Tag Archives: china

China Retracts Wuhan Wet-Market Origin of Virus

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From The Business-Standard, May 27, 2020:

‘Scientists collected viral genome samples from 326 patients in Shanghai between January 20 and February 25. They identified two major clades, both of which included cases diagnosed in early December 2019. The scientists noticed that genomes of six patients with contact history related to the Huanan seafood market fell into one kind of clade while those of three other patients diagnosed in the same period but without exposure to the market clustered into the other clade, suggesting multiple origins of transmission in Shanghai.’

Earlier the Chinese study into the origin of the novel coronavirus have suggested that the virus, which caused havoc on the globe, had its origin in the famous Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.”

This news doesn’t mean necessarily refute the theory that the virus was spread from the 7th World Military Games at Wuhan in October 2019. It’s still quite within the range of probability that the Games were the point of dissemination of the virus in China and some clades of the virus stayed in Wuhan, while others were transported to Shanghai.

But it also doesn’t mean that the US was the country behind the dissemination. It could also have been China itself…or some other hitherto unsuspected nation.

Frankly, we just don’t have enough data to do more than speculate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Worst cyber-crime is in US, Russia

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As I blogged yesterday, the IP addresses attacking me trace back to a Netherland hosting company called Ecatel Network.

ECATEL NETWORK

Ecatel has become notorious for hosting bad actors, from the Russian spammers to pedophile networks.  It also has a reputation for brushing off requests for help from the victims.

Trying to figure out what was going on, I did a bit of research into the world of cyber-crime.

AKAMAI REPORT – CHINA LEADS CYBER-CRIME?

The mainstream media likes to portray cyber-crime as essentially a foreign threat. China, especially, is fingered as the bad guy.

For instance, in January,  US-based Akamai Technologies issued a report  placing China at the head of global hacking, responsible for 35% of cyber-attacks world-wide.

More recently,  the US government pressed cyber-warfare charges against five of China’s army officers.

Nigerians scamsters are rumored to run a close second.

There are two things wrong with this picture. The first is the source of the information.

Akamai Technologies is a “content-delivery network” head-quartered in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

It was founded by an MIT applied math professor, Tom Leighton, and a graduate student at MIT, Daniel Lewin, later killed on AA flight 11, which crashed during the September 11, 2001 attack.

According to his MIT bio, Leighton is a specialist in cryptography,  digital rights, and algorithms for network applications. He also chaired a Presidential committee on Cyber-Security.

Akamai’s co-founder,  COO, and President was the founder of the Road-Runner cable service. Its CEO was a senior VP from IBM.

Akamai’s privacy policy states that it collects IP addresses and effectively tracks clients.

Its partners include Microsoft and Apple and its clients include the BBC, the White House,  Facebook, Twitter, Adobe Systems, Netflix, Yahoo, ESPN Star (India),  China Central Television and Al Jazeera, among many others.

How likely is it that reports from Akamai on cyber-crime are untouched by political pressure?

WORLD HOSTS REPORT –  US, RUSSIA LEAD CYBER-CRIME

Point two. The statistics don’t support Akamai’s pious propaganda.

The Chinese do indeed have a very high number of IP addresses attached to their malicious activity. If sheer volume were the only criterion, China would dominate.

However,  as far as the number of malicious sites and the level of threat involved, the world’s leading cyber-criminals aren’t Chinese.  Not even close.

They are in the US and in Russia, closely followed by smaller countries like the Netherlands, the Ukraine, and Romania.

In Host Exploit’s authoritative World Hosts Report of March 2013, five of the top twenty  malware hosts were based in the US; four were in Russia, two each in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Ukraine.

Chinanet Backbone was the only host from China that made the top twenty.

What was especially interesting to me was to find the originator of the attacks on my computer, Ecatel network, at the top of the list of the world’s leading hosts for malware.

Host Exploit also breaks down cyber-crime by country, with Russia leading the pack.

This is its list of the world’ top ten cyber-crime havens in 2013:

1. The Russian Federation (RU)

2. Belarus (BY)

3. Ukraine (UA)

4. The British Virgin Islands (VG)

5. The United States (US)

6. Romania (RO)

7. Netherlands (NL)

8. Poland (PL)

9. Turkey (TR)

10. Bulgaria  (BG)

 

Ali Baba In Mumbai

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Zahir Ebrahim analyzes the role of China and India in the overall strategy being pursued by the Rothschild cartel, at his excellent ProjectHumanBeingsFirst Blog:

“….here are references to two articles I had written at the time when the Mumbai terror event was being blamed upon various actors, primarily Islamofascism, militant Islam, even “Muslim Revolution”.

Your summation article and your quoted statement above, both underscore the truth of the observations made in December 2008:

“Just to add some additional thoughts to your summation (in green font), the agenda upon India is no less nefarious, and pernicious, than upon Pakistan. This agenda has to be understood forensically and it cannot necessarily be discovered by examining the effects, the puppet shows, and the images on the screen in Plato’s allegory of the cave.
First, both India and China were economically built up by off-shoring American manufacture and industry in order to weaken the industrial base of the United States, and to destabilize the domestic base of the sole superpower nation-state by making it interdependent upon other nations for domestic sectors in which it was previously both entirely self-sufficient and mostly an exporter.
Second, those nations used for this purpose, primarily as catalyst, are also to be destabilized lest they raise themselves beyond control due to this gratuitous gift, more like a Trojan Horse than a gift.”

“Ex-Pentagon” Analyst Made “Devyani Durga” Video

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NOTE: REPOSTED FROM MY BLOG-POST – COLOR REVOLUTION INDIA

SHOCKER: Ex-Pentagon analyst behind a urination-and-rape video of Bin Laden, as well as the “Durga” video of Khobragade’s arrest.

“Early on in the Khobragade story, a video representation of the arrest of Devyani Khobragade appeared on the net. It was later removed.

The video was an animation of the arrest, in which, as in pictures in later news reports, Khobragade kept turning into a multi-armed figure reminiscent of the Goddess Durga/Kali:

“The one-and-a-half-minute spoof has been posted by a group called “Next Media Animation TV. And though not everyone will be amused by the fact that the sari-clad Khobragade keeps turning into a Goddess Kali-like entity, the idea seems essentially to tell the basic story of the row wittily. Subtitles include one that goes “US not sari”.

Next Media Animation is an animation company in Taiwan. It is run by a former Pentagon analyst, Mark Simon from Virginia, which is the headquarters of  the US intelligence community and of the government-subsidized electronic snooping industry. [See below.]

Next Media Animation is a subsidiary of Next Media, a Hong Kong-based media conglomerate that creates humorous animations of news events.

Next Media  is the creation of serial entrepreneur and devout  Catholic Jimmy Lai and it’s the largest media group in Hong Kong.

While Lai might be Catholic, one cannot assume Mark Simon – who runs Next Animation – is.

So, the “Durga” video need not be read as a display of personal religious animosity toward a “pagan, polytheistic” religion.

The video might just have been a clumsy attempt to use religious symbolism for political purposes.

Jimmy Lai is known as the “Rupert Murdoch of Asia” and is responsible for bringing in a flashy, tabloid-style of media into Asia. (Added: Jan 20, 2014)

Lai owns the biggest media operation in Hong-Kong.

Lai is highly critical of the Chinese government for its human-rights violations and lack of democracy, which has got wide coverage in Western mainstream outlets, like the BBC.

Also see this flattering Asia Week report of Lai, the maverick, republished at CNN.

(Added: Jan 21, 2014)

Lai has been targeted, reportedly, because of his political outspokenness.

Lai’s position on China seems close to the position of the US State Dept.

The Catholic Lai  has worked with Cardinal Joseph Zen in a campaign against the Beijing government’s attempt to replace Hong-Kong’s free educational system with organizing committees in each school.

The new government committees will replace the educational institutions (including the Catholic church) that now run the schools.

In China, there is a “legal” Catholic church that toes the official Marxist line on abortion, among other things, and there is also an “illegal” church that doesn’t and therefore suffers persecution and suppression.

Jimmy Lai seems to be an outlet for CIA disinformation and psyops.

NEWS REPORT: A Pentagon defense analyst runs Lai’s pro-democracy efforts

QUOTE:

“Lai had made donations of nearly $8 million over five years to pro-democracy groups and individuals — and that [Mark] Simon, as head of his private office, handled the payments.”

QUOTE

“Simon, who spends most of his time in Taiwan, where he runs Next Media’s animation unit, dismissed the whole affair as a “sloppy farce.”

NEWS REPORT: A New York Times interview with Lai mentions a video made by Next Media Animation that showed Osama Bin Laden being urinated on and raped in hell.  Lai says the video was an “accident” by young employees

The End Of Chinese Manufacturing?

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Vivek Wadhwa at Forbes:

The End of Chinese manufacturing?

“There is great concern about China’s real-estate and infrastructure bubbles.  But these are just short-term challenges that China may be able to spend its way out of. The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble.

By offering subsidies, cheap labor, and lax regulations and rigging its currency, China was able to seduce American companies to relocate their manufacturing operations there. Millions of American jobs moved to China, and manufacturing became the underpinning of China’s growth and prosperity. But rising labor costs, concerns over government-sponsored I.P. theft, and production time lags are already causing companies such as Dow Chemicals, Caterpillar, GE, and Ford to start moving some manufacturing back to the U.S. from China. Google recently announced that its Nexus Q streaming media player would be made in the U.S., and this put pressure on Apple to start following suit.

But rising costs and political pressure aren’t what’s going to rapidly change the equation. The disruption will come from a set of technologies that are advancing at exponential rates and converging.

These technologies include robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, and nanotechnology. These have been moving slowly so far, but are now beginning to advance exponentially just as computing does.  Witness how computing has advanced to the point at which the smart phones we carry in our pockets have more processing power than the super computers of the ’60s—and how the Internet, which also has its origins in the ’60s, went on an exponential growth path about 15 years ago and rapidly changed the way we work, shop, and communicate.  That’s what lies ahead for these new technologies.

The robots of today aren’t the Androids or Cylons that we used to see in science-fiction movies, but specialized electro-mechanical devices that are controlled by software and remote controls. As computers become more powerful, so do the abilities of these devices. Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. And DIY’ers are lending a helping hand. There are dozens of startups, such as Willow Garage, iRobot, and 9th Sense, selling robot-development kits for university students and open-source communities. They are creating ever more-sophisticated robots and new applications for these. Watch this video of the autonomous flying robots that University of Pennsylvania professor Vijay Kumar created with his students, for example.

The factory assembly that the Chinese are performing is child’s play for the next generation of robots—which will soon become cheaper than human labor. Indeed, one of China’s largest manufacturers, Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, announced last August that it plans to install one million robots within three years to do the work that its workers in China presently do. It found Chinese labor to be too expensive and demanding. The world’s most advanced car, the Tesla Model S, is also being manufactured in Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places in the country. Tesla can afford this because it is using robots to do the assembly.

Then there is artificial intelligence (AI)—software that makes computers do things that, if humans did them, we would call intelligent. We left AI for dead after the hype it created in the ‘80s, but it is alive and kicking—and advancing rapidly. It is powering all sorts of technologies. This is the technology that IBM’s Deep Blue computer used in beating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997and that enabled IBM’s Watson to beat TV-show Jeopardy champions in 2011. AI is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as Apple’s Siri, and the face-recognition software Facebook recently acquired. AI technologies are also finding their way into manufacturing and will allow us to design our own products at home with the aid of AI-powered design assistants.

How will we turn these designs into products? By “printing” them at home or at modern-day Kinko’s: shared public manufacturing facilities such as TechShop, a membership-based manufacturing workshop, using new manufacturing technologies that are now on the horizon.

A type of manufacturing called “additive manufacturing” is making it possible to cost-effectively “print” products.  In conventional manufacturing, parts are produced by humans using power-driven machine tools, such as saws, lathes, milling machines, and drill presses, to physically remove material to obtain the shape desired. This is a cumbersome process that becomes more difficult and time-consuming with increasing complexity. In other words, the more complex the product you want to create, the more labor is required and the greater the effort.

In additive manufacturing, parts are produced by melting successive layers of materials based on 3D models—adding materials rather than subtracting them. The “3D printers” that produce these use powered metal, droplets of plastic, and other materials—much like the toner cartridges that go into laser printers.  This allows the creation of objects without any sort of tools or fixtures. The process doesn’t produce any waste material, and there is no additional cost for complexity. Just as, in using laser printers, a page filled with graphics doesn’t cost much more than one with text, in using a 3D printer, we can print sophisticated 3D structures for about the cost of a brick.

3D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1000. Soon, we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. It is entirely conceivable that in the next decade we start 3D-printing buildings and electronics.”

War On India: Naval Command Info Hacked By Chinese IP’s

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The Indian Express reports on July 1, 2012:

“Hackers have broken into sensitive naval computer systems in and around Visakhapatnam, the headquarters of the Eastern Naval Command, and planted bugs that relayed confidential data to IP addresses in China.

The Eastern Naval Command plans operations and deployments in the South China Sea — the theatre of recent muscle-flexing by Beijing — and beyond. India’s first nuclear missile submarine, INS Arihant, is currently undergoing trials at the Command.

The extent of the loss is still being ascertained, and officials said it was “premature at this stage” to comment on the sensitivity of the compromised data. But the Navy has completed a Board of Inquiry (BoI) which is believed to have indicted at least six mid-level officers for procedural lapses that led to the security breach.

The naval computers were found infected with a virus that secretly collected and transmitted confidential files and documents to Chinese IP addresses. Strict disciplinary action against the indicted officers is imminent.

Responding to a questionnaire sent by The Sunday Express on whether highly classified data had been sent to IP addresses in China due to the bug, the Navy said: “An inquiry has been convened and findings of the report are awaited. It needs to be mentioned that there is a constant threat in the cyber domain from inimical hackers worldwide.”

Sources, however, confirmed that classified data had been leaked, and the breach had possibly occurred because of the use of pen drives that are prohibited in naval offices. The virus was found hidden in the pen drives that were being used to transfer data from standalone computers to other systems, said a person familiar with the investigation.”

Chinese Buyers Holding Up Beaten Down Real Estate

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While the government meddlers aim at the impossible (“stimulating the economy”) with the aid of the unethical (appropriating tax payer funds for their interventions), the much-maligned market is doing its best to sweeten the pain the only way it knows – providing new buyers at prices that turn the old buyers into sellers. Joel Bowman at The Daily Reckoning reports (June 12, 2010):

“For a growing number of well-to-do, geographically mobile Chinese citizens, property investments abroad are becoming a popular store of wealth, and a hedge against an increasingly precarious market back home. Continue reading →

China Defies US And Sells Gasoline To Iran

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The Sino-US trade wars are heating up. On Friday, the US announced that it would impose stiff duties on Chinese-made oil country tubular goods, which are steel pipes used in the oil industry.

“According to US data, the OCTG trade case is the largest in US history against China imports valued at more than $2.6 billion in 2008 and about $1 billion last year.”

China responded on Tuesday with anti-dumping duties against the US and Russia:

“China has imposed anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on a U.S. specialty steel product, and also hit Russia with anti-dumping duties in the same case, its customs administration said.

U.S. producers will be assessed anti-dumping duties of up to 64.8 percent and anti-subsidy, or “countervailing,” duties of up to 44.6 percent on the grain-oriented electrical steel, it said on its website on Monday.

Grain-oriented electrical steel, also known as grain-oriented silicon steel, is used for the cores of high-efficiency transformers, electric motors and generators.

The state-backed China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals and Chemicals Importers and Exporters hailed the Ministry of Commerce’s April 10 ruling, which the Ministry has not yet publicly announced, state news agency Xinhua said.

“During the investigation the Ministry found that U.S. producers had received subsidies by the U.S. government, and their unfair competition hurt Chinese producers,” Xinhua said, quoting an unnamed person at the chamber of commerce.”

Meanwhile, China also announced its first trade deficit since May 2004

“According to the statistics from the General Administration of Customs, China’s exports were valued at US $112.11 billion in March, up by 24.3 percent year on year, while the imports were up by 66 percent to US $119.35 billion, trade deficit were US $ 7.24 billion. This is the first monthly trade deficit for China since May of 2004.”

What’s interesting is that this trade row with the US isn’t necessarily a sign of rising protectionism in China, as the media often reports. It seems to signal a move toward more trade with emerging markets in Asia and elsewhere. Thus at the recently concluded Boao Forum for Asia, (the Chinese Davos), the Chinese Vice-President called for open markets and not protectionism. Of course, this isn’t free trade, by any means, but state-driven mercantilism. It remains to be seen whether that is any better than state-driven protectionism.

Another example.

While some top oil-exporting countries have curbed their exports to Iran to avoid penalties from the US, state-owned Chinaoil has sold two cargoes of gasoline to Iran in defiance of the US, the first direct sales since January 2009.

As Russia has hardened its position and moved closer to the European and US stance, the Chinese move has become crucial for Iran. Iran continues to be the fifth largest exporter of crude in the world, but US sanctions have meant that its refineries have suffered from lack of foreign investment and it now relies on the world market for its gasoline needs.

China Bubble: State Firms Bid Up Land Prices To Record Levels

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China Daily:

“In spite of all the government’s tough talk against excessive home price hikes, the record land price for residential housing in Beijing was broken twice on Monday thanks to aggressive bids by State-owned enterprises.

The weeklong postponement of the land auction seemingly served to save policymakers, who were explaining to the National People’s Congress how they would prevent housing bubbles, from trouble.

Yet, the jaw-dropping results only underscored how differently these cash-rich State firms think about housing prices. It seems that all the measures that the government adopted to raise capital requirements and leverage restrictions have so far worked only to discourage private property developers while doing little to restrain the appetite of State firms for a bigger market share.

The record land sales on Monday certainly cast doubts on a previous official claim that not a single cent of the country’s 4-trillion-yuan stimulus package has flowed into the real estate sector. Worse, they fueled expectations of more price hikes to undermine government efforts to prevent housing bubbles.”

The Great Missile…er…Engineering Gap…

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An article in the Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 20, 2005, suggests that data-manipulation abounds in tech rivalry between countries. Our geeks beat yours, is the 21st century version of saber-rattling:

“India provides the clearest example of how the numbers can be interpreted differently. The 350,000 engineers that it supposedly graduated last year is almost certainly false. After publishing that number in October, the National Academies revised it downward to 200,000 in a note issued last month. The Duke study pegs the number at 215,000, but it also points out that nearly half of those are three-year diplomas – not the four-year degrees counted in the US.

More four-year diplomas than India

Last year, the US awarded bachelor’s degrees to 72,893 engineering students, according to the American Society for Engineering Education. But using India’s more inclusive definition, the Duke study finds the US handed out 137,437 bachelor’s degrees last year, more than India’s 112,000. The US number is far more impressive in rela-tive terms, since India has more than three times as many people.

China’s numbers are more problematic because its government does not break them down. In its revised figures, the National Academies reduced the Chinese total from 600,000 to 500,000. The Duke study pegs the total at 644,106, as reported by the Chinese Ministry of Education. But the study also points out that, as with India, the Chinese total includes engineering graduates with so-called “short cycle degrees” that represent three years or less of college training.

“China includes in its count a lot of graduates – including auto mechanics – who would not be included as engineers in the US or many other nations,” says Gary Gereffi, a coauthor of the study and a professor of sociology who directs Duke’s Center on Globalization, Governance, and Competitiveness.

A press spokesman of the Chinese embassy in Washington declined comment, and its education office there did not respond.

China still graduated 351,537 engineers with four-year degrees. That’s 2-1/2 times the US total (although China has four times the US population).

For its part, the National Academies stands by its report, even after its revisions. “I don’t think we believe at all that these new numbers change the ultimate recommendations we have,” says Deborah Stine, of the National Academies. “The US is well behind other countries.”

Back toward 1986 graduation peak

The number of US engineering graduates peaked in 1986, fell back, then has slowly built back up since the late 1990s, says Daniel Bateson, of the Engineering Workforce Commission.

While US numbers don’t approach China’s, some experts say the quality of US graduates remains superior. A McKinsey Global Institute study last summer found that only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers were capable of competing for outsourced work.”

My Comment

We love the land of our birth dearly, but stereotypes have a reason for existing. My countrymen – and I know every variety of them — are not always as self-critical as they should be. Many call them arrogant…

Satyameva Jayate is the national motto: Truth Always Triumphs.

But Satyam (Truth) Computers found that with Big Four Accounting Firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) signing off on them, cooked books can also triumph…at least until the market collapses.

Indian cricket teams, in terms of sheer talent possibly the best in the world, are nonetheless notorious for snatching defeat out of the mouths of certain victory. They tend to rest on their duffs, when they  should keep their heads down and put their money in their shoes.

True, there is a strong professional and entrepreneurial class. But remember, this is a country of a billion and a third, where nearly a billion people live lives of bare subsistence.

There’s universal corruption. The Corruption Perception Index 2009 by Transparency International has ranked India as the 85th most corrupt country, among 180 countries in the world. It is 19th on the bribery index.

There’s mind-numbing bureaucracy  The Hong Kong-based political and economic risk consultancy group (PERC) reports that Indian civil servants are the least efficient among 12 Asian counterparts: Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Philippines, Indonesia and India.

India, Thailand, and Malaysia face the worst political and social risks, adds PERC.

In some states, the courts and police are feared worse than criminals.

Indian society is often sickeningly color and status-conscious.*

India is a good long-term bet for investment, if you’re careful and monitor your positions. But it’s a  sure-fire disaster for cocky, blind-folded speculation.

Update (March 17, 2010):

*I add a quote from an inter-racial couple:

“My partner is white and I am black, facts of which the Indian public reminds us daily. Bank associates have denied me chai, while falling over to please my white friend. Mall shop attendants have denied me attentiveness, while mobbing my partner. Who knows what else is more quietly denied?

“An African has come,” a guard announced over the intercom as I showed up. Whites are afforded the luxury of their own names, but this careful attention to my presence was not new. ATM guards stand and salute my white friend, while one guard actually asked me why I had come to the bank machine as if I might have said that I was taking over his shift.”