Where Is Naomi Wu?
ofb.biz
It was such a cute gadget. A tiny computer, brushed aluminum on the outside, with a decent keyboard (albeit with chicklet keys), a Thinkpad-ish pointing stick that would even take a grippy Thinkpad “cat’s tongue” insert. A fairly fast X86 Intel processor, enough storage, and 8 gigs of memory. And now it was on sale at a low price.

Archived version

Naomi Wu has disappeared. Perhaps she has been disappeared. That’s not rare in China.

[…]

The proximate cause of her apparent disappearance, as Jackie Singh explains in detail here, was a discovery that Naomi Wu, an experienced coder, had made. It seemed that the cute little cellphone keyboard applications developed by the Chinese company Tencent, and used by just about everyone, were spyware. They could log keystrokes, and did it outside of even very secure applications such as Signal, so things that were sent securely could be “phoned home” by the keyboard app itself.

It seems, though the evidence is coincidental, that this was one too many cats let out of the bag, and the Chinese communist government of Winnie Xi Pooh acted quickly, with the results (probably understated) in the Tweet quoted above.

[…]

The silence has been deafening. People on the internet, especially young, enthusiastic websters, have long been thought unbelievably shallow, in it for whatever they could get out of it, and unwilling to take a stand on something important unless there was profit in it for them. We needn’t think that anymore — now we know it’s true.

What can be done? […] Our government won’t lift a finger even for American citizens or very well known Chinese figures trapped under the thumb of the Disney-character’s evil lookalike, or the Uyghurs, unless there’s some political gain to be had, such as with the tattooed LGBT WNBA player who couldn’t be bothered to leave her dope at home during a visit to Russia.

[…]

China was afraid that silencing Naomi Wu would make the government there look bad. Let’s prove them right.

  • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.devEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    Losing Naomi Wu to the CCP was a catastrophic loss to the FOSS community, I remember that she once went directly to confront a company (I think located in China) to demand for the release of their modified version of a copyleft software

    I hope she’s still alive and doing well

    • infeeeee@lemm.ee
      6·
      2 months ago

      That video is till up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ

      She went there, because in the support forum the manufacturer replied that they can only give the source code in person.

      Actually that’s acceptable, and does not violate GPL, they just expected that noone will show up in their sweatshop. GPL does not define how you should make the source available.

      • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        The GPL is not a China-backed agreement. China can do whatever the fuck it wants, because that’s how dictatorships roll.

  • mctoasterson@reddthat.com
    8·
    2 months ago

    She posted about this. Basically the party aparatchiks came to her house and told her to stop her “subversive” activities (posting on YouTube, talking about devices useful to protestors, mentioning being a lesbian in public media) or she would not like the consequences. She said she would leave the country entirely, except her romantic partner cannot leave (I assume this is due to political travel restrictions or family reasons).

    I think her content was awesome and it showed someone defying expectations of who can do product design, fabrication, electrical engineering, etc.

    China should very much get roasted for silencing speech.

  • T (they/she)@beehaw.org
    3·
    2 months ago

    And when I buy things in the future, I’ll make an effort, not so much to buy American — we make next to nothing nowadays, but to not buy Chinese.

    Good luck with that.

    • superkret@feddit.org
      1·
      2 months ago

      You can definitely avoid buying stuff from mainland China for most product categories.
      And for those you can’t, buy second-hand.

  • tardigrada@beehaw.orgOP
    1·
    2 months ago

    Naomi Wu and the Silence That Speaks Volumes (August 2023) — [Archived version]

    When China’s prodigious tech influencer, Naomi Wu, found herself silenced, it wasn’t just the machinery of a surveillance state at play. Instead, it was a confluence of state repression and the sometimes capricious attention of a Western audience that, as she asserts, often views Chinese activists more as ideological tokens than as genuine human beings.

    […]

    Naomi Wu’s devastating July 7th [2023] tweet alluded to a pressure that had long been feared by many, yet optimistically hoped she could manage to avoid indefinitely.

    Ok for those of you that haven’t figured it out I got my wings clipped and they weren’t gentle about it- so there’s not going to be much posting on social media anymore and only on very specific subjects. I can leave but Kaidi can’t so we’re just going to follow the new rules and…

    — Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) July 8, 2023