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boingboing.net May 07, 2019 China's Xinjiang province is home to the country's Uyghur ethnic minority and other people of Turkic Muslim descent; it has become a living laboratory for next-generation, electronically mediated totalitarianism;  up to 1,000,000 people have been sent to concentration/torture camps  in the region, and targets for rendition ot these camps come via  compulsory mobile apps  that  spy on residents in every conceivable way  (naturally, war criminal Eric "Blackwater" Prince, brother of billionaire heiress Education Secretary Betsy DeVos,  is into this stuff up to his eyeballs , as are  other American collaborators ). Key to maintaining the Chinese control over the region is the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, which authorities use to spy on the population and each other. IJOP was created by the Hebei Far East Communication System Engineering Company, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Electronics Tech...

The Indian Express May 20, 2019 The GST Council is likely to consider next month a proposal for setting up a national bench of the Appellate Authority for Advance Ruling (AAAR) to reconcile the contradictory orders on similar issues passed by AARs in different states, a move aimed at providing certainty to taxpayers. Advertising Sources said the revenue department is mulling on the idea of a national bench of AAAR since it feels that the Authority for Advance Ruling (AAR) mechanism in its current form is not serving its objective of providing certainty to taxpayers under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime. “There has been a view that a second Appellate Authority for Advance Ruling needs to be set up. It would be a national bench only to reconcile divergent verdicts passed by state AARs. We will present the proposal before the GST Council, which is expected to meet in June,” an official told PTI. The AARs in different states have passed about 470 orders, w...

The Indian Express May 20, 2019 China’s top diplomat Wang Yi has asked US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go “too far” in its “damaging moves” against the Chinese interests, saying that both countries will benefit from cooperation and lose from conflicts. Advertising State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang held a telephonic conversation with Pompeo on Saturday, days after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring American companies from installing the foreign-made telecom equipment posing a national security threat, a move apparently aimed at banning  Huawei  from US networks. Beijing has warned of retaliation against the order that effectively barred Chinese telecom giant Huawei from the US market. The world’s top two economies are locked in a trade battle that has seen mounting tariffs, sparking fears that the conflict could damage the global economy. Wang, noting that the US has recently made remarks and taken actions t...

The Indian Express May 20, 2019 With strong memories of the last catastrophic war in Iraq, Europeans are united in opposing what many consider the United States’ effort to provoke Iran into a shooting war. Yet, despite the strains in trans-Atlantic relations in the Trump years, flat-out opposition to Washington remains an uncomfortable place for European nations. Initially, not even pro-American Britain would go along with President Donald Trump’s administration, with officials defending a senior British general in the coalition fighting the Islamic State who said that there was no enhanced threat from Iran in Iraq and Syria. But that brought an American rebuttal, and soon the Europeans, reluctant to confront Washington directly, softened the criticism. Britain officially rowed back, saying that it now agreed with the Americans, while Germany and the Netherlands suspended their troop training in Iraq, citing the American warnings. (Germany subsequently said it was planning ...

The Hindu May 18, 2019 Technology is often touted as a solution to the world’s environmental challenges, but it is also part of the problem: industry executives are facing rising pressure to clean up their energy and resource-intensive business. How much energy, for example, does it take to send a one-megabyte email? Around 25 watts per hour, representing 20 grammes of carbon dioxide emissions, according to France’s CNRS research centre. It might not seem like much, but the Radicati research group expects 293 billion emails will be sent every single day this year and the power needs to be generated — mostly from fossil fuels. Apps can quickly drain and shorten the life of phone batteries, with Snapchat a particularly “heavy” messaging service because it automatically turns on the camera. Then there are the server farms crunching mammoth amounts of data worldwide, which require huge amounts of electricity both to run and to power airconditioning which keeps the equ...

Business Standard May 17, 2019 The  Bitcoin  bulls came back. Literally. Little Dude, a real-life bovine housed in a make-shift pen in a Manhattan ballroom, greeted crypto enthusiasts at the Magical Crypto Conference last weekend. He was brought by the anonymous  Bitcoin  Sign Guy, who offered 21 “Buy Bitcoin” replicas -- pen on yellow legal-pad paper -- for roughly $8,000 a pop. Only six were left at the end of the week. Bitcoin  true believers will tell you they never lost faith, but a 50% rally earlier this month has awakened the animal spirits that roamed in the halcyon days of 2017, when the digital currency dominated Thanksgiving conversations and sparked one of the biggest asset bubbles since the financial crisis. Now, the hype machine that fed the frenzy has kicked back into gear. At New York’s Blockchain Week, one of the industry’s biggest gatherings, the  Winklevoss  twins hawked crypto swag to promote their payment network. Fun...