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DeepSeek: How a Small Chinese AI Company Is Shaking Up U.S. Tech Heavyweights
For consumers, access to AI may also become cheaper. For researchers who already have a lot of resources, more efficiency may have less of an effect. It is unclear whether DeepSeek’s approach will help to make models with better performance overall, or simply models that are more efficient.
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DeepSeek Shatters Beliefs About the Cost of AI, Leaving U.S. Tech Giants Reeling
Society may benefit from less computationally intensive, and therefore more energy-efficient, AI. However, the geopolitical risk of a single country capturing the market, together with concerns about data privacy, intellectual property and censorship may outweigh the benefits.
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Treasury Sanctions Company, Hacker Associated with Salt Typhoon
The Department of the Treasury has sanctioned a Chinese national and a Chinese company for their direct involvement in the Salt Typhoon cyber group, which recently compromised the network infrastructure of multiple major U.S. telecommunication and internet service provider companies.
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A Russian Airline Bomb Plot? What We Know About the Polish PM's Accusations
The accusation was as blunt as it was serious: Russia is plotting terror attacks against unspecified targets utilizing aircraft, Poland’s prime minister said. Though shocking, the Polish leader’s comments were not out of the blue: there’s been a growing number of suspicious, alarming, and unexplained incidents in recent months.
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U.S. Representative Who Backed Aid to Ukraine Removed from Committee Chairmanship
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has removed the chairman of the powerful House Intelligence Committee who has been an outspoken supporter of assistance for Ukraine.
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U-M Ends Partnership with Chinese University
The University of Michigan has announced it will end its Joint Institute with Chinese Shanghai Jiao Tong University, following growing concerns from lawmakers about national security.
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Baltic Subsea Sabotage: China Gets Away with Non-cooperation
On Christmas Day, one of two cables connecting Finland’s electricity grid to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was cut. Four data cables—three linking Finland and Estonia and one between Finland and Germany—were broken at the same time. This and two earlier instances have heightened concerns about the vulnerability of Europe’s undersea infrastructure.
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The World’s Most Bizarre Secret Weapons: How Pigeons, Cats, Whales and Even Robotic Catfish Have Acted as Spies Through the Ages
The death of a spy is rarely newsworthy, but when a white beluga whale suspected of spying for Moscow was found dead in Norwegian waters in September, the animal soon became a minor celebrity. The whale is one in a long line of animals which have been used by the intelligence services.
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U.S. Slow to React to Pervasive Chinese Hacking: Experts
As new potential threats from Chinese hackers were identified this week, the federal government issued one of its strongest warnings to date about the need for Americans —and in particular government officials and other “highly targeted” individuals —to secure their communications against eavesdropping and interception.
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China-Based Hacker Conspired to Develop and Deploy Malware That Exploited Tens of Thousands of Firewalls Worldwide
Chinese hacker and his co-conspirators worked at the offices of Sichuan Silence Information Technology Co. Ltd. to discover and exploit a previously-unknown vulnerability (an “0-day” vulnerability) in certain firewalls.
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Interference Interrupted: The US Government’s Strides Defending Against Foreign Threats to the 2024 Election
Foreign interference in U.S. elections has undoubtedly evolved, becoming more sophisticated and extensive, since Russia’s sweeping operation in 2016. But so have the US government’s strategies to expose, counter, and mitigate these attacks.
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Rep. Michael McCaul Calls Tulsi Gabbard a “baffling” Pick to Lead Intelligence Community
The Austin Republican leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee and predicted Gabbard’s nomination would fail in the Senate.
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Former FBI Informant Pleads Guilty to Fabricating Biden Bribery Story
Alexander Smirnov, a former FBI informant, pleaded guilty Monday in Los Angeles federal court to faking the story about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The fabricated story was the central element of a House impeachment inquiry.
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What is Salt Typhoon? A Security Expert Explains the Chinese Hackers and Their Aattack on U.S. Telecommunications Networks
Lost in the noise of the story is that Salt Typhoon has proved that the decades of warnings by the internet security community were correct. No mandated secret or proprietary access to technology products is likely to remain undiscovered or used only by “the good guys” – and efforts to require them are likely to backfire.
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Chinese Hackers Still Lurk in U.S. Telecommunications systems
Chinese hackers blamed for compromising U.S. telecommunications infrastructure and spying on American presidential campaigns and American officials are still entrenched in those systems.
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The long view
The American TikTok Deal Doesn’t Address the Platform’s Potential for Manipulation, Only Who Profits
If we want to protect democratic information systems, we need to focus on reducing the vulnerabilities in our relationship with media platforms – platforms with surveillance power to know what we will like, the algorithmic power to curate our information diet and control of platform incentives, and rules and features that affect who gains influence. The biggest challenge is to make platforms less riggable, and thus less weaponizable, if only for the reason that motivated the TikTok ban: we don’t want our adversaries, foreign or domestic, to have power over us.