A dozen poor countries are facing economic instability and even collapse under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign loans, much of them from the world's biggest and most unforgiving government lender, China. From a report: An Associated Press analysis of a dozen countries most indebted to China -- including Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Laos and Mongolia -- found paying back that debt is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open, provide electricity and pay for food and fuel. And it's draining foreign currency reserves these countries use to pay interest on those loans, leaving some with just months before that money is gone. Behind the scenes is China's reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been required to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that push China to the front of the line of creditors to be paid.

Countries in AP's analysis had as much as 50% of their foreign loans from China and most were devoting more than a third of government revenue to paying off foreign debt. Two of them, Zambia and Sri Lanka, have already gone into default, unable to make even interest payments on loans financing the construction of ports, mines and power plants. In Pakistan, millions of textile workers have been laid off because the country has too much foreign debt and can't afford to keep the electricity on and machines running. In Kenya, the government has held back paychecks to thousands of civil service workers to save cash to pay foreign loans. The president's chief economic adviser tweeted last month, "Salaries or default? Take your pick."

"China delivered the latest salvo in an escalating semiconductor war with the U.S.," reports Bloomberg, "announcing that Micron Technology Inc. products have failed to pass a cybersecurity review in the country." In a statement Sunday, Beijing warned operators of key infrastructure against buying the company's goods, saying it found "relatively serious" cybersecurity risks in Micron products sold in the country. The components caused "significant security risks to our critical information infrastructure supply chain," which would affect national security, according to the statement from the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC...

Chinese officials privately say that the probe of Micron is part of a broader trend toward the dominance of "pro-retaliation" voices in Beijing, where national security concerns increasingly trump economic arguments. "No one should understand this decision by CAC as anything but retaliation for the US's export controls on semiconductors," said Holden Triplett, founder of Trenchcoat Advisors and a former FBI counterintelligence official in Beijing. "No foreign business operating in China should be deceived by this subterfuge. These are political actions pure and simple, and any business could be the next one to be made an example of." The move brings fresh uncertainty to the other US chipmakers that sell to China, the world's biggest market for semiconductors.
The article notes pointedly that memory chips "aren't usually considered a cybersecurity risk because they don't require any specific software or run code. They're mostly basic grids of transistors used for storing data and, as such, haven't typically been a vector of attack for hackers." The Associated Press describes China's move as "stepping up a feud with Washington over technology and security," adding that Chinese officials "appear to be struggling to find ways to retaliate without hurting China's smartphone producers and other industries and efforts to develop its own processor chip suppliers," which import more than $300 billion in foreign chips every year. An official review of Micron under China's increasingly stringent information security laws was announced April 4, hours after Japan joined Washington in imposing restrictions on Chinese access to technology to make processor chips on security grounds. Foreign companies have been rattled by police raids on two consulting firms, Bain & Co. and Capvision, and a due diligence firm, Mintz Group. Chinese authorities have declined to explain the raids but said foreign companies are obliged to obey the law.

India's government gave nearly early household a bank account offering app-based digital money transfers, reports the Economist. But that's just the beginning: Take a walk on Mumbai's Juhu beach and little has changed in five years — except for the QR codes adorning every food stall. Go to São Paulo in Brazil, Beijing in China, or many other cities across the emerging world and you find something similar. "Most people only want to use UPI," says Govind, a seaside-snack vendor at Juhu, referring to India's fast-growing payments network. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a platform that allows free and fast account-to-account transfers using fintech apps such as PhonePe or Google Pay. Unlike Alipay in China, it is open, so users are not locked into a single company and can take their financial history to competitors, notes Praveena Rai, the chief operating officer of the National Payments Corporation of India (NpCI), which manages the platform. And it is facilitated by QR codes or easy-to-remember virtual IDs.

UPI is drawing attention from across the world. "Look at what India has accomplished with the UPI, Aadhaar and the payments stack," Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, has marvelled. Overall, it processed over $1trn in transactions in 2022, equivalent to a third of India's GDP. It was bolstered by the government's surprise "demonetisation" of 2016, when multiple high-denomination banknotes were discontinued. UPI also benefited when covid left consumers scared of cash. It has grown from around 17% of 31bn digital transactions in 2019 to 52% of 88.4bn transactions by 2022. "India leads the world in real-time digital payments by clocking almost 40% of all such transactions," Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has boasted.

The Indian model is inspiring others. Brazil's Pix, which facilitates bank-to-bank payments with a small fee, was launched in November 2020. It now accounts for some 30% of Brazil's electronic payments (credit and debit cards take up around 20% each). Such open instant-payment systems are an alternative both to the bank/card model in the rich world and to the closed fintech one in China... The hope is that UPI and similar systems might now let some poorer countries leapfrog the West... Mr Nilekani hopes UPI will eventually be used everywhere. "If I go to Lulu in Dubai or Harrods in London, I should be able to make a payment with UPI." That would surely create new competition for the bank/card behemoths in the West.

Apple is reportedly expanding its involvement in the mass production of micro-LED displays to reduce its reliance on Samsung and gain more control over the supply chain. Nikkei Asia reports: Apple has spent heavily on the development of micro-LED displays over the past decade and once production starts, it intends to perform the critical "mass transfer" step of the manufacturing process itself, according to sources involved in the project. The mass transfer step involves moving at least tens of thousands of tiny micro-LED chips onto substrates. This process will be carried out at Apple's secretive R&D facilities in the Longtan District in the northern Taiwanese city of Taoyuan, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the project.

Displays are one of the most expensive components in all of Apple's devices. Since the American company first introduced OLED displays on its iPhone in 2017, its reliance on Samsung Display for the screens has only grown. To reduce that dependence and gain price-bargaining power, Apple tried to bring in other suppliers, namely LG Display and China's display champion BOE Technology, but they lag the South Korean leader in terms of technology and quality stability, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

"Apple has spent at least $1 billion on the R&D and samples for micro-LED technologies in the past nearly 10 years," said one of the people who has been directly involved in the project for years. "It wants to secure more control over the next-gen display technologies for its future products." For the project, Apple is partnering with suppliers like ams-Osram for micro-LED components, LG Display for the substrates -- also called backplates -- and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for 12-inch wafers. In addition to designing the driver integrated circuits for the micro-LED screens, Apple even designed some of the production equipment itself to better control the mass transfer process, according to two of the people with direct knowledge of the matter. "It doesn't mean that Apple will always do the mass transfer on its own. But it shows how determined Apple is to allocate resources to have more control over [these] next-gen display technologies in its own hands," one of the sources said.

"Apple's ultimate plan is to introduce the technologies on its iPhone, which is its key revenue source and has much bigger volume, to justify the investments over the years," added one of the sources.

Apple has released (PDF) its first App Store Transparency Report, as mandated by a lawsuit settlement in 2021. In 2022, the report reveals that over 1.6 million apps were rejected, 186,195 apps were removed for violating App Store rules, and China topped the list with the most government-requested app takedowns. MacRumors reports: In 2022, there were 1,783,232 apps on the App Store, with 6,101,913 total app submissions received and 1,679,694 apps rejected for various reasons like safety, performance, design, and legal. Apple provides numbers on the specific App Store guidelines that were violated by rejected apps, with the highest number of single rule rejections (149,378) due to violations of the Design 4.0 rule and the DPLA 3.2 Fraud rule (32,009). A total of 253,466 app submissions were approved after rejection when developers worked with Apple to resolve issues, and 186,195 apps were removed from the App Store for breaking the App Store rules. The majority of apps removed from the App Store were games, followed by Utilities, Business, and Education.

Apple outlines the total number of apps removed from the App Store due to government takedowns, and China is at the top of the list. The Chinese government asked Apple to remove 1,435 apps, but 1,276 of those apps were games that were removed for not having the GRN license that China requires. Apple removed 14 apps at the request of India's government, 10 apps for Pakistan, and seven apps for Russia. In other countries including Turkiye, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Italy, Latvia, and Nigeria, fewer than two apps were removed at the government's request. Developers appealed 18,412 app removals in total, and Apple restored just 616 developer accounts. Apple says that apps that are appealed were typically pulled from the App Store for fraud or illegality, which is why the rejected appeal number is so high.

There are 36,974,015 registered developers, and in 2022, Apple terminated 428,487 developer accounts. According to Apple, developers are removed from the Apple Developer Program "for a number of reasons," but most commonly because of accounts that are connected with other terminated developer accounts. 3,338 developers appealed their App Store bans, and Apple reinstated just 159 accounts. Again, Apple says that this is because "most developer account terminations that are appealed are removed from the App Store due to fraud," so Apple rejects most of them. 282,036,628 customer accounts were terminated, but that number does incorporate all accounts created, even those made on the website by non-iPhone and iPad users. There were 656,739,889 average weekly visitors to the App Store and 747,873,877 average weekly app downloads. Customer accounts searched the App Store 373,211,396 times on average, and 1,399,741 apps appeared in the top 10 results of at least 1000 searches. You can download the report from Apple's legal site.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Seven weeks after Alibaba announced its historic restructuring plan to split itself into six independent companies, the juggernaut is gearing up to spin off its intelligence group. Alibaba went public in New York back in 2014, marking the largest IPO at the time. Not long after Hong Kong relaxed rules around dual-class structures, which allow founders to retain certain control while opening the company to outside investment, in 2019, Alibaba sought a secondary listing in the city. Rising tensions between the U.S. and China also prompted many Chinese companies to retreat from the NASDAQ and NYSE in recent years.

"We are taking concrete steps towards unlocking value from our businesses and are pleased to announce that our board has approved a full spin-off of the Cloud Intelligence Group via a stock dividend distribution to shareholders, with intention for it to become an independent publicly listed company," Daniel Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, announced in the firm's earnings report today. Zhang is also one of the cloud arm's board of directors. Alibaba aims to complete the spinoff in the next 12 months and plans to include external strategic investors in the group through private financings.

You might not be familiar with Alibaba's cloud intelligence group, but think of its main product lines roughly as "AWS+Slack+OpenAI". Its cloud business Alibaba Cloud dominates China's market. Globally, Alibaba Cloud was the third largest infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud provider in 2021, according to market research firm Gartner. Add platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and private cloud to the mix, Alibaba came in fourth in Q4 2021, according to another market insight firm Synergy Research Group. Alibaba's Dingtalk, an enterprise chat app and productivity platform, surpassed 600 million users as of Q3 2022, with 15 million paid daily active users and 23 million enterprise users, the company said previously. [...] It makes sense that Alibaba is grouping its cloud business and AI research team under one umbrella as these two go hand in hand. With each new breakthrough in AI, the amount of computational power needed to train data increases exponentially -- so does the cost. "The cloud business generated $2.7 billion in revenue during the first quarter, making up 9% of Alibaba's total revenues," notes TechCrunch. You can read a deep dive into the cloud spinout here.

IBM and Google are giving $150 million for quantum-computing research at the University of Chicago and the University of Tokyo as the U.S. and Japan try to stay ahead of a fast-rising China. From a report: Quantum computers are a hot area of research because they could help solve problems that classical computers alone can't, such as modeling how a drug molecule interacts with the body's proteins or how batteries work at an atomic scale. China has invested heavily in quantum computing, which also has possible military applications in cryptology and materials for weapons. U.S. researchers said Chinese laboratories have shown progress recently -- often touted in state media -- and are competitive in some areas. However, quantum-computing specialists say more basic study is needed before anyone can be sure the technology delivers real-world benefits.

The U.S.-Japan partnership is an example of how scientific research with implications for security and economic growth is increasingly split between China and a U.S.-led camp that includes allies such as Japan and Western European nations. "We have to count on our allies more for primary research," said Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan. Until recently, he said, the U.S. was too lax in allowing Chinese students to work at American universities in advanced scientific fields. "We were funding them. We were not only funding them, we were training them, educating them to come back and compete against us," he said.

India is unveiling a 170 billion-rupee ($2.1 billion) financial incentive plan to draw makers of laptops, tablets and other hardware to the South Asian nation as companies look to diversify supply chains beyond China. From a report: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is capitalizing on the early success of Apple's local assembly operations -- which have helped the US company produce about 7% of its global iPhone output -- to pitch the country as a viable global manufacturing hub. New Delhi wants to bring more tech production to India after China's trade war with the US and its strict Covid policies prompted companies to weigh other options. Apple has yet to begin making iPads or MacBook laptops in India, but fresh incentives could push the Cupertino, California-based company to consider such moves. Other manufacturers who could take advantage of the new measures include Dell, HP and Asustek Computer.

Longtime Slashdot reader Okian Warrior writes: There's been a lot of discussion about regulating AI in the news recently, including Sam Altman going before a Senate committee begging for regulation. So far I've seen only calls for regulation, but not suggestions on what those regulations should be. Since Slashdot is largely populated with experts in various fields (software, medicine, law, etc.), maybe we should begin this discussion. And note that if we don't create the reasonable rules, Congress (mostly 80-year old white men with conflicts of interest) will do it for us.

What are some good AI regulation suggestions?

I'll start: A human (and specifically, not an AI system) must be responsible for any medical treatment or diagnosis. If an AI suggests a diagnosis or medical treatment, there must be buy-in from a human who believes the decision is correct, and who would be held responsible in the same manner as a doctor not using AI. The AI must be a tool used by, and not a substitute for, human decisions. This would avoid problems with humans ignoring their responsibility, relying on the software, and causing harm through negligence. Doctors can use AI to (for example) diagnose cancer, but it will be the doctor's diagnosis and not the AI's.

What other suggestions do people have?

A former Apple software engineer was charged with stealing Apple's autonomous technology for a Chinese self-driving car company, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. From a report: Weibao Wang worked as a software engineer at Apple from 2016 to 2018, a DOJ indictment said. Wang worked on Apple's Annotation Team and was granted "broad access" to databases which the Justice Department said could only be accessed by 2,700 of Apple's 135,000 employees. Wang is the third former Apple employee to be accused of stealing autonomous trade secrets for China.

Wang has been charged with six separate counts involving the theft or attempted theft of Apple's "entire autonomy source code," tracking systems, behavior planning for autonomous systems, and descriptions of the hardware that was behind the systems. A year into his employment, four months before he quit his job at Apple, Wang accepted a job at the U.S.-based subsidiary of an unnamed Chinese company that was developing autonomous driving technology and he began to siphon "large amounts" of sensitive commercial technology and source code, the indictment alleges.

"Deep in a pine forest in Wilcox County, Alabama, three workers dangled from the top of a 350-foot cellular tower," reports the New York Times. "They were there to rip out and replace Chinese equipment from the local wireless network..." As the United States and China battle for geopolitical and technological primacy, the fallout has reached rural Alabama and small wireless carriers in dozens of states. They are on the receiving end of the Biden administration's sweeping policies to suppress China's rise, which include trade restrictions, a $52 billion package to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing against China and the divestiture of the video app TikTok from its Chinese owner. What the wireless carriers must do, under a program known as "rip and replace," has become the starkest physical manifestation of the tech Cold War between the two superpowers. The program, which took effect in 2020, mandates that American companies tear out telecom equipment made by the Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE. U.S. officials have warned that gear from those companies could be used by Beijing for espionage and to steal commercial secrets.

Instead, U.S. carriers have to use equipment from non-Chinese companies. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program, would then reimburse the carriers from a pot of $1.9 billion intended to cover their costs. Similar rip-and-replace efforts are taking place elsewhere. In Europe, where Huawei products have been a key part of telecom networks, carriers in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden have also been swapping out the Chinese equipment because of security concerns, according to Strand Consult, a research firm that tracks the telecom industry. "Rip-and-replace was the first front in a bigger story about the U.S. and China's decoupling, and that story will continue into the next decade with a global race for A.I. and other technologies," said Blair Levin, a former F.C.C. chief of staff and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

But cleansing U.S. networks of Chinese tech has not been easy. The costs have already ballooned above $5 billion, according to the F.C.C., more than double what Congress appropriated for reimbursements. Many carriers also face long supply chain delays for new equipment. The program's burden has fallen disproportionately on smaller carriers, which relied more on the cheaper gear from the Chinese firms than large companies like AT&T and Verizon. Given rip-and-replace's difficulties, some smaller wireless companies now say they may not be able to upgrade their networks and continue serving their communities, where they are often the only internet providers. "For many rural communities, they are faced with the disastrous choice of having to continue to use insecure networks that are ripe for surveillance or having to cut off their services," said Geoffrey Starks, a Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C.

Last month, Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican of Nebraska, introduced a bill to close the gap in rip-and-replace funding for carriers... In January, the F.C.C. said it had received 126 applications seeking funding beyond what it could reimburse. Lawmakers had underestimated the costs of shredding Huawei and ZTE equipment, and new equipment and labor costs have risen. The F.C.C. said it could cover only about 40 percent of the expenses. Some wireless carriers immediately paused their replacement efforts. "Until we have assurance of total project funding, this project will continue to be delayed as we await the necessary funding required to build and pay for the new network equipment," United Wireless of Dodge City, Kansas, wrote in a regulatory filing to the F.C.C. in January.

"Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity," argues an column in the Guardian, adding "They are kidding themselves..."

"There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life... " AI — far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations — is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation...

What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon ...) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.

This should not be legal. In the case of copyrighted material that we now know trained the models (including this newspaper), various lawsuits have been filed that will argue this was clearly illegal... The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft "disruption" — and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don't apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China — all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands... These companies must know they are engaged in theft, or at least that a strong case can be made that they are. They are just hoping that the old playbook works one more time — that the scale of the heist is already so large and unfolding with such speed that courts and policymakers will once again throw up their hands in the face of the supposed inevitability of it all...

[W]e trained the machines. All of us. But we never gave our consent. They fed on humanity's collective ingenuity, inspiration and revelations (along with our more venal traits). These models are enclosure and appropriation machines, devouring and privatizing our individual lives as well as our collective intellectual and artistic inheritances. And their goal never was to solve climate change or make our governments more responsible or our daily lives more leisurely. It was always to profit off mass immiseration, which, under capitalism, is the glaring and logical consequence of replacing human functions with bots.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

More than a decade ago engineers at AMD "began toying with a radical idea," remembers the New York Times. Instead of designing one big microprocessor, they "conceived of creating one from smaller chips that would be packaged tightly together to work like one electronic brain."

But with "diminishing returns" from Moore's Law, packaging smaller chips suddenly becomes more important. [Alternate URL here.] As much as 80% of microprocessors will be using these designs by 2027, according to an estimate from the market research firm Yole Group cited by the Times: The concept, sometimes called chiplets, caught on in a big way, with AMD, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, IBM and Intel introducing such products. Chiplets rapidly gained traction because smaller chips are cheaper to make, while bundles of them can top the performance of any single slice of silicon. The strategy, based on advanced packaging technology, has since become an essential tool to enabling progress in semiconductors. And it represents one of the biggest shifts in years for an industry that drives innovations in fields like artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and military hardware. "Packaging is where the action is going to be," said Subramanian Iyer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped pioneer the chiplet concept. "It's happening because there is actually no other way."

The catch is that such packaging, like making chips themselves, is overwhelmingly dominated by companies in Asia. Although the United States accounts for around 12 percent of global semiconductor production, American companies provide just 3 percent of chip packaging, according to IPC, a trade association. That issue has now landed chiplets in the middle of U.S. industrial policymaking. The CHIPS Act, a $52 billion subsidy package that passed last summer, was seen as President Biden's move to reinvigorate domestic chip making by providing money to build more sophisticated factories called "fabs." But part of it was also aimed at stoking advanced packaging factories in the United States to capture more of that essential process... The Commerce Department is now accepting applications for manufacturing grants from the CHIPS Act, including for chip packaging factories. It is also allocating funding to a research program specifically on advanced packaging...

Some chip packaging companies are moving quickly for the funding. One is Integra Technologies in Wichita, Kan., which announced plans for a $1.8 billion expansion there but said that was contingent on receiving federal subsidies. Amkor Technology, an Arizona packaging service that has most of its operations in Asia, also said it was talking to customers and government officials about a U.S. production presence... Packaging services still need others to supply the substrates that chiplets require to connect to circuit boards and one another... But the United States has no major makers of those substrates, which are primarily produced in Asia and evolved from technologies used in manufacturing circuit boards. Many U.S. companies have also left that business, another worry that industry groups hope will spur federal funding to help board suppliers start making substrates.

In March, Mr. Biden issued a determination that advanced packaging and domestic circuit board production were essential for national security, and announced $50 million in Defense Production Act funding for American and Canadian companies in those fields. Even with such subsidies, assembling all the elements required to reduce U.S. dependence on Asian companies "is a huge challenge," said Andreas Olofsson, who ran a Defense Department research effort in the field before founding a packaging start-up called Zero ASIC. "You don't have suppliers. You don't have a work force. You don't have equipment. You have to sort of start from scratch."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Axios: The Chinese Communist Party "maintained supreme access" to data belonging to TikTok parent company ByteDance, including data stored in the U.S., a former top executive claimed in a lawsuit Friday...

In a wrongful dismissal suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, Yintao Yu said ByteDance "has served as a useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party." Yu, whose claim says he served as head of engineering for ByteDance's U.S. offices from August 2017 to November 2018, alleged that inside the Beijing-based company, the CCP "had a special office or unit, which was sometimes referred to as the 'Committee'." The "Committee" didn't work for ByteDance but "played a significant role," in part by "gui[ding] how the company advanced core Communist values," the lawsuit claims... The CCP could also access U.S. user data via a "backdoor channel in the code," the suit states...

In an interview with the New York Times, which first reported the lawsuit, Yu said promoting anti-Japanese sentiment was done without hesitation.
"The allegations come as federal officials weigh the fate of the social media giant in the U.S. amid growing concerns over national security and data privacy," the article adds.

Yu also accused ByteDance of a years-long, worldwide "scheme" of scraping data from Instagram and Snapchat to post on its own services.

Trend Micro researchers at Black Hat Asia are warning that millions of Android devices worldwide come pre-infected with malicious firmware before the devices leave their factories. "This hardware is mainly cheapo Android mobile devices, though smartwatches, TVs, and other things are caught up in it," reports The Register. From the report: This insertion of malware began as the price of mobile phone firmware dropped, we're told. Competition between firmware distributors became so furious that eventually the providers could not charge money for their product. "But of course there's no free stuff," said [Trend Micro researcher Fyodor Yarochkin], who explained that, as a result of this cut-throat situation, firmware started to come with an undesirable feature -- silent plugins. The team analyzed dozens of firmware images looking for malicious software. They found over 80 different plugins, although many of those were not widely distributed. The plugins that were the most impactful were those that had a business model built around them, were sold on the underground, and marketed in the open on places like Facebook, blogs, and YouTube.

The objective of the malware is to steal info or make money from information collected or delivered. The malware turns the devices into proxies which are used to steal and sell SMS messages, take over social media and online messaging accounts, and used as monetization opportunities via adverts and click fraud. One type of plugin, proxy plugins, allow the criminal to rent out devices for up to around five minutes at a time. For example, those renting the control of the device could acquire data on keystrokes, geographical location, IP address and more. "The user of the proxy will be able to use someone else's phone for a period of 1200 seconds as an exit node," said Yarochkin. He also said the team found a Facebook cookie plugin that was used to harvest activity from the Facebook app.

Through telemetry data, the researchers estimated that at least millions of infected devices exist globally, but are centralized in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. A statistic self-reported by the criminals themselves, said the researchers, was around 8.9 million. As for where the threats are coming from, the duo wouldn't say specifically, although the word "China" showed up multiple times in the presentation, including in an origin story related to the development of the dodgy firmware. Yarochkin said the audience should consider where most of the world's OEMs are located and make their own deductions.

The team confirmed the malware was found in the phones of at least 10 vendors, but that there was possibly around 40 more affected. For those seeking to avoid infected mobile phones, they could go some way of protecting themselves by going high end. That is to say, you'll find this sort of bad firmware in the cheaper end of the Android ecosystem, and sticking to bigger brands is a good idea though not necessarily a guarantee of safety. "Big brands like Samsung, like Google took care of their supply chain security relatively well, but for threat actors, this is still a very lucrative market," said Yarochkin.

A man in China's Gansu province has been detained for allegedly using ChatGPT to generate a fake story about a train crash, marking China's first arrest in an AI-related probe as Beijing tightens deepfake technology. From a report: The story, which claimed the crash killed nine construction workers in a city in China's northwestern Gansu, gained more than 15,000 clicks after being published on social media on April 25, Pingliang city's local police bureau reported. China's new rules for deepfake bar service providers and users from using such technology to produce, release and fabricate untrue information. The rules, which took effect from Jan. 10, are designed to curb the use of generative AI technology to alter online content.

Chinese police have arrested a man for using ChatGPT to create a fake news article about a train crash, under a new law governing "deep synthesis technologies" introduced by China this year. CNBC reports: Police in Gansu province in northwest China detained a man, surnamed Hong, who they said allegedly fabricated a news story regarding a train crash that caused nine deaths. The authorities found that more than 20 accounts had posted this article on a blogging platform owned by Chinese search giant Baidu and they'd garnered more than 15,000 views. Hong allegedly used ChatGPT to create slightly different versions of the fake news article to pass duplication checks on the Baidu-owned platform.

The Gansu police authorities arrested Hong under the first-of-its kind law governing "deep synthesis technologies" which China introduced this year. Deep synthesis technologies refer to AI being used to generate text, images, video or other media. The law states that deep synthesis services cannot be used to disseminate fake news. China drafted the law as ChatGPT was taking off and going viral, as authorities looked to get ahead of the technology. China's internet is heavily censored and controlled. Beijing has sought to introduce laws governing new technologies which could present concerns to the central government. ChatGPT is blocked in China but can be accessed with the use of a virtual private network -- a software that can help bypass the country's internet restrictions.

LinkedIn, the networking platform used by millions of employees and companies, said on Monday it will pare down its operations in China, capping a multiyear pullback that exemplified the challenges of running a foreign business in China. From a report: The company, owned by Microsoft, said it will lay off 716 employees worldwide, including teams dedicated to engineering and marketing in China, because of slumping demand. It did not say how many of those layoffs will be in China. LinkedIn will also shut its China job posting app, a bare-bones version of its international service, by August. Users of the app, called InCareer, could only search for jobs and not post or share articles the way they can on LinkedIn.

When LinkedIn started a Chinese-language version of its website in 2014, it charted a path that its peers, including Facebook and Google, had shied away from. It partnered with local firms and began censoring the content of millions of Chinese customers in accordance with Beijing's strict laws. Several U.S. journalists and activists said their profiles had been blocked because of "prohibited content." The company said at the time that while it opposed government censorship, its absence in the country could deprive Chinese professionals of the chance to make professional connections.

Facebook says it is not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it is not just for "old people," as young people have been saying for years. From a report: Now, with the biggest thorn in its side -- TikTok -- facing heightened government scrutiny amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook could, perhaps, position itself as a viable, domestic-bred alternative. There's just one problem: young adults like Devin Walsh (anecdote in the story) have moved on. [...] Today, 3 billion people check it each month. That's more than a third of the world's population. And 2 billion log in every day. Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence. For younger generations -- those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it's decidedly not the place to be. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background -- utilitarian but boring, like email.

While American leaders fret that China might eventually overtake the U.S. in developing artificial intelligence, Beijing is already way ahead of Washington in enacting rules for the new technology. From a report: Chinese officials will close consultation Wednesday on a second round of generative AI regulation, building on a set of rules governing deepfakes agreed in 2022. The Biden administration is behind both allies and adversaries on AI guardrails. While officials in Washington talk about delivering user rights and urge CEOs to mitigate risks, Beijing and Brussels are actually delivering rights and mitigating risks. If China can be first on AI governance, it can project those standards and regulations globally, shaping lucrative and pliable markets. At the same time, Beijing's speedy regulation achieves three goals at home: Delivers tighter central government control of debate. Builds up hybrid corporate entities that are meshed with the Chinese Communist Party. Boosts trust in AI -- already among the highest levels globally -- which drives consumer uptake and spurs growth.