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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10925160

Archived version

If you shop on AliExpress and your Bluetooth headphones stop switching between devices, this is caused by hidden tracking scripts on the site, not broken hardware. Install uBlock Origin and add filter rules to block collina.js and fireyejs.js on aliexpress.com, then close all open AliExpress tabs and reload the site for the fix to take effect.

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AliExpress users report a privacy-invasive tracking mechanism on the company's homepage that interferes with Bluetooth hardware. The site runs hidden audio processes that prevent multipoint headphones from switching between devices. This behavior occurs even when the tab is idle and no media is visible to the user. The issue is caused by Alibaba's security scripts designed for device identification and anti-fraud detection.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10925160

Archived version

If you shop on AliExpress and your Bluetooth headphones stop switching between devices, this is caused by hidden tracking scripts on the site, not broken hardware. Install uBlock Origin and add filter rules to block collina.js and fireyejs.js on aliexpress.com, then close all open AliExpress tabs and reload the site for the fix to take effect.

...

AliExpress users report a privacy-invasive tracking mechanism on the company's homepage that interferes with Bluetooth hardware. The site runs hidden audio processes that prevent multipoint headphones from switching between devices. This behavior occurs even when the tab is idle and no media is visible to the user. The issue is caused by Alibaba's security scripts designed for device identification and anti-fraud detection.

...

Archived version

If you shop on AliExpress and your Bluetooth headphones stop switching between devices, this is caused by hidden tracking scripts on the site, not broken hardware. Install uBlock Origin and add filter rules to block collina.js and fireyejs.js on aliexpress.com, then close all open AliExpress tabs and reload the site for the fix to take effect.

...

AliExpress users report a privacy-invasive tracking mechanism on the company's homepage that interferes with Bluetooth hardware. The site runs hidden audio processes that prevent multipoint headphones from switching between devices. This behavior occurs even when the tab is idle and no media is visible to the user. The issue is caused by Alibaba's security scripts designed for device identification and anti-fraud detection.

...

Archived version

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Three of the world's most active state-sponsored hacking programs — North Korea, Russia, and China — collectively carried out 158 documented cyberattack incidents in the first half of 2026, a 7.5% rise over the 147 recorded in the prior six months, according to the S2W TALON H1 2026 APT report published August 12 by South Korean cybersecurity intelligence firm S2W. The aggregate number, modest on its face, conceals three radically different strategic stories — and one counterintuitive finding that may be the most important for enterprise defenders: China's 17.5% decline in attributed incidents does not reflect reduced threat. It reflects a backdoor that conventional firewalls and network scanners physically cannot detect.

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No state matched North Korea's volume. Pyongyang-linked groups were attributed 99 incidents over the six months — up 13.8% from 87 in the prior period, according to the same S2W report. South Korea absorbed 19 of those attacks, nearly double the eight recorded against the United States. Those are the headline numbers. The mechanism behind them is what should recalibrate how defenders think about social engineering.

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Russia's 30% surge is the steepest percentage increase among all three state actors and the finding most directly relevant to enterprise organizations with European operations. Russian-linked APT groups recorded 26 incidents in H1 2026, up from 20 in the prior period.

Ukraine remained the primary target, absorbing 10 of those 26 attacks as Moscow's cyber operations continue to function as a force multiplier in the ongoing conflict. But the geographic footprint is expanding. Poland and Romania each recorded two confirmed Russian-attributed incidents — marking a systematic shift toward NATO's eastern flank that mirrors the broader hybrid warfare escalation Russia has conducted against both countries.

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China's attribution count fell 17.5%, from 40 incidents in H2 2025 to 33 in H1 2026. That decline is not evidence of reduced threat. It is the product of a specific technical mechanism that makes Chinese APT activity structurally harder to detect than any other state actor's operations.

The mechanism is BPFDoor. The backdoor — attributed to Chinese APT cluster Red Menshen (also tracked as Earth Bluecrow and DecisiveArchitect) — operates at the Linux kernel level, embedding itself into the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) subsystem, a decades-old networking feature originally designed for efficient traffic analysis. BPFDoor does not open any listening ports. It does not maintain an outbound connection to a command-and-control server. It does not register as a suspicious process in standard system monitoring. It remains completely dormant, passively inspecting incoming network traffic in kernel space — below the layer where firewalls and network scanners operate — until a specially crafted "magic packet" arrives.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10269370

Archived version

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The angst over China's latest AI models is missing an important business fact: "open weight" AI is not the same thing as open-source software.

Open-source software, where the code is freely shared, can be an amazing business. Think Red Hat, which IBM bought for $34 billion. Open-weight AI models are different — and, so far, they're proving to be a terrible business.

Take Z.ai, also known as Zhipu. It's publicly traded, so we can see its finances. Last year, the Chinese company lost almost $500 million on revenue of about $107 million.

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Zhipu is the lab behind GLM 5.2, an open-weight AI model that wowed the industry when it launched last month. You might expect the stock to have soared. Instead, Zhipu shares have plunged more than 40% over the past month.

MiniMax, one of the only other independent Chinese AI labs that's publicly traded, lost $250 million last year on revenue of just $79 million. Its shares have fallen more than 50% in the past month.

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Open-weight AI isn't open-source software

The key difference comes down to economics.

Software can be distributed almost for free. Once it's written, sending another customer a copy costs practically nothing. Profit margins improve as software companies grow.

AI doesn't work that way. Every answer requires expensive chips, electricity, and data-center capacity. The next unit of software is nearly free; the next unit of intelligence is not.

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Moonshot AI, another Chinese lab, illustrated the problem last week. Its new Kimi K3 open-weight model impressed the industry with frontier-level performance. But days after launch, the company had to halt new customer sign-ups because it didn't have enough computing power to run the model.

If Moonshot were selling traditional software, adding millions of users would be relatively easy. Instead, every new customer increases the company's infrastructure bill, capping its growth.

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Someone else captures the profits

The way open-weight AI models are run, a process known as inference, makes the business situation worse.

Open-weight AI labs give outsiders their models' trained numerical parameters, allowing them to download and run them. (Parameters are like tiny numerical dials inside a model's brain that determine how these systems learn from data and what outputs they produce).

After that, these models are usually run by other companies, such as cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Alibaba. There are also specialist providers such as Fireworks AI and Baseten, although they largely rent capacity from the big cloud companies.

Companies can also download these open weights and run the models themselves. Or, they can also use the Chinese model maker's own inference service, but in the Western world, most corporate customers don't do that for data security reasons.

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Only that last option reliably generates real revenue for the model creator. In the other three cases, the AI lab that spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the model may receive little or no ongoing revenue.

That leaves the model makers in a difficult position. They've paid heavily to train the systems, then given away the key assets.

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No wonder Alibaba's stock is up about 13% over the past month, while AI labs Zhipu and MiniMax have been crushed.

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"Unlike open-source software, open-weight models do not generate significant sums of revenue by selling support, services, and enterprise editions around the free offering (the Red Hat playbook)," William Blair's Bhatia wrote.

"Instead, they primarily generate revenue by hosting the model and selling inference compute. But inference workloads will flow to whoever can operate the inference infrastructure most efficiently, and this is usually not the model provider," the analyst added.

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Raimo Lenshow, an analyst at Barclays, recently came back from China after researching the country's AI sector. He reached a similar conclusion.

"Intense domestic competition has also led to more aggressive pricing competition," the analyst told investors. "Some major models remain open-source or open-weight, accelerating the pricing pressure throughout the system. While this helps drive faster commercialization, it is also adding uncertainty to long-term profitability for those AI labs."

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So why give the models away?

Open technology has long been a strategy for challengers trying to catch market leaders. A late starter may not be able to match a leader's customers or distribution, but it can spread its technology widely, attract developers, and make the leader's product harder to sell at premium prices.

That may be exactly what China and its AI labs are trying to do. Open-weight models put pressure on OpenAI, Anthropic, and other US leaders by offering capable alternatives at lower prices. Even if the Chinese labs make little money themselves, they can force American competitors to cut prices and make it harder to recover the billions they spend training new models.

Bhatia said Chinese labs may be releasing open-weight models with "little regard for near-term profitability." In his view, openness can turn advanced AI into a commodity, weakening the business model of US companies that keep their technology closed.

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The financial payoff for the Chinese labs may come much later — or may be less important than the broader strategic benefit to China.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10269423

Beijing consults companies on ways to stop west acquiring its advanced technologies and star start-ups.

Archived version

Chinese regulators are considering tightening export controls on artificial intelligence and semiconductor technologies, as the US-China rivalry intensifies in cutting-edge AI.

Regulators led by the Ministry of Commerce (MofCom) have been consulting leading domestic AI and chipmaking groups on how to prevent China’s advanced technologies and star start-ups from being acquired by the west, according to two people involved in the discussions.

MofCom talked to AI companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhipu on limiting the transfer of key data for the training of their models overseas, as well as allowing their model weights to be downloaded by foreign users, the people said.

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MofCom has also sought views on possible restrictions that would prevent overseas chipmakers including Qualcomm and TSMC from producing advanced semiconductors based on designs developed by Chinese companies such as Huawei, Alibaba and ByteDance, according to the people.

Potential restrictions could also be imposed on the overseas acquisition of strategic technology groups in areas such as agentic AI, the people said. This is mainly to address a loophole that Beijing believes to have led to Meta’s $2bn acquisition of Manus, a deal that was subsequently ordered to be unwound by Chinese authorities.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10253969

Archived version

The release of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and Xi Jinping's diplomatic offensive mark a pivot in China's global AI strategy. Unable to match the United States in advanced semiconductor manufacturing due to stringent export controls, China is leveraging its strength in software engineering and algorithmic efficiency to dominate the open-source layer of the AI stack. This strategy effectively turns AI into a digital Trojan horse. While the US attempts to build a walled garden around its proprietary technology, China is building the public roads—roads that lead directly back to Beijing's digital infrastructure and regulatory influence. India, caught between these two titans, is attempting a delicate balancing act, leveraging its sovereign digital public infrastructure to avoid the Chinese trap while remaining heavily dependent on Western compute power.

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The Trap Mechanism: By offering "free" foundational models, China aims to make the Global South algorithmically dependent on Chinese infrastructure, embedding censorship and surveillance capabilities into foreign digital architectures.

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First, there is the infrastructure trap. Running a model as large as Kimi K3 requires significant inference compute. While the weights are free, the hardware to run them is not. Chinese cloud providers, backed by state subsidies, offer to host these models for developing nations at rates Western cloud giants cannot match. The data generated by these nations then flows through Chinese servers.

Second, there is the alignment and ideological trap. Open-source models from China are trained to adhere to "socialist core values." While developers can fine-tune the models, the foundational weights contain baked-in biases. The model will inherently struggle with, or refuse to generate, content related to Taiwanese independence, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or critiques of the Chinese Communist Party. By normalizing the use of these models globally, Beijing subtly exports its censorship red lines.

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"Open-source AI from China is not a public good; it is a digital Belt and Road. The code is free, but the geopolitical alignment is expensive."

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Political and Diplomatic Implications

Beijing's diplomatic corps has seamlessly integrated AI into its South-South cooperation narrative. By offering Kimi K3 and similar models to BRICS nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, China is building a technological coalition that inherently aligns with its data governance standards. This fractures the global internet further, creating a "splinternet" where not only the applications differ, but the very cognitive engines processing information operate on divergent ethical and ideological frameworks.

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Military and Intelligence Implications

From an intelligence perspective, the proliferation of Chinese open-source models presents a severe counterintelligence nightmare. Open-source does not mean secure; it means the code is visible, but the training data and potential latent vulnerabilities are not. Integrating Chinese models into NATO or allied telecommunications and defense supply chains—even at the application layer—creates avenues for data exfiltration, model poisoning, and adversarial attacks.

Economic and Trade Implications

The economic strategy is simple: commoditize the complement. If AI models become a cheap, open commodity, the value shifts to the application layer and the compute layer. Because China controls the manufacturing of mid-tier hardware and heavily subsidizes its cloud infrastructure, it can win the application layer in price-sensitive markets. Meanwhile, US tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, which expected high-margin returns on their multi-billion-dollar AI investments, face a pricing collapse. If a free Chinese model performs 95% as well as a $20-per-month US API, the commercial model breaks down.

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Counterarguments: The Case for Open Ecosystems

... Many technologists argue that the US push for closed, proprietary AI creates a techno-feudal system where only a few billionaires control humanity's cognitive engine. From this perspective, China's release of Kimi K3 democratizes AI, allowing developing nations to build local tech ecosystems without paying tribute to Silicon Valley.

Furthermore, open-source models are auditable. Security researchers can (theoretically) inspect the weights and architecture for backdoors. Proponents argue that the "China trap" narrative is merely a protectionist talking point used by American tech giants to stave off competition.

While these points hold merit regarding the general value of open-source technology, they fail to account for the specific nature of the Chinese state. In China, there is no delineation between private enterprise and state security. The National Intelligence Law of 2017 mandates that all Chinese organizations and citizens must "support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts." Therefore, any Chinese AI startup, no matter how independently it markets itself, is ultimately subject to CCP directives. The risk is not in the visible code, but in the invisible training data, the alignment protocols, and the potential for future remote manipulation or data harvesting via associated cloud services.

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The China AI Trap refers to the geopolitical strategy where China offers advanced AI models as open-source and free to developing nations. Once these nations build their digital infrastructure, government services, and private sectors on these models, they become dependent on Chinese cloud infrastructure, updates, and regulatory frameworks, compromising their digital sovereignty.

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The geopolitical contest over artificial intelligence is often framed as a race for compute power and algorithmic supremacy. But the release of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and Xi Jinping's open-source diplomatic offensive reveal that the true battleground is infrastructure dependency. China has recognized that if it cannot build the best chips, it can build the most used software, thereby capturing the global digital nervous system.

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Archived version

Ask Claude to make a pamphlet critical of President Donald Trump or Britain’s King Charles III, and Anthropic’s chatbot would oblige. Prompted to do the same for Thailand’s king, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince or China’s leader, and the artificial intelligence model declined.

It is a key finding from a Meta Oversight Board study released Thursday, showing that major AI systems, including those built in the U.S., are more likely to refuse to criticize restrictive leaders or governments. It raises concerns that the large language models powering chatbots and AI agents could be regurgitating and spreading government influence over online speech as the technology is increasingly adopted worldwide.

“There is a real risk that, if model developers do not undertake human rights due diligence and implement mitigation measures, they will build AI infrastructure that, intentionally or not, has the effect of extending illegitimate restrictions on freedom of expression globally,” according to the report from the quasi-independent body.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10193506

America’s quest for AI dominance is scary. China is not the solution.

Archived version

China's leader, Xi Jinping, is too stern to sing or dance in public—no Donald Trump-style piston-arm disco moves for him. This is a shame, for it would save time if he binned his planned remarks when the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) opens in Shanghai on July 17th, and sang instead. Specifically, he could unleash his rich baritone on the hippy anthem, “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmoneee.”

Puzzled delegates might frown. But it would be cheering if Mr Xi sang: “I’d like to build a world a home, and furnish it with love.” And as a guide to China’s real-world AI ambitions, it would be about as helpful as an official speech. Communist Party media have offered previews of what the WAIC may hear, including such vapid phrases as “those who walk together go far” and “global AI for good”. In China’s telling, benevolence explains why its large language models (LLMs) are open-source or open-weight (tech-speak for models that users can download, run on their own servers and customise). China calls open-source AI a “shared asset for all humanity”, notably users in less wealthy countries.

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Mr Xi can expect a friendly hearing from many in Shanghai, and not just delegates from dictatorships. These are jarring times for users of American AI technologies. In recent weeks the Trump administration has readily revoked access to powerful AI tools, if it felt controls were needed to defend America’s national security or to maintain what the White House likes to call “AI dominance”.

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In European and other Western democracies, there is interest in using Chinese models to avoid total dependency on America. Alas, if countries fear domination by a control-obsessed superpower, they might not want to pin all their hopes on China. Strict rules require Chinese AI firms to uphold national security, social stability and “core socialist values”. Its cyber-regulators test LLMs, bots and agents for political compliance, bombarding them with tricky questions. The effects can be startling. Last year American researchers asked Miiloo, a baby-voiced, AI-enabled doll exported from China, about the status of Taiwan. The island “is an inalienable part of China”, replied the toy, and this “cannot be refuted”.

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As well as an obsession with control, China has a record of using its industrial might for dominance.

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Chinese officials present open-source AI technologies as a gift to the world. In reality, openness is a logical strategy for laggards. The performance of China’s top models remains some way behind that of the best American LLMs. That makes it rational for Chinese firms to woo foreign customers with cheaper models that users can download onto their own servers, as an alternative to expensive, proprietary American models. Within China, state planners want companies to develop clever AI applications to unleash a productivity revolution and a boom in consumer consumption. Deploying cheap, open-source tools helps with that.

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Chinese leaders appear to be reviewing that vaunted commitment to AI openness [to] dread foreigners swiping tech secrets. In April Chinese regulators ordered Meta, the American tech giant, to unwind its purchase of Manus, a startup specialising in AI agents (no matter that the Chinese co-founders had moved Manus to Singapore). China has since tightened rules on all cross-border AI deals. Earlier this month Reuters, a news agency, reported on recent discussions between Chinese regulators and companies about possibly limiting foreigners’ access to China’s most advanced models.

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Bmbracing China is a risky hedge against a domineering America. Like a secret policeman in a hippy wig, China has always been an unlikely champion of openness. Party chiefs enjoy the propaganda win of painting America as a bully. They hope that low-cost AI will hook foreigners on Chinese digital infrastructure. But if openness ever clashes with national security or political power, they will choose control in an instant.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10035660

Archived version

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been on a hot streak of Pacific diplomacy. Over the past week, Australia has inked three pacts – the Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu, the Ocean of Peace Alliance and the Vuvale Union, both with Fiji – which are reshaping the region’s security architecture. These positive developments have been overshadowed by a Chinese submarine test-firing a missile carrying a dummy warhead into Pacific waters, which analysts say is a direct warning to Pacific countries and a reminder of the PLA's reach and presence.

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While the missile test may be a demonstration of China's arsenal, Beijing may have just handed Albanese the ammunition he needs to put the tussle for regional security to bed.

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A missile test makes Pacific countries spectators in their own region, much like they were during the Second World War. Albanese’s opening is to offer something different – partnerships that give Pacific countries legitimacy and agency over their own security, not another arrangement decided over their heads.

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Pacific leaders have said for years that they don't want their region to be a theatre for someone else’s power contest. They want responsibility for their own security, not protection from it. China just gave them, and Albanese, the clearest possible proof of what they worry about.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10035660

Archived version

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been on a hot streak of Pacific diplomacy. Over the past week, Australia has inked three pacts – the Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu, the Ocean of Peace Alliance and the Vuvale Union, both with Fiji – which are reshaping the region’s security architecture. These positive developments have been overshadowed by a Chinese submarine test-firing a missile carrying a dummy warhead into Pacific waters, which analysts say is a direct warning to Pacific countries and a reminder of the PLA's reach and presence.

...

While the missile test may be a demonstration of China's arsenal, Beijing may have just handed Albanese the ammunition he needs to put the tussle for regional security to bed.

...

A missile test makes Pacific countries spectators in their own region, much like they were during the Second World War. Albanese’s opening is to offer something different – partnerships that give Pacific countries legitimacy and agency over their own security, not another arrangement decided over their heads.

...

Pacific leaders have said for years that they don't want their region to be a theatre for someone else’s power contest. They want responsibility for their own security, not protection from it. China just gave them, and Albanese, the clearest possible proof of what they worry about.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10035053

• China-linked shareholders in one of Australia’s most strategically vital rare earths companies have so far ignored Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ latest order to sell their stakes, casting doubt over the future of a potential supplier of critical minerals to the defence industry.

• The disregard to Chalmers’ edict shown by six investors in Northern Minerals – who combined own 1.7 billion shares, or 17.6 per cent of the company – extends a three-year arm wrestle with the federal government.

• Treasurer Chalmers has twice ordered multiple Chinese companies and individuals to divest their shares, citing national security grounds.

Archived version

Beijing stands accused of engaging in foreign interference in its bid to control – or stifle – development of a mine in ... Australia that promises to break China’s stranglehold on critical minerals crucial to hi-tech defence.

For more than three years, the federal government has been wrestling to rid Chinese investors from Northern Minerals, a Perth-based company that owns a mine at Browns Range in WA’s East Kimberley, near the Northern Territory border.

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Brown’s Range is rich in terbium and dysprosium, heavy metal rare earths used in high-temperature magnets, ballistic missiles, nuclear-powered submarines and fighter jets, as well as electric vehicle motors and wind turbines.

China has invested heavily in critical minerals processing over the past 20 years and has a near monopoly on world supply.

Northern Minerals is considered strategically vital as potentially the largest non-China heavy rare earths.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has twice ordered multiple Chinese companies and individuals to divest their shares in the WA company, citing national security grounds.

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One of the companies instead transferred the shares to its sole director and shareholder, triggering a wider investigation by the Foreign Investment Review Board into Northern Minerals’ share registry.

Robert Monterosso, a research fellow at the United States Studies Centre with an expertise in critical minerals, said the share activity was “certainly foreign interference”.

“These are shadowy Chinese firms that are often not publicly listed that are buying up shares in an Australian company.

“Their purpose is to gain control of the company through equity and influence board decisions.

“Some of these firms do not have Australia’s best interests at heart.

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“This is China’s playbook for critical minerals and rare earth dominance. They seek to buy up assets overseas, gain control of those assets, and link them into China’s own supply chains.

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Resources Minister Madeleine King said it was vital Australia made the most of its “geological advantage”.

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