Interesting article shared with me about the way Wi-Fi location services work.

I just love the taste of ethanol, I once tried ethanol for disinfection and it was so good. And I always drink alcohol purely for taste, I drink it very rarely and when I do it is for taste. But like it is so tasty. And I love bitter and all sorts of strong tastes. Now I will not drink alcohol too much because I do not love getting drunk, and especially not disinfection alcohol because of toxicity it was just taste test, but why is it so tasty??

Goldman Sachs Research sees 5-6% annual growth in China’s exports and raised its real GDP forecasts for 2026 and 2027 to well above consensus.

China’s growth will likely come at the expense of other high-tech producers such as Europe and Japan

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5697622

Archived version

Chinese intelligence officers attempted to recruit “thousands” of people linked to Westminster in a vast online operation that specifically targeted the “weak underbelly of parliament”, Whitehall sources have said.

Officials believe the agents used two recruitment “headhunters”, Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen, to contact parliamentary staff, advisers and policy specialists as part of a “scattergun” effort o identify people with access to sensitive political information. The pair were highlighted, sources said, because they were allegedly the most prolific among a wider group of Chinese intelligence assets still operating.

“They kissed a lot of frogs,” one Whitehall source said. “This was a widespread scattergun targeting. They certainly sent out thousands of approaches. Some of it was dismissed as spam but it was an effort spread far and wide. They only need one out of hundreds to respond; that’s a win for them.”

...

MI5 told MPs and peers that China was offering “large financial incentives for seemingly low-level information” as a way of building relationships and encouraging targets to provide “non-public sensitive information”. Those approached included advisers to former Conservative ministers, including an ex-chancellor, advisers to Labour ministers, officials and researchers at several think tanks, among them the Tony Blair Institute.

The agency said China was attempting to “cultivate” people who were “one step removed” from high-priority parliamentary figures, and urged MPs to be wary of “unusual questions” from colleagues or contacts that might indicate intelligence-gathering.

...

Ordinary Britons should also be cautious about unsolicited online contact from potential Chinese intelligence operatives, the defence minister said.

...

In a letter to MPs, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, said it was of the “utmost importance” that everyone working in parliament understood “how this activity happens and how to protect ourselves against it”. Chinese state entities, he said, were “relentless” in seeking to influence Westminster.

Qiu, chief executive of BR-YR Executive Search, and Shen, co-founder of the Internship Union, have been identified by MI5 as operating LinkedIn accounts used by the Ministry of State Security to “conduct outreach at scale”. Officials believe the pair were specifically tasked with approaching people working in parliament, while other Chinese operatives are deployed against academics, the military, scientific institutions and private industry.

...

Among those contacted was a staff member in the office of Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP and head of policy for Kemi Badenoch, who has been sanctioned by Beijing. The aide received a message from Shen offering remote consultancy work and praising them as an “excellent candidate”. James Price, a former special adviser to Nadhim Zahawi when he was chancellor, received a similar unsolicited approach framed as a “professional headhunting” opportunity. Both ignored the messages.

...

In September the case collapsed against two men accused of spying for China, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, in which prosecutors alleged they had passed information to Beijing. The pair deny wrongdoing.

The National Protective Security Authority, part of MI5, said last month that Chinese agents were posting fake job adverts online to lure British professionals into handing over secret material. Thousands had already been identified.

...

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42160115

Archived link

Taiwan's Deputy Foreign Minister Wu Chih-chung called for closer Taiwan-Europe security cooperation at the Berlin Security Conference arguing that peace in Europe is closely linked to stability in the Indo-Pacific.

He noted that Taiwan is a global technological hub, producing about 70% of the world’s semiconductors and more than 95% of its advanced chips. A crisis in the Taiwan Strait, he warned, would cause the most severe disruption to the technological supply chain since World War II.

He said European countries have sent naval vessels through the Taiwan Strait several times since last year. France, the UK, and Italy have deployed carrier strike groups to take part in Indo-Pacific exercises, signaling that Europe is increasingly concerned about Taiwan Strait security.

Wu said Taiwan will increase its defense budget to NT$937.2 billion (US$30 billion) in 2026, with a target of reaching 5% of GDP by 2030, in line with NATO standards.

...

China is mobilizing an armada of civilian ships that could help in an invasion of Taiwan – a mission that could surpass the Second World War’s Normandy landings. Reuters used ship tracking data and satellite images to monitor the role civilian vessels played in Chinese maritime exercises this summer. The drills revealed that China is devising concrete invasion plans, naval warfare experts say, and rehearsing new techniques aimed at speeding up beach landings of troops and equipment in a bid to overwhelm Taiwan’s defenders.

Note: scroll down to see next page & image

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/53462995

Several Dutch seed producers, greenhouse builders and agricultural machinery suppliers remain active in Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine, according to an investigation by the NRC and Investico.

The NRC identified 10 Dutch agricultural firms that have attended Russian agricultural trade fairs in the past two years. Eight were present this week at YugAgro in Krasnodar, one of the sector’s largest events.

The Netherlands is the second-largest supplier of agricultural machinery to Russia after Germany, according to research by Wageningen University and national statistics office CBS.

Most Dutch companies operating in Russia now do so through local subsidiaries, which means they also pay tax in Russia. Some maintain Russian-language websites and marketing channels, including podcasts, the paper said.

Soon we can have chatbots grade the work of chatbots.

The manufacturer's main plant in Munich is to be worst affected, with 1,300 jobs lost, followed by 600 at the site in Salzgitter and 400 in Nuremberg.

The email nickname "Brooklyn Barack" fits for all the wrong reasons.

560 out of a total of approximately 3200 employees at the Augsburg site will now lose their jobs.

Like, can't you read?

hey real quick can I borrow $18.99?

Hi guys!

I'm looking for a replacement travel dongle to play my Jellyfin movies whenever I'm traveling. My goto device up to this point has been a Chromecast (with GTV I think). But it's becoming increasingly clear its playback is very unreliable, hanging mid-playback for long periods. I blamed it initially on bandwidth issues over very long distances (the server is on a different continent at the moment!). But playing on the laptop via browser or via the jellyfin media player flatpak works just beautifully. So it clearly seems to be issues with the Chromecast as it's connected to the same Wifi and TV as the laptop.

So I am thinking...what other devices could I look into as Chromecast replacement? There's over 3yr old recommendations about a Walmart device (but I don't live anywhere near the American continent). The other go-to device would be an Nvidia Shield, the canister-looking one. But that still seems a bit hefty for traveling. After all these years, is there any device you'd recommend to use as light-to-bring dongle for traveling?

Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45918775

Archived

The Chinese Communist Party’s chief diplomat in Melbourne tried to get a think tank to shut down an appearance by journalist Cheng Lei, and invoked the China-Australia trade relationship in the process.

Chinese-born, Australian journalist Cheng Lei was locked up by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] in China for three years and two months. She was detained after the former Coalition government called for an inquiry into COVID and convicted in a sham trial for forwarding a fellow journalist an economic report before its public release.

[...] Lei [...] said the CCP was still trying to silence her, two years after being released from detention in China.

[...]

“They keep tabs on me,” Ms Cheng said. “For example, I know they tried to stop a talk that I was giving at the Australian Institute of International Affairs. This is the Melbourne consulate.”

Ms Cheng details her time in jail and the geopolitical storm in which she was caught in her recently released memoir, Cheng Lei: A Memoir of Freedom.

[...]

She said that while she remained angry at the time the CCP had deprived her of her freedom and time with her young daughter and son, she was using her unique position of safety in Australia to tell the world about how the Chinese government treats individuals and families.

“It’s a different standard of humanity, and that is something that’s totally missing from a lot of the coverage that we get on China just because a select few go through this and then they’re too scared to write about it afterwards,” she said.

“So I’m definitely using that freedom to their dismay, probably.”

Richard Iron, President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs Victorian branch, confirmed the Chinese had asked him to cancel Cheng Lei’s talk.

He said China’s Consul General Fang Xinwen had visited him in the morning on August 5, the day of Lei’s scheduled talk.

[...]

Mr Iron said the Consul-General told him that Cheng Lei had “a warped idea about China” and was a “convicted criminal”.

Mr Iron told The Nightly that he told Fang Xinwen in response that Australians wanted a good trading relationship with China and also desired friendship, but that: “They don’t like being spied on, they don’t like being intimidated, and they don’t like being bullied”.

The [Chinese] Consul-General was contacted for comment, but did not respond.

[...]

It is the second time that it is known that the Chinese have tried to cancel Cheng Lei from Australian public life.

In June last year, Chinese officials accompanying Chinese Premier Li Qiang on his visit to Canberra to meet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese tried to physically block Ms Cheng from camera view.

Ms Cheng was an anchor for China’s state-run English-language television station CGTN when she was arrested and accused of “illegally supplying state secrets overseas’’.

Since her release, she has returned to journalism, working for Sky News Australia and was attending a document signing ceremony between the Chinese Premier and Australian Prime Minister in that capacity.

The incident made global headlines.

[...]

Cheng Lei’s parents moved to Australia when she was aged 10 in the mid-1980s.

But she warned that technology was enabling the Chinese diaspora to live in its own bubble, in a way that was not possible in her parents’ day.

“It needs to be a two-way street of acceptance and integration, between the non-Chinese and the Chinese immigrants,” she said.

“I see the immigrant bubbles, and it’s not just the Chinese community because of technology, because of the number of certain diasporas, there’s less inclination to integrate into what might be called mainstream society that may not have been the case 20, 30 years ago.

“They use Chinese apps, go to Chinese restaurants, go back to China for holidays, and then they don’t really fully experience the benefits of a free society.

“People want the rights of democracy, but they don’t want the responsibilities.”

[...]

She said the “China cheerleaders” who only ever discuss the economic opportunities and China’s development had an obligation to present the other side.

“Because I lost so much and because I’ve already been in prison, I’m fearless, but so many people are fearful if they have assets or business relationships or family in China,” she said.

“And I can’t think of another major power that is so obsessed with restricting and controlling the diaspora overseas and has so many resources and uses them compared to other countries.

She added that the CCP’s control of its diaspora was having a corrosive effect on Australian democracy.

[...]