Yes, what makes this even worse is that modern slavery is also a big issue in the self-defined ‘socialist’ countries like China.

Deepseek is welcome in Europe as all others, as long as it complies with EU’s GDPR and the law: A quick reminder that Deepseek is being probed so far in Italy (where it’s prohibited), in France, and Ireland. We’ll see whether other countries follow.

There should be a solution to this once they both agree on mutual independence.

with claim to all China’s territory.

What does that mean? Taiwan doesn’t claim ‘all of China’s territory’ …

Yes, the Vatican is also silent on China’s supression of religious groups, including catholics.

‘There is no longer a safe place to be a Christian in China’ - report

The Chinese government is increasingly cracking down on state-sanctioned churches as well as underground churches, leaving no “safe place” for Christians, according to International Christian Concern.

A new report by ICC tracks persecution of Christians in China since July 2021 and records 32 cases of arrests and detainments, five raids on Christian schools, and 20 cases of the Sinicization of churches - where churches are forced to align their faith with the social and political messaging of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The ICC said that exact numbers were likely to be far higher because of the challenges of receiving information from China.

@jet@hackertacks.com

I personally believe this is some sort of political rhetoric. Marcos knows well that China won’t stop its aggression.

@NutinButNet

@Scheisser

As an addition, the South Korea privacy watchdog is also to ask DeepSeek about personal information use (after Italy and Ireland announced the same some days ago).

South Korea’s information privacy watchdog plans to ask DeepSeek about how the personal information of users is managed, an agency official said on Friday.

The country’s Personal Information Protection Commission will be sending a written request for information to the operators of the Chinese artificial intelligence model soon, the official said.

[Edit typo.]

There’s a related report focusing on the Serbian prime minister’s resignation:

Serbia’s PM Milos Vucevic resigns amid Chinese contractor controversy – [unpaywalled link]

Vucevic was mayor of Novi Sad before becoming prime minister in elections last April. His successor as mayor also resigned on Tuesday. Protesters claim the Chinese consortium responsible for renovating parts of Novi Sad station had bypassed safety regulations with the ­assistance of corrupt officials.

…

There is a growing perception that the president [Vucic, who is now about to decide whether to form a majority government or hold a snap parliamentary election] is trying to quash democratic freedoms in Serbia and turn the country back towards Moscow, despite ­Belgrade’s formal efforts to join the European Union. Serbia is a candidate to join the bloc but must first normalise relations with its neighbour Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia after a Nato intervention in 1999 that brought an end to Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

Yeah, I get your point, but there is also ‘good’ cotton. Hard to find and evaluate for us consumers, though. We need transparent supply chains I would say.

That’s a real issue:

Censorship and isolation as China bans thousands of mobile apps

… ironically, TikTok, along with other globally popular social media platforms, is also unavailable in China. Conversely, ByteDance tailor-made a local version, Douyin, for Chinese users, to comply with the country’s stringent censorship rules. In fact, TikTok is not an isolated case. Alibaba’s popular messaging platform, Ding Talk, is also unavailable in China, and its local version is called Ding Ding.

Yeah, I would say we really need Open Source, privacy-respecting apps everywhere. We don’t need a Great Firewall. Nowhere.

we don’t see similar articles for OpenAI and other US-based AI tools.

I don’t know what kind of media you consume, but I read such articles all the time. And as I said already here, there is still a difference as surveillance and censorship is much harsher in China than anywhere else.

(It’s amazing. I’m really new on Lemmy, but it seems whataboutery is a thing here …)

There would be a lot of reasons to differentiate between democracies and autocracies, but I agree that it’s not surprising. This is just the next step of a totally over-hyped technology imo. Here everyone gets excited about a performance while no one even knows what the training data is, but people are excited by these PR announcements.

‘So what?’: Privacy warnings about DeepSeek fall on deaf ears

Privacy activists are warning about the invasive nature of DeepSeek, which collects a trove of personal user information that could be handed over to the Chinese government

People, however, just don’t care.

Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), shared screenshots from the Chinese AI chatbot’s privacy policy, which stated data it collects is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

…

“Just fyi, @deepseek_ai collects your IP, keystroke patterns, device info, etc etc, and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the [Chinese] State,” said de Pulford, leader of IPAC, a global group of lawmakers who seek to hold China accountable for democratic abuses.

“Anticipating tedious whataboutery: the difference between this and free-world social media apps is that you can enforce your data rights in rule of law countries. This is not the case in China,” said de Pulford. >

‘So what?’: Privacy warnings about DeepSeek fall on deaf ears

Privacy activists are warning about the invasive nature of DeepSeek, which collects a trove of personal user information that could be handed over to the Chinese government

People, however, just don’t care.

Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), shared screenshots from the Chinese AI chatbot’s privacy policy, which stated data it collects is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

…

“Just fyi, @deepseek_ai collects your IP, keystroke patterns, device info, etc etc, and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the [Chinese] State,” said de Pulford, leader of IPAC, a global group of lawmakers who seek to hold China accountable for democratic abuses.

“Anticipating tedious whataboutery: the difference between this and free-world social media apps is that you can enforce your data rights in rule of law countries. This is not the case in China,” said de Pulford. >

What has your comment to do with the article?

And? Is this a reason to send your data to China or anywhere else?

The guys at HF (and many others) appear to have a different understanding of Open Source.

As the Open Source AI definition says, among others:

Data Information: Sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system so that a skilled person can build a substantially equivalent system. Data Information shall be made available under OSI-approved terms.

• In particular, this must include: (1) the complete description of all data used for training, including (if used) of unshareable data, disclosing the provenance of the data, its scope and characteristics, how the data was obtained and selected, the labeling procedures, and data processing and filtering methodologies; (2) a listing of all publicly available training data and where to obtain it; and (3) a listing of all training data obtainable from third parties and where to obtain it, including for fee.

Code: The complete source code used to train and run the system. The Code shall represent the full specification of how the data was processed and filtered, and how the training was done. Code shall be made available under OSI-approved licenses.

• For example, if used, this must include code used for processing and filtering data, code used for training including arguments and settings used, validation and testing, supporting libraries like tokenizers and hyperparameters search code, inference code, and model architecture.

Parameters: The model parameters, such as weights or other configuration settings. Parameters shall be made available under OSI-approved terms.

• The licensing or other terms applied to these elements and to any combination thereof may contain conditions that require any modified version to be released under the same terms as the original.

These three components -data, code, parameter- shall be released under the same condition.

Clearly, however, there are concerns about censorship, democracy and security. One of the drivers of the Chinese AI industry has been access to extraordinary amounts of data, which is more difficult to get hold of in the West.

This is a very brief paragraph about real issues. The whole article basically says that “China is better because it’s cheaper,” but it doesn’t say exactly why it’s cheaper. You’ll find a lot of reliable information about slavery-like labour in China and the absence of any workers’ rights. This BBC article ignores that completely.

Is Deepseek Open Source?

Hugging Face researchers are trying to build a more open version of DeepSeek’s AI ‘reasoning’ model

Hugging Face head of research Leandro von Werra and several company engineers have launched Open-R1, a project that seeks to build a duplicate of R1 and open source all of its components, including the data used to train it.

The engineers said they were compelled to act by DeepSeek’s “black box” release philosophy. Technically, R1 is “open” in that the model is permissively licensed, which means it can be deployed largely without restrictions. However, R1 isn’t “open source” by the widely accepted definition because some of the tools used to build it are shrouded in mystery. Like many high-flying AI companies, DeepSeek is loathe to reveal its secret sauce.