Sonatype and Cloud Native Computing Foundation Partner to – GlobeNewswire

Fulton, Md., Oct. 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sonatype, the pioneer of software supply chain management, in partnership with The Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, has announced an inaugural virtual Security Slam event to help improve their projects security posture, while raising $50,000 for its Diversity Scholarship Fund donated by Google.

Security Slam is a virtual event aimed at improving the security posture of all CNCF open source projects. This new event will use CNCFs automated CLOMonitor that measures project security, enabling maintainers and contributors to work together and improve participating projects overall security. Every CNCF project that reaches 100% Security status will win prizes for its top participating maintainers and contributors, including free Linux Foundation courses, gift cards to the CNCF online store, and more.

From our ongoing stewardship of Maven Central to the creation of our free developer solutions like OSS Index, Sonatype has a long history of supporting the open source community, says Brian Fox, co-founder and CTO of Sonatype. We are ecstatic to partner with CNCF and Google on this event to improve CNCF projects security, while raising funds that can help expand our community to include more individuals from historically underrepresented groups.

Additionally, the top overall contributor will win free airfare and hotel to the next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, courtsey of Open Source Travel Fund by Community Classroom. Plus, for every project that achieves 100% Security, Google will donate $2,500 to CNCFs Diversity Scholarship Fund, which helps underrepresented individuals become valuable members of the CNCF community. The event will culminate at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 North America in Detroit, where winners will be announced October 24-26, 2022.

Were thrilled to be putting on this event that will help our projects become even more secure, while garnering the largest donation weve ever received for the CNCF Diversity Scholarship Fund and giving prizes to our valued contributors and maintainers, said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

To learn more about the Security Slam, visit community.cncf.io/cloud-native-security-slam/.

Open source maintainers can sign their project up for participation here, and open source contributors can sign up to participate here.

About SonatypeSonatype is the software supply chain management company. We empower developers and security professionals with intelligent tools to innovate more securely at scale. Our platform addresses every element of an organizations entire software development life cycle, including third-party open source code, first-party source code and containerized code. Sonatype identifies critical security vulnerabilities and code quality issues and reports results directly to developers when they can most effectively fix them. This helps organizations develop consistently high-quality, secure software which fully meets their business needs and those of their end-customers and partners. More than 2,000 organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 100, and 15 million software developers already rely on our tools and guidance to help them deliver and maintain exceptional and secure software.

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Sonatype and Cloud Native Computing Foundation Partner to - GlobeNewswire

How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen … according to Citrix – The Register

Open Source Summit What's the difference between the Citrix Hypervisor and Xen? Well, one has quite a big crowd of upset current and former community members.

One of the more interesting talks at the Open Source Summit was from Jonathan Headland, software development manager at Citrix, with the unusual title "How to Disengage the Open-Source Community: The Citrix Hypervisor Experience." Given all the usual fist-pumping so many companies' marketing teams like to engage in, especially at an event like the Open Source Summit, The Reg FOSS desk was intrigued.

Among other things, these days Citrix offers the Citrix Hypervisor, the product formerly known as XenServer, which it has owned since it acquired XenSource in 2007. The focus of Headland's talk [PDF] was how Citrix mismanaged the relationships between its commercial version of XenServer, the free open source version, and both its upstream and its user community. His opening line was:

He went on to carefully itemize the mistakes the company made, and the four lessons he suggests for others to avoid doing the same.

Citrix originally offered XenServer under the "freemium" model: one product was free, the other commercial for enterprise users. Only paying customers received maintenance. The model was successful, and the revenue funded a full-time team of eight engineers and a community manager who worked on the upstream project.

According to Headland, Citrix's first significant misstep was in 2011, when it decided to open source the full feature set of the enterprise product, with revenue to be made from support. The goal, he said, was to get more community buy-in, but the company learned some tough lessons: "We had a very poor understanding of our customers and what they'd actually pay for. Customers happily took the new features, but it turned out that they weren't so keen to pay for the maintenance."

The result was crashes: in revenue, in the reputations of the people who made the decisions, and in that of open source itself within the company.

Another problem was that when Citrix gave away the source code to the enterprise product, it didn't provide the accompanying tooling. "Even if we had remembered, or thought, to make all these tools available, we'd still have needed to teach people how to use them."

The result was disappointing Xen enthusiasts, and "rather than increasing contributions, it inhibited them."

In 2017, in "an atmosphere of mistrust of open source projects, and with the feeling that many of its customers were free-riding and not making any contributions," the company announced a change of direction. Product management reintroduced limits, cutting or reducing the features available for free, some to lower than the free product had back in 2010. For example, the number of hosts in a server cluster went from 64 down to just three.

However, this hit one particular sub-community of free users that one engineer Headland interviewed called the "weird systems users": hobbyists who offer virtualization to non-profit and charity users, using old, out-of-maintenance hardware that had been inherited or passed on to them. Enthusiast users, with no funds to buy licenses, but who had been among the most important finders and fixers of bugs. Unable to use the free version any more, they were forced to move to other products or create them.

The result was a whole new product: XCP-ng. "We did regain revenue from our paying customers, the big ones, the enterprises who were never going to make contributions but we lost the ones who were keeping the project alive."

Headland's talk ended with some confessions, and the four lessons he felt were the most important things for any company selling products based on open source.

He said that Citrix misunderstood and underestimated the breadth and richness of the community, and the number and types of stakeholders in it. That it hadn't identified the most important members, and didn't do enough to support even the ones it did know about. It also never thought about working with the other "commercial peer contributors to Xen: Red Hat, Oracle, SUSE, and Amazon, to name a few."

His takeaways?

It is both fascinating and wonderful to see such openness and honesty from any commercial entity. Even before Citrix changed its name, Xen wasn't the most well-known commercial hypervisor that's always been VMware, the company that pretty much created the industry. But as the references to Amazon and EC2 hint, Xen has some very big users and is a more important competitor in the space than you might think.

Whether Citrix's candor is going to win it more trust is uncertain, but it's an astonishingly big olive branch, and we applaud it.

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How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix - The Register

Red Hat CEO on OpenShift roadmap, competitive play – ComputerWeekly.com

Red Hat, the open source juggernaut known for its enterprise-grade Linux distribution and OpenShift container application platform in more recent years, undertook a leadership change in July 2022, when it appointed Matt Hicks as president and CEO.

Hicks, who previously served as Red Hats executive vice-president of products and technologies, took over the top job from Paul Cormier, who will serve as chairman of the company.

In a wide-ranging interview with Computer Weekly in Asia-Pacific (APAC), the newly minted CEO said he hopes to continue building on Red Hats core open source model and tap new opportunities in edge computing with OpenShift as the underlying technology platform.

Having taken over as Red Hat CEO recently, could you tell us more about how youd like to take the company forward?

Hicks: Ive been at Red Hat for a long time, and what drew me to Red Hat was its core open source model, which is very unique and empowering. I distil it down to two fundamental things. One, we genuinely want to innovate and evolve on the shoulders of giants because there are thousands of creative minds across the world who are building and contributing to the products that we refine.

The second piece is that customers also have access to the code, and they understand what were doing. They can see our roadmaps, and our ability to innovate and co-create with them is unique. Those two things go back a long time and make us special. For me, thats the core mentality we want to hold on to at Red Hat because thats what differentiates us in the industry.

In terms of where we want to go with that open source model, weve talked about the open hybrid cloud for quite a while because we think customers are going to get the best in terms of being able to run what they have today, as well as where they want to be tomorrow. We want to help customers be productive in cloud and on-premise, and use the best that those environments offer, whether its from regional providers, hyperscalers, as well as specialised hardware. We see hybrid cloud as a huge, trillion-dollar opportunity, with just 25% of workloads having moved to the cloud today.

Potentially, there are more exciting opportunities with the extension to edge. Were seeing this accelerate with technologies such as 5G, where you still need to have computing reach and move workloads closer to users while pushing technologies like AI [artificial intelligence] at the point of interaction with users.

So, its going from the on-premise excellence we have today, extending that reach into public cloud and eventually into edge use cases. Thats Red Hats three- to five-year challenge, and an opportunity we are addressing with the same strategy of open source-based innovation that weve had in the past.

Were involved in practically every SBOM effort at this point, but when we make that final choice, we want to make sure its the most applicable choice at the time Matt Hicks, Red Hat

Against the backdrop of what youve just described, what is your outlook for APAC, given that the region is very diverse with varying maturities in adopting cloud and open-source technologies?

Hicks: If we look at APAC as a market, I think the core fundamentals of using software to drive digital transformation and innovation is key, and that could be for a lot of reasons. It could be controlling costs due to inflation. It could be tighter labour markets, where we need to drive automation. It could be adjusting to the Covid-19 situation where you might not be able to access workers. And I think for all of these reasons, weve seen the drive to software innovation in APAC, similar to the other markets.

DBS Bank is a good example in Singapore. They pride themselves in driving innovation and by using OpenShift and adopting open source and cloud technologies, they were able to cut operating costs by about 80%. But they are not just trying to cut costs, they also want to push innovation and I think thats very similar to other customers we have across the globe.

Kasikorn Business Technology Group in Thailand has a very similar approach, where theyre using technologies such as OpenShift to cut development times from a month to two weeks while increasing scale. Another example is Tsingtao Alana, which is using Ansible to drive network automation and improve efficiencies.

Like other regions, the core theme of using software innovation and getting more comfortable with open source and leveraging cloud technologies is similar in APAC. But one area where we might see an acceleration in APAC more so than in the US is the push to edge technologies driven by the innovation from telcos.

You spoke a lot about OpenShift, which has been a priority for Red Hat for a number of years. Moving forward, whats the balance in priorities between OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which Red Hat is known for among many companies in APAC?

Hicks: Its a great question, and heres how I tend to explain that to customers that are new to the balance between OpenShift and RHEL.

The core innovation capability that RHEL provides on a single server is still the foundation that we build on. Its done really well for decades, for being able to provide that link to open source innovation in the operating system space. I call it the Rosetta Stone between development and hardware and being able to get the most out of that is what we aspire to do with RHEL.

That said, if you look at what modern applications need and Ive been in this space for more than 20 years they far exceed the resources of a single computer today. And in many cases, they far exceed the resources of a dozen, 100 or 1,000 computers. OpenShift is like going from a single bee to a swarm of bees, which gives you all the innovation in RHEL and lets you operate hundreds or thousands of those machines as a single unit so you can build a new class of applications.

RHEL is part and parcel of OpenShift, but its not a single-server model anymore. Its that distributed computing model. For me, thats exciting because I started my open source journey with Linux and then with RHEL when I was in consulting. Since then, the power of RHEL has expanded across datacentres and helps you drive some incredible innovation. Thats why the pull to OpenShift doesnt really change our investment footprint as RHEL offers a great model to leverage all of those servers more efficiently.

Could you dive deeper into the product roadmap for OpenShift? Over the years, OpenShift has been building up more capabilities, including software as a service (SaaS) for data science, for example. Are we expecting more SaaS applications in the future?

Hicks: When we think about OpenShift, or platforms in general, we try to focus on the types of workloads that customers are using with them and how we can help make that work easier.

One of the popular trends is AI-based workloads, and that comes down to the training aspects of it, which requires capabilities like GPU rather than CPU acceleration. Being able to take trained models and incorporate them into traditional development are things that companies struggle with. So, the way to get your Nvidia GPUs to work with your stack, and then get your data scientists and developers working together, is our goal with OpenShift Data Science.

We know hardware enablement, we have a great platform to leverage both training and deployment, and we know developers and data scientists, so that MLOps space is a very natural fit. What you will see more from us in the portfolio is what we call the operating model, where for decades, the prevalent model in the industry was having customers run their own software supplied and supported by us.

The public cloud has changed some of the expectations around that. While theres still going to be a ton of software run by customers, they are also increasingly leveraging managed platforms and cloud services. Once we know the workloads that we need to get to, we will try to offer that in multiple models where customers can run the software themselves if they have a unique use case.

But at the same time, we want to improve our ability to run that software for them. One area where youll see a lot of innovation is managed services, in addition to the software and edge components.

We at Red Hat, along with IBM, have put our bet on containers. VMware, I think, has tried or was sort of a late entrant to that party around Tanzu. For us, our core is innovation in Linux which is an extension to containers Matt Hicks, Red Hat

If you look at telcos, for example, they run big datacentres with lots of layers in between where the technology stack gets smaller and smaller. They also have embedded devices, which may have RHEL on them even if they are running containers. In the middle, were seeing a pull for OpenShift to get smaller and smaller. You can think of it as the telephone pole use case for 5G, or maybe its closer to the metropolitan base station that runs MicroShift, a flavour of OpenShift optimised for the device edge.

That ability to run OpenShift on lightweight hardware is key as edge devices dont have the same power and compute capabilities of a datacentre. So, those areas, coupled with specific use cases like AI or distributed networking based applications, is where youll see a lot of the innovation around OpenShift.

Red Hat has done some security work in OpenShift to support DevSecOps processes. I understand that currently there isnt any kind of software bill of materials (SBOM) capabilities that are embedded in OpenShift. What are your thoughts around that?

Hicks: If we picked one of the most important security trends that we try to cater to, it is understanding your supply chain and being confident in the security of it. Arguably, this is what we do we take open source, where you might not have that understanding of its provenance or the expertise to understand it, and add a layer of provenance so you know where its coming from.

I would argue that for the past 20 years, whether it was the driving decision or not, you are subscribing to security in your supply chain if you are a Red Hat customer. And were excited about efforts around how you build that bill of materials when youre not only running Red Hat software but also combining Red Hat software with other things.

There are a few different approaches, and this is always Red Hats challenge: when we make a bet, we have to stick with it for a while. Were involved in practically every SBOM effort at this point, but when we make that final choice, we want to make sure its the most applicable choice at the time.

So, while we havent pulled the trigger on a single approach or said what we will support, the core foundation behind SBOM is absolutely critical and we invest a lot there. Were excited about this, and honestly, before the SolarWinds incident, this was an area that was overlooked as a risk to consuming software that you dont understand.

With open source continuing to drive innovation, I think its critical for customers to understand where theyre getting that open source code from, whether its tied to suppliers or whether theyre responsible for understanding it themselves. But we havent made that final call on the SBOM format to support right now. I fully expect, in the next year or so, that we start to converge as an industry on a couple of approaches.

What are your thoughts on the competitive landscape, particularly around VMware with its Tanzu Application Platform?

Higgs: Its really about the choice on the right technology architecture to get the most out of hybrid cloud. About a year ago, most customers were drawn to a single public cloud and that trend was certainly strong, at least in the US and Europe, for a variety of reasons.

I think enterprises have realised that they might still have that desire, but its not practical for them. Theyre going to end up in multiple public clouds, maybe through acquisition or geopolitical challenges. And your on-premise environments, whether its mainframe technology or others, are not going away quickly. The need for hybrid has therefore become much more recognised today than it was even a year or two ago.

The second piece on that is, what is the technology platform that enterprises are going to leverage to build and structure their application footprint for hybrid? VMware certainly has their traditional investment in virtualisation and the topology around that.

We at Red Hat, along with IBM, have put our bet on containers. VMware, I think, has tried or was sort of a late entrant to that party around Tanzu. For us, our core is innovation in Linux which is an extension to containers. Were pretty comfortable with that and we see a lot of traction because all the hyperscalers have adopted that model.

Personally, I think we have a great position on a technology that lets customers leverage public clouds natively and get the most out of their on-premise environments. I dont know if virtualisation will have that same reach and flexibility of being able to run on the International Space Station, as well as power DBS Banks financial transactions as containers do.

VMware, I think, will be more drawn to their core strength in virtualisation, but we still have 75% of workloads remaining that have yet to move so well see how that really shakes out. But Im pretty comfortable with the containers and OpenShift bet on our side.

Red Hat has a strategic partnership with Nutanix to deliver open hybrid cloud offerings. In light of the uncertainty around Broadcoms acquisition of VMware, are you seeing more interest from VMware customers?

Hicks: Acquisitions are tricky and its hard to predict the outcome of an acquisition like that. What I would say is that we partner pretty deeply with VMware today as virtualisation still provides a good operating model for containers. I would expect us to partner with VMware as part of Broadcom.

That said, theres a bit of uncertainty in an area like this, and it does create a decision point around architecture. Were neutral to that because for us, if customers choose to stay on that core vSphere base, we will continue to serve them, even if containers are their technology going forward.

We also partner closely with companies like Nutanix, which will compete at that core layer. For us, we really run on the infrastructure tier, and we want to let customers run applications whether they are on Nutanix, vSphere or Amazon EC2.

We dont really care too much where that substrate lies. We want to make sure we serve customers at that decision point, and I think we have a lot of options to deliver to customers regardless of how the acquisition ends or how the landscape changes with other partners.

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Red Hat CEO on OpenShift roadmap, competitive play - ComputerWeekly.com

[Interview] Next Generation Connected Experiences: Experts Share the Story Behind Tizen’s 10 Year Development – Samsung

On October 12, Samsung Electronics will host the Samsung Developer Conference 2022 (SDC 2022) in the U.S. Through this years SDC, Samsung will showcase its latest updates that seek to create even smarter user experiences by intuitively and organically connecting various devices. By providing upgraded, next-generation connected experiences, the role of the operating system (OS) has become even more important.

Samsung recognized the importance of OS early on and subsequently began research and development. In April of 2012, Samsung unveiled the first version of Tizen, a Linux-based open-source platform. 10 years later, at this years SDC, Samsung will unveil its new vision for Tizen 7.0.

The team behind the research and development of Tizen OS at Samsung Research: VP Jinmin Chung, Head of the Platform Team (center), and researchers Seonah Moon of the MDE Lab (left) and Jin Yoon of the Tizen Platform Lab (right)

Since the first version of Tizen was released, much time has passed and Tizen has evolved in a variety of ways. To learn the details behind the development of Tizen, Samsung Newsroom met with Samsung Researchs Vice President Jinmin Chung and researchers Jin Yoon and Seonah Moon, who have been working on Tizen since the beginning.

Tizen is a Linux-based open-source platform led by Samsung and it also supports all types of smart devices. With the aim of being utilized in various types of Samsung products to support smooth product operation, Tizen has been equipped in about 330 million smart devices as of the end of 2021.

We needed Tizen to differentiate Samsungs devices from others and to provide a different service and user experience, VP Chung said. Its already been 10 years since Tizen was first developed. We experienced challenges in the initial development stage, but we felt supported by the people who believed in the possibility and usability of Tizen and rooted for us. We focused on the research proudly knowing that we were leading Samsungs own independent OS development project, he added.

In 2014, for the first time, Tizen was equipped in Samsungs Gear 2, a wearable device, proving its viability through its commercialization. Furthermore, a year later, Tizen was used in the 2015 Samsung Smart TV product line up that set a new bar of smart TVs.

Tizen has many advantages that enable it to offer the highest performance across Samsungs devices. First, Tizens flexibility allows it to be easily applied to a variety of smart devices. In order to make this possible, Tizen went through multiple platform improvement processes. Several profiles were established based on the different types of products. Then, Tizen Common, which is the common module for all products, and the Specialized Module, which is needed for certain products only, were created. The structure is designed in a way that allows the platform to be quickly modified and applied to new products as well. This enables Tizen to be utilized in a wide range of products, including smart TVs, refrigerators and air conditioners.

Additionally, Samsung utilized its advanced know-how and experience in commercializing embedded system software when developing Tizen. The Tizen platform is optimized to perform well while using minimal memory and low power. Its an open-source platform that can be used by anyone, and it supports optimized performance for immediate commercialization.

Tizen is also convenient for new product development because it is Samsungs own independent OS. The platform can be modified as desired to add new features and services to products in a timely manner.

Across the world, only a handful of companies own their own independent OS, Chung said. The fact that Samsung has its own OS called Tizen means that Samsung has become a company proficient in developing not only hardware but software as well, he emphasized.

Many developers put much effort into the development and evolution of Tizen.

Researcher Jin Yoon has been participating in the Tizen project since its early stages, meaning he has witnessed the growth of Tizen firsthand. Starting with Smart TVs, the applications for Tizen are gradually increasing, and the system is evolving and advancing further, Yoon said. In addition, the implementation of a new development language, framework and infrastructure makes development more convenient and increases the productivity of developers. Now, were working hard to secure usability that is appropriate for each product group that uses Tizen, he continued.

The code sources of Tizen are very stable because theyve gone through actual commercialization. On top of that, they come with performance-specific details and security as well. This means third party developers can trust and find these sources, Yoon said.

Expanding the application of Tizen to more devices and creating an ecosystem for Tizen is important for improving the usability of a product, but active participation in open-source communities is also crucial. This is because open-source communities enable community members to share problems and come up with solutions together, directly contributing to the improvement of software. In order to manage this, Seonah Moon from the MDE Lab, whos been developing Tizen for eight years, is responsible for tasks involving open-source maintenance. Countless open sources were also used for Tizens development. Moon monitors each open source, analyzes its errors and shares her opinion on them to help outside developers access Tizen more easily.

Tizen is more than just an OS for Samsungs developers and researchers.

Since the platforms development requires constant maintenance, this means developers must continue to hone their skills. Tizen motivated each member of the development team to continue learning and improving their software skills. The developers of Tizen have grown into experts specializing in different areas. Since the teams initial start, they have grown to accumulate many platform codes over the last 10 years. They also constantly learned by voluntarily participating in study group meetings.

Tizen is like a bridge that connects all of Samsungs products together, Moon said. Cooperation among business divisions is a must for utilizing the OS in different products. Through this cooperation, we can share our development knowledge with one another and also create a new service based on our OS, Moon continued.

Tizen has continued to evolve to allow all devices around us, including wearables, TVs, refrigerators and even robot vacuum cleaners, to provide new user experiences. When asked about what the future of Tizen will look like, the developers explained their ambitions to continue connecting devices using Tizen.

Were now living in an era where everything is connected to one another through the Internet of Things (IoT), said Yoon. By increasing the productivity of Tizen app development, Id like to provide an innovative user experience where all Samsung products are connected to one another, creating an interconnected product ecosystem, he explained.

Id like to lead the efforts in expanding Tizens use in a variety of ways by discovering new scenarios and utilizing even more advanced technologies, said Moon when explaining her ambitions. By growing together with Tizen, Id like to become the maintainer or the key contributor to the open-source project, she continued.

I dream of a future in which Tizen is equipped in all the devices that people use in their daily lives, enabling various devices to operate organically as if theyre one and providing intelligent services, like the metaverse, Chung said. To enable this, Samsung Research is developing various technologies with many teams in order to manifest a future in which various Tizen devices are all connected through the OS, providing a Multi-Device Experience (MDE), modular AI and more.

The infinite possibilities of Tizen will be showcased at SDC 2022 this year. At the conference, Samsung Research will share how easy it is to make new devices based on the flexibility of Tizen 7.0, and how the new version of Tizen can strengthen intelligent services. As it continues to evolve in line with the era of hyper-connectivity and intelligence, the future of Tizen is bright and its applications are limitless.

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[Interview] Next Generation Connected Experiences: Experts Share the Story Behind Tizen's 10 Year Development - Samsung

First Hand analysis: a good open source demo for hand-based interactions – The Ghost Howls

I finally managed (with some delay) to find the time to try First Hand, Metas opensource demo of the Interaction SDK , which shows how to properly develop hand-tracked applications. Ive tested it for you, and I want to tell you my opinions about it, both as a user and as a developer.

First Hand is a small application that Meta has developed and released on App Lab. It is not a commercial app, but an experience developed as a showcase of the Interaction SDK inside the Presence Platform of Meta Quest 2.

It is called First Hand because it has been roughly inspired by Oculus First Contact, the showcase demo for Oculus Touch controller released for the Rift CV1. Actually, it is just a very vague inspiration, because the experiences are totally different, and the only similarity is the presence of a cute robot.

The experience is open source, so developers wanting to implement hand-based interactions in their applications can literally copy-paste the source code from this sample.

Here follows my opinion on this application.

As a user, Ive found First Hand a cute and relaxing experience. There is no plot, no challenge, nothing to worry about. I just had to use my bare hand and interact with objects in a natural and satisfying way. The only problem for me is that it was really short: in 10 minutes, it was already finished.

I expected a clone of the Oculus First Contact experience that made me discover the wonders of Oculus Touch controllers, but actually, it was a totally different experience. The only similarities are the presence of a cute little robot and of some targets to shoot. This makes sense considering that controllers shine with different kinds of interactions than the bare hands, so the applications must be different. Anyway, the purpose and the positive mood were similar, and this is enough to justify the similar name.

As Ive said, in First Hand there is not a real plot. You find yourself in a clock tower, and a package gets delivered to you. Inside there are some gloves (which are a mix between Alyxs and Thanoss ones) which you can assemble and then use to play a minigame with a robot. Over.

What is important here is not the plot, but the interactions that you perform in the application in a natural way using just your bare hands. And some of them are really cool, like for instance:

There were many other interactions, with some of them being simple but very natural and well made. What is incredible about this demo is that all the interactions are very polished, and designed so that to be ideal for the user.

For instance, pressing buttons just requires tapping on them with the index finger, but the detection is very reliable, and the button never gets trespassed by the fingertips, resulting very well-made and realistic.

The shooting with the palm is very unreliable because you cant take good aim with your palm, so the palm shoots a laser for a few seconds, giving you time to adjust its aim until you shoot the object you want to destroy.

And force-grabbing is smart-enough to work on a cone of vision centered on your palm. When you stretch your palm, the system detects what is the closest object in the area you are aiming at with your hand, and automatically shows you a curved line that goes from your palm to it. This is smart for two reasons:

All the interactions are polished so that to cope with the unreliability of hand tracking. I loved how things were designed, and Im sure that Metas UX designers made very experiments before arriving at this final version. I think the power of this experience as a showcase is given by this polish level, so that developers and designers can take inspiration from this to create their own experiences.

As Ive told you, as a user I found the experience cute and relaxing. But at the same time, I was quite frustrated by hands tracking. I used the experience both with artificial and natural light, and in both scenarios, I had issues with the tracking of my hands, with my hands losing tracking a lot of times. Its very strange, because I found tracking more unreliable than in other experiences like Hand Physics Lab. This made my experience a bit frustrating, because for instance, when I went to grab the first object to take the remote and activate the elevator, lots of times my virtual hand froze when I was close to it, and it took me many tries before being able to actually grab it.

I also noticed more how hand tracking can be imprecise: Meta did a great job in masking its problems by creating a smart UX, but it is true that these smart tricks described above were necessary because hand tracking is still unreliable. Furthermore, not having triggers to press, you have to invent other kinds of interactions to activate objects, which may be more complex. Controllers are much more precise than hands, and so for instance shooting would have been much easier with the controllers, exactly as force grab.

This showed me that hand tracking is not very reliable and cant be the primary controlling method for most VR experiences, yet.

But at the same time, when things worked, performing actions with the hands felt much better. I dont know how to describe it: it is like when using controllers, my brain knows that I have a tool in my hands, while just using my bare hands, it feels more that its truly me making that virtual action. After I assembled the Thanos gloves, I watched my hands with them on, and I had this weird sensation that those gloves were on my real hands. It never happened to me with controllers. Other interactions were satisfying to me, like for instance scrolling the Minority Report screen, or force grabbing. Force Grabbing is really well implemented here, and it felt very fun to do. All of this showed me that hand tracking may be unreliable, but when it works, it gives you a totally different level of immersion than controllers. For sure in the future hand tracking will be very important for XR experiences, especially the ones that dont require you to have tools in your hands (e.g. a gun in FPS games).

Since the experience is just 10 minutes long, I suggest everyone give it a try on App Lab, so that to understand better these sensations I am talking about.

The Unity project of First Hand is available inside this GitHub repo. If you are an Unreal Engine guy, well Im sorry for you.

The project is very well organized inside folders, and also the scene has a very tidy tree of gameobjects. This is clearly a project made with production quality, something that doesnt surprise me because this is a common characteristic of all samples released by Meta.

Since the Interaction SDK can be quite tricky, my suggestion is to read its documentation first, and only after check out the sample. Or to have a look at the sample while reading the documentation. Because there are some parts that just by looking at the sample are not easily understandable.

Since the demo is full of many different interactions, it is possible in the sample to have the source code of all of them, and this is very precious if you, as a developer, want to create a hand-tracked application. You just copy a few prefabs, and you can use them in your experience. Kudos to Meta for having made this material available to the community.

Ive not used the Interaction SDK in one of my projects yet, so this sample was a good occasion for me to see how easy it is to implement it.

My impression is that the Interaction SDK is very modular and very powerful, but also not that easy to be employed. For instance, if you want to generate a cube every time the user does a thumb up with any of his hands, you have to:

As you can see, the structure is very tidy and modular, but it is also quite heavy. Creating a UI button that when you point-and-click with the controllers generates the cube is much easier. And talking about buttons, to have those fancy buttons you can poke with your fingertip, you require various scripts and various child gameobjects, too. The structure is very flexible and customizable, but it seems also quite complicated to master.

For this reason, it is very good that there is a sample that gives developer prefabs ready out-of-the-box that could be copied and pasted, because I guess that developing all of this from scratch can be quite frustrating.

The Interaction SDK, which is part of the Presence Platform of the Meta Quest is interesting. But sometimes, I wonder: what is the point of having such a detailed Oculus/Meta SDK, if it works on only one platform? What if someone wants to do a cross-platform experience?

I mean, if I base all my experience on these Oculus classes, and this fantastic SDK with fantastic samples how can I port all of this to Pico? Most likely, I can not. So I have to re-write all the application, maybe managing the two versions in two different branches of a Git repository, with all the management hell that comes out of it.

This is why I usually am not that excited about the updates on the Oculus SDK: I want my applications to be cross-platform and work on the Quest, Pico, and Vive Focus, and committing only to one SDK is a problem. For this reason, Im a big fan of Unity.XR and the Unity XR Interaction Toolkit, even if these tools are much rougher and unriper than Oculus SDK or even the old Steam Unity plugin.

Probably OpenXR may save us, and let us develop something with Oculus SDK and make it run on Pico 4, too. But for now, OpenXR implementation is not very polished in Unity, yet, so developers have still to choose if going for only one platform with a very powerful SDK, or going cross-platform with rougher tools or using 3rd-parties plugins, like for instance AutoHand, which works well in giving physics-based interactions in Unity. I hope the situation will improve in the future.

I hope you liked this deep dive in First Hand, and if it is the case, please subscribe to my newsletter and share this post on your social media channels!

(Header image by Meta)

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First Hand analysis: a good open source demo for hand-based interactions - The Ghost Howls

How the blockchain helps a whisky and rum producer protect his brand – Fortune

Standing in a vineyard in the Alsace region of France, after the three-day-long Whisky Live Paris conference, longtime master distiller Mark Reynier wanted to discuss something else: the blockchain.

Although combining the age-old craft of distilling with such comparatively nascent technology may seem odd to some, Reynier, the CEO and founder of Waterford Whisky Distillery and of Renegade Rum Distillery, is no stranger to unconventional ideas.

Well known in the industry for helping revive the shuttered Bruichladdich Distillery, located on the isle of Islay in Scotland, Reynier helped pioneer applying the concept of terroiror teireoir, the term the company trademarked that includes the Irish Gaelic word for Irelandto whisky.

Terroir has been used in wine production for a millennia, with winemakers obsessing over environmental factors like microclimate, soil, and topography interacting together to create a wines flavor profile. But the practice typically hadnt been applied to whiskey or rum, which are mostly mass produced by large corporations like Paris-based Pernod Ricard, which controls 80% of the global Irish whiskey market.

Using terroir to produce alcohol means rejecting the homogenization of industrial distillation or industrial manufacture, and extolling the virtues of going au naturel, Reynier told Fortune.

Through a proprietary blockchain-enabled system called ProTrace that validates their record-keeping system for manufacturing, Waterford and Renegade Rum are proving the effectiveness of terroir for spirits and presenting the details in digital form, tracking and compiling every step of the growing and distilling process. Cian Dirrane, the group head of technology for both distilleries, said he worked with his team to create ProTrace as a custom blockchain after researching open source code on GitHub, and it was implemented it in 2019.

On the back of every bottle of whisky or rum distilled by Reyniers companies is a nine-digit code that customers can enter online to reveal myriad details. Although the company could have used another technology or system to accomplish the same goal, Dirrane said using the blockchain ensures the recorded data cant be changed.

Its not just marketing bullshit, Reynier added. Its a validation, as well as a proof of concept.

For one such bottle of whisky from Waterford Distillery, part of a bottling of 21,000, the company reported the names of the growers and when they harvested the grain, when the product was distilled and bottled, and how long the bottles contents had matureddown to the day.

To make the data more visual, along with the processing information collected by Waterfords blockchain system, each bottles unique report includes a map with the location of the farm where the barley was grown, a video of the field and the farmers, and ambient sounds.

Its really a counter to the nonsense thats spouted around the world by different sales guys and brand owners or whatever, Reynier said. Our process is so specific. And because were small guys in a world of multinational companies, I have to be able to verify what I say.

The blockchain verification involves more than 800 validation points spanning from when the grain is received by the distillery to the end of distillation when the spirit is put in casks, according to Dirrane. These validation points include the amount of malt brought to the distillery by trucks and the temperatures reached when the fermented liquid is heated into vapor and condensed back into a liquid.

Every data point is validated and logged on the digital ledger, which cant be tampered with, Dirrane said.

The whole productionfrom the raw product intake to the distillation process to the casting and agingand then the finished product is all on the blockchain, Dirrane said. If anybody wants to validate externally, they can see all the processes that happened.

Those processes do add to production costs. A typical bottle of whisky from Waterford Distillery may cost $80 to $120, whereas a bottle of Jameson, a well-known Irish whisky brand produced by Pernod Ricard, may retail for just $25. Renegade Rums first mature bottling will be released by the end of the month, and one of the first bottles will likely cost about $55, compared with a $20 price tag on a bottle of Captain Morgan from London-based Diageo.

But Waterford Distillery and Renegade Rum could soon have some company. Dirrane and his team, instead of keeping the tech to themselves, have written a white paper and are planning to make the code and ledger open source, and publish it online next year. Dirrane said that in addition to Reyniers commitment to transparency, as a software engineer, hes eager to see the program reviewed by peers.

Public or not, the blockchain has been essential for Reynier in an industry sometimes known for obfuscation.

This is taking on a completely Wild West drink sector, Reynier said, and trying to establish and verify my way of doing it so everybody can see the traceability and the transparency.

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How the blockchain helps a whisky and rum producer protect his brand - Fortune

Google Chrome is the most vulnerable browser in 2022 – General Discussion Discussions on AppleInsider Forums – AppleInsider

New data reveals that Google Chrome users need to be careful when browsing the web, but Safari users don't get off scot-free.

According to a report by Atlas VPN on Wednesday, Google Chrome is the most vulnerable browser on the market. So far, in 2022, the browser had 303 vulnerabilities, totaling 3,159 cumulative vulnerabilities.

These figures are based on data from the VulDB vulnerability database, covering Janurary 1, 2022 to October 5, 2022.

Google Chrome is the only browser with new vulnerabilities in the five days in October. Recent ones include CVE-2022-3318, CVE-2022-3314, CVE-2022-3311, CVE-2022-3309, and CVE-2022-3307.

The CVE program tracks security flaws and vulnerabilities across multiple platforms. The database doesn't list details for these flaws yet, but Atlas VPN says they can lead to memory corruption on a computer.

Users can fix these by updating to Google Chrome version 106.0.5249.61.

Mozilla's Firefox browser is in second place for vulnerabilities, with 117 of them. Microsoft Edge had 103 vulnerabilities as of October 5, 61% more than the entire year of 2021. Overall, it has had 806 vulnerabilities since its release.

Next is Safari, which has some of the lowest levels of vulnerabilities. For example, in the first three quarters of 2022, it had 26 vulnerabilities, and its number for cumulative vulnerabilities 1,139 since its release.

Meanwhile, the Opera browser had no documented vulnerabilities so far in 2022 and only 344 total vulnerabilities.

Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Opera all share the Chromium browser engine. Vulnerabilities in Chromium may affect all three browsers.

The Chromium open-source project generates the source code used by all Chromium-based browsers. Not all flaws will affect all of these browsers because each company creates their browsers in different ways.

As of May 2022, Safari reached over a billion users, and Apple has been working hard to make sure its browser is secure and safe to use.

To stay safe on the web, people should keep their browsers updated to the latest version. Be careful when downloading plug-ins and extensions, especially from lesser-known sources or developers.

Read on AppleInsider

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Google Chrome is the most vulnerable browser in 2022 - General Discussion Discussions on AppleInsider Forums - AppleInsider

WikiLeaks Damage Lives On: The Case of Marafa Hamidou Yaya – The Foreign Service Journal

Speaking Out

BY NIELS MARQUARDT

The U.K. government decision in June to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to face prosecution for crimes related to the release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of stolen confidential U.S. government documents brings him one step closer to justice. No doubt he will appeal that decision, but I deeply hope that he will lose again and soon find himself facing justice before an American court.

Only then will the world see and, perhaps, fully understand the enormous damage his crimes inflicted on innocent friends and allies around the globe. This may also give the lie to the remarkably widely held fiction that Assanges crimes had no victims and that his actions were somehow brave, harmless, or even worthy of admiration.

It is high time to start pushing back forcefully on the deeply mistaken notion that actions by Assange, perceived by many to be a sort of modern-day Robin Hood, advanced press freedom or brought welcome transparency to the workings of government. They did not. Instead, they illegally undermined the necessarily confidential basis of information sharing that makes diplomacy possible and advances Americas global interests in the process.

I write this column as a retired American diplomat whose normal embassy reporting, like that of many colleagues, was compromised by Assanges indiscriminate release of that infamous cache of stolen documents more than a decade ago. No one seems able to say how many people, including many of Americas close friends, were damaged worldwide by the WikiLeaks release.

But I know well of at least one case, where a good man has now spent more than a decade in prison for alleged crimes never proven in court. This happened in Cameroon, where I served as U.S. ambassador from 2004 to 2007.

There, shortly after the WikiLeaks release, Kansas University graduate Marafa Hamidou Yaya was jailed and subjected to a short kangaroo court proceeding that resulted in a 25-year prison sentence on entirely unproven corruption charges.

Before his arrest, Mr. Marafa had served in various high-level ministerial positions in Cameroon, including as secretary-general of the presidency, arguably the nations second-most powerful post. Our embassy, then led by Ambassador Robert Jackson, witnessed his trial and denounced it as the farce it was; no evidence was presented, yet he was found guilty on all charges.

Since then, the State Departments annual Human Rights Report to Congress has listed Mr. Marafa as a political prisoner in Cameroon. He is jailed in a military prison in a damp cell with no daylight. After his arrest, his loyal secretary of 20 years was savagely assassinated in her home, and his wife died without having a chance to visit her husband even once.

The United Nations has formally declared Mr. Marafas detention arbitrary and demanded his immediate release and compensation for the damages he has suffered. He has petitioned repeatedly for his own release on health-related grounds, and many outsiders have also weighed in on his behalf.

I and seven other former U.S. ambassadors to Cameroon have written to successive U.S. administrations for assistance in seeking Mr. Marafas release, so far without effect. Ambassadors (ret.) Frances Cook, Harriet Isom, Charles Twining, John Yates, George Staples, Janet Garvey, and Robert Jackson all know and respect him and have joined me in formally demanding his release. The Biden administration is fully aware of this situation but, to my knowledge, has not taken any strong action to secure Mr. Marafas release.

Because Mr. Marafas health has deteriorated significantly during his decade-plus in prison, the case for his release is ever more urgent. Now in old age, he survived COVID-19 (unvaccinated) while in detention last year. He has gone almost completely blind, suffers from a serious heart condition, and desperately needs medical treatment unavailable in Cameroon.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has written many times lately, requesting the government of Cameroon to provide Mr. Marafa with immediate access to the adequate and specialised medical care that may be required to preserve his sight. So far, this call has not been heeded. Mr. Marafa has repeatedly said that he would be willing to go into exile abroad to obtain that treatment, implicitly abandoning any future political role at home.

While Mr. Marafa was accused of corruption, his only real crime was having told me, in confidence in 2006, that he might be interested in seeking Cameroons presidency one day, if ever the incumbent president, Paul Biya, were to leave office. My political section, then ably headed by current Ottawa Deputy Chief of Mission Katherine Brucker, naturally reported his comment in a periodic piece speculating on succession scenarios in a post-Biya era.

Once that cable to Washington was released by WikiLeaks in 2010, Mr. Marafas revelation immediately became frontpage news in Cameroon. This led directly to his arrest, and then to a classic show trial the following year. In Cameroon, where the near-nonagenarian Biya just marked 40 years in power, the whole succession question is sensitive enough that Mr. Marafas otherwise unremarkable comment about possible higher political ambition deeply rattled the countrys delicate tribal and political balance.

Evidently, Biyas coterie of mostly southern, Christian supporters from the Beti tribe felt sufficiently threatened by the prospect of Mr. Marafa becoming president that they decided to sideline him permanently, and manipulated the countrys judicial system to do just that.

Mr. Marafa is a northern Muslim, like the countrys only other president since independence, Ahmadou Ahidjo. After 40 years of political advantage under Biya, little bothers privileged southerners more than the thought of a northerner regaining power.

WikiLeaks happened on the Obama-Biden administrations watch. Many officials in the current administration were serving in senior government positions at the time and remain well aware of Mr. Marafas unjust incarceration. Thus, they should not need reminding of our governments enduring responsibility to protect those harmed by this massive failure to protect confidences shared with us in good faith.

Nonetheless, they have not taken action; nor have they even shown the intellectual curiosity to seek to find out how many other Marafas are out there, across the globe. Indeed, when I invited the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to help gather the facts around this issue, they declined on the basis that WikiLeaks was not an intel issue.

Speaking Out is the Journals opinion forum, a place for lively discussion of issues affecting the U.S. Foreign Service and American diplomacy. The views expressed are those of the author; their publication here does not imply endorsement by the American Foreign Service Association. Responses are welcome; send them to journal@afsa.org.

I continue to believe that basic American decency and a sense of loyalty and fair play compel us to pursue his case, and all others like it, until justice is truly served. Not only is it the right thing to do; it also would demonstrate to our friends and collaborators around the worldincluding many who were sufficiently shaken by WikiLeaks that they pointedly ceased even speaking to American diplomatsthat, even after something as stupidly tragic as WikiLeaks is allowed to occur, America will live up to our responsibilities to friends affected by our mistakes.

Additionally, I fear that the United States is losing the global public opinion battle around WikiLeaks. With Assanges impending extradition and prosecution, now is the time to launch a far stronger effort to explain why this case matters, and why we are taking it so seriously. Specious arguments positing that he is a legitimate journalist standing up for press freedom and transparency sadly resonate with far too many global citizens, few of whom have an inkling of the harm done to Marafa and others like him.

No doubt other friends who confided in the U.S. have met similar or worse fates; who is telling their stories? Absent an enhanced effort to explain why WikiLeaks matters, the U.S. will again appear in global public opinion to be nothing more than an overreaching bully.

But let me also ask: If the WikiLeaks theft and release of government secrets is worth extraditing Assange and pursuing in court over a decade later, shouldnt we demonstrate some real concern for the actual victims of that crime, by taking action to address circumstances like Mr. Marafas?

Meanwhile, Paul Biya rules a wobbly Cameroon in senescence, incompetently repressing a bloody Anglophone secession campaign, watching Boko Haram stream largely unchecked across its borders, and continuing to preside over a well-endowed country that has performed far short of its extraordinary potential under his rule. No one knows what will happen when he finally leaves the scene, but widespread violence is considered by many of us to be a likely element of the coming transition.

What a missed opportunity that the competent, U.S.-educated Mr. Marafa is no longer among the possible solutions to Cameroons coming political drama. However, there is still the possibility of his being released for medical treatment in exile, and thus for him to live out his remaining days in dignity and freedom. We must press for this outcome, making clear that the American government stands by him and recognizes our direct responsibility for his current circumstances.

Here are two things FSJ readers can do to help.

First, please write to your congressional representatives, especially if they sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or House Foreign Affairs Committee, to demand action by the State Department and White House to secure Mr. Marafas release. A strong expression of congressional interest may help the State Department find the missing courage to take this on. (And please free to email me at nielsm@lclark.edu for a template message that can easily be pasted into an email to your senator.)

Second, if any reader has knowledge of other friends of the United States who were negatively affected by WikiLeaks and need our governments attention, please email me that information. I will then share it with States Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which I believe is the appropriate place in our government to compile comprehensive information on the full impact of WikiLeaks. I would hope that this information may then be used by others to strengthen a public affairs strategy to explain why prosecuting Assange is so important.

In my opinion, our governments approach to WikiLeaks over successive administrations has been myopic and inadequate, and our failure to vigorously stand up for its victims for the past decade has bordered on shameful.

It is not too late, however, for us to do far better. For that to happen, more of us need to speak up and demand better. Please help do so.

Niels Marquardt was a Foreign Service officer from 1980 to 2013. He led Secretary of State Colin Powells Diplomatic Readiness Initiative from 2001 to 2004, then served as ambassador to Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Madagascar, and the Comoros. His final assignment was as consul general in Sydney, where he stayed until 2017 as CEO of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia. Ambassador (ret.) Marquardt currently volunteers as diplomat in residence at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

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WikiLeaks Damage Lives On: The Case of Marafa Hamidou Yaya - The Foreign Service Journal

Arundhati Roy on Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: The Dismantling of the World as We Know It – LiveWire

This is the full text of the Stuart Hall Memorial Lecture delivered by the author at the Conway Hall on September 30, 2022.

Thank you for inviting me to speak here today in memory of Stuart Hall.

Weve been trying to make this happen for what seems like years. I will never ever again take for granted the pleasure of being in a room together with so many fellow human beings. The pandemic has faded somewhat, but many of us are still struggling to get the measure of the trauma it has left in its wake. I can hardly believe that I never met Stuart. But reading his work makes me feel we would have spent a lot of time laughing together about things.

The main title of this lecture, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, is the title of a little book I wrote along with the actor John Cusack. It was about a trip that he and I made to Russia in December, 2013 to meet Edward Snowden in Moscow. Our other companion was Daniel Ellsberg for those of you who are too young to remember, he was the Snowden of his time; the whistleblower who made public the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war.

Snowden, who warned us years ago that we were sleepwalking into a surveillance state, continues to live in exile in Moscow. And we have tumbled enthusiastically into the surveillance state he warned about, with our little phone-companions that have become as intimate and as indispensable as any vital organ in our bodies, spying on us, recording and transmitting our most personal information so that we can be tracked, controlled, standardised and domesticated. Not just by the state, but by each other too.

Imagine if your liver, or your gall bladder didnt have your best interests at heart, your doctor would tell you that you are terminally ill. Thats the sort of bind we find ourselves in. We cant do without it, but its doing us in.

The first section of my talk will be about things that can and cannot be said. The second, about the dismantling of the world as we knew it.

This has been a bad year for those who have said and done Things That Cannot Be Said. Or Done. In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed while she was in the custody of Irans moral police for the sin of not wearing her headscarf in the way that is officially mandated. In the protests that followed and are ongoing, several people have been killed.

Meanwhile, in India, in the southern state of Karnataka, Muslim schoolgirls who wanted to assert their identity as Muslim women in their classrooms by wearing hijabs were physically intimidated by right-wing Hindu men. This in a place where Hindus and Muslims have lived together for centuries but have recently become dangerously polarised.

Both instances strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries may appear to be antagonistic, but they arent really. Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isnt about the hijab. Its about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women.

In August, Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked in upstate New York by an Islamist zealot for his book, The Satanic Verses; a book that was first published in 1988. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution and the first leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued an edict calling for Rushdies death. All these years later, just when it had begun to seem that the anger and passions his book aroused had abated and Rushdie gradually came out of hiding, came the attack.

Also read: How Salman Rushdie Has Been a Scapegoat for Complex Historical Differences

After the initial news of the 75-year-old Rushdie having survived the attack and being in good cheer, there is no news at all. One can only hope that he is recovering and will return to the world of literature with all his powers intact. Heads of state in Europe and the US have come out robustly in Rushdies support, some saying, a little self-servingly, His fight is our fight.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange, who published and exposed some of the more terrible war crimes committed by soldiers of those countries, wars in which hundreds of thousands died, is in terrible health and remains locked up in Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US, where he may face a death sentence or several life sentences.

So, we must pause before casting this horrifying attack on Rushdie in cliched terms such as a Clash of Civilisations or Democracy versus Darkness. Because millions have been killed in invasions led by these so-called free-speech evangelists, and among those, millions have been writers, poets and artists, too.

As for the news from India, in June, Nupur Sharma, spokesperson of the BJP, Indias ruling Hindu nationalist party, once a permanent, bullying presence on TV talk shows, made several intemperate comments against Prophet Mohammed in a provocative performance whose very purpose appeared to be to cause offence. There was an international uproar, and several death threats later, she has retreated from public life. But two Hindu men who supported her comments were brutally beheaded. In the days that followed, throngs of Muslim zealots have gathered to chant tan se sar juda (separate the head from the body) and call for the state to pass a blasphemy law. It doesnt seem to occur to them that nothing would make the state happier.

Theyre not the only ones who conflate censorship and assassination. Earlier this month I was in Bangalore to speak on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the assassination of my friend Gauri Lankesh, the journalist who was shot down outside her home by Hindu fanatics. Hers was one in a series of assassinations that appear to be connected to the same shadowy group: Dr Narendra Dabholkar, the physician and well-known rationalist thinker, was shot in 2013; comrade Govind Pansare, a writer and member of the Communist Party of India, was shot in February 2015, and the Kannada scholar professor M.M. Kalburgi in August that same year.

Assassination is of course, not the only form of censorship we experience. In the year 2022, India ranks 150th out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, below Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. We are policed not just by the government, but by mobs on the streets, by social media trolls and, ironically, by the media itself.

On the hundreds of 247 TV news channels we often refer to as Radio Rwanda, our baying TV anchors rage against Muslims and anti-nationals, call for dissenters to be arrested, sacked, punished. They have ruined lives and reputations with absolute impunity and no accountability. Activists, poets, intellectuals, lawyers and students are being arrested almost every day. As for Kashmir the Valley from which No News Can Come it is a giant prison. Soon there could be more soldiers there than citizens.

Also read: Communal Virus Injected into Diaspora, and the Culture is Growing

Every communication by Kashmiris, private as well as public, even the very rhythm of their breathing, is supervised. In schools, under the guise of learning to love Gandhi, Muslim children are being taught to sing Hindu bhajans. When I think of Kashmir these days, for some reason I think of how, in some parts of the world, watermelons are being trained to grow in square moulds so that they are cube-shaped and easier to stack. In the Kashmir valley, it looks as though the Indian government is running that experiment on humans instead of melons. At gun-point.

Down in the Gangetic plains the cow belt of North India, mobs of sword-wielding Hindus led by godmen, who the media for some reason calls seers, call for the genocide of Muslims and the rape of Muslim women with complete impunity.

We have witnessed daylight lynchings, and the genocidal killing of more than a thousand Muslims (non-government figures put that number at closer to two thousand) in Gujarat in 2002 and in hundreds in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in 2013. Not surprisingly, both massacres took place just before crucial elections.

We have watched the man under whose chief ministership the Gujarat massacre took place, Narendra Modi, consolidate his position as Hindu Hriday Samrat (the Emperor of Hindu Hearts) and rise to assume the highest office in the country. He has never expressed regret or apologised for what happened. We have watched him continue to amass political capital from his dangerous, sneering anti-Muslim rhetoric. We have watched the highest court in the land absolve him of all responsibility, legal as well as moral. We have watched, nauseated, as leaders of the so-called Free World embrace him as a statesman and a democrat.

Last month, India celebrated the 75th anniversary of independence from British Rule. From his elevated lectern in the Red Fort in Delhi, Modi thundered about his dream of empowering women in India. He spoke with passion, clenched his fist. He wore a turban flecked with the colours of the national flag.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves at the audience during the 75th Independence Day function at the historic Red Fort, in New Delhi, Sunday, August 15, 2021. (PTI Photo/Kamal Singh) (PTI08_15_2021_000025B)

Empowering women in a society built on the Hindu caste system where privileged-caste men have for centuries exercised what they believe to be their ordained right to the bodies of Dalit and Adivasi women, is not a matter of policy alone. Its about a socialisation, and a belief system.

There is a rising graph of crimes against women in India, putting it on the map of amongst the most unsafe places in the world for women. It surprises no one these days to see how often the criminals belong to or are related to members of the current ruling dispensation. In such cases, we have seen public rallies in favour of rapists. In the most recent case in which a 19-year-old girl was raped and murdered, a local leader blamed her father for spreading raw milk before hungry cats.

Even as Modi was delivering his Independence Day speech, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state of Gujarat announced special amnesty for 11 men who were serving life-sentences for the 2002 gang rape of 19-year-old Bilkis Bano and the murder of 14 members of her family, including her mother, her sisters, her baby brothers, her aunts, her uncle, her cousins, her cousins one-day-old infant, and Saleha, Bilkiss three-year-old daughter, whose head was smashed against a rock.

This grisly crime, only one of several similar ones, was a part of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom I mentioned earlier. The panel that approved their release had several members from the BJP, one of them an elected legislator who went on record later to say that, since some of the convicts were Brahmins with good sanskar (good upbringing), it was unlikely they were guilty at all.

In cases investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation, as this one was, it is legally mandated that any decision to give convicts amnesty has to be approved by the Central government, which is of course the government of Narendra Modi. So, we must assume that that permission was given.

When the convicts came out, they were greeted outside the prison walls as heroes they were garlanded with flowers, fed sweets and had their feet touched by members of Hindu groups loosely affiliated to the BJP (the looseness is to provide what is called plausible deniability) that make up the Sangh Parivar, the Joined Family. In a few months time, Gujarat goes to the polls.

In India, strange things happen just before our free and fair elections. Its always the most dangerous time.

As the rapist-mass murderers return to take their place as respected members of society, Teesta Setalvad, the activist whose organisation, Citizens for Justice and Peace, has meticulously compiled a tower of documentary evidence that points to the complicity of the Gujarat government in general and Narendra Modi in particular with the 2002 massacre, was arrested, accused of forgery, tutoring witnesses and attempting to keep the pot boiling.

These are the conditions in which we live and work. And say the things that cannot be said. In speech, as in everything else, the law is applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. A Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. Solidarity, speaking up for others is more important than ever. But that too has become a perilous activity.

In India as in other countries, the weaponisation of identity, in which identity is disaggregated and atomised into micro-categories, has turned the air itself into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine. Even these micro-identities have developed a power hierarchy. In his book Elite Capture, the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo describes how certain individuals then become elevated from among these groups, individuals usually located in powerful countries, in big cities, in big universities, those with social capital on the internet, and then are given platforms by foundations, by media, by corporations to speak for and decide on behalf of the rest of their communities.

Also read: Even After a Century, Water Is Still the Marker of Indias Caste Society

Its an understandable response to historic pain and humiliation. But its not a revolutionary response. Micro-Elite Capture cannot be the only answer to Macro-Elite Capture. As some empirical research has shown, when we buy into a culture of proscription and censorship, it is the Right that benefits disproportionately. A recent study by PEN America of banned school textbooks shows that the overwhelming majority of proscribed textbooks contain progressive texts on gender and race.

Sealing in communities, reducing and flattening their identities into silos can be perilous and precludes solidarity. Ironically, that was and is the ultimate goal of the caste system in India divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable silos, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another because they are in constant conflict. It works like a self-operating, intricate administrative/surveillance machine in which society administers/surveils itself, and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom (and these categories are minutely graded too) is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.

Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly, almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature. Not Shakespeare, for sure. Not Tolstoy imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karenina. Not Dostoevsky, who only refers to older women as crones. By his standards, Id qualify as a crone for sure. But Id still like people to read him. It goes without saying that by these standards, every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster.

Amidst the apparent noise in public discourse, we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock. Solidarity can never be pristine. It should be challenged, debated, argued about, corrected. By precluding it, we reinforce the very thing we claim to be fighting against.

And now Id like to turn to the subheading of my talk the dismantling of the world as we knew it. Id like to speak a little about queens and their funerals.

When the Queen died, some British newspapers asked me to write a piece about her passing. I was a little puzzled by the request. Perhaps because Ive never lived in England, Queen Elizabeth II barely existed even on the peripheries of my imagination. So, I said sure, but it wont be about the queen that youre thinking about.

The queen I was thinking about was my mother, who founded and ran a high school, who died earlier this month. For good or for bad, she was the most singular, most profound influence in my life. We were dangerous foes and desperately good friends. She was the obstacle race that I structured myself around from the time I was very young. And now that shes gone, and left me not heart-broken, but heart-smashed, my rather odd shape and structure doesnt seem to make sense to me anymore. I was tempted to make this lecture about the politics of two funerals. One on the worlds stage and the other in a small town in South India. But I will resist that temptation.

Perhaps, nows time for me to say the first Thing that Should Not Be Said, at least not here in London, not now.

I couldnt believe the pomp and pageantry and the days of endless television coverage of the rites and rituals of her funeral. I was transfixed by the obsequious, reverential paying of respects by those darker folks who hold high office in her former colonies, now known as the Commonwealth. There was nothing common about that wealth. It was extractive. And it flowed in one direction. We in the colonies paid for those costumes, those furs, those jewels, those gold sceptres.

Theres much to say about colonies and colonialism and the Monarchs who reigned over that barbarous period in history. Who better than Start Hall to tell us that story? But hows this just as a piece of graffiti as the somber cavalry rides past? The historian Mike Davis estimates that in the last quarter of the 19th century, between 30 and 60 million people died of hunger in the mostly man-made famines in colonial India, China and Brazil. He calls it the Great Victorian Holocaust.

Why do we love and admire those who humiliate us? That could be the most pertinent political, as well as personal, question of our times.

I apologise if this sounds like an unnuanced commentary on colonialism. That is not my position. I dont count myself among those Indian intellectuals who rage against colonialism but choose to remain silent about the wrongs in our own societies. The Hindu caste system, for example, is one of the most brutal systems of social hierarchy the world has ever known. Many would call it a form of colonialism that pre-dates British colonialism and is prevalent even today. Caste remains the engine that runs modern India. It is remarkable how many Indian writers and intellectuals manage to completely elide the question of caste. To unsee something that stares us in the face almost every moment of every single day, they have to assume the literary or academic version of a very elaborate, tortuous yoga asana.

All this is the subject of much of my writing, so for now Id like to return to my bemusement about the Queens funeral. What was it really about? Someone please help me out here, because I dont understand.

It cant have been about the passing of a 96-year-old monarch of a small island country, which is having trouble even holding on to the sum of its parts Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Was it only a harking back, a nostalgic invocation, a paean to the ghost of the Empire on which the Sun Never Set? Or was it something more than that? Was it about the past, or is it about the future?

As the war in the Ukraine unfolds and the modern world as we know it comes apart at the seams, was all that pageantry actually a pantomime rally, a posturing, a parading of friends and allies, for a battle that is still to come?

It reminded me of the opening chapter of Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August about the lead up to World War I.

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled sashes flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queensand a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of the Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on historys clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying world of splendour never to be seen again

The dangerous brinkmanship being played out in the Ukraine is being somewhat obscured by the noise of propaganda on both sides. But historys clock could very well be racing towards sunset.

The various points of view on the war also involve some pretty tortuous yoga asanas some pretty drastic seeing and unseeing depending on where you have decided to place yourself. Many on the Left cannot find it in themselves to call out Russias invasion of the Ukraine. They believe that Ukrainian outrage against Russia has been entirely confected and cultivated by Western Imperialism. That the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s never happened. They deny that millions of Ukrainians the historian Timothy Snyder estimates five million died in the famine of the early 1930s under Stalins policy of forced collectivisation.

They see Russias invasion of Ukraine as a defensive war against an existential threat to itself by NATO. Thats not untrue. The fact that Russia does face a very serious threat is hard to deny. The hitch is that that the defensive war is being fought offensively on Ukrainian soil and against the Ukrainian people.

When the Cold War ended, demilitarisation and nuclear disarmament should have begun. Instead, NATO did the opposite. It amassed more weapons, fought more wars and used the territory of its allies and proxies for the aggressive and provocative forward deployment of troops and missiles. If Russia had done through proxies in Europe or the US what NATO is doing to it, there is little doubt that we would be seeing the moral arguments and western media coverage turned inside out.

None of this makes Vladimir Putin a revolutionary anti-imperialist or a democrat of any kind. None of it alters the fact that he believes in an overtly fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-Homosexual, Christian nationalist ideology (which ironically, he calls de-Nazification) propounded by his two favourite ideologues, Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov.

His claim about Ukraine, Crimea and Belarus being inseparable territories that made up Ancient Rus, a theory based on the millennial myth of the Christian baptism of its leader Volodymyr/Valdemar in Crimea in AD 988, has been (correctly) met with hilarity.

But we must ask why then is there less amusement in the same quarters when it comes to talk of Israels treatment of Palestinians and its claims of being the ancient Promised Land for the Jewish people, which translates in modern legalese as the Nation-State of the Jewish people.

Or in India, when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist militia and cultural guild of which Prime Minister Modi is a member, calls for an Akhand Bharat, a sort of fantasy that is futuristic and ancient all at once a future ancient India that includes Pakistan and Bangladesh, which will be conquered and where all its people will be subjected to Hindu rule.

Ordinary people in Europe are gearing up to face the harsh winter that is nearly upon them, with very little or no heating, as Russia, in response to economic sanctions, threatens to shut off their gas supply. As Ukrainians fight on with relentless courage, and the chances of a negotiated settlement fade away, anxiety is building over the possibility of the war expanding and escalating. Putin has announced the partial mobilisation, whatever that means, of 300,000 military reservists. Perhaps for now the US is far away enough and safe enough, but all of Europe, Russia and much of Asia could become the theatre of a war unlike any the world has ever seen. A war in which there cant be a winner.

Isnt it time for everybody to step back? Isnt it time to begin a real conversation about complete nuclear disarmament?

God forbid, Russia resorts to using US logic for turning to nuclear weapons. In an article titled, If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used, published in December 1946, Karl K. Compton, the physicist and former president of MIT, said that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved hundreds of thousands perhaps several millions of lives, both American and Japanese; that without its use the war would have continued for many months. His logic was that the Japanese, even though they had been defeated, would not have surrendered and, if not for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people, they would have fought to the last man standing.

Was the use of the atomic bomb inhuman? Compton asks himself. All war is inhuman, was his reassuring reply (to himself.) It was published in The Atlantic. President Truman wrote in to endorse this argument.

Years later, General William Westmoreland carried that logic a little further during the Vietnam war: The Oriental doesnt put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient. In other words, we Asians dont value our lives and so we force the White world to bear the burden of genocide.

And then theres Robert McNamara, of course, who had a successful career arc, first as the planner of the bombing of Tokyo in 1946, which killed more than 200,000 people in two separate raids, then as the president of Ford Motor Company, next as the US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, in which US soldiers were ordered to Kill Anything That Moves, as a result of which 3 million Vietnamese lost their lives.

McNamaras last job was to take care of world poverty as President of the World Bank. Towards the end of his life, in an Erroll Morris documentary called The Fog of War, he asks an anguished question: How much evil must we do in order to do good?

As you must have gathered, Im a collector of these gems. Lets not forget that President Obama had a Kill List. And that Madeline Albright, who President Joe Biden recently described as a force for goodness, grace, and decency and for freedom, when she was asked about the estimated half-a-million Iraqi children dying because of US economic sanctions, famously said, I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.

Where are we headed? Even those of us who stand squarely with the Ukrainian people against the Russian invasion of their country cannot help but marvel at the difference in tone and tenor of the Western Medias coverage of the war in Ukraine and the breathless admiration with which it covered the US and NATOs invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. This January, Tony Blair, the most passionate purveyor of the fake news about Iraqs non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion, and President George Bush Jr.s most enthusiastic ally in the invasion, was ordered Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the senior most British order of chivalry.

Watching the funeral of the Queen the other day I nearly choked on whatever it was I was drinking as I heard one of the Bishops or Archbishops say that, unlike those who merely cling to wealth and power, Queen Elizabeth II would be loved and remembered for her life of service to the public. Her son, the new King of England, will inherit her wealth and station. His royal lifestyle will not be supported by his own private wealth, which reportedly amounts to about a billion dollars. It will be paid for with public money, by the British people, millions of whom, the Guardian reports, have begun to skip a meal every day just to keep the lights on.

Perhaps its hard for the rest of us to understand the mystery of the British peoples love and enthrallment with their monarchy. Perhaps it has to do with a national sense of identity and pride which cannot and certainly ought not to be reduced to vulgar economics. But allow me to indulge in some vulgarity for a minute or two.

A recent analysis in the Financial Times concludes that income inequality in the US and the UK is so great that they could be classed as poor societies with some very rich people. Theyre like us Third Worlders now, Banana Republics whose wealthy have seceded into outer space and whose poor are falling into the sea.

A 2022 Oxfam study says Indias 98 richest people own the equivalent of the combined wealth of the poorest 552 million people. For this impertinence, Oxfam offices in India have been raided by the Income Tax department and perhaps will soon be shut down, like Amnesty International and every other organisation that is critical of the Modi regime.

King Charles III, rich though he may be, is a pauper compared to Gautam Adani, the worlds third richest man, Gujarati corporate tycoon and friend to Narendra Modi. Adanis fortune is estimated to be $137 billion a sum that rapidly increased during the pandemic.

In 2014, when he was first elected Prime Minister of India, Modi made a point of flying from Ahmedabad, his home city in Gujarat, to Delhi in Adanis private jet his name and logo emblazoned across it. In the eight years of Modis rule, Adanis fortune has grown from $8 billion in 2014 to what it is now. Thats an accumulation of $129 billion. Im just saying. Please dont read deep meaning into it. Adanis money comes from coal mining and operating sea-ports and airports. Most recently, he was involved in the hostile takeover of NDTV, the only mainstream national TV news channel that dares to delicately criticise the Modi regime. Most of the rest of the media is already bought and paid for.

The corporations that are blasting mountain ranges, clear-felling forests and bleaching corral reefs also fund happiness conferences, sporting events, film and literature festivals. They provide courageous writers platforms on which to condemn attacks on Free Speech and make declarations about their commitment to peace, justice and human rights. And say Things Cannot Be Said, Done.

Capitalism is in its Endgame. Sadly, as it goes down, its taking our planet with it.

Between nuclear hawks and mining corporations, its a race to the bottom.

Meanwhile, for light entertainment, lets all fight about what gods to pray to, what flags to wave, what songs to sing. In case Ive left you feeling dejected, let me read you an email I wrote in response to a member of the audience who criticised me (gently) for sounding overly optimistic when I spoke in memory of Gauri Lankesh:

If we have no hope, lets all sit down and give up. There are millions of excellent reasons for us to be pessimistic. Thats why I suggested we should divorce Hope from Reason. Hope should be wild, irrational and unreasonable.

In every line I write, every word I speak, what Im really saying is, We are not Zero. You havent defeated us.

For millions in the world with their backs to the wall, these debates about hope and despair are a luxury. Even here, underneath the reek of wealth in the city of London, a visitor can sense a sort of tense, vibrating unease, like the rumble beneath your feet as a train approaches the platform.

None of this will matter in the event of a nuclear war. That will simply end us. Its time for the two sides to step back. And for the rest of the world to step in. Armageddon doesnt contain a clause for second chances.

Arundhati Royis a writer.

Featured image:From left to right: Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, Arundhati Roy, Narendra Modi and Teesta Setalvad. Photos: Reuters, PTI.

This article was first published on The Wire.

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Arundhati Roy on Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: The Dismantling of the World as We Know It - LiveWire

Billion Dollar Harvest: TikTok’s Threat to National and Personal Security MARIST CIRCLE – Marist College The Circle

TikTok needs no introduction; with a billion monthly active users, the short-form video app is ubiquitous in modern culture. What fewer of these users seem to be aware of is TikToks ability to harvest massive quantities of their information, from biometric data to every keystroke in the in-app browser. That information is then sent to Chinese data servers, contrary to the claims of the apps developer ByteDance. This makes TikToks tremendous popularity a constant threat to both the personal privacy of its users and the national security of the United States.

In June, BuzzFeed News obtained leaked audio from discussions between third-party auditors and ByteDance that revealed that employees have constant access to the private data of American users. The discovery was ironically made as the auditors were ensuring that the data was stored on American servers as part of a prospective acquisition of TikToks U.S. division by Oracle. The company claims this process was completed, but that it retains backups of the information.

BuzzFeed also notes that much of the information will be stored on a server in Virginia that is still accessible to ByteDance, which is consistent with a habit of Oracle to grant the company significant leniency in how it carried out the transition. This is despite the fact the purpose of the acquisition was to prevent China from harvesting oceans of American data to use for potentially hostile purposes. Oracles lack of responsibility is unsurprising given it has recently been sued for tracking the nonpublic data of five billion people.

Even before the BuzzFeed investigation was released, numerous findings regarding the extent of the information TikTok collects already made the label spyware a fair evaluation. Felix Krause, a security researcher, found that the app tracks all inputs, including taps and keystrokes, in the in-app browser on Apple devices. Not only that, TikTok updated its privacy policy and openly revealed it would start collecting biometric information such as fingerprints and faceprints. As with every other official statement, the company claimed it was safely stored in U.S. data centers and that the information was only used to optimize the user experience. The former claim would turn out to be an outright lie, and the latter can be evaluated similarly through an examination of Chinas espionage habits.

Chinas mass information harvest has long posed a national security threat through consumer technology, and several of the biggest incidents still occupy no space in the American consciousness. An investigation by Bloomberg discovered that during a security evaluation for a prospective acquisition of a smaller company in 2015, Amazon found that servers built by Supermicro had an extremely small chip on the motherboard not in the blueprints. Further examination showed that the chips were sending secrets from the largest American technology corporations to servers owned by the Chinese government in an operation directed by its military. A foreign power infiltrated the most covert secrets of the most powerful companies in the world, yet few people seem to know.

Not content with the theft of American corporate secrets, Chinas activities reveal a pattern of harnessing the power of big data and artificial intelligence to construct an oppressive society. TikTok is one tool of many, a small part of a growing surveillance network intended to structure society to the ruling partys liking. A New York Times investigation found that Chinese authorities are linking physical and digital activity to create comprehensive profiles of its citizens. China is likely utilizing the information from foreigners in a similar manner, collected through apps like TikTok and enabled by American officials and corporate leaders who do not care enough to take action against it.

Dismissing these threats as merely paranoia or conspiracy theories is naive as evidence of Chinese encroachment on the American digital landscape grows exponentially. This does not mean the United States is not conducting mass surveillance, particularly considering what was revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013. However, we do not use it for ethnic cleansing or constructing a totalitarian state with a backbone of technology as China does with its social credit system.

Despite this track record, U.S. officials remain oblivious to the threat. As of this month, the Biden administration has begun to draft a deal with ByteDance to resolve information security concerns without selling TikToks American division, according to The New York Times. The report outlines preliminary terms that fail to address the core issues: review by Oracle of TikToks servers and algorithms, and a security board to set policies. Given Oracles apathy towards the entire ordeal, this deal gives little hope that ByteDances violation of Americans privacy will be solved any time soon.

Taking action against TikTok is only one step toward securing personal and national security against Chinas flagrant data harvest. The U.S. government and its contractors must have the will to create holistic approaches that acknowledge the gravity of the threat or risk handing our adversaries the information they desire on a silver platter. If both the American public and the government feign ignorance of the dangers of foreign espionage, we are only enabling Chinas plans for technological oppression.

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Billion Dollar Harvest: TikTok's Threat to National and Personal Security MARIST CIRCLE - Marist College The Circle