Hong Kong mourns firefighter killed in city's deadliest fire in decades

HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kongers offered flowers and bowed outside a funeral parlor on Friday to pay tribute to a firefighter who was among the 160 people killed by the city's deadliest fire in decades.

Ho Wai-ho lost his life battling the massive blaze that engulfed seven buildings of a housing complex on Nov. 26. He was 37. The fire services department has posthumously awarded him the title of senior fireman.

An array of wreaths lay outside the Universal Funeral Parlour, with thank-you cards from residents put up on its wall. Top officials, including Hong Kong leader John Lee, were among the funeral attendees.

After the ceremony, they stood outside the parlor to send off the hearse, which carried Ho’s portrait at the front. Dozens of firefighters raised a salute as Ho’s coffin, draped with a Hong Kong regional flag, departed.

Before the funeral, some black-clad residents laid flowers at a mourning area outside the venue. One woman cried when she paid respect, and a man made a salute gesture.

Resident Andy Fong, who brought yellow flowers with him, said he hoped Ho could rest in peace.

“It's heartbreaking. Although we have never met, it has saddened every Hong Konger," he said.

Retiree Tse Pak-yin praised Ho for his bravery.

“I hope he will be happy. He still hasn't got married and it's such as pity,” he said.

Ho is survived by his parents, his two brothers and his fiancée.

The hearse headed to Wang Fuk Court, the site of the fire, for another ceremony before proceeding to Ho's fire station. At the station, colleagues paid their last tributes, with some officers marching on both sides of the hearse as it moved. He was laid to rest at Gallant Garden, a burial ground for civil servants who die in the line of duty.

In a Monday statement, the fire services department said Ho was an industrious, polite and dedicated member who was well respected by his colleagues.

The financial hub's worst blaze since 1948 broke out November 26 at Wang Fuk Court, in the northern suburban district of Tai Po. It was undergoing a monthslong renovation project with buildings covered by bamboo scaffolding and green netting.

Authorities have pointed to the substandard plastic nylon netting and foam boards installed on windows for contributing to the fire’s rapid spread.

Thousands of affected residents have moved to transitional homes, hotels and youth hostels, struggling to recover from the loss of lives and homes that took them years to buy. The tragedy pained many residents across the city.

While arrests were made, some residents have raised concerns about government oversight in building maintenance projects and official investigation efforts.

The government last week announced a judge-led independent committee to probe the cause and expected it to conclude the work within nine months, along with new requirements for checking the standards of netting.

An earlier version of the headline on this story inaccurately described the fire as Hong Kong’s deadliest. It was the deadliest in decades.

Firefighters gather around the grave of Ho Wai-ho, the firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty during the deadly fire at Wang Fuk Court on Nov. 26, during a funeral in Hong Kong, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Chan Long Hei)

A picture of Ho Wai-ho, the firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty during the deadly fire at Wang Fuk Court on Nov. 26, is displayed on a hearse at a funeral parlor, in Hong Kong, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Chan Long Hei)

A display of wreaths stand outside a funeral parlor at a tribute to Ho Wai-ho, the firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty during the deadly fire at Wang Fuk Court on Nov. 26, in Hong Kong, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Chan Long Hei)

A resident salutes to pay tribute to Ho Wai-ho, the firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty during the deadly fire at Wang Fuk Court on Nov. 26, in Hong Kong, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Chan Long Hei)

People gather outside a funeral parlor to pay tribute to Ho Wai-ho, the firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty during the deadly fire at Wang Fuk Court on Nov. 26, passing by a funeral parlor in Hong Kong, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Chan Long Hei)

A hearse carries Ho Wai-ho, the firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty during the deadly fire at Wang Fuk Court on Nov. 26, as it passes by a funeral parlor, in Hong Kong, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Chan Long Hei)

A hearse carries Ho Wai-ho, the firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty during the deadly fire at Wang Fuk Court on Nov. 26, passes by a funeral parlor in Hong Kong, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Chan Long Hei)

ATLANTA (AP) — Security researchers say rapid advances in artificial intelligence are making it more critical to address a flaw in Georgia's voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.

The system's vulnerability has been drawing increased attention, with election security advocates criticizing state election officials for failing to fix it before the November elections. Georgia election officials say they have taken steps to address the potential harm, but some advocates say the state is not going far enough.

The vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That is important because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.

While the flaw has been known for a few years, the widespread adoption of AI tools and the blistering pace of its sophistication have election security experts raising alarms.

This is "a bit of a wake-up call because it illustrates how much more easily vulnerabilities can be exploited now that AI can do all of the technical work for you,” said J. Alex Halderman, a voting technology specialist at the University of Michigan who was part of the team that exposed the flaw.

Other jurisdictions across the country use the same voting equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has since been sold and renamed Liberty Vote. But many have applied a software update to fix the flaw, and some other states do not allow the public release of records that are needed to exploit it, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology.

Georgia, a presidential battleground with one of the nation's most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year, is the only place where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a “perfect storm."

"It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility,” Lindeman said.

Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots voters insert into scanners to tally the votes.

Such cast-vote records detail the votes from each ballot. Those records and electronic ballot images created by the scanners are randomized. But the software flaw allows them to be put back in the order they were cast, according to a report by researchers who discovered it in 2022.

Along with other publicly available data, that information could be used to match voters to their ballots, the researchers wrote.

Max Springer, a Princeton University researcher who was not involved in the original research and studies AI, said he gave a publicly available AI assistant that research. He said it was able to reverse the shuffling of electronic ballot records from Georgia's May primary and then tell him what other records it would need to match names to ballots.

He then gave the AI assistant the early voting list for the counties he examined and the cast-vote record file, which could be obtained through a public records request. It was able to create “buckets of ballots and potential voters,” he wrote in a blog post. In many instances, that made it possible to match voters to their ballots.

In cases where ambiguity remained, he wrote, he got the public audit log for the ballot scanners and precinct check-in records and was able to match most ballots to specific voters.

“AI coding tools are essentially supercharging laymen people to exploit vulnerabilities,” Springer said in an interview.

Georgia's Constitution says elections “shall be by secret ballot” and state law requires voting machines to “permit voting in absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know any other elector’s votes.”

A lack of ballot secrecy can make it easier to buy or sell votes and increase the danger of coercion to vote a certain way by family members, political organizations, employers or government officials. It also is information that could be invaluable to political campaigns.

Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager in the secretary of state’s office, pushed back on the concerns. He said it would be easier to use mail ballots if vote-buying or coercion was the goal and that it likely would be cheaper for campaigns to just increase outreach to voters who fit a certain profile than try to identify voters this way.

State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a rule during the board’s August meeting that would have required the secretary of state’s office to apply the software update recommended by the manufacturer by Tuesday.

“Each (voter) has one vote, and no one is entitled to know how it was cast,” Grubbs said. “That privacy protects more than the individual voter. It protects the integrity of the entire election.”

In a letter to the election board, an agency lawyer argued that the update has not been certified by the secretary of state, the implementation would take months and the legislature has not provided necessary funding. The board rejected Grubbs' proposal. Some members said they did not believe they had the authority to order the secretary of state to act and they raised concerns about the short timeline before the November midterms.

Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, who voted against the proposal, said it is “intensely frustrating” that the software update has not been applied. But she pointed out that it is a felony to reveal how someone voted, which should serve as a deterrent.

“I hate the fact that it’s even physically possible, but there are very, very severe penalties if somebody were to actually do this,” she said.

The secretary of state's office sent guidance to county election officials instructing them to refer open records requests for certain records to the secretary of state's office. It will release them with the problematic information blacked out and decline to release other information and documents.

Sterling said the office is working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they are made public. Halderman said that precaution would be necessary to keep someone from reconstructing the order.

While some other jurisdictions have applied the software update that reportedly fixes the problem, some have done what Georgia is now trying to do by restricting public access to the records needed to exploit the flaw.

Marilyn Marks is executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election transparency and security and raised the alarm about the vulnerability. She argued that withholding documents is not the solution and that steps need to be taken to ensure ballots cannot be traced to voters in the first place.

“When Georgia’s election records contain identifiers that can be used to trace ballots to voters, the only legal and acceptable answer is to stop recording that information — not restrict public access to sensitive unlawful information to insiders and commercial vendors,” she said.

With time growing short before the elections, Marks said a workable interim solution would be to collect ballots in locked boxes at precincts and then shuffle and scan them at a central tabulating center.

FILE - An election worker walks near voting machines at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, Nov. 5, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)

FILE - Voting machines fill the floor for early voting at State Farm Arena, Oct. 12, 2020, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)