In Hong Kong, knife-wielding robbers stole 600 rolls of toilet paper from a delivery worker outside Wellcome Supermarket. Police reportedly nabbed two suspects and recovered some of the toilet paper, a hot commodity as people stock up in fear of the coronavirus. From the BBC News:

Other household products have also seen panic-buying including rice, pasta and cleaning items.

Face masks and hand sanitisers are almost impossible to get as people try to protect themselves from the coronavirus, which has already claimed more than 1,700 lives...

Authorities blame false online rumours for the panic buying and say supplies of food and household goods remain stable.

In Hong Kong, the protracted pro-democracy uprising has triggered a local economic recession, especially as businesses and Hong Kongers seek to boycott mainland Chinese businesses and products. Read the rest

"Fight the Traitors Together" (motto: "Hong Kong is part of China and this can't be meddled with by outside power") is a web-game that has attained new popularity in mainland China; it invites players to locate with caricatures of real Hong Kong protest leaders and slap them or pelt them with rotten eggs. Read the rest

Today, 800,000 Hong Kongers marched through the city in a demonstration commemorating their six months of protests. Thanks to landslide victories for pro-Democracy candidates in last month's election, today's march had an official police permit -- the first such permit issued since August. Read the rest

Vox's 9 questions about the Hong Kong protests you were too embarrassed to ask by Jen Kirby does an excellent job of sketching out the political relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China, the history that created that relationship, the political controversies since the handback of Hong Kong to China in 1999, the eruption of protests last spring, the state's (mis)handling of those protests, and the political situations in both China and Hong Kong that led to the catastrophic failures in Chinese leadership. (Image: Studio Incendo, CC BY) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

Last week's local elections in Hong Kong were supposed to be a pro-forma affair, reaffirming the dominance of pro-Beijing "loyalist" politicians; instead, pro-democracy parties swept every district save one -- the rural Islands district, where seats are automatically handed to "pro-establishment rural chiefs." Read the rest

More tactical diversity from the Hong Kong protests: "trilithons" -- little stonehenges made of bricks or pavers that impede police vehicles. (Image: thumbnail from Ryan Ho Kilpatrick) (Thanks, Jeff!) Read the rest

Zeynep Tufekci (previously) has been in Hong Kong reporting on the protests for months, and she's witnessed firsthand the failure of every prediction that the uprising would end soon -- but despite the mounting numbers and militancy of protesters, she reports that the protesters are not animated by hope or optimism, but rather, a fatalistic understanding that they will lose eventually, and a determination to go down fighting. Read the rest

When Blizzard Entertainment president J Allen Brack opened this month's Blizzcon with a carefully worded apology over the company's suspension of Blitzchung, the Hearthstone champ who was punished for his in-game support of the Hong Kong protesters, what he didn't say (the words "Hong Kong" or "China") was just as newsworthy as what he did. Read the rest

Mac Pierce created a simple wearable to challenge facial recognition: do a little munging to an image of a face, print it on heat transfer paper, iron it onto see-through mosquito netting, slice, and affix to a billed cap -- deploy it in the presence of facial recognition cameras and you'll be someone else. It's the kind of "adversarial example" countermeasure that fools computers pretty reliably but wouldn't work on a human. (via JWZ) Read the rest

When Blizzard Entertainment ejected the Hearthstone champion player Blitzchung in retaliation for voicing a pro-Hong Kong message during a tournament, it kicked off a furious round of protests against the company, resulting in canceled events and more player action in support of the protesters. Read the rest

Matteo writes, "Kai Lan Egg is an anonymous artist from Hong Kong. He started drawing illustrations of the Hong Kong protest primarily using a Japanese anime style to encourage the people around him to stand against the progressive erosion of the Hong Kong independence." Read the rest

In 2017, a group of Dutch design students created some fictional anonymity "products" that they displayed under the name "Group Anonymous" at Milan Design Week. Read the rest

Blizzard has suspended Casey Chambers, Corwin Dark, and TJammer -- American University Hearthstone team players -- for six months after the trio displayed a "Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz" sign in a streamed competition. Read the rest

Blizzard's cowardly decision to appease Chinese authoritarians by ejecting a champion player who expressed support for the pro-democracy struggle in Hong Kong has kicked off a global rebellion by the company's customers, who are furious that the firm has put its profits over an entire nation's right to self-determination and basic democratic freedoms. Read the rest

For decades, it was a commonplace in western business that no one could afford to ignore China: whatever problems a CEO might have with China's human rights record could never outweigh the profits to be had by targeting the growing Chinese middle-class. Read the rest

Apple can't seem to figure out how to kowtow to China without losing face in the US. Read the rest