Tag: china

Dalai Lama’s Succession Plans

Religion and politics aren’t only enmeshed here in the West… fascinating situation unplaying here…

The Dalai Lama announces plans for a successor : NPR:

The English translation published on his website said the search for his successor will be carried out by The Gaden Phodrang Trust, a religious body of Buddhist monks who are part of the office of the Dalai Lama in India.

In what appears to be a nod to China, the statement adds that “no one else has any such authority to interfere in the matter.” China has stated that it alone has the authority to appoint the next leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibet is an autonomous region controlled by China…

… The Tibetan spiritual leader had previously speculated that his successor might be an adult, could be an “attractive” woman, or there might not be one at all. In his recently released book Voice for the Voiceless, he said that the new Dalai Lama will be born “in the free world” and outside of China.

Chinese Spy Cars?

Turns out it wasn’t just spy balloons…

Chinese self-driving cars have quietly traveled 1.8 million miles on U.S. roads, collecting detailed data with cameras and lasers | Fortune:

Since 2017, self-driving cars owned by Chinese companies have traversed 1.8 million miles of California alone, according to a Fortune analysis of the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles data. As part of their basic functionality, these cars capture video of their surroundings and map the state’s roads to within two centimeters of precision. Companies transfer that information from the cars to data centers, where they use it to train their self-driving systems.

AI Video Generators

OpenAI’s Sora is impressive but the amount of text-to-video AI generators we’re seeing released (especially from China) points to a very real moment that we all need to pause and reflect upon. The coming year (I would’ve said the coming 2-3 years back in March) is going to be fascinating, haunting, and challenging all at once…

Introducing Gen-3 Alpha: A New Frontier for Video Generation:

Gen-3 Alpha is the first of an upcoming series of models trained by Runway on a new infrastructure built for large-scale multimodal training. It is a major improvement in fidelity, consistency, and motion over Gen-2, and a step towards building General World Models.

More from Runway’s X account here.

Time to update your Exchange Server

If your company or organization uses Microsoft Exchange for email, you’re going to want to run the latest update…

At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The espionage group is exploiting four newly-discovered flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server email software, and has seeded hundreds of thousands of victim organizations worldwide with tools that give the attackers total, remote control over affected systems.

Source: At Least 30,000 U.S. Organizations Newly Hacked Via Holes in Microsoft’s Email Software — Krebs on Security