… Blackrock CEO Points to Pensions and Retirement Savings

So he wants to copy China’s playbook?

Alarming Statistics: Retractions and China’s NSFC Sanctions Rock Chinese Academia

China leads global retractions, with studies showing 40% of biomedical papers tainted by misconduct per surveys. In 2025, NSFC [National Natural Science Foundation of China] disclosed multiple batches: 26 cases in April (plagiarism, data forgery) and 25 in July, affecting top institutions. 96 By early 2026, another 46 sanctions linked to 20 universities emerged.

• 2023 Hindawi: 8,200+ Chinese-linked retractions out of 9,600 total.
• NSFC 2025: 51 sanctions, including 11 proposal plagiarisms.
• Medical universities: 14.81% lack public RM [research misconduct] investigation records.

These figures underscore pressure from ‘publish or perish’ metrics at elite ‘Double First-Class’ universities, where 15% report incidents.

@[email protected]

Lemmygrad. ml is explicitly ML.

Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad. ml

… findings reveal a substantial increase in user activity and toxicity levels following the migration of these subreddits to Lemmygrad. ml. We also identify posts that support authoritarian regimes, endorse the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and feature anti-Zionist and antisemitic content … Moreover, their support can extend beyond backing these authoritarian regimes, even cheering on their violent actions, as evidenced by their posts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine …

The whole study makes a good read.

never anything that paints China (let alone its government) in the slightest positive light

Feel free to change that. Just use quite sensible and well-sourced articles.

This is the first part, as the article says.

It’s not only about control but also a big threat for democracy and a stable society as a whole. Last year, for example, Chinese state-backed hacking group Salt Typhoon breached the U.S. telecom networks’ wiretap system (a backdoor legally required for law enforcement to access people’s private communication), forcing the authorities to urge U.S. citizens using encrypted messaging. So there is no such thing as a backdoor only for the good guys.

Breaking encryption opens the door not just for control but also for malign actors within the borders and from abroad. Where such democratic decline ends can be seen in China, for example, where total control and surveillance is suppressing any form of dissent.

(There is a very good documentary about the devastating consequences of surveillance for those interested: https://total-trust.org/.)

[Edit typo.]

China requires not only Chinese leadership, you can’t even found a subsidiary in China that you would own. You always need a Chinese partner company that would then control the majority stake of the Joint Venture (btw, the only non-Chinese company that is exempted from this rule is Tesla).

The Chinese government will certainly understand the Dutch move as they eliminate all Western technology firms such as Nokia and Ericsson from its domestic networks. So what’s the issue?

I don’t know, but I am not sure whether the number of users is too relevant for this kind of software. If you use it in a country with a low population, it does the same fine job. A big problem we are facing is that online spaces are engineered to capture attention - as the article suggests - rather than to encourage a productive civil discourse. In Taiwan, for example, they built a solution called vTaiwan, which is based on the Open Source tool Pol.is, specifically designed to address this problem.

Lol and what about them other AIs

Whataboutism, the rhetorical practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counteraccusation, by asking a different but related question, or by raising a different issue altogether. Whataboutism often serves to reduce the perceived plausibility or seriousness of the original accusation or question by suggesting that the person advancing it is hypocritical or that the responder’s misbehavior is not unique or unprecedented. Acts of whataboutism typically begin with rhetorical questions of the form “What about…?”

Source

As the German agency suggests, there is a larger attack surface due to decentralization, and a geopolitical shift with more and increasingly active adversarial (state) actors.

Spain probes cyber weaknesses at small power plants after blackout (archived Financial Times article)

Senior government officials [of Spain] have “concerns” about the robustness of cyber defences at small and medium-sized power facilities, notably the solar and wind farms that have proliferated as Spain became a global renewables leader, said one person familiar with the matter.

Spain has yet to identify the root cause of the collapse of the Iberian power grid on April 28 and has not discounted a cyber attack. “As of today, we are not ruling out any possibilities. Everything remains on the table,” said Spain’s energy and environment ministry …

Ukraine hits Chinese firms with sanctions after accusing Beijing of arming Russia

The [sanctions] list […] named Beijing Aviation And Aerospace Xianghui Technology Co. Ltd, Rui Jin Machinery Co. Ltd, and Zhongfu Shenying Carbon Fiber Xining Co. Ltd, all described as registered in China.

It did not give details of why they had been added to the sanctions list, which bans companies from doing business in Ukraine and freezes their assets there.

Ukraine exported $8 billion of goods to China in 2021, mostly raw materials and agricultural products, while it imported from China just under $11 billion, mainly in manufactured goods, according to the Ukrainian government.

Accusing people of bad faith without reason just because they disagree with you is one of the most disingenuous things you can do.

I fully agree. Just read many of the comments about the linked article. They do exactly what you portray.

Yeah, and if you buy a product that is shipped around the globe for the price of a dollar or two, you can be absolutely sure that the workers who make it receive a fair pay, right? (s/, just to be safe).

The 50 cent warriors are somewhere else.

Amazing how this thread illustrates how many tankie alt accounts are here on Beehaw already.

Just read the article before you (intentionally?) misinterpret the content:

The admission of Chinese responsibility came during a secret meeting between outgoing Biden administration officials and Chinese representatives on the sidelines of a summit in Geneva in December 2024. […] The Chinese attendants referred indirectly to the activity as being a warning for the US to stay away from any attempts to support or defend Taiwan.

A study from EnkryptAI (pdf) confirms that DeepSeek is prone to delivering misinformation and harmful content. It claims that the model is:

• 3x more biased than Claude-3 Opus
• 4x more vulnerable to generating insecure code than OpenAI’s O1
• 4x more toxic than GPT-4o
• 11x more likely to generate harmful output versus OpenAI O1
• 3.5x more likely to produce Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) content​ than OpenAI O1 and Claude-3 Opus

It’s still censored even if you run it locally.