Tag Archives: china

Chinese Researchers Are Outperforming Americans in Science

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For decades, China’s growth was driven by shifting workers from agriculture to manufacturing. As the country started to approach the so-called Lewis turning point, when such shifts no longer raise overall productivity, the government made an increasingly concerted effort to build the scientific base to provide another vector for growth. The results of those efforts are showing up in both the rankings of Chinese universities (11 of the top 100 globally) and in scholarly output.

Source: Chinese Researchers Are Outperforming Americans in Science – Bloomberg

Bitcoin Miners Are Shifting Outside China Amid State Clampdown

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Bitmain, which runs China’s two largest bitcoin-mining collectives, is setting up regional headquarters in Singapore and now has mining operations in the U.S. and Canada, Wu Jihan, the company’s co-founder, said in an interview. BTC.Top, the third-biggest mining pool, is opening a facility in Canada and ViaBTC, ranked No. 4, has operations in Iceland and America, their founders said.

Source: Bitcoin Miners Are Shifting Outside China Amid State Clampdown – Bloomberg

More news on Bitcoin today.

From:  Microsoft Halts Bitcoin Transactions Because It’s An “Unstable Currency

While Bitcoin price has always fluctuated, it never swung like it did in the past three months. To be widely adopted by the financial sector, a digital or fiat currency must be stable in order to be useful, something that Bitcoin is definitely not.

From:

China orders bitcoin exchanges to shut down

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Bitcoin is created and exchanged without the involvement of banks or governments. Transactions allow anonymity, which has made bitcoin popular with people who want to conceal their activity. Bitcoin can be converted to cash when deposited into accounts at prices set in online trading.

Source: Reports: China orders bitcoin exchanges to shut down – ABC News

EU Presidency calls for massive internet filtering

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A Council of the European Union document leaked by Statewatch on 30 August reveals that during the summer months, that Estonia (current EU Presidency) has been pushing the other Member States to strengthen indiscriminate internet surveillance, and to follow in the footsteps of China regarding online censorship.

Source: Leaked document: EU Presidency calls for massive internet filtering – EDRi

According to the leaked document, the text suggests two options for each of the two most controversial proposals: the so-called “link tax” or ancillary copyright and the upload filter.

A note about www.digitaltrends.com

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Editorial Note:  This is the first time I had to deal with something like this.  Linking to a site is not against the law nor can anyone demand it be removed.  Here are two emails supposedly from www.digitaltrends.com.  The email lists three urls from bucktownbell.com, this site, but none of them reference the link he complained about.   Thus, this could be a bot email and Rob Wolfe at dtlinkoutreach@gmail.com could be spam or some kind of spear phishing attack on me.

So I took the post that linked to https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/china-floating-solar-power-plant/  down.  No big deal.    After the emails are links to other sites about China’s new solar power plant.  I found the story interesting.  This site is about articles I find interesting.

Now bugger off Rob Wolfe whoever you are!

Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2018 18:55:53 +0000
From: Rob Wolfe <dtlinkoutreach@gmail.com>
To: Mark Anderson <mea@brandylion.com>
Subject: quick question
Parts/Attachments:
   1   OK     25 lines  Text
   2 Shown    26 lines  Text
----------------------------------------

Just a quick question Mark

- did you get my last e-mail?

I really need you to remove the link on

http://bucktownbell.com/
http://bucktownbell.com/?%C2%A0
http://bucktownbell.com/?%C2%A0&paged=2
http://bucktownbell.com/?author
http://bucktownbell.com/?author=2

going to my site at


https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/china-floating-solar-power-plant/

Can you please remove it ASAP?

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know

---
Rob Wolfe

------------- latest email -----------------
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:26:58 +0000
From: rob Wolfe <dtlinkoutreach2@gmail.com>
To: Mark Anderson <mea@brandylion.com>
Subject: Mark please respond
Parts/Attachments:
   1   OK     29 lines  Text
   2 Shown    33 lines  Text
----------------------------------------

Hey Mark

I really really need you to act on this.

You are linking to my site at


https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/china-floating-solar-power-plant/

from here

http://bucktownbell.com/
http://bucktownbell.com/?%C2%A0
http://bucktownbell.com/?%C2%A0&paged=2
http://bucktownbell.com/?author
http://bucktownbell.com/?author=2

I am very sure that this link is hurting my site in Google!

This means, retaining that link would hurt the reputation of your site as well, if we
need to include it in our link disavow request to Google.

So please remove that link ASAP and I'll make sure to not bother you again!

Thanks in advance!

---
Rob Wolfe
 Here are some better articles on this subject anyway.  Enjoy!

China Turns On the World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm

So why build solar plants on top of lakes and reservoirs? Fiona Harvey at The Guardian explains that building on bodies of water, especially manmade lakes that are not ecologically sensitive, helps protect agricultural land and terrestrial ecosystems from being developed for energy use. The water also cools the electronics in the solar panels, helping them to work more efficiently, reports Alistair Boyle for The Telegraph. For similar reasons Britain built a 23,000-panel floating solar farm on the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir near Heathrow airport in 2016 to help power the Thames Water treatment plant.
Source: China Turns On the World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm | Smart News | Smithsonian
Another blurb from an actual tree hugger site of all places:  World’s largest floating solar farm, now online in China
When I wrote about China and India being years ahead of their climate pledges, some commenters expressed skepticism. But whatever your views on how well we can trust official government statistics, one thing is pretty much undeniable at this point:

Renewable energy and clean tech are very big business in China and India right now.

And here and here and here and here ….

 

How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War

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Yet despite the talk of a borderless currency, a handful of Chinese companies have effectively assumed majority control of the Bitcoin network. They have done so through canny investments and vast farms of computer servers dispersed around the country. The American delegation flew to Beijing because that was where much of the Bitcoin power was concentrated.

Source: How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War – The New York Times

Mr. Ng, 36, said he had become an expert in finding cheap energy, often in places where a coal plant or hydroelectric dam was built to support some industrial project that never happened. The Bitcoin mining machines in his facilities use about 38 megawatts of electricity, he said, enough to power a small city.

Chinese hack compromised security-clearance database

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Last week, the OPM announced that a database containing the personal information of about 4 million current and former federal employees was hacked. Privately, U.S. officials said the Chinese government was behind the breach. The administration has not publicly pointed a finger at Beijing.

Source: Chinese hack compromised security-clearance database – The Washington Post

I’m surprised the Washington Post continues with this Chinese narrative as there has been no official condemnation of China over this and determining the true source of an intrusion is extremely difficult if not impossible in many cases.  They still haven’t caught the culprits in the Target and Home Depot data breaches.  The list of suspects with motive to obtain this kind of data is probably quite long so it’s irresponsible to assume a guilty party before any evidence has been leaked.  No doubt consultants are working furiously tracing log records but at least wait until there is something concrete.  The Washington Post is an institution with top notch journalists so they should know better.

And here’s the blurb that made me laugh.

Offensive actions might include directing a U.S. agency to locate the servers holding the stolen data and deleting or altering the data, the former official said.

Haha.  Like whoever did this wouldn’t have backups 6 ways to Sunday of every bit gathered.  There’s no way to delete anything digital once it’s out in the ether.  Why would anyone publish a statement like that?  The only thing an offensive cyber attack can accomplish is making the US government behave like the criminals who they denounce.

Don’t Be Fodder for China’s ‘Great Cannon’

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“It only intercepts traffic to a certain set of Internet addresses, and then only looks for specific script requests. About 98 percent of the time it sends the Web request straight on to Baidu, but about two percent of the time it says, ‘Okay, I’m going to drop the request going to Baidu,’ and instead it directly provides the malicious reply, replying with a bit of Javascript which causes the user’s browser to participate in a DOS attack, Weaver said.

via Don’t Be Fodder for China’s ‘Great Cannon’ — Krebs on Security.

Interestingly, this type of attack is not unprecedented. According to documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA and British intelligence services used a system dubbed “QUANTUM” to inject content and modify Web results for individual targets that appeared to be coming from a pre-selected range of Internet addresses.

Counting Legal Positions in Go

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The computation uses dynamic programming to count the number of paths through a graph consisting of 18^2=324 layers with up to 81 billion nodes each. Each node corresponds to a set of partial board (e.g. the top 7 rows plus 6 points on the 8th row) positions that are equivalent in their set of valid completions. Our paper explains the algorithm in detail, and also explains how the resulting exact counts allow derivation of the approximation formula

L(m,n) ~ 0.850639925845714538 * 0.96553505933837387^{m+n} * 2.97573419204335724938^{m*n}

which gives us the approximate number of legal positions on a standard board size

L(19,19) ~ 2.08168199381982*10^170

via Counting Legal Positions in Go.

Thanks to the Chinese Remainder Theorem, the work of computing L(19,19) can be split up into 9 jobs that each compute 64 bits of the 566-bit result. Allowing for some redundancy, we need from 10 to 13 servers, each with at least 8 cores, 512GB RAM, and ample disk space (10-15TB), running for about 5-9 months.

Why would Chinese hackers want hospital patient data?

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people without health insurance can potentially get treatment by using medical data of one of the hacking victims.Halamka, who also runs the “Life as a healthcare CIO” blog, said a medical record can be worth between US$50 and $250 to the right customer — many times more than the amount typically paid for a credit card number, or the cents paid for a user name and password.

via Why would Chinese hackers want hospital patient data? | ITworld.