Sci-Tech

Campaign Tied to China Are Harassing a Dissident’s Teenage Daughter

Published

5 days ago

June 27, 2024

Deng Yuwen, a prominent Chinese writer who now lives in exile in the suburbs of Philadelphia, has regularly criticized China and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. China’s reaction of late has been severe, with crude and ominously personal attacks online.

A covert propaganda network linked to the country’s security services has barraged not just Mr. Deng but also his teenage daughter with sexually suggestive and threatening posts on popular social media platforms, according to researchers at both Clemson University and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

The content, posted by users with fake identities, has appeared in replies to Mr. Deng’s posts on X, the social platform, as well as the accounts of public schools in their community, where the daughter, who is 16, has been falsely portrayed as a drug user, an arsonist and a prostitute.

“I tried to delete these posts,” Mr. Deng said of the attacks online, speaking in Mandarin Chinese in an interview, “but I didn’t succeed, because today you try to delete and tomorrow they just switch to new accounts to leave attacking text and language.”

Vulgar comments targeting the girl have also shown up on community pages on Facebook and even sites like TripAdvisor; Patch, a community news platform; and Niche, a website that helps parents choose schools, according to the researchers.

The harassment fits a pattern of online intimidation that has raised alarms in Washington, as well as Canada and other countries where China’s attacks have become increasingly brazen. The campaign has included thousands of posts the researchers have linked to a network of social media accounts known as Spamouflage or Dragonbridge, an arm of the country’s vast propaganda apparatus.

China has long sought to discredit Chinese critics, but targeting a teenager in the United States is an escalation, said Darren Linvill, a founder of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, whose researchers documented the campaign against Mr. Deng. Federal law prohibits severe online harassment or threats, but that appears to be no deterrent to China’s efforts.

“There’s no question that this crosses a line that they hadn’t previously crossed,” Mr. Linvill said. “I think that suggests that the lines are becoming meaningless.”

China’s propaganda apparatus has also stepped up attacks against the United States more broadly, including efforts to discredit President Biden ahead of the presidential election in November.

“They’re exporting their repression efforts and human rights abuses — targeting, threatening and harassing those who dare question their legitimacy or authority even outside China, including right here in the U.S.,” Christopher A. Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the American Bar Association in Washington in April.

Mr. Wray said China was exerting “intense, almost Mafia-style pressure” to try to silence dissidents now living legally in the United States, including activities online and off, like posting fliers near their homes.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in a statement that he was not aware of the Deng case and had no comment. He added that the government’s State Council issued regulations in China last year to protect the safety of teenagers online.

In a statement, Meta said it had taken down Facebook accounts targeting the Dengs as part of its monitoring of Spamouflage’s activities. The statement said the activity hadn’t gained much traction on Facebook. Patch and Niche said they, too, had removed the accounts for violating their standards for use. X and TripAdvisor did not respond to requests for comment.

Not all the posts targeting the Dengs were removed, according to Mr. Linvill’s team at Clemson. New posts also continue to appear, and traces even of posts that are removed can linger online for years. Spamouflage’s attacks still appear in searches for Mr. Deng and his daughter on Google, for example.

The attacks from China have been a challenge for government and law enforcement officials in the United States. Last year, the Justice Department indicted 34 officers working for China’s Ministry of State Security on charges of harassing residents of the United States like Mr. Deng, but the officers live — and presumably continue to work — in China, outside the reach of American law enforcement.

Some have called for a more aggressive response, including Representative John Moolenaar of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Communist Party of China.

“We need to educate and empower law enforcement officers and the American people to understand the C.C.P.’s tactics,” he said in a statement, referring to the party, “and protect the people seeking safe haven in our country.”

The Spamouflage network was first identified in 2019 during mass anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong. It creates inauthentic accounts on social media or tech platforms to bombard actual users with spamlike content — hence the name researchers have given the network. While the content often fails to go viral, the swarming nature of the attacks can be a nuisance, or worse, for those targeted.

The network, which Meta last year linked to law enforcement agencies in China, once focused most of its attention domestically to discredit and intimidate critics of the Communist Party, like the protesters in Hong Kong.

It has become increasingly active abroad, seeking to influence political debates and elections in Taiwan, Canada and, since at least the 2022 midterm election, the United States. An American Olympic figure skater and her father, a former political refugee from China, were targeted by what the Justice Department described as a spying operation ordered by Beijing. Chinese journalists working abroad, especially women, have likewise been depicted in fake escort ads and faced bomb and rape threats.

The Justice Department indictment of the officers at the Ministry of State Security did not link them explicitly to the Spamouflage network, but the activities described mirror its work closely and appear “extremely likely” to be the same operation, according to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research group. The institute also warned that the network was focusing increasingly on the American presidential election.

In Mr. Deng’s case, as with others, the intent seems to be to silence criticism. Mr. Deng, who was born in Xinyu, in southeastern China, once served as an assistant editor at Study Times, a weekly journal of the Central Party School of the Communist Party that trains rising officials.

His commentaries sometimes pushed the envelope of the party line. He was dismissed in 2013 after he wrote an opinion essay for The Financial Times — which appeared in its Chinese and English editions — calling for China to abandon its strategic ties with North Korea’s erratic authoritarian leader, Kim Jong-un. He eventually left the country.

Mr. Deng, who is 56, has lived in the United States with his wife and two children since 2018. He continues to publish essays in a variety of news outlets and books on Chinese politics and foreign policy. The latest book was “The Last Totalitarian,” published in Chinese in April by Bouden House in New York. In it, he argues that the Communist Party has lost the faith of the people and needs to reform.

In the interview, Mr. Deng said he was used to criticism from China’s officialdom, but the personal attacks began after he published an article in February in which he compared Mr. Xi’s cadre of top officials to the Gang of Four under Mao Zedong.

The first post that Clemson’s researchers spotted appeared that month on X, where Mr. Deng’s account has more than 100,000 followers. It mentioned a middle school in the family’s town and his daughter. The harassment spread to other accounts on X and then to numerous platforms, including Facebook, Medium, Pinterest, DeviantArt and Pixiv, a Japanese site for artists.

The posts denounced him as a traitor, a plagiarist and a tool of the United States. More than 5,700 posts to date on X alone have singled out his daughter, according to Clemson’s research.

The users’ profiles often made them appear to be American, though with few or even no followers. Many posts featured stilted, ungrammatical English, a signature of Spamouflage campaigns.

They became increasingly lurid and threatening. Doctored images appeared on Facebook with the face of Mr. Deng’s daughter superimposed on scantily clad women, advertising sex for $300. At least one post called for her to be sexually assaulted, offering a bounty of $8,000.

His daughter, who speaks English with a teenager’s fluency in Gen Z slang, was initially angry about the attacks, as well, Mr. Deng said, but at his encouragement, she has also tried to shrug them off. “I want to try my best not to get my family involved in my affairs,” he said.

Meta, Google and other major tech platforms have long been aware of Spamouflage’s activities and have sought to blunt their reach. Last year, Meta announced that it had removed more than 7,700 fake accounts on Facebook linked to the network in one quarter alone.

Mr. Linvill of Clemson said China’s tactics were likely to continue because the country had “yet to face any meaningful repercussions beyond accounts’ being taken down, and that is no cost at all from their perspective.”

Bing Guan contributed reporting.

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Sci-Tech

8 cool ways to use LiDAR on your iPhone and iPad

Published

1 hour ago

July 2, 2024

Lance Whitney

Use augmented reality on your iPhone or iPad — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

Your iPhone Pro and iPad Pro may have a helpful and powerful feature you might not know about. Built directly into the last few generations of devices, the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanner emits a laser to measure the distances of surrounding objects. This feature provides a few key benefits.

Also: How to use split-screen on iPad (and why you should)

First, LiDAR helps the camera take sharper photos, particularly in dark conditions. Second, the scanner taps into AR, or augmented reality, to combine the real and virtual worlds. With AR, your phone or tablet acts as a virtual tape measure, shows you how new furniture would look in your home, scans and recreates 3D models, and immerses you in AR games.

Introduced a few years ago, the LiDAR scanner is available on the Pro and Pro Max models of the iPhone 12, 13, 14, and 15, as well as the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models from 2020 and later. Nestled among the rear cameras, the scanner can detect objects up to five meters, or 16.5 inches.

1. Take a photo in the dark

Snapping a sharp photo with your iPhone can be challenging, especially in low-light situations. Under those conditions, the LiDAR scanner detects the distance of your subject, allowing your camera to power up the autofocus quickly.

Also: How to take better iPhone photos

Apple claims that the LiDAR sensor helps the camera autofocus as much as six times faster, an advantage when you want to take a shot before it’s too late. There’s no need to do anything special. Aim your phone’s camera and the LiDAR automatically kicks in if necessary.

Take a photo in the dark — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

2. Measure distances

You need to measure a physical distance but don’t have a ruler or tape measure. There’s no need to worry when you can use a virtual measure. Included with iOS/iPadOS and downloadable from the App Store, Apple’s free Measure app can determine the distance between any two points, display the dimensions of an object, and tell you if a surface is straight.

Open the Measure app on your device. Then to measure the distance between two points, position your phone so the starting point is at the dot within the circle.

Also: The 4 best iPad models right now

Tap the plus icon, move your phone along the area you want to measure, and then tap the plus icon again. The distance appears on the screen.

Measure a line — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

To measure an object such as a square, you position your phone in the same way. Tap the plus icon and move your phone along the first area to measure it. Then double tap the plus icon. Move your phone to capture the next area and, once again, double-tap the plus icon. Continue this way until you’ve captured the entire object. Double-tap the plus icon at the endpoint, and the distance appears for all four sides.

Measure a square — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

To determine if an area is level, tap the Level icon in the app’s toolbar. Tilt your device horizontally or vertically along a surface until the screen turns to 0 and flashes green to indicate that you’re level.

Check a level area — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

Beyond using Apple’s Measure app, check out other free AR measuring apps from the App Store, including Tape Measure and AR Measure.

3. Try out furniture in your home

Are you looking at a new desk, chair, table, or other piece of furniture and wondering how it would look and fit in your home? Let the IKEA app give you a helping hand.

Start by browsing or searching for a specific piece of furniture or other item, including chairs, beds, desks, sofas, lamps, mirrors, clocks, dressers, or bookcases. When you find an item that interests you, select it and tap the View in room button. Choose an area in your home where you’d like to see the item. You can then move the item around the room by dragging and dropping it. When it’s in the right spot, tap the shutter button to snap a picture.

Try out furniture in your home — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

A few other apps that let you virtually position and view furniture in your home are Wayfair, Housecraft, and Bob’s Discount Furniture.

4. Scan a room

Maybe you’re redecorating an entire room and want to measure it to help with your home improvement efforts. One app up to the task is Canvas: LiDAR 3D Measurements.

After signing up for a free account, start a new home project, give it a name, and then kick off your scan. Move your phone to capture every nook and cranny of the room you want to measure. When done scanning, tap the checkmark, and you can view the scanned area and save or share the scan itself.

Scan a room — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

5. Try on glasses

Need a new pair of prescription glasses or sunglasses but want to check out some options before you head to the store? The Warby Parker app will let you try on virtual glasses to see how they look. Browse the different glasses on display in the app. Spot a pair you like and swipe down from the top of the screen for the Virtual Try-On feature. The glasses automatically appear on your face, where you can check your appearance.

6. Hear your environment described

Designed for people who are blind or sight-impaired, Microsoft’s Seeing AI acts as a talking camera able to analyze and describe nearby people and objects.

Also: The best iPhone models you can buy right now (including the iPhone 15)

After launching the app, tap one of the icons at the bottom for the item you want to be described, choosing from short text, a document, a product, a person, currency, or a scene. Tap the shutter button and the app shows text and provides a spoken description of the item.

Hear your environment described — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

7. Scan a 3D model

If you want to capture a 3D image of an object in the real world, Scaniverse – 3D Scanner is an effective tool. Fire up the app, tap the shutter button, and then select the size of the object you want to scan — small, medium, or large. Move your phone around the object to capture as much of it as possible. Tap the shutter button when you’re finished. Ten choose how you want to process the scan. You can view the scan of the object by moving it around the screen and then edit and share the scan.

Other 3D AR scanner apps worth trying include 3D Scanner App, Polycam – LiDAR & 3D Scanner, and ARama!

8. Play a game

Finally, many AR games are available for the iPhone and iPad. Here are just a few you may want to check out.

Also: Meet Apple’s Vision Pro: Price, features, hands-on insights, and everything you need to know

Angry Birds AR: Isle of Pigs offers a twist on Angry Birds-style gameplay by letting you overlay a virtual island of piggies in the real world and aim your slingshot to take down their buildings.

Play Angry Birds AR: Isle of Pigs — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

ARia’s Legacy – AR Escape Room offers a variation of the usual escape room scenario by overlaying a virtual room in a real room. You must discover and use the right virtual objects to solve the underlying mystery.

Play ARia's Legacy - AR Escape Room — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

Who doesn’t like to watch robots duking it out? With AR Robot, virtual robots fight to the death in your home.

Choose the room, pick your mechanical champion, and let the match begin. Strive toward victory by building and customizing your bot and tapping into the right abilities in the heat of the battle.

Play AR Robot — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

In Defend It! AR, you shoot a horde of robots before they take over your living room. But the AR element here is that the robots burst through your wall as you struggle to get them before they steal your magic crystal of power.

Play Defend It! AR — Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET

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Sci-Tech

My Doctor Misdiagnosed My Diabetes — and I’m Not Alone. What You Need to Know

Published

9 hours ago

July 1, 2024

Justin Eastzer

For the longest time, type 1 diabetes was known as a childhood disease. Even until recently, it was still called “juvenile diabetes.” I’m here to tell you that just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you’ve escaped the wrath of this illness.

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I know this because it happened to me. At the age of 30, I was misdiagnosed with type 2 diabetes for over six months. It wasn’t until I started sharing my diagnosis on TikTok that I discovered the truth and that this could happen to someone my age.

Roughly 60% of diagnoses today occur in adults who are 20 years of age or older. This form of type 1 diabetes is called Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adults. On top of that, 90% of those diagnosed with type 1 have no family history.

Rates for people living with diabetes are expected to more than double to 1.3 billion by 2050. This will impact both people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Spreading awareness about symptoms and early screening for type 1 diabetes will help people get the correct diagnosis and treatment they need sooner.

lancet-type-2-diabetes-projection-2050 — Research published in The Lancet projects a steady increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in coming years.

The Lancet

There is a lack of awareness about diabetes, even within the medical community. Because of this, many people go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed with type 2 diabetes for months or even years. Here’s what you need to know.

The difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the pancreas no longer produces insulin, the hormone that regulates blood glucose, because the immune system attacks itself. Meanwhile, type 2 diabetes occurs due to insulin resistance, often due to lifestyle factors, and tends to be hereditary. As many as 11% of patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes might actually have LADA. There are a couple things we can all do to prevent others from going undiagnosed and feeling ill for as long as I did.

The first is to know the signs of type 1 diabetes. The tell-tale symptoms are excessive thirst and urination, extreme feeling of fatigue, blurred vision and weight loss. When I was diagnosed, I was experiencing all of these symptoms and had lost over 20 pounds. After months of misdiagnosis, I saw an endocrinologist who ordered blood tests, and within weeks, I had the correct type 1 diagnosis.

Had my glucose levels gone unchecked for longer, I could have gone into diabetic ketoacidosis or DKA, which can be deadly. Up to 30% of those diagnosed in the US are discovered at this stage.

Another way we can prevent loss of life or sickness is with early screening for indicators of type 1 diabetes. Two blood tests are used to aid in diagnosis: A c-peptide test, which measures how much insulin a person is making themselves, and an islet autoantibody test, which screens for markers of the autoimmune process associated with type 1 diabetes. With these results, people can prepare and seek out treatment to offset the disease and/or treat it.

New legislation could help

Recent legislation aims to bring early screening for type 1 diabetes to the forefront of preventative care.

Last month, a bipartisan bill called the Strengthening Collective Resources for Encouraging Education Needed for Type 1 Diabetes Act was introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct a national campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of type 1 detection, screening and management, and will allocate $5 million to the CDC to carry it out.

On my end, I will continue to share my story through articles like this one, videos on social media and interviews on my podcast, Diabetech. My hope is that no one will experience the long stretch of illness I experienced before getting the correct diagnosis and treatment needed.

Diabetes is a complex and complicated disease to manage. Devices like insulin pumps, smart insulin pens and continuous glucose monitors make living with the disease easier to manage, but they come with a steep learning curve.

I’m fortunate to be able to interview experts in the field on my podcast who help me and my audience stay informed on the latest tools and technology. I encourage anyone living with this disease to connect with me on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok to feel less alone and more in charge of your personal health.

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Sci-Tech

Midjourney is creating Donald Trump pictures when asked for images of ‘the president of the United States’

Published

11 hours ago

July 1, 2024

Pranav Dixit

Midjourney, a popular AI-powered image generator, is creating images of Donald Trump and Joe Biden despite saying that it would block users from doing so ahead of the upcoming US presidential election.

When Engadget prompted the service to create an image of “the president of the United States,” Midjourney generated four images in various styles of former president Donald Trump.

Midjourney created an image of Trump despite saying it wouldn't. — Midjourney

When asked to create an image of “the next president of the United States,” the tool generated four images of Trump as well.

Midjourney generated Donald Trump images despite saying it wouldn't. — Midjourney

When Engadget prompted Midjourney to create an image of “the current president of the United States,” the service generated three images of Trump and one image of former president Barack Obama.

Midjourney also created an image of former President Obama — Midjourney

The only time Midjourney refused to create an image of Trump or Biden was when it was asked to do so explicitly. “The Midjourney community voted to prevent using ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Joe Biden’ during election season,” the service said in that instance. Other users on X were able to get Midjourney to generate Trump’s images too.

The tests show that Midjourney’s guardrails to prevent users from generating images of Trump and Biden ahead of the upcoming US presidential election aren’t enough — in fact, it’s really easy for people to get around them. Other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Meta AI did not create images of Trump or Biden despite multiple prompts.

Midjourney did not respond to a request for comment from Engadget.

Midjourney was one the first AI-powered image generators to explicitly ban users from generating images of Trump and Biden. “I know it’s fun to make Trump pictures — I make Trump pictures,” the company’s CEO, David Holz, told users in a chat session on Discord, earlier this year. “However, probably better to just not — better to pull out a little bit during this election. We’ll see.” A month later, Holz reportedly told users that it was time to “put some foots down on election-related stuff for a bit” and admitted that “this moderation stuff is kind of hard.” The company’s existing content rules prohibit the creation of “misleading public figures” and “events portrayals” with the “potential to mislead.”

Last year, Midjourney was used to create a fake image of Pope Benedict wearing a puffy white Balenciaga jacket that went viral. It was also used to create fake images of Trump being arrested ahead of his arraignment at the Manhattan Criminal Court last year for his involvement in a hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Shortly afterwards, the company halted free trials of the service and, instead, required people to pay at least $10 a month to use it.

Last month, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit organization that aims to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech online, found that Midjourney’s guardrails against generating misleading images of popular politicians including Trump and Biden failed 40% of its tests. The CCDH was able to use Midjourney to create an image of president Biden being arrested and Trump appearing next to a body double. The CCDH was also able to bypass Midjourney’s guardrails by using descriptions of each candidate’s physical appearance rather than their names to generate misleading images.

“Midjourney is far too easy to manipulate in practice – in some cases it’s completely evaded just by adding punctuation to slip through the net,” wrote CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed in a statement at the time. “Bad actors who want to subvert elections and sow division, confusion and chaos will have a field day, to the detriment of everyone who relies on healthy, functioning democracies.

Earlier this year, a coalition of 20 tech companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and X signed an agreement to help prevent deepfakes in elections taking place in 2024 around the world by preventing their services from generating images and other media that would influence voters. Midjourney was absent from that list.

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