Researchers at Canada’s Citizen Lab have spotted a phishing campaign and supply chain attack directed at Uyghur people living outside China, and suggest it’s an example of Beijing’s attempts to target the ethnic minority group.

Many Uyghur people, a Muslim ethnic majority, live in China’s Xinjiang province and according to the United Nations are subjected to “serious human rights violations” including arbitrary detention, may be forced not to use their own language, and are subject to discriminatory government policies that create “interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights.

Some Uyghur people have moved abroad, and formed a group called the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) to lobby for their people’s rights. According to Citizen Lab, “several senior members” of the Congress living outside China were sent emails that “impersonated a trusted contact at a partner organization and contained Google Drive links that, if clicked, would download a password-protected RAR archive.”

That archive contained a Windows version of an open source Uyghur text editor called UyghurEditPP. Citizen Lab thinks members of the WUC know the application’s developer, who has also worked on optical character recognition software for Uyghur script and speech recognition software for the Uyghur language. That prior relationship means recipients would likely trust the sender.

    • @[email protected]
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      3712 days ago

      Let me scry this for a moment:

      “Blablabla CIA blabla unable to take any responsibility bla crying and pissing themselves because of criticism.”

    • @[email protected]
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      2712 days ago

      They will not make anything of it. It’s willful ignorance and they’ll stay silent. Brush this off as propaganda and move on within their delusional filter bubble.

    • @[email protected]
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      2512 days ago

      Denial that there is any oppression. Or even that the Uyghur people exist as a culture at all.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 days ago

        And splitting hairs over what exactly constitutes a genocide, conveniently ignoring the fact that the US wanted cultural genocide excluded from the UN definition for propaganda purposes.

        I guess they’re fine with US propaganda as long as it aligns with their chosen capitalist state’s interests.

      • @[email protected]OP
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        612 days ago

        They can’t, or rather most can’t see it (except if they’re on their alt) I was site banned for speech off their instance (just like the Reddit mods of ol’ eh? LMAO)

        All my posts are safe spaces from .ml lolol

  • @[email protected]
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    2212 days ago

    You can also see the affects of manual manipulation of wiki entries, ie changing the name to Han or something else completely.

  • @[email protected]
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    -3012 days ago

    subjected to “serious human rights violations” including arbitrary detention, may be forced not to use their own language, and are subject to discriminatory government policies that create “interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights.

    short side observation: how is this any different from the USA today?

    • El Barto
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      3212 days ago

      Hey folks, gather up. This is what a whataboutism in disguise looks like.

      • @[email protected]
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        -1112 days ago

        If that was my goal, I would not have explicitly pointed out I was making a side observation…

        • @[email protected]
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          1112 days ago

          “It’s not whatabautism if I don’t explicitly say ‘What about…’”

          In any case, answering your point, the degree is very very different, so not similar at all.

    • @[email protected]
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      512 days ago

      The difference is that in the USA about 10 million Americans have been out in the streets protesting all of the fascist regime’s abuses. The judicial branch of the US gov’t is also making efforts to block illegal abusive actions with moderate success. The difference is that in the USA we have the rights to fight these things.