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.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
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