WAGE THEFT

$14,700 fine, pay cut: Japanese man lands in trouble for 4,500 smoke breaks at work

A Japanese man landed in hot water for smoking on the job more than 4,500 times in 14 years. 

The man was hit with a fine worth around $14,700 for the same.

India Today World Desk
New Delhi ,UPDATED: Mar 30, 2023

The man was asked to return 1.44 million yen of his salary, in addition to his disciplinary wage reduction (Photo: Pixabay/Representational)

By India Today World Desk: A 61-year-old Japanese civil servant recently got in trouble for smoking on the job more than 4,500 times in 14 years. He was slapped with a fine worth around 1.44 million yen (S$14,700) for taking smoke breaks during office hours, the Straits Times reported.

The report stated that the authorities in Osaka took strict action against the government employee, along with two colleagues in the prefecture's finance department. They also imposed a 10 per cent pay cut for six months for repeatedly smoking during work hours despite multiple warnings.

In 2022, the human resources office received a tip-off that the trio were secretly stashing tobacco. The employees were then summoned by their supervisor and warned they may face consequences if they are caught smoking again. However, the three continued smoking and lied about it when interviewed in December 2022.

The report said that out of the three, a 61-year-old director-level employee was deemed to have violated the "duty of devotion" under the Local Public Service Act. The man was asked to return 1.44 million yen of his salary, in addition to his disciplinary wage reduction.

The prefectural government revealed that the man clocked up 355 hours and 19 minutes of smoking on duty.

Osaka has some of the strictest smoking laws in the world and, in 2008, it introduced a total ban on government premises such as offices and public schools. Government employees have also been banned from lighting up while on duty since 2019.

Reacting to the penalty, some argued that having to go off-site for a puff would have meant wasting more time, while others found the fine harsh, saying one can waste time by drinking tea, eating snacks or just chatting, but those are not punishable offences, so neither should be smoking tobacco.

In 2019, a high school teacher in Osaka was similarly disciplined with a temporary pay cut after he was found to have taken around 3,400 illicit smoke breaks. He was also asked to return one million yen of his salary to the education ministry.

France probes case of man gravely injured at water protest

By AFP
March 29, 2023

Police said firing thousands of tear gas grenades was a 'proportionate' response to violent demonstrators - Copyright AFP Oliver Contreras

French prosecutors said Wednesday they were probing the case of a man seriously wounded at a demonstration over access to water, after his family filed a criminal complaint.

The 32-year-old has been fighting for his life in a coma since Saturday’s thousands-strong environmental protest against a new “mega-basin” gathering water for irrigation in the western Deux-Sevres region.

The probe was prompted by his parents, who filed a complaint alleging attempted murder as well as the prevention of access by first responders.

Protest organisers said Tuesday that the man, from the southwestern city Toulouse, was seriously wounded when he was struck in the head by a tear gas grenade fired by police.

“People close to him are determined to bear witness and uncover the truth about what happened,” they added.

The case is being investigated by military prosecutors in western city Rennes who have jurisdiction over France’s gendarmes — police officers belonging to the armed forces.

Warlike scenes of Saturday’s clashes between around 5,000 protesters and 3,200 police in the open fields made headlines over the weekend.

Fielding helicopters, armoured vehicles and water cannon, security forces fired thousands of tear gas grenades and dozens of other projectiles in a response the DGGN police authority described as “proportionate to the level of threat”.

Authorities say officers were faced with “an unprecedented explosion of violence” and targeted with Molotov cocktails and fireworks.

– Ambulance access –

But Human Rights League (LDH) observers on the scene said police made “unrestrained and indiscriminate use of force” against all the demonstrators, rather than targeting violent groups or individuals.

AFP journalists saw police begin using tear gas as soon as the marchers arrived.

Prosecutors in nearby Niort counted 47 wounded police and seven demonstrators requiring medical aid, including two in danger for their lives — one of whose condition has since improved.

Protest organisers complained of 200 wounded, 40 seriously including one person who lost an eye.

In an audio recording published by daily Le Monde, a member of the ambulance service told the LDH that “commanders on the ground” were holding them back from the scene, without identifying individuals.

The service said on Twitter Tuesday that “sending an ambulance with oxygen into an area with clashes is not recommended given the risk of explosion”.

Deux-Sevres’ prefect — the top government official in the region — wrote in a Tuesday report to the interior ministry that it was “very difficult” for ambulances to reach wounded demonstrators as “the clashes had not stopped or were starting again”.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has responded to the clashes by vowing to ban one of the associations that organised the protests.

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M
Spain competition watchdog opens Google probe


By AFP
March 29, 2023

The European Union and several member states have in recent years taken steps to stop US tech giants like Google from stifling competition - Copyright AFP/File STR

Spain’s competition watchdog has launched an investigation into Google for alleged anti-competitive practices affecting news agencies and press publications.

The probe seeks to determine if Google and its parent company Alphabet abused their “dominant position” in the Spanish market, competition watchdog CNMC said in a statement late on Tuesday.

“Specifically, these practices consist of the possible imposition of unfair commercial conditions on publishers of press publications and news agencies established in Spain for the exploitation of their copyrighted content,” it added.

The watchdog said it opened its probe following a complaint from the Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO), a non-profit association of authors and publishers of books, magazines and newspapers.

It did not specify the period covered by the investigation, nor what sanctions Google could face if it is proven that Google had abused its dominant position in Spain.

The European Union and several member states have in recent years taken steps to stop US tech giants like Google from stifling competition, avoiding tax and profit from news content without paying.

The digital giants are regularly criticised for dominating markets by elbowing out rivals.

In July 2022, the European Parliament adopted the Digital Markets Act to curb the market dominance of Big Tech, with violators facing fines of up to 10 percent of their annual global sales.

Brussels has slapped over eight billion euros in fines on Google alone for abusing its dominant market position.

The EU has also created a form of copyright called “neighbouring rights” that allows print media to demand compensation for use of their content.

After initial resistance, Google and Facebook agreed to pay French media, including AFP, for articles shown in web searches.

UK defence minister would ‘love’ return of conscription

VERY SUCCESSFUL IN VIETNAM WAR

ByAFP
March 29, 2023

Britain's Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said reservists were important given the reliance of modern armed forces on specialists - Copyright AFP Oliver Contreras

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Wednesday he would “love” to see Britain emulate Finland and Sweden by bringing back military conscription.

Britain scrapped national service for all young men in 1960, and occasional calls for its return have been confined to right-wing politicians and media.

Wallace, a former army officer, was briefing reporters alongside Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson about Sweden and Finland’s bids to join NATO after Russia invaded Ukraine.

He conceded that “a different cultural thing” was at play after both Nordic countries persisted with conscription in the decades since World War II, albeit with a seven-year break for Sweden.

But Wallace said: “I think we’re all envious of both Sweden and Finland, in (their) reserves.”

He said reservists were especially important given the reliance of modern armed forces on specialists, for example in cyberwarfare, who could be activated in time of need.

“And I think we’ve got to recognise that again the lesson of Ukraine is how do we work on our resilience, and part of that is about reserves,” he said.

“I would love to have a model like that.”

The first draft card of the Vietnam War era was burned on this day in 1965 — 56 years ago.   NOTE IT IS AN AFRO AMERICAN DRAFT DODGER

Erdogan embarks on his toughest election test

ByAFP
March 31, 2023

Erdogan has been touring quake-hit cities to revive his re-election campaign 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan travels to the heart of Turkey’s earthquake disaster zone on Friday to formally kick off the toughest election campaign of his two-decade rule.

One poll released on the first official day of campaigning showed the 69-year-old trailing his secular rival by nearly 10 percentage points in the May 14 presidential and parliamentary vote.

The gap appears to have widen due to seething anger at the government’s response to a massive earthquake in February that claimed more than 50,000 lives and displaced millions.

But secular opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu — a 74-year-old former civil servant who has never won a national race — is facing his own problems from an unlikely source.

Kilicdaroglu has cobbled together a six-party alliance that groups politicians with radically different views and the shared goal of defeating Erdogan.

The opposition views this as their best chance yet to defeat Erdogan and end his Islamic-rooted party’s control of growing facets of the highly polarised country’s social life.

Turkey’s worst economic crisis of Erdogan’s era should also boost his rival’s hand.

But a last-minute entry of maverick opposition leader Muharrem Ince threatens to upset Kilicdaroglu’s plans.

Ince challenged Erdogan in the last election and refused Kilicdaroglu’s offer to bow out of the race this week.

– Healing wounds –

Polls show Ince’s support small but growing. The opposition fears the 58-year-old will split the anti-Erdogan vote.

Analysts also point to Erdogan’s stellar election record, as well as the government’s control of the media and state institutions during the campaign.

Political risk consultancy Eurasia Group said Erdogan’s re-election “remains the baseline (scenario), though the odds are falling”.

Erdogan’s decision to launch his campaign in the ethnically mixed southeastern city of Gaziantep is telling.

He enjoyed some local support during his early efforts to negotiate an end to a Kurdish struggle for an independent state that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

A breakdown of those talks led to a resurgence of violence and a crackdown on Kurdish leaders that has seen hundreds jailed.

The main pro-Kurdish party — seen as a kingmaker with roughly 10 percent of the vote — has given its tacit support to Kilicdaroglu.

But Erdogan appears to be trying to break through to Kurdish voters via pledges of more social support.

He will be attending the groundbreaking ceremony for a relief centre in quake-hit Gaziantep — one of several he has opened in the past few weeks.

– Kitchen chats –

Many point to the similarities with an earlier government failing in its response to an earthquake in 1999 in which more than 17,000 people died.

“We are working day and night to heal the wounds caused by the quake,” Erdogan said at a similar groundbreaking ceremony in nearby Adiyaman this week.

Kilicdaroglu has taken a radically different approach.

He has played up his humble upbringing in video chats that he records from his formica-tiled kitchen. These regularly gather millions of YouTube and Twitter views.

He appeals directly to the estimated six million teens who grew up during Erdogan’s time in power and will be voting for the first time.

Other messages are addressed to religious conservatives who form the core of Erdogan’s support.

“I want to appeal to conservative young women,” Kilicdaroglu said in one message.

Erdogan prides himself on removing religious restrictions in the officially secular state.

Kilicdaroglu has fought hard to show that his secular party will not curb conservative women’s right to stay veiled at work or school.

“We will not allow your achievements and freedoms to be destroyed,” Kilicdaroglu told conservative women in the message.

– Outsiders –

Election officials announced on Friday that the presidential ballot will have four names on it.

Ince’s outside candidacy is joined by that of Sinan Ogan — a far-right politician who obtained his doctorate degree at a prestigious Moscow university.

Ogan’s support languishes in the low single digits.

But that of Ince is edging up thanks to support from Turkey’s younger male voters, who sympathise with his secular nationalist views.

One poll showed Ince picking up 10 percent of the vote in May.

The opposition Halk TV news site pointed out that Ince was the first politician to reach the quake’s epicentre and the most visible in the disaster zone in the past few weeks.

“His voters are not satisfied with the opposition and are against the government,” one Halk TV analyst wrote.

Tycoon’s ‘unvaxxed sperm’ auction taps into conspiracies


By AFP
March 30, 2023

Copyright AFP/File Ed JONES
Anuj Chopra and Marisha Goldhamer

A fugitive Chinese billionaire plans to auction “unvaccinated sperm” on an online platform rife with misinformation — a sale that vaccine skeptics bill optimistically as a chance to buy the “next Bitcoin.”

The sales pitch that sperm from uninoculated men will be in high demand — and therefore fetch top dollar — stems from the widely debunked conspiracy theory that Covid-19 jabs cause mass infertility.

Guo Wengui, a tycoon exiled in the United States who was recently arrested for alleged fraud, is putting that pitch to the test with his much-hyped auction slated for June on the fringe platform Gettr.

“Sperm and eggs from our fellow fighters will be auctioned on our Gettr platform between June 1 and June 6,” Guo said in a livestream in February.

The tycoon, a cult-like figure who is wanted in China and closely tied to Donald Trump’s former political advisor Steve Bannon, claimed to have already stored nearly 6,000 eggs and a “few million sperm” from unvaccinated supporters.

“We will auction off the best sperm and eggs, including of course my own sperm,” he said, adding that trading will be allowed in digital currencies and be open to all races and ethnicities.

It remains unclear whether the auction will go ahead following the arrest earlier this month of Guo, who faces federal charges that he defrauded thousands of online followers of some $1 billion.

But the planned sale has generated buzz on Gettr, where the tycoon’s supporters have hailed it as a “new era for humanity.”

“Giving unvaccinated sperms or eggs not only is an honorable way to gain wealth, but also will save the future of humanity,” said a Gettr post that endorsed Guo.

The post featured a photo with a hand-scrawled message: “Unvaxxed sperm is the next Bitcoin.”

– ‘Pure bloods’ –


“This auction plays off a broader false narrative that Covid-19 vaccines have harmed fertility,” John Gregory, health editor at the watchdog NewsGuard, told AFP.

“Anti-vaccine misinformers pushed that claim even in the face of an abundance of medical studies showing that the vaccines don’t hurt male or female fertility.”

Guo, who goes by other names including Miles Guo, himself is an adherent to the false claim.

The New Federal State of China, an anti-Chinese Communist Party lobby group created by Guo, has also repeatedly made unfounded statements such as “vaccines are a bioweapon.”

Guo’s aides are tight-lipped about the auction. When asked about it this week, a NFSC spokeswoman told AFP to expect a response within 10 minutes, but did not reply and stopped responding to reminders.

Gettr, a right-wing social media company which the US media said was initially bankrolled by Guo, did not respond when asked whether it would allow the auction.

In his livestream, Guo vowed to make struggling Gettr the first global platform to trade sperm and eggs from unvaccinated people.

He pledged to use “scientific methods” for verification and said a letter from an attorney will be required to confirm that the traders are unvaccinated, without giving further details on testing or storage.

But some Gettr staff have expressed skepticism about turning the platform into such a marketplace, noting hurdles including legal restrictions on the sale of semen in other countries, Rolling Stone magazine reported.

If Gettr were to proceed, the platform will likely tap into the “pure bloods,” a shadowy global movement spawned by vaccine misinformation.

Wrongly asserting that Covid-19 vaccines “contaminate” the body, adherents of the movement use online forums to seek out blood, sperm and even breast milk from unvaccinated donors.


– Profit from falsehoods –

The online chatter appears to have fueled a belief among vaccine skeptics that the sperm represents a lucrative financial opportunity.

“The real money is in unvaccinated sperm,” said a post on Gettr.

“It’s the new white gold,” it added, using the hashtag “unvaccinated and proud.”

In another sign of interest, “unvaccinated sperm available” mugs and t-shirts have gone on sale on Amazon and eBay.

Indonesia’s health ministry in February rejected a fabricated article shared on Facebook and Twitter that said the sperm of unvaccinated men “will be highly valuable in the future,” AFP factcheckers reported.

Another social media user suggested that if a “sperm bank for the unvaccinated” ever opened, he could get rich.

“It’s only a ‘precious commodity’ if a person has bought into the false narrative that Covid-19 vaccination harms fertility,” Gregory said.

“This auction fits with an established pattern where anti-vaccine misinformers sell products to profit from their false claims.”

burs-ac/bgs

Meng Wanzhou: Huawei’s ‘princess’ claims her crown

By AFP
March 31, 2023

The daughter of Huawei's billionaire founder, Meng Wanzhou will take over as rotating chairwoman as the Chinese tech giant's profits plummet under US sanctions - 

Copyright AFP STR

The daughter of Huawei’s billionaire founder, Meng Wanzhou will take over as rotating chairwoman as the Chinese tech giant enters choppy waters, with profits plummeting under US sanctions.

The Washington-led pressure campaign has contributed to Huawei losing its top spot in the smartphone market and has throttled its supply chains.

After Huawei’s Friday announcement that its 2022 net profits had plunged 69 percent compared to the previous year, Meng struck a defiant tone at a press conference.

“We might not be successful in the end, but being placed in a fatal impasse, we have no choice but to go all in and fight, with all hands on deck,” she said.

The 51-year-old is not new to being on the front line of the US-China tech war.

In 2018, she was arrested in Canada at the behest of the United States on fraud charges relating to her alleged efforts to hide violations of US sanctions on Iran involving Huawei affiliate Skycom.

She remained under house arrest in Vancouver for almost three years while fighting extradition, with the case becoming a major thorn in relations between the three countries.

She was allowed to return to China in September 2021, and in December 2022, the US Justice Department dropped all charges against her.

– Huawei under pressure –

Huawei has been repeatedly targeted by Washington in recent years over cybersecurity and espionage concerns.

The administration of former president Donald Trump effectively barred US companies from doing business with the firm, and his successor Joe Biden has slapped on further sanctions, including a ban on sales of new Huawei equipment in the United States.

Washington has also put controls on the export of sophisticated computer components and chip fabrication equipment to Huawei and other Chinese companies.

Huawei says it has replaced thousands of product components banned for export by the United States with homegrown versions, but it still relies on US chips for many of its 4G smartphones and consumer gadgets.

Consequently, the company is looking to expand its lines of business and develop new supply chains.

Meng on Friday identified Huawei’s cloud business as a key area of growth.

It is also looking into building telecom infrastructure for solar farms and makers of driverless cars, and investing heavily in Africa and emerging economies in South and Southeast Asia.

– ‘Humble’ beginning –



Despite being internally known as Huawei’s “princess”, Meng is said to be approachable and self-deprecating.

According to Chinese media, she started off as a secretary at Huawei and kept her head down for years, to such an extent that few knew her father was founder Ren Zhengfei.

This may have been aided by the fact that she took her mother’s surname from a young age, for reasons that remain unclear.

Ren, a former army engineer, founded Huawei with a few thousand dollars in 1987, growing it into one of the world’s leading suppliers of hardware for telecommunications networks.

“He is a CEO at work, and a father at home,” Meng once said, to emphasise that competence, not connections, determined one’s path at Huawei.

Huawei credits Meng for reorganising the company’s financial and IT architecture, beginning in the early 2000s, so that the company could cope with its rapid global growth.

Meng herself recounted how initially, she and other bookkeepers had to bind the company’s financial records by hand each month, according to a readout of a speech she gave at her former high school last year.

Meng will lead the company for six months until September 30.

Huawei, which is not publicly listed, has two other rotating chairs — Eric Xu and Ken Hu.

Meng said Friday that the company’s future, as it navigates one of its roughest patches yet, would depend on its “collective leadership”.

“In times of pressure, we press on –- with confidence,” she said.
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Op-Ed: ChatGPT vs GPT4 vs Bard, vs Bing vs whatever — Don’t get too impressed with any of it just yet


ByPaul Wallis
PublishedMarch 30, 2023


ChatGPT can deliver an essay, computer code... or legal text, within seconds. - Copyright AFP Abdul MAJEED

A lot of information is being generated by comparisons between AI bots. A hierarchy of sorts is emerging, but performance is highly variable. Selective use of subjects for comparison is another issue. Also, remember that these are first-generation “large language” AIs at work.

The New York Times did a pretty good job of comparing ChatGPT and Bard as executive assistants. ChatGPT did well, Bard didn’t really cut it on any level. The New York Times article is well worth reading because it also defines the parameters for comparison.

The natural inference from this comparison is that ChatGPT, which is now the previous iteration of that AI, has a much stronger learning base. You’d think so from the outcome.

What’s important about this inference is that the bar has been raised so high, so fast. This is like the pre-Windows 95 era, and you can expect the new tech to happen much faster.

The current intrusions into the consumer space are pretty tentative. If you have Bing, you’ll also note that there’s now an AI interface on the search engine. That was a very quick response to the AI breakout into the mainstream, and an attempt to get market share from Google. The obvious point to be made here is that the market is already driving the development, in that sense.

That’s not necessarily good news for the immediate future of AI. You could get a sort of AI domestic servant, not necessarily a high-bandwidth do-everything AI as a market model, sort of “for the housewives” AI.

Tech tends to do that. Most people want something to do all the basics and can live without the more advanced tech because they don’t really need it. So a cut-down version of AI is likely to take market share over a high-end AI.

What’s bad about that is that it reduces the demand for advanced development. Scientific AI, which gets very little attention, is a different type of AI that is ultra-functional and very useful for heavy lifting in the sciences. This “species” of AI is evolved to perform specialist tasks, and it’s doing very well.

If mainstream AI turns into a drudge job worker, you could wind up with dumbed-down purely consumer AI that’s not much more advanced than it is now in 2050. It will be able to do all the basics. The problem with that is that the AI will also have to catch up with current comms, tech innovations, new platforms, etc.

To reboot Moore’s Law – “The number of AIs will increase as the AIs evolve more capability.” That’s likely to mean a pretty high evolution rate and turnover in AI types and models. Which leads to an unavoidable question – How long can your AI be viable?

Add to this technotopia the usual bells and whistles attached to all types of tech. “Our AI can find your soul mate, do your washing, fix your tax return and housetrain the dog”.

Yeah, sure it will. A lot of superfluous and probably expensive crud is likely to come along for the ride. As with digital civilization in general, AI could easily be contaminated with whatever the equivalent of useless apps for AI will be.

Like the useless apps of the past, this will come out like low-quality dye in the wash. What’s likely to be far more important is the public image of AI they will create, which like those apps, will be largely fictional.

Points being:AI has proven its capacity at this current level, and no more.
AI will evolve rapidly, finding new roles.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of predictable information. The rest is paid hype and hysteria. You’re looking at an almost blank slate, colored in by a couple of this year’s “enlightened” chatbots.

This almost total lack of hard information is sparking terror:

AI could replace people. So could other people.

AI could run businesses. That’d probably be an improvement in many cases.

AI could remove those lousy low-paid jobs nobody wants. So what?

What’s really different is that AI is a truly open-ended, real-time, multitasking class of tech. That’s what’s actually new.

Fear of AI is useless. People including Elon Musk are now actually calling for a halt to the training of AI. That’s not going to happen and nobody can make it happen. Google and OpenAI are definitely not going to let their competitors catch up. China is definitely not going to stop development.

The “answer” to AI is critical thinking. The world’s not good at that, and that’s likely to be the real problem.

The risk and reward of ChatGPT in cybersecurity


By Dr. Tim Sandle
March 31, 2023


ChatGPT appeared in November and immediately generated a buzz as it wrote texts including poems - Copyright AFP/File Lionel BONAVENTURE

There is considerable hype and fear there’s been around ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI. This extends to articles about academics and teachers worrying that the platform will make cheating easier than ever. On the other side of the coin, you might have seen there are articles evangelising all of ChatGPT’s potential applications.

Alternatively, there are some more esoteric examples of people using the tool. One user, for example, got it to write an instruction guide for removing peanut butter sandwiches from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible. Another asked it to write a song in the style of Nick Cave; although the singer was less than enthused about the results.

According to JP Perez-Etchegoyen, CTO of Onapsis, amidst all that hype and discussion, there has not been nearly enough attention paid to the risks and rewards that AI tools like ChatGPT present in the cybersecurity arena, as he explains to Digital Journal.

Understanding ChatGPT

Perez-Etchegoyen says that: “In order to get a clearer idea of what those risks and rewards look like, it’s important to get a better understanding of what ChatGPT is and what it’s capable of.”

Perez-Etchegoyen’sclear explanation is: “ChatGPT (now in its latest version, ChatGPT-4, released on March 14th, 2023) is part of a larger family of AI tools developed by the US-based company OpenAI. While it’s officially called a chatbot, that doesn’t quite cover its versatility. Trained using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques, it can do far more than most chatbots.”

Furthermore: “As part of its responses, it can generate content based on all the information it was trained on. That information includes general knowledge as well as programming languages and code. As a result, it can, for instance, simulate an entire chat room; play games like tic-tac-toe; and simulate an ATM.”

More importantly, for businesses and other large organisations, Perez-Etchegoyen states: “It can help improve businesses’ customer service through more personalised, accurate messaging. It can even write and debug computer programs. Some of those, and other, features mean that it could both be a cybersecurity ally and a threat.”

Education, filtering, and bolstering defences

Looking at a key sector – learning – Perez-Etchegoyen reveals: “On the positive front, there’s a lot to be said for ChatGPT. One of the most valuable roles it could play is also one of the most simple: spotting phishing. Organisations could entrench a habit in their employees whereby they use ChatGPT to determine if any content they’re not sure about is phishing or if it was generated with malicious intent.”

Outlining the importance, Perez-Etchegoyen states: “For all the technological advances made in recent years, social engineering attacks like phishing remain one of the most effective forms of cybercrime. In fact, research shows that, of the cyberattacks successfully identified in the UK in 2022, 83 percent involved some form of phishing.”

In addition: “There are numerous other ways that ChatGPT can be used to bolster cybersecurity efforts. It could, for example, provide a degree of assistance to more junior security workers, whether that’s in communicating any issues they might have or helping them better understand the context of what they’re meant to be working on at any given point. It could also help under-resourced teams curate the latest threats and in identifying internal vulnerabilities.”

The bad guys are using it too

There is a dark side to this AI advancement. Perez-Etchegoyen observes: “Even as cybersecurity professionals explore ways of using ChatGPT to their advantage, cybercriminals are too. They might, for example, make use of its ability to generate malicious code. Alternatively, they might use it to generate content that appears to be human-generated, potentially used to trick users into clicking on malicious links, unknowingly leading to dangerous consequences.”

The unsavoury practices continue in other areas. Here Perez-Etchegoyen adds: “Some are even using ChatGPT to convincingly mimic legitimate AI assistants on corporate websites, opening up a new avenue in the social engineering battlefront. Remember, the success of cybercriminals largely depends on being able to target as many possible vulnerabilities, as frequently and quickly as possible. AI tools like ChatGPT allow them to do that by essentially acting as a supercharged assistant that can help create all assets needed for malicious campaigns.”

Use the tools available

This translates into business advice, which Perez-Etchegoyen draws into a recommendation: “It should be clear then that, if cybercriminals are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to enhance their attacks, your security team should also be using them to bolster your cybersecurity efforts. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone.”

Perez-Etchegoyen further advises: “The right security provider won’t just engage in constant research around how cybercriminals are using the latest technologies to enhance their attacks but also how those technologies can be used to improve threat detection, prevention, and defence. And with the damage that a cybersecurity attack can do to your critical infrastructure, it’s something they should be proactively telling you about too.”

In a follow-up article, Perez-Etchegoyen provides his analysis of ChatGPT-4.

 

The Politics Of Japanese Support For Ukraine By Strategy Page,   Mar 31, 2023 -

Japan had an unusual, for Japan, reaction to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2014, when Russia took Crimea and parts of two eastern Ukrainian provinces, the Japanese response was rather mild. This was because Japan did not want to antagonize Russia, which shared a sea border off northern Japan. In 2014 Japan feared any Japanese use of the strong sanctions imposed on Russia would lead to Russia and China cooperating in opposing Japan. In 2014 Russia was not on particularly good terms with China and Japan preferred to keep it that way.

Japanese policy changed in 2022 when Japan fully embraced harsh Western economic sanctions on Russia and considered supplying military assistance to Ukraine. Opinion polls in Japan showed strong support for such military aid. What stopped this were changes to Japan’s post-World War II constitution that prohibited exporting weapons. Now Japan can do that, but not to nations engaged in a war. Japanese attitudes saw the Russian aggression in Ukraine as similar to what China threatens against Taiwan. Japan has become part of an informal alliance with South Korea, the Philippines and other nations threatened by Chinese claims to the South China Sea. The Japanese public wants a stronger response to Chinese and Russian threats.

Russia has long been particularly aggressive against Japan and potential threats to Russian Pacific Coast territories. For example, in 2021, after a decade of effort Russia finally completed its coast defense rebuilding program. This was mainly about installing Bastion-P coastal defense missile batteries on Sakhalin Island. Sakhalin is 43 kilometers from Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Japanese home islands. The waters between them are called the La Perouse Strait, which is the passage between the Russian dominated Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. The strait is closed up to four months a year by ice and transit by submerged submarines is difficult because of strong currents and relatively shallow (as little as 51 meters) depth. The eastern part of the Sea of Okhotsk is covered by the Kamchatka Peninsula, which already had Bastion-P batteries installed. That provides coastal defense extending into Arctic waters. The southernmost region of the Russian Far East, containing the port of Vladivostok and the most densely populated portion of the Russian Far East, was always well defended. This Pacific coast region is huge, at seven million square kilometers. That is almost the size of the continental United States, but only has a population of 8.3 million. While the Far East region contains 40 percent of Russian territory and less than six percent of Russia’s population, it also contains many naval and ballistic missile bases as well as ports that provide the cheapest way to get goods from the rest of Russia to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railroad alone cannot support the population and economy of the Far East. That explains the importance of defending the Far East from naval attack.

From the 1970s to the 1990s Russian coastal areas in the north and along the Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific coasts were guarded by mobile and fixed batteries of Rubezh missiles. These were 2.5 ton solid-fuel cruise missiles that only had a range of 80 kilometers and much less capable guidance systems than the 21st century Bastion system. Although the Rubezh missiles underwent upgrades through the 1980s, all that stopped in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The government later revealed that by 2000 Russian coasts were largely undefended and it was with great urgency that work began on developing the Bastion system.

By 2010 Bastion was in production and the first priority was the northern, Baltic and Black Sea coasts. Finally, in mid-2016 Russia deployed at least one battery of Bastion-P (K-300P or SSC-5) land based anti-ship missiles in the Kuril Islands, a chain of 56 small islands that extend over a thousand kilometers from Sakhalin Island to the Kamchatka Peninsula. Up until 1945 Japan controlled four of the Kuril Islands closest to Sakhalin. Russia took these four islands from Japan after World War II and Japan wants them back. The presence of Bastion-P coastal defense missiles on these islands reminds Japan that they are not getting the islands back.

The three-ton K-300P missiles used by Bastion have a range of 600 kilometers and a 250 kg (550 pound) warhead. Russia says the Bastion-P uses composites for the casing, making it stealthier, as in harder for radar to spot and track. The stealth is important because after launch the missile initially travels at high altitude (nearly 10,000 meters/30,000 feet) where radar can spot it. But at that altitude the missile can move faster (maximum speed of 3,000 kilometers an hour). Speed makes it harder to intercept and means it takes five minutes or less to reach its target. Guidance is GPS or inertial to reach the general area of the target, which is usually a ship or other small target, then radar (in the anti-ship version) that will identify the specific target and hit it. For its final approach, the missile drops to an altitude of five meters (16 feet) to make it more difficult to spot and stop. The high speed at impact causes additional damage because of the weight of the entire missile.

A Bastion-P battery consists of one or two control vehicles, a support vehicle, four launcher vehicles (each with two missiles in separate canisters) and four reload vehicles. Minimal deployment would be one launcher vehicle and one command vehicle. Several models of 6x6 trucks are used for the command, launcher, support and reload vehicles.

Six years before Bastion-P entered service, the Bal coastal defense missile system was deployed. This was something of an interim coast defense system that used the 670 kg Kh-35 anti-ship missile. This was the Russian answer to the American Harpoon missile and is still used on ships and carried by aircraft. Originally Bal used the early version of Kh-35, which had a range of 130 kilometers. Not much later these were supplemented or replaced by the latest, 260-kilometer version of Kh-35. Because these missiles were smaller and lighter, each launcher vehicle carried eight of them. In the Far East the Bastion system is preferred because much longer coastlines are involved. But for key areas, like major ports or naval bases, the Bal system is useful.

Bastion-P is another variant of the Yakhont (3M55, Oniks and P-800), a design that was able to complete development with an investment from India. This partnership produced the BrahMos for India while Russian used the new BrahMos tech to perfect the 3M55. While officially entering service in 1999, the 3M55 was not really ready for action until BrahMos development was completed in 2006. Because of that it wasn’t until 2010 that Bastion-P entered service. Before deliveries were completed in the Far East Bastion-P was stationed in Crimea and sold to Syria and Vietnam. Russia also plans to install one Bastion-S system in the Far East. Bastion-S is a stationary system with the missiles stored and launched from underground silos. Bastion-S makes sense in the Far East where there are not a lot of roads for launcher vehicles to use and military bases are fewer and larger compared to western Russia.

All these coastal defense systems rely on other target data from aircraft, ships, satellites or land-based radars.

Japan got Russia’s attention with energetic enforcement of the 2022 sanctions. In the past Japan was a source of tech and components used by Russian commercial and military equipment. That ended in 2022 and only added to the isolation Russia is now experiencing. Russia lost most of its active duty ground forces and their armored vehicles in Ukraine and has run out of high-speed guided missiles to use against Ukraine. The Bastion-P missiles are still on the Pacific Coast, if only because Japan is seen as a threat, not a patsy.

Source:Ocnus.net 2023

American children are working hazardous jobs – and it’s about to get worse By Robert Reich, Guardian  Mar 31, 2023 - Child labor violations – including kids working night-shifts and with dangerous equipment – are rising in the US. Republicans want even fewer protections When I was secretary of labor 30 years ago, one major goal was to crack down on companies that employed children, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. I remember being horrified to discover that even in the early 1990s, children who should have been in school were working, often in dangerous jobs. We made progress. Child labor declined in the United States. But it was a hard slog. By law, the highest fines I could levy against companies that put children to work were relatively small. Some firms treated them as costs of business. Other businesses dragged their feet. The US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbying groups argued that almost any minimum standard of decency at work – whether barring child labor, setting a minimum wage, or requiring employers to install safety equipment – was an intrusion on the so-called “free market” and therefore a “job killer”. My argument was that the nation’s goal was not just more jobs; it was more good jobs, safe jobs, jobs that allowed kids to go to school, jobs that upheld minimum standards of decency. In the years since then, I’ve assumed that progress was continuing on eliminating child labor in America. Sadly, I was wrong. Serious child labor violations are once again on the rise, including in hazardous meatpacking and manufacturing jobs. Children are working with chemicals and dangerous equipment. They are also working night shifts. In just the last year, the number of children employed in violation of child labor laws increased 37%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. You might think that in the face of this mounting problem, lawmakers around the country would rush to protect these children. You’d be wrong. In fact, state legislatures are rushing in the opposite direction, seeking to weaken child labor protections. This month, after young children were found working at a factory owned by Arkansas’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods, the Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed legislation making it easier for companies to employ children – eliminating a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed. In the past two years, 10 states have introduced or passed legislation expanding work hours for children, lifting restrictions on hazardous occupations for children, allowing children to work in locations that serve alcohol, and lowering the state minimum wage for minors. Already in 2023, bills to weaken child labor protections have been introduced in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota. One bill introduced in Minnesota would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work on construction sites. Across the country, we’re seeing a coordinated effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations to protect children from abuse – regulations that had been in place for decades. Why is this going on now? Four reasons. Since the surge in post-pandemic consumer demand, employers have been having difficulty finding the workers they need at the wages employers are willing to pay. Rather than pay more, employers are exploiting children. And state lawmakers who are dependent on those employers (such as Tyson) for campaign donations have been willing to let them. A second reason is that the children who are being exploited are considered to be “them” rather than “us” – disproportionately poor, Black, Hispanic and immigrant. So the moral shame of subjecting “our” children to inhumane working conditions when they ought to be in school is quietly avoided, while lawmakers and voters look the other way.     We are witnessing across America a resurgence of cruel capitalism – a form of social Darwinism Third, some of these children (or their parents) are undocumented. They dare not speak out. They need the money. This makes them vulnerable and easily exploited. Finally, we are witnessing across America a resurgence of cruel capitalism – a form of social Darwinism – in which business lobbyists and lawmakers justify their actions by arguing that they are not exploiting the weak and vulnerable, but rather providing jobs for those who need them and would otherwise go hungry or homeless. Conveniently, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers are among the first to claim we “can’t afford” stronger safety nets that would provide these children with safe housing and adequate nutrition. Yet when it comes to handouts from the government in the form of tax loopholes, subsidies and bailouts, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers claim that the nation can easily afford them and that businesses need and deserve them. Obviously, the Department of Labor needs more inspectors and authority to levy higher fines. But that’s not all that’s needed. America seems to be lurching backward to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when workers – including young children – were treated like cow dung and robber barons ruled the roost. The public must demand that child labor once again be relegated to the dustbin of history.