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.
She continues to post from Twitter.com/nukittobesure
Cool, and she updates her github repos now and then. Good to know.
she updates her github repos
I was so confused by the link not going to GitHub. (and the Lemmy instance looks very different from mine)
Sorry, I thought you might want the scenic route to Github 🙂
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
Yeah she’s ok but I miss her content too 😢
Is she OK? I’d like to believe that, but as far as I know nothing’s been heard from her for more than a year.
Yeah, I too hope she is well but there’s been no news in a long time.
She did release a book 8 months ago. It’s in the community tab of her YT page.
Thanks for pointing this out, I missed it. The book’s listing on CrowdSupply has an update from her from April of this year, so that makes me feel a bit better.
The other reason there won’t be an electronic edition is that unlike bunnie, I’m a Chinese national. My offering an app or download specifically for English-speaking hardware engineers to install on their phones would be… iffy. If at some point “I” do offer you such a thing, I’d suggest you not use it.
That “I” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Even surveilled, she’s still getting out the word to be wary of CCP tactics, like publishing an app using her forged identity.
What an absolute boss.
Jesus that’s chilling…
True all I know is the above. But that’s a year ago now…
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.
You can definitely avoid buying stuff from mainland China for most product categories.
And for those you can’t, buy second-hand.
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
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.
The GPL is not a China-backed agreement. China can do whatever the fuck it wants, because that’s how dictatorships roll.
One of the subs that was mentioning her had an update: she updated some files on GitHub in Jan. That’s the last mention?
Looks like this might be the one, and it supports @Generative@aussie.zone’s info that she’s behind the Nukit twitter account (and online shop).
So apparently the state “only” cracked down on her previous online presence such as Youtube, and probably put her and her partner under increased surveillance/control?
The “wings clipped” tweet still haunts me.
She is such a remarkable and genuine person, we are all worse off without her contributions.
Fuck.
Godspeed, Naomi.
That’s a chilling read. Wu was only ever on the periphery of my attention — some tech advice here, the odd flash of TMI there — so I thought nothing of it when she fell off the radar.
Realising that she had gotten so relatively big, despite her circumstances, that government agencies were only waiting for fickle Western users like myself showing signs of indifference, before doing …whatever they’ve done to her… serves as a constant reminder that not everone online is here on an equal footing with, say, the average North American or European.
I’d love if some of the terminally online keyboard warriors (that didn’t rally to support her last year) might at least do an investigation into her current situation.
Edited for clarity.
a sign of fickle Western users like myself before doing
So if someone is into a person or thing at a point, they can never become not interested in that thing? I’m confused by the message here.
Person. We’re talking about a person in a precarious situation who was basically doxxed by Vice, and more or less shrugged off by the general online public.
It’s not like you deciding you’re not into vaporwave anymore.
You’re talking about requiring fans to give a lifetime commitment to a figure.
There’s no “requirement” to do anything.
People fall in and out of the public eye. That’s a fact.
CCP can wait until someone falls out of the public eye to do something about an unwanted individual. That’s a fact.
Sure, if you think it’s your responsibility to save any such unwanted individual, you can interpret what they said as “you need a lifetime commitment”, but I don’t think that’s what they meant.
It was an observation, not an accusation for a personal failing.
No, I’m talking about people seeing past f—ng fandom to the reality that others they meet online, or whose content they consume, may live under less free circumstances than themselves.
She was outed by Vice, which seems to have been met with apathy by the online community, and it looks like the authorities cracked down on her as a consequence. The insistence of some commenters to see this through a “fan” or “taste” lens is pretty blinkered.
Background on the Vice stuff for those interested 👍
Vice has always been sleazy, exploitative, and imperial.
I was never into her or her content (IIRC, she wasn’t making anything that caught my attention), so this was more of a general question (hence ‘person or thing’ in my question) rather than specific to her situation.
Read also: Naomi Wu and the Silence That Speaks Volumes by Jackie Singh
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.
