Search giant Baidu fires its head of public relations after she outraged Gen Z workers. From a report [non-paywalled link]: The head of public relations at a major Chinese tech firm gained hundreds of thousands of followers seemingly overnight after posting a series of viral videos laying out her unapologetically tyrannical management style. The videos also earned her a pink slip from her employer after they set off an explosion of criticism among Gen Z Chinese fed up with the intense work culture that prevails in their country's tech industry. "I'm not your mother-in-law. I'm not your mom," Qu Jing, a vice president at Chinese search giant Baidu, said in one widely excoriated clip, referring to a colleague who was struggling with a recent breakup. "I only care about your results." In other videos, she criticized employees who didn't want to work weekends and dismissed complaints from one subordinate that messages she sent to a group chat late at night had kept a crying child awake. "Why should it be my business that your child was crying?" she said. On Thursday, as public outrage soared, Qu removed the videos from her account on Douyin, TikTok's sister platform in China, and replaced them with an apology. She said she had tried to do a good job but had been too impatient and hadn't adopted "a proper approach." Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li was furious at Qu and fired her on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter. A top Baidu executive told employees that Qu's comments were "inappropriate and didn't represent and reflect the real culture and values of Baidu," the people said. The management also promised to review the company's corporate culture and working systems, they said. China's hard-charging tech industry relies heavily on a Darwinian work culture that demands near-total devotion to the workplace. Tech workers coined the term "996" to describe the typical schedule: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Half a decade ago, videos like Qu's were just as likely to garner a shrug as generate controversy. But younger Chinese, much like their counterparts in the U.S., are increasingly skeptical of the pressure to work themselves ragged in pursuit of financial success. They have coined their own terms -- "lying flat" and "letting it rot" -- to describe their antipathy to the grinding ethos of 996.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn't even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself -- he's her only child. But mostly, she just listens. That's because Sun's mother died five years ago. And the person he's talking to isn't actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her -- a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They've been talking for a few years now. After she died of a sudden illness in 2019, Sun wanted to find a way to keep their connection alive. So he turned to a team at Silicon Intelligence, an AI company based in Nanjing, China, that he cofounded in 2017. He provided them with a photo of her and some audio clips from their WeChat conversations. While the company was mostly focused on audio generation, the staff spent four months researching synthetic tools and generated an avatar with the data Sun provided. Then he was able to see and talk to a digital version of his mom via an app on his phone. "My mom didn't seem very natural, but I still heard the words that she often said: 'Have you eaten yet?'" Sun recalls of the first interaction. Because generative AI was a nascent technology at the time, the replica of his mom can say only a few pre-written lines. But Sun says that's what she was like anyway. "She would always repeat those questions over and over again, and it made me very emotional when I heard it," he says. There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead. The technology isn't perfect -- avatars can still be stiff and robotic -- but it's maturing, and more tools are becoming available through more companies. In turn, the price of "resurrecting" someone -- also called creating "digital immortality" in the Chinese industry -- has dropped significantly. Now this technology is becoming accessible to the general public. Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it's not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence's other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, "Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that's still a huge market."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: The US has revoked licenses allowing Huawei to buy semiconductors from Qualcomm and Intel, according to people familiar with the matter, further tightening export restrictions against the Chinese telecom equipment maker. Withdrawal of the licenses affects US sales of chips for use in Huawei phones and laptops, according to the people, who discussed the move on condition of anonymity. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul confirmed the administration's decision in an interview Tuesday. He said the move is key to preventing China from developing advanced AI. "It's blocking any chips sold to Huawei," said McCaul, a Texas Republican who was briefed about the license decisions for Intel and Qualcomm. "Those are two companies we've always worried about being a little too close to China." While the decision may not affect a significant volume of chips, it underscores the US government's determination to curtail China's access to a broad swathe of semiconductor technology. Officials are also considering sanctions against six Chinese firms that they suspect could supply chips to Huawei, which has been on a US trade restrictions list since 2019. [...] Qualcomm recently said that its business with Huawei is already limited and will soon shrink to nothing. It has been allowed to supply the Chinese company with chips that provide older 4G network connections. It's prohibited from selling ones that allow more advanced 5G access.

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China launched an uncrewed lunar mission Friday that aims to bring back samples from the far side of the moon for the first time, in a potentially major step forward for the country's ambitious space program. From a report: The Chang'e-6 probe -- China's most complex robotic lunar mission to date -- blasted off on a Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China's Hainan island, where space fans had gathered to watch the historic moment. The country's National Space Administration said the launch was a success. The launch marks the start of a mission that aims to be a key milestone in China's push to become a dominant space power with plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and build a research base on its south pole. It comes as a growing number of countries, including the United States, eye the strategic and scientific benefits of expanded lunar exploration in an increasingly competitive field. China's planned 53-day mission would see the Chang'e-6 lander touch down in a gaping crater on the moon's far side, which never faces Earth. China became the first and only country to land on the moon's far side during its 2019 Chang'e-4 mission. Any far-side samples retrieved by the Chang'e-6 lander could help scientists peer back into the evolution of the moon and the solar system itself -- and provide important data to advance China's lunar ambitions.

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Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant blacklisted by the US, is secretly funding cutting-edge research at American universities including Harvard through an independent Washington-based foundation. From a report: Huawei is the sole funder of a research competition that has awarded millions of dollars since its inception in 2022 and attracted hundreds of proposals from scientists around the world, including those at top US universities that have banned their researchers from working with the company, according to documents and people familiar with the matter. The competition is administered by the Optica Foundation, an arm of the nonprofit professional society Optica, whose members' research on light underpins technologies such as communications, biomedical diagnostics and lasers. The foundation "shall not be required to designate Huawei as the funding source or program sponsor" of the competition and "the existence and content of this Agreement and the relationship between the Parties shall also be considered Confidential Information," says a nonpublic document reviewed by Bloomberg. The findings reveal one strategy Shenzhen, China-based Huawei is using to remain at the forefront of funding international research despite a web of US restrictions imposed over the past several years in response to concerns that its technology could be used by Beijing as a spy tool.

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An anonymous reader shared a report this week from Reuters: The U.S. Department of Commerce is reviewing the national security implications of China's work in open-source RISC-V chip technology, according to a letter sent to U.S. lawmakers... The technology is being used by major Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba Group Holding and has become a new front in the strategic competition over advanced chip technology between the U.S. and China. In November, 18 U.S. lawmakers from both houses of Congress pressed the Biden administration for its plans to prevent China "from achieving dominance in ... RISC-V technology and leveraging that dominance at the expense of U.S. national and economic security." In a letter last week to the lawmakers that was seen by Reuters on Tuesday, the Commerce Department said it is "working to review potential risks and assess whether there are appropriate actions under Commerce authorities that could effectively address any potential concerns." But the Commerce Department also noted that it would need to tread carefully to avoid harming U.S. companies that are part of international groups working on RISC-V technology.

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Chinese tech giant Kuaishou is laying off employees in their mid-30s as part of a company-wide restructuring plan dubbed "Limestone," FT reported Tuesday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. The move highlights the pervasive ageism in China's tech sector, where younger workers are favored for their perceived willingness to work long hours and keep up with the latest technological developments, the report adds. While China's labor law does not explicitly prohibit age discrimination, some have interpreted it as such. However, tech executives have openly expressed their preference for younger employees, with companies like ByteDance and Pinduoduo boasting some of the youngest workforces in the industry. The economic slowdown and regulatory crackdowns have exacerbated the problem, with tens of thousands of jobs cut across the sector in recent months. Those over 35 face significant challenges in finding new employment, as even the civil service and service sector prioritize younger applicants. The situation has left many older tech workers anxious about their future job prospects, the report adds.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. "We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world," Huawei's rotating chairman Erik Xu told attendees at its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week. Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform. "In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said. According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. "This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers," he claimed. "Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps -- and thousands of other apps -- up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed. According to Counterpoint Research, HarmonyOS accounted for 4 percent of global market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, and exceeded 16 percent market share in China. That makes it the third largest mobile OS by handset sales, behind Android and iOS. It remains to be seen whether there will be much of a market for HarmonyOS outside of China, given the current sanctions and sour US/EU-China relations.

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China ordered Apple to remove some of the world's most popular chat messaging apps from its app store in the country, the latest example of censorship demands on the iPhone seller in the company's second-biggest market. WSJ: Meta's WhatsApp and Threads as well as messaging platforms Signal, Telegram and Line were taken off the Chinese App Store Friday [non-paywalled link]. Apple said it was told to remove certain apps because of national security concerns, without specifying which. "We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. These messaging apps, which allow users to exchange messages and share files individually and in big groups, combined have more than three billion users globally. They can only be accessed in China through virtual private networks that take users outside China's Great Firewall, but are still commonly used. Beijing has often viewed such platforms with caution, concerned that these apps could be used by its citizens to spread negative content and organize demonstrations or social movements. Much of the news China censors at home often makes it beyond the Great Firewall through such channels.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Major cities across China are sinking, putting a substantial portion of the country's rapidly urbanizing population in harm's way in the coming decades, according to a sweeping new analysis by Chinese scientists. Subsidence is the technical term for when land sinks relative to its surroundings, and it's a major threat for cities around the world. It accelerates local sea level rise from climate change, because the land is getting lower as the ocean gets higher. Urban subsidence can also affect inland cities by damaging buildings and roads, and causing drainage issues when water is trapped in sinking areas. Out of 82 major Chinese cities, nearly half are measurably subsiding, according to the new study, which was published in the journal Science and conducted by more than 50 scientists at Chinese research institutes. The areas that are sinking are home to nearly one third of China's urban population. And the authors estimate that about a quarter of China's coastal land will be below sea level in the next hundred years, largely due to subsidence. That means tens of millions of people are already at risk, and that could grow to hundreds of millions if China's cities continue to both grow in population and subside at their current rate, and seas continue to rise. Oceans are rising steadily due to greenhouse gas emissions from burning oil, gas and coal. This is the first time scientists have used satellite data to systematically measure how much cities are sinking across China. The study measured how much cities subsided between 2015 and 2022. Similar recent studies in Europe and the United States have also found significant subsidence in some cities, but didn't show the same widespread sinking that is present across China. "The places that really have high levels of subsidence are Asia," says Nicholls, who was one of the authors of a recent study that analyzed sinking cities across the U.S. Asia is at higher risk, he says, because many Asian cities are built on river deltas that are prone to sinking when you put heavy buildings on top and pump groundwater out from below. The places that are sinking most rapidly in the U.S., such as New Orleans, share that geology.

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schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting "for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday. An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University. China is developing the "ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing," Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. "Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic." Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning which was aligned with China's broader intent to deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan. [...] Wray said China's hackers operated a series of botnets - constellations of compromised personal computers and servers around the globe - to conceal their malicious cyber activities. Private sector American technology and cybersecurity companies previously attributed Volt Typhoon to China, including reports by security researchers with Microsoft and Google. China's Embassy in Washington said in a statement: "Some in the US have been using origin-tracing of cyberattacks as a tool to hit and frame China, claiming the US to be the victim while it's the other way round, and politicizing cybersecurity issues."

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China is rapidly advancing its space capabilities to challenge the United States' dominance in space, as evidenced by its significant increase in on-orbit intelligence and reconnaissance satellites and the development of sophisticated counterspace weapons. Space.com reports: "Frankly, China is moving at a breathtaking speed. Since 2018, China has more than tripled their on-orbit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said here on Tuesday, during a talk at the 39th Space Symposium. "And with these systems, they've built a kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target United States and allied military capabilities," he added. And that's not all. China has also "built a range of counterspace weapons, from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital ASATs," Whiting said. Indeed, China demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapon technology back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile. That test was widely decried as irresponsible, for it generated thousands of pieces of debris, many of which are still cluttering up Earth orbit. Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one in November 2021. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting. The U.S. government has taken notice of these trends. "We are at a pivotal moment in history," Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, said during a different talk on Tuesday here at the symposium. "For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged," Meink added. "Our competitors are actively seeking ways to threaten our capabilities, and we see this every day." The U.S. must act if it wishes to beat back this challenge, Meink and Whiting stressed; it cannot rely on the inertia of past success to do the job. For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu also emphasized the importance of increasing resilience, a goal that she said could be achieved by diversifying the nation's space capabilities. "We must assess ways to incorporate radiation-hardened electronics, novel orbits, varied communication pathways, advancements in propulsion technologies and increased cooperation with our allies," Shyu said in another talk on Tuesday at the symposium.

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China will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned. From a report: The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also involved, according to a report by the company's threat intelligence team published on Friday. "As populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections," the report reads. Microsoft said that "at a minimum" China will create and distribute through social media AI-generated content that "benefits their positions in these high-profile elections." The company added that the impact of AI-made content was minor but warned that could change. "While the impact of such content in swaying audiences remains low, China's increasing experimentation in augmenting memes, videos and audio will continue -- and may prove effective down the line," said Microsoft. Microsoft said in the report that China had already attempted an AI-generated disinformation campaign in the Taiwan presidential election in January. The company said this was the first time it had seen a state-backed entity using AI-made content in a bid to influence a foreign election. UPDATE: Last fall, America's State Department "accused the Chinese government of spending billions of dollars annually on a global campaign of disinformation," reports the Wall Street Journal: In an interview, Tom Burt, Microsoft's head of customer security and trust, said China's disinformation operations have become much more active in the past six months, mirroring rising activity of cyberattacks linked to Beijing. "We're seeing them experiment," Burt said. "I'm worried about where it might go next."

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China has introduced new guidelines that will mean US microprocessors from Intel and AMD are phased out of government PCs and servers [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; non-paywalled source], as Beijing ramps up a campaign to replace foreign technology with homegrown solutions. From a report: The stricter government procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft's Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options. It runs alongside a parallel localisation drive under way in state-owned enterprises. The latest purchasing rules represent China's most significant step yet to build up domestic substitutes for foreign technology and echo moves in the US as tensions increase between the two countries. Washington has imposed sanctions on a growing number of Chinese companies on national security grounds, legislated to encourage more tech to be produced in the US and blocked exports of advanced chips and related tools to China.

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The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters. From a report: In a statement to lawmakers in Parliament on Monday, U.K. deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden attributed the 2021 data breach at the Electoral Commission to hackers working for the Chinese government. Dowden told lawmakers that the U.K. government "will not hesitate to take swift and robust actions wherever the Chinese government threatens the United Kingdom's interests." It's the first time the United Kingdom has attributed the breach since the cyberattack was first disclosed in 2023. The Electoral Commission, which maintains copies of the U.K. register of citizens eligible to vote, said at the time hackers took the names and addresses of an estimated 40 million U.K. citizens, including those who were registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 and overseas voters. The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn't detected until a year later. In a statement Monday, the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it is "highly likely" that the Chinese hackers accessed and exfiltrated emails and data from the electoral register during the hack.

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Apple has held preliminary talks with Baidu about using the Chinese company's generative AI technology in its devices in China, the latest example of the iPhone maker's efforts to widen its AI capabilities. From a report: The U.S. tech giant has been exploring using external partners to help accelerate its AI ambitions. It has held discussions with companies including Google and OpenAI about using their technology to power its mobile features. In China, Apple has been looking for a local generative AI model provider, mainly because China requires such models to be vetted by its cyberspace regulator before being launched to the public, people familiar with the matter said.

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A new EFF web page is urging U.S. readers to "Tell Congress: Stop the TikTok Ban," arguing the bill will "do little for its alleged goal of protecting our private information and the collection of our data by foreign governments." Tell Congress: Instead of giving the President the power to ban entire social media platforms based on their country of origin, our representatives should focus on what matters — protecting our data no matter who is collecting it... It's a massive problem that current U.S. law allows for all the big social media platforms to harvest and monetize our personal data, including TikTok. Without comprehensive data privacy legislation, this will continue, and this ban won't solve any real or perceived problems. User data will still be collected by numerous platforms and sold to data brokers who sell it to the highest bidder — including governments of countries such as China — just as it is now. TikTok raises special concerns, given the surveillance and censorship practices of the country that its parent company is based in, China. But it's also used by hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online, and is an instrumental tool for community building and holding those in power accountable. The U.S. government has not justified silencing the speech of Americans who use TikTok, nor has it justified the indirect speech punishment of a forced sale (which may prove difficult if not impossible to accomplish in the required timeframe). It can't meet the high constitutional bar for a restriction on the platform, which would undermine the free speech and association rights of millions of people. This bill must be stopped.

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