It’s 9 a.m. on a typical morning in Chengdu and I’m awakened by the sound of my phone alarm. The phone is in my study, connected to my bedroom by sliding doors. I turn off the alarm, pick up my phone, and, like millions of people in China, the first thing I do is check my WeChat. At 9:07, I send my first message of the day.
WeChat, the brainchild of Tencent—one of China’s big three tech giants—is often referred to in the West as a social media app, something equivalent to Facebook or WhatsApp, but that’s to undersell it. WeChat has over 1 billion active users. In China, people don’t refer to it as a social media platform but rather as a social ecosystem. The features are seemingly endless. Beyond the typical social media functions of messaging and a Twitter-style feed called “friend circle,” it can be used to make payments for almost anything. Because developers can slot their apps directly into WeChat and tie them into the social and payment functions, it acts like a very sleek and efficient operating system. If it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in London and use a VPN to jump the great firewall to keep in touch with my friends at home and use Google, I could go entire days without leaving WeChat. Read More
Tag Archives: China
Will China win the military AI race on the back of commercial technology?
The earliest weapons were dual-use technologies: rocks chipped into sharp edges and bound to arrows or spears or clubs that proved as useful for hunting as they did fighting.
Modern life is millennia removed from proto-ethical debates over the dangers of collaborating on hunting technology with people who may someday turn it to violence, but dual-use tools are at the center of a major inter- and intra-national debate. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission held a hearing June 7 about China and technology, specifically the ways in which developments in the civilian sector could be exploited and weaponized by China’s military.
“China has been hyped as an AI superpower poised to overtake the U.S. in the strategic technology domain of AI,” said Jeffrey Ding, China lead for the Center for the Governance of AI, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford; D.Phil. Candidate, University of Oxford. Read More
Chinese military to replace Windows OS amid fears of US hacking
Amidst an escalating trade war and political tensions with the US, Beijing officials have decided to develop a custom operating system that will replace the Windows OS on computers used by the Chinese military.
The decision, while not made official through the government’s normal press channels, was reported earlier this month by Canada-based military magazine Kanwa Asian Defence.
Per the magazine, Chinese military officials won’t be jumping ship from Windows to Linux but will develop a custom OS. Read More
Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system
Smart cities are designed to make life easier for their residents: better traffic management by clearing routes, making sure the public transport is running on time and having cameras keeping a watchful eye from above.
But what happens when that data leaks? One such database was open for weeks for anyone to look inside.
Security researcher John Wethington found a smart city database accessible from a web browser without a password. He passed details of the database to TechCrunch in an effort to get the data secured. Read More
How Mass Surveillance Works in Xinjiang, China
Chinese authorities are using a mobile app to carry out illegal mass surveillance and arbitrary detention of Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang region.
The Human Rights Watch report, “China’s Algorithms of Repression: Reverse Engineering a Xinjiang Police Mass Surveillance App,” presents new evidence about the surveillance state in Xinjiang, where the government has subjected 13 million Turkic Muslims to heightened repression as part of its “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism.” Between January 2018 and February 2019, Human Rights Watch was able to reverse engineer the mobile app that officials use to connect to the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), the Xinjiang policing program that aggregates data about people and flags those deemed potentially threatening. By examining the design of the app, which at the time was publicly available, Human Rights Watch revealed specifically the kinds of behaviors and people this mass surveillance system targets. Read More
One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority
The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnationfor its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps.
Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.
The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism. Read More
Exclusive: Israel's chip sales to China jump as Intel expands
TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel’s exports of computer chips to China soared last year as Chinese companies bought more semiconductors made at Intel’s Kiryat Gat plant.
An official at the Israel Export Institute told Reuters that new data showed semiconductor exports to China jumped 80 percent last year to $2.6 billion. An industry source told Reuters that Intel Israel accounted for at least 80 percent of those sales…
Intel announced a $5 billion investment to expand capacity in its Kiryat Gat plant in southern Israel in 2017, which makes some of the smallest and fastest chips in the world. Read More
You Can Now Major in 'Artificial Intelligence' in China
Soon in China you’ll be able to get a degree in “artificial intelligence.
”Though the country has long had computer science as a major, it has just given the green light to 35 higher education institutions set up undergraduate artificial intelligence (AI) majors, according to a new report from the Ministry of Education.
The new major will be a four-year undergraduate program supervised by the schools’ engineering — rather than computer science — departments. Some analysts thus believe the new AI courses might emphasize more infrastructure-related projects. Read More
This ‘Smart City’ in China Is Controlled By An Artificial Intelligence
The idea of smart cities – infrastructure interlinked by software – isn’t new, but it’s undeniably cool. Who wouldn’t want to live somewhere where programs use data and evidence, not intuition, to actively improve their day-to-day lives?
Now imagine that an entire smart city actually exists, but it’s even more advanced than you could possibly imagine, where infrastructural systems are altered on the fly by an artificial intelligence (AI). This may sound futuristic, but one such place can already be found in China. Read More
Five Chinese smart cities leading the way
Across the world, over a thousand smart city pilots have been launched. China is home to half of these cities, amounting to a staggering 500 pilots.
The country’s smart city ambitions have been predominantly powered by private-sector giants, which has enabled cities across China to rapidly enhance their tech and innovation capabilities to meet citizen needs.
GovInsider shares five Chinese cities leading the way. Read More
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