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Cake day: January 29th, 2025

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  • There’s a related report focusing on the Serbian prime minister’s resignation:

    Serbia’s PM Milos Vucevic resigns amid Chinese contractor controversy – [unpaywalled link]

    Vucevic was mayor of Novi Sad before becoming prime minister in elections last April. His successor as mayor also resigned on Tuesday. Protesters claim the Chinese consortium responsible for renovating parts of Novi Sad station had bypassed safety regulations with the ­assistance of corrupt officials.

    There is a growing perception that the president [Vucic, who is now about to decide whether to form a majority government or hold a snap parliamentary election] is trying to quash democratic freedoms in Serbia and turn the country back towards Moscow, despite ­Belgrade’s formal efforts to join the European Union. Serbia is a candidate to join the bloc but must first normalise relations with its neighbour Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia after a Nato intervention in 1999 that brought an end to Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.











  • ‘So what?’: Privacy warnings about DeepSeek fall on deaf ears

    Privacy activists are warning about the invasive nature of DeepSeek, which collects a trove of personal user information that could be handed over to the Chinese government

    People, however, just don’t care.

    Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), shared screenshots from the Chinese AI chatbot’s privacy policy, which stated data it collects is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

    “Just fyi, @deepseek_ai collects your IP, keystroke patterns, device info, etc etc, and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the [Chinese] State,” said de Pulford, leader of IPAC, a global group of lawmakers who seek to hold China accountable for democratic abuses.

    “Anticipating tedious whataboutery: the difference between this and free-world social media apps is that you can enforce your data rights in rule of law countries. This is not the case in China,” said de Pulford. >



  • Clearly, however, there are concerns about censorship, democracy and security. One of the drivers of the Chinese AI industry has been access to extraordinary amounts of data, which is more difficult to get hold of in the West.

    This is a very brief paragraph about real issues. The whole article basically says that “China is better because it’s cheaper,” but it doesn’t say exactly why it’s cheaper. You’ll find a lot of reliable information about slavery-like labour in China and the absence of any workers’ rights. This BBC article ignores that completely.