Tag Archive for: hurt

Will Russia’s struggle in Ukraine help Taiwan — or hurt it? | Russia-Ukraine war

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In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Beijing and Moscow doubled down on their close relationship.

While Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have a long history of working together, they publicly cemented their ties with a “no-limits” partnership just weeks before the war began.

The timing of the meeting and the subsequent invasion, after the Beijing Winter Olympics had concluded, led many observers to wonder whether Xi knew the war was coming. They also wondered, as Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, whether Taiwan was next.

Superficially at least, Ukraine and Taiwan appear to have much in common. Both are democracies whose territories have historically been claimed by much larger and better-armed neighbours. Beijing has long pledged to “reunify” with Taiwan by force or by peace by 2049, the year the Chinese Communist Party has set for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, 100 years after their victory in the country’s Civil War.

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait rose further last August as Nancy Pelosi, then the United States House of Representatives speaker, became the highest-ranking US official to visit Taipei in 25 years. China responded with a series of war exercises around Taiwan and ramped up its rhetoric. In 2022, Beijing sent a record 1,737 flights into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone, which includes the airspace around Taiwan and the coast of China, according to data compiled by Gerald C Brown and Ben Lewis, independent defence analysts who track such incursions. This was more than the combined numbers for the previous four years.

Now, on the eve of the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s struggles to make advances in the war have once again given rise to questions about what lessons China may have learned from its close ally. Will China conclude that it might be better to attack Taiwan before it is better prepared to defend itself? Or has Putin’s war shown the perils of rushing into such a conflict?

The short answer: Predicting China’s behaviour is a challenge because its decision-making is opaque to much of the outside world. Instead, China…

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Workers and consumers hurt by ransomware attacks are starting to sue the companies who got hacked – The Washington Post

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Workers and consumers hurt by ransomware attacks are starting to sue the companies who got hacked  The Washington Post

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Will FinCEN’s Crypto Conundrum Hurt Ransomware Victims?

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Ransomware was invented 30 years ago when an AIDS researcher mailed between 10 and 20 thousand 5.25 floppy disks emblazoned with the name “AIDS Information Version 2.0,” to people and business around the world. Over the past 30 years, much has changed including our use of computers which now, instead of being attached to cathode ray television sets, fit into our pockets. The trajectory, from floppy disks in the 80’s, to e-commerce by the early 2000s, has culminated in the minting of digital money. Since then, as the use of cryptocurrency has grown, other industries have grown with it. One industry, often overlooked, is ransomware. Ransomware is a plague on businesses world-wide. Indeed, the  U.S. government recommends not paying these ransoms. New guidance, however, issued by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) to the industry in late 2020, takes this too far; it threatens to impose sanctions on the insurance industry that has bloomed around cyber crime and will likely hurt the victims, not the criminals.

Ransomware is Everywhere

“Today, ransomware is a booming business for cyber criminals, making cyber insurance a business imperative.” Says Bridget Choi, the General Counsel of Kivu Consulting, a digital forensic-incident response (“DFIR”) firm, who leads their regulatory program. “Since the dot.com boom, cyber insurance has become a billion-dollar industry.” Originally designed to be a risk transfer should a network go down and a business lose revenue, cyber insurance is now frequently used to protect against and respond to ransomware attacks. And cyber insurance claims happen to be an excellent metrics for tracking these cyber-attacks. “As recently as 2013, the large cyber-claims were typically well-known data or payment card data security breaches,” explains Choi. “With the growth of digital payments and cryptocurrency, the cyber threat landscape has changed.” Indeed, the FBI estimates that “$144.35 million in Bitcoin have been paid” for ransomware attacks between 2013 and 2019. Estimates for ransomware payments for 2020—based in part on the surge in remote work spurred by COVID-19—reached…

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Activision Deletes And Replaces ‘Call Of Duty’ Trailer Worldwide Over 1 Second That Hurt China’s Feelings

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While China-bashing is all the rage right now (much of it deserved given the country’s abhorrent human rights practices), it’s sort of amazing what a difference a year makes. While the current focus of ire towards the Chinese government seems focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and a few mobile dance apps, never mind the fully embedded nature of Chinese-manufactured technology in use every day in the West, late 2019 was all about China’s translucent skin. Much of that had to do with China’s inching towards a slow takeover of Hong Kong and how several corporate interests in the West reacted to it. Does anyone else remember when our discussion about China was dominated by stories dealing with Blizzard banning Hearthstone players for supporting Hong Kong and American professional sports leagues looking like cowards in the face of a huge economic market?

Yeah, me neither. But with all that is going on the world and all of the criticism, deserved or otherwise, being lobbed at the Chinese government, it’s worth pointing out that the problems of last year are still going on. And, while Google most recently took something of a stand against the aggression on Hong Kong specifically, other companies are still bowing to China’s thin-skin in heavy-handed ways. The latest example of this is an admittedly relatively trivial attempt by Activision to kneel at the altar of Chinese historical censorship.

The debut trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has been blocked in China, and subsequently edited everywhere else, after featuring around one second’s worth of footage from the Communist government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. When the game was first announced last week, a trailer running for 2:02 was released to the world and hosted on the official Call of Duty and Xbox YouTube pages, along with major trailer sites like IGN and Gamespot.

On August 21, however, the videos on Call of Duty and Xbox’s YouTube pages were replaced with a much shorter, 1:00 version. This isn’t an additional trailer, it’s a replacement, which we know because…the original 2:02 video we embedded in our own story is no longer working, having been marked as “private”.

So here’s the, ahem, tik-tok on this. Activision, which also owns Blizzard, releases a new trailer for a new Call of Duty game. That trailer includes a single second of an image from Chinese protests against the government from three decades ago. The Chinese government, true to form, flips the fuck out and bans the trailer entirely. One imagines there were also threats of banning the game entirely, but that is yet to be confirmed. Activision then, seeing the Chinese government go full carpet bomb over the trailer in its country, decides to try to out-carpet-bomb the carpet bomb by doing a delete/replace of the offending trailer worldwide.

While we’re talking about a mere video game trailer here, the implications aren’t as insignificant as they might seem. Games are a subset of culture and commerce. While much of the discourse over how companies do business in China is overstated to say the least, what Activision did here is something different. Indeed, it could probably be best summarized as: Activision allowed the Chinese government to censor the company’s art throughout the world.

And, sinophobia aside, that is a very dangerous precedent to set. That it was an action taken on a trailer for a game called Call of Duty: Cold War, in fact, is probably proof that the universe is not without a sense of irony.

Techdirt.