Information Warfare Monitor (IWF), a team of researchers from the University of Toronto and the Ottawa-based think tank SecDev, summarized its report on GhostNet, a vast cyber-spying ring that has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, in Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network. IWF said that while its analysis points to China as the main source of the network, it has not conclusively been able to detect the identity or motivation of the hackers. The report is available online at www.tracking-ghost.net.
Two Cambridge University computer researchers who worked on part of the IWF investigation related to Tibetan exiles, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson, summarized their findings in an independent report, The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement. Unlike the IWF report, The Snooping Dragon states that “agents of the Chinese government” were behind cyberwarfare attacks on the Dalai Lama’s “computing infrastructure.” An abstract of the report and a link to a PDF version are available online at www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-746.html.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
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