Meta’s Censorship Deal with China #1805

Lead story from Monday, March 10. A shocking new whistleblower complaint reveals that Meta, formerly Facebook, went to extreme lengths to gain access to the Chinese market, even agreeing to censorship demands from the Chinese Communist Party. According to former global policy director, Sarah Wynne Williams, the company developed a censorship system, a tool, which allowed suppression suppressed dissident voices to be silenced and planned to allow the CCCP to oversee content moderation.

The complaint filed with the SEC accuses made of misleading investors and regulators about its China dealings. I dive into the explosive allegations and what they mean for future big tech and global free speech. Welcome to episode 18 o five. Hey. I wanna get into this a little bit before, we get too deep into the show.

But this is just crazy. This Washington Post report that is out and online and being reported, all over the place, including a slash dot. Basically saying, Mady was willing to go to extreme lengths to censor content and shut down political dissent. They were willing to play ball with the Chinese. Said for many years, Meidu has been working hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party, briefing them on the latest tech developments and lying about it.

Reached for a comment, media spokesperson, Annie Stone, told the Washington Post it was no secret they'd been interested in operating in China. This is widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with ideas we explored, which Zuckerberg announced in 02/2019. Although the post shares new tape no details about a what if about what a Facebook privacy policy stuff or offers offered China in negotiations in 02/2014.

Again, in exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, Facebook would agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users' data, including Hong Kong users as well. This is just beyond disturbing and it it really follows a trend and something that I saw that is sign related over the weekend. There's this YouTube series out. There's there's some channels China Observer, China uncensored.

There's a number of YouTube channels that really talk about what China has done in in what they are doing in regards to, you know, basically putting pressure on people that are reporting negatively on China. This uncensored live, which is now eleven minutes long, is is a worthy is a worthy watch for those of you that want to have a better understanding on what's going on.

Because, purportedly, YouTube is now basically down ranking any negative any negative China content. And what China is embarking on is a PR plan or a, you know, basically go out there and, you know, provide positive China messaging through sponsorships of travel channels and a whole bunch of

other things. It's quite eye opening that channels that have been talking about China in a negative way are now with millions of views with videos that in those channels get seven, eight hundred thousand views per episode that have millions of subscribers has fallen off the map on YouTube and can no longer be found. Just because they talk negatively and they talk about what really happens in China and the things that are going

on. It's also being reported that China is investing heavily in SEM search results so that these sponsored junkets, these folks that have been paid to come in and have story lines so they're almost fed to them word from word, end up being highly rank. So

China has a long play here. A very, very long play. They they want to put forward a China positive face versus a China negative face, of course. And they're putting dollars behind that. But the question I would ask all of you, obviously, Meta did not continue with their their conversation with basically given the Chinese government, the Chinese government communist government access to a tool to silence dissidents, remove threads, etcetera, etcetera.

But why is YouTube now, which they say technically they don't have an issue just people not as interested in this content, which I doubt. Why are they down ranking any negative Chinese news while at the same time promoting China positive content? It makes one question. And again, it goes back to something I've been saying for a very, very long time. Is that really the only place that you're gonna find censorship free content that cannot be manipulated, cannot be down ranked, is podcast.

If you're subscribed to a podcast, you're gonna get the content that you want delivered to you at the time that you want, on demand. And you're not gonna have to worry about a YouTube agenda or a Facebook agenda driving down content. Creators at some point will need to wake up and understand that these platforms do not have their best interest in hand. So, with that, we'll get into, the rest of the show. I wanna welcome you to episode 1,805. Of course, I'm your host, Todd Cochran.

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sponsor here at Geek News Central. So, before we get into the red rest of the stack here, my little hub that I ordered showed up. So now I have the ability to very easily switch back and forth with a touch of a button or I bought one of the Elgato foot switches that allows me just to tap my foot and I can change the view that those of you watching the show live can do so. So a little more handy from a a switching standpoint, and managing the show.

So still having, you know, some little itty bitty learning curves with OBS, in specifically having glitching audio from time to time. And, I'm not quite sure, what the deal on that is, but, we'll continue to work at it. Alrighty, Brent. So let's get into the stack here.

Yeah. It was a good weekend, but otherwise, my sleeping oh, this is a challenge. Well, you know, I'm I'm working, nights and having everything flip twelve hours and then at least being able to have some semblance of being able to eat and a normal time here. I tell you, I'm having a little more challenge than I have in the past in, switching over to, the new schedule. So, anyway, doing the best I can. Working days has its advantages, but, not in the situation I can do right now.

Well, a little more news on the Chinese front.

A hidden feature, quote unquote, was found in a Chinese made Bluetooth chip. That this Bluetooth chip is installed in a hundreds of millions of IoT devices. So this hidden feature, although a malicious actor could access a device and sense of data through this hidden feature and I it's wonder it's kind of, you know, TechRadar. I'm a little disappointed. It sure to me smells like something that was put there on purpose.

But cybersecurity researchers have claimed that ESP 32 chips, which allow connectivity via Wi Fi or Bluetooth, have hidden commands not documented by the manufacturer. Those commands would allow modifying the chips arbitrarily to unlock additional features, infecting these chips with a malicious code and even carrying out attacks of identity theft of devices. So the ESP 32 chip is built by a quote unquote Chinese semiconductor company in Shanghai called Espressif.

It costs approximately $2 per unit and according to the manufacturer has been sold 8,000,000,000 times from its inception in 2023. Said its affordability is one of the main reasons. Well, maybe it's backed by Chinese government. They first described defining as a backdoor, but later backtracked on that terminology. I said, we'd like to clarify.

It is more appropriate to refer to the presence of proprietary commands, which allow operations such as reading and modifying memory in the controller as a hidden feature rather than a backdoor. Still, threat actors could use these commands to run supply chain attacks, hide backdoors in the chipset, or execute more sophisticated attacks. Harlock added they could impersonate known devices that connect to mobile phones, computers, and smart devices even when they're offline.

So the company has not responded to this. But say you, Chinese backdoor into Wi Fi and Bluetooth and IoT devices. I would not be surprised. Call me a conspiracy theorist.

Big outage over x. They've been going under a massive cyberattack. Twitter's been going down. I did not see it here. I was on and off, x all day. But some of you may have seen this, but, Elon Musk basically said that, they've had a huge, huge outage. The first outage occur around 02:30AM Pacific time with a further more significant spike in reports around 7AM. And, Elon says there's a massive cyber attack going against x said company.

We we've got attacked we get attacked every day, but this was with a lot of resources. Either a large coordinated group and or a country is involving, so I'm not surprised. You know, more generally, a number of major Internet just caused significant disruption over the past year. We know that Slack went down a few weeks ago. We know that CrowdStrike issue that happened with flights and so forth. So these cyber attacks per se, and this one in particular seems to be pretty big.

Now if you use Zelle, Chase will soon block certain Zelle charges and here's what you need to know. They're cracking down on social media scams with its new Zelle policy. And I think we've seen this, in other device or other would do other banks do this as well. Zelle and digital payment apps such as Venmo, Cash App make it easy for scammers to get your money. And many scammers target people on social media

according to Chase. Nearly 50% of fraud reports that we see between June of twenty twenty four and December 31 came from the media with a $870,000,000 lost through Zelle payments, since the app launch in 02/2017. So with this new policy, Chase hopes to start it fraud before it happens, and its updated Zelle service agreement will allow it to decline or block payments it believes are originated on social media.

The bank may also delay or hold payment so it can request information from you to authenticate the transaction. So,

I use an app called Paysend to to pay my bills and send money and I recently been having trouble with it. It's tied to my debit card and my bank is currently working on the issue. Hasn't been an issue up to this date, but all of a sudden, boom, it just started happening. And so my bank seems to know what's going on even though the transactions weren't declined. It's something part of the process. So be careful out there. Hey, Nvidia at Tesla have been slammed over the stock market today.

A lot of uncertainty going on with with the tariffs causing investors to be, be skittish. But, all the big ones were down. Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft all fell with Tesla falling a whopping 15% to lead losses. And five of the seven mega cap names also saw drops of 4%. Only Microsoft was down 3.3 and Amazon down 2.3. So, you know, I think there's going to be more of this as, as new policies put in place and things will even out over time.

Google's Pixel four a update was due to battery overheating. So if you remember this, Google didn't explain exactly why it shipped a mandatory software update for the Pixel four on, which is basically a very early Android phone. But the nature of the update gave some models all but unstable battery life provided some clues as did later software analysis. But now Australian authorities have provided a more concrete answer. And their safety arm has issued a recall for the Pixel four a last week.

The reason the commission said is that Google's firmware update and battery chain changes serve to mitigate the risk of overheating because an overheating battery could pose a risk of fire, but they're recalling that. So

this is something where Google kind of thread the the needle here and, basically, you know, they've they've said at this point, hey, it's seems to be bad enough. We should recall, the phone. So there's a good article. Little h two o here folks. Sorry. By Ron Wyden. And that name should be familiar. Ron Wyden says, why the Internet still needs section two thirty. And there's been a lot of debate about section two thirty and whether it should be revoked and whether it should be amended.

And its its controversy has crossed multiple administrations at this point. But, you know, it's been fashionable to blame nearly all the Internet's ills on section two thirty of the Communication Decency Act. Everyone from the president to some Democratic folks have argued that section two thirty has let major tech platforms moderate too much or too little. Here's the deal. If you're privately held platform, you should be able to do whatever you want within your terms of service.

And people have to understand where they wanna hang out. People don't like censorship. We just talked about what Facebook was gonna do with China. That's their choice if they decide to do that, and they have to live with the ramifications of what they do. But I think in the most part, companies like mine have benefited benefited from section two thirty. We look at media when it's being reported that it has there's concerning content. And but we don't have to basically go through and,

you know, monitor. That would be very difficult and very expensive to do that. We have to think about when Section two thirty came online, there was only about 20,000,000 people that had internet, because it was written in 1995. So and also the Communication Act was being of 1934 was being rewritten. So, you know, I don't know where you may think about section two thirty. It's good and bad at the same point, but he contends that section two thirty is still needed.

What do you say? What do you think in that regard when it comes to section

two thirty? [email protected]. A lot of people are complaining about Apple's Apple Intelligence and attributing it to is Apple Intelligence the new Apple Maps. And you know Apple Maps when it first came out did not have that good of a run. They had some challenges in those early early days. And I think now most of us know that Apple Maps are pretty good. But I don't think this spells doom or gloom for Apple that they're behind in AI. Why? There's lots of tools out there. Lots and lots of tools.

And do we need AI on our smartphones at this point? I don't think so. But people are are in a feeding frenzy right now and want more. More, more, more in regards to AI. And I think it's, you know, it's it can be it can be a little bit concerning here, that they want to push Apple to have deeper intelligence at this point on their phones. I I don't think Apple's gonna get hurt on this, on these delays in contextual AI development. I don't I don't think it's going to

dilute Apple's brand. I think people buy Apple because of the devices not because of AI. So I don't know. Right? To me, I can use ChatGPT. I can use Claude. I can use Perplexity. I can use a large number of AI tools on my Mac without needing Apple intelligence. My Mac still works, does everything it needs. I'm not impacted by this. So I don't necessarily agree with the author's intention here that this is going to set Apple back.

Now we know that Apple's Smart Home Hub has reportedly been postponed due to AKA the Siri slowdown giving advantage to Alexa. But, again, I don't need Alexa Plus to live my life. The hub has to be or Alexa plus has to have some function that really makes me go, Wow, I can't live without this.

And I don't think I'm at that point. What say you? What do you think is giving you advantage? What is tactically making it worth $20 a month to have Alexa Plus? Has anyone done that? Has anyone bought it? I'll say that the the OpenAI Pro for me up to this point has been pretty well worth it. Am I getting a full $200 value out of it? I don't know. We'll see at the end of the month. On a more fun topic, there's a 2,000 piece Mario kit Lego set available.

And, if you are a Lego fan or Mario Kart fan, it looks like this is a must have for those of you that are looking for this. It's a hundred and $70. And, what does it look like? I guess that's the front. Yeah. They didn't put a picture of what it looks like, but it's the Mario in standard kart set. Again, available for preorder and depicts Mario on his iconic red and blue cart. So that gives you a little bit of an answer of what this Lego set is going to be.

If you're a Chromecast user, some of you are getting increasingly angry about a weird and trusted device bug. So if you have an early version of the Chromecast, specifically second gen, they prevent they're preventing these devices from from casting normally. In other words, throwing, something to the screen. As reported by nine to five and Android Authority, the bug surfaced over the last few days, throwing a couple of error messages.

So, you know, these devices are cheap enough that if you're having problems with the second gen, which is launched in 2015, go out and grab yourself another Chromecast. They're not very expensive at all. Of course, lots of doom and gloom articles about what's going to happen with the tariffs and they're saying expect pain at the cash register. PC insider weighs on the tariffs. We all know that we're gonna see increases in prices.

This is a well known. We're gonna see, a jump. It won't be as as as bad as people think in some cases and maybe worse than others. So I warned all of you to go out if you had a big purchase coming to make sure you you you grab that early so that you could get it from available inventory and not be impacted. I'd really like to hear from all of you. When you start seeing increases in prices or something that's affecting you, let me know. I really wanna know. More outages.

A mayor a major Oracle outage has hit US Federal health record system. This was going on for about five hours. Six veteran affairs hospitals were affected. DOD, US Coast Guard and NOAA also affected by the downtime. VA plans to use federal EHR in even more sites. So hopefully, they, get these outages figured out.

In the sign of the times, Google paid out $12,000,000 via their bug bounty programs in 2024. I know that we probably paid out several thousand dollars in big bug bounties. Nothing like a $12,000,000 worth of bounties being paid but it does show you that they're getting quite a few significant bugs to pay, that much money out. At the same time, the Department of Justice latest proposal wants Google to cut Chrome loose. Google is tangled was, you know, they're tangled in this antitrust mess.

And, you know, since a judge ruled last year that it unfairly dominated the online search market. So the current actions are looking like they want Google to sell off its web browser and maybe even Android. A group of 38 state attorneys have teamed up to file the updated proposal laying out the final steps to break Google's illegal stranglehold on the search engine market.

In its latest filings, it says arguing that forcing Google to sell Chrome would break the grip on a key search gateway opening it for real competition. You really wanna fix this and make them bust out Google Ads? That's where the real competition is. And I guess the browser is is a first step. They have such a domination in in online advertising. It's it's really really difficult. I don't know if you've opened up any of your DVDs recently, but it might be a good idea to

take a look at your inventory. If you have DVDs that just been sitting on the shelf, they're having some what's called disc rot and basically, DVDs that are getting older are starting to have playback issues. So if you have a Warner Brother disc that were released in 02/2006 and 02/2008, just be aware that you could get a replacement if they are still making the, the release. Otherwise, you might be just kind of screwed here.

A statement shared by movie site Joe Blow, that's j o b l o. I'm not kidding. That's what it's called. Warner Brothers says where potential issues affecting select DVD titles and the company has been actively working with consumers to replace defective disc Where possible, defective disc have been replaced with the same title. However, some of the affected titles are longer print. A rights to expired consumers have been offered exchange for a title of like value.

So, you can contact them at [email protected]. So take a look at your disc out there and see if you've got any disc routers disc that are not playing well. For NASA astronauts, a ten day space mission that lasted nine months and landing date is in sight. So you know, they've been up there since June 5 and, they're going to be coming back. What is the date? Is it announced? What the return date is? We knew it was gonna be in March to begin with. Yeah. They don't actually call out the exact

date that they're coming back. But very, very soon, why would they write the article and not actually put the date out on when they're going to return? It's kind of funny. Yeah? That they would do that. So link will be in the show notes. That was really effective. Wow. Build the punchline.

Speaking of report that agentic Ai has profound issues with security and privacy signal president says, which is very interesting that they would announce that The present popular messenger app single has warned AI agents come with a significant risk to privacy and security. Speaking South by Southwest, Meredith Whitaker argued AI agents are being marked like a magic genie bot, which thinks many steps ahead and completes tasks for for you.

Your brain can just sit in a jar and you're not doing any of that yourself. Well, they say this comes at a cost. And although the use of AI agents is providing popular, he expresses a real danger with these spots because they require extensive access to data. I think we all kinda know that.

Look at what DeepSeek is doing and how dangerous it is. But anyway, so you say you're gonna ask an a a AI agent to book a concert for you.

This should be fairly straightforward task. It does mean the AA agent would need access to your browser, your credit card information, your calendar and even your messages to let friends know that means that just one task, the agent now has access to your financial details, your day to day plans, your messages, which could be extremely damaging if the data fell into the wrong hands.

So I think we have to be very, very careful with all of this stuff that's out there and determine at what level we feel comfortable for allowing these agents to have access to our data. YouTubers have been targeted a in a blackmail campaign to promote malware on their channels and I'm wondering how they're actually being blackmailed. Well, oh, they're they're being threatened with copyright claims claims. And the way to resolve the problem is

to share a download link. The link distributes trojanized programs install a crypto miner. So cyber researchers at Kaspersky, which is banned in The US right now, recently spotted the campaign in a while claiming the majority of the victims are Russian. It's spotted a video with more than 400,000 views sharing the malicious link and that the campaign resulted in more than 40,000 downloads before being pulled down.

So it's called Windows Packet Diverter, which is a very, very naughty naughty naughty application and, can do some serious damage, when someone's connected to your computer. So, interesting that YouTubers are using blackmail to get them to promote something. Very, very curious. I've been getting a lot of emails on toll road usage. It was kind of weird because I hadn't seen any in a while and I went on a toll road about three days before I left for The Philippines.

But now people also get fake parking tickets. So if you're getting an SMS message for a fake parking ticket or a toll, be very, very careful. If when in doubt, go to your local municipality parking website and check and make sure your vehicle is not impacted. These are a ways for people to get micropayments from you, 20 to $35 at a whack. And, you send that out to a hundred thousand people and a hundred people react well, you've done well.

Reaches continue 560,000 people impacted across four health data breaches. Hillcrest convalescent center, Gastroenterology Associates of Central Florida and Community Care Alliance in Sunflower Medical Group were affected. Data breach happened on January 7. So you do give them credit for fast reporting. Show that hackers had access since December 15, But, they've got access to a lot of data out there. So just if you're one of those groups, you'll probably be getting a letter from folks.

Also, don't fall for a Trump coin offers being used as in a malware campaign. Beyonce is being spoofed in an email campaign that uses up to 2,000 free Trump coins as lure leading to installation of ConnectWise RAT and remote takeover the victim's computer. So again, you're gonna get something for free. That's probably too good to be true. So just be careful. Alright. So we continue to wonder what's gonna be the fate of TikTok. We're fifty days or so into the reprieve.

And apparently, there's four different groups talking to TikTok. So we'll see. They have 70 yeah. The fifth they're they got twenty five days left. So we're gonna see. We're gonna see what happens here. And, if that, if that's a deal that gets that gets done. So folks here at Geek News Central, it's always important for you to consider dropping us a note [email protected]. Don't forget to use one of those modern podcast apps and

stream sats to the show. If you're still having issues streaming sats, let me know. Also, we accept boost and also one time donations at geekinaccentral.com/insider. I'm going to wrap things up here. I'll be back with you on Thursday for another edition of the Keto Central podcast. You all be safe. Take care. Let me know if you like how I'm doing the new format for the show with the kickoff article being gone into

in quite some detail before we get into any of the administrative stuff. Everyone take care. We'll see you next time. Thank you for being here. Stay safe. Alright. Bye bye.