@IngStem @blauwbaard_ @NXT4EU @signalapp @mer__edith It wasn’t vanilla Signal. Read your own link. It was a custom made derivative build on top of the Signal source ( which is Open-Source ).
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marc hofer
19.1K posts
marc hofer
@marchofer
Freelance journalist. Former Nairobi, Kampala, Beirut, Beijing and Brussels. Now back in Europe. https://t.co/xAvd9VutO0.
Katılım Nisan 2009
447 Takip Edilen1.8K Takipçiler
@blauwbaard_ @NXT4EU @signalapp @mer__edith United States government group chat leaks - Wikipedia share.google/5r99M18zBtuX7g…
It was Signal, correct me if I am wrong mate.
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marc hofer retweetledi
This is one of the biggest stories in the world right now...and yet it's largely ignored because it's precisely the kind of esoteric thing that today's media is structurally unable to focus on or process.
Luke Goldstein@lukewgoldstein
Amid the Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic, Trump admin is rewriting contracting rules so that federal officials can override any AI companies’ internal protocols on safety, privacy, surveillance or autonomous warfare usage
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Notable 10 days for senior scientists and military scientists in China.
• Fang Daining, a key scientist in China’s hypersonic weapons programme, has died at the age of 68, according to an image of an obituary notice that began circulating on Chinese social media last week.
• Zhang Jinshui, a pioneering scientist in remote sensing who led major R&D programmes in China and was instrumental in enhancing the country’s food security with satellite technologies, has died at the age of 47.
• Liu Guozhi, a former top PLA scientist, was delisted from the CAS website. In 2016, Liu was named head of the science and technology commission of the Central Military Commission, a position he is believed to have held until the early 2020s.
• The profile of the J-20 stealth fighter jet’s chief designer, Yang Wei, was also removed from the CAS site
• Three top nuclear weapons, radar and missile experts, all members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, were scrubbed from the academy’s website.
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marc hofer retweetledi
This man is a billionaire and was removing labels with a hair dryer personally, you're simply not grinding hard enough
NIK@ns123abc
🚨BREAKING: SUPER MICRO CO-FOUNDER ARRESTED FOR SMUGGLING $2.5B IN NVIDIA GPUs TO CHINA >SMCI co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw arrested today >personally holds $464 MILLION in SMCI stock >charged with smuggling BILLIONS in Nvidia servers to china >used a southeast asian shell company to funnel $2.5B in servers to chinese buyers >$510 million worth shipped in just THREE WEEKS in spring 2025 >built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool U.S compliance auditors >caught on surveillance camera using a HAIR DRYER to swap serial number stickers >coordinated the whole thing over encrypted group chats >SMCI down 12% after hours >faces up to 30 years in federal prison ITS SO OVER…
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marc hofer retweetledi
🚨BREAKING: SUPER MICRO CO-FOUNDER ARRESTED FOR SMUGGLING $2.5B IN NVIDIA GPUs TO CHINA
>SMCI co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw arrested today
>personally holds $464 MILLION in SMCI stock
>charged with smuggling BILLIONS in Nvidia servers to china
>used a southeast asian shell company to funnel $2.5B in servers to chinese buyers
>$510 million worth shipped in just THREE WEEKS in spring 2025
>built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool U.S compliance auditors
>caught on surveillance camera using a HAIR DRYER to swap serial number stickers
>coordinated the whole thing over encrypted group chats
>SMCI down 12% after hours
>faces up to 30 years in federal prison
ITS SO OVER…
National Security Division, U.S. Dept of Justice@DOJNatSec
Three Charged with Conspiring to Unlawfully Divert Cutting Edge U.S. Artificial Intelligence Technology to China “The indictment unsealed today details alleged efforts to evade U.S. export laws through false documents, staged dummy servers to mislead inspectors, and convoluted transshipment schemes, in order to obfuscate the true destination of restricted AI technology—China,” said John A. Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. “These chips are the product of American ingenuity, and NSD will continue to enforce our export-control laws to protect that advantage.” 🔗: justice.gov/opa/pr/three-c…
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marc hofer retweetledi
The video that got the Supermicro cofounder arrested
bone@boneGPT
DEVELOPING: Chinese entrepreneur boasts receipt of 200 NVIDIA H200 GPUs in Beijing despite US export ban, explains how he circumvents export ban 🧵
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marc hofer retweetledi
😬 Location of 🇫🇷French aircraft carrier FS Charles de Gaulle given away by sailor using @Strava running app while jogging on the flight deck.
Raphael Grably@GrablyR
La localisation du porte-avions français Charles de Gaulle rendue possible grâce à l'imprudence d'un marin utilisant l'application de running Strava, rapporte Le Monde. En faisant son footing sur le pont, il révélait la présence du navire.
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@vshih2 GoLaxy’s operations have been reported on quite a while back though: therecord.media/golaxy-china-a…
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Creepy but frankly social sciences are heading in that direction also. See papers like this link.springer.com/article/10.100…
James Tobyne (任翔）@JamesTobyne
Chinese database for spying on Taiwanese leaked, 23 million households included - Taipei Times taipeitimes.com/News/front/arc…
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marc hofer retweetledi
It's good to see that people now understand that AI slop isn't just bad AI Gen art - it's slop law, slop policing, slop education, slop military.
Everywhere AI is forced into systems it brings with it the same +30% error rate of hallucinated info.
Slop is dangerous.
Financial Times@FT
Create enough hallucinated legal arguments, flawed engineering calculations and backdoor-ridden code, and the slop vats fill faster than our capacity to tell good work from bad, writes Tim Harford. Read his column on telling good AI from bad: ft.trib.al/j6Io85O
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marc hofer retweetledi
There has been an alarming development in our legal system. Judges are starting to contract with a private corporation started by an ex-Palantir employee--whose bio says he is also a former speechwriter for Israel's UN ambassador--to have **secretive proprietary AI help decide cases for them.**
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marc hofer retweetledi
Legislators: “fork over your ID to protect kids or you can’t use the internet.”
Hackers: “we’ll take it from here.”
1 billion records. 203 million Americans. The age-verification mandate is the vulnerability.
NetChoice@NetChoice
🚨🚨 @FoxNews: 1 BILLION identity records exposed in ID verification data leak — INCLUDING +203 MILLION America records Governments requiring Digital ID w/ "age verification" mandates create MASSIVE security risks The threat is NOT hypothetical. Another unfortunate example:
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@badiucao The news of the hack has been around for a while : x.com/netaskari/stat…
NetAskari@NetAskari
After having a run through some of the sample files, here is what we know so far from the massive data leak that seems to be on sale ( or has ben already sold ) on Breach Forums. We did not have access to the full list of all the files ( would love to, but not cashing out 10 XMR ). 1/7
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Rumor about major hack on China's National Super-computing Center (NSCC) Research Facility is spreading on twitter.
I can not confirm but looks interesting.
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marc hofer retweetledi
Hacked data from the DHS’s technology incubator shows it funding a variety of companies that would expand its surveillance capabilities with artificial intelligence theguardian.com/us-news/2026/m…
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marc hofer retweetledi
🚨 Everyone is focused on the cyberattack on Stryker claimed by Iran-linked Handala.
But there may be a second story unfolding alongside it. We identified stryker.passkeysetup[.]com, a subdomain that appears to have been created after the Handala incident came into public view.
We have already tied passkeysetup[.]com to ShinyHunters infrastructure from a real attempted attack involving help desk impersonation, MFA reset guidance, and mobile-first lures, the same tradecraft highlighted in our recent reporting.
That suggests a financially motivated actor may be trying to take advantage of the confusion around #Stryker’s current situation. In other words, one incident may now be creating cover for another.
🔗 reliaquest.com/blog/threat-sp…
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marc hofer retweetledi
I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize.
Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness.
Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding.
He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history.
The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future.
A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite.
That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.
Dudes Posting Their W’s@DudespostingWs
Huge W
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marc hofer retweetledi
As far as I am aware this is the first attack of its kind in the DRC that has targeted the Chinese.
Aaron Y. Zelin@azelin
Interesting Islamic State attack in the DRC: -Hits DRC army barracks tasked with guarding a Chinese-operated mining site -Storms the Chinese mine and set fire to most of the vehicles and equipment located inside as well as the living quarters of the Chinese workers
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marc hofer retweetledi
The Real Reason China Avoids a Wealth Tax
The Economist is right to identify inherited wealth as a rising fault line in China. But I’d go one step further on why the CCP is so hesitant to tax wealth.
It is not ideology. It is self-preservation.
To levy a serious wealth tax, the state would first need a reasonably accurate map of who owns what. In a normal system, that is a technical challenge. In China, it is a political minefield.
First, the entire officialdom is implicated. Corruption is not a marginal defect in the system; it is woven into the way power has operated for decades. Office has long been monetized. Once wealth registration becomes real, it does not just expose “the rich.” It exposes the political class itself. And the problem for Beijing is obvious: what do you do when the rot is universal? You cannot arrest everyone. Nor can you easily shine a light on it, because this is not a matter of a few bad apples. It is a rotten forest.
Second, a genuine accounting of wealth would expose how much of it sits within official families, and how much is passed down to their children. It would reveal that the CCP is not merely governing society, but it sits atop it as a hereditary elite. The real danger is not that people discover inequality. They already know inequality is severe. The danger is that they discover, in granular detail, how much of it resides inside the families of those who rule in the name of socialism.
Third, any serious collection of wealth data would create enormous political risk. In China, database leaks are universal. Once a national database of personal wealth exists, leaks become inevitable. And in today’s climate of slowing growth, falling property prices, youth unemployment, and public frustration, such leaks would not be mere gossip scandals. They could trigger a political earthquake.
That is why wealth taxation in China is not just an economic reform. It is a regime transparency test. The moment the state seriously tries to map private wealth, it risks exposing the hidden balance sheet of Party rule itself: corruption, hereditary privilege, and the conversion of political power into family fortune. That is precisely why the issue keeps being postponed. The CCP does not fear wealth taxes because they are too radical. It fears them because they are too revealing.
The Economist@TheEconomist
Even as the economy slows and opportunity narrows, a lucky few receive big windfalls economist.com/briefing/2026/…
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marc hofer retweetledi
The Tate brothers are living it up with their female companions in Hong Kong…
Byron Wan@Byron_Wan
Geez, the Tate brothers went to this well-known spicy crab Chinese restaurant in Wanchai…
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@lukedepulford The deluge of “libertarian” opinion makers and steroid pumped, self assured online commentators inspired by Tates “true words” on China will be insufferable. That said, Tate still has a strong following in certain geographical areas, getting him in on the grift might pay off.
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and you thought the situation in Hong Kong couldn’t get any worse
Byron Wan@Byron_Wan
The Tate brothers — social media influencer Andrew Tate aka Top G and Tristan Tate, who are facing criminal charges including rape and human trafficking in the UK, Romania and the US, are seen hanging out in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong, last night (Mar 13 presumably)… 🤔 nytimes.com/article/andrew…
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