Notices by Cindʎ Xiao 🍉 (cxiao@infosec.exchange)

@ProPublica Your employee union is raising very valid concerns right now, about management's refusal to guarantee AI guardrails in their contract.

https://social.coop/@dphiffer/115687141981028270

As a reader-funded publication, your funding relies on maintaining the trust you have with your readers. If you refuse to guarantee that you will avoid using AI to generate text, images, and video, and if you refuse to guarantee that you will label AI-generated content, how can you expect to maintain reader trust?

@dphiffer It was dismaying to see this donation request post (https://newsie.social/@ProPublica/115686546158657305) from the ProPublica account, right after seeing your post.

I left them a reply linking to your post here. Full support to you and thank you for posting this to Fedi.

JD....bro.......😭😭😭😭😭

(new signalgate screenshots from
https://media.defense.gov/2025/Dec/04/2003834916/-1/-1/1/DODIG_2026_021.PDF)

I wanted to note a detail of the ICE raid on the Korean battery plant in Georgia. I think this is important for professionals assessing the risk of travelling to the US for short-term business. This includes conferences, trainings, trade shows, and meetings with colleagues:

Many of those reportedly entered the US using B1 visas — issued for business purposes, such as attending meetings or signing contracts — or through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization visa waiver program for short-term stays. US immigration officials said that was the central issue in the raid.

(https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10570143)

The South Korean nationals working in Georgia were largely given visas suitable for training purposes, such as the B-1 visa, and many there were working as instructors, according to a South Korean official.

(https://www.wsj.com/us-news/u-s-arrests-hundreds-in-raid-at-hyundai-plant-construction-site-in-georgia-4e150feb / https://archive.is/JfSCF)

For Canadian citizens, because I honestly think many of us don't even think about this or are aware of this: When we go to the US for short-term business travel, we are admitted under B-1 status.

For people from other countries under the Visa Waiver Program, such as most European countries, and many other Western countries: As I'm sure you're aware, you enter the US for short-term personal or business purposes under an ESTA.

We don't know yet whether the people in this case overstayed their visas (even though B-1 allows 6-month stays with an extension of up to 1 year, and ESTA/VWP allows repeated non-contiguous 90-day stays for up to 2 years). We also don't know yet whether they conducted activities outside of what was allowed by their visa (even though the business activities allowed by both are quite broad). However, even a small risk of mistaken arbitrary detention by ICE may be unacceptable.

#canada #hyundai #lg #southkorea #korea #georgia #ice

@hacks4pancakes I find that a lot of Canadians are pretty ignorant about our immigration system and barely know the difference between a work permit and permanent residence. That said though, for any infosec workers who are American citizens: it may be easier to get a visa / permanent residence than you think. The Canadian immigration system still overwhelmingly favours "skilled" workers, and the recent immigration cuts specifically target international students and temporary foreign workers.

For any other Canadians reading this thread: check out the Migrant Rights Network as a great org doing work to educate people about our immigration system, to combat anti-immigrant rhetoric in Canada, and to advocate for "unskilled" workers.

https://migrantrights.ca

#canada

@molly0xfff I've just signed up for an annual subscription. Thank you for the work you do!

With the news that people are moving to Xiaohongshu due to uncertainty about the future of TikTok and the changes to Meta's content policies, and that people are now really interested in learning Mandarin: I would encourage you to check out the active Chinese-language communities right here on the fediverse as well, such as the public forum at https://ovo.st/club/board (@ board @ ovo.st ), and the instance https://m.cmx.im/about. Or, perhaps, you can follow my recent favourite fediverse account, @labor, which collects news about modern Chinese labour issues that you will never find on Chinese social media platforms.

In general I think there is a huge lack of understanding among western users about how much Chinese social media and Chinese tech companies are intertwined with the government, a lack of understanding or engagement with Chinese social issues which are heavily censored on all Chinese social media platforms, and a mistake belief that "well, Chinese social media can't be much worse than the American ones". I had to mute the discourse around TikTok for my own sanity because there was so much complete misunderstanding around privacy, censorship, and the nature of these companies. It's like seeing people say "we don't want to use apps run by (american) fascists, so we will flock to an app that shares all its data with a fascist government, and actively censors all topics unfavourable to that government". It makes no sense.

Of course, I think it is good that people are engaging with Chinese people, finally, as people, and not as just abstractions. I think it is also good that people have an incentive to learn my native language. I just wish people would use that to engage with and listen to the Chinese people who have been posting here, all along.

#china #tiktok #xiaohongshu #rednote #socialmedia #fediverse

I did the requisite responsible reading about Threads federating, and I decided to domain block them after thinking about it.

1) Anybody who wants to view my public posts can still view them.

2) This is mostly an infosec account, and there's AFAIK zero infosec community presence on Threads.

3) I'm not really interested in helping Threads grow an infosec community presence.

4) I don't think there's any Mastodon admin ready for the network effects of several million users suddenly joining the network. There is shockingly little discussion about problems like coordinated inauthentic activity, which are going to come at that scale. I'm REALLY not interested in seeing or interacting in any way with chinese state disinformation campaigns lol

5) Mastodon servers and clients are held together by duct tape and prayers by people in their spare time. Threads is held together by people paid full time salaries at a large multinational corporation. Threads can make a better fediverse app and a better fediverse server than anything that currently exists. I think any future where people start downloading the Threads app as their default client to interact with the fediverse, and where people start using threads.net as their default server, is one that is very dangerous for the existence of the fediverse as a set of interoperable clients and servers built on open standards. I'm doing my part to make this as unappealing and as high friction as possible 🫡

6) fuck libs of tiktok, and fuck threads which is currently platforming them. The impact of accounts like Libs of TikTok on rolling back LGBTQ rights in the real world is a very good example of why network effects, discoverability, and social media amplification are dangerous.

Thanks to @jerry for letting people on this instance make this choice themselves. Having this kind of choice is a welcome change from other social networks.

#threads #fediverse #fedimeta