How China’s advertising and monitoring systems really work
Smells The collection of internal documents, which came out of a slightly known Chinese company, has pushed back on how to marketing and export digital censorship tools worldwide. Geedge Networks deals with at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Myanmar. The pioneering leak shows the granular details of the capabilities that the company shows for monitoring, tracking and hacking internet traffic. The researchers who examined the files described it as “digital authority as a service”.
But I would like to pay attention to something else that shows: While people often view China’s large firewall as a powerful and powerful state -owned state system for China, the real process of development and preservation in the way the Western monitoring technology is carried out. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions in research and development, adapts its business strategy to different customer needs, and even restores the remaining infrastructure from its competitors. In Pakistan, for example, Geedge has obtained a contract to collaborate with and replace the gear made by the Canadian company Sandvine.
Randomly, another leak from a different Chinese company published this week reinforces this. On Monday, Vendorbel University researchers made a 399 -page document of Golaxy, a Chinese company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze social media and the production of advertising materials. The leaked documents, which include internal decks, commercial targets and meetings, may be unhappy with a former employee – the last two pages accuse Galaxy by paying their costs and forced hours of workers’ abuse. The document had been sitting on the Internet months before another researcher laid it to Burt Goldstein, a research professor at the Vandarbilt School of Engineering.
Golaxy’s main business is different from Geedge: it collects open source information from social media, maps between political figures and news agencies, and pressure targeted narratives through artificial social media profiles. In the leaked document, Golaxy claims that “Mark Number One is in China’s major data analysis and serves three main customers: the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government and the Chinese army. Technology exhibitions, including technology, focus heavily on geopolitical issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and US elections. And unlike Geedge, Golaxy seems to only target domestic government institutions as a customer.
But there are very few cases that make the two companies comparable, especially in terms of performance of their jobs. Both Geedge and Golaxy maintain close relations with the Nature Index, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the world’s top government -related research institute. And both of them offer their services to government agencies across China, which monitor the localized issues they want and carry out budgets to save on supervisory and advertising tools.
Golaxy immediately did not respond to the request of the Wired comment. In a previous response to the New York Times, the company rejected the collection of targeted data from US officials and called the misrepresentation of the output report. Vanderbilt researchers say they saw the company removed from their website after the initial report.
Closer than it looks like
In the West, when academic scientists see opportunities to commercialize their outstanding research, they often become the founders of the startup or start a side jobs. Golaxy seems to be no exception. Many key researchers in the company, based on the leaked document, still occupy points in the CAS.
But there is no guarantee that CAS researchers will receive government funding – just like a public university professor in the United States cannot bet on the launch of federal contracts. Instead, they have to look for customers like any private company, looking for government agencies. One document in the leak shows that Golaxy has devoted sales targets to five employees and intended to provide 42 million RMB (about $ 5.9 million) in contracts with Chinese state agencies in 2020. Another spreadsheet since around 2021 covers the company’s current customer list, including Chinese military branches, government security and provincial police departments as well as other potential customers.
