financial technology giant Ant Group Co. and its biggest rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. Ant's Alipay accounts of 55.6% of the Chinese online payment market, while Tencent's WeChat accounts for 38.8%, according to iResearch data. If a monopoly is confirmed, the central bank can suggest the cabinet impose restrictive measures including breaking up the entity by its business type. Firms already with payment licenses would have a one-year grace period to comply with the new rules, the PBOC said. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and Ant Groups, emerged in public as he spoke to 100 rural teachers through a video call on Wednesday for the first time since China began clamping down on his businesses, ending several months of speculation over his whereabouts. Ma last appeared publicly at a conference where he castigated China's (and that of the world's) financial regulatory systems in front of a room of high-ranked officials. His controversial remark, according to reports, prompted the Chinese regulator to abruptly halt Ant's initial public offering, which would have been the biggest public share sale of all time.
140448758
submission
hackingbear writes:
Ant Group, the world’s largest fintech company, must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday. Ant started out in 2004 as the payments processing arm of Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce platform, through its Alipay app which has created a duopoly in payments in China, alongside arch-rival Tencent Holdings' WeChat Pay. Since then it has morphed into a services and technology provider. It made the bulk of its revenue from selling services in wealth management, micro financing and insurance companies. Fearing a Lehman Brother-like financial collapse, the Chinese regulators said on Sunday that they required Ant to enhance the transparency of transactions on its platform, to prevent illegal competition, obtain the necessary permits for its individual credit service, and to protect personal data privacy. They also required that the company establish a financial holding company to ensure it has sufficient capital, and that connected transactions were conducted legally. They said they wanted Ant to revamp its businesses such as loans, insurance and wealth management, and strengthen the management of its securities related institutions. Last week, China’s antitrust regulator has officially started investigations into Alibaba Group Holding over alleged monopolistic business practices including a requirement for e-commerce merchants to pick only one platform as their exclusive distribution channel.
140081710
submission
hackingbear writes:
China has recovered precious lunar samples after a successful reentry and landing of the Chang’e-5 return capsule.
The roughly 300-kilogram Chang’e-5 return capsule performed a ballistic skip reentry at 12:33 p.m. Eastern Dec. 16, effectively bouncing off the atmosphere over the Arabian Sea before reentry. The capsule containing around 2 kilograms of drilled and scooped lunar material landed in the grasslands of Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia at 12:59 p.m. Recovery vehicles located the capsule shortly after. The extended phase of lunar exploration involves the Chang’e-6, 7 and 8 lunar landing missions in the coming years. The aim will be to establish an ‘international lunar research station’ in the mid-to-late 2020s as a precursor to crewed landings.
139467986
submission
hackingbear writes:
A team led by Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China claims to have made the first definitive demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ — exploiting the counter-intuitive workings of quantum mechanics to perform computations that would be prohibitively slow on classical computers. They have used beams of laser light to perform a computation which had been mathematically proven to be practically impossible on normal computers. The team's 76-qubit [quantum bit, max] photonic quantum computer achieved within 200 seconds what would take 2.5 billion year or half the age of Earth on the world's third fastest conventional supercomputers — China's Sunway Taihu Light. Contrary to Google’s first demonstration of a quantum advantage, performed last year on 53-qubit superconducting circuits, their version is virtually unassailable by any classical computer. The result is published on Science. Last year, researchers at Google’s quantum-computing laboratory in Santa Barbara, California, announced the first-ever demonstration of quantum advantage, but some quantum researchers contested the claim, on the grounds that a better classical algorithm that would outperform the quantum one could exist.
139288886
submission
hackingbear writes:
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an apology and take down after a senior Chinese official posted a "fake image" of an Australian soldier holding a knife with blood on it to the throat of an Afghan child, calling it “truly repugnant” and demanding it be taken down. The Australian government has asked Twitter to remove the image, posted on Monday by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on his official Twitter account, Morrison said. “It is utterly outrageous and cannot be justified on any basis,” Morrison said. “The Chinese government should be utterly ashamed of this post. It diminishes them in the world’s eyes.”
The image is actually an art work, originally posted on Weibo by online artist Wuhe Qilin, based on the recently uncovered of war crimes committed by Australian special forces in Afgan War. On Friday, Australia has told 13 special forces soldiers they face dismissal in relation to an independent report on alleged unlawful killings in Afghanistan, the head of the country’s army said on Friday. “It is the Australian government who should feel ashamed for their soldiers killing innocent Afghan civilians,” said Hua Chunying, China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, when asked about Morrison’s comments. Wuhe Qilin praised Zhao's re-posting [translation: "Deputy Zhao's strong. Go for it!"] of his work.
138623944
submission
hackingbear writes:
Reports in the Danish media allege that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) spied on the country’s Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its defense industry firm Terma, as well as other European defense contractors Eurofighter GmbH and Saab, in an attempt to gain information on its fighter acquisition program that was eventually won by the U.S.-made Lockheed Martin F-35. Allegedly, the NSA sought to conduct espionage [ab]using an existing intelligence-sharing agreement between the two countries. Under this agreement, it is said the NSA is able to wiretap fiber-optic communication cables passing through Denmark and stored by the Danish Defense Intelligence Service, or Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE). In June, Denmark said it want to be able to exclude 5G technology suppliers [namely Huawei Technologies of China] from providing critical infrastructure in Denmark if they are not from countries considered security allies. “In order to protect Denmark and the Danes, we want to collaborate with someone with whom we already have alliances,” Minister of Defence Trine Bramsen told reporter. U.S. officials were seeking to block an undersea cable backed by Google, Facebook Inc. and a Chinese partner, in a national security review that could rewrite the rules of internet connectivity between the U.S. and China, alleging that Beijing could physically access the cable for espionage—in this case by wiretapping internet traffic.
138429828
submission
hackingbear writes:
China regulators issued draft rules Tuesday aimed at preventing monopolistic practices by internet companies, a move that caused Alibaba stock and that of other Chinese internet giants based in the nation to plunge on the news. China's State Administration for Market Regulation, which issued the draft, said it wanted to prevent platforms from dominating the market or from adopting methods aimed at blocking fair competition, according to a report from Reuters. [The list of these behaviors] would include demanding vendors to transact only on one platform exclusively, or providing differentiated prices to customers based on their shopping profiles, which could potentially be outlawed, according to the draft guidelines. It would be the first time [Chinese] market regulators, who are seeking reviews and feedback from the public toward the draft rules until Nov. 30, have attempted to define what constitutes anti-competitive practices among internet companies under the law. Last week, Chinese regulators suspended the $37 billion IPO of the gigantic Ant Group, founded by Alibaba and boasted institution investors including US venture firm Silver Lake and China's Social Security Fund, claiming a comprehensive considerations about systematic financial risks, reminiscing that of Lehman Brother's collapse which triggered the 2008 Great Recession, and safeguarding the interests of financial consumers and investors. “We encourage the financial sector to explore reasonable innovation while put risks under control. At the same time, we will regulate fintech in accordance with its nature of finance, and include all financial activities into the regulatory framework,” Liang Tao, vice chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, told reporters.
138300932
submission
hackingbear writes:
China successfully launched the world's first 6G communication satellite by a Long March-6 carrier rocket that blasted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China Central Television (CCTV) reported. The 6G experimental satellite, named after the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), was jointly developed by Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology, UESTC, and Beijing MinoSpace Technology. It will be used to verify the performance of 6G technology in space as the 6G frequency band will expand from the 5G millimeter wave frequency to the terahertz frequency. The technology is expected to be over 100 times faster than 5G, enabling lossless transmission in space to achieve long-distance communications with a smaller power output.
137996694
submission
hackingbear writes:
Investors, both big and small, are defying the threats of sanctions by populistic US politicians and anxiously waiting on Thursday to find out whether they would be one of the lucky ones to win a golden ticket for a slice of Jack Ma’s Ant Group, the fast-growing digital finance platform, in the biggest initial public offering in history which will debut equally in Hong Kong and Shanghai raising $34 billion combined, surpassing previous IPO records of Saudi Aramco at $29 billion and Ant's parent Alibaba Group at $25 billion. The retail tranche in Hong Kong was more than 90 times oversubscribed as of Thursday morning. Ant’s IPO values the company at US$313 billion, which could rise to US$318.50 billion including an overallotment option, making the fintech unicorn more valuable than the world’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase. When thousands of retail investors could first subscribe to the Ant shares, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) the city’s de facto central bank had intervened twice by selling a combined HK$31.8 billion to curb shortages of the Hong Kong Dollar. Speaking at a business conference in Shanghai last week, Ma touted the fact that the pricing for Ant's IPO was "determined outside of New York City," underscoring China's growing clout in finance and tech. "We didn't dare to think about it five years ago, or even three years ago," Ma said, calling it "a miracle" that such a huge IPO can now take place in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
137035882
submission
hackingbear writes:
In a virtual lecture to the Economic Club of New York, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger has called on the U.S. and China to set boundaries on threats to one another, or risk a mutual slide into a world war. [After China developed nuclear weapons,] Kissinger engineered the establishment of relations between communist China and the U.S. in order to gain strategic dominance over the Soviet Union, a move that betrayed former ally Taiwan ROC. Kissinger explained that U.S. policymakers should “think of an economic world in which no other country should be able to blackmail us, but where that objective is not designed in such a way that all potential technological capabilities in other countries have to be confronted and reduced.” In exchange for allying with the U.S. during Cold War, the American market was opened up to China after ending years of sanction and China has since risen to become the second-largest economy in the world and a chief opponent of the U.S. The two countries have engaged before in the Korean War, ending with the US-led 16 nation allies unable to defeat the communist China despite having overwhelming military and economic advantages.
136646302
submission
hackingbear writes:
As October 1 arrives, hundreds of millions of people in China are expected to pack highways, trains and planes for the National Day holiday, one of the busiest times for travel in the world's most populous country. In a sign of the government's confidence in keeping the virus under control, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that domestic travels can be arranged "as normal" for the upcoming holiday, given all cities in mainland China are marked as low risk for the coronavirus. The expected 550 million trips during the 8-day holiday will be a much-awaited boost to Chinese economic recovery. "I think China has (the virus) under pretty good control," said a 29-year-old traveler flew from Guangzhou to Shanghai. "I'm wearing masks and bringing alcohol wipes with me to clean my hands, especially before eating — although in Shanghai, few people wear masks now." More than eight months on, China's restrictions on domestic movement have all been lifted. Officially, some cities still require passengers to produce a green health code on their smartphones at train stations and airports to show they're safe to travel, but implementation can be lax in practice. China has not reported any locally transmitted symptomatic case since mid-August, and is rigorously screening overseas arrivals and workers at risk of exposure to the virus.
136589420
submission
hackingbear writes:
Plans to poison or kidnap Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy were discussed between sources in US intelligence and a private security firm that spied extensively on the WikiLeaks co-founder, a court hearing his extradition case has been told. Microphones were concealed to monitor Assange’s meetings with lawyers, his fingerprint was obtained from a glass and there was even a plot to obtain a nappy (diaper) from a baby who had been brought on regular visits to the embassy in order to establish paternity but the plan was foiled when the then employee alerted the child’s mother, according to the witness, whose evidence took the form of a written statement. “There was a suggestion that the door of the embassy would be left open allowing people to enter from the outside and kidnap or poison Assange,” the court was told. The witness alleged [founder and director of security company UC Global] Morales said these suggestions were under consideration with his contacts in the US.
