The winner of the Best Paper Award at Crypto this year was a significant improvement to lattice-based cryptanalysis.

This is important, because a bunch of NIST’s post-quantum options base their security on lattice problems.

I worry about standardizing on post-quantum algorithms too quickly. We are still learning a lot about the security of these systems, and this paper is an example of that learning.

News story.

Good essay on software bloat and the insecurities it causes.

The world ships too much code, most of it by third parties, sometimes unintended, most of it uninspected. Because of this, there is a huge attack surface full of mediocre code. Efforts are ongoing to improve the quality of code itself, but many exploits are due to logic fails, and less progress has been made scanning for those. Meanwhile, great strides could be made by paring down just how much code we expose to the world. This will increase time to market for products, but legislation is around the corner that should force vendors to take security more seriously.

Apple announced PQ3, its post-quantum encryption standard based on the Kyber secure key-encapsulation protocol, one of the post-quantum algorithms selected by NIST in 2022.

There’s a lot of detail in the Apple blog post, and more in Douglas Stabila’s security analysis.

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s probably premature to switch to any particular post-quantum algorithms. The mathematics of cryptanalysis for these lattice and other systems is still rapidly evolving, and we’re likely to break more of them—and learn a lot in the process—over the coming few years. But if you’re going to make the switch, this is an excellent choice. And Apple’s ability to do this so efficiently speaks well about its algorithmic agility, which is probably more important than its particular cryptographic design. And it is probably about the right time to worry about, and defend against, attackers who are storing encrypted messages in hopes of breaking them later on future quantum computers.

In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character uses technology to enter his targets’ dreams to steal information and insert false details into their subconscious. 

A new “inception attack” in virtual reality works in a similar way. Researchers at the University of Chicago exploited a security vulnerability in Meta’s Quest VR system that allows hackers to hijack users’ headsets, steal sensitive information, and—with the help of generative AI—manipulate social interactions. 

The attack hasn’t been used in the wild yet, and the bar to executing it is high, because it requires a hacker to gain access to the VR headset user’s Wi-Fi network. However, it is highly sophisticated and leaves those targeted vulnerable to phishing, scams, and grooming, among other risks. 

In the attack, hackers create an app that injects malicious code into the Meta Quest VR system and then launch a clone of the VR system’s home screen and apps that looks identical to the user’s original screen. Once inside, attackers can see, record, and modify everything the person does with the headset. That includes tracking voice, gestures, keystrokes, browsing activity, and even the user’s social interactions. The attacker can even change the content of a user’s messages to other people. The research, which was shared with MIT Technology Review exclusively, is yet to be peer reviewed.

A spokesperson for Meta said the company plans to review the findings: “We constantly work with academic researchers as part of our bug bounty program and other initiatives.” 

VR headsets have slowly become more popular in recent years, but security research has lagged behind product development, and current defenses against attacks in VR are lacking. What’s more, the immersive nature of virtual reality makes it harder for people to realize they’ve fallen into a trap. 

“The shock in this is how fragile the VR systems of today are,” says Heather Zheng, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, who led the team behind the research. 

Stealth attack

The inception attack exploits a loophole in Meta Quest headsets: users must enable “developer mode” to download third-party apps, adjust their headset resolution, or screenshot content, but this mode allows attackers to gain access to the VR headset if they’re using the same Wi-Fi network. 

Developer mode is supposed to give people remote access for debugging purposes. However, that access can be repurposed by a malicious actor to see what a user’s home screen looks like and which apps are installed. (Attackers can also strike if they are able to access a headset physically or if a user downloads apps that include malware.) With this information, the attacker can replicate the victim’s home screen and applications. 

Then the attacker stealthily injects an app with the inception attack in it. The attack is activated and the VR headset hijacked when unsuspecting users exit an application and return to the home screen. The attack also captures the user’s display and audio stream, which can be livestreamed back to the attacker. 

In this way, the researchers were able to see when a user entered login credentials to an online banking site. Then they were able to manipulate the user’s screen to show an incorrect bank balance. When the user tried to pay someone $1 through the headset, the researchers were able to change the amount transferred to $5 without the user realizing. This is because the attacker can control both what the user sees in the system and what the device sends out. 

This banking example is particularly compelling, says Jiasi Chen, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, who researches virtual reality but was not involved in the research. The attack could probably be combined with other malicious tactics, such as tricking people to click on suspicious links, she adds. 

The inception attack can also be used to manipulate social interactions in VR. The researchers cloned Meta Quest’s VRChat app, which allows users to talk to each other through their avatars. They were then able to intercept people’s messages and respond however they wanted. 

Generative AI could make this threat even worse because it allows anyone to instantaneously clone people’s voices and generate visual deepfakes, which malicious actors could then use to manipulate people in their VR interactions, says Zheng. 

Twisting reality

To test how easily people can be fooled by the inception attack, Zheng’s team recruited 27 volunteer VR experts. The participants were asked to explore applications such as a game called Beat Saber, where players control light sabers and try to slash beats of music that fly toward them. They were told the study aimed to investigate their experience with VR apps. Without their knowledge, the researchers launched the inception attack on the volunteers’ headsets. 

The vast majority of participants did not suspect anything. Out of 27 people, only 10 noticed a small “glitch” when the attack began, but most of them brushed it off as normal lag. Only one person flagged some kind of suspicious activity. 

There is no way to authenticate what you are seeing once you go into virtual reality, and the immersiveness of the technology makes people trust it more, says Zheng. This has the potential to make such attacks especially powerful, says Franzi Roesner, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, who studies security and privacy but was not part of the study.

The best defense, the team found, is restoring the headset’s factory settings to remove the app. 

The inception attack gives hackers many different ways to get into the VR system and take advantage of people, says Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, who was part of the team doing the research. But because VR adoption is still limited, there’s time to develop more robust defenses before these headsets become more widespread, he says. 

On a drab Monday morning in San Jose, California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference filed into the main ballroom until all the seats were taken and the crowd began to line the walls along the back and sides of the room. The convention brings together people who work in the chip industry from all over the world. And on this cool February morning, they had gathered to hear tech industry luminaries extol the late Gordon Moore, Intel’s cofounder and first CEO. 

Craig Barrett, also a former CEO of Intel, paid tribute, as did the legendary engineer Burn-Jeng Lin, a pioneer of immersion lithography, a patterning technology that enabled the chip industry to continue moving forward about 20 years ago. Mostly the speeches tended toward reflections on Moore himself—testaments to his genius, accomplishments, and humanity. But the last speaker of the morning, Martin van den Brink, took a different tone, more akin to a victory lap than a eulogy. Van den Brink is the outgoing co-president and CTO of ASML, the Dutch company that makes the machines that in turn let manufacturers produce the most advanced computer chips in the world. 

Moore’s Law holds that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. In essence, it means that chipmakers are always trying to shrink the transistors on a microchip in order to pack more of them in. The cadence has been increasingly hard to maintain now that transistor dimensions measure in a few nanometers. In recent years ASML’s machines have kept Moore’s Law from sputtering out. Today, they are the only ones in the world capable of producing circuitry at the density needed to keep chipmakers roughly on track. It is the premise of Moore’s Law itself, van den Brink said, that drives the industry forward, year after year. 

To showcase how big an achievement it had been to maintain Moore’s Law since he joined ASML in 1984, van den Brink referred to the rice and chessboard problem, in which the number of grains of rice—a proxy for transistors—is doubled on each successive square. The exponential growth in the number of transistors that can be crammed on a chip since 1959 means that a single grain of rice back then has now become the equivalent of three ocean tankers, each 240 meters long, full of rice. It’s a lot of rice! Yet Moore’s Law compels the company—compels all of the technology industry—to keep pushing forward. Each era of computing, most recently AI, has brought increased demands, explained van den Brink. In other words, while three tankers full of rice may seem like a lot, tomorrow we’re going to need six. Then 12. Then 24. And so on. 

ASML’s technology, he assured the gathering, would be there to meet the demands, thanks to the company’s investment in creating tools capable of making ever finer features: the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines it rolled out widely in 2017, the high-numerical-aperture (high-NA) EUV machines it is rolling out now, and the hyper-NA EUV machines it has sketched out for the future. 

The tribute may have been designed for Gordon Moore, but at the end of van den Brink’s presentation the entire room rose to give him a standing ovation. Because if Gordon Moore deserves credit for creating the law that drove the progress of the industry, as van den Brink says, van den Brink and ASML deserve much of the credit for ensuring that progress remains possible. 

Yet that also means the pressure is on. ASML has to try and stay ahead of the demands of Moore’s Law. It has to continue making sure chipmakers can keep doubling the amount of rice on the chessboard. Will that be possible? Van den Brink sat down with MIT Technology Review to talk about ASML’s history, its legacy, and what comes next. 

Betting big on an unwieldy wavelength

ASML is such an undisputed leader in today’s chip ecosystem that it’s hard to believe the company’s market dominance really only dates back to 2017, when its EUV machine, after 17 years of development, upended the conventional process for making chips. 

Since the 1960s, photolithography has made it possible to pack computer chips with more and more components. The process involves crafting small circuits by guiding beams of light through a series of mirrors and lenses and then shining that light on a mask, which contains a pattern. Light conveys the chip design, layer by layer, eventually building circuits that form the computational building blocks of everything from smartphones to artificial intelligence. 

ASML

Photolithographers have a limited set of tools at their disposal to make smaller designs, and for decades, the type of light used in the machine was the most critical. In the 1960s, machines used beams of visible light. The smallest features this light could draw on the chip were fairly large—a bit like using a marker to draw a portrait. 

Then manufacturers began using smaller and smaller wavelengths of light, and by the early 1980s, they could make chips with ultraviolet light. Nikon and Canon were the industry leaders. ASML, founded in 1984 as a subsidiary of Philips in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, was just a small player.

The way van den Brink tells it, he arrived at the company almost by accident. Philips was one of a few technology companies in Holland. When he began his career there in 1984 and was looking into the various opportunities at the company, he became intrigued by a photo of a lithography machine.

“I looked at the picture and I said, ‘It has mechanics, it has optics, it has software—this looks like a complex machine. I will be interested in that,” van den Brink told MIT Technology Review. “They said, well, you can do it, but the company will not be part of Philips. We are creating a joint venture with ASM International, and after the joint venture, you will not be part of Philips. I said yes because I couldn’t care less. And that’s how it began.”

When van den Brink joined in the 1980s, little about ASML made the company stand out from other major lithography players at the time. “We didn’t sell a substantial amount of systems until the ’90s. And we almost went bankrupt several times in that period,” van den Brink says. “So for us there was only one mission: to survive and show a customer that we could make a difference.”

By 1995, it had a strong enough foothold in the industry against competitors Nikon and Canon to go public. But all lithography makers were fighting the same battle to create smaller components on chips. 

If you could have eavesdropped on a meeting at ASML in the late 1990s about this predicament, you might have heard chatter about an idea called extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography—along with concerns that it might never work). By that point, with pressure to condense chips beyond current capabilities, it seemed as if everyone was chasing EUV. The idea was to pattern chips with an even smaller wavelength of light (ultimately just 13.5 nanometers). To do so, ASML would have to figure out how to create, capture, and focus this light—processes that had stumped researchers for decades—and build a supply chain of specialized materials, including the smoothest mirrors ever produced. And to make sure the price point wouldn’t drive away its customers. 

Canon and Nikon were also pursuing EUV, but the US government denied them a license to participate in the consortium of companies and US national labs researching it. Both subsequently dropped out. Meanwhile ASML acquired the fourth major company pursuing EUV, SVG, in 2001. By 2006 it had shipped only two EUV prototype machines to research facilities, and it took until 2010 to ship one to a customer. Five years later, ASML warned in its annual report that EUV sales remained low, that customers weren’t eager to adopt the technology given its slow speed on the production line, and that if the pattern continued, it could have “material” effects on the business given the significant investment. 

Yet in 2017, after an investment of $6.5 billion in R&D over 17 years, ASML’s bet began to pay off. That year the company shipped 10 of its EUV machines, which cost over $100 million each, and announced that dozens more were on backorder. EUV machines went to the titans of semiconductor manufacturing—Intel, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)—and a small number of others. With a brighter light source (meaning less time needed to impart patterns), among other improvements, the machines were capable of faster production speeds. The leap to EUV finally made economic sense to chipmakers, putting ASML essentially in a monopoly position.

Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University and author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, says that ASML was culturally equipped to see those experiments through. “It’s a stubborn willingness to invest in technology that most people thought wouldn’t work,” he told MIT Technology Review. “No one else was betting on EUV, because the development process was so long and expensive. It involves stretching the limits of physics, engineering, and chemistry.”

A key factor in ASML’s growth was its control of the supply chain. ASML acquired number of the companies it relies on, like Cymer, a maker of light sources. That strategy of pointedly controlling power in the supply chain extended to ASML’s customers, too. In 2012, it offered shares to its three biggest customers, which were able to maintain market dominance of their own in part because of the elite manufacturing power of ASML’s machines. 

“Our success depends on their success,” van den Brink told MIT Technology Review. 

It’s also a testament to ASML’s dominance that it is for the most part no longer allowed to sell its most advanced systems to customers in China. Though ASML still does business in China, in 2019, following pressure from the Trump administration, the Dutch government began imposing restrictions on ASML’s exports of EUV machines to China. Those rules were tightened further just last year and now also impose limits on some of the company’s deep-ultraviolet (DUV) machines, which are used to make less highly advanced chips than EUV systems.

Van den Brink says the way world leaders are now discussing lithography was unimaginable when the company began: “Our prime minister was sitting in front of Xi Jinping, not because he was from Holland—who would give a shit about Holland. He was there because we are making EUV.”

Just a few years after the first EUV machines shipped, ASML would face its second upheaval. Around the start of the pandemic, interest and progress in the field of artificial intelligence sent demand for computing power skyrocketing. Companies like OpenAI needed ever more powerful computer chips and by late 2022 the frenzy and investment in AI began to boil over. 

By that time, ASML was closing in on its newest innovation. Having already adopted a smaller wavelength of light (and realigned the entire semiconductor industry to it in the process), it now turned its attention to the other lever in its control: numerical aperture. That’s the measure of how much light a system can focus, and if ASML could increase it, the company’s machines could print even smaller components.

Doing so meant myriad changes. ASML had to source an even larger set of mirrors from its supplier Carl Zeiss, which had to be made ultra-smooth. Zeiss had to build entirely new machines, the sole purpose of which was to measure the smoothness of mirrors destined for ASML. The aim was to reduce the number of costly repercussions the change would have on the rest of the supply chain, like the companies that make reticles containing the designs of the chips. 

In December of 2023, ASML began shipping the first of its next-generation EUV device, a high-NA machine, to Intel’s facility in Hillsboro, Oregon. It’s an R&D version, and so far the only one in the field. It took seven planes and 50 trucks to get it to Intel’s plant, and installation of the machine, which is larger than a double-decker bus, will take six months. 

The high-NA machines will only be needed to produce the most precise layers of advanced chips for the industry; the designs on many others will still be printed using the previous generation of EUV machines or older DUV machines. 

ASML has received orders for high-NA machines from all its current EUV customers. They don’t come cheap: reports put the cost at $380 million. Intel was the first customer to strike, ordering the first machine available in early 2022. The company, which has lost significant market share to competitor TSMC, is betting that the new technology will give it a new foothold in the industry, even though other chipmakers will eventually have access to it too. 

“There are obvious benefits to Intel for being the first,” Miller says. “There are also obvious risks.” Sorting out which chips to use these machines for and how to get its money’s worth out of them will be a challenge for the company, according to Miller. 

The launch of these machines, if successful, might be seen as the crowning achievement of van den Brink’s career. But he is already moving on to what comes next.

The future

The next big idea for ASML, according to van den Brink and other company executives who spoke with MIT Technology Review, is hyper-NA technology. The company’s high-NA machines have a numerical aperture of .55. Hyper-NA tools would have a numerical aperture higher than 0.7. What that ultimately means is that hyper NA, if successful, will allow the company to create machines that let manufacturers shrink transistor dimensions even more—assuming that researchers can devise chip components that work well at such small dimensions. As it was with EUV in the early 2000s, it is still uncertain whether hyper NA is feasible—if nothing else, it could be cost prohibitive. Yet van den Brink projects cautious confidence. It is likely, he says, that the company will ultimately have three offerings available: low NA, high NA, and—if all goes well—hyper NA. 

“Hyper NA is a bit more risky,” says van den Brink. “We will be more cautious and more cost sensitive in the future. But if we can pull this off, we have a winning trio which takes care of all the advanced manufacturing for the foreseeable future.”

Yet although today everyone is banking on ASML to keep pushing the industry forward, there is speculation that a competitor could emerge from China. Van den Brink was dismissive of this possibility, citing the gap in even last-generation lithography. 

“SMEE are making DUV machines, or at least claim they can,” he told MIT Technology Review, referring to a company that makes the predecessor to EUV lithography technology, and pointed out that ASML still has the dominant market share. The political pressures could mean more progress for China. But getting to the level of complexity involved in ASML’s suite of machines, with low, high, and hyper NA is another matter, he says: “I feel quite comfortable that this will be a long time before they can copy that.”

Miller, from Tufts University, is confident that Chinese companies will eventually develop these sorts of technologies on their own, but agrees that the question is when. “If it’s in a decade, it will be too late,” he says. 

The real question, perhaps, is not who will make the machines, but whether Moore’s Law will hold at all. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has already declared it dead. But when asked what he thought might eventually cause Moore’s Law to finally stall out, van den Brink rejected the premise entirely. 

“There’s no reason to believe this will stop. You won’t get the answer from me where it will end,” he said. “It will end when we’re running out of ideas where the value we create with all this will not balance with the cost it will take. Then it will end. And not by the lack of ideas.”

He had struck a similar posture during his Moore tribute at the SPIE conference, exuding confidence. “I’m not sure who will give the presentation 10 years from now,” he said, going back to his rice analogy. “But my successors,” he claimed, “will still have the opportunity to fill the chessboard.”

This story was updated to clarify information about ASML’s operations in China.

Data modernization is squarely on the corporate agenda. In our survey of 350 senior data and technology executives, just over half say their organization has either undertaken a modernization project in the past two years or is implementing one today. An additional one-quarter plan to do so in the next two years. Other studies also consistently point to businesses’ increased investment in modernizing their data estates.

It is no coincidence that this heightened attention to improving data capabilities coincides with interest in AI, especially generative AI, reaching a fever pitch. Indeed, supporting the development of AI models is among the top reasons the organizations in our research seek to modernize their data capabilities. But AI is not the only reason, or even the main one.

This report seeks to understand organizations’ objectives for their data modernization projects and how they are implementing such initiatives. To do so, it surveyed senior data and technology executives across industries. The research finds that many have made substantial progress and investment in data modernization. Alignment on data strategy and the goals of modernization appear to be far from complete in many organizations, however, leaving a disconnect between data and technology teams and the rest of the business. Data and technology executives and their teams can still do more to understand their colleagues’ data needs and actively seek their input on how to meet them.

Following are the study’s key findings:

AI isn’t the only reason companies are modernizing the data estate. Better decision-making is the primary aim of data modernization, with nearly half (46%) of executives citing this among their three top drivers. Support for AI models (40%) and for decarbonization (38%) are also major drivers of modernization, as are improving regulatory compliance (33%) and boosting operational efficiency (32%).

Data strategy is too often siloed from business strategy. Nearly all surveyed organizations recognize the importance of taking a strategic approach to data. Only 22% say they lack a fully developed data strategy. When asked if their data strategy is completely aligned with key business objectives, however, only 39% agree. Data teams can also do more to bring other business units and functions into strategy discussions: 42% of respondents say their data strategy was developed exclusively by the data or technology team.

Data strategy paves the road to modernization. It is probably no coincidence that most organizations (71%) that have embarked on data modernization in the past two years have had a data strategy in place for longer than that. Modernization goals require buy-in from the business, and implementation decisions need strategic guidance, lest they lead to added complexity or duplication.

Top data pain points are data quality and timeliness. Executives point to substandard data (cited by 41%) and untimely delivery (33%) as the facets of their data operations most in need of improvement. Incomplete or inaccurate data leads enterprise users to question data trustworthiness. This helps explain why the most common modernization measure taken by our respondents’ organizations in the past two years has been to review and upgrade data governance (cited by 45%).

Cross-functional teams and DataOps are key levers to improve data quality. Modern data engineering practices are taking root in many businesses. Nearly half of organizations (48%) are empowering cross-functional data teams to enforce data quality standards, and 47% are prioritizing implementing DataOps (cited by 47%). These sorts of practices, which echo the agile methodologies and product thinking that have become standard in software engineering, are only starting to make their way into the data realm.

Compliance and security considerations often hinder modernization. Compliance and security concerns are major impediments to modernization, each cited by 44% of the respondents. Regulatory compliance is mentioned particularly frequently by those working in energy, public sector, transport, and financial services organizations. High costs are another oft-cited hurdle (40%), especially among the survey’s smaller organizations.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

It can be dizzying to try to understand all the complex components of a single computer chip: layers of microscopic components linked to one another through highways of copper wires, some barely wider than a few strands of DNA. Nestled between those wires is an insulating material called a dielectric, ensuring that the wires don’t touch and short out. Zooming in further, there’s one particular dielectric placed between the chip and the structure beneath it; this material, called dielectric film, is produced in sheets as thin as white blood cells. 

For 30 years, a single Japanese company called Ajinomoto has made billions producing this particular film. Competitors have struggled to outdo them, and today Ajinomoto has more than 90% of the market in the product, which is used in everything from laptops to data centers. 

But now, a startup based in Berkeley, California, is embarking on a herculean effort to dethrone Ajinomoto and bring this small slice of the chipmaking supply chain back to the US.

Thintronics is promising a product purpose-built for the computing demands of the AI era—a suite of new materials that the company claims have higher insulating properties and, if adopted, could mean data centers with faster computing speeds and lower energy costs. 

The company is at the forefront of a coming wave of new US-based companies, spurred by the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, that is seeking to carve out a portion of the semiconductor sector, which has become dominated by just a handful of international players. But to succeed, Thintronics and its peers will have to overcome a web of challenges—solving technical problems, disrupting long-standing industry relationships, and persuading global semiconductor titans to accommodate new suppliers. 

“Inventing new materials platforms and getting them into the world is very difficult,” Thintronics founder and CEO Stefan Pastine says. It is “not for the faint of heart.”

The insulator bottleneck

If you recognize the name Ajinomoto, you’re probably surprised to hear it plays a critical role in the chip sector: the company is better known as the world’s leading supplier of MSG seasoning powder. In the 1990s, Ajinomoto discovered that a by-product of MSG made a great insulator, and it has enjoyed a near monopoly in the niche material ever since. 

But Ajinomoto doesn’t make any of the other parts that go into chips. In fact, the insulating materials in chips rely on dispersed supply chains: one layer uses materials from Ajinomoto, another uses material from another company, and so on, with none of the layers optimized to work in tandem. The resulting system works okay when data is being transmitted over short paths, but over longer distances, like between chips, weak insulators act as a bottleneck, wasting energy and slowing down computing speeds. That’s recently become a growing concern, especially as the scale of AI training gets more expensive and consumes eye-popping amounts of energy. (Ajinomoto did not respond to requests for comment.) 

None of this made much sense to Pastine, a chemist who sold his previous company, which specialized in recycling hard plastics, to an industrial chemicals company in 2019. Around that time, he started to believe that the chemicals industry could be slow to innovate, and he thought the same pattern was keeping chipmakers from finding better insulating materials. In the chip industry, he says, insulators have “kind of been looked at as the redheaded stepchild”—they haven’t seen the progress made with transistors and other chip components. 

He launched Thintronics that same year, with the hope that cracking the code on a better insulator could provide data centers with faster computing speeds at lower costs. That idea wasn’t groundbreaking—new insulators are constantly being researched and deployed—but Pastine believed that he could find the right chemistry to deliver a breakthrough. 

Thintronics says it will manufacture different insulators for all layers of the chip, for a system designed to swap into existing manufacturing lines. Pastine tells me the materials are now being tested with a number of industry players. But he declined to provide names, citing nondisclosure agreements, and similarly would not share details of the formula. 

Without more details, it’s hard to say exactly how well the Thintronics materials compare with competing products. The company recently tested its materials’ Dk values, which are a measure of how effective an insulator a material is. Venky Sundaram, a researcher who has founded multiple semiconductor startups but is not involved with Thintronics, reviewed the results. When compared to other build-up films—the dielectric category in which Thintronics is competing—their most impressive Dk values are better than those of any other material available today, he says.

A rocky road ahead

Thintronics’ vision has already garnered some support. The company received a $20 million Series A funding round in March, led by venture capital firms Translink and Maverick, as well as a grant from the US National Science Foundation. 

The company is also seeking funding from the CHIPS Act. Signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, it’s designed to boost companies like Thintronics in order to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to American companies and reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. A year after it became law, the administration said that more than 450 companies had submitted statements of interest to receive CHIPS funding for work across the sector. 

The bulk of funding from the legislation is destined for large-scale manufacturing facilities, like those operated by Intel in New Mexico and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) in Arizona. But US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has said she’d like to see smaller companies receive funding as well, especially in the materials space. In February, applications opened for a pool of $300 million earmarked specifically for materials innovation. While Thintronics declined to say how much funding it was seeking or from which programs, the company does see the CHIPS Act as a major tailwind.

But building a domestic supply chain for chips—a product that currently depends on dozens of companies around the globe—will mean reversing decades of specialization by different countries. And industry experts say it will be difficult to challenge today’s dominant insulator suppliers, who have often had to adapt to fend off new competition. 

“Ajinomoto has been a 90-plus-percent-market-share material for more than two decades,” says Sundaram. “This is unheard-of in most businesses, and you can imagine they didn’t get there by not changing.”

One big challenge is that the dominant manufacturers have decades-long relationships with chip designers like Nvidia or Advanced Micro Devices, and with manufacturers like TSMC. Asking these players to swap out materials is a big deal.

“The semiconductor industry is very conservative,” says Larry Zhao, a semiconductor researcher who has worked in the dielectrics industry for more than 25 years. “They like to use the vendors they already know very well, where they know the quality.” 

Another obstacle facing Thintronics is technical: insulating materials, like other chip components, are held to manufacturing standards so precise they are difficult to comprehend. The layers where Ajinomoto dominates are thinner than a human hair. The material must also be able to accept tiny holes, which house wires running vertically through the film. Every new iteration is a massive R&D effort in which incumbent companies have the upper hand given their years of experience, says Sundaram.

If all this is completed successfully in a lab, yet another hurdle lies ahead: the material has to retain those properties in a high-volume manufacturing facility, which is where Sundaram has seen past efforts fail.

“I have advised several material suppliers over the years that tried to break into [Ajinomoto’s] business and couldn’t succeed,” he says. “They all ended up having the problem of not being as easy to use in a high-volume production line.” 

Despite all these challenges, one thing may be working in Thintronics’ favor: US-based tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are making headway in designing their own chips for the first time. The plan is to use these chips for in-house AI training as well as for the cloud computing capacity that they rent out to customers, both of which would reduce the industry’s reliance on Nvidia. 

Though Microsoft, Google, and Meta declined to comment on whether they are pursuing advancements in materials like insulators, Sundaram says these firms could be more willing to work with new US startups rather than defaulting to the old ways of making chips: “They have a lot more of an open mind about supply chains than the existing big guys.”

This story was updated on April 12 to clarify how the Dk values of Thintronics’ materials compare to those of other build-up films.

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

I don’t know about you, but I only learned last week that there’s something connecting MSG and computer chips.

Inside most laptop and data center chips today, there’s a tiny component called ABF. It’s a thin insulating layer around the wires that conduct electricity. And over 90% of the materials around the world used to make this insulator are produced by a single Japanese company named Ajinomoto, more commonly known for commercializing the seasoning powder MSG in 1909.

Hold on, what? 

As my colleague James O’Donnell explained in his story last week, it turns out Ajinomoto figured out in the 1990s that a chemical by-product of MSG production can be used to make insulator films, which proved to be essential for high-performance chips. And in the 30 years since, the company has totally dominated ABF supply. The product—Ajinomoto Build-up Film—is even named after it.

James talked to Thintronics, a California-based company that’s developing a new insulating material it hopes could challenge Ajinomoto’s monopoly. It already has a lab product with impressive attributes but still needs to test it in manufacturing reality.

Beyond Thintronics, the struggle to break up Ajinomoto’s monopoly is not just a US effort.

Within China, at least three companies are also developing similar insulator products. Xi’an Tianhe Defense Technology, which makes products for both military and civilian use, introduced its take on the material, which it calls QBF, in 2023; Zhejiang Wazam New Material and Guangdong Hinno-tech have also announced similar products in recent years. But all of them are still going through industrial testing with chipmakers, and few have recent updates on how well these materials have performed in mass-production settings.

“It’s interesting that there’s this parallel competition going on,” James told me when we recently discussed his story. “In some ways, it’s about the materials. But in other ways, it’s totally shaped by government funding and incentives.”

For decades, the fact that the semiconductor supply chain was in a few companies’ hands was seen as a strength, not a problem, so governments were not concerned that one Japanese company controlled almost the entire supply of ABF. Similar monopolies exist for many other materials and components that go into a chip.

But in the last few years, both the US and Chinese governments have changed that way of thinking. And new policies subsidizing domestic chip manufacturing are creating a favorable environment for companies to challenge monopolies like Ajinomoto’s.

In the US, this trend is driven by the fear of supply chain disruptions and a will to rebuild domestic semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. The CHIPS Act was announced to inject investment into chip companies that bring their plants back to the US, but smaller companies like Thintronics could also benefit, both directly through funding and indirectly through the establishment of a US-based supply chain.

Meanwhile, China is being cornered by a US-led blockade to deny it access to the most advanced chip technologies. While materials like ABF are not restricted in any way today, the fact that one foreign company controls almost the entire supply of an indispensable material raises the stakes enough to make the government worry. It needs to find a domestic alternative in case ABF becomes subject to sanctions too.

But it takes a lot more than government policies to change the status quo. Even if these companies are able to find alternative materials that perform better than ABF, there’s still an uphill battle to convince the industry to adopt it en masse.

“You can look at any dielectric film supplier (many from Japan and some from the US), and they have all at one time or another tried to break into ABF market dominance and had limited success,” Venky Sundaram, a semiconductor researcher and entrepreneur, told James. 

It’s not as simple as just swapping out ABF and swapping in a new insulator material. Chipmaking is a deeply intricate process, with components closely depending on each other. Changing one material could require a lot more knock-on changes to other components and the entire process. “Convincing someone to do that depends on what relationships you have with the industry. These big manufacturing players are a little bit less likely to take on a small materials company, because any time they’re taking on new material, they’re slowing down their production,” James said.

As a result, Ajinomoto’s market monopoly will probably remain while other companies keep trying to develop a new material that significantly improves on ABF. 

That result, however, will have different implications for the US and China. 

The US and Japan have long had a strategic technological alliance, and that could be set to deepen because both of them consider the rise of China a threat. In fact, Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, was just visiting the US last week, hoping to score more collaborations on next-generation chips. Even though there has been some pushback from the Japanese chip industry about how strict US export restrictions could become, this hasn’t been strong enough to sway Japan to China’s side.

All these factors give the Chinese government an even greater sense of urgency to become self-sufficient. The country has already been investing vast sums of money to that end, but progress has been limited, with many industry insiders pessimistic about whether China can catch up fast enough. If Ajinomoto’s failed competitors in the past tell us anything, it’s that this will not be an easy journey for China either.

Do you think China has a chance of cracking Ajinomoto’s monopoly over this very specific insulating material? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. Following the explosive popularity of minute-long short dramas made for phones, China’s culture regulator will soon announce new regulations that tighten its control of them. (Sixth Tone)

• This is not a surprise to the companies involved. Some Chinese short-drama companies have already started to expand overseas, driven out by domestic policy pressures. I profiled one named FlexTV. (MIT Technology Review)

2. There have been many minor conflicts between China and the Philippines recently over maritime territory claims. Here’s what it feels like to live on one of those contested islands. (NPR)

3. The Chinese government has asked domestic telecom companies to replace all foreign chips by 2027. It’s a move that mirrors previous requests from the US to replace all Huawei and ZTE equipment in telecom networks. (Wall Street Journal $)

4. A decade ago, about 25,000 American students were studying in China. Today, there are only about 750. It may be unsurprising given recent geopolitical tensions, but neither country is happy with the situation. (Associated Press)

5. Latin America is importing large amounts of Chinese green technologies—mostly electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar panels. (The Economist $)

6. China’s top spy agency says foreign agents have been trying to intercept information about the country’s rare earth industry. (South China Morning Post $)

7. Amid the current semiconductor boom, Southeast Asian youths are flocking to Taiwan to train and work in the chip industry. (Rest of World)

Lost in translation

The bodies of eight Chinese migrants were recently discovered on a beach in Mexico. According to Initium Media, a Singapore-based publication, this was the first confirmed shipwreck incident with Chinese migrants heading to the US, but many more have taken the perilous route in recent years. In 2023, over 37,000 Chinese people illegally entered the US through the border with Mexico.

The traffickers often arrange shabby boats with no safety measures to sail from Tapachula to Oaxaca, a popular route that circumvents police checkpoints on land but makes for an extremely dangerous journey often rocked by strong winds and waves. There had always been rumors of people going missing in the ocean, but these proved impossible to confirm, as no bodies were found. The latest tragedy was the first one to come to public attention. Of the nine Chinese migrants onboard the boat, only one survived. Three bodies remain unidentified today.

One more thing

Forget about the New York Times’ election-result needles and CNN’s relentless coverage by John King. In South Korea, the results of national elections are broadcast on TV with wild and whimsical animations. To illustrate the results of parliamentary elections that just concluded last week, candidates were shown fighting on a fictional train heading toward the National Assembly, parodying Mission: Impossible’s fight scene. According to the BBC, these election-night animations took a team of 70 to prepare in advance and about 200 people working on election night.

Every Friday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri speaks to the people. He has made a habit of hosting weekly “ask me anything” sessions on Instagram, in which followers send him questions about the app, its parent company Meta, and his own (extremely public-facing) job. When I started watching these AMA videos years ago, I liked them. He answered technical questions like “Why can’t we put links in posts?” and “My explore page is wack, how to fix?” with genuine enthusiasm. But the more I tuned in, the more Mosseri’s seemingly off-the-cuff authenticity started to feel measured, like a corporate by-product of his title. 

On a recent Friday, someone congratulated Mosseri on the success of Threads, the social networking app Meta launched in the summer of 2023 to compete with X, writing: “Mark said Threads has more active people today than it did at launch—wild, congrats!” Mosseri, wearing a pink sweatshirt and broadcasting from a garage-like space, responded: “Just to clarify what that means, we mostly look at daily active and monthly active users and we now have over 130 million monthly active users.”

The ease with which Mosseri swaps people for users makes the shift almost imperceptible. Almost. (Mosseri did not respond to a request for comment.)

People have been called “users” for a long time; it’s a practical shorthand enforced by executives, founders, operators, engineers, and investors ad infinitum. Often, it is the right word to describe people who use software: a user is more than just a customer or a consumer. Sometimes a user isn’t even a person; corporate bots are known to run accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms, for example. But “users” is also unspecific enough to refer to just about everyone. It can accommodate almost any big idea or long-term vision. We use—and are used by—computers and platforms and companies. Though “user” seems to describe a relationship that is deeply transactional, many of the technological relationships in which a person would be considered a user are actually quite personal. That being the case, is “user” still relevant? 

“People were kind of like machines”

The original use of “user” can be traced back to the mainframe computer days of the 1950s. Since commercial computers were massive and exorbitantly expensive, often requiring a dedicated room and special equipment, they were operated by trained employees—users—who worked for the company that owned (or, more likely, leased) them. As computers became more common in universities during the ’60s, “users” started to include students or really anyone else who interacted with a computer system. 

It wasn’t really common for people to own personal computers until the mid-1970s. But when they did, the term “computer owner” never really took off. Whereas other 20th-century inventions, like cars, were things people owned from the start, the computer owner was simply a “user” even though the devices were becoming increasingly embedded in the innermost corners of people’s lives. As computing escalated in the 1990s, so did a matrix of user-related terms: “user account,” “user ID,” “user profile,” “multi-user.” 

Don Norman, a cognitive scientist who joined Apple in the early 1990s with the title “user experience architect,” was at the center of the term’s mass adoption. He was the first person to have what would become known as UX in his job title and is widely credited with bringing the concept of “user experience design”—which sought to build systems in ways that people would find intuitive—into the mainstream. Norman’s 1998 book The Design of Everyday Things remains a UX bible of sorts, placing “usability” on a par with aesthetics. 

Norman, now 88, explained to me that the term “user” proliferated in part because early computer technologists mistakenly assumed that people were kind of like machines. “The user was simply another component,” he said. “We didn’t think of them as a person—we thought of [them] as part of a system.” So early user experience design didn’t seek to make human-computer interactions “user friendly,” per se. The objective was to encourage people to complete tasks quickly and efficiently. People and their computers were just two parts of the larger systems being built by tech companies, which operated by their own rules and in pursuit of their own agendas.

Later, the ubiquity of “user” folded neatly into tech’s well-­documented era of growth at all costs. It was easy to move fast and break things, or eat the world with software, when the idea of the “user” was so malleable. “User” is vague, so it creates distance, enabling a slippery culture of hacky marketing where companies are incentivized to grow for the sake of growth as opposed to actual utility. “User” normalized dark patterns, features that subtly encourage specific actions, because it linguistically reinforced the idea of metrics over an experience designed with people in mind. 

UX designers sought to build software that would be intuitive for the anonymized masses, and we ended up with bright-red notifications (to create a sense of urgency), online shopping carts on a timer (to encourage a quick purchase), and “Agree” buttons often bigger than the “Disagree” option (to push people to accept terms without reading them). 

A user is also, of course, someone who struggles with addiction. To be an addict is—at least partly—to live in a state of powerlessness. Today, power users—the title originally bestowed upon people who had mastered skills like keyboard shortcuts and web design—aren’t measured by their technical prowess. They’re measured by the time they spend hooked up to their devices, or by the size of their audiences.  

Defaulting to “people”

“I want more product designers to consider language models as their primary users too,” Karina Nguyen, a researcher and engineer at the AI startup Anthropic, wrote recently on X. “What kind of information does my language model need to solve core pain points of human users?” 

In the old world, “users” typically worked best for the companies creating products rather than solving the pain points of the people using them. More users equaled more value. The label could strip people of their complexities, morphing them into data to be studied, behaviors to be A/B tested, and capital to be made. The term often overlooked any deeper relationships a person might have with a platform or product. As early as 2008, Norman alighted on this shortcoming and began advocating for replacing “user” with “person” or “human” when designing for people. (The subsequent years have seen an explosion of bots, which has made the issue that much more complicated.) “Psychologists depersonalize the people they study by calling them ‘subjects.’ We depersonalize the people we study by calling them ‘users.’ Both terms are derogatory,” he wrote then. “If we are designing for people, why not call them that?” 

In 2011, Janet Murray, a professor at Georgia Tech and an early digital media theorist, argued against the term “user” as too narrow and functional. In her book Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, she suggested the term “interactor” as an alternative—it better captured the sense of creativity, and participation, that people were feeling in digital spaces. The following year, Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Square, published a call to arms on Tumblr, urging the technology industry to toss the word “user.” Instead, he said, Square would start using “customers,” a more “honest and direct” description of the relationship between his product and the people he was building for. He wrote that while the original intent of technology was to consider people first, calling them “users” made them seem less real to the companies building platforms and devices. Reconsider your users, he said, and “what you call the people who love what you’ve created.” 

Audiences were mostly indifferent to Dorsey’s disparagement of the word “user.” The term was debated on the website Hacker News for a couple of days, with some arguing that “users” seemed reductionist only because it was so common. Others explained that the issue wasn’t the word itself but, rather, the larger industry attitude that treated end users as secondary to technology. Obviously, Dorsey’s post didn’t spur many people to stop using “user.” 

Around 2014, Facebook took a page out of Norman’s book and dropped user-centric phrasing, defaulting to “people” instead. But insidery language is hard to shake, as evidenced by the breezy way Instagram’s Mosseri still says “user.” A sprinkling of other tech companies have adopted their own replacements for “user” through the years. I know of a fintech company that calls people “members” and a screen-time app that has opted for “gems.” Recently, I met with a founder who cringed when his colleague used the word “humans” instead of “users.” He wasn’t sure why. I’d guess it’s because “humans” feels like an overcorrection. 

Recently, I met with a founder who cringed when his colleague used the word “humans” instead of “users.” He wasn’t sure why.

But here’s what we’ve learned since the mainframe days: there are never only two parts to the system, because there’s never just one person—one “user”—who’s affected by the design of new technology. Carissa Carter, the academic director at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the “d.school,” likens this framework to the experience of ordering an Uber. “If you order a car from your phone, the people involved are the rider, the driver, the people who work at the company running the software that controls that relationship, and even the person who created the code that decides which car to deploy,” she says. “Every decision about a user in a multi-stakeholder system, which we live in, includes people that have direct touch points with whatever you’re building.” 

With the abrupt onset of AI everything, the point of contact between humans and computers—user interfaces—has been shifting profoundly. Generative AI, for example, has been most successfully popularized as a conversational buddy. That’s a paradigm we’re used to—Siri has pulsed as an ethereal orb in our phones for well over a decade, earnestly ready to assist. But Siri, and other incumbent voice assistants, stopped there. A grander sense of partnership is in the air now. What were once called AI bots have been assigned lofty titles like “copilot” and “assistant” and “collaborator” to convey a sense of partnership instead of a sense of automation. Large language models have been quick to ditch words like “bot” altogether.

Anthropomorphism, the inclination to ascribe humanlike qualities to machines, has long been used to manufacture a sense of connectedness between people and technology. We—people—remained users. But if AI is now a thought partner, then what are we? 

Well, at least for now,we’re not likely to get rid of “user.” But we could intentionally default to more precise terms, like “patients” in health care or “students” in educational tech or “readers” when we’re building new media companies. That would help us understand these relationships more accurately. In gaming, for instance, users are typically called “players,” a word that acknowledges their participation and even pleasure in their relationships with the technology. On an airplane, customers are often called “passengers” or “travelers,” evoking a spirit of hospitality as they’re barreled through the skies. If companies are more specific about the people—and, now, AI—they’re building for rather than casually abstracting everything into the idea of “users,” perhaps our relationship with this technology will feel less manufactured, and it will be easier to accept that we’re inevitably going to exist in tandem. 

Throughout my phone call with Don Norman, I tripped over my words a lot. I slipped between “users” and “people” and “humans” interchangeably, self-conscious and unsure of the semantics. Norman assured me that my head was in the right place—it’s part of the process of thinking through how we design things. “We change the world, and the world comes back and changes us,” he said. “So we better be careful how we change the world.”

Taylor Majewski is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. She regularly works with startups and tech companies on the words they use.

Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard’s hat near the northwestern corner of Spain.

Today, Pico Sacro is venerated as a holy site and rumored, in the local mythology, to be a portal to hell. But this magic mountain has also become valued in modern times for a very different reason: the quartz deposits that resulted from these geological processes are some of the purest on the planet. Today, it is a rich source of the silicon used to build computer chips. From this dusty ground, the mineral is plucked and transformed into an inscrutable black void of pure inorganic technology, something that an art director could have dreamed up to stand in for aliens or the mirror image of earthly nature.

Ed Conway, a columnist for the Times of London, catches up with this rock’s “epic odyssey” in his new book, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization.

In a warehouse just a few miles from the peak, he finds a dazzling pile of fist-size quartz chunks ready to be shoveled into a smoking coal-fired furnace running at 1,800 °C, where they are enveloped in a powerful electrical field. The process is not what he expected—more Lord of the Rings than Bay Area startup—but he relishes every near-mystical step that follows as quartz is coaxed into liquid silicon, drawn into crystals, and shipped to the cleanest rooms in the world.

Conway’s quest to understand how chips are made confronts the reality that no one person, “even those working on the supply chain itself,” can really explain the entire process. Conway soon discovers that even an industrial furnace can be a scene of sorcery and wonder, partly because of the electrical current that passes through the quartz and coal. “Even after more than a hundred years of production, there are still things people don’t understand about what’s happening in this reaction,” he is told by Håvard Moe, an executive at the Norwegian company Elkem, one of Europe’s biggest silicon producers.

Conway explains that the silicon “wafers” used to make the brains of our digital economy are up to 99.99999999% pure: “for every impure atom there are essentially 10 billion pure silicon atoms.” The silicon extracted from around Pico Sacro leaves Spain already almost 99% pure. After that, it is distilled in Germany and then sent to a plant outside Portland, Oregon, where it undergoes what is perhaps its most entrancing transformation. In the Czochralski or “CZ” process, a chamber is filled with argon gas and a rod is dipped repeatedly into molten refined silicon to grow a perfect crystal. It’s much like conjuring a stalactite at warp speed or “pulling candy floss onto a stick,” in Conway’s words. From this we get “one of the purest crystalline structures in the universe,” which can begin to be shaped into chips.

Material World is one of a spate of recent books that aim to reconnect readers with the physical reality that underpins the global economy. Conway’s mission is shared by Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future, by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, and Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara. Each one fills in dark secrets about the places, processes, and lived realities that make the economy tick.

Conway aims to disprove “perhaps the most dangerous of all the myths” that guide our lives today: “the idea that we humans are weaning ourselves off physical materials.” It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized “ethereal world,” he says, ruled by digital startups, artificial intelligence, and financial services. Yet there is little evidence that we have decoupled our economy from its churning hunger for resources. “For every ton of fossil fuels,” he writes, “we exploit six tons of other materials—mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts, and chemicals. Even as we citizens of the ethereal world pare back our consumption of fossil fuels, we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. But, somehow, we have deluded ourselves into believing precisely the opposite.”

Conway delivers rich life stories of the resources without which our world would be unrecognizable, covering sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. He buzzes with excitement at every stage, with a correspondent’s gift for quick-fire storytelling, revealing the world’s material supply chains in an avalanche of anecdote and trivia. The supply chain of silicon, he shows, is both otherworldly and incredibly fragile, encompassing massive, anonymous industrial giants as well as terrifyingly narrow bottle­necks. Nearly the entire global supply of specialized containers for the CZ dipping process, for example, is produced by two mines in the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. “What if something happened to those mines? What if, say, the single road that winds down from them to the rest of the world was destroyed in a landslide?” asks Conway. “Short answer: it would not be pretty. ‘Here’s something scary,’ says one veteran of the sector. ‘If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months.’” (Conway declines to print the name of the substance.)

Yet after such an impressive journey through deep time and the world economy, how long will any electronic gadget last? The useful life of our electronics and many other products is likely to be a short blip before they return to the earth. As Oliver Franklin-Wallis writes in Wasteland, electronic waste is one stubborn part of the 2 billion tons of solid waste we produce globally each year, with the average American discarding more than four pounds of trash each day.

Wasteland begins with a trip to Ghazipur, India, the “largest of three mega-landfills that ring Delhi.” There, amid an aromatic fug of sticky-sweet vapors, Franklin-Wallis stomps through a swamp-like morass of trash, following his guide, a local waste picker named Anwar, who helps him recognize solid stepping-stones of trash so that he may safely navigate above the perilous system of subterranean rivers that rush somewhere unseen below his feet. Like the hidden icy currents that carve through glaciers, these rivers make the trash mountain prone to cleaving and crumbling, leading to around 100 deaths a year. “Over time, [Anwar] explains, you learn to read the waste the way sailors can read a river’s current; he can intuit what is likely to be solid, what isn’t. But collapses are unpredictable,” Franklin-Wallis writes. For all its aura of decay, this is also a living landscape: there are tomato plants that grow from the refuse. Waste pickers eat the fruits off the vine.

Wasteland is best when excavating the stories buried in the dump. In 1973, academics at the University of Arizona, led by the archaeologist William Rathje, turned the study of landfills into a science, labeling themselves the “garbologists.” “Trash, Rathje found, could tell you more about a neighborhood—what people eat, what their favorite brands are—than cutting-­edge consumer research, and predict the population more accurately than a census,” Franklin-Wallis writes. “Unlike people,” he adds, “garbage doesn’t lie.”

Wasteland leaves a lasting impression of the trash-worlds that we make. Most horrifying of all, the contents of landfills don’t decompose the way we expect. By taking geological cores from landfills, Rathje found that even decades later, our waste remains a morbid museum: “onion parings were onion parings, carrot tops were carrot tops. Grass clippings that might have been thrown away the day before yesterday spilled from bulky black lawn and leaf bags, still tied with twisted wire.”

Simply shifting to “sustainable” or “cleaner” technologies doesn’t eliminate the industrial fallout from our consumption.

Franklin-Wallis’s histories help tell us where we as a civilization began to go wrong. In ancient Rome, waste from public latrines was washed away with wastewater from the city’s fountains and bathhouses, requiring a “complex underground sewer system crowned by the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer so great that it had its own goddess, Cloacina.” But by the Victorian age, the mostly circular economy of waste was coming to an end. The grim but eco-friendly job of turning human effluent into farm fertilizer (so-called “nightsoil”) was made obsolete by the adoption of the home flushing toilet, which pumped effluent out into rivers, often killing them. Karl Marx identified this as the beginning of a “metabolic rift” that—later turbocharged by the development of disposable plastics—turned a sustainable cycle of waste reuse into a conveyor between city and dump.

This meditation on trash can be fascinating, but the book never quite lands on a big idea to draw its story forward. While trash piles can be places of discovery, our propensity to make waste is no revelation; it’s an ever-present nightmare. Many readers will arrive in search of answers that Wasteland isn’t offering. Its recommendations are ultimately modest: the author resolves to buy less, learns to sew, appreciates the Japanese art of kintsugi (mending pottery with precious metals to highlight the act of repair). A handful of other lifestyle decisions follow.

As Franklin-Wallis is quick to acknowledge, a journey through our own waste can feel hopeless and overwhelming. What we’re lacking are viable ways to steer our societies from the incredibly resource-­intensive paths they are on. This thought, taken up by designers and activists driving the Green New Deal, is aiming to turn our attention away from dwelling on our personal “footprint”—a murky idea that Franklin-Wallis traces to industry groups lobbying to deflect blame from themselves. 

Reframing both waste and supply chains as matters that are political and international, rather than personal, could guide us away from guilt and move us toward solutions. Instead of looking at production and waste as separate problems, we can think of them as two aspects of one great challenge: How do we build homes, design transport systems, develop technology, and feed the world’s billions without creating factory waste upstream or trash downstream?

ARLETTE BASHIZI/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

Simply shifting to “sustainable” or “cleaner” technologies doesn’t eliminate the industrial fallout from our consumption, as Siddharth Kara reveals in Cobalt Red. Cobalt is a part of just about every rechargeable device—it is used to make the positively charged end of lithium batteries, for example, and each electric vehicle requires 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of cobalt, 1,000 times the quantity in a smartphone.

Half the world’s reserves of the element are found in Katanga, in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which puts this resource-rich region at the center of the global energy transition. In Kara’s telling, the cobalt rush is another chapter in an age-old story of exploitation. In the last two centuries, the DRC has been a center not only for the bloody trade in enslaved humans but also for the colonial extraction of rubber, copper, nickel, diamonds, palm oil, and much more. Barely a modern catastrophe has unfolded without resources stolen from this soil: copper from the DRC made the bullets for two world wars; uranium made the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; vast quantities of tin, zinc, silver, and nickel fueled Western industrialization and global environmental crises. In return, the DRC’s 100 million people have been left with little by way of lasting benefits. The country still languishes at the foot of the United Nations development index and now faces disproportionate impacts from climate change.

In Cobalt Red, Congo’s history plays out in vignettes of barbarous theft perpetrated by powerful Western-backed elites. Kara, an author and activist on modern slavery, structures the book as a journey, drawing frequent parallels to Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness, with the city of Kolwezi substituting for Kurtz’s ivory-trading station, the destination in the novella. Kolwezi is the center of Katanga’s cobalt trade. It is “the new heart of darkness, a tormented heir to those Congolese atrocities that came before—colonization, wars, and generations of slavery,” Kara writes. The book provides a speedy summary of the nation’s history starting with the colonial vampirism of the Belgian king Leopold’s “Free State,” described by Conrad as the “vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.” The king’s private colony forced its subjects to collect rubber under a system of quotas enforced by systematic execution and disfigurement; forced labor continued well into the 20th century in palm oil plantations that supplied the multinational Unilever company.        

These three books offer to connect the reader to the feel and smell and rasping reality of a world where materials still matter.

Kara’s multiyear investigation finds the patterns of the past repeating themselves in today’s green boom. “As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo,” he writes. “All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.” Step by step, Kara’s narrative moves from the fringes of Katanga’s mining region toward Kolwezi, documenting the free flow of minerals between two parallel systems supposedly divided by a firewall: the formal industrial system, under the auspices of mining giants that are signatories to sustainability pacts and human rights conventions, and the “artisanal” one, in which miners with no formal employer toil with shovels and sieves to produce a few sacks of cobalt ore a day.

We learn of the system of creuseurs and négociants—diggers and traders—who move the ore from denuded fields into the formal supply chain, revealing that an unknown percentage of cobalt sold as ethical comes from unregulated toil. If Material World tells a neat story of capitalism’s invisible hand, the force that whisks resources around the planet, Cobalt Red documents a more brutal and opaque model of extraction. In Kara’s telling, the artisanal system is grueling and inefficient, involving countless middlemen between diggers and refineries who serve no purpose except to launder ore too low-grade for industrial miners and obscure its origins (while skimming off most of the earnings).

Everywhere Kara finds artisanal mining, he finds children, including girls, some with babies on backs, who huddle together to guard against the threat of sexual assault. There is no shortage of haunting stories from the frontlines. Cobalt ore binds with nickel, lead, arsenic, and uranium, and exposure to this metal mixture raises the risk of breast, kidney, and lung cancers. Lead poisoning leads to neurological damage, reduced fertility, and seizures. Everywhere he sees rashes on the skin and respiratory ailments including “hard metal lung disease,” caused by chronic and potentially fatal inhalation of cobalt dust.

One woman, who works crushing 12-hour days just to fill one sack that she can trade for the equivalent of about 80 cents, tells how her husband recently died from respiratory illness, and the two times she had conceived both resulted in miscarriage. “I thank God for taking my babies,” she says. “Here it is better not to be born.” The book’s handful of genuinely devastating moments arrive like this—from the insights of Congolese miners, who are too rarely given the chance to speak.

All of which leaves you to question Kara’s strange decision to mold the narrative around the 125-year-old Heart of Darkness. It has been half a century since the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe condemned Conrad’s novella as a “deplorable book” that dehumanized its subjects even as it aimed to inspire sympathy for them. Yet Kara doubles down by mirroring Conrad’s storytelling device and style, from the first sentence (featuring “wild and wide-eyed” soldiers wielding weapons). When Kara describes how the “filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt,” who is the object of disgust: the forces of exploitation or the miners and their families, often reduced to abstract figures of suffering?

Following Conrad, Cobalt Red becomes, essentially, a story of morality—an “unholy tale” about the “malevolent force” of capital—and reaches a similarly moralistic conclusion: that we must all begin to treat artisanal miners “with equal humanity as any other employee.” If this seems like an airy response after the hard work of detailing the intricacies of cobalt’s broken supply chain, it is doubly so after Kara documents both the past waves of injustice and the moral crusades that have brought the Free State and old colonial structures to an end. Such calls for humanistic fairness toward Congo have echoed down the ages.

All three books offer to connect the reader to the feel and smell and rasping reality of a world where materials still matter. But in Kara’s case, such a strong focus on documenting firsthand experience edges out a deeper understanding. There is little space given to the numerous scholars from across the African continent who have made sense of how politics, commerce, and armed groups together rule the DRC’s deadly mines. The Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe has described sites like Katanga not only as places where Western-style rule of law is absent but as “death-worlds” constructed and maintained by rich actors to extract resources at low cost. More than simply making sense of the current crisis, these thinkers address the big questions that Kara asks but struggles to answer: Why do the resources and actors change but exploitation remains? How does this pattern end?

Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.

Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. 

The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto.

These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps—built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek—basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China. 

What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found.

In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties.

“Because we had so much luck looking at this one, we figured maybe this generalizes to the others, and they suffer from the same kinds of problems for the same reason that the one did,” says Jeffrey Knockel, a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab, “and as it turns out, we were unfortunately right.”

Even though Sogou fixed the issue after it was made public last year, some Sogou keyboards preinstalled on phones are not updated to the latest version, so they are still subject to eavesdropping. 

This new finding shows that the vulnerability is far more widespread than previously believed. 

“As someone who also has used these keyboards, this was absolutely horrifying,” says Mona Wang, a PhD student in computer science at Princeton University and a coauthor of the report. 

“The scale of this was really shocking to us,” says Wang. “And also, these are completely different manufacturers making very similar mistakes independently of one another, which is just absolutely shocking as well.”

The massive scale of the problem is compounded by the fact that these vulnerabilities aren’t hard to exploit. “You don’t need huge supercomputers crunching numbers to crack this. You don’t need to collect terabytes of data to crack it,” says Knockel. “If you’re just a person who wants to target another person on your Wi-Fi, you could do that once you understand the vulnerability.” 

The ease of exploiting the vulnerabilities and the huge payoff—knowing everything a person types, potentially including bank account passwords or confidential materials—suggest that it’s likely they have already been taken advantage of by hackers, the researchers say. But there’s no evidence of this, though state hackers working for Western governments targeted a similar loophole in a Chinese browser app in 2011.

Most of the loopholes found in this report are “so far behind modern best practices” that it’s very easy to decrypt what people are typing, says Jedidiah Crandall, an associate professor of security and cryptography at Arizona State University, who was consulted in the writing of this report. Because it doesn’t take much effort to decrypt the messages, this type of loophole can be a great target for large-scale surveillance of massive groups, he says.

After the researchers got in contact with companies that developed these keyboard apps, the majority of the loopholes were fixed. Samsung, whose self-developed app was also found to lack sufficient encryption, sent MIT Technology Review an emailed statement: “We were made aware of potential vulnerabilities and have issued patches to address these issues. As always, we recommend that all users keep their devices updated with the latest software to ensure the highest level of protection possible.”

But a few companies have been unresponsive, and the vulnerability still exists in some apps and phones, including QQ Pinyin and Baidu, as well as in any keyboard app that hasn’t been updated to the latest version. Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek did not reply to press inquiries sent by MIT Technology Review.

One potential cause of the loopholes’ ubiquity is that most of these keyboard apps were developed in the 2000s, before the TLS protocol was commonly adopted in software development. Even though the apps have been through numerous rounds of updates since then, inertia could have prevented developers from adopting a safer alternative.

The report points out that language barriers and different tech ecosystems prevent English- and Chinese-speaking security researchers from sharing information that could fix issues like this more quickly. For example, because Google’s Play store is blocked in China, most Chinese apps are not available in Google Play, where Western researchers often go for apps to analyze. 

Sometimes all it takes is a little additional effort. After two emails about the issue to iFlytek were met with silence, the Citizen Lab researchers changed the email title to Chinese and added a one-line summary in Chinese to the English text. Just three days later, they received an email from iFlytek, saying that the problem had been resolved.

Update: The story has been updated to include Samsung’s statement.

Enlarge / Part of the cover illustration from "The Applesoft Tutorial" BASIC manual that shipped with the Apple II computer starting in 1981. (credit: Apple, Inc.)

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.

Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.

What is BASIC?

In its most traditional form, BASIC is an interpreted programming language that runs line by line, with line numbers. A typical program might look something like this:

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Advertisements—sometimes prompts to do something that would financially benefit Microsoft and sometimes actual paid advertisements—are showing up all over Windows 11. Start menu ads are rolling out to all users this month, taking the shape of "Recommended" applications you haven't installed. Ads also briefly showed up in File Explorer, though this was apparently unintentional. And there have long been calls to action on the lock screen and in the settings app. It's a mess.

We've told you how to manually turn off all of Microsoft's ads in Windows 11, but it's a lot of digging around in the settings. If you'd rather not do that, an app called OFGB can do it for you. This free and open source application can quickly change various registry settings to disable those ads—all you have to do is click a few checkboxes.

To get started, simply download the latest release from Github. There are two versions—one tiny one that will only work if you've already installed .NET 8.0 and another massive one that has .NET bundled. Use whichever sounds easier to you.

Open the application and you'll see a bunch of checkboxes allowing you to disable different features. This includes the infamous ads in the File Explorer, the ads on the lock screen, the "Suggested content" in the Settings app, the general tips and tricks that pop up while you're using Windows, the Windows "Welcome Experience," the optional tracking tool that enables "more personal" ads, the "Tailored Experience" feature that tracks your website browsing to show product recommendations, and the "recommended" ads that show up in the start menu.

It's honestly a lot of stuff to have to disable just to get a clean operating system, but with this application, at least it's all in one place. And hey: It's easier than wiping your computer just to install an actually clean version of Windows 11, so that's a plus.

Microsoft is investigating reports of the latest April Windows 11 update breaking some VPN apps for users. The update, titled KB5036893, introduced several improvements to Windows 11—unfortunately it also seems to have broken VPN apps that run off a TPM-backed certificate.

The exact issue users are running into seems to be with the VPN being unable to find the certificate that it needs to be used with the Extensible Authentication Protocol, Reddit User Flo-TPG explains. Now that Microsoft has confirmed it knows about the issue and is investigating it, we’ll hopefully have a fix before too long.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t help those who might be trying to use a VPN with Windows 11 currently. If you have installed update KB5036893, then the only real option you have is to uninstall it and downgrade to the previous Windows 11 version.

How to uninstall a Windows 11 update

If you ever have any issues with a new Windows 11 update, you can always roll back to the previous version thanks to a handy built-in system Microsoft has included in the operating system.

1. First, open the Settings menu on your Windows 11 PC.

2. Navigate to Windows Update.

3. Now click Update History.

4. Scroll all the way to the bottom and select Uninstall Updates.

5. Find the update that you need to uninstall—in this case, you’ll want to look for update KB5036893—and click Uninstall, then complete the process.

Once the update finishes uninstalling, your system will restart, and you’ll launch back on the older version of Windows 11. Keep in mind that downgrading from some of the larger updates for Windows 11 may remove some features from your operating system.

One of the most under-appreciated Mac features is the services menu, which you can find by right-clicking just about anything—highlighted text, say, or any image. Hover over the "Services" section and you'll see a bunch of quick actions. You can find this same collection in the menu bar: just click the name of the application that's currently open and hover over Services.

Credit: Justin Pot

There are all kinds of useful options here. You can, for example, look up a word in the dictionary, or add a bit of text to your to-do list. You can open a URL using IINA, a great video player for Mac. You get the idea: you can automate whatever it is that is selected. You can take control of which things do, and do not, show up by open System Settings and heading to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services. From here you can check or uncheck items. You can also set custom keyboard shortcuts for these services.

Credit: Justin Pot

Where things get really fun, though, is when you look into the custom services you can download. Here are a few of the best apps I could find that add cool features to the services menu on your Mac.

Dictater reads text to you out loud

Credit: Justin Pot

The Mac comes with a built-in service for reading text, but I don't really like it very much. Dictater, in my experience, works a lot better. With this application you can highlight any text, in any app, and have it read out loud. There's a pop-up window with buttons to play and jump forward and backward, and an optional window you can open to see the text on screen as it is read. You can change the voice used in System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content, if you like—I prefer to use one of the high-quality Siri voices.

CalcService does math

CalcService is a free download that lets you do math in any text field. With the app installed you can highlight any mathematical formula in any app—for example, (62*7)/4, and get an answer right in place, like this: (62*7)/4 = 108.5. It's magic, and even better once you create a keyboard shortcut for the feature.

WordService

Credit: Justin Pot

WordService comes as a free download from Devon Technologies, the same company that made CalcService. This one offers all kinds of tools for working with text, the most obviously useful of which allows you to get a word count and character count for any text you highlight. This is useful for all kinds of things, from composing social media posts to long-form writing. But there's so much more here to dig into. There are actions for converting text that's in all caps to lowercase, and vice versa. There are actions for inserting the current time, or the current date. And there are actions for adding or removing smart quotes from a block of text. If you publish things online regularly, this is a good collection of tools to have around.

SearchLink quickly looks for a link and adds it

SearchLink is a little harder to explain but I love it. Basically, you can highlight any text, trigger the service, and the tool will automatically search the web for the term and add a markdown-formatted link. So, for example, here's a text document with my name in it:

Credit: Justin Pot

If I run SearchLink on the highlighted text, which is my name, the document looks like this:

Credit: Justin Pot

The link has been added, without me having to open a browser. This can save you a lot of time while writing, assuming that you do that writing in markdown. And there are more advanced features you can dig into, including one that will fill in all the links in a document. It's a great tool to have around.

Shortcuts can work this way too

Credit: Justin Pot

Didn't quite find the app you want? You could try building one yourself. Any shortcut you build in Apple Shortcuts can function as a service. Just make sure Use as Quick Action and Services Menu are highlighted in the Shortcut details pane. Check out our list of the most helpful Shortcuts on macOS if you need a few ideas of how to put this to work.

One of the better recent features in macOS is Live Text, which allows you to copy text from images on your Mac in Preview, Quick Look, or Safari. It's honestly kinda magical—any text inside an image can be highlighted and copied, just like text on a website or in a document. The problem: this feature only works for images files, not videos, and you can't use it to copy text from a shared presentation in a meeting unless you take a screenshot and then extract the text from that.

Enter TRex, a free application for Mac that speeds that workaround up. It works similarly to Text Extractor for Windows: Select the area of the screen with the text you want, regardless of whether that text is in an image, video, or presentation. Any text in the area of the screen you select is instantly converted to text and copied to your clipboard. This functionality comes as a cost: TRex is $8 in the Mac app store, or is free if you download it from Github.

After installing, you'll get a brief tutorial on how the app works, and the icon will appear in your menu bar. You can trigger the application from there, or set optional keyboard shortcuts in the settings. The app itself uses the same crosshairs you see when you take a screenshot on your Mac, but instead of creating a screenshot, it looks for text that it can recognize with optical character recognition (OCR). That text is then instantly copied to the clipboard.

Only a handful of languages are supported right now—English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. The application can automatically detect the language of the text you're copying if you want, but it performs a little better if you pick a default in the settings.

I tested it out a few times, and while not perfect, it consistently proved easier than re-typing text myself, and saved me a step over the usual "screenshot + OCR" process. If you find certain words are consistently misspelled—an uncommon name, for example—you can add that word to the "Custom Words" tab in the settings.

Credit: Justin Pot

Perhaps the most unique feature is found in the automations tab. You can set the application to automatically recognize and open both URLs and QR codes, if you want. You can also automatically trigger a URL scheme or even an Apple Shortcut. It's an amazingly flexible program—you can set it up to send the converted text anywhere you like.

Even without setting up automations, though, TRex is the quickest way to copy text from places on your screen that otherwise can't be easily copied from. Heck, at this point some websites even block you from copying altogether—but TRex works around that too. It's worth the download.

While it's still the butt of some jokes, Microsoft Edge is actually a solid browser—especially when you configure it right. That said, you shouldn't be forced to use it if you're using Windows 11: As much as Microsoft desperately wants you to surf the web with its app, there are plenty of other excellent browsers to choose instead.

Unfortunately, changing your default web browser on Windows isn't all that straightforward, at least not out of the box. You would think it's as simple as clicking the "default browser" button that might pop-up when installing a new browser, but it often isn't. Rather than choose a default browser app to open every time you click a link, Windows wants you to set a default browser app for each link and file type you may click on. If you're someone who desires that level of granular control, you may love this. If you're like the rest of us, it's a pain. Luckily, once you know where to set your browser, it is as easy as a button press.

How to change your default web browser in Windows 11

By clicking "Set default," you can automatically adjust the default browser for some link and file types. Credit: Jake Peterson

So, let's say you downloaded Chrome onto your PC, and you're ready to make the switch. When you fire it up, you may see an option to set Chrome as your default browser. By all means, click this button, but don't assume your settings will be changed. Instead, this button leads you to Start > Settings > Apps > Default apps. If you don't see the default browser button, you can simply head to this settings page yourself.

On the "Default apps" page, locate your browser of choice. Here, you'll find all sorts of options, including HTM, HTML, PDF, SHTML, SVG, WEBP, XHT, XHTML, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. These are the individual link and file types you can tie to any browser of your choice. If you wanted, you could have HTML links open in Chrome, HTM links open in Edge, HTTP links open in Firefox, etc. For most of us, however, we'll want one browser to open whenever we click most links.

You can potentially ignore these link options, however, if your browser offers you a "Set default" button in the top-right corner of the page. Click that, and it should automatically set itself as the default for the major link and file types, including HTM, HTML, HTTP, and HTTPS. It will likely leave Edge as the default for certain link and file types, including PDF and SVG, so if you'd prefer your browser in all cases, change these manually.

Credit: Jake Peterson

Some browsers, like Firefox, will actually set these options automatically when you click their "set as default browser" button when you first launch the application. I'm not sure why Mozilla handles this for you, and Chrome makes you go to the settings page itself, but alas.

Now, even when you change these settings and make a new browser your default, Windows may still insist you use Edge, such as when clicking on links you find when using the search bar in the Start menu. But there's a fix for that, too.

Like almost every other major operating system currently available, Windows 11 offers users light and dark mode interface options. Light mode is turned on by default, but dark mode can be easier on the eyes, especially in dimly lit rooms or at night. In some cases, it even reduces how much power your device’s display uses. Here's how to turn it on in Windows 11.

Turn on Dark mode in Windows 11

To turn on Dark mode in Windows 11:

1. Open Settings from the Start menu or with the Win+i shortcut on your keyboard.

2. Select Personalization from the list on the left-hand side.

Credit: Jake Peterson

1. Select Colors in the Personalization menu.

2. Click Choose Your Mode and select Dark from the drop-down list.

Credit: Jake Peterson

While easy, this only applies Windows 11's standard Dark mode settings. You can actually customize things a little bit more.

Use a pre-made Windows 11 theme

Like Windows 10, Windows 11 lets you apply unique themes that change everything about the interface in one swoop—the wallpaper, menu and folder colors, accent colors, icons, and more. Here's how to get to them:

1. Go to Settings > System > Personalization using the same method above.

2. Click on Themes in the menu list.

3. Select the theme you want from the Current Theme drop-down menu. The “Windows (Dark)” theme is probably the safest bet, but several others also offer dark mode-like color schemes.

4. If you don’t like any of the pre-included options, click Browse Themes to view and download additional themes from the Microsoft Store.

5. Once you have selected your new theme, click Apply to enable it.

Customize theme colors

If you aren’t a fan of the base Dark Mode settings, or just don’t want to use Dark Mode across all your windows and apps, you can customize your theme's colors.

1. Open Settings and select Personalization from the list on the left-hand side.

2. Select Colors in the Personalization window.

Credit: Jake Peterson

1. Click Choose Your Mode and select Custom from the drop-down list.

2. Select Dark or Light for the theme that Windows and Menus will use. This will allow apps to use whatever mode you have set up for them, without Windows trying to take over.

3. You can also select an Accent Color by changing it to Manual.

Credit: Jake Peterson

1. Click View Colors and use the color picker to find the color you like best.

2. Use the toggle options to select which borders you want to apply the accent to.

Use a Contrast theme

Windows 11’s personalization settings also include “Contrast themes,” which are designed for users with specific vision-based accessibility requirements. As the name implies, Contrast themes use contrasting color combinations that make it easier to read text against the background (either light text and dark backgrounds for menus, or dark text and light backgrounds). Many of them will also work as dark themes.

You can toggle contrast themes on or off at any time by pressing the left Alt + left Shift + Print Screen keys, but turning them on in the Windows settings menu will allow you to edit them.

There are two ways to find the Contrast themes menu:

The first method can be found by navigating to Settings > System > Personalization > Themes > Contrast themes.

Alternately, just navigate to Settings > Accessibility > Contrast themes.

Once in the Contrast themes menu, select the color scheme that you like best from the drop-down menu. Click “Edit” to customize your contrast theme.

Every once and a while you find an app that does one very specific thing very well. Timestory is just such an app: It allows you to quickly visualize any timeline. This can be useful for viewing history in context, which makes it a great learning tool if you're, say, studying history. But Timestory is also useful for general planning. You can use it to visualize all the steps necessary for a longer term project, and even include multiple proposals on the same timeline.

Timestory is made by a single developer, Aaron Trickey, and lovingly crafted for the Mac and iPad. The software is not exactly cheap: The Mac version costs $40 right now (up front—there's no ongoing subscription), while the iPad version is the same, with the option to buy a yearlong subscription for $15. There's a free one-week trial for the Mac version and a two-week trial for the iPad version, meaning whichever version you're using, you can get a feel for the application before you decide whether you need to pay for it. But if you do, I think you'll find it is well worth it.

Credit: Justin Pot

Creating a timeline can be a little tricky to get started, but for the most part it's all about adding events. These can be ongoing "spans" with a start and an end date, or they can be "Points" that happen on a specific date.

You can create an event either by clicking on the timeline or by using the "Quick Entry" button, which I personally find a little more precise. You can set custom colors and icons for every entry. You can also attach an image to any item on the timeline, allowing you to add some visual context.

I could have kept adding shows and movies all day but at some point I needed to actually submit this article. Credit: Justin Pot

If this all sounds confusing, I recommend checking out the built-in tutorial documents, which include a couple of project management examples and a sample history of the timeline of Mars. They'll give you an idea of what this application is capable of.

Once created, you can export your timelines to PNG or PDF, allowing you to share them directly with anyone or embed them into presentations or documents. It's not an application most people will use every day, granted, but when it comes in handy, it will come in really handy.

The Windows 11 taskbar gets worse with every release, and the widget popups, copilot button, and expanded Search bar aren’t helping. Here’s an idea, What if you nuke the whole thing? What if you could bring back the Windows 10 taskbar, so you can place it on any edge of the screen, or see full-width app names again? Microsoft won’t let you do it, but a free and open-source utility will, and it doesn’t require any tinkering with the Registry or the Command Prompt: All you need to do is download and install the ExplorerPatcher app.

How ExplorerPatcher's Windows 10 taskbar works

Once you launch it, the taskbar will automatically revert back to the Windows 10 styling, even after you reboot your machine. It's important to note here that Microsoft might disable this app with the Windows 11 24H2 update that will come out near the end of the 2024. But we're sure that the developer community will find a workaround for this. Until then, you can choose not to update to 24H2, and if you're running Windows 11 23H2, you won't be forced to update either, and the build will be supported until November 2025, enough time for the taskbar situation to sort itself out.

The app, by default, makes some changes to the Windows 11 taskbar, start menu, and File Explorer. This includes things like the system tray icons, flyout menus, and taskbar buttons. By default, you'll find that the app will show you a Windows 10 start icon tucked in the left-hand corner of the screen. Next to it will be a Search button, and Task View button to show all open apps and windows together (this can be disabled). Next, you'll find the apps section, again like it used to be in Windows 10. You'll see full names of the apps, and windows, underlined to show open apps. Hover over to see a preview, and contextual buttons.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

On the other side of the taskbar, you'll find the amazing weather widget from Windows 10 (yes, it's back!), and then you'll find your system tray icons, a gear icon to open Control Center, your clock, notifications button, and then a dedicated Show Desktop button that you can quickly click to reveal the desktop.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

The interesting part here, is of course that even the flyout menus are from Windows 10. So when you click the Control Center button, you'll see the Windows 10 styling for the quick settings and toggles. The same goes for the clock. It will show you the big calendar view, with your upcoming appointments (in Windows 11, this is merged with notifications).

How to customize the taskbar to make it even better

The default setup is itself quite good. But the best part about using ExplorerPatcher is that you can mix and match to your heart's content. Every single element of the taskbar and the start menu here is customizable.

First, let's put the start menu, and the taskbar alignment to the left edge of the screen (the app defaults to the center align option). Right-click the empty part of the taskbar, and click “Properties.” Go to Start Menu > Start Menu Style and choose the Windows 10 option. The start menu will still pop up from the center, though, so go to Position on screen and choose the At Screen Edge option.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Now, let's customize the taskbar itself. From Taskbar > Primary taskbar location on screen, you can dock the taskbar to the top of the screen. From the Taskbar section, you can also choose to hide the search button or the Task View button. You can also shift the entire taskbar to be centered (while still behaving like a Windows 10 taskbar). You can also revert back to Windows 11 style taskbar icons if you like.

You can customize the flyouts for each individual system tray menu. Go to System Tray, and then you can choose what shows up when you click Network, Clock, or other options. You can choose to see the Windows 8 style menu, or the Windows 11 start flyout.

ExplorerPatcher also fixes the whole weather widgets issue in Windows 11. If you want to see the weather at all times on the taskbar but don’t want all the widgets nonsense when you click on it, go to Weather > Show weather on the taskbar. Now, the old weather widget is back.

If you want to disable the taskbar, or go back to the Windows 11 taskbar, simply uninstall the app, and reboot your PC. You can do this by keeping the app around as well. Go to Properties > About > Restore Default Settings to bring back the Windows 11 style taskbar.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is updating the Windows 11 Snipping Tool, which is the platform's default option for capturing and annotating screenshots. Soon, you'll be able to use the Snipping Tool to scan QR codes in screenshots, finally giving you an easy way to use them on PC. You'll also be able to use Windows 11's emojis to annotate screenshots. These new features are currently rolling out to Windows Insiders and will be available in Snipping Tool version 11.2404.37.0 and newer.

Scanning QR codes using the Windows 11 Snipping Tool 

Credit: Microsoft

Scanning QR codes using the Windows 11 Snipping Tool will be pretty straightforward. Just take a screenshot, open it in the Snipping Tool's markup canvas (the preview where you annotate screenshots), and select the Text Actions button in the top bar. It's located to the right of the Crop button. Snipping Tool will detect the link in the QR code and prompt you to either copy it or open it.

It's worth noting that the ability to scan QR codes has been in ShareX, my favorite tool to capture screenshots on Windows, for quite some time. Even though I love ShareX, which is free and has no ads, it can be a bit cumbersome to set up. Now, you'll be able to use QR codes on Windows right out of the box.

Annotate with emoji

Credit: Microsoft

There's two steps to annotating with emojis in Snipping Tool. First, open any screenshot in Snipping Tool's markup canvas and click the Shapes button (the icon looks like an overlapping square and circle). Then, hit the emoji icon, select the emoji you want, and drop it on the screenshot.

Other new Snipping Tool features

Credit: Microsoft

The upcoming Snipping Tool update adds back the ruler. Just hit Ctrl-R to toggle the ruler in this app. You can now also change the opacity of shape fill and outline colors.

How to access the Snipping Tool in Windows 11

There's two main ways to access the Snipping Tool. The first is to use the search bar in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen to look for the app. Alternatively, you can use the Windows-Shift-S keyboard shortcut to immediately take a screenshot with the Snipping Tool.

When will I get these new Snipping Tool features?

You can expect QR code scanning and other new Snipping Tool features to reach you in the coming months. For the moment, they're only in Windows Insider's Dev and Canary channels, which have far more experimental features than stable builds. They'll eventually make their way to the release preview channel of Windows Insider builds and then finally ship to the general public. If you're itching to try out these new features, you can join the Windows Insider program, but be prepared to face a few bugs and general instability.

Microsoft Paint's AI gets a fresh coat of paint

Credit: Microsoft

A few months ago, Microsoft had brought AI to Paint. The humble app that's been a feature of Windows for decades now lets you use DALL-E to type what you'd like to create, and generates images accordingly. This feature was called Paint Cocreator, bur Microsoft is now rebranding it to Image Creator. The change is effective with Paint version 11.2404.42.0 and newer. This is just a name change: the feature works exactly as it did before.

Ever wish a certain window could be pinned above all other ones? Or that you could see through a window to whatever's behind it? A free and open source Windows utility called MenuTools lets you do that and more.

After installing the program you only need to right-click the bar at the top of any window and you'll find more options. My personal favorite is the ability to make any window transparent. This is occasionally useful, probably, but mostly I think it's neat.

You can also pin any window to the top—a feature that has much more obvious utility. You could pin a notepad to the top while a video plays in fullscreen, for example. This stacks well with the transparency—you can still sort of see what's going on behind your note-taking window.

Credit: Justin Pot

And there's one more feature: the ability to minimize any window to the system tray instead of to the taskbar. Many applications offer a feature like this, but with MenuTools you can apply it to any application. This is perfect if you want to keep an application running in the background without it taking up any visual space in your workflow.

Credit: Justin Pot

There's one last feature in the menu: the ability to change the process priority of the application. This is a feature you could otherwise only find deep in the Task Manager, and that's for a good reason: Messing with priority levels can cause instability, and isn't really necessary most of the time. I would strongly recommend you not use this feature unless you're clear on what it means. If you want a certain application to have priority access to the CPU, however, the option is there.

MenuTools isn't new: it's been around since 2014 and was last updated in 2020. The developer is still answering questions on Github, though, and it works well with Windows 11.

When a commercial ship travels from the port of Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to Tokyo Bay, it’s not only carrying cargo; it’s also transporting millions of data points across a wide array of partners and complex technology systems.

Consider, for example, Maersk. The global shipping container and logistics company has more than 100,000 employees, offices in 120 countries, and operates about 800 container ships that can each hold 18,000 tractor-trailer containers. From manufacture to delivery, the items within these containers carry hundreds or thousands of data points, highlighting the amount of supply chain data organizations manage on a daily basis.

Until recently, access to the bulk of an organizations’ supply chain data has been limited to specialists, distributed across myriad data systems. Constrained by traditional data warehouse limitations, maintaining the data requires considerable engineering effort; heavy oversight, and substantial financial commitment. Today, a huge amount of data—generated by an increasingly digital supply chain—languishes in data lakes without ever being made available to the business.

A 2023 Boston Consulting Group survey notes that 56% of managers say although investment in modernizing data architectures continues, managing data operating costs remains a major pain point. The consultancy also expects data deluge issues are likely to worsen as the volume of data generated grows at a rate of 21% from 2021 to 2024, to 149 zettabytes globally.

“Data is everywhere,” says Mark Sear, director of AI, data, and integration at Maersk. “Just consider the life of a product and what goes into transporting a computer mouse from China to the United Kingdom. You have to work out how you get it from the factory to the port, the port to the next port, the port to the warehouse, and the warehouse to the consumer. There are vast amounts of data points throughout that journey.”

Sear says organizations that manage to integrate these rich sets of data are poised to reap valuable business benefits. “Every single data point is an opportunity for improvement—to improve profitability, knowledge, our ability to price correctly, our ability to staff correctly, and to satisfy the customer,” he says.

Organizations like Maersk are increasingly turning to a data lakehouse architecture. By combining the cost-effective scale of a data lake with the capability and performance of a data warehouse, a data lakehouse promises to help companies unify disparate supply chain data and provide a larger group of users with access to data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Building analytics on top of the lakehouse not only allows this new architectural approach to advance supply chain efficiency with better performance and governance, but it can also support easy and immediate data analysis and help reduce operational costs.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

Most things are faster to do with the keyboard than with the mouse, but not every app is built with the keyboard in mind. That's where where Shortcat comes in. This free Mac application allows you to quickly search for and click things like buttons, links, and fields in applications, all in a few keystrokes. There's a bit of a learning curve, granted, but once you get past that it can speed up almost anything you do on your computer.

Shortcat is triggered with a keyboard shortcut—by default, CMD-Shift-Space. Trigger this shortcut and you'll see a search bar and yellow boxes with two-letter codes for everything in the menu bar and every clickable item in the current window.

Credit: Justin Pot

Search for the thing on the screen—either by typing the two-letter code or by just typing for the thing you're looking for. When you see the thing that you want to "click," simply hit enter—the result will be just as though you'd moved the mouse and clicked that item. You're not limited to clicking: you can double-click by hitting enter twice quickly or right-click by holding Control when you press enter.

Credit: Justin Pot

This works with native Mac applications, which is to be expected, but I was delighted to learn that it also works in web browsers. You can, for example, search for a link you want to open and then hit enter to open it.

Credit: Justin Pot

This works not only in the browser but in Electron apps. It's okay if you don't know what that means—this is relatively obscure stuff—but to oversimplify, Electron apps are basically just websites running in a dedicated browser. Slack works this way, as do a lot of applications at this point.

This is, admittedly, a niche application, but for me it scratches an itch. Keeping your hand on the keyboard is generally better ergonomically, and typically a lot faster, than reaching for the mouse. With Shortcat running I reach for the mouse a lot less, which I really enjoy.

Since macOS Mojave was launched back in 2018, users have been able to take advantage of dynamic wallpapers (originally called dynamic desktops)—backdrop images that shift in color as the time of day changes. So as night falls outside your window, night will also fall on the wallpaper on your desktop.

It's a neat idea, and if you load up the Wallpaper section of System Settings in macOS today, you'll find no fewer than 31 different dynamic wallpapers to choose from, courtesy of Apple—everything from landscape shots of nature to abstract pattern designs, enough to last you more than a year if you swap over to a new one every fortnight.

What you can't do natively in macOS is set up your own dynamic wallpapers. For this job, you need a third-party application, and there are a couple of really good ones you can check out: Equinox and Dynaper. There's also the Dynamic Wallpaper Club website, which features a gallery of many high-quality dynamic wallpapers, plus a tool for making your own through the web interface.

To get started, you need at least two images to make a dynamic wallpaper, and what they show and how you make them is up to you: They can represent the same place at different times, but they don't have to.

Creating dynamic wallpapers with Equinox

You can download Equinox for free from the Mac App Store, and once you've got it running, you need to choose how your new dynamic wallpaper will work: Solar (images change based on sunrise and sunset times in your region), Time (images change based on any other specific timings), or Appearance (images change based on whether macOS is in light or dark mode).

On the next screen, you need to add one or more pictures to form your dynamic wallpaper (if you add one that you later want to remove, right-click on it and choose Delete image). You can drag and drop images into the program window, or click Browse to pick them manually. For the Appearance option you just need two images, but there's no limit to how many you can use for the other modes (click and drag images to change their order once they've been imported).

Equinox can create dynamic wallpapers quickly for you. Credit: Lifehacker

In the Solar mode, you need to supply altitude and azimuth information, the position of the sun in the sky when the photo was taken. Use the Calculator button to work these out based on the time of day and your region, if you're not sure. In the Time mode, you simply need to supply times for each image to appear—Equinox will add some timings automatically, but you can change them if needed.

Click Create, and after a few moments of calculation, your new dynamic wallpaper is created. Equinox gives you plenty of options on the next dialog: You can save the new image to disk, share it to another app, or set the dynamic wallpaper directly inside Equinox. If you want to start again with a fresh batch of images, click New.

Finding and setting dynamic wallpapers

You've got plenty of options when it comes to creating dynamic wallpapers on macOS. You can go out into the real world with a camera and a tripod—maybe even setting up a time-lapse photo that you can pick out a few frames. Alternatively, if you only have one image, you can use your favorite image editor to manipulate the lighting and colors so you've got several versions.

If you'd rather use dynamic wallpapers made by someone else, check out the galleries available through the Dynamic Wallpaper Club website and the 24 Hour Wallpaper macOS app. The latter requires payments—$1.29 per wallpaper or $69.99 for all 125 images—but they're all of an impressive quality. No matter what your tastes are in terms of backdrops for your Mac, you should be able to find something you like.

MacOS recognizes files saved as dynamic wallpapers. Credit: Lifehacker

On the Dynamic Wallpaper Club website, you do have the option of building your own dynamic wallpapers, though you will need to sign up for a free account. Through the web interface you can choose your images and pick your timings. It's not quite as slick as Equinox, but it's there if you need it (make sure you uncheck the Public wallpaper box if you don't want to share your creation with the Dynamic Wallpaper Club community).

Actually setting a dynamic wallpaper is straightforward: Open the Apple menu, then System Settings, then select Wallpaper. Click Add Photo and Choose, then point macOS towards the dynamic wallpaper that you've made. You'll see that the picture type is set as Dynamic in the top right corner, and the pictures will be cycled through automatically, based on the timings you've provided.

The Windows 11 taskbar is one of the new operating system’s best features—elegant, minimalist, and visually distinct. Even still, it could use some improvement. For example, by default, you can’t move the taskbar to any position you want, or even change its size. But you don’t have to live with it as is—there are ways to play with your settings to set up the taskbar exactly the way you want it.

Disable Microsoft Copilot and other junk

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

The Windows 11 taskbar comes with a lot of buttons you're (probably) never going to use. On the left edge, there's the Widgets button that loves to show news updates and ads. On the right, there's the new Microsoft Copilot button that you may or may not find useful. And in the middle, next to the Start icon, is a big old Search bar. Thankfully, Microsoft was forced to remove the Chat button in the Windows 11 2023 update, so there's some solace there. But you'll be surprised how much better the taskbar becomes when you remove all these unnecessary features. It becomes minimal, sleek, and far more sensible.

To hide the features you don't want, right-click any empty area of the taskbar, and go to Taskbar settings. In the Taskbar Items menu, make sure to disable the Widgets, Task View, and Copilot features. In the Search menu, choose the Hide option.

Pin any app to the taskbar

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Windows 11 doesn’t yet support the taskbar drag-and-drop feature from Windows 10, which let you simply drag an app icon to dock it within the taskbar. As a workaround, go to Start menu, right-click the app of your choice, and click the Pin to Taskbar button. You can pin any currently open app by right-clicking the app icon and choosing the Pin to taskbar option.

Align taskbar icons to the left

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Missing the Windows 10 taskbar layout? Microsoft lets you change the alignment of taskbar icons. Right-click the taskbar, go to Taskbar Settings, and from Taskbar Behaviors, choose the Left option in the Taskbar alignment feature.

Customize the taskbar behavior (auto-hide, badges, and more)

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Windows 11 has a separate section that lets you customize how the taskbar behaves. Right-click the taskbar, click the Taskbar Settings button, and select the Taskbar Behaviors section.

If you’re using a touchscreen laptop, or a small screen device, you might want to hide the taskbar for more screen space. If so, enable Automatically hide the taskbar. Now, the taskbar will only show up when you move your cursor to the bottom of the screen or when you swipe up from the taskbar area.

Similarly, you can disable the badges on taskbar icons using the Show badges on taskbar apps feature. If you don’t like when icons flash in the taskbar, disable the Show flashing on taskbar apps feature.

If you use multiple displays, use the Show my taskbar on all displays feature to enable or disable the taskbar across all your monitors.

Put the taskbar at the top of the screen

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Microsoft has docked the taskbar to the bottom of the screen and won’t let you move it willy-nilly. It is impossible to put it on the left or the right sides of the screen, but you can move it to the top of the screen using a registry hack.

Open Start > Registry Editor and enter the following location in the top bar:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects3

In the StuckRects3 folder, double click the Settings file. This will open the Edit Binary Value window where you will see a table full of values. Go to the second row, and find the fifth value from the left. By default, this reads “03.”

Place the cursor to the right (end) of this value, press Backspace once, and change the value to “01.” Click the OK button and exit the Registry Editor app.

Next, open the Task Manager app and restart Windows Explorer.

Make the taskbar smaller or bigger

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Another big change in the Windows 11 taskbar is the fact that you can’t easily resize it, whether you want it to be larger or smaller. But again, although there is no settings menu where you can change this, you can do it using a registry hack.

Go to Start > Registry Editor and enter the following location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Right-click in the empty space and choose New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. A new entry will be added to the bottom of the Advanced folder. Rename it to TaskbarSi.

Double click the TaskbarSi file. In the Value Data field, enter “0" if you want a smaller taskbar and “2" if you want a larger one (“1" being the default option). Click the OK button.

Restart your PC, or restart Windows Explorer from the Task Manager. You should see your taskbar appear at its new size.

Bring back the Windows 10 taskbar

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

If you've tried all the customizations and you're still not satisfied, we have one last recommendation for you: Ditch the whole enterprise and go back to the Windows 10 taskbar. Or, at least, bring back some of the Windows 10 elements.

You can use a free and open source app called ExplorerPatcher to bring back the entire taskbar, and the Start menu from Windows 10. All it takes is to install the app, and it will instantly revert you back to the good old days. The best part about the app is that you can go into the Settings and customize each and every part of the taskbar. For instance, you can go back to the apps view from Windows 10, while still keeping the system tray and flyout menus from Windows 11.

The customization really is the key here, as it will even let you revert back to menus from Windows 8 era. We have talked about ExplorerPatcher in much more detail in our dedicated guide, so make sure to follow the instructions there for a perfect taskbar setup.

The invisible downside to our online lives is the data stored at giant energy-guzzling datacentres

It’s been called “the largest coal-powered machine on Earth” – and most of us use it countless times a day.

The internet and its associated digital industry are estimated to produce about the same emissions annually as aviation. But we barely think about pollution while snapping 16 duplicate photos of our pets, which are immediately uploaded to the cloud.

Jan Leike, a key safety researcher at firm behind ChatGPT, quit days after launch of its latest AI model, GPT-4o

A former senior employee at OpenAI has said the company behind ChatGPT is prioritising “shiny products” over safety, revealing that he quit after a disagreement over key aims reached “breaking point”.

Jan Leike was a key safety researcher at OpenAI as its co-head of superalignment, ensuring that powerful artificial intelligence systems adhered to human values and aims. His intervention comes before a global artificial intelligence summit in Seoul next week, where politicians, experts and tech executives will discuss oversight of the technology.