A United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement database WIRED obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the agency has been leaning on a certain type of administrative subpoena to collect data from elementary schools, abortion clinics, and other vulnerable populations. And new details about a recent supply chain attack against the VoIP software 3CX indicate that attackers--likely hackers working for the North Korean government--were targeting cryptocurrency companies in the broad assault. We also looked at this week's move by Italy's data regulator, Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, to temporarily stop OpenAI from incorporating Italians' personal information into training data. In response, the company has currently stopped people in Italy from accessing its generative AI platform, ChatGPT. Meanwhile, we explored the dangerous missing security defense in the US agriculture sector and the nation's food supply chain, and we went deep on the saga of a small US gadget blog that found troubling flaws in foreign security cameras and took on the Chinese surveillance industry to get them fixed. In virtual private network news, the open source VPN Amnezia has been allowing users in Russia to stay one step ahead of the Kremlin's inveterate censorship and digital control.

Back in 2018, Pinduoduo sent shock waves through the investor community when it raised $1.6 billion from a Nasdaq listing as a three-year-old company. Online shoppers in China were excited to see its rise as an alternative to long-time market dominators Alibaba and JD.com. But the startup founded by former Google engineer Colin Huang has ambitions well beyond e-commerce. It's answering the Chinese government's call to modernize the country's agriculture and bolster the rural economy. Life in China has become highly digital in many facets, from retail and entertainment to education and healthcare. But agriculture remains an exception.

China's social e-commerce startup Pinduoduo broke away from the pack with its successful IPO this week in New York, raising $1.6 billion and valuing the company at nearly $30 billion. Pinduoduo, best known of the newly public Chinese tech companies, was one of three that went public in a frenzy of IPO action this past Thursday in New York -- and in the midst of a U.S.-China trade war and growing restrictions on Chinese investment in the U.S. The two other new publicly traded Chinese companies in New York are Chinese unicorn and mobile data provider Jiguang and automotive transaction service platform Cango. Interestingly, both Pinduoduo and Cango have Tencent as backers. I'll write about the two lesser known ones of the trio since so much info is already out there about the three-year-old Pinduoduo, seen as Alibaba's biggest rival. And the others are almost as interesting as Pinduoduo, which has been likened to Groupon meets Dollar Store.