China orders state offices to replace foreign PCs and software | Beijing to legalise ‘theft’ of Aussie business secrets | Facebook ads push misinformation
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Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, in a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell and Microsoft. Financial Times.
Australian companies operating in China will have to allow Chinese government access to their encrypted data, risking their trade secrets being shared with domestic competitors. The Australian.
Fifty-two top LGBT advocates say the company has ignored their calls to action, creating a major public-health concern that puts patients at risk. The Washington Post.
ASPI ICPC
Canberra to put social media fake news under microscope
ZDNet
@achanthadavong
The Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media, which was proposed by Labor and backed by the government, will also examine how to reduce the risk of cyber-enabled foreign interference and the spread of misinformation. The inquiry will be headed up by Labor Senator Jenny McAllister and will produce a final report by May 2022. She noted how as part of the inquiry, the committee will "look at the international experience; we'll talk to our national security agencies, we'll talk to political parties and we'll talk to experts in the field like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute".
Why Facebook and Google must do more on fake news in Southeast Asia
South China Morning Post
@RossTapsell
In early October in Indonesia, 42 Facebook pages and 34 Instagram accounts connected to the issue of growing hostilities in West Papua were taken down by Facebook. The tech giant also named a company, InsightID, saying the network spent about US$300,000 on Facebook adverts paid for in rupiah, and was linked to a centre founded by former Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla. An extensive social media operation by West Papuan “trolls” was exposed a few weeks earlier by an investigation jointly done by a BBC data analytics researcher and researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Check out the joint BBC- ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre investigation here that analysed a well-funded and co-ordinated information campaign aimed at distorting the truth about events in Indonesia's West Papua province, and has identified those responsible for its operation.
The World
Facebook ads push misinformation about HIV prevention drugs, LGBT activists say, ‘harming public health’
The Washington Post
@TonyRomm
Fifty-two top LGBT advocates say the company has ignored their calls to action, creating a major public-health concern that puts patients at risk.
Australia
Beijing to legalise ‘theft’ of Aussie business secrets
The Australian
@bennpackham
Australian companies operating in China will have to allow Chinese government access to their encrypted data, risking their trade secrets being shared with domestic competitors.
Engaging the public to counter foreign interference | The Strategist
The Strategist
@KMansted
To pierce the veil of plausible deniability that adversaries hide behind, the government needs to prioritise building public trust and educating citizens about the nature of the threats we face. One positive step is the increased public profile of Australia’s spy chiefs. But more can be done. More frequent, principles-based attribution of responsibility for cyber-enabled activities, such as state-sponsored cyberattacks and data breaches, would help. Building public familiarity with the standards and frameworks used to assess responsibility for such activities can position the government as an honest broker that can be trusted to make correct calls in the future. Agencies could also act to build public awareness of other countries’ political warfare playbook.
Democratisation of technology: Iran shows Australia what’s possible | The Strategist
The Strategist
@michael_ASPI
The rise of China as a high-technology competitor to the US is one of the underlying drivers of the return to great-power strategic and economic competition. It’s a phenomenon that has enormous implications for the design and structure of Australia’s military.
Warnings over Chinese company Huawei's links with Sydney trains
Daily Telegraph
@benpike00
A technology company with links to the Chinese Communist Party, which has been black-listed by the federal government, has signed fresh contracts to operate critical parts of NSW’s infrastructure.
Hastie urges democracies to engage in political warfare to preserve peace
The Sydney Morning Herald
@latikambourke
Australia - The chairman of Parliament's joint committee on intelligence and security, Andrew Hastie, says Western nations must wage their own political warfare campaigns "to preserve peace and avoid war" and stop rival authoritarian states from undermining democracy. The Liberal MP said the West had watched on passively while states such as Russia and China had weaponised "previously benign" areas such as diplomacy, media, investment flows, infrastructure development and foreign asset purchases. Under hybrid warfare, Mr Hastie said "university campuses had become the modern battlegrounds of covert influence and interference", which in turn complemented "more aggressive forms of subversive warfare" such as intellectual property theft, cyber-attacks and espionage.
China
Beijing orders state offices to replace foreign PCs and software
Financial Times
Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment and software within three years, in a potential blow to the likes of HP, Dell and Microsoft. The directive is the first publicly known instruction with specific targets given to Chinese buyers to switch to domestic technology vendors, and echoes efforts by the Trump administration to curb the use of Chinese technology in the US and its allies. The move is part of a broader campaign to increase China’s reliance on home-made technologies, and is likely to fuel concerns of “decoupling”, with supply chains between the US and China being severed.
Facing Criticism Over Muslim Camps, China Says: What’s the Problem?
The New York Times
@ChuBailiang @austinramzy
Chinese officials have released social media videos, blistering editorials and attacks on researchers in a push to counter evidence of its Muslim internment drive.
Exclusive: China's SenseTime expects $750 mln 2019 revenue despite U.S. ban - sources
Reuters
@yingzhi_yang @brendagoh_
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up SenseTime, which Washington put on a trade blacklist in October, expects its 2019 revenue to increase by more than 200% year-on-year to around $750 million, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Read more about SenseTime, and it’s global footprint, in ASPI ICPC’s Mapping China’s Technology Giants.
Microsoft’s GitHub mulls expansion in China
The Economist
Its plans could attract official attention in the West. Because they are published openly, the projects that GitHub hosts are not subject to American export controls of the kind that have dogged Chinese technology companies in recent months. For that reason, the Chinese government is increasingly interested in stimulating the development of open-source software, as part of a more general attempt to build a domestic computing industry independent of American technology and influence.
Beijing's latest tech ally in US clampdown: Arm China
Nikkei Asian Review
@dabieannie
Since SoftBank sold control, venture doubles staff and develops cryptographic IP.
USA
DHS chooses Bryan Ware, former AI entrepreneur, as assistant director for cybersecurity
CyberScoop
@snlyngaas
Department of Homeland Security officials have selected Bryan S. Ware, a tech-savvy entrepreneur and holder of multiple patents, to be the department’s most senior official focused exclusively on cybersecurity, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
North Asia
Taiwan Gets Tough On Disinformation Suspected From China Ahead Of Elections
NPR
@EmilyZFeng
The stakes for curbing the propaganda are especially high right now in Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing says belongs to the People's Republic of China. In January, Taiwan will vote for its president and legislators. Its current leaders are determined to avoid a repeat of the 2018 local elections, which were marred by suspicions of Chinese interference. One of the latest efforts against disinformation is a unique collaboration between Facebook and the Taiwan FactCheck Center. The nonprofit center uses a back-end tool provided by Facebook to track viral, misleading posts and works to fact-check them. Once it does, Facebook alerts anyone who shared the post that it was wrong and includes a link to the fact-check article below the false post.
UK
Britain investigating whether leaked trade papers were hacked - sources
Reuters
British cyber security officials are investigating whether classified UK-U.S. trade documents that were shared online ahead of Thursday's election were acquired by hacking or were leaked, two sources told Reuters. Beside the fears that Russia could be meddling in another Western election, the disclosure of the classified documents has raised questions about the security of sensitive discussions between the United States and one of its closest allies.
Russia
For Sale: Access to Moscow’s CCTV Network on Black Market
The Moscow Times
Access to Moscow’s network of more than 170,000 surveillance cameras is being sold on the black market, investigators have found.
Misc.
In wake of Shutterstock’s Chinese censorship, American companies need to relearn American values
TechCrunch
@dannycrichton
The complexity of the Chinese market has only expanded with the country’s prodigious growth. The sharpness, intensity, and self-reflection of values required for Western companies to operate on the mainland has reached new highs. And yet, executives have vastly under-communicated the values and constraints they face, both to their own employees but also to their shareholders as well. It’s well past time for all American companies though to double down on the American values that underly their business. Ultimately, if you compromise on everything, you stand for nothing — and what sort of business would anyone want to join or back like that?
How anti-vaxxers get around Instagram's new hashtag controls - Coda Story
Coda Story
@isocockerell
Until the spring of this year, anti-vaxxers enjoyed near total freedom on Instagram. “They had a white flag where they could do anything they wanted,” said Anne-Julie Dionne, 22, a Quebec-based pro-vaccine campaigner who runs an account called @queenofvaccines. In May, Instagram shut down some of the most popular anti-vax hashtags, including #vaccinescauseAIDS, #vaccineskill and #vaccinescauseautism. But anti-vaccine Instagram users have been getting around the controls by employing more than 40 cryptic hashtags such as #learntherisk and #justasking.
Events
Responsible state behaviour in cyberspace
On November 27, 2019, in Hanoi, the Ministry of Information and Communications in collaboration with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute organized a conference on "Responsible state behaviour in cyberspace". Deputy Minister Nguyen Thanh Hung attended and delivered the opening speech. Attending were Ms. Rebecca Bryant, Interim Representative of the Australian Embassy in Vietnam and representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and cybersecurity agencies of some ASEAN countries.