China has never had expansionist ambitions. On the contrary, modern Chinese foreign policy is explicitly grounded in non-interventionism and respect for sovereignty (the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence). Xinjiang, Tibet and, per Beijing, Taiwan, are internal matters. The "Philippine islands" have been claimed by multiple states long before the PRC existed.
Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government. The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders (e.g. Meng Wanzhou, Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried, Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, etc.).
> Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government.
You're making zero sense:
1. I predict there will be no change in the US government's access as a result of this.
2. I don't think Americans are so indifferent to their own country that they'd prefer a situation where an adversary country gets handed an intelligence asset. I mean, hypothetically, would an American prefer US trade policy be set that in a way that disadvantages American workers, because some politician got blackmailed because of something his Roomba recorded?
> The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders
3. The Chinese government has been going after people in the US. They've long been engaged in industrial espionage, but there's also their "overseas police stations" (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65305415). It's worth noting that US citizens can have a Chinese origin, and I doubt the Chinese government would suddenly become uninterested in a dissident once he got naturalized.
I'm not sure how useful of an intelligence asset a map of my house is, or pictures of me in my boxers on a saturday morning. I'm also not sure why you think they weren't already just buying this information from iRobot.
> I'm not sure how useful of an intelligence asset a map of my house is, or pictures of me in my boxers on a saturday morning.
Seriously, who cares about you or your house? Why do you think your personal example is the one to reason from?
iRobot sold 50 million robots, lets conservatively say 10% of those are internet connected and still in service. That's 5 million households. There's probably quite a few people in that 5 million who have something going on that Chinese intelligence is interested in, even things that may affect you personally, if indrectly (if that's what you care about).
> Again, I don't know why you think China wasn't already buying that information from iRobot before it went bankrupt.
Come on, do really you think iRobot they sold data like that to third parties? Like user-identified floor plans? Camera images from inside people's homes?
> Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.
When Twitter had its recent VPN reveal, what actually took me by surprise was how many divisive accounts weren't from China or Russia, but from regions of the world like Turkey, India, Africa, and South America. Sure, they could be spouting divisive politics to push an agenda of someone who is paying them, but the simpler answer might be that they spout divisive politics because it earns them money in terms of advertising dollars.
And that's the real problem, IMHO. The subversion of democracy isn't happening because of China, Russia, or any number of adversarial countries, but because our social media companies don't care enough about our country or the people living inside it to meaningfully crack down on ragebait engagement farming.
The general thing about state actors is that they have every incentive to have a dossier of compromising information on every foreign national regardless of current relevance, for potential use in the future. You could, for instance, someday be in a position where you have privileged access to data that becomes relevant to them, and thus your history becomes useful.
True, but the US has a long track record of pursuing both foreigners and citizens—through prosecutions, extraditions, sanctions, or asset seizures—often years later and regardless of nationality. In practical terms, the risk of being targeted by the US for breaking a law is far higher than being blackmailed by a foreign state like China. The consequences are asymmetric as well: blackmail usually amounts to little more than embarrassment, whereas being pursued by the US government can carry lengthy prison sentences or worse.
This is not to mention that the US also engages in data collection for coercion purposes.
State actors also have finite budgets and do cost/benefit analyses. They don't really gain much for creating and maintaining deep dossiers on hundreds of millions of random foreigners.
and then list out examples that the US targeted which includes a US citizen, also while ignoring that China goes beyond its borders to target their citizens?
Both countries routinely act this way because they have the power to do so
The western view of China’s Internet censorship often flies in the face of reality. A lot of people seem to think China has an impenetrable firewall.
Bypassing internet restrictions in mainland China is a normal part of life for people who want to access the western internet. China is able to censor the Internet effectively because Chinese people are most comfortable using apps that cater directly to Chinese people, through language and culture. The Chinese government has a lot of control over these companies because they’re based are located in China.
The English speaking west is so dependent on the U.S. internet that it is impossible to copy the Chinese model.
It’s a mistake to think you need to get everyone perfectly all the time to be effective. Stopping businesses from operating legally and having your population afraid of committing a crime does a lot of work by itself.
It’s only techies who think “if I can get around it, it’s not that big of a deal”. As long as you live in a society, how other people behave affects what you can do too.
Even those who are happy to break laws, don't generally do so perfectly.
Even nation states' pulling James Bond stunts don't do it perfectly.
Imperfect enforcement used to be the default even for petty crimes, before CCTV and finger prints and DNA tests and all the other forensics got cheap. The legal systems don't care if the methods are imperfect… and worse, they don't understand why we do, making it hard to explain to them the consequences of this kind of thing in our domain.
Almost certainly VPN traffic. Most major LLMs block both China and Hong Kong (surprisingly, not the other way around), so Singapore ends up being the fastest nearby endpoint that isn't restricted.
Ah, you're right. Still, I wonder if it's because of Chinese people and companies using Singaporean bank accounts. It just seems odd that such a small country is so overrepresented here.
It's their own decisions they made long before the controls and presure. Besides being in bed with the US gov, people that run big AI shops tend to be fervently nationalistic and politically ambitious on their own. Leopold Aschenbrenner's dystopian rant [1] or Dario Amodei's [2] [3] are pretty representative.
Early on there was a lot of distillation going on, apparently. Note that OpenAI introduced ID verification for high volume accounts and I think it was for that reason. It does raise questions about how much of the Chinese model's performance is entirely home grown. At least historically, it was quite hard to crawl the English web from behind the Great Firewall.
> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.
They must be really glad to have so much competition then.
> If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.
I wonder if OpenAI will start assisting Google now?
> France isn't a safe country for open source privacy projects. They expect backdoors in encryption and for device access too. Secure devices and services are not going to be allowed.
If this is true, it's a bit concerning for Ledger users. One state-mandated firmware update away from losing all your crypto?
Fortunately it's not true. GrapheneOS seem https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1993061892324311480#m to be reacting to news coverage https://archive.ph/UrlvK saying that although legitimate uses exist, if GrapheneOS have connections to a criminal organization and refuse to cooperate with law enforcement, they could be prosecuted nonetheless:
« il existe pour une certaine partie des utilisateurs une réelle légitimité dans la volonté de protéger ses échanges. L’approche est donc différente. Mais ça ne nous empêchera pas de poursuivre les éditeurs, si des liens sont découverts avec une organisation criminelle et qu’ils ne coopèrent pas avec la justice. »
Charitably, GrapheneOS are not in fact a front for organized crime, but merely paranoid, assuming that the news coverage is laying the groundwork for prosecution on trumped-up charges. Notably, there doesn't appear to have been direct communication from law enforcement yet.
Of course if your organization have connections to a criminal organization, you are going to be in trouble. Same thing for refusing to cooperate with law enforcement, this is not some abstract thing, it is about following the law, for example relating to evidence tampering or search warrants.
I don't think France is anything special in that regard.
Paranoid? Telegram CEO was arrested and held for days, his movements out of France restricted for months. And he is a connected billionaire, not an open source developer.
Open source developers have been given jail sentences in the last months.
If you're a broke open source developer - even if you believe under the law you're not doing anything wrong - would you want to be exposed to law enforcement harassment (lawfare) for no reason?
Easy. They'll just demand major tech companies implement in Europe exactly what they did to comply with China's government surveillance request. They already have the blueprint of the apparatus, they just need to throw a blue coat of paint and a circle of gold stars over it to legitimize it and make it less scary looking.
And they don't give a damn about attracting eyeballs since the surveillance will be mandated by law and done legally by the book, and it will be done "for your own safety and protection against the boogieman", so that people will accept it.
I can't speak to the political or legal aspects, but technically, Ledger firmware updates are closed‑source binaries delivered from Ledger's servers. That centralization makes it possible for a state actor—or anyone with access to Ledger's signing keys and servers—to slip in a backdoor. Even if the firmware were fully open source, a backdoor could still be inserted during the build process and never appear in the repositories. Avoiding it would require building the firmware yourself, which most users don't do.
As a side note, Bitcoin Core mitigates this risk with deterministic builds and multiple independent developers verifying and signing releases. But this option isn't available for Ledger as most of the firmware is closed source.
If there is a backdoor in an open-source system, and people know about it, then they will organize independently to patch it out. So it will be ineffective to the extent that the technology allows reprogrammability.
The only way you can beat it, as a governement trying to insert a backdoor, is through use of tivoization or some other technology that clinches control during manufacturing or other centralization weak points around economies of scale that the re-programmers don't have.
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