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    510K CPUs, HDDs & more seized as smugglers keep trying to sneak tech into China

    news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 2 days ago - 22:34

Hong Kong customs said it seized about $3.8 million in tech, including these HP laptops, on Monday.

Enlarge / Hong Kong customs said it seized about $3.8 million in tech, including these HP laptops, on Monday. (credit: Hong Kong Customs )

The recent chip shortage showed us how far people will go to obtain rare components and gadgets. Those who couldn't wait for new electronics battled enormous price tags, frustrating lottery systems, questionable sellers, and unreliable stock. But just as people will go to extremes to buy tech, extreme measures can be taken to sell them.

In 2023, the gray market for PC components, including CPUs, SSDs, and HDDs, and devices like phones and computers in mainland China appears thriving. Just ask the China and Hong Kong customs agents who have been announcing seizure after seizure of tech hardware, including a batch reportedly worth about $3.8 million obtained on Monday.

510,000 electronics seized

Hong Kong customs announced it seized 508,000 PC parts, including CPUs, computer hard drives, and RAM sticks, with an estimated market value of around $3.5 million. There were also 2,000 electronic devices, like laptops, phones, dash cams, and styli for touchscreens, that are estimated to be worth about $255,000.

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    TikTok CEO fails to convince Congress that the app is not a “weapon” for China

    news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 23 March - 22:21

TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Enlarge / TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. (credit: Kent Nishimura / Contributor | Los Angeles Times )

For nearly five hours, Congress members of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew over concerns about the platform's risks to minor safety, data privacy, and national security for American users.

“The American people need the truth about the threat TikTok poses to our national and personal security,” committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wa.) said in her opening statement, concluding that “TikTok is a weapon.”

Rodgers suggested that even for Americans who have never used the app, “TikTok surveils us all, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is able to use this as a tool to manipulate America as a whole.”

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    Fighting VPN criminalization should be Big Tech’s top priority, activists say

    news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 20 March - 11:00 · 1 minute

Fighting VPN criminalization should be Big Tech’s top priority, activists say

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

“Women, life, freedom” became the protest chant of a revolution still raging in Iran months after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in custody of morality police. Amini was arrested last September for “improperly” wearing a hijab and violating the Islamic Republic's mandatory dress code laws. Since then, her name has become a viral hashtag invoked by millions of online activists protesting authoritarian regimes around the globe.

In response to Iran's ongoing protests—mostly led by women and young people—Iranian authorities have increasingly restricted Internet access. First, they temporarily blocked popular app stores and indefinitely blocked social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. They then implemented sporadic mobile shutdowns wherever protests flared up. Perhaps most extreme, authorities responded to protests in southeast Iran in February by blocking the Internet outright, Al Arabiya reported . Digital and human rights experts say motivations include controlling information, keeping protestors offline, and forcing protestors to use state services where their online activities can be more easily tracked—and sometimes trigger arrests.

As getting online has become increasingly challenging for everyone in Iran—not just protestors—millions have learned to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide Internet activity, circumvent blocks, and access accurate information beyond state propaganda. Simply put, VPNs work by masking a user's IP address so that governments have a much more difficult time monitoring activity or detecting a user's location. They do this by routing the user's data to the VPN provider's remote servers, making it much harder for an ISP (or a government) to correlate the Internet activity of the VPN provider's servers with the individual users actually engaging in that activity.

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    Biden’s TikTok ultimatum: Sever ties with China or face US ban

    news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 16 March - 16:12 · 1 minute

Biden’s TikTok ultimatum: Sever ties with China or face US ban

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

After US President Joe Biden and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) spent years trying to work out a deal with TikTok that could address national security concerns, Biden seems to have given up. Yesterday, TikTok confirmed that the Biden administration issued an ultimatum to the app’s China-based owners to either divest their stakes or risk a TikTok ban in the US, Reuters reported .

Biden’s demand comes just one week before TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Chew is already in the US and is working with “experienced Washington advisers” to help him defend TikTok against its harshest critics in Congress next Thursday.

Chew told The Journal that forcing a sale does not address national security concerns any better than the deal that TikTok had already worked out with the CFIUS. Under the deal that Biden seems to be shrugging off now, TikTok has already invested billions in moving its US users’ data to US servers and hiring independent monitors to ensure that Americans’ TikTok feeds can’t be manipulated and that their data can’t be accessed by China authorities.

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    Chinese search giant launches AI chatbot with prerecorded demo

    news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 16 March - 13:11

PIcture of presentation

Enlarge / Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of Baidu chief Robin Li introduces the functions of the company’s AI chatbot Ernie in Beijing on Thursday. Li said there was high market demand as Chinese companies raced to develop an equivalent to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT. (credit: Ng Han Guan/AP)

Shares of Baidu fell as much as 10 percent on Thursday after the web search company showed only a pre-recorded video of its AI chatbot Ernie in the first public release of China’s answer to ChatGPT.

The Beijing-based tech company has claimed Ernie will remake its business and for weeks talked up plans to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its search engine and other products.

But on Thursday, millions of people tuning in to the event were left with little idea of whether Baidu’s chatbot could compete with ChatGPT.

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    Breaking RSA with a Quantum Computer

    news.movim.eu / Schneier · Tuesday, 3 January - 17:38 · 1 minute

A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong.

We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy. But it takes a big quantum computer, on the orders of millions of qbits, to factor anything resembling the key sizes we use today. What the researchers have done is combine classical lattice reduction factoring techniques with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm. This means that they only need a quantum computer with 372 qbits, which is well within what’s possible today. (IBM will announce a 1000-qbit quantum computer in a few months. Others are on their way as well.)

The Chinese group didn’t have that large a quantum computer to work with. They were able to factor 48-bit numbers using a 10-qbit quantum computer. And while there are always potential problems when scaling something like this up by a factor of 50, there are no obvious barriers.

Honestly, most of the paper is over my head—both the lattice-reduction math and the quantum physics. And there’s the nagging question of why the Chinese government didn’t classify this research.

But…wow…maybe…and yikes! Or not.

“Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor”

Abstract: Shor’s algorithm has seriously challenged information security based on public key cryptosystems. However, to break the widely used RSA-2048 scheme, one needs millions of physical qubits, which is far beyond current technical capabilities. Here, we report a universal quantum algorithm for integer factorization by combining the classical lattice reduction with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). The number of qubits required is O(logN/loglogN ), which is sublinear in the bit length of the integer N , making it the most qubit-saving factorization algorithm to date. We demonstrate the algorithm experimentally by factoring integers up to 48 bits with 10 superconducting qubits, the largest integer factored on a quantum device. We estimate that a quantum circuit with 372 physical qubits and a depth of thousands is necessary to challenge RSA-2048 using our algorithm. Our study shows great promise in expediting the application of current noisy quantum computers, and paves the way to factor large integers of realistic cryptographic significance.

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    China’s secretive space plane flies higher and longer than before

    news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 9 August, 2022 - 20:06

A Long March 2F carrier rocket carrying the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on June 5, 2022.

Enlarge / A Long March 2F carrier rocket carrying the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on June 5, 2022. (credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Last week one of China's most reliable rockets, the Long March 2F vehicle, took off from a spaceport in the Gobi Desert carrying a secretive space plane.

In a short report on the launch by China's state-owned Xinhua news service, the government provided little detail about the "reusable test spacecraft" beyond saying it would remain in orbit for "a period of time" and providing technical verification of reusable and in-orbit services.

This is the second time China launched what is believed to be a small space plane, likely similar in size and scope to the US Space Force's experimental X-37B vehicle. This uncrewed X-37B resembles NASA's space shuttle, but at less than 10 meters in length, it is considerably smaller. The vehicle's cargo bay can hold something about the size of a standard refrigerator.

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    Critical Vulnerabilities in GPS Trackers

    news.movim.eu / Schneier · Thursday, 21 July, 2022 - 13:36 · 1 minute

This is a dangerous vulnerability:

An assessment from security firm BitSight found six vulnerabilities in the Micodus MV720 , a GPS tracker that sells for about $20 and is widely available. The researchers who performed the assessment believe the same critical vulnerabilities are present in other Micodus tracker models. The China-based manufacturer says 1.5 million of its tracking devices are deployed across 420,000 customers. BitSight found the device in use in 169 countries, with customers including governments, militaries, law enforcement agencies, and aerospace, shipping, and manufacturing companies.

BitSight discovered what it said were six “severe” vulnerabilities in the device that allow for a host of possible attacks. One flaw is the use of unencrypted HTTP communications that makes it possible for remote hackers to conduct adversary-in-the-middle attacks that intercept or change requests sent between the mobile application and supporting servers. Other vulnerabilities include a flawed authentication mechanism in the mobile app that can allow attackers to access the hardcoded key for locking down the trackers and the ability to use a custom IP address that makes it possible for hackers to monitor and control all communications to and from the device.

The security firm said it first contacted Micodus in September to notify company officials of the vulnerabilities. BitSight and CISA finally went public with the findings on Tuesday after trying for months to privately engage with the manufacturer. As of the time of writing, all of the vulnerabilities remain unpatched and unmitigated.

These are computers and computer vulnerabilities, but because the computers are attached to cars, the vulnerabilities become potentially life-threatening. CISA writes :

These vulnerabilities could impact access to a vehicle fuel supply, vehicle control, or allow locational surveillance of vehicles in which the device is installed.

I wouldn’t have buried “vehicle control” in the middle of that sentence.