In recent months, followers of influential liberal bloggers have been
interviewed by police as China widens its net of online surveillance
Late last year, Duan*, a university student in China, used a virtual private
network to jump over China’s great firewall of internet censorship and download
social media platform Discord.
Overnight he entered a community in which thousands of members with diverse
views debated political ideas and staged mock elections. People could join the
chat to discuss ideas such as democracy, anarchism and communism. “After all,
it’s hard for us to do politics in reality, so we have to do it in a group
chat,” Yang Minghao, a popular vlogger, said in a video on YouTube.
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Tag - Asia Pacific
Justice minister signs extradition order for Megaupload founder 12 years after
FBI-ordered raid over filesharing site
Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct filesharing
website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice
minister says, which could end more than a decade of legal wrangling.
German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition
to the US since 2012 after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. The high
court in New Zealand first approved his extradition in 2017, with an appeal
court reaffirming the finding the year after. In 2020, the country’s supreme
court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of
judicial review.
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The country has long been the world’s biggest market – but the government’s
interest is more geopolitical than environmental
When Kenzi, an advertising worker in Shanghai, bought an electric vehicle in
November she wasn’t even thinking about the environmental benefits. She had read
Elon Musk’s biography and thought the Tesla 3 looked good. She also knew that if
she bought an EV she could bypass the long wait and cost of getting licence
plates, which are rationed by the government.
“It’s not easy to get a licence plate in Shanghai, but you get a licence for
free when you buy an EV,” she said.
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Trump has accused Taiwan of ‘taking’ the US chip sector, but Taipei has been at
the forefront of the industry for decades, and its future could depend on it
The Hsinchu Science Park, on Taiwan’s west coast, is lush and green, with
streets neatly planned and clearly signposted. The buildings are modern and well
maintained – from the outside most visitors wouldn’t even know that they are
among the world’s most important factories.
Hsinchu used to be famous for its fishball street snacks, but now it’s referred
to as Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, a tech-focused microcosm pipelining workers from
school to university and into the world-leading semiconductor industry that is
crucial to global supply chains.
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US firm’s move, amid Beijing-Washington tensions, sparks rush to lure users to
homegrown models
At the World AI Conference in Shanghai last week, one of China’s leading
artificial intelligence companies, SenseTime, unveiled its latest model,
SenseNova 5.5.
The model showed off its ability to identify and describe a stuffed toy puppy
(wearing a SenseTime cap), offered feedback on a drawing of a rabbit, and
instantly read and summarised a page of text. According to SenseTime, SenseNova
5.5 is comparable with GPT-4o, the flagship artificial intelligence model of the
Microsoft-backed US company OpenAI.
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