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Chinese game 'Marvel' has been accused of censorship after players of its new video game were unable to chat about topics that are banned in China.

Marvel Rivals is a new release featuring battles between heroic characters such as Captain America and Iron Man and the villains Loki and Venom. The plot revolves around Doctor Doom and his future counterpart Doom 2099.

The game was developed by Marvel in conjunction with the Chinese developer NetEase and released in December. However, players have been blocked from typing in words such as “Tiananmen Square” and “Wuhan virus” in the chat function. They are met with the warning: “text contains inappropriate content”.

Marvel Rivals game artwork featuring Iron Man, Spider-Man, and other characters.

Other restricted phrases include “free Taiwan”, “free Hong Kong”, “free Tibet”, “Taiwan is a country”, “Taiwan No 1” and even “1989”, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chatting about Mao Zedong or the Dalai Lama is also banned.

Winnie-the-Pooh, a name associated with President Xi, is blocked. Xi was compared to the character after appearing in a photograph with Barack Obama in 2017.

Popular gamers have posted videos of themselves trying to type in the words. Asmongold, the YouTuber, is allowed to type in the words “Taiwan sucks” and “Taiwan is bad” only to be blocked when trying “free Taiwan”. At the end of the video he added sarcastically: “Marvel Rivals is a very interesting game that has no censorship at all and lets people think whatever they want and that’s just the way it is guys.”

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China has a long history of censoring the content of video games and films for the domestic market. The Second World War strategy game Hearts of Iron was banned for depicting Tibet, Manchuria and Xinjiang as independent nations. Command & Conquer: Generals, a game depicting a hypothetical Third World War, was said to “smear the image of China and the Chinese army”.

Marvel has also been accused of altering films so they would be accepted in the Chinese market. In the 2016 film Doctor Strange the main character is trained by a Celtic woman played by Tilda Swinton rather than a Tibetan monk who appeared in the original comics. A screenwriter claimed it was to appease the Chinese authorities and Marvel later admitted the move was a mistake.

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Archived link

Here is the report (pdf)

Advancements in AI and biometrics by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pose significant risks to global security, particularly to the United States and Western nations, according to an unclassified report from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

The nearly 200-page DOD report to Congress, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, details how the PRC’s strategic integration of AI and biometric technologies into national security, military modernization, and global influence operations threatens U.S. and Western security.

The report warns that “PRC leaders … power to shape world events continues to grow, presenting ‘new strategic opportunities’ to create an environment favorable for PRC interests and national rejuvenation.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defines “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” as a state in which the PRC is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.”

National rejuvenation, however, DOD emphases, “requires the PRC to ‘take an active part in leading the reform of the global governance system’ since many rules and norms were established, in the PRC’s view, during a time of PRC weakness and without the PRC’s consultation and input.”

[...]

The PRC views AI as being pivotal to its future warfare capabilities and global influence. According to DOD, “The PRC aims to overtake the West in AI R&D by 2025 to become the world leader in AI by 2030. The PRC has designated AI as a priority, national-level S&T development area and assesses that advances in AI and autonomy are central to ‘intelligentized warfare,’ the PRC’s concept of future warfare.”

This strategy includes leveraging AI to enhance cyber operations, such as reconnaissance, deepfake generation, misinformation campaigns, and state-sponsored hacking to acquire a waterfront of sensitive information, including personal data that it can use to blackmail and coerce targeted individuals. DOD says, “the PRC presents a significant, persistent cyber-enabled espionage and attack threat.” Conversely, DOD says the CCP Party Congress has “stressed the CCP’s need to prevent digital penetration, sabotage, subversion, and separatism activities from external actors.”

[...]

Under its Military-Civil Fusion initiative, the PRC seeks to integrate civilian and military innovation ecosystems to develop cutting-edge AI-enabled military capabilities. DOD says, “Beijing views the integration of military and civilian institutions as central for developing AI-enabled military capabilities and has established military-civilian R&D centers and procured commercially developed AI … to ensure PLA access to cutting-edge AI technologies.”

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I honestly did not realize this was not already the case but it is a good move to make right now. Hopefully folks will start to recognize the Fediverse for what it is and can be and explore coming to the Activity Pub side over using Bluesky.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/52551251

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24242302

This is seems on par for Meta. With FB and Instagram being such monoliths, could we be seeing the early stages of their collapse? I wonder how much more it will take for the everyday user to become disenchanted with Meta to drop their platforms.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18000578

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Ed Miliband is facing demands to introduce new measures to stop Britain using solar panels made by the Uighurs, an oppressed Muslim minority in western China, as part of his race towards net zero.

A cross-party group of peers has called for the energy secretary to introduce safeguards that prevent UK renewable energy companies from importing Chinese components made by slave labour.

It comes as the House of Lords debates Labour’s flagship legislation to establish Great British Energy, a publicly-owned company that will help deliver the government’s green transition.

Senior parliamentarians are concerned about the supply chains of renewable energy companies, many of which rely on products from China. In particular, there are questions around solar panels, which often contain polysilicon. Nearly half of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced in the Xinjiang region of China where more than 2.6 million people, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, have been subjected to forced labour in detention camps.

Academics, politicians and human rights groups have long warned that forced labour is rife there, including in the sourcing of polysilicon, with 11 companies in the region identified as being engaged in forced labour transfers.

[...]

To prevent UK energy supply chains being tainted by forced labour, a group of peers has now tabled an amendment to the bill, which, if approved, would prevent any public funds being given to companies involved with GB Energy where there is “credible evidence of modern slavery in the supply chain”.

[...]

Luke de Pulford, the executive director of Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said: “Labour has gone from an admirably strong position on the persecution of Uighurs to energy policies which facilitate it. It’s an absolute 180 in policy terms. Now the chancellor is in Beijing meeting with China’s génocidaires.

“Whatever the economic imperative, the consciences of politicians across both Houses should not permit the rush to net zero to be achieved on the back of Uighur slavery.”

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/52481326

The description of the demo is very specific and oddly exactly what I experienced about a month ago when my company was looking for a new Application Lifecycle Management tool. It's uncanny.

archive.is link

In amongst all this, key figures from within the wider WordPress community have stepped forward. Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications’ lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his “vision for a new WordPress era,” where he discussed the potential for “federated and independent repositories.” Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed similar thoughts in a separate blog post.

WP Engine, meanwhile, indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand.

Earlier this week, Automattic announced it would reduce its contribution to the core WordPress open source project to align with WP Engine’s own contribution, a metric measured in weekly hours. This spurred de Valk to take to X on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his “team stands ready.”

Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the “push it needs to get off the ground,” he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts.

“I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.

At the same time, Mullenweg revealed he was also deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it’s worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly incorporated non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a “neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources” around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem.

At the moment, the world of Browsers is currently a big Monopoly favoring Google: Chrome is the most widely used Browser in the world (Some say, even 70% of all users use chrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables).

Chrome has a so called Engine at its core. That is the thing which actually understands websites and can translate that to something you as a user can see and interact with. This engine is called Blink. Many other Browsers such as Opera, Internet Explorer, Brave, etc also use Blink.

That means, the developers of Chrome (=Google) have much power over websites, because they control how users see the websites.

The only other engines (and therefore truly independent browsers) are Gecko from Firefox and WebKit from Safari. Firefox however is also dependent on Google and is currently badly managed. (=The user share of firefox declines, the payment of the CEO is rising).

Furthermore, all these browser engines are written in insecure languages. (=Because when these were started, more secure languages didn't exist yet).

Servo is a browser engine, which started at mozilla (the company developing firefox), but it was discarded. Servo was then moved to the linux foundation and the open source consulting company iagalia (https://www.igalia.com/2023/09/07/The-Servo-project-is-joining-Linux-Foundation-Europe.html). So it is truly independent and its progress is promising!

Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned.

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[This is an opinionated piece by Renée DiResta, associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown in the U.S.]

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Today [...] user exodus [from large platforms like Facebook and Twitter] to smaller platforms has become increasingly common — especially from X, the once-undisputed home of The Discourse. X refugees have scattered and settled again and again: to Gab and Truth Social, to Mastodon and Bluesky.

What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees” tasked with defining and enforcing rules like no hate speech, or making calls about how to handle Covid-19 content. Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — which proposed that “borderline” content (posts that fell into grey areas around hate speech, for example) remain visible but unamplified — attempted to articulate a middle ground. However, even nuanced efforts were reframed as unreasonable suppression by ideologues who recognized the power of dominating online discourse. Efforts to moderate became flashpoints, fueling a feedback loop where online norms fed offline polarization — and vice versa.

And so, in successive waves, users departed for alternatives: platforms where the referees were lax (Truth Social), nearly nonexistent (Telegram) or self-appointed (Mastodon). Much of this fracturing occurred along political lines. Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats.

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The federated nature of emerging alternatives, like Mastodon and Bluesky — platforms structured as a network of independently-run servers with their own users and rules, connected by a common technological protocol — offers a potential future in which communities spin up their own instances (or servers) with their own rules.

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It was once novel features … that drew users to social media sites. Now, it’s frequently ideological alignment.

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For years, loyalty to major platforms was less about affection and more about structural realities; monopolistic dominance and powerful network effects left social media users with few realistic alternatives. There weren’t many apps with the features, critical mass or reach to fulfill users’ needs for entertainment, connection or influence. Politicians and ideologues, too, relied on the platforms’ scale to propagate their messages. People stayed, even as their dissatisfaction simmered.

And so, voice was the answer. Politicians and advocacy groups pressured companies to change policies to suit their side’s needs — a process known as “working the refs” (referees) among those who study content moderation. In 2016, for example, “Trending Topicsgate” saw right-wing influencers and partisan media chastise Facebook for allegedly downranking conservative headlines on its trending topics feature. The outrage cycle worked: Facebook fired its human news curators and remade the system. (Their replacement, an algorithm, quickly busied itself spreading outrageous and untrue headlines, including from Macedonian troll factories, until the company ultimately decided to kill the feature.) Left-leaning organizations ref-worked over the years as well, applying pressure to maximize their interests.

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The Great Decentralization — the migration away from large, centralized one-size-fits-all platforms to smaller, ideologically distinct spaces — is fueled by political identity and dissatisfaction. [...] These [decentralized] platforms prioritize something foundationally distinct from their predecessors: federation. Unlike centralized platforms, where curation and moderation are controlled from the top down, federation relies on decentralized protocols — ActivityPub for Mastodon (which Threads also supports) and the AT Protocol for Bluesky — that enable user-controlled servers and devolve moderation (and in some cases, curation) to that community level. This approach doesn’t just redefine moderation; it restructures online governance itself. And that is because, writ large, there are no refs to work.

The trade-offs are important to understand. If centralized platforms with their centrally controlled rules and algorithms are “walled gardens,” federated social media might best be described as “community gardens,” shaped by members connected through loose social or geographical ties and a shared interest in maintaining a pleasant community space.

In the fediverse, users can join or create servers aligned with their interests or communities. They are usually run by volunteers, who manage costs and set rules locally. Governance is federated as well: While all ActivityPub servers, for example, share a common technological protocol, each sets its own rules and norms, and decides whether to interact with — or isolate from — the broader network. For example, when the avowedly Nazi-friendly platform Gab adopted Mastodon’s protocol in 2019, other servers defederated from it en masse, cutting ties and preventing Gab’s content from reaching their users. Yet Gab persisted and continued to grow, highlighting one of federation’s important limitations: defederation can isolate bad actors, but it doesn’t eliminate them.

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Protocol-based platforms offer a significant potential future for social media: digital federalism, where local governance aligns with specific community norms, yet remains loosely connected to a broader whole. For some users, the smaller scale and greater control possible on federated platforms is compelling.

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While federation offers users more autonomy and fosters diversity, it makes it significantly harder to combat systemic harms or coordinate responses to threats like disinformation, harassment or exploitation. Moreover, because server administrators can only moderate locally — for example, they can only hide content on the server they operate — posts from one server can spread across the network onto others, with little recourse.

Posts promoting harmful pseudoscience (“drinking bleach cures autism”) or doxxing can persist unchecked on some servers, even if others reject or block the content. People who have become convinced that “moderation is censorship” may feel that this is an unmitigated win, but users across the political spectrum have consistently expressed a desire for platforms to address fake accounts and false or violent content.

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There is also the looming question of economics [with regard to federated networks]. Federated alternatives must be financially sustainable if they intend to persist. Right now, Bluesky is primarily fueled by venture capital; it has broached having paid subscriptions and features in the future. But if the last two decades of social media experimentation have taught us anything, it’s that economic incentives inevitably have an outsized impact on governance and user experience.

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Federated platforms will give us the freedom to curate our online experience, and to create communities where we feel comfortable. They represent more than a technological shift — they’re an opportunity for democratic renewal in the digital public sphere. By returning governance to users and communities, they have the potential to rebuild trust and legitimacy in ways that centralized platforms no longer can. However, they also run the risk of further splintering our society, as users abandon those shared spaces where broader social cohesion may be forged.

The Great Decentralization is a digitalized reflection of our polarized politics that, going forward, will also shape them.

So, you know commercial spyware? No I'm not referring to ads or things like pegasus. Talking about those weird providers that market to schools, employers and shitty partners

What measures could be taken to mitigate these threats? When physical can be assumes but the attacker isn't skilled, just using one of said tools? How would this vary between phones and laptops for example?

Thoughts?

No I'm not in danger, just get curious about this subject once in a while

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/52215027

Archived link

Summary:

Between July 2023 and December 2024, Insikt Group observed the Chinese state-sponsored group RedDelta targeting Mongolia, Taiwan, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Cambodia with an adapted infection chain to distribute its customized PlugX backdoor. The group used lure documents themed around the 2024 Taiwanese presidential candidate Terry Gou, the Vietnamese National Holiday, flood protection in Mongolia, and meeting invitations, including an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting. RedDelta likely compromised the Mongolian Ministry of Defense in August 2024 and the Communist Party of Vietnam in November 2024. The group conducted spearphishing targeting the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, but Insikt Group observed no evidence of successful compromise. From September to December 2024, RedDelta likely targeted victims in Malaysia, Japan, the United States, Ethiopia, Brazil, Australia, and India.

In late 2023, RedDelta evolved the first stage of its infection chain to leverage a Windows Shortcut (LNK) file likely delivered via spearphishing. In 2024, the group transitioned to using Microsoft Management Console Snap-In Control (MSC) files. Most recently, RedDelta used spearphishing links to prompt a victim to load an HTML file remotely hosted on Microsoft Azure. Since July 2023, RedDelta has consistently used the Cloudflare content distribution network (CDN) to proxy command-and-control (C2) traffic, which enables the group to blend in with legitimate CDN traffic and complicates victim identification. Other state-sponsored groups, including Russia’s BlueAlpha, have similarly leveraged Cloudflare to evade detection.

RedDelta’s activities align with Chinese strategic priorities, focusing on governments and diplomatic organizations in Southeast Asia, Mongolia, and Europe. The group’s Asia-focused targeting in 2023 and 2024 represents a return to the group’s historical focus after targeting European organizations in 2022. RedDelta’s targeting of Mongolia and Taiwan is consistent with the group’s past targeting of groups seen as threats to the Chinese Communist Party’s power.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/52223836

Among the many laptops and desktops that Lenovo announced at CES 2025 is an intriguing peripheral: the Self-Charging Bluetooth Keyboard. This unique productivity keyboard ditches the traditional battery, instead utilizing solar and ambient light to charge and store energy.

The Lenovo Self-Charging Bluetooth Keyboard might seem like your run-of-the-mill keyboard, but it comes with a party trick that might just save you a buck in the long run. Using advanced photovoltaic technology and fast-charging supercapacitors, the keyboard actually harnesses ambient light to store energy, eliminating the need for disposable batteries.