Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Polaris of Enlightenment

PoX: New memory chip from China sets speed record

Published 7 May 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Fudan engineers are now working on scaling up the technology and developing new prototypes.
2 minute read

A research team at Fudan University in China has developed the fastest semiconductor memory reported to date. The new memory, called PoX, is a type of non-volatile flash memory that can write a single bit in just 400 picoseconds – equivalent to about 25 billion operations per second.

The results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature and unlike traditional RAM (such as SRAM and DRAM), which is fast but erases data in the event of a power outage, non-volatile memory such as flash retains stored information without power. The problem has been that these memories are significantly slower – often thousands of times – which is a bottleneck for today’s AI systems that handle huge amounts of data in real time.

The research team, led by Professor Zhou Peng, achieved the breakthrough by replacing silicon channels with two-dimensional Dirac graphene – a material that allows extremely fast charge transfer. By fine-tuning the so-called “Gaussian length” of the channel, the researchers were able to create a phenomenon they call two-dimensional superinjection, which allows effectively unlimited charge transfer to the memory storage.

Using AI‑driven process optimization, we drove non‑volatile memory to its theoretical limit. This paves the way for future high‑speed flash memory, Zhou told the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

“Opens up new applications”

Co-author Liu Chunsen compares the difference to going from a USB flash drive that can do 1,000 writes per second to a chip that does a billion – in the same amount of time.

The technology combines low power consumption with extreme speed and could be particularly valuable for AI in battery-powered devices and systems with limited power supplies. If PoX can be mass-produced, it could reduce the need for separate caches, cut energy use and enable instant start-up of computers and mobiles.

Fudan engineers are now working on scaling up the technology and developing prototypes. No commercial partnerships have yet been announced.

– Our breakthrough can reshape storage technology, drive industrial upgrades and open new application scenarios, Zhou asserts.

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Over half a billion Chinese users embrace generative AI

The future of AI

Published today 11:03
– By Editorial Staff
AI services are used for intelligent search, content creation, as productivity tools, and in smart hardware.
1 minute read

The number of users of generative artificial intelligence in China has increased sharply during the first half of 2025. In June, 515 million Chinese people had access to AI services – an increase of 266 million in six months, according to official Chinese figures.

The data comes from a report presented on Saturday by the China Internet Network Information Center. It notes that domestically developed AI models have become popular among users.

A survey included in the report shows that over 90 percent of users say they prefer Chinese AI models.

Generative AI is being used in areas such as intelligent search, content creation, productivity tools and smart hardware. The technology is also being tested in agriculture, manufacturing and research.

The majority of users are young and middle-aged with higher education. Among users, 74.6 percent are under 40 years old, while 37.5 percent hold college, bachelor’s or higher degrees.

The report claims that China has become increasingly important in the global AI field. As of April, the country had filed approximately 1.58 million AI-related patent applications, representing 38.58 percent of the global total – the most in the world.

OpenAI launches AI-powered browser – challenges Google with ChatGPT Atlas

The future of AI

Published yesterday 22:48
– By Editorial Staff
Users should be aware that ChatGPT stores all conversation data that you send to the service.
2 minute read

OpenAI on Tuesday unveiled its new AI-based browser ChatGPT Atlas, a significant step in the company’s ambition to compete with Google as the primary source for information searches on the internet. The service, initially rolling out for macOS with support for Windows, iOS and Android coming soon, will be available to all users from the start.

Browsers have quickly become the next major battleground in the AI industry. Despite Google Chrome’s long-standing market dominance, a transformative shift is now underway as AI chatbots and intelligent agents change how people work online. Several startup companies have already launched their own AI-powered browsers, including Perplexity’s Comet and The Browser Company’s Dia. Google and Microsoft have also updated Chrome and Edge respectively with AI features.

OpenAI’s chief technology officer for Atlas, Ben Goodger, emphasized in a livestream on Tuesday that ChatGPT forms the core of the company’s first browser. Users can in ChatGPT Atlas engage in dialogue with their search results, similar to the functionality in Perplexity or Google’s AI mode, writes TechCrunch.

Side panel and web history

The most prominent feature in AI-based browsers has been the built-in chatbot in a side panel that automatically receives context from what is displayed on screen. This eliminates the need to manually copy and paste text or drag files to ChatGPT. OpenAI’s product manager Adam Fry confirmed that ChatGPT Atlas also includes this feature.

Additionally, ChatGPT Atlas has a “web history,” which means ChatGPT can now log which websites the user visits and what is done on them, then use the information for more personalized responses.

AI-based browsers also contain agents designed to automate web-based tasks. In TechCrunch’s tests, early versions of these agents prove to work well for simple tasks, but they struggle to handle more complex problems reliably.

Warning: OpenAI stores user data

Users should be aware that ChatGPT stores all conversation data. According to OpenAI’s official data storage guidelines, deleted conversations are saved for up to 30 days in the company’s system, unless legal obligations require longer storage. This applies even when users actively delete their chats.

Furthermore, OpenAI uses conversations to improve its services. Following a court ruling from the New York Times, OpenAI is now forced to permanently save all chats for non-business customers, meaning data is no longer deleted at all for many users.

Chinese Apple users file complaint against company for monopoly practices

Published yesterday 16:31
– By Editorial Staff
Pedestrians at the Apple store on Wangfujing shopping street in Beijing, China.
1 minute read

A group of 55 Chinese iPhone and iPad users has filed a complaint against Apple with the country’s market regulator. They accuse the tech giant of abusing its dominant position by forcing users onto the company’s own platforms for downloads and payments – while charging commissions of up to 30 percent.

The complaint to the Chinese competition authority was filed on Monday and comes as the trade conflict between Beijing and Washington intensifies. Both countries are using tariffs and technology restrictions as political tools, reports Reuters.

The group, represented by lawyer Wang Qiongfei, argues that Apple holds a monopoly on iOS app distribution in China. Meanwhile, the company allows alternative payment methods and app stores in other markets following pressure from the EU and the United States.

Forced to use Apple’s system

The complaint identifies three violations of China’s anti-monopoly law: Apple forces consumers to purchase digital content through the company’s own payment system, restricts app downloads to the App Store, and charges commissions of up to 30 percent.

Apple has not commented on the allegations.

This is the second time Wang Qiongfei has pursued a similar case. A lawsuit from 2021 was dismissed by a Shanghai court last year, but the ruling has been appealed to the Supreme People’s Court, where a final decision has not yet been reached.

Wang tells Reuters that he expects faster processing of this regulatory complaint compared to the previous civil lawsuit.

China has recently initiated several antitrust reviews against American tech companies, including chipmaker Qualcomm.

5 ways that the Patriot Act destroyed financial privacy

Published 18 October 2025
– By Naomi Brockwell
6 minute read

This week I was asked to give a presentation in DC about the history of financial surveillance. Now, most people know that the Patriot Act did tremendous damage to privacy in general. But fewer people understand the extent of damage that it did to financial privacy in particular.

Basically, the Patriot Act was the Bank Secrecy Act on steroids.

In this newsletter I want to look at Title III of the Patriot Act: The International Money Laundering Abatement and Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, and 5 ways that the Patriot Act destroyed financial privacy.

This was a moment in time that radically expanded financial surveillance under what we were told was a temporary measure, but it ended up lasting forever.

1. KYC

The Patriot Act standardized and mandated “Know Your Customer” (KYC) rules across all financial institutions.

Before 2001, “KYC” existed in principle but was largely determined by banks. Institutions determined their own risk tolerance, and what customer information they would collect. A community bank might rely on non-documentary checks and longstanding relationships, while a larger bank might collect more documents.

For example, if Betty wanted to open a bank account and you’ve known her since she was 5, and you knew her parents for 20 years and they’ve held an account with you for years, you might already have a pretty good understanding of the risk level of that potential customer. As a business, you would determine what you needed from them in order to let them open an account.

The Patriot Act introduced minimum ID standards. It enforced a Customer Identification Program (CIP) for every bank, broker‑dealers, mutual funds, and other similar institute in the US. These entities had to collect and verify government-issued IDs for every customer. They also had to cross-check identities against government watchlists.

This is when privacy in banking effectively ended and financial anonymity became illegal. “Risk-based KYC” went from a business choice to a legal requirement.

2. Expanded definitions

The Patriot Act broadened the definition of a “money transmitter”: Before 2001 it was just “a licensed sender of money”. After the change it covered any person engaged as a business in transmitting funds, including informal money transfer systems. That was a big expansion.

The Patriot Act also imposed an AML‑program mandate across financial institutions, extending coverage for different sectors.

This massively widened the surveillance reach, pulling basically every financial touchpoint into a federal dragnet.

3. Data sharing

The Patriot Act allowed unprecedented data sharing across agencies and borders.

Sections 351 and 358 broke down specific information-sharing barriers between the FBI, CIA, NSA, FinCEN, and foreign governments.

For example, SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports) were formalized under the 1992 Annunzio-Wylie Anti–Money Laundering Act to strengthened reporting rules. Banks became required to file reports against ANYTHING they deemed suspicious about how someone was using their own money. SARs were originally confined to Treasury oversight, and could be shared with law enforcement. But the Patriot Act expanded this access so that now these could be shared freely with intelligence agencies.

Under the Annunzio-Wylie Anti–Money Laundering Act it was already illegal for banks to tell customers when a suspicious activity report was filed. But with the Patriot Act came extended “safe harbor” provisions, where banks were encouraged to proactively share customer data with intelligence, without fear of being sued by the customer because they would have legal immunity.

It covered liability under “any contract or other legally enforceable agreement”, So if you had a contract with your bank that they’d keep your information private? The government said the bank now had immunity if they shared that information and broke the contract.

(Just to put this into context: The 4th amendment is mean to stop the government getting your information without a warrant. So instead, the government mandated that banks collect that information, and then granted the banks legal immunity for sharing that information with the government. An egregious overstep of what was meant to be a constitutional protection, if ever I’ve seen one.)

Additionally Section 314(b) created a safe harbor financial institutions to share customer and activity information with other financial institutions, when they in good faith suspect money laundering or terrorist financing.

So the net result of these safe harbor rules was that banks were both REQUIRED to report SARs and other information to the government, and they were legally shielded from aggressively and proactively doing so, and were also allowed to exchange intelligence with other banks. It basically fueled the private-sector surveillance grid that we have today, and deputized the financial system as investigatory agents in it.

Mass data pipelines from private banks to the surveillance state were legalized overnight.

4. Foreign surveillance

The Patriot Act authorized surveillance of correspondent and foreign accounts.

A “correspondent account” is a US bank account opened by a foreign bank so that foreign customers can move dollars, clear wires, and access the US financial system.

Think of it as the on-ramp to the dollar network for non-US banks.

The Patriot Act forced US banks to perform “enhanced due diligence” on all correspondent accounts held for foreign banks. It made dollar-clearing a surveillance chokepoint: any transaction touching the US financial system was now subject to monitoring.

It also added extraterritorial subpoena and forfeiture reach. If a foreign bank uses a US correspondent account, US authorities can subpoena records held abroad related to that account, and can freeze or take money sitting in that US account to enforce a seizure. This extended American surveillance standards globally, and made access to dollars conditional on cooperation. It also allowed for the override of local confidentiality or privacy rules. The result is a chilling effect: many foreign banks simply close accounts for whole customer groups or regions to avoid US penalties, even when those customers are legal where they live.

5. Bank/Intelligence marriage

The Patriot Act hard-wired banks into intelligence investigations, and made the relationship permanent. For example, it introduce something called government “broadcast lookups”. This is where FinCEN can blast a query to thousands of financial institutions (like “do you have anything on X person/entity?” or “do you have anything matching these patterns?”) and banks must search their records quickly and report back.

It shifted the relationship from requiring passive reporting from banks to creating on-demand, system-wide queries, where banks have been deputized as active responders and participants.

Under the Patriot Act, FinCEN’s mission was also codified as financial intelligence. Congress tied it explicitly to collecting, analyzing, and disseminating financial data in support of law-enforcement and intelligence, giving the FinCEN a permanent mandate and making it a statutory intel hub.

The new normal

The Patriot Act took a crisis, used the opportunity to create a mass surveillance program in the financial sector, and then rewrote the rules for how money is allowed to move, who gets to participate, and what the government can see. Then it quietly froze those rules in place until most people forgot there had ever been another way.

But we don’t have to accept this new normal, where every customer is now treated like a suspect, or where you have to beg for permission to access your own money and hope that the person holding on to it doesn’t instead file a secret report about you.

The financial sector was conscripted into the surveillance regime because it provided a loophole to avoid Fourth-Amendment protections. We should instead insist on real warrants, not outsource surveillance to private companies.

But if we can’t roll back what has become an ingrained surveillance overreach that we all take for granted these days, at least there are now decentralized payment systems that don’t opt in to traditional financial rails at all. These give people back human dignity, instead of egregious violation of their financial privacy.

I think that we also need to tell a better story about risk, because endless de-risking has become a license for collective punishment that shuts people out of the financial system entirely. Of course we don’t want to protect criminals – this is about restoring traditional check and balances, as well as basic civic norms, that used to be obvious: you should be able to use your own money without being tracked, profiled, and stored forever in a government database.

 

Yours in privacy,
Naomi

Naomi Brockwell is a privacy advocacy and professional speaker, MC, interviewer, producer, podcaster, specialising in blockchain, cryptocurrency and economics. She runs the NBTV channel on Rumble.

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