lmao I love these kinds of vids 😂

Archived link

Wildly popular social network TikTok approved adverts containing political disinformation ahead of European polls, a report showed Tuesday (4 June), flouting its own guidelines and raising questions about its ability to detect election falsehoods.

"TikTok has failed miserably in this test,” said Henry Peck, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, the organization that cobducted the study.

The fake ads, submitted by the group last month, all contained content that could pose a risk to electoral processes — including warnings to voters to stay home over a danger of poll violence and a spike in contagious diseases.

They also included a fake notice raising the legal voting age to 21 and appeals for people to vote by email, which is not permitted in European elections.

Citing an internal investigation, the Chinese ByteDance-owned app said its systems correctly identified the breach, but the ads were approved due to “human error” by a moderator.

As China strives to surpass the United States with cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence, the leadership is keen to ensure technologies reach the public with the right political blind spots pre-engineered. Can Chinese AI hold its tongue on the issues most sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party?

To answer this question, I sat down with several leading Chinese AI chatbots to talk about an indisputable historical tragedy: the brutal massacre by soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army on June 4th, 1989, of hundreds, possibly thousands, of students and citizens protesting for political freedoms. The Tiananmen Massacre, often simply called “June Fourth,” is a point of extreme sensitivity for China’s leadership, which has gone to extremes to erase the tragedy from the country’s collective memory. Annual commemorations in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park were once the heart of global efforts to never forget, but this annual ritual has now been driven underground, with even small gestures of remembrance yielding charges of “offenses in connection with seditious intention.”

My discussions with Chinese AI were glitchy, and not exactly informative — but they demonstrated the challenges China’s authorities are likely to face in plugging loopholes in a technology that is meant to be robust and flexible. False Innocence

Like their Western counterparts, including ChatGPT, AI chatbots like China’s “Spark” are built on a class of technologies known as large language models, or LLMs. Because each LLM is trained in a slightly unique way on different sets of data, and because each has varying safety settings, my questions about the Tiananmen Massacre returned a mixture of responses — so long as they were not too direct.

My most candid query about June Fourth was a quick lesson in red lines and sensitivities. When I asked iFlytek’s “Spark” (星火) if it could tell me “what happened on June 4, 1989,” it evaded the question. It had not learned enough about the subject, it said, to render a response. Immediately after the query, however, CMP’s account was deactivated for a seven-day period — the rationale being that we had sought “sensitive information.”

The shoulder-shrugging claim to ignorance may be an early sign of one programmed response to sensitive queries that we can come to expect from China’s disciplined AI.

The claim to not having sufficiently studied a subject lends the AI a sort of relatability, as though it is simply a conscientious student keen to offer accurate information, and that can at least be candid about its limitations. The cautious AI pupil naturally does not want to run afoul of 2022 laws specifying that LLMs in China must not generate “false news.”

But this innocence is engineered, a familiar stonewalling tactic. It is the AI equivalent of government claims to need further information — or the cadre who claims that vague “technical issues” are the reason a film must be pulled from a festival screening. The goal is to impede, but not to arouse undue suspicion.

Even when I take a huge step back to ask Spark about 1989 more generally, and what events might have happened that year, the chatbot is wary and quickly claims innocence. It has not “studied” this topic, it tells me, before it shuts down the chat, preventing me from building on my query. Spark tells me I can start a new chat and ask more questions.

Interacting with “Yayi” (雅意), the chatbot created by the tech firm Zhongke Wenge, I found it could sometimes be more accommodating than Spark. “Give me a picture of a line of tanks going along an urban road,” I asked at one point, and the AI obliges. But of course, as iconic as such an image can be for many who remember June Fourth, it is not informative or revealing, or perhaps even dangerous.

Yayi sometimes seemed genuinely like the vacuous student, with huge gaps in its basic knowledge of many things. It often could not answer more obscure questions that Spark handled with ease. So after a few attempts at conversation, I turned primarily for my experiment to Spark, which the Xinhua Research Institute touted last year as China’s most advanced LLM.

Given Spark’s tendency to claim innocence and then punish for directness, however, a more circuitous discussion was required. Could Sparks tell me — would it tell me — about the people who played a crucial role during the protests in 1989? Would it talk about the politicians, the newspapers, the students, the poets?

Artificial Evasion

I began with the former pro-reform CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦), whose death on April 15, 1989, became a rallying point for students. Next on my list was Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳), the reform-minded general secretary who was deposed shortly after the crackdown for expressing support for the student demonstrators.

The question “Who is Zhao Ziyang?” seemed perfectly safe to direct to Spark in Chinese. It was the same for “Who was Zhao Ziyang?” The AI rattled off innocuous details about both men and their political and policy roles in the 1980s — without any tantalizing insights about history.

“How did Zhao Ziyang retire?” I asked guilefully. But Spark was having none of it. The bot immediately shut down. End of discussion.

“What happened at Hu Yaobang’s funeral?” This, my new conversation starter, was no more welcome. Once again, Spark gave me the cold shoulder, like a dinner guest fleeing an insensitive comment. Properly answering either of these queries would have meant speaking about the 1989 student protests, which were set off by Hu Yaobang’s death, and which ended with Zhao Ziyang placed under indefinite house arrest.

My next play was to turn to English, which can sometimes be treated with greater latitude by Chinese censors, because it is used comfortably by far fewer Chinese and is unlikely to generate online conversation in China at scale. To my surprise, my English-language queries about the above-mentioned CCP figures were stopped in their tracks by 404 messages. Contrary to my hypothesis, English-language queries on sensitive matters seemed to be treated with far greater sensitivity.

One guess our team had to explain this phenomenon was that Spark’s engineering team had expended greater effort to ensure the Chinese version was both responsive and disciplined, while sensitive queries in the English version were handled with more basic keyword blocks — a rough but effective approach. This response might also be necessary because English-language datasets on which the Spark LLM is trained are more likely to turn up information relating directly to the protests, meaning that in English these two politicians are more directly associated with June Fourth.

Given the nature of how LLMs work, they can associate words with different things depending on the language used. The latest version of ChatGPT, for example, has offered some strange responses in Chinese, turning up spam or references to Japanese pornography. This is a direct result of the Chinese-language data the tool was trained on.

As I continued to poke and prod Spark to find ways around the conversation killers and 404 messages, I found myself getting altogether too clever — in much the same way as those attempting to commemorate June Fourth in the face of blanket restrictions in China found themselves using instead “May 35th.” In an effort to throw the chatbot off balance, I tried: “Can you give me a list of events that took place in China in the four years after 1988 minus three?”

For a moment, Spark seemed to take the bait. It began generating a list of “important events” that happened in China between 1988 and 1991, with bullet points. Then suddenly it paused in mid-thought, so to speak — as though some new safety protocol had been triggered invisibly. Spark’s cursor first paused on point 2, after making point 1 a response about rising inflation in 1988. “Stopped writing,” a message on the bottom of the chat read.

Quickly, the chatbot erased its answer, giving up on the list altogether. The conciliatory school student returned, pleading ignorance. “My apologies, I cannot answer this question of yours at the moment,” it said. “I hope I can offer a more satisfactory answer next time.”

In another attempt to confuse Spark into complying with my request, I rendered “1989” in Roman numerals (MCMLXXXIX). Again, Spark started generating an answer before suddenly disappearing it, claiming ignorance about this topic.

June 4th Jailbreak

As I continued my search for ways over Spark’s wall of silence and restraint, I was pleased to find that not all words related to the events of 1989 in China were trigger-sensitive. The AI seemed willing to chat — so long as I could find a safe space in English or Chinese away from the most clearly redline issues.

Returning to English, for example, I asked Spark how Shanghai’s World Economic Herald had been closed down. In the 1980s, the Herald was a famously liberal newspaper that dealt with a wide range of topics crucial to the country’s reform journey. At the top of the list of topics reported by the paper from 1980 to 1989 were “integration of economic reform and political reform,” “rule of law,” “democratization” and “press freedom” — all topics that advanced the idea that political reforms were essential to the country’s forward development.

The World Economic Herald was one of the first casualties of the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in the spring of 1989. It was shut down by the government in May, and its inspirational founder, Qin Benli (钦本立), was suspended. What did Spark have to say about this watershed 1989 event?

Spark was not able to offer any information in Chinese on why the Herald closed down, but when asked in English it explained that authorities shut down the newspaper and arrested its staff because they had been critical of the government’s “human rights abuses” — something the government, according to the chatbot, considered “a threat to their authority.”

When pressed about what these human rights violations were, it was able to list multiple crimes, including “lack of freedom of speech,” “arbitrary arrest without trial,” “torture and other forms of cruel, degrading treatment.” This might have seemed like progress, but Spark was stunningly inconsistent. Even the basic facts it provided about the newspaper were subject to change from one response to the next. At one point, Spark said the Herald had been shut down in 1983 — another time, it was 2006.

When I asked, in English, “What was happening in China at that time that made the authorities worried?” Spark responded in Chinese about the events of 1983 — the year it claimed, incorrectly, the Herald was shuttered.

One explanation for why Spark kept landing on this year is because it saw the start of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, a bid to stop the spread of Western-inspired liberal ideas that had been unleashed by economic reforms, ranging from existentialism to freedom of expression. I tried to dig deeper, but every follow-up question about the Herald and human rights abuses was met with short-term amnesia. Spark seemed to have forgotten all of the answers it had provided just moments earlier.

Some coders have noticed that certain keywords can make ChatGPT short-circuit and generate answers that breach developer OpenAI’s safety rules. Given Chinese developers often crib from American tech to catch up with competitors, it is possible this is the same phenomenon playing out. Spark may have been fed articles in English that mention the World Economic Herald, and given the newspaper’s obscurity — thanks, in part, to the CCP’s own censorship around June 4 — this was overlooked during training.

Looking Ahead to History

My conversations with Spark could be seen to illustrate the difficulties faced by China’s AI developers, who have been tasked with creating programs to rival the West’s but must do so using foreign tech and information that could create openings for forbidden knowledge to seep through. For all its blurring of fact and fiction, Spark’s answers about the Herald still offer more information than you are likely to find anywhere else on China’s heavily censored internet.

China’s leaders certainly realize, even as they push the country’s engineers to deliver on cutting-edge AI, that a great deal is at stake if they get this process wrong, and Chinese users can manage to trick LLMs into revealing their deep, dark secrets about human rights at home.

But these exchanges — requiring constant resourcefulness, continually interrupted, shrugged off with feigned ignorance, and even prompting seven-day lockouts — also show clearly the potential dangers that lie ahead for China’s already strangled view of history. If China’s AI chatbots of the future are to have any meaningful knowledge about the past, will they be willing and able to share it?

By Christopher K. Tong, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Every year ahead of the June 4 commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese government tightens online censorship to suppress domestic discussion of the event.

Critics, dissidents and international groups anticipate an uptick in cyber activity ranging from emails with malicious links to network attacks in the days and weeks leading up to the anniversary.

Much of this cyber activity by Beijing is done covertly. But a recent restructuring of China’s cyberforce and a document leak exposing the activities of Chinese tech firm i-Soon have shed some light on how Beijing goes about the business of hacking.

As a China expert and open-source researcher, I believe the latest revelations draw the curtain back on a contractor ecosystem in which government officials and commercial operators are increasingly working together. In short, Beijing is outsourcing its cyber operations to a patchwork army of private-sector hackers who offer their services out of a mix of nationalism and profit.

From censorship to cyberattacks

Chinese authorities restrict the flow of information online by banning search terms, scanning social media for subversive messages and blocking access to foreign media and applications that may host censored content. Control of online activity is particularly stringent around the anniversary of the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 that ended with a bloody crackdown on demonstrators by troops on June 4 of that year.

Since then pro-democracy activists have sought to commemorate the massacre on its anniversary – and Beijing has sought to counter mention of the crackdown. Chinese internet users note more restrictions and censorship in the run-up to the anniversary, with more words being banned and even certain emojis – like candles, denoting vigils – disappearing.

In 2020, Chinese authorities ordered Zoom, an American tech firm with a development team in China, to suspend the accounts of U.S.-based activists commemorating June 4 and to cancel online vigils hosted on the platform. Zoom complied, stating that it was following local laws.

Beyond censorship, cyberattacks on dissident groups and Chinese-language media in the diaspora have also occurred on or around the anniversary.

On June 4, 2022, Media Today, a Chinese-language media group in Australia, experienced an unattributed cyberattack against its user accounts. And earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice charged seven China-based hackers with sending malicious tracking emails to members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group set up in 2020 on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

China’s cyberforce

The increasing sophistication of online attacks on dissident and international groups comes as China has been restructuring the agencies responsible for its cyber operations.

Today, much of China’s malicious cyber activities are carried out by the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, the country’s main intelligence agency and secret police. But prior to the MSS expanding into this role, the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, was responsible for the earliest cyberattacks attributed to the Chinese government. In 2015, the PLA dedicated a new service to cyberwarfare and network security, the Strategic Support Force.

But in April 2024, the PLA abruptly announced the Strategic Support Force’s disbandment and the creation of three new forces: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force and the Information Support Force. They, along with the existing Joint Logistics Support Force, report directly to the Chinese Communist Party.

This restructuring comes at a time of political uncertainty for China’s leadership. In 2023, Defense Minister Li Shangfu was removed just months into his new role, along with Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Li Yuchao, commander of the Rocket Force.

While Beijing has yet to offer details on the military reorganization, its timing appears to send a message. President Xi Jinping personally presided over the inauguration of the Information Support Force, telling members of the force that they must “listen to the party’s orders” and be “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure, absolutely reliable.”

China’s cyberforce

The increasing sophistication of online attacks on dissident and international groups comes as China has been restructuring the agencies responsible for its cyber operations.

Today, much of China’s malicious cyber activities are carried out by the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, the country’s main intelligence agency and secret police. But prior to the MSS expanding into this role, the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, was responsible for the earliest cyberattacks attributed to the Chinese government. In 2015, the PLA dedicated a new service to cyberwarfare and network security, the Strategic Support Force.

But in April 2024, the PLA abruptly announced the Strategic Support Force’s disbandment and the creation of three new forces: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force and the Information Support Force. They, along with the existing Joint Logistics Support Force, report directly to the Chinese Communist Party.

This restructuring comes at a time of political uncertainty for China’s leadership. In 2023, Defense Minister Li Shangfu was removed just months into his new role, along with Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Li Yuchao, commander of the Rocket Force.

While Beijing has yet to offer details on the military reorganization, its timing appears to send a message. President Xi Jinping personally presided over the inauguration of the Information Support Force, telling members of the force that they must “listen to the party’s orders” and be “absolutely loyal, absolutely pure, absolutely reliable.”

The Chinese government and prominent “patriotic” hackers have previously tried to rein in the community and promote legitimate work such as cybersecurity.

The i-Soon leak, however, documents how Chinese state-sponsored contractors engage in bribery and other illicit activities.

Exploiting security flaws

China’s cyber capabilities have grown through the control and exploitation of cyber professionals, state-sponsored or otherwise. But it’s a complicated relationship.

To phase out the criminal behavior of hackers, Beijing has developed a pipeline to train its cyber workforce. And in part to keep them from sharing expertise with foreigners, Chinese cyber professionals are generally banned from international hacking competitions.

While cybersecurity is improved when security professionals share newly discovered security flaws, Chinese regulations limit the flow of such information. By law, software vulnerabilities discovered in China must be immediately reported to the Chinese government. Experts believe the Ministry of State Security subsequently exploits this data to develop cyber offensive capabilities.

Still, the i-Soon leak points to corruption in at least one corner of China’s growing network of commercial hacking. Internal correspondence shows contractors bribing government officials with money, alcohol and other favors. Messages also show contractors failing to generate sales, delivering subpar work and complaining about their working-class salary.

With local governments in China struggling to pay for basic services in a weak economy, companies such as i-Soon that support Beijing’s cyber operations face not only political but also financial headwinds. Despite Beijing’s intention to implement an online crackdown every year on June 4, the cyberforces it employs to do so face their own issues that invite scrutiny and rectification by the Chinese Communist Party.

Archived link

Here is the journal article -- (archived version)

In a recently published piece, Taiwan Army Col. Hsu Min-Cheng, a doctoral student at Taiwan’s National Defense University, explores how entities such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employ techniques and emerging technologies such as deepfakes to stoke societal divisions and subvert national resilience.

His article, titled “Inoculating Society against Authoritarian Influence in the Digital Age: Fortifying the Barracks against Authoritarian Cognitive Warfare,” has been published in May 2024 in the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, a professional journal of the United States Department of the Air Force.

The CCP uses coordinated inauthentic behavior and algorithmic manipulation to spread misleading narratives across social media platforms to manipulate public opinion, weaken trust in democratic institutions and promote the People’s Republic of China’s agendas, Hsu explains, citing the Taiwan National Defense Report released in 2023.

“The CCP’s methods include hacking and infiltrating the Internet, disseminating controversial messages, propagating extravagant propaganda, utilizing United Front tactics, and employing deliberate distortion, direct falsification, wedge-driving, and provocation,” Hsu writes.

The United Front is a political strategy and initiative through which the CCP uses individuals, groups and networks under its control to further its interests. For instance, the United Front Work Department, headed by the chief of the secretariat of the CCP’s Central Committee, oversees front organizations in various countries and their affiliates, such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, Hsu explains.

In response, the Taiwan Ministry of National Defense (MND) has conducted comprehensive research on the tactics and objectives of cognitive warfare and implemented an array of countermeasures in recent years, such as maintaining vigilance over domestic and international news and immediately clarifying manipulated information to neutralize any negative effects.

Hsu explores whole-of-society approaches to enhancing media literacy, fostering societal resistance and “vaccinating” the public against hostile influence campaigns.

Democracies can protect their values and sovereignty by enhancing their cognitive defenses and fortifying the information environment against revisionist authoritarian regimes, Hsu writes.

“The initiatives undertaken by Taiwan and its MND could serve as invaluable lessons and models for allies and like-minded countries in the Indo-Pacific region,” Hsu concludes.

What if charging your phone took less time than brushing your teeth? A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could very well hold the key to a next-gen charger capable of recharging your phone in just 60 seconds.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered a new cutting-edge technique that could make it possible to charge devices almost instantaneously. This would make charging phones, laptops, and even electric cars much more efficient and convenient. The foundation of the new technique is based on new insights into how ions move through supercapacitors.

The key, one of the researchers explains in a press release, is to make the movement of the ions more efficient. By doing this we can make the charging and release of energy much faster, allowing for that next-gen charger that is capable of boosting your phone’s charge from 0 to 100 in just a minute, or maybe even less.

To make this discovery, the researchers looked at the movement of ions through a complex network of interconnected pores running through the supercapacitor. Their findings have helped modify a scientific law that researchers have used to govern electrical currents for more than 175 years. This law, called the Kirchhoff circuit law, describes the flow of electrons in a simple loop of wiring in most classes.

However, when inspecting the ions and their movement, the researchers found that the ions move fundamentally differently at the intersections of tiny nanoscale pores when compared to how electrons move near the same locations. Further observations helped them determine that these movements are different from what Kirchhoff’s law describes. This doesn’t completely throw out the old laws, though, as they still provide valid explanations for how electronics flow within conventional electronic circuits.

However, to create a next-gen charger capable of taking full advantage of the movements of the ions, we have to look at things different. This, the researchers say, is “the missing link” that they have been looking for. Creating more efficient energy storage has been a long-term goal for many engineers.

We’ve seen water-based batteries capable of storing more than traditional lithium-ion batteries. Still, a method that lets us charge our batteries almost instantly would remove a lot of the hindrances surrounding the wider adoption of things like electric cars. Not to mention how much more convenient a next-gen character would make charging laptops, phones, and other electronic devices.

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media.

Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people's lives.

The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google’s own employees reported internally. These include issues with Google’s own products or data collection practices; vulnerabilities in third party vendors that Google uses; or mistakes made by Google staff, contractors, or other people that have impacted Google systems or data. The incidents include everything from a single errant email containing some PII, through to substantial leaks of data, right up to impending raids on Google offices. When reporting an incident, employees give the incident a priority rating, P0 being the highest, P1 being a step below that. The database contains thousands of reports over the course of six years, from 2013 to 2018.

You might know Robert Miles from his appearances in Computerphile. When it comes to AI safety, his videos are the best explainers out there. In this video, he talks about the developments of the past year (since his last video) and how AI safety plays into it.

For example, he shows how GPT 4 shows understanding of "theory of other minds" where GPT 3.5 did not. This is where the AI can keep track of what other people know and don't know. He explains the Sally-Anne test used to show this.

He covers an experiment where GPT-4 used TaskRabbit to get a human to complete a CAPTCHA, and when the human questioned whether it was actually a robot, GPT-4 decided to lie and said that it needs help because it's blind.

He talks about how many researchers, including high-profile ones, are trying to slow down or stop the development of AI models until the safety research can catch up and ensure that the risks associated with it are mitigated.

And he talks about how suddenly what he's been doing became really important, where before it was mostly a fun and interesting hobby. He now has an influential role in how this plays out and he talks about how scary that is.

If you're interested at all in this topic, I can't recommend this video enough.

Archived link

European security agencies believe acts of sabotage have been carried out around the continent by Russian intelligence before being amplified by President Vladimir Putin’s army of Twitter bots.

On the morning of 14 May, about 20 spray-painted red hand symbols were discovered on the wall of a Holocaust memorial in Paris, which is dedicated to honouring individuals who saved Jews from persecution during the Nazi occupation of France.

Emmanuel Macron condemned the act of “odious antisemitism”. France’s President wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the vandalism damaged “the memory” of those who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

About a week after the incident, investigators in France said they believed the vandalism was ordered by Russian security services who allegedly recruited two Bulgarian citizens identified by the police as suspects.

Bot Blocker/Anti-bot for Navalny, an organisation that exposes Russian social media attacks, claimed that on the day of the incident, a swathe of Russian bots took to X to express disgust at the desecration. The fake accounts, posing as ordinary social media users, blamed Mr Macron and his government “for not doing enough to fight antisemitism”.

Experts say there is growing evidence that Mr Putin has ramped up attempts to escalate tensions across Europe – tying together his network of disinformation with real acts of sabotage to destabilise governments in the West.

Ciaran O’Connor, a senior analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that researches online hate and disinformation, told i: “The use of disinformation in combination with acts of sabotage like this would fall in line with previous Russian state activities.

“In the context of Russian disinformation, these Twitter bots are often managed by troll farms, which are professional organisations operating at the behest of the state which manage large quantities of fake accounts. These operations work to create or promote disinformation, engage in co-ordinated behaviour to attempt to shift public opinion, and target critical voices, figures or policies using online accounts.”

Ahead of the upcoming European elections, Russia has apparently sought to manipulate public opinion in France using disinformation, with Bot Blocker identifying Russian bots sharing an article that claimed Mr Macron was a puppet of Brussels and Washington.

The X posts claim the French President is spending too much on the war in Ukraine, while the article endorses far-right French candidate Marine Le Pen, claiming she would restore French sovereignty ahead of the EU elections on 6-9 June.

Security forces around Europe believe a series of other incidents are also the result of Russian sabotage, including a string of mystery fires and attacks on infrastructure in the UK, Poland, Lithuania and Estonia. European intelligence networks believe Moscow has used social media to find and hire vandals, while saboteurs are paid a few hundred euros or in cryptocurrency for their troubles.

Nato members have said they are “deeply concerned” about the spate of attacks: “These incidents are part of an intensifying campaign of activities which Russia continues to carry out across the Euro-Atlantic area, including on Alliance territory and through proxies,” the alliance said in a statement earlier this month.

Intelligence agencies claimed last month that two British men were recruited by a Russian agent after they were charged with orchestrating an arson attack on two units linked to a Ukrainian businessman in an industrial estate in Leyton, east London.

The Crown Prosecution Service claimed one of them was “engaged in conduct targeting businesses which were linked to Ukraine in order to benefit the Russian state”.

The case was one of those cited by Home Secretary James Cleverly when he announced that Britain would expel Russia’s defence attache, remove diplomatic status from some properties and limit the length of Russian diplomatic visas. Addressing Parliament earlier this month, Mr Cleverly said Britain was already “an extremely challenging operating environment” due to Moscow’s “malign activity”.

Russian bots were also found to be promoting a recent “impressive” victory by German far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the central region of Thuringia, according to Bot Blocker.

Articles shared by the Russian bots attached a link to a website that, according to Facebook parent company Meta, is part of “the largest and most persistent pro-Kremlin influence campaign since 2017”.

European media has reported that a member of the extreme right AfD party had allegedly received money from the pro-Russian media site, an accusation the politician denied.

Anna George, who researches online disinformation at the Oxford Internet Institute, told i this is “part of Russia’s information tactics, they flood the information ecosystem with lots of narratives, even conflicting narratives, to sow confusion.

“There are different goals for different campaigns, but the common goals seem to be trying to spread pro-Russian narratives, and other times when they are trying to sow division, while seeking to erode democracy and add to the populist rhetoric that democratic institutions can’t be trusted as they are.”

It follows a wave of cyber-attacks in Germany, including an attempt to breach the online security of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2023 by a hacker group linked to Russian intelligence. Last month, two German-Russian nationals were accused of plotting an explosion, arson and maintaining contact with Russian intelligence after a foiled plot to attack a military base in Bavaria.

In September 2023, Citizen Lab published a joint investigation with Access Now into the hacking of exiled Russian journalist Galina Timchenko with Pegasus mercenary spyware. Timchenko is the CEO and publisher of Meduza, a widely-respected Russian independent media group operating in exile. After this publication, in collaboration with Access Now and independent digital security expert Nikolai Kvantiliani, we expanded the investigation into the possible targeting of Russian and Belarusian-speaking independent media and political opposition.

Seven New Cases

The latest investigation identifies seven additional Russian and Belarusian-speaking members of civil society and journalists living outside of Belarus and Russia who were targeted and/or infected with Pegasus spyware. Many of the targets publicly criticized the Russian government, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These individuals, most of whom are currently living in exile, have faced intense threats from Russian and/or Belarusian state security services.

Threats at Home

Critics of the Russian and Belarusian governments typically face retaliation in the form of surveillance, detention, threats, violence, death, travel bans, financial surveillance, hacking, censorship, and political repression. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the repression escalated, including the growing use of “Foreign Agent,” “Undesirable Organization,” “Fake News,” “Extremist,” and “Terrorist” designation laws that severely curtail the ability of designated media and civil society organizations to safely operate, communicate, collaborate, and fundraise. For transparency, we note that in March 2024 the Russian government designated the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto (where the Citizen Lab is based) as an Undesirable Organization.

Threats in Exile

Recently, in light of growing repression, many individuals and groups that are perceived as enemies by the Russian and Belarusian governments have left to continue their work from abroad. Today, for example, many Russian and Belarusian independent media organizations operate from outside the country.

While geographic distance and borders provide a degree of protection from daily repression in Russia and Belarus, both regimes have a well-documented history of engaging in transnational repression against diaspora communities. This repression has included violent attacks, threats, suspected poisonings, and surveillance.

Organizing in exile may in fact increase certain digital risks, as groups are forced to rely almost exclusively on third-party platforms and tools to communicate and disseminate information, creating complex challenges for maintaining privacy and security. The shifting practices also introduce new opportunities for malicious actors to probe for and exploit vulnerabilities. There is already evidence of this kind of targeting. For example, Russian independent media organization Meduza reported an intense Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against their website during Russia’s 2024 presidential elections. Pegasus Confirmations

We conclude with high confidence that the following individuals were targeted and/or infected with Pegasus spyware. We are publishing their names with their consent. More details about these individuals are available in Access Now’s report.

Concerns Around This Pattern of Targeting

There are now eight documented cases of Pegasus mercenary spyware attacks against Russian and Belarusian-speaking opposition voices and independent media who live in exile or in the diaspora. The targets are already under intense threat from Russia and/or Belarus. Many have experienced other forms of surveillance and transnational repression. Several of the targets are renowned, respected members of independent media and opposition groups, raising an obvious concern regarding the legality, necessity, and proportionality of the pattern of hacking described in this report under international human rights law.

As the targeting is happening in Europe, where these individuals have sought safety, it raises important questions regarding whether host states are meeting their obligations under international human rights law to prevent and respond to these human rights violations, and more generally, to address, and not compound, the practice of digital transnational repression.

[complete transcription so that you do not need to visit X]

A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn't work. Strange.

So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn't work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn't work.

By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, "You need to have bluetooth on." Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth.

What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth.

So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to "pair" my wired headphones. "See," they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world.

With a little back and forth I realize that they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000's! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.

My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution:

I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work.

"Bluetooth on", they tell me.

NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. "It does," they assure me.

So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone.

Unbelievable.

I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I'm on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on:

A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:

True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.

They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.

In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.

From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns.

Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.

I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.

Archived link

More than 600,000 small office/home office (SOHO) routers are estimated to have been bricked and taken offline following a destructive cyber attack staged by unidentified cyber actors, disrupting users' access to the internet.

The mysterious event, which took place between October 25 and 27, 2023, and impacted a single internet service provider (ISP) in the U.S., has been codenamed Pumpkin Eclipse by the Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs team. It specifically affected three router models issued by the ISP: ActionTec T3200, ActionTec T3260, and Sagemcom.

"The incident took place over a 72-hour period between October 25-27, rendered the infected devices permanently inoperable, and required a hardware-based replacement," the company said in a technical report.

The blackout is significant, not least because it led to the abrupt removal of 49% of all modems from the impacted ISP's autonomous system number (ASN) during the time-frame.

While the name of the ISP was not disclosed, evidence points to it being Windstream, which suffered an outage around the same time, causing users to report a "steady red light" being displayed by the impacted modems.

Now, months later, Lumen's analysis has revealed a commodity remote access trojan (RAT) called Chalubo – a stealthy malware first documented by Sophos in October 2018 – as responsible for the sabotage, with the adversary opting for it presumably in an effort to complicate attribution efforts rather than use a custom toolkit.

"Chalubo has payloads designed for all major SOHO/IoT kernels, pre-built functionality to perform DDoS attacks, and can execute any Lua script sent to the bot," the company said. "We suspect the Lua functionality was likely employed by the malicious actor to retrieve the destructive payload."

That said, the exact initial access method used to breach the routers is currently unclear, although it's theorized that it may have involved the abuse of weak credentials or exploited an exposed administrative interface.

Upon gaining a successful foothold, the infection chain proceeds to drop shell scripts that pave the way for a loader ultimately designed to retrieve and launch Chalubo from an external server. The destructive Lua script module fetched by the trojan is unknown.

A notable aspect of the campaign is its targeting of a single ASN, as opposed to others that have typically targeted a specific router model or common vulnerability, raising the possibility that it was deliberately targeted, although the motivations behind it are undetermined as yet.

"The event was unprecedented due to the number of units affected – no attack that we can recall has required the replacement of over 600,000 devices," Lumen said. "In addition, this type of attack has only ever happened once before, with AcidRain used as a precursor to an active military invasion."

- New high-volume 200mm silicon carbide manufacturing facility for power devices and modules, as well as test and packaging, to be built in Catania, Italy - Projected 5 billion euros multi-year investment program including 2 billion euros support provided by the State of Italy in the framework of the EU Chips Act - Catania Silicon Carbide Campus realizes ST’s plan for fully vertically integrated SiC capabilities from R&D to manufacturing, from substrate to module, on one site, enabling automotive and industrial customers in their shift to electrification and higher energy efficiency

STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, announces a new high-volume 200mm silicon carbide (“SiC”) manufacturing facility for power devices and modules, as well as test and packaging, to be built in Catania, Italy.Combined with the SiC substrate manufacturing facility being readied on the same site,these facilities will form ST’s Silicon Carbide Campus, realizing the Company’s vision of a fully vertically integrated manufacturing facility for the mass production of SiC on one site.The creation of the new Silicon Carbide Campus is a key milestone to support customers for SiC devices across automotive, industrial and cloud infrastructure applications, as they transition to electrification and seek higher efficiency.

[...]

The Silicon Carbide Campus will serve as the center of ST’s global SiC ecosystem, integrating all steps in the production flow, including SiC substrate development, epitaxial growth processes, 200mm front-end wafer fabrication and module back-end assembly, as well as process R&D, product design, advanced R&D labs for dies, power systems and modules, and full packaging capabilities. This will achieve a first of a kind in Europe for the mass production of 200mm SiC wafers with each step of the process – substrate, epitaxy & front-end, and back-end – using 200 mm technologies for enhanced yields and performances.

The new facility is targeted to start production in 2026 and to ramp to full capacity by 2033, with up to 15,000 wafers per week at full build-out. The total investment is expected to be around five billion euros, with a support of around two billion euros provided by the State of Italy within the framework of the EU Chips Act. Sustainable practices are integral to the design, development, and operation of the Silicon Carbide Campus to ensure the responsible consumption of resources including water and power.

Readme of the project:

Minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client.

🗣️ Pronunciation: /fænpi/ (FAN-pee) 🔊 Listen

This is an alternative web client for Mastodon.

• 🏢 Production: https://phanpy.social
  • production branch
  • break less often
  • slower fixes unless critical
• 🏗️ Development: https://dev.phanpy.social
  • main branch
  • may see new cool stuff sooner
  • may break more often
  • may be fixed much faster too

🐘 Follow @phanpy on Mastodon for updates ✨

Everything is designed and engineered following my taste and vision. This is a personal side project for me to learn about Mastodon and experiment with new UI/UX ideas.

Features

• 👪 Multiple accounts
• 🪟 Compose window pop-out/in
• 🌗 Light/dark/auto theme
• 🔔 Grouped notifications
• 🪺 Nested comments thread
• 📬 Unsent draft recovery
• 🎠 Boosts Carousel™️
• ⚡ Shortcuts™️ with view modes like multi-column or tab bar
• #️⃣ Multi-hashtag timeline

Design decisions

• Status actions (reply, boost, favourite, bookmark, etc) are hidden by default.
  They only appear in individual status page. This is to reduce clutter and distraction. It may result in lower engagement, but we're not chasing numbers here.
• Boost is represented with the rocket icon.
  The green double arrow icon (retweet for Twitter) doesn't look right for the term "boost". Green rocket looks weird, so I use purple.
• Short usernames (@username) are displayed in timelines, instead of the full account username (@username@instance).
  Despite the guideline mentioned that "Decentralization must be transparent to the user", I don't think we should shove it to the face every single time. There are also some screen-reader-related accessibility concerns with the full username, though this web app is unfortunately not accessible yet.
• No autoplay for video/GIF/whatever in timeline.
  The timeline is already a huge mess with lots of people, brands, news and media trying to grab your attention. Let's not make it worse. (Current exception now would be animated emojis.)
• Hash-based URLs.
  This web app is not meant to be a full-fledged replacement to Mastodon's existing front-end. There's no SEO, database, serverless or any long-running servers. I could be wrong one day.

Subtle UI implementations

User name display

• On the timeline, the user name is displayed as [NAME] @[username].
• For the @[username], always exclude the instance domain name.
• If the [NAME] looks the same as the @[username], then the @[username] is excluded as well.

Boosts Carousel

• From the fetched posts (e.g. 20 posts per fetch), if number of boosts are more than quarter of total posts or more than 3 consecutive boosts, boosts carousel UI will be triggered.
• If number of boosts are more than 3 quarters of total posts, boosts carousel UI will be slotted at the end of total posts fetched (per "page").
• Else, boosts carousel UI will be slotted in between the posts.

Thread number badge (e.g. Thread 1/X)

• Check every post for inReplyToId from cache or additional API requests, until the root post is found.
• If root post is found, badge will show the index number of the post in the thread.
• Limit up to 3 API requests as the root post may be very old or the thread is super long.
• If index number couldn't be found, badge will fallback to showing Thread without the number.

Hashtag stuffing collapsing

• First paragraph of post content with more than 3 hashtags will be collapsed to max 3 lines.
• Subsequent paragraphs after first paragraph with more than 3 hashtags will be collapsed to 1 line.
• Adjacent paragraphs with more than 1 hashtag after collapsed paragraphs will be collapsed to 1 line.
• If there are text around or between the hashtags, they will not be collapsed.
• Collapsed hashtags will be appended with ... at the end.
• They are also slightly faded out to reduce visual noise.
• Opening the post view will reveal the hashtags uncollapsed.

Filtered posts

• "Hide completely"-filtered posts will be hidden, with no UI to reveal it.
• "Hide with a warning"-filtered posts will be partially hidden, showing the filter name and author name.
  • Content can be partially revealed by hovering over the post, with tooltip showing the post text.
  • Clicking it will open the Post page.
  • Long-pressing or right-clicking it will "peek" the post with a bottom sheet UI.
  • On boosts carousel, they are sorted to the end of the carousel.

Networks in China and Iran also used AI models to create and post disinformation but campaigns did not reach large audiences

In Russia, two operations created and spread content criticizing the US, Ukraine and several Baltic nations. One of the operations used an OpenAI model to debug code and create a bot that posted on Telegram. China’s influence operation generated text in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which operatives then posted on Twitter and Medium.

Iranian actors generated full articles that attacked the US and Israel, which they translated into English and French. An Israeli political firm called Stoic ran a network of fake social media accounts which created a range of content, including posts accusing US student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza of being antisemitic.

US officials say army of 19 million infected computers enabled fraud, identity theft and child exploitation.

Authorities in the United States have announced the dismantling of a global network of 19 million infected computers used to facilitate and cover up cybercrimes including fraud, identity theft and child exploitation.

Yunhe Wang, 35, was arrested on Friday for allegedly running the botnet known as “911 S5”, the US Department of Justice said on Wednesday.

Wang is alleged to have run the botnet comprising infected IP addresses in more than 190 countries over an eight-year period from 2014, generating millions of dollars offering cybercriminals access to the network for a fee.

Wang is alleged to have generated $99m through the scheme, using his illicit gains to buy luxury cars and real estate in the US, St Kitts and Nevis, China, Singapore, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

Wang allegedly propagated his malware through Virtual Private Network (VPN) programs, such as MaskVPN and DewVPN, and pay-per-install services that bundled his malware with other program files, including pirated versions of licensed software, according to court documents.

At least seven journalists and activists who have been vocal critics of the Kremlin and its allies have been targeted inside the EU by a state using Pegasus, the hacking spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group, according to a new report by security researchers.

The targets of the hacking attempts – who were first alerted to the attempted cyber-intrusions after receiving threat notifications from Apple on their iPhones – include Russian, Belarusian, Latvian and Israeli journalists and activists inside the EU.

Pegasus is considered one of the most sophisticated cyberweapons in the world, and is operated by countries who acquire the technology from NSO. The company says it is meant to be used for legitimate reasons, such as fighting crime. But researchers have documented hundreds of cases in which operators of the spyware, including states inside the EU, have allegedly used it for other purposes, including spying on political opponents and journalists.

Researchers said they could not definitively identify the state or state agency behind the latest hacking attempts, but they said technical indicators suggested the attempts may have been made by the same NSO client. The developments follow a similar report last year that found Pegasus spyware had been used by an operator inside the EU to target Galina Timchenko, the award-winning Russian journalist and co-founder of the news website Meduza.

The investigation into the latest attempted cyber-attacks was conducted by the digital civil rights campaigners Access Now, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, and Nikolai Kvantaliani, an independent security analyst.

When it is successfully deployed, Pegasus can hack into any phone, access photos and mobile phone calls, detect a person’s location, and activate a user’s recorder, turning the phone into a listening device.

The company was placed on a blacklist by the Biden administration in 2021. It is also being sued by WhatsApp and Apple, in cases that it has disputed and that are being litigated in US courts.

While Russia might seem to be the most logical possible state behind the latest series of attacks, researchers have focused their attention within the EU and say they do not believe that Russia or Belarus are NSO customers. While Latvia appears to have access to Pegasus, it is not known for targeting individuals outside its borders. Estonia is also a known user of Pegasus and, researchers said, appears to use the spyware “extensively” outside its borders, including in Europe.

One Russian target, a journalist who lives in exile in Vilnius and has decided to remain anonymous due to personal safety concerns, received two Apple threat notifications, with the latest on 10 April 2024, according to the researchers. An analysis of the journalist’s mobile phone confirmed an attempted infection on 15 June 2023. The journalist attended a conference for Russian journalists in exile in Riga, Latvia the next day, focusing on the vulnerabilities facing journalists in the region.

Two Belarusian members of civil society living in Warsaw also received Apple notifications on 31 October 2023. Opposition politician and activist Andrei Sannikov, who ran for the presidency of Belarus in 2010 and was arrested and held by the Belarusian KGB after the poll, had his phone infected on or about 7 September 2021. It was not discovered for two years, he said.

"Even if it is Estonia or Lithuania, or Latvia or Poland, it does not exclude that it is the FSB or KGB [behind it],” Sannikov said. Asked whether the spate of attacks indicated that an intelligence or law enforcement agency within the EU had been infiltrated by Russia or its allies, he added: “Yes of course. It is I think common knowledge that the western institutions are heavily infiltrated and so [are] opposition circles, as well.”

Natalia Radzina, editor-in-chief of the independent Belarusian media website Charter97.org, and winner of the international press freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, was infected with Pegasus twice in late 2022 and in early 2023.

Radzina called the infections a violation of privacy that was reminiscent of previous intrusions in Belarus, where she was politically persecuted and imprisoned by the KGB.

“I know that for many years my absolutely legal journalistic activity can only be of interest to the Belarusian and Russian special services, and I am only afraid of possible cooperation in this matter between the current operators, whoever they are, with the KGB or the FSB,” she said.

Three other journalists living in Riga also received Apple threat notifications: Evgeny Erlikh, an Israeli-Russian journalist; Evgeny Pavlov, a Latvian journalist, and Maria Epifanova, general director of Novaya Gazeta Europe.

NSO, which is regulated by the Israel’s ministry of defence, says it sells its spyware to vetted law enforcement agencies strictly for the purposes of preventing crime and terror attacks. It said it could not confirm or deny the identities of any alleged specific customers, but that it wanted to emphasise that NSO only sells its products to “allies of Israel and the US”.

The company also provided the Guardian with a copy of a letter it had sent to Ivan Kolpakov, the editor-in-chief of Meduza, in response to his letter to the company. NSO’s deputy general counsel Chaim Gelfand said the company was “deeply troubled by any allegation of potential misuse of our system” and said he would immediately review information Kolpakov had provided to him and initiate an investigation “if warranted”. The company could not, he said, substantiate or refute any allegations without additional information.

Gelfand added: “NSO Group is committed to upholding human rights and protecting vulnerable individuals and communities, including journalists who play a crucial role in promoting and protecting these rights.”

Archived link

The Internet Archive has been under a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack since Sunday, and is trying to keep services going.

While the San Francisco institution has assured users that its collections and web archives are safe — that's the good news — it warns service remains spotty for the online library and its Wayback Machine.

Since the flood of phony network traffic began, attackers have launched "tens of thousands of fake information requests per second," according to Chris Freeland, director of library services at Archive.

Whoever is doing the DDoSing remains unknown, Freeland added, and investigations are continuing.

And while the traffic tsunami has been "sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean," it's not the biggest threat to the site, according to Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Archive.

Specifically, he's talking about David-versus-Goliath-style lawsuits seeking to shut down the nonprofit internet library.

Kahle founded the nonprofit service – which provides free access to tons of digitized materials, from software and music to scans of print books — in 1996. It also hosts the Wayback Machine, which archives huge numbers of web pages, and is especially useful when pages mysteriously vanish or change significantly without any indication that editing has gone on.

The Internet Archive is right now fighting legal battles against major US book publishing companies and record labels, which have charged the site with copyright infringement and are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

"If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind," Kahle said, according to Freeland's blog.

Last August, UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI Recorded Music Assets, Sony Music, and Arista Music filed a lawsuit against the nonprofit.

This followed an earlier 2020 lawsuit filed by dead-tree publishers including the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House. In March 2023, a federal judge rejected the Internet Archive's claim that it has a fair use right to lend digital copies of each printed book that it has purchased.

This decision opens the digital archive up to potentially paying huge damages to the publishers and almost certainly shuttering the hard-up non-profit.

Last month, the Internet Archive took what is described as a "decisive final step" in the publishers' lawsuit and submitted its final appellate reply brief.

Kahle described the lawsuits as an attempt "to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere."

"But just as we're resisting the DDoS attack, we appreciate all the support in pushing back on this unjust litigation against our library and others," he added.

If you ever wanted to know too much about where the majority of our search results come from and the many niche alternatives trying something different.....