fidzu : computers

A former Chinese official who fled to the U.S. says Beijing has used advanced surveillance technology from U.S. companies to track, intimidate, and punish him and his family across borders. ABC News reports: Retired Chinese official Li Chuanliang was recuperating from cancer on a Korean resort island when he got an urgent call: Don't return to China, a friend warned. You're now a fugitive. Days later, a stranger snapped a photo of Li in a cafe. Terrified South Korea would send him back, Li fled, flew to the U.S. on a tourist visa and applied for asylum. But even there -- in New York, in California, deep in the Texas desert -- the Chinese government continued to hunt him down with the help of surveillance technology. Li's communications were monitored, his assets seized and his movements followed in police databases. More than 40 friends and relatives -- including his pregnant daughter -- were identified and detained, even by tracking down their cab drivers through facial recognition software. Three former associates died in detention, and for months shadowy men Li believed to be Chinese operatives stalked him across continents, interviews and documents seen by The Associated Press show. The Chinese government is using an increasingly powerful tool to cement its power at home and vastly amplify it abroad: Surveillance technology, much of it originating in the U.S., an AP investigation has found. Within China, this technology helped identify and punish almost 900,000 officials last year alone, nearly five times more than in 2012, according to state numbers. Beijing says it is cracking down on corruption, but critics charge that such technology is used in China and elsewhere to stifle dissent and exact retribution on perceived enemies. Outside China, the same technology is being used to threaten wayward officials, along with dissidents and alleged criminals, under what authorities call Operations "Fox Hunt" and "Sky Net." The U.S. has criticized these overseas operations as a "threat" and an "affront to national sovereignty." More than 14,000 people, including some 3,000 officials, have been brought back to China from more than 120 countries through coercion, arrests and pressure on relatives, according to state information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Dec 2025 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dozens of Ukrainian civilians filed a series of lawsuits in Texas this week, accusing some of the biggest US chip firms of negligently failing to track chips that evaded export curbs. Those chips were ultimately used to power Russian and Iranian weapon systems, causing wrongful deaths last year. Their complaints alleged that for years, Texas Instruments (TI), AMD, and Intel have ignored public reporting, government warnings, and shareholder pressure to do more to track final destinations of chips and shut down shady distribution channels diverting chips to sanctioned actors in Russia and Iran. Putting profits over human lives, tech firms continued using "high-risk" channels, Ukrainian civilians' legal team alleged in a press statement, without ever strengthening controls. All that intermediaries who placed bulk online orders had to do to satisfy chip firms was check a box confirming that the shipment wouldn't be sent to sanctioned countries, lead attorney Mikal Watts told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday, according to the Kyiv Independent. "There are export lists," Watts said. "We know exactly what requires a license and what doesn't. And companies know who they're selling to. But instead, they rely on a checkbox that says, 'I'm not shipping to Putin.' That's it. No enforcement. No accountability." [...] Damages sought include funeral expenses and medical costs, as well as "exemplary damages" that are "intended to punish especially wrongful conduct and to deter similar conduct in the future." For plaintiffs, the latter is the point of the litigation, which they hope will cut off key supply chains to keep US tech out of weapon systems deployed against innocent civilians. "They want to send a clear message that American companies must take responsibility when their technologies are weaponized and used to commit harm across the globe," the press statement said. "Corporations must be held accountable when its unlawful decisions made in the name of profit directly cause the death of innocents and widespread human suffering." For chip firms, the litigation could get costly if more civilians join, with the threat of a loss potentially forcing changes that could squash supply chains currently working to evade sanctions. "We want to make this process so expensive and painful that companies are forced to act," Watts said. "That is our contribution to stopping the war against civilians."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Dec 2025 3:30am GMT

Chandler, Arizona unanimously rejected a proposed AI data center despite heavy lobbying from Big Tech interests and former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Politico reports: The Chandler City Council last night voted down a request by a New York developer to rezone land to build a data center and business complex. The local battle escalated in October after Sinema showed up at a planning commission meeting to offer public comment warning officials in her home state that federal authority may soon stomp on local regulations. "Chandler right now has the opportunity to determine how and when these new, innovative AI data centers will be built," she told local officials. "When federal preemption comes, we'll no longer have that privilege." Explaining her no vote, Chandler Vice Mayor Christine Ellis said that she had long framed her decision about the local benefits rather than the national push to build AI. She recalled a meeting with Sinema where she asked point-blank, "what's in it for Chandler?" "If you can't show me what's in it for Chandler, then we are not having a conversation," Ellis said before voting against the project. [...] The project, along with Sinema's involvement, attracted significant community opposition, with speakers raising concerns about whether the project would use too much water or raise power prices. Residents packed the council chambers, with many holding up signs reading "No More Data Centers." According to the city's planning office, more than 200 comments were filed against the proposal compared to just eight in favor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Dec 2025 2:20am GMT

There's a new Haiku monthly activity report, and this one's a true doozy. Let's start with the biggest news. The most notable development in November was the introduction of a port of the Go programming language, version 1.18. This is still a few years old (from 2022; the current is Go 1.25), but it's far newer than the previous Go port to Haiku (1.4 from 2014); and unlike the previous port which was never in the package repositories, this one is now already available there (for x86_64 at least) and can be installed via pkgman. ↫ Haiku activity report As the project notes, they're still a few versions behind, but at least it's a lot more modern of an implementation than they had before. Now that it's in the repositories for Haiku, it might also attract more people to work on the port, potentially bringing even newer versions to the BeOS-inspired operating system. Welcome as it may be, this new Go port isn't the only big ticket item this month. Haiku can now gracefully recover from an app_server crash, something it used to be able to do a long time ago, but which was broken for a long time. The app_server is Haiku's display server and window manager, so the ability to restart it at runtime after a crash, and have it reconnect with still-running applications, is incredibly welcome. As far as I can tell, all modern operating systems can do this by now, so it's great to have this functionality restored in Haiku. Of course, aside from these two big improvements, there's the usual load of fixes and changes in applications, drivers, and other components of the operating system.

12 Dec 2025 11:51pm GMT

Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill has published a very interesting blog post about the shortcomings of both sudo and doas, and offers a potential different way of achieving the same goals as those tools. Systems built around identity-based access control tend to rely on ambient authority: policy is centralized and errors in the policy configuration or bugs in the policy engine can allow attackers to make full use of that ambient authority. In the case of a SUID binary like doas or sudo, that means an attacker can obtain root access in the event of a bug or misconfiguration. What if there was a better way? Instead of thinking about privilege escalation as becoming root for a moment, what if it meant being handed a narrowly scoped capability, one with just enough authority to perform a specific action and nothing more? Enter the object-capability model. ↫ Ariadne Conill To bring this approach to life, they created a tool called capsudo. Instead of temporarily changing your identity, capsudo can grant far more fine-grained capabilities that match the exact task you're trying to accomplish. As an example, Conill details mounting and unmounting - with capsudo, you can not only grant the ability for a user to mount and unmount whatever device, but also allow the user to only mount or unmount just one specific device. Another example given is how capsudo can be used to give a service account user to only those resources the account needs to perform its tasks. Of course, Conill explains all of this way better than I ever could, with actual example commands and more details. Conill happens to be the same person who created Wayback, illustrating that they have a tendency to look at problems in a unique and interesting way. I'm not smart enough to determine if this approach makes sense compared to sudo or doas, but the way it's described it does feel like a superior, more secure solution.

12 Dec 2025 11:35pm GMT

Unix has been enormously successful over the past 55 years. It started out as a small experiment to develop a time-sharing system (i.e., a multi-user operating system) at AT&T Bell Labs. The goal was to take a few core principles to their logical conclusion. The OS bundled many small tools that were easy to combine, as it was illustrated by a famous exchange between Donald Knuth and Douglas McIlroy in 1986. Today, Unix lives on mostly as a spiritual predecessor to Linux, Net/Free/OpenBSD, macOS, and arguably, ChromeOS and Android. Usenet tells us about the height of its early popularity. ↫ Gábor Nyéki There are so many amazing stories in this article, I honestly have no idea what to highlight. So first and foremost, I want you to read the whole thing yourself, as everyone's bound to have their own personal favourite section that resonates the most. My personal favourite story from the article - which is just an aside, to illustrate that even the asides are great - is that when Australia joined Usenet in 1983, new posts to Usenet were delivered to the country by airmail. On magnetic tape. Once per week. The overarching theme here is that the early days of UNIX, as documented on Usenet, were a fascinating wild west of implementations, hacks, and personalities, which, yes, clashed with each other, but also spread untold amounts of information, knowledge, and experience to every corner of the world. I hope Nyéki will write more of these articles.

12 Dec 2025 10:27pm GMT

"The vast majority of Codex is built by Codex," OpenAI told us about its new AI coding agent.

12 Dec 2025 10:16pm GMT

Help raise a charity haul that's already past $11,000 in just a couple of days.

12 Dec 2025 9:35pm GMT

Expanded live translation will come to iOS in the coming months.

12 Dec 2025 8:44pm GMT

The following packages may require manual intervention due to the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.0:

• aspnet-runtime
• aspnet-targeting-pack
• dotnet-runtime
• dotnet-sdk
• dotnet-source-built-artifacts
• dotnet-targeting-pack

pacman may display the following error failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) for the affected packages. If you are affected by this and require the 9.0 packages, the following commands will update e.g. aspnet-runtime to aspnet-runtime-9.0: pacman -Syu aspnet-runtime-9.0 pacman -Rs aspnet-runtime

11 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT