Tag: china

Bluetooth Glitch Exposes Alibaba’s Secret Tracking Of Users, Developer Says

A San Francisco-based developer discovered that Alibaba Group’s AliExpress marketplace secretly hijacked his computer’s audio system through hidden browser scripts, allowing the website to run inaudible sound waves at zero volume to create “fingerprints” used to track devices without relying on cookies. 

The privacy-focused Brave browser revealed in a series of X posts that the AliExpress marketplace was keeping the developer’s computer audio system active through hidden browser scripts, potentially allowing the website to generate a unique identifier for his device.

The issue emerged when the developer’s Bluetooth headphones refused to transfer their audio connection from his computer to his phone while AliExpress was open. A deeper dive of the website’s code showed background scripts maintaining access to the computer’s audio-processing system without producing audible sound.

The scripts allegedly used the browser’s Web Audio API to process signals at zero volume. Small differences in how individual computers handle those signals can be measured and combined into an “audio fingerprint,” allowing websites to recognize devices even when cookies are deleted or blocked.

The developer also found that the scripts collected other device characteristics, including available memory, screen dimensions, and network information.

Here’s what Brave found:

1. Alibaba’s AliExpress was caught using users’ audio systems to track them. AliExpress wasn’t recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users’ specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them.

2. Fingerprinting is a way that websites can identify you without cookies. Sites will note details about your device like your screen size or installed fonts. These details are then combined into a unique, persistent “fingerprint” that can be used to track you across the Web.

3. There are slight variations in how each device plays the same audio file due to differences in CPU, sound card, browser, etc. When AliExpress played the silent sound, it measured these small variations to help build fingerprints of users’ devices.

4. This tracking was discovered due to an unexpected side effect. A user with Bluetooth headphones noticed they couldn’t play music on their phone because the headphones were instead playing AliExpress’s silent sound from their PC.

Brave turned what it found into a sales pitch for its browser:

1. For 6+ years, Brave has protected users against audio fingerprinting, and other fingerprinting types, by default. Brave injects random data into the browser’s output so you show a different fingerprint to different sites. This fingerprint also resets across sessions.

2. Trackers are constantly finding new ways to fingerprint your device, so Brave keeps adding new protections. We recently added defenses against GPU fingerprinting, which stops sites from identifying you with your graphics card or drivers.

The findings raise new questions about browser fingerprinting, a stealthy way that uses silent audio processing for covert tracking. 

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Once China’s Richest Man, Evergrande Founder Hui Ka Yan Gets Life In Prison — And The Property Crisis Rolls On

Hui Ka Yan, the founder and once richest man in China of property developer China Evergrande Group, has been sentenced to life in prison for fraud and bribery in one of the biggest corporate collapses in history.

Hui Ka Yan, the chairman of Evergrande Property Services, was found guilty of fraud by a Chinese court on Thursday and sentenced to life in prison, along with a number of other defendants, including his two sons. Xu Tenghe and Xu Zhijian were also found guilty of crimes committed as part of the business dealings of their father.

He was arrested in 2023 while abroad after he had pleaded guilty in April 2023 to multiple counts brought against him as the former chairman of the now-bankrupt property developer including dishonesty offenses and the misuse of funds. He was at one stage the world’s richest man and was the number one ranked person in China’s rich list, compiled by China’s rich list magazine Fortune China, which ranked individuals by their estimated net worth.

Evergrande became the symbol of China’s massive property market financed by massive amounts of debt that eventually collapsed under the weight of Beijing’s tighter leverage rules. Its highly publicized default in 2021 triggered a massive systemic crisis in China’s entire property sector and got the attention of investors worldwide, from Hong Kong to New York.

The liquidation of Evergrande Group’s Hong Kong incorporated entity was ordered by a Hong Kong court in early 2024. As a consequence, Evergrande Group was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In the meantime, the Chinese mainland regulators and liquidators are trying to recover the large amounts of dividends and assets, which were distributed to Hui Ka Yan and his family members during the boom years.

In other news, China’s onshore bankruptcy proceedings against the mainland entity of Evergrande’s Hong Kong listed subsidiary have been launched this week and will complicate recovery for international creditors.

The severe sentence handed down to Hui Ka Yan, once China’s richest man, will be seen as a warning to the rest of the country’s business leaders that they will be held accountable for the debts that have so destabilized the economy. The developers are responsible for the mess left by Evergrande’s collapse, and for the hundreds of thousands of homebuyers left in the lurch – many still waiting in their half-finished apartments for the homes they had paid for in full.

China’s real estate market, once accounting for some 25% of China’s total GDP, continues to be a drag on the country’s broader economy with no end in sight to the downturn in home prices in major cities. China is prioritizing accountability over bailouts in the sector, believing that by putting the worst perpetrators of the crisis behind bars, they can restore confidence in the property market.

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Beijing Outraged as U.S. Warns Dominican Republic of Espionage Risk with Chinese Tech

The Chinese embassy in the Dominican Republic on Sunday accused its American counterpart of spreading “defamatory” remarks by sharing statements made by a U.S. official warning of the potential security dangers that come with using Chinese tech.

Over the past year, Trump administration officials have warned America’s Latin American allies of the great risks that come with using technology equipment made by Huawei, ZTE, and other companies linked to the Chinese communist party. The U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Juan Pablo Segura reiterated the dangers of using Chinese tech in a social media post last week. Segura emphasized that Beijing forces tech companies to cooperate with the regime’s intelligence services, creating risks of spying, hacking, and network shutdowns.

“We urge U.S. partners in the Americas to quickly switch to trusted suppliers to protect their people and their sovereignty,” Segura wrote.

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Guess Who’s Getting Purged? How Chinese Citizens Turn Fear Into a Black Market

If you’ve ever wanted to know what Chinese political paranoia looks like in action, congratulations! The CCP just handed us the perfect specimen.

Turns out, Xi Jinping’s ongoing purge of senior officials has gotten so intense, so incomprehensible, and so secretive, that an actual underground market has emerged.

Chinese citizens are now literally paying money to access what appear to be leaked details about which officials are under investigation. Shadowy online groups claim to have insider information on the next wave of purges.

According to Bloomberg, authorities are playing whack-a-mole trying to shut these leaky groups down. But they can’t because the demand is too high. This is the price of the CCP making itself a total black box.

The purge market is just the symptom. The disease is that the CCP created a system with no stability, no clear rules, and no way to know if tomorrow you’ll be promoted or investigated. So citizens and lower-ranking officials are doing the rational thing: trying to buy information to stay ahead of the knife. Or maybe they’re just betting for money, like Polymarket for General Hostility.

This also reveals something much darker about CCP governance. It’s not like these are leaks from innocent whistleblowers. These are just corrupt people trying to navigate a corrupt system. Can they be trusted to predict what’s coming next? Buyers hope so.

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Chinese Christian Detained After Listening to the Bible in His Car

A Christian living in northwestern China was reportedly arrested after listening to the Bible with a USB device in his car.

The unnamed believer — referred to as Brother AK in an Aug. 13 report from Premier Christian News —  was stopped at a checkpoint while driving with his family through a Muslim-majority part of China to visit other Christians.

He reportedly told officials that “because I believe in Jesus, I was listening to the Bible through the USB.”

Brother AK was detained for questions, and his wife and children — including their baby — were separated from him.

Several days passed without news of his whereabouts as the family stayed with nearby Christians.

Then the host family received a call from authorities inquiring into their relationship with Brother AK’s family.

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China Quietly WEAPONIZING Our Own Heritage While Hollywood Bows and Apologizes

Christopher Nolan sat down in Beijing recently to promote “The Odyssey.” But this wasn’t your typical press junket with softball questions and movie clips. A Chinese political philosophy student named Zhong Shu grilled him for nearly 20 minutes about Homer, hubris, the fall of Athens, and whether Hollywood has turned greatness into something that requires an apology.

The interview went viral for good reason. It was a masterclass — but not the kind Americans are used to seeing.

Zhong didn’t just ask about special effects or casting choices. She came prepared with Thucydides and challenged Nolan on whether he had “Christianized” Homer. She asked if the gods in his film were just projections of the human psyche. And then she cut to the heart of it all.

“We turn greatness into privileges and we demand apologies for it. That’s a fact of Hollywood,” Zhong stated before asking Nolan if he agreed.

Nolan didn’t dodge. He didn’t spin. He described it the way an engineer describes a load-bearing wall: This is simply how the mechanism works in our culture today. In a democratic age committed to equality, storytellers have to manage the audience’s built-in resistance to greatness. Do we have to apologize for that greatness?

“And the answer is yes, we do,” he said.

Think about that. The West’s most prominent living filmmaker just calmly conceded that his civilization can no longer receive a story about greatness unless greatness acknowledges wrongdoing first. And he delivered this admission in Beijing to an educated Chinese classicist who came prepared with provocations from our own civilization’s foundational myths.

This wasn’t a random interview. It was a snapshot of a much bigger conflict — a narrative cold war where each civilization is grappling with its relationship to the guiding stories of the past in an effort to determine which culture will lead the world in the future.

For years — with very little media attention — China has been quietly engaged in a narrative arms race with an American culture it believes is in decline. There’s a belief within the Chinese government that the modern West abandoned its own inheritance by deconstructing its foundational myths and values, and that now is the time to build where we have faltered. So for years, the Chinese have been mining the “classics” of Western Civilization for the insights that once gave us a civilizational advantage.

In November 2024, Beijing hosted the first World Conference of Classics: 600 participants and scholars, a congratulatory letter from Xi Jinping read aloud by the CCP’s propaganda chief, and a new Chinese School of Classical Studies established in Athens. Over the past decade, Peking University and Renmin have built classical studies programs too.

A key figure in China’s modern fascination with Western classical education is political philosopher Liu Xiaofeng, who spent the 2000s importing “Great Books education” into Chinese universities at precisely the moment Western universities were more focused on critiquing, subverting, and deconstructing these stories. Three of his students now run a classics division inside the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Here in the U.S., we’re finally starting to wake up. Even if Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic myth is a matter of debate, the fact that he believed it was the right time to return to a 2,800-year-old story means something. Hollywood has been in a confused state of nostalgia for quite some time — prequels, sequels, reboots, sometimes deconstructing classic fairy tales and modern mythic heroes, other times celebrating them.

What’s undeniable is that the relationship to these stories of our past matters.

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NATO whines it cannot fight simultaneous wars against Russia, China and Iran

NATO war planners rarely discuss their “nightmare scenarios” in public and appear even less prepared for real-life confrontations on that scale. This is particularly true when it comes to simultaneous or near-simultaneous wars in which the most aggressive racketeering cartel in recorded history has to fight in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. As the pillar of NATO, the United States would be forced to manage wars against Russia, Iran and China at once. One of the most infamous mainstream propaganda machine outlets, The Atlantic, explored this possibility, calling it “NATO’s nightmare”. The analysis largely focuses on “a coordinated assault by Beijing and Moscow” and how difficult it would be to “muster a viable defense” (obviously implying that NATO wouldn’t attack first, which is beyond laughable given its history).

The author, Simon Shuster, warns that “about a year ago, General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s top commander in Europe, publicly warned of the risk of a two-front war involving Russia and China and urged European allies to help the US prepare”. He quotes Florence Gaub, director of research at the NATO Defense College, who described it as “the scenario we’re currently not ready for”. She warns that “NATO strategists know the gap exists, but have not closed it” and that “despite growing military cooperation between Russia and China, Western governments have conducted only a handful of low-profile exercises examining what a joint attack might look like”. Although there weren’t any publicly acknowledged drills with this specific scenario in mind, Western-led military exercises in different areas of the world certainly focused on such a possibility.

However, The Atlantic admits that even when such scenarios were conducted as part of war games, the results were “less than optimistic”. The report quotes Mark Montgomery, a retired US Navy rear admiral who participated in major war games and stated that he last studied such a scenario roughly 15 years ago. Montgomery recalled that “it didn’t go well” because “even then, the US lacked the weapons stockpiles and industrial capacity to sustain a prolonged multifront war”. Even when numerous US allies, vassals and satellite states are added to the mix, “it made no difference at all”. What’s more, Montgomery warns that “those metrics have worsened, even as some NATO countries have increased defense spending”. To prove this is truly the case, one simply needs to look at the US aggression against Iran, which demonstrated remarkable resilience.

Worse yet (for America), Tehran also uncovered the Pentagon’s woeful incompetence in fighting a remotely capable opponent. A single country that the US promised to “defeat in three days to two weeks tops” has not only withstood all attacks in the last six months, but has also successfully retaliated against US occupation forces across the Middle East. It should be noted that Iran has been under Western sanctions for nearly half a century at this point. Now imagine how a direct confrontation with Russia or China would unfold, even separately, much less simultaneously. The Atlantic fears that “Moscow and Beijing have actually improved their positions”. The report points to the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, which “pushed Russia’s massive industrial base onto a war footing and sharpened its use of drones”.

It also warns that “while China has not fought a major war in decades, it now surpasses the US in warships and long-range missiles”. Obviously, the Asian giant hasn’t fought a major war in nearly half a century because it has refused to do so. Nothing prevents Beijing from fully restoring its sovereignty over Taiwan by force. However, it seeks to resolve the dispute through peaceful means, just like it did when restoring sovereignty over Hong Kong and Macao back in 1997 and 1999, respectively. This is precisely what the US fears the most, as a non-violent transition would only strengthen China and effectively break US dominance in the Asia-Pacific without firing a single shot. Washington DC would much rather see Taiwan destroyed than give up its influence there peacefully. This is why the US maintains tight control over local military forces.

However, directing “controlled chaos” is not enough for the Pentagon to “feel safe”. Namely, growing Sino-Russian ties are what really makes the political West “shiver” (or should we say, suffer panic attacks). The Atlantic is particularly concerned by the “no-limits partnership” Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced back in February 2022. NATO simply has no mechanisms to prevent Moscow and Beijing from building their alliance. On the contrary, its truly unprovoked aggression against the entire world has only strengthened their strategic partnership. The Atlantic thinks that “from Russia’s and China’s perspective, the timing may look favorable”, primarily because “the US is stretched by conflict in the Middle East, has shifted ships and aircraft away from Europe and Asia, and has depleted much of its advanced air-defense missile stockpile”.

Well, nobody forced Washington DC to wage yet another war of aggression. Neither Moscow nor Beijing forced the Trump administration to foolishly attack Iran. However, even the Middle East pales in comparison to how Western forces would fare in a fight against adversaries such as Russia and China, particularly now that the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict has turned the Russian military into the deadliest fighting force on the planet. The Atlantic concludes that “in a two-front war, the side most likely to prevail may be the one that acts with common purpose and stays united”. It would seem NATO didn’t learn from the strategic mistakes of its Axis predecessors, because that’s precisely what’s going to happen if it continues with its aggression against the entire world, which will have no other choice but to unite.

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Robot Reportedly Runs Faster Than Usain Bolt, Jumps Higher Than Any Human Athlete

It’s the fast-approaching dawning of the robot era.

We live in a race to produce the stronger, faster, and more useful robots on the planet – and the Chinese seem to have gathered some pace.

Robot firm Unitree has unveiled a ‘super-humanoid’ that – they are claiming – is faster than Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest sprinter.

The droid also performs other athletic tasks.

The New York Post reported:

“They unveiled the abilities of the cybernetic specimen, dubbed ‘Superman’, in an X video with nearly 950,000 views.

According to Unitree, the robot was developed in just three months but can already high jump 2 meters (6.56 feet) and achieve a top speed of 12.66 m/s (28.3 mph), allegedly eclipsing ‘the records of all humans around the world’.”

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NSA Blocked Reports Of China Interference In US Elections From Reaching Trump: Declassified Docs

Newly declassified intelligence emails reveal that decisions were made by National Security Agency (NSA) leadership to block reports of Chinese influence in American elections from reaching President Donald Trump.

Four pages of emails, all dated March 13, 2020, were released on Aug. 18 by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.

According to one email—written by an unidentified NSA employee following a meeting about intelligence reporting foreign efforts to target the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in the United States beginning in 2014—internal concerns were raised about the agency’s suppression of the reports.

“We did not know why we were here, trying to defend the election and identify threats to it, if we were unable to actually report what those threats were because of issues like this,” the NSA employee wrote.

According to another email, NSA analysts had proposed releasing the reports in 2018.

Task force officials are digging through files to determine why evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to influence the elections was not passed on to the president, Congress, and some intelligence leaders, including then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, now CIA director.

Certain aspects of the reports on the Chinese election influence were censored because “it was judged that some of the details regarding the 2016 election were ‘sensational’ and so required a limited distribution [redacted],” an NSA analyst wrote, noting that colleagues tried for 16 months to get the information published.

“People higher in the chain than us—including but not limited to people at ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]—time and again failed to make real decisions in a timely manner,” they said.

Intelligence officers were told in February 2020 that the office approved the report, and analysts prioritized its delivery, but the NSA deputy director blocked its release, according to the documents.

George Barnes served as NSA deputy director from 2017 to 2023.

“[The deputy director] explained that he was concerned that releasing the [redacted] at this time—in the current political climate, with an acting [director of national intelligence (DNI)] who had been tasked … to ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community, and with an administration that is suspicious of the [intelligence community] and aggressive in removing anyone who stand in their way—would damage NSA’s credibility,” the analyst wrote, referring to Trump appointee Richard Grenell, who became acting DNI on Feb. 20, 2020.

The analyst said the deputy director was concerned that releasing the information could be viewed as political in nature because of the two-year delay.

“I lacked the courage to point out that we, [redacted], had processed the information in a timely manner, and the delay in releasing it was due in part to decisions and inaction on the part of people in the room,” the analyst wrote.

According to the analyst, the deputy director also sought to keep the NSA’s reputation separate from the CIA, FBI, and ODNI—agencies he perceived “had been tarred as hosting or being part of the ‘deep state.’”

The analyst said the deputy director thought publishing the report would “destroy that trust.”

“He felt the questioning of NSA that would ensue would have ramifications on the credibility of NSA reporting overall and would result in morale problems among the broader NSA workforce, a la when the [redacted],” the analyst wrote.

Other elements of the gathered intelligence were excluded from reporting because it would have been impossible to conceal the identity of members of Congress, the analyst said. Such cases require special approval, as dictated by the “Gates Procedures,” established by Robert Gates, former director of Central Intelligence, in 1992.

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Declassified Files Reveal Eric Swalwell Admitted to Sex with Chinese Spy Fang Fang

Files declassified by President Donald Trump on former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and the Chinese spy known as Fang Fang reveal that the disgraced ex-congressman admitted to the FBI he had a sexual relationship with her  — and that the bureau attempted at one point to recruit her without her knowledge.

The documents prove that the United States government was aware of the suspicious relationship between Swalwell and Fang since at least 2014, years before Axios broke the story in 2020.

A zip file of documents, labeled “Rusty Thumbs” after the FBI’s codename for Fang, was published on the White House Election Integrity webpage on Monday along with the following synopsis:

The FBI developed evidence that a Chinese woman with direct ties to that country’s intelligence service had potentially compromised a Democratic congressman from California with sex, foreign interns and illicit donations while she was being recruited to become a bureau informant a decade ago, according to bombshell memos that expose another threat to America’s political system from Beijing.

The files chronicling the relationship between Rep. Eric Swalwell and the Chinese national Fang Fang – also known by her English name Christine Fang – were declassified by President Donald Trump and released Monday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force as part of a broader effort to unmask foreign threats to U.S. political and election systems.

According to the explosive FBI files, the bureau had opened a full-scale investigation into Swalwell over the allegations that Fang, a suspected intelligence operative for the Chinese government, had been facilitating campaign contributions for him in exchange for placing interns in his office. At one stage of the operation, the objective was to gather enough evidence to arrest and charge both Swalwell and Fang, who had ties to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS).

Multiple witnesses described their interactions with Fang to the FBI, including a winery owner who said that Fang told him to “just bring his checkbook” to a campaign event for Swalwell because she would reimburse him, and a wealthy restaurant franchise owner who said that Fang wanted his contribution to Swalwell attributed to her. 

The FBI’s case, codenamed “Freshman Fifteen,” was opened as a “Sensitive Investigative Matter” due to one of its subjects being a sitting member of congress at the time. In June 2014, an FBI memorandum stated that the possible violations included bribery of public officials, conspiracy, excessive campaign contributions, prohibited foreign-national contributions and contributions through conduits. 

In a May 2015 FBI interview, Swalwell said he first met Fang in 2012 when they were seated at the same table at an event celebrating the Chinese-American community. In the interview, he described Fang as a “striking individual,” and admitted that he met her for a drink a couple of weeks later. 

After that drink, he said that their relationship became sexual. 

According to Swalwell, he had “physical relations with Fang on a handful of occasions,” although the relationship did not become romantic. He said their last sexual encounter was in March 2015, just a couple of months before he sat down for that interview. 

While he described the relationship as casual, he stated that he believed that Fang wanted something more romantic. 

“Investigation has revealed that Fang Fang, a Chinese foreign national residing in the United States, is the facilitator of a scheme to trade internships in Congressman Eric Swalwell’s Congressional office in return for campaign contributions,” an FBI memorandum stated. 

The memorandum noted that “in at least two cases,” Fang used middlemen in order to conceal herself as a foreign-national source of political donations. 

When Swalwell was interviewed by the FBI again in March 2016, he brought along legal counsel. He again admitted to once having an ongoing physical relationship with Fang, but reiterated that it never advanced into formal dating. 

The FBI records also stated that Fang was introduced to Swalwell by the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association (APAPA), with Swalwell telling the FBI that anyone Fang recommended for an internship with his office was effectively coming through APAPA. 

One of these referred interns who worked on Swalwell’s campaign was a Chinese national Fang referred to as her sister, though they were not related. 

Another Fang referral, who was a student at University of California, Davis, was given an internship in Swalwell’s office in Washington, DC.

Fang also extended multiple invitations to Swalwell and his family, including his father, to visit China. The Swalwells declined these invitations, with the then-congressman telling the FBI that he did not want to go unless it was an official trip sanctioned by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

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