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Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.88 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.

Google has increasingly faced a reckoning over the dominant role its products play in how people get information and conduct business online. Another federal judge ruled in August that the company had a monopoly in online search. He is now considering a request by the Justice Department to break the company up.

Judge Brinkema, too, will have an opportunity to force changes to Google’s business. In its lawsuit, the Justice Department pre-emptively asked the court to force Google to sell some pieces of its ad technology business acquired over the years.

When her phone vibrates with a WhatsApp alert from her “Task Hunters” group, she has little time to react.

Fuentes, 35, rushes to her computer and logs on to Appen, an artificial-intelligence data platform where she has been tagging data for the past decade. She works quickly as she competes with thousands of other crowd-workers for 5–25 cents per task. With each click, she may choose the genre of a movie, decide if an image is AI-generated, or solve a math problem.

Fuentes is among the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who do informal work for the tech industry. As Venezuela’s economic crisis worsened and its currency became nearly worthless around 2018, educated Venezuelans signed up on AI-training and freelancing platforms to earn in U.S. dollars. They formed up to 75% of the workforce at companies like Mighty AI and Scale AI in 2018. Remotasks even created a special program to attract Venezuelan workers.

They annotated all kinds of data to train AI tools, such as vision models, autonomous vehicles, and warehousing robots. They also moderated violent content and wrote articles to optimize websites for search.

But with the rise of generative AI, such digital jobs have become scarce and poorly paid, workers and researchers told Rest of World. Without formal contracts, the workers have little choice but to find ways to compete with AI, or quit.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32848522

Archived

Though less well-known than groups like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, Brass Typhoon, or APT 41, is an infamous, longtime espionage actor that foreshadowed recent telecom hacks.

As China continues its digital gambit around the world, researchers are warning that hacking activity from long-tracked groups is evolving and blending together. On top of that, attackers are hiding their campaigns more effectively and blurring the lines between cybercriminals and state-backed hacking.

Last year, revelations rocked the United States federal government that the Chinese hacking group known as “Salt Typhoon” had breached at least nine major US telecoms. And the group’s rampage even continued into this year in the US and other countries around the world. Meanwhile, the Beijing-linked hacking group “Volt Typhoon” has continued to lurk in US critical infrastructure and utilities around the world. Meanwhile, the notoriously versatile syndicate known as Brass Typhoon—also called APT 41 or Barium—has been operating in the shadows.

[...]

Brass Typhoon is known for having carried out a notable string of software supply chain attacks in the late 2010s and for brazen attacks on telecoms around the same time in which the group specifically targeted call record data. The gang is also known for its hybrid activity, carrying out hacks that align with Chinese state-sponsored espionage by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, but also moonlighting on seemingly cybercriminal projects, particularly focused on the video game industry and in-game currency scams.

Research indicates that Brass Typhoon has continued to be active in recent months with financial crimes targeting online gambling platforms as well as espionage targeting manufacturing and energy firms. Its sustained activity has run in parallel to Salt and Volt Typhoon’s recent, attention-grabbing campaigns, and analysis increasingly shows that China’s state-backed hacking operations must be viewed comprehensively, not just in terms of individual actors.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32835964

Archived

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In one [Tiktok] video that has nearly 10 million views, a creator claims to be able to sell yoga pants from the same manufacturer that supplies Lululemon for $5-$6, instead of the $100 they sell for in the United States.

“The material and the craftsmanship are basically the same because they come from the same production line,” she says, standing in front of what appears to be a factory.

In another, a man standing on a factory floor claims to have access to manufacturers that produce Louis Vuitton bags, which he says can be sold directly to customers for $50.

But both companies deny their products are finished in China, and experts told The Independent the videos are likely an effort by counterfeit or “dupe” manufacturers to take advantage of the chaos over the tariffs to boost their sales.

“They're trying to conflate the fake manufacturers in China with the real manufacturers,” said Conrad Quilty-Harper, author of Dark Luxury, a newsletter about the luxury goods industry.

“They're very clever with their social media, and they’re very effective at driving demand in the West,” he added.

[...]

Louis Vuitton has said repeatedly that it does not manufacture products in China.

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TikTok users have reported seeing the videos appear in their feeds in recent days as the trade war between the U.S. and China continues to heat up.

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The counterfeit market in China is the largest in the world. U.S. Customs seized counterfeit items worth some $1.8 billion in recommended retail price in 2023.

Quilty-Harper said the counterfeit industry in China has been a concern for Western companies for years. And the enforcement of trademark and intellectual property rights internally has tended to depend on the geopolitical climate.

“In the past, the Chinese authorities have been stricter on it, and sometimes they've been looser on it, and often that's to do with the relationship with the US and previous presidents,” he said.

“This is part of a huge geopolitical battle between America and China over intellectual property. And it's just fascinating to see this sort of propaganda fight happening on these very high-traffic TikTok videos,” he added.

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/1233561

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2468564

Archived link

Russia has created thousands of TikTok accounts in an effort to influence public opinion in Ukraine, [...]. The strategy takes advantage of TikTok’s algorithm, which allows even new accounts with no followers to go viral — making it the most effective platform in Ukraine for bot farms to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda.

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Data from the research firm DataReportal shows that TikTok has 17 million users in Ukraine — more than both Instagram (12 million) and Facebook (13.9 million). In April 2024, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation reported blocking several dozen TikTok channels spreading what it referred to as “enemy propaganda.” Among them were pages linked to anti-vaccine activist Ostap Stakhiv, pro-Russian journalist Diana Panchenko, and lawmaker Oleksandr Dubinsky, who is currently in jail awaiting trial on treason charges. But according to the center’s head, Andriy Kovalenko, taking down individual accounts is like “treating symptoms, not the disease.” He said the platform itself should be able to distinguish between disinformation and legitimate content.

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Russia’s playbook: first, a “bot farm,” a network of accounts with minimal information or followers, is set up. Then, an “emotional video” is created using either real footage or AI. The same video is posted across hundreds of these accounts within a day, and bots swarm in to like, comment, and “watch” the video all the way through to boost engagement. TikTok’s algorithm interprets this as genuine popularity and starts pushing the video to more users.

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AI and deepfake technology have also made it possible for Russia to create fake TikTok accounts posing as Ukrainian soldiers. In late March 2025 — during the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the Kursk region and amid statements by U.S. President Donald Trump about thousands of Ukrainian troops being surrounded — videos began appearing on TikTok that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers recording their “last words.” The AI-generated men in the clips claimed that their commanders had abandoned them and that they were expecting to die there. According to Ukrainska Pravda, these videos racked up millions of views.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32830658

[This is an op-ed by Valentin Weber, senior research fellow with the German Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the International Forum for Democratic Studies report “Data-Centric Authoritarianism: How China’s Development of Frontier Technologies Could Globalize Repression.” His research covers the intersection of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and technological spheres of influence.]

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While the financial, economic, technological, and national-security implications of DeepSeek’s achievement have been widely covered, there has been little discussion of its significance for authoritarian governance. DeepSeek has massive potential to enhance China’s already pervasive surveillance state, and it will bring the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closer than ever to its goal of possessing an automated, autonomous, and scientific tool for repressing its people.

[...]

With the world’s largest public AI-surveillance networks — “smart cities” — Chinese police started to amass vast amounts of data. But some Chinese experts lamented that smart cities were not actually that smart: They could track and find pedestrians and vehicles but could not offer concrete guidance to authorities — such as providing police officers with different options for handling specific situations.

[...]

China’s surveillance-industrial complex took a big leap in the mid-2010s. Now, AI-powered surveillance networks could do more than help the CCP to track the whereabouts of citizens (the chess pawns). It could also suggest to the party which moves to make, which figures to use, and what strategies to take.

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Inside China, such a network of large-scale AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] systems could autonomously improve repression in real time, rooting out the possibility of civic action in urban metropolises. Outside the country, if cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — where China first exported Alibaba’s City Brain system in 2018 — were either run by a Chinese-developed city brain that had reached AGI or plugged into a Chinese city-brain network, they would quietly lose their governance autonomy to these highly complex systems that were devised to achieve CCP urban-governance goals.

[...]

As China’s surveillance state begins its third evolution, the technology is beginning to shift from merely providing decision-making support to actually acting on the CCP’s behalf.

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The next step in the evolution of China’s surveillance state will be to integrate generative-AI models like DeepSeek into urban surveillance infrastructures. Lenovo, a Hong Kong corporation with headquarters in Beijing, is already rolling out programs that fuse LLMs with public-surveillance systems. In [the Spanish city of] Barcelona, the company is administering its Visual Insights Network for AI (VINA), which allows law enforcement and city-management personnel to search and summarize large amounts of video footage instantaneously.

[...]

The CCP, with its vast access to the data of China-based companies, could use DeepSeek to enforce laws and intimidate adversaries in myriad ways — for example, deploying AI police agents to cancel a Lunar New Year holiday trip planned by someone required by the state to stay within a geofenced area; or telephoning activists after a protest to warn of the consequences of joining future demonstrations. It could also save police officers’ time. Rather than issuing “invitations to tea” (a euphemism for questioning), AI agents could conduct phone interviews and analyze suspects’ voices and emotional cues for signs of repentance. Police operators would, however, still need to confirm any action taken by AI agents.

[...]

DeepSeek and similar generative-AI tools make surveillance technology smarter and cheaper. This will likely allow the CCP to stay in power longer, and propel the export of Chinese AI surveillance systems across the world — to the detriment of global freedom.

[Edit typo.]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32771800

Bits of Freedom, European Digital Rights (EDRi), Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, and Convocation Design + Research are filing a complaint under the Digital Services Act (DSA) against Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. According to the complaint, Meta violates the DSA’s user protections by not offering easily accessible news feed options on its platforms that are not based on profiling of users.

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The obligation set out in the DSA is meant to enable people to protect themselves against Meta’s sensationalist and toxic content algorithms. By using deceptive interface designs, Meta makes it unnecessarily difficult for people to choose and keep a content feed that is not based on profiling.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32771896

Western intelligence agencies warned on Tuesday of an increasing threat from Beijing's security services to use malicious mobile phone applications to surveil Taiwanese independence activists, Tibetan rights advocates and others opposed by the Chinese government.

An advisory warned of "the growing threat" posed by malicious surveillance software deployed by a Chengdu-based contractor reported to have ties to China’s Ministry of Public Security. The advisory was signed by cybersecurity agencies in Britain, the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Germany.

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The warning comes amid increasing tensions surrounding Taiwan, including April 1 Chinese military drills around the island and a March 28 visit to the Philippines by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in which he reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to deterring Chinese aggression in the region.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2449681

Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal.

Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.

For the past year, health officials had been assessing whether extra safeguards were needed for patient records when added to the genomes, tissue samples and questionnaire responses held by UK Biobank. Personal details such as names and dates of birth are stripped from UK Biobank data before it is shared but experts say that in some cases individuals can still be identified.

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cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/24693759

Archived

Original article behind paywall

Volt Typhoon has been responsible for intrusions into vital critical infrastructure both in the continental United States and its possessions through the Pacific.

The group has made transport hubs and water utilities a particular target, with the hackers so far not causing any disruption but rather prepositioning themselves ahead of any hostile action.

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. According to two anonymous observers, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported late last week that 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.

According to the WSJ, the comments were “indirect and somewhat ambiguous”; however, US officials present felt the meaning was plain.

Speaking to Cyber Daily’s sister brand, Defence Connect, earlier this year, Adam Meyers, SVP of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike, said that Volt Typhoon’s activity was clearly aimed at disrupting any US action in the region.

Revealing Reality created multiple Roblox accounts, registering them to fictional users aged five, nine, 10, 13 and 40-plus. The accounts interacted only with one another, and not with users outside the experiment, to ensure their avatars’ behaviours were not influenced in any way.

Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children’s accounts, the researchers concluded: “Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.”

The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification. This was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences, instead having access only to public broadcast messages.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32773817

Archived

In his speech, [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] highlighted the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cooperation [with Asian countries], and touted ideas of building high-level connectivity networks, enhancing industrial cooperation, advancing security and law enforcement cooperation, and expanding people-to-people exchanges. China is likely to sign a number of agreements as it seeks to deepen ‘all-around cooperation’ with the three Southeast Asian nations. These are likely to include ongoing attention to digital infrastructure, technology, and governance norms-setting under digital cooperation – and risk further entrenching digital repression in the region.

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Vietnam

Vietnam is emblematic of a digital authoritarian state learning from China’s digital governance norms.

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there is a great degree of similarity between the two laws, pointing to China’s influence over the development of Vietnam’s digital governance. Both laws define cybersecurity in a manner that diverges from conventional, rights-based approach, conflating technical infrastructure security with information control — resulting in enhanced censorship. Both laws also take a centralised approach to critical information infrastructure and promote centralised censorship of information critical of the regime. They require data localisation, raising serious risks of surveillance, and include a number of concerning obligations on foreign tech companies. Both laws also promote real name registration, which further compromises right to privacy and anonymity protections, adversely impacting freedom of expression online. Finally, Vietnam’s approach to cybersecurity models China’s emphasis on individual and tech companies’ requirements to act as surveillance extensions of the Party-State apparatus. Subsequent decrees in Vietnam have positioned the law even closer to its Chinese predecessor.

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Cambodia

In early 2022, Cambodia launched its Cambodian Digital Government Policy 2022– 2035, which referred to China as a positive case study in successful digital government, raising concerns about internet freedom in the country. We are likely to see further tightening of this relationship through additional cooperation agreements and memoranda of understanding.

The starkest example of China’s malicious influence over Cambodia’s digital infrastructure and governance space is in the National Internet Gateway (NIG). In February 2021 Cambodia enacted the NIG Sub-Decree, establishing the country’s version of the Great Firewall of China. Article 6 of the Sub-Decree requires telecommunications companies and service providers to route internet traffic through government-controlled and monitored servers ‘to prevent and disconnect all network connections that affect national income, security, social order, morality, culture, traditions, and customs’. Articles 14 and 16 allow government officials to retain traffic data for a year and issue overbroad penalties for non-compliance. Sopheap Chak, former executive director of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights, has observed that ‘the proposed NIG mirrors that of the Chinese internet gateway’.

[...]

Malaysia

Malaysia is home to the second-largest Chinese overseas community in the world, after Thailand. It is also among the top 10 global recipients of BRI support; relations with China and digital cooperation are common elements of Malaysian politics. [...]

One area where cooperation between China and Malaysia has raised human rights concerns is around partnerships on high-risk Chinese surveillance and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, last year ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, promised to invest some USD 2,13 billion to develop an AI hub in Malaysia.

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One of the stated objectives outlined the recent Central Work Conference on Diplomacy with Neighbouring Countries has been to expand law enforcement cooperation. This is likely to be among the priorities of Xi Jinping’s trip, and we should expect further discussion on these points in Malaysia. Cooperation on expanding partnership in new and emerging technologies, especially around AI, are likely to also be a focus of the upcoming delegation, as China seeks to both elevate its global norms setting role and further dislodge the United States as a leader in AI technology.

The Federal Trade Commission's blockbuster antitrust case against Meta kicks off on Monday in a courtroom in Washington. It's the culmination of a nearly six-year investigation into whether the social media giant broke competition laws in acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp.

At stake is the future Meta's $1.4 trillion advertising business and the prospect of having to spin off its hugely popular services into separate companies — a corporate breakup the likes of which has not been seen since AT&T's telephone monopoly was forced to split apart more than 40 years ago.

So, which butthole did you pull your code, copy, or image from today? 🙂

People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones. Like Apple creating the iPhone (sure, smartphones existed before—but cars also existed before the Ford Model T).

But sometimes, I really want a faster horse.

Netflix in 2012 was a super fast horse. It had a simple but massive catalog of movies and shows, solid recommendations, and basic library management. Compared to my limited local media library it was great. You could actively tune your tastes and rate things with a 5-star system.