Lemdro.id

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51811171

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From March 1, a new law is in effect in Uyghur region — and it tells government workers what they cannot say, where they cannot travel, and who they cannot talk to, for the rest of their lives if necessary. It orders villages to appoint secrecy officers. It requires artificial intelligence to monitor what information leaves government systems. And it makes clear that anyone who talks — to a journalist, a foreign government, a human rights investigator — may be committing a crime.

China already has a national state secrets law. Every province is bound by it. So when the region’s legislature passed its own separate secrecy regulation on November 26, 2025, the question human rights advocates immediately asked was: why does the region need one of its own?

Yalkun Uluyol, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, offered a direct answer.

“China has a state secret law,” he said. “But Xinjiang authorities had to enact a new one to hide its crimes against humanity. The new law provides new enforcement mechanisms, including travel restrictions for officials and state secret offices at local institutions.”

The regulation took effect on March 1, 2026.

[...]

Among its most significant provisions is one that targets the people most likely to know what has happened inside region’s detention system: the officials who ran it. Under Article 32, any government worker who leaves a position with access to classified information enters what the law calls a “demystification period.” During that time, they are barred from traveling abroad. They cannot emigrate. They cannot speak publicly about what they know in any form.

For years, the testimony of former officials and guards has been among the most important evidence used by researchers documenting abuses in what Beijing calls “vocational training centers.” This law creates a legal wall around those people.

The law also reaches far down into ordinary Uyghur life. Article 5 requires township governments and neighborhood committees — the grassroots structures that in the region already function as instruments of community surveillance — to formally appoint secrecy management personnel. These are the same bodies that have been documented knocking on doors, monitoring prayer habits, and reporting families for contact with relatives abroad. They are now, under this law, official nodes in a secrecy enforcement network.

[...]

Perhaps the most technically far-reaching provision is Article 24, which requires agencies to treat aggregated data as classified even when individual pieces of it are not. Demographic records, birth statistics, religious registration data — the very datasets that independent researchers and UN investigators have used to document what has happened to Uyghurs — could under this article be sealed entirely.

[...]

For the families of the disappeared, for the former detainees who have already spoken, and for those inside the region who have not yet found a way to, the law arrives with a message that needs no translation: what you know about this place is a secret. And it belongs to the state.

At no point in my lifetime has there not been war going on in the Middle East. Are we going to run out of boots or faces first I wonder? Or will it really just last forever?

Video Source

International News Article

A Marine Corps veteran suffered a broken arm as he was dragged out of a hearing in the US Capitol by police and a senator.

Brian McGinnis called out during a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing in protest of the US attack on Iran.

...

Three Capitol Police officers grabbed McGinnis and attempted to drag him out of the room.

The officers were joined by Senator Tim Sheehy, who joined them in trying to pull him away.

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McGinnis, a Greens Party candidate for a Senate seat in North Carolina, has been charged with resisting arrest and three counts of assaulting a police officer.

Over the last three years I've had a lot of folks ask me questions about using GrapheneOS. Let's answer them!

Apparently there was no reason to attack Iran.

Honey, I Shrunk The Vids is an overengineered oversimplified system-agnostic frontend for FFMPEG.

This is a followup to a post I made yesterday, about a silly little Windows application I'd made for batch transcoding files. I wanted something that I could just dump my files onto without having to muck about with Handbrake or Tdarr - post here, for those curious: https://piefed.ca/c/selfhosted/p/568748/honey-i-shrunk-the-vids-a-windows-transcoding-frontend-for-ffmpeg

So I spent today making my silly little Windows application a silly little platform-agnostic application. I rewrote the whole thing in Rust and JavaScript with a webview frontend, and apparently Github lets you compile binaries for quite the range of target platforms, so I have compiled binaries available for Windows, Linux, and Mac (Intel/Apple Silicon). It's got a dark theme because of course and a light theme because I guess, also it's themeable because why the hell not. I'm pretty pleased with how it's coming along - if anyone decides to give it a go, please let me know if you find issues!

screenshots

Compiled binaries can be downloaded at https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal/releases.