Enlarge / On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket's next test flight from South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.44 of the Rocket Report! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX's Starbase launch facility, says the company expects to receive an FAA launch license for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. It looks like this rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two-and-a-half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over the previous intervals of seven months and four months between Starship flights.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Blue Origin launch on tap this weekend. Blue Origin plans to launch its first human spaceflight mission in nearly two years on Sunday. This flight will launch six passengers on a flight to suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 km) over West Texas. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has not flown people to space since a New Shepard rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another uncrewed suborbital mission in December.

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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.

We finally know the result of a legal case I’ve been tracking in Hong Kong for almost a year. Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits the city government to go to Western platforms like YouTube and Spotify and demand they remove the protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong,” because the government claims it has been used for sedition.

To read more about how this injunction is specifically designed for Western Big Tech platforms, and the impact it’s likely to have on internet freedom, you can read my story here.

Aside from the depressing implications for pro-democracy movements’ decline in Hong Kong, this lawsuit has also been an interesting case study of the local government’s complicated relationship with internet control and censorship.

I was following this case because it’s a perfect example of how censorship can be built brick by brick. Having reported on China for so long, I sometimes take for granted how powerful and all-encompassing its censorship regime is and need to be reminded that the same can’t be said for most other places in the world.

Hong Kong had a free internet in the past. And unlike mainland China, it remains relatively open: almost all Western platforms and services are still available there, and only a few websites have been censored in recent years. 

Since Hong Kong was returned to China from the UK in 1997, the Chinese central government has clashed several times with local pro-democracy movements asking for universal elections and less influence from Beijing. As a result, it started cementing tighter and tighter control over Hong Kong, and people have been worrying about whether its Great Firewall will eventually extend there. But actually, neither Beijing nor Hong Kong may want to see that happen. All the recent legal maneuverings are only necessary because the government doesn’t want a full-on ban of Western platforms.

When I visited Hong Kong last November, it was pretty clear that both Beijing and Hong Kong want to take advantage of the free flow of finance and business through the city. That’s why the Hong Kong government was given tacit permission in 2023 to explore government cryptocurrency projects, even though crypto trading and mining are illegal in China. Hong Kong officials have boasted on many occasions about the city’s value proposition: connecting untapped demand in the mainland to the wider crypto world by attracting mainland investors and crypto companies to set up shop in Hong Kong. 

But that wouldn’t be possible if Hong Kong closed off its internet. Imagine a “global” crypto industry that couldn’t access Twitter or Discord. Crypto is only one example, but the things that have made Hong Kong successful—the nonstop exchange of cargo, capital, ideas, and people—would cease to function if basic and universal tools like Google or Facebook became unavailable.

That’s why there are these calculated offenses on internet freedom in Hong Kong. It’s about seeking control but also leaving some breathing space; it’s as much about looking tough on the outside as negotiating with platforms down below; it’s about showing its determination to Beijing but also not showing too much aggression to the West. 

For example, the experts I’ve talked to don’t expect the government to request that YouTube remove the videos for everyone globally. More likely, they may ask for the content to be geo-blocked just for users in Hong Kong.

“As long as Hong Kong is still useful as a financial hub, I don’t think they would establish the Great Firewall [there],” says Chung Ching Kwong, a senior analyst at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an advocacy organization that connects legislators from over 30 countries working on relations with China. 

It’s also the reason why the Hong Kong government has recently come out to say that it won’t outright ban platforms like Telegram and Signal, even though it said that it had received comments from the public asking it to do so.

But coming back to the court decision to restrict “Glory to Hong Kong,” even if the government doesn’t end up enforcing a full-blown ban of the song, as opposed to the more targeted injunction it’s imposed now, it may still result in significant harm to internet freedom.

We are still watching the responses roll in after the court decision last Wednesday. The Hong Kong government is anxiously waiting to hear how Google will react. Meanwhile, some videos have already been taken down, though it’s unclear whether they were pulled by the creators or by the platform. 

Michael Mo, a former district councilor in Hong Kong who’s now a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds in the UK, created a website right after the injunction was first initiated last June to embed all but one of the YouTube videos the government sought to ban. 

The domain name, “gloryto.hk,” was the first test of whether the Hong Kong domain registry would have trouble with it, but nothing has happened to it so far. The second test was seeing how soon the videos would be taken down on YouTube, which is now easy to tell by how many “video unavailable” gaps there are on the page. “Those videos were pretty much intact until the Court of Appeal overturned the rulings of the High Court. The first two have gone,” Mo says. 

The court case is having a chilling effect. Even entities that are not governed by the Hong Kong court are taking precautions. Some YouTube accounts owned by media based in Taiwan and the US proactively enabled geo-blocking to restrict people in Hong Kong from watching clips of the song they uploaded as soon as the injunction application was filed, Mo says. 

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of internet freedom in Hong Kong? Let me know what you think at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. The Biden administration plans to raise tariffs on Chinese-made EVs, from 25% to 100%. Since few Chinese cars are currently sold in the US, this is mostly a move to deter future imports of Chinese EVs. But it could slow down the decarbonization timeline in the US.  (ABC News)

2. Government officials from the US and China met in Geneva today to discuss how to mitigate the risks of AI. It’s a notable event, given how rare it is for the two sides to find common ground in the highly politicized field of technology. (Reuters $)

3. It will be more expensive soon to ride the bullet trains in China. A 20% to 39% fare increase is causing controversy among Chinese people. (New York Times $)

4. From executive leadership to workplace culture, TikTok has more in common with its Chinese sister app Douyin than the company wants to admit. (Rest of World)

5. China’s most indebted local governments have started claiming troves of data as “intangible assets” on their accounting books. Given the insatiable appetite for AI training data, they may have a point. (South China Morning Post $)

6. A crypto company with Chinese roots purchased a piece of land in Wyoming for crypto mining. Now the Biden administration is blocking the deal for national security reasons. (Associated Press)

Lost in translation

Recently, following an order made by the government, hotels in many major Chinese cities stopped asking guests to submit to facial recognition during check-in. 

According to the Chinese publication TechSina, this has had a devastating impact on the industry of facial recognition hardware. 

As hotels around the country retire their facial recognition kiosks en masse, equipment made by major tech companies has flooded online secondhand markets at steep discounts. What was sold for thousands of dollars is now resold for as little as 1% of the original price. Alipay, the Alibaba-affiliated payment app, once invested hundreds of millions of dollars to research and roll out these kiosks. Now it’s one of the companies being hit the hardest by the policy change.

One more thing

I had to double-check that this is not a joke. It turns out that for the past 10 years, the Louvre museum has been giving visitors a Nintendo 3DS—a popular handheld gaming console—as an audio and visual guide. 

It feels weird seeing people holding a 3DS up to the Mona Lisa as if they were in their own private Pokémon Go–style gaming world rather than just enjoying the museum. But apparently it doesn’t work very well anyway. Oops.

Enlarge / HyImpulse's single-stage rocket, SR75, lifts off from Australia. (credit: HyImpulse)

Welcome to Edition 6.43 of the Rocket Report! This week saw the debut of two new rockets, a suborbital lifter from a German startup, and a new variant of the Long March 6 from China's state-owned launch provider. We also got within two hours of the debut of a crewed launch of Boeing's Starliner vehicle, but a rocket issue forced a 10-day delay. Soon, hopefully.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Orbital launch tally running ahead of 2023. There were 63 orbital launch attempts worldwide in the first quarter of 2024, which is 10 more than the same time last year, Payload reports. SpaceX accounted for 32 of the 34 US orbital launch attempts in Q1. One ULA Vulcan launch and one Rocket Lab Electron launch out of Wallops rounded out the remaining total. (Rocket Lab flights out of New Zealand are not counted in US launch totals.)

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Cybersecurity is a battlefield where innovation is paramount. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a potential game-changer, promising to revolutionize threat detection and response. Vendors have made bold claims, promising their AI-powered solutions will provide unparalleled capabilities, eliminate false positives, and autonomously defend against even the most sophisticated attacks.

The post Whitepaper: The False Promises of AI in Cybersecurity appeared first on Security Boulevard.

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.

If you could talk again to someone you love who has passed away, would you? For a long time, this has been a hypothetical question. No longer. 

Deepfake technologies have evolved to the point where it’s now easy and affordable to clone people’s looks and voices with AI. Meanwhile, large language models mean it’s more feasible than ever before to conduct full conversations with AI chatbots. 

I just published a story today about the burgeoning market in China for applying these advances to re-create deceased family members. Thousands of grieving individuals have started turning to dead relatives’ digital avatars for conversations and comfort. 

It’s a modern twist on a cultural tradition of talking to the dead, whether at their tombs, during funeral rituals, or in front of their memorial portraits. Chinese people have always liked to tell lost loved ones what has happened since they passed away. But what if the dead could talk back? This is the proposition of at least half a dozen Chinese companies offering “AI resurrection” services. The products, costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, are lifelike avatars, accessed in an app or on a tablet, that let people interact with the dead as if they were still alive.

I talked to two Chinese companies that, combined, have provided this service for over 2,000 clients. They describe a growing market of people accepting the technology. Their customers usually look to the products to help them process their grief.

To read more about how these products work and the potential implications of the technology, go here.

However, what I didn’t get into in the story is that the same technology used to clone the dead has also been used in other interesting ways.

For one, this process is being applied not just to private individuals, but also to public figures. Sima Huapeng, CEO and cofounder of the Chinese company Silicon Intelligence, tells me that about one-third of the “AI resurrection” cases he has worked on involve making avatars of dead Chinese writers, thinkers, celebrities, and religious leaders. The generated product is not intended for personal mourning but more for public education or memorial purposes.

Last year, Silicon Intelligence replicated Mei Lanfang, a renowned Peking opera singer born in 1894. The avatar of Mei was commissioned to address a 2023 Peking opera festival held in his hometown, Taizhou. Mei talked about seeing how drastically Taizhou had changed through modern urban development, even though the real artist died in 1961.

But an even more interesting use of this technology is that people are using it to clone themselves while they are still alive, to preserve their memories and leave a legacy. 

Sima said this is becoming more popular among successful families that feel the need to pass on their stories. He showed me a video of an avatar the company created for a 92-year-old Chinese entrepreneur, which was displayed on a big vertical monitor screen. The entrepreneur wrote a book documenting his life, and the company only had to feed the whole book to a large language model for it to start role-playing him. “This grandpa cloned himself so he could pass on the stories of his life to the whole family. Even when he dies, he can still talk to his descendants like this,” says Sima.

Sun Kai, another cofounder of Silicon Intelligence, is also featured in my story because he made a replica of his mom, who passed away in 2019. One of his regrets is that he didn’t have enough video recordings of his mom that he could use to train her avatar to be more like her. That inspired him to start recording voice memos of his life and working on his own digital “twin,” even though, in his 40s, death still seems far away.

He compares the process to a complicated version of a photo shoot, but a digital avatar that has his looks, voice, and knowledge can preserve much more information than photographs do. 

And there’s still another use: Just as parents can spend money on an expensive photo shoot to capture their children at a specific age, they can also choose to create an AI avatar for the same purpose. “The parents tell us no matter how many photos or videos they took of their 12-year-old kid, it always felt like something was lacking. But once we digitized this kid, they could talk to the 12-year-old version of them anytime, anywhere,” Sun says.

At the end of the day, the deepfake technologies used to clone both the living and the deceased are the same. And seeing that there’s already a market in China for such services, I’m sure these companies will keep on developing more use cases for it. 

But what’s also certain is that we’d have to answer a lot more questions about the ethical challenges of these applications, from the issue of consent to violations of copyright. 

Would you make a replica of yourself if given the chance? Tell me your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. Zhang Yongzhen, the first Chinese scientist to publish a sequence of the covid-19 virus, staged a protest last week over being locked out of his lab—likely a result of the Chinese government’s efforts to discourage research on covid origins. (Associated Press $)

2. Chinese president Xi Jinping is visiting Europe for five days. Half of the trip will be spent in Hungary and Serbia, the only two European countries that are welcoming Chinese investment and manufacturing. Xi is expected to announce an electric-vehicle manufacturing deal in Hungary while he’s there. (Associated Press)

3. China launched a new moon-exploring rover on Friday. It will collect samples near the moon’s south pole, an area where the US and China are competing to build permanent bases. Maybe the Netflix comedy series Space Force will look like a documentary soon. (Wall Street Journal $)

4. Huawei is secretly funding an optics research competition in the US. The act likely isn’t illegal, but it’s deceptive, since university participants, some of whom had vowed to not work with the company, didn’t know the source of the funding. (Bloomberg $)

5. China is quickly catching up on brain-computer interfaces, and there’s strong interest in using the technology for non-medical cognitive improvement. (Wired $)

6. Taiwan has been rocked by frequent earthquakes this year, and developers are racing to make earthquake warning apps that might save lives. One such app has seen user numbers increase from 3,000 to 370,000. (Reuters $)

7. Prestigious Chinese media publications, which still publish hard-hitting stories at times, are being forced to distance themselves from the highest-profile journalism award in Asia to avoid being accused by the government of “colluding with foreign forces.”  (Nikkei Asia $)

Lost in translation

While generative AI companies have taken the spotlight during the current AI frenzy, China’s older “AI Four Dragons”—four companies that rose to market prominence because of their technological lead in computer vision and facial recognition—are grappling with profit setbacks and commercialization hurdles, reports the Chinese publication Guiji Yanjiushi.

In response to these challenges, the “Dragons” have chosen different strategies. Yitu leaned further into security cameras; Megvii focused on applying computer vision in logistics and the Internet of Things; CloudWalk prioritized AI assistants; and SenseTime, the largest of them all, ventured into generative AI with its self-developed LLMs. Even though they are not as trendy as the startups, some experts believe these established players, having accumulated more computing power and AI talent over the years, may prove to be more resilient in the end.

One more thing

During this year’s Met Gala, fans were struggling to discern real photos of celebrities from AI-generated ones. To add to the confusion, some social media accounts were running real photos in AI-powered enhancement apps, which slightly distorted the images and made it even harder to tell the difference. 

One of the most widely used such apps is called Remini, but few people know that it was actually developed by a Chinese company called Caldron and later acquired by an Italian software company. Remini now has over 20 million users and is extremely profitable. Still, it seems its AI enhancement tools have a long way to go.

Enlarge / This image captured by Astroscale's ADRAS-J satellite shows the discarded upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket. (credit: Astroscale)

Welcome to Edition 6.42 of the Rocket Report! Several major missions are set for launch in the next few months. These include the first crew flight on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, set for liftoff on May 6, and the next test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket, which could happen before the end of May. Perhaps as soon as early summer, SpaceX could launch the Polaris Dawn mission with four private astronauts, who will perform the first fully commercial spacewalk in orbit. In June or July, Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket is slated to launch for the first time. Rest assured, Ars will have it all covered.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

German rocket arrives at Scottish spaceport. Rocket Factory Augsburg has delivered a booster for its privately developed RFA One rocket to SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, the company announced on X. The first stage for the RFA One rocket was installed on its launch pad at SaxaVord to undergo preparations for a static fire test. The booster arrived at the Scottish launch site with five of its kerosene-fueled Helix engines. The remaining four Helix engines, for a total of nine, will be fitted to the RFA One booster at SaxaVord, the company said.

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Verizon’s 2024 DBIR shows that vulnerability exploitation increased three times and confirmed data breaches doubled compared to the previous year.

The post Verizon DBIR 2024 Shows Surge in Vulnerability Exploitation, Confirmed Data Breaches  appeared first on SecurityWeek.

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.

Allow me to indulge in a little reflection this week. Last week, the divest-or-ban TikTok bill was passed in Congress and signed into law. Four years ago, when I was just starting to report on the world of Chinese technologies, one of my first stories was about very similar news: President Donald Trump announcing he’d ban TikTok. 

That 2020 executive order came to nothing in the end—it was blocked in the courts, put aside after the presidency changed hands, and eventually withdrawn by the Biden administration. Yet the idea—that the US government should ban TikTok in some way—never went away. It would repeatedly be suggested in different forms and shapes. And eventually, on April 24, 2024, things came full circle.

A lot has changed in the four years between these two news cycles. Back then, TikTok was a rising sensation that many people didn’t understand; now, it’s one of the biggest social media platforms, the originator of a generation-defining content medium, and a music-industry juggernaut. 

What has also changed is my outlook on the issue. For a long time, I thought TikTok would find a way out of the political tensions, but I’m increasingly pessimistic about its future. And I have even less hope for other Chinese tech companies trying to go global. If the TikTok saga tells us anything, it’s that their Chinese roots will be scrutinized forever, no matter what they do.

I don’t believe TikTok has become a larger security threat now than it was in 2020. There have always been issues with the app, like potential operational influence by the Chinese government, the black-box algorithms that produce unpredictable results, and the fact that parent company ByteDance never managed to separate the US side and the China side cleanly, despite efforts (one called Project Texas) to store and process American data locally. 

But none of those problems got worse over the last four years. And interestingly, while discussions in 2020 still revolved around potential remedies like setting up data centers in the US to store American data or having an organization like Oracle audit operations, those kinds of fixes are not in the law passed this year. As long as it still has Chinese owners, the app is not permissible in the US. The only thing it can do to survive here is transfer ownership to a US entity. 

That’s the cold, hard truth not only for TikTok but for other Chinese companies too. In today’s political climate, any association with China and the Chinese government is seen as unacceptable. It’s a far cry from the 2010s, when Chinese companies could dream about developing a killer app and finding audiences and investors around the globe—something many did pull off. 

There’s something I wrote four years ago that still rings true today: TikTok is the bellwether for Chinese companies trying to go global. 

The majority of Chinese tech giants, like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, operate primarily within China’s borders. TikTok was the first to gain mass popularity in lots of other countries across the world and become part of daily life for people outside China. To many Chinese startups, it showed that the hard work of trying to learn about foreign countries and users can eventually pay off, and it’s worth the time and investment to try.

On the other hand, if even TikTok can’t get itself out of trouble, with all the resources that ByteDance has, is there any hope for the smaller players?

When TikTok found itself in trouble, the initial reaction of these other Chinese companies was to conceal their roots, hoping they could avoid attention. During my reporting, I’ve encountered multiple companies that fret about being described as Chinese. “We are headquartered in Boston,” one would say, while everyone in China openly talked about its product as the overseas version of a Chinese app.

But with all the political back-and-forth about TikTok, I think these companies are also realizing that concealing their Chinese associations doesn’t work—and it may make them look even worse if it leaves users and regulators feeling deceived.

With the new divest-or-ban bill, I think these companies are getting a clear signal that it’s not the technical details that matter—only their national origin. The same worry is spreading to many other industries, as I wrote in this newsletter last week. Even in the climate and renewable power industries, the presence of Chinese companies is becoming increasingly politicized. They, too, are finding themselves scrutinized more for their Chinese roots than for the actual products they offer.

Obviously, none of this is good news to me. When they feel unwelcome in the US market, Chinese companies don’t feel the need to talk to international media anymore. Without these vital conversations, it’s even harder for people in other countries to figure out what’s going on with tech in China.

Instead of banning TikTok because it’s Chinese, maybe we should go back to focus on what TikTok did wrong: why certain sensitive political topics seem deprioritized on the platform; why Project Texas has stalled; how to make the algorithmic workings of the platform more transparent. These issues, instead of whether TikTok is still controlled by China, are the things that actually matter. It’s a harder path to take than just banning the app entirely, but I think it’s the right one.

Do you believe the TikTok ban will go through? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. Facing the possibility of a total ban on TikTok, influencers and creators are making contingency plans. (Wired $)

2. TSMC has brought hundreds of Taiwanese employees to Arizona to build its new chip factory. But the company is struggling to bridge cultural and professional differences between American and Taiwanese workers. (Rest of World)

3. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, met with Chinese president Xi Jinping during a visit to China this week. (New York Times $)

• Here’s the best way to describe these recent US-China diplomatic meetings: “The US and China talk past each other on most issues, but at least they’re still talking.” (Associated Press)

4. Half of Russian companies’ payments to China are made through middlemen in Hong Kong, Central Asia, or the Middle East to evade sanctions. (Reuters $)

5. A massive auto show is taking place in Beijing this week, with domestic electric vehicles unsurprisingly taking center stage. (Associated Press)

• Meanwhile, Elon Musk squeezed in a quick trip to China and met with his “old friend” the Chinese premier Li Qiang, who was believed to have facilitated establishing the Gigafactory in Shanghai. (BBC)
• Tesla may finally get a license to deploy its autopilot system, which it calls Full Self Driving, in China after agreeing to collaborate with Baidu. (Reuters $)

6. Beijing has hosted two rival Palestinian political groups, Hamas and Fatah, to talk about potential reconciliation. (Al Jazeera)

Lost in translation

The Chinese dubbing community is grappling with the impacts of new audio-generating AI tools. According to the Chinese publication ACGx, for a new audio drama, a music company licensed the voice of the famous dubbing actor Zhao Qianjing and used AI to transform it into multiple characters and voice the entire script. 

But online, this wasn’t really celebrated as an advancement for the industry. Beyond criticizing the quality of the audio drama (saying it still doesn’t sound like real humans), dubbers are worried about the replacement of human actors and increasingly limited opportunities for newcomers. Other than this new audio drama, there have been several examples in China where AI audio generation has been used to replace human dubbers in documentaries and games. E-book platforms have also allowed users to choose different audio-generated voices to read out the text. 

One more thing

While in Beijing, Antony Blinken visited a record store and bought two vinyl records—one by Taylor Swift and another by the Chinese rock star Dou Wei. Many Chinese (and American!) people learned for the first time that Blinken had previously been in a rock band.

An analysis conducted by Honeywell shows that much of the USB-borne malware targeting industrial organizations can still cause OT disruption.

The post Honeywell: USB Malware Attacks on Industrial Orgs Becoming More Sophisticated appeared first on SecurityWeek.

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’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was invented in the US, today about 80% of the world’s solar manufacturing takes place in China. For some parts of the process, it’s responsible for even more: 97% of wafer manufacturing, for example. 

So I jumped at the opportunity to interview Shawn Qu, the founder and chairman of Canadian Solar, one of the largest and longest-standing solar manufacturing companies in the world, last week.

Qu’s company provides a useful lens on wider efforts by the US to reshape the global solar supply chain and bring more of it back to American shores. Although most of its production is still in China and Southeast Asia, it’s now building two factories in the US, spurred on by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. You can read my story here.

I met Qu in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was attending the Harvard College China Forum, a two-day annual conference that often draws a fair number of Chinese entrepreneurs. I also attended, hoping to meet representatives of Chinese tech companies there.

At the conference, I noticed three interesting things.

One, there was a glaring absence of Chinese consumer tech companies. With the exception of one US-based manager from TikTok, I didn’t see anyone from Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, or ByteDance. 

These companies, with their large influence on Chinese people’s everyday lives, used to be the stars of discussions around China’s tech sector. If you had come to the Harvard conference before covid-19, you would have met plenty of people representing them, as well as the venture capitalists that funded their successes. You can get a sense just by reading past speaker lists: executives from Xiaomi, Ant Financial, Sogou, Sequoia China, and Hillhouse Capital. These are the equivalents of Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel in China’s tech world.

But these companies have become much more low profile since then, for a couple of main reasons. First, they underwent a harsh domestic crackdown after the government decided to tame them. (I recently talked to Angela Zhang, a law professor studying Chinese tech regulations, to understand these crackdowns.) And second, they have become the subject of national security scrutiny in the US, making it politically unwise for them to engage too much on the public stage here.

The second thing I noticed at the conference is what stood in their place: a batch of new Chinese companies, mostly in climate tech. William Li, the CEO of China’s EV startup NIO, was one of the most popular guest speakers during the conference’s opening ceremony this year. There were at least three solar panel companies present—two (JA Solar and Canadian Solar) among the top-tier manufacturers in the world, and a third that sells solar panels to Latin America. There were also many academics, investors, and even influencers working in the field of electric vehicles and other electrified transportation methods.

It’s clear that amid the increasingly urgent task of addressing climate change, China’s climate technology companies have become the new stars of the show. And they are very much willing to appear on the global stage, both bragging about their technological lead and seeking new markets. 

“The Chinese entrepreneurs are very eager,” says Jinhua Zhao, a professor studying urban transportation at MIT, who also spoke on one of the panels at the conference. “They want to come out. I think the Chinese government side also started to send signals, inviting foreign leadership and financial industries to visit China. I see a lot of gestures.” 

The problem, however, is they are also becoming subject to a lot of political animosity in the US. The Biden administration has started an investigation into Chinese-made cars, mostly electric vehicles; Chinese battery companies have been navigating a minefield of politicians’ resistance to their setting up plants in North America; and Chinese solar panel companies have been subject to sky-high tariffs. 

Back in the mid-2010s, when Chinese consumer tech companies emerged onto the global stage, the US and China had a warm relationship, creating a welcoming environment. Unfortunately, that’s not something climate tech companies can enjoy today. Even though climate change is a global issue that requires countries to collaborate, political tensions stand in the way when companies and investors on opposite sides try to work together.

On that note, the last thing I noticed at the conference is a rising geopolitical force in tech: the Middle East. A few speakers at the conference are working in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and they represent other deep-pocketed players who are betting on technologies like EVs and AI in both the United States and China.

But can they navigate the tensions and benefit from the technological advantages on both sides? It’ll be interesting to watch how that unfolds. 

What do you think of the role of the Middle East in the future of climate technologies? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. A batch of documents mistakenly unsealed by a Pennsylvania court reveals the origin story of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Who knew it started out as a real estate venture? (New York Times $)

2. Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest man, said he would move some of his copper smelting factories to China to reduce the impact of Western sanctions, which block Russian companies from using international payment systems. (Financial Times $)

3. Chinese universities have found a way to circumvent the US export ban on high-end Nvidia chips: by buying resold server products made by Dell, Super Micro Computer, and Taiwan’s Gigabyte Technology. (Reuters $)

4. TikTok is testing “TikTok Notes,” a rival product to Instagram, in Australia and Canada. (The Verge)

5. Since there’s no route for personal bankruptcy in China, those who are unable to pay their debts are being penalized in novel ways: they can’t take high-speed trains, fly on planes, stay in nice hotels, or buy expensive insurance policies. (Wall Street Journal $)

6. The hunt for the origins of covid-19 has stalled in China, as Chinese politicians worry about being blamed for the findings. (Associated Press)

7. Because of pressure from the US government, Mexico will not hand out tax cuts and other incentives to Chinese EV companies. (Reuters $)

Lost in translation

Until last year, it was normal for Chinese hotels to require facial recognition to check guests in, but the city of Shanghai is now turning against the practice, according to the Chinese publication 21st Century Business Herald. The police bureau of Shanghai recently published a notice that says “scanning faces” is required only if guests don’t have any identity documents. Otherwise, they have the right to refuse it. Most hotel chains in Shanghai, and some in other cities, have updated their policies in response. 

China has a national facial recognition database tied to the government ID system, and businesses such as hotels can access it to verify customers’ identities. However, Chinese people are increasingly pushing back on the necessity of facial recognition in scenarios like this, and questioning whether hotels are handling such sensitive biometric data properly. 

One more thing

The latest queer icon in Asia is Nymphia Wind, the drag persona of a 28-year-old Taiwanese-American named Leo Tsao, who just won the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Fully embracing the color yellow as part of her identity, Nymphia Wind is also called the “Banana Buddha” by her fans. She’s hosting shows in Taoist temples in Taiwan, attracting audiences old and young.

Mandiant's M-Trends 2024 report shows that defenses are improving – and that may be true. But the reality remains that these same statistics demonstrate that if anything, the attackers still retain the upper hand.

The post The Battle Continues: Mandiant Report Shows Improved Detection But Persistent Adversarial Success appeared first on SecurityWeek.

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.

If you’re a longtime subscriber to this newsletter, you know that I talk about China’s tech policies all the time. To me, it’s always a challenge to understand and explain the government’s decisions to bolster or suppress a certain technology. Why does it favor this sector instead of that one? What triggers officials to suddenly initiate a crackdown? The answers are never easy to come by.

So I was inspired after talking to Angela Huyue Zhang, a law professor in Hong Kong who’s coming to teach at the University of Southern California this fall, about her new book on interpreting the logic and patterns behind China’s tech regulations.

We talked about how the Chinese government almost always swings back and forth between regulating tech too much and not enough, how local governments have gone to great lengths to protect local tech companies, and why AI companies in China are receiving more government goodwill than other sectors today.

To learn more about Zhang’s fascinating interpretation of the tech regulations in China, read my story published today.

In this newsletter, I want to show you a particularly interesting part of the conversation we had, where Zhang expanded on how market overreactions to Chinese tech policies have become an integral part of the tech regulator’s toolbox today.

The capital markets, perpetually betting on whether tech companies are going to fare better or worse, are always looking for policy signals on whether China is going to start a new crackdown on certain technologies. As a result, they often overreact to every move by the Chinese government.

Zhang: “Investors are already very nervous. They see any sort of regulatory signal very negatively, which is what happened last December when a gaming regulator sent out a draft proposal to regulate and curb gaming activities. It just spooked the market. I mean, actually, that draft law is nothing particularly unusual. It’s quite similar to the previous draft circulated among the lawyers, and there are just a couple of provisions that need a little bit of clarity. But investors were just so panicked.”

That specific example saw nearly $80 billion wiped from the market value of China’s two top gaming companies. The drastic reaction actually forced China’s tech regulators to temporarily shelve the draft law to quell market pessimism. 

Zhang: If you look at previous crackdowns, the biggest [damage] that these firms receive is not in the form of a monetary fine. It is in the form of the [changing] market sentiment. 

What the agency did at that time was deliberately inflict reputational damage on [Alibaba] by making this surprise announcement on its website, even though it was just one sentence saying “We are investigating Alibaba for monopolistic practice.” But they already caused the market to panic. As soon as they made the announcement, it wiped off $100 billion market cap from this firm overnight. Compared with that, the ultimate fine of $2.8 billion [that Alibaba had to pay] is nothing.

China’s tech regulators use the fact that the stock market predictably overreacts to policy signals to discipline unruly tech companies with minimum effort.

Zhang: These agencies are very adept at inflicting reputational damage. That’s why the market sentiment is something that they like to [utilize], and that kind of thing tends to be ignored because people tend to fix any attention on the law.

But playing the market this way is risky. As in the previously mentioned example of the video-game policy, regulators can’t always control how significant the overreactions become, so they risk inflicting broader economic damage that they don’t want to be responsible for.

Zhang: They definitely learned how badly investors can react to their regulatory actions. And if anything, they are very cautious and nervous as well. I think they will be risk-averse in introducing harsh regulations.

I also think the economic downturn has dampened the voices of certain agencies that used to be very aggressive during the crackdown, like the Cyberspace Administration of China. Because it seems like what they did caused tremendous trauma for the Chinese economy.

The fear of causing negative economic fallout by introducing harsh regulatory measures means these government agencies may turn to softer approaches, Zhang says. 

Zhang: Now, if they want to take a softer approach, they would have a cup of tea with these firms and say “Here’s what you can do.” So it’s a more consensual approach now than those surprise attacks.

Do you agree that Chinese regulators have learned to take a softer approach to disciplining tech companies? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. Covert Chinese accounts are pretending to be Trump supporters on social media and stoking domestic divisions ahead of November’s US election, taking a page out of the Russian playbook in 2016. (New York Times $)

2. Tesla canceled long-promised plans to release an inexpensive car. Its Chinese rivals are selling EV alternatives at less than one-third the price of the cheapest Teslas. (Reuters $)

3. Donghua Jinlong, a factory in China that makes a nutritional additive called “high-quality industrial-grade glycine,” has unexpectedly become a meme adored by TikTok users. No one really knows why. (You May Also Like)

4. Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s chairman, said in a recent interview that he believes Chinese AI firms lag behind US peers “by two years.” (South China Morning Post $)

5. At first glance, a hacker behind a multi-year attempt to hack supply chains seemed to come from China. But details about the hacker’s work hours suggest that countries in Eastern Europe or the Middle East could be the real culprit. (Wired $)

6. While visiting China, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that she would not rule out potential tariffs on China’s green energy exports, including products like solar panels and electric vehicles. (CNBC)

Lost in translation

Hong Kong’s food delivery scene used to be split between the German-owned platform Foodpanda and the UK-owned Deliveroo. But the Chinese giant Meituan has been working since May 2023 on cracking into the scene with its new app KeeTa, according to the Chinese publication Zhengu Lab. It has so far managed to capture over 20% of the market.

Both of Meituan’s rivals waive the delivery fee only for larger orders, which makes it hard for people to order food alone. So Meituan decided to position itself as the platform for solo diners by waiving delivery fees for most restaurants, saving users up to 30% in costs. To compete with the established players, the company also pays higher wages to delivery workers and charges lower commission fees to restaurants. 

Compared with mainland China, Hong Kong has a tiny delivery market. But Meituan’s efforts here represent a first step as it works to expand into more countries overseas, the company has said.

One more thing

For some hard-to-explain reasons, every time US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visits China, Chinese social media becomes obsessed with what and how she eats during the trip. This week, people were zooming into a seven-second video of Yellen’s dinner to scrutinize … her chopstick skills. Whyyyyyyy?

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.

Like most reporters, I have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. But for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) released by Meta last year. The way it has to be tied to your Instagram account didn’t sit well with me, and as its popularity dwindled, I felt maybe it was not necessary to use it.

But I finally joined Threads last week after I discovered that the app has unexpectedly blown up among Taiwanese users. For months, Threads has been the most downloaded app in Taiwan, as users flock to the platform to talk about politics and more. I talked to academics and Taiwanese Threads users about why the Meta-owned platform got a redemption arc in Taiwan this year. You can read what I discovered here.

I first noticed the trend on Instagram, which occasionally shows you a few trending Threads posts to try to entice you to join. After seeing them a few times, I realized there was a pattern: most of these were written by Taiwanese people talking about Taiwan.

That was a rare experience for me, since I come from China and write primarily about China. Social media algorithms have always shown me accounts similar to mine. Although people from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all write in Chinese, the characters we use and the expressions we choose are quite different, making it easy to spot your own people. And on most platforms that are truly global, the conversations in Chinese are mostly dominated by people in or from mainland China, since its population far outnumbers the rest. 

As I dug into the phenomenon, it soon turned out that Threads’ popularity has been surging at an unparalleled pace in Taiwan. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, publicly acknowledged that Threads has been doing “exceptionally well in Taiwan, of all places.” Data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, shows that Threads has been the most downloaded social network app on iPhone and Android in Taiwan almost every single day of 2024. On the platform itself, Taiwanese users are also belatedly realizing their influence when they see that comments under popular accounts, like a K-pop group, come mostly from fellow Taiwanese users. 

But why did Threads succeed in Taiwan when it has failed in so many other places? My interviews with users and scholars revealed a few reasons.

First, Taiwanese people never really adopted Twitter. Only 1% to 5% of them regularly use the platform, now called X, estimates Austin Wang, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The mainstream population uses Facebook and Instagram, but still yearns for a platform for short text posts. The global launch of Threads basically gave these users a good reason to try out a Twitter-like product.

But more important, Taiwan’s presidential election earlier this year means there was a lot to talk, debate, and commiserate about. Starting in November, many supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) “gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool,” Wang says. “Even DPP presidential candidate Lai received more interaction on Threads than Instagram and Facebook.” 

It turns out that even though Meta has tried to position Threads as a less political version of X, what actually underpinned its success in Taiwan was still the universal desire to talk about politics.

“Taiwanese people gather on Threads because of the freedom to talk about politics [here],” Liu, a designer in Taipei who joined in January because of the elections, tells me. “For Threads to depoliticize would be shooting itself in the foot.” 

The fact that there are an exceptionally large number of Taiwanese users on Threads also makes it a better place to talk about internal politics, she says, because it won’t easily be overshadowed or hijacked by people outside Taiwan. The more established platforms like Facebook and X are rife with bots, disinformation campaigns, and controversial content moderation policies. On Threads there’s minimal interference with what the Taiwanese users are saying. That feels like a fresh breeze to Liu.

But I can’t help feeling that Threads’ popularity in Taiwan could easily go awry. Meta’s decision to keep Threads distanced from political content is one factor that could derail Taiwanese users’ experience; an influx of non-Taiwanese users, if the platform actually manages to become more successful and popular in other parts of the world, could also introduce heated disagreements and all the additional reasons why other platforms have deteriorated. 

These are some tough questions to answer for Meta, because users will simply flow to the next trendy, experimental platform if Threads doesn’t feel right anymore. Its success in Taiwan so far is a rare win for the company, but preserving that success and replicating it elsewhere will require a lot more work.

Do you believe Threads stands a chance of rivaling X (Twitter) in places other than Taiwan? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. Morris Chang, who founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company at the age of 55, is an outlier in today’s tech industry, where startup founders usually start in their 20s. (Wall Street Journal $)

2. A group of Chinese researchers used the technology behind hypersonic missiles to make high-speed trains safer. (South China Morning Post $)

3. The US government is considering cutting the so-called de minimis exemption from import duties, which makes it cheap for Temu and Shein to send packages to the US. But lots of US companies also benefit from the exemption now. (The Information $)

4. The Chinese commerce minister will visit Europe soon to plead his country’s case amid the European Commission’s investigation into Chinese electric vehicles. (Reuters $)

5. After three years of unsuccessful competition with WhatsApp, ByteDance’s messaging app designed for the African market finally shut down last month. (Rest of World)

6. The rapid progress of AI makes it seem less necessary to learn a foreign language. But there are still things AI loses in translation. (The Atlantic $)

7. This is the incredible story of a Chinese man who takes his piano to play outdoors at places of public grief: in front of the covid quarantine barriers in Wuhan, at the epicenter of an earthquake, on a river that submerged villages. And he plays the same song—the only song he knows, composed by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. (NPR)

Lost in translation

With Netflix’s March release of The Three Body Problem, a series adapted from the global hit sci-fi novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin, Western audiences are also learning about a movie-like real-life drama behind the adaptation. In 2021, the Chinese publication Caixin first investigated the mysterious death of Lin Qi, a successful businessman who bought the movie rights to the book. In 2017, he hired Xu Yao, a prominent attorney, to work on legal affairs and government relations.

In December 2020, Lin died after he was poisoned by a mysterious mix of toxins. According to Caixin, Xu is a fan of the TV series Breaking Bad and had his own plant in Shanghai where he made poisons. He would order hundreds of different toxins through the dark web, mix them, and use them on pets to experiment. A week before Lin’s death, Xu gave him a bottle of pills that were supposedly prebiotics, but he had replaced them with poison. 

Xu was arrested soon after Lin died, and he was sentenced to death on March 22 this year.

One more thing

Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce platform, announced it’s experimenting with delivering packages by rockets. Yes, rockets. Made by a Chinese startup, Taobao’s pilot rockets will be able to deliver something as big as a car or a truck, and the rockets can be reused for the next delivery. To be honest, I still can’t believe this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

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.

In 2019, MIT Technology Review covered a report that shined a light on how fast China’s AI talent pool was growing. Its main finding was pretty interesting: the number of elite AI scholars with Chinese origins had multiplied by 10 in the previous decade, but relatively few of them stayed in China for their work. The majority moved to the US. 

Now the think tank behind the report has published an updated analysis, showing how the makeup of global AI talent has changed since—during a critical period when the industry has shifted significantly and become the hottest technology sector. 

The team at MacroPolo, the think tank of the Paulson Institute, an organization that focuses on US-China relations, studied the national origin, educational background, and current work affiliation of top researchers who gave presentations and had papers accepted at NeurIPS, a top academic conference on AI. Their analysis of the 2019 conference resulted in the first iteration of the Global AI Talent Tracker. They’ve analyzed the December 2022 NeurIPS conference for an update three years later.

I recommend you read the original report, which has a very well-designed infographic that shows the talent flow across countries. But to save you some time, I also talked to the authors and highlighted what I think are the most surprising or important takeaways from the new report. Here are the four main things you need to know about the global AI talent landscape today. 

1.  China has become an even more important country for training AI talent.

Even in 2019, Chinese researchers were already a significant part of the global AI community, making up one-tenth of the most elite AI researchers. In 2022, they accounted for 26%, almost dethroning the US (American researchers accounted for 28%). 

“Timing matters,” says Ruihan Huang, senior research associate at MacroPolo and one of the lead authors. “The last three years have seen China dramatically expand AI programs across its university system—now there are some 2,000 AI majors—because it was also building an AI industry to absorb that talent.” 

As a result of these university and industry efforts, many more students in computer science or other STEM majors have joined the AI industry, making Chinese researchers the backbone of cutting-edge AI research.

2. AI researchers now tend to stay in the country where they receive their graduate degree. 

This is perhaps intuitive, but the numbers are still surprisingly high: 80% of AI researchers who went to a graduate school in the US stayed to work in the US, while 90% of their peers who went to a graduate school in China stayed in China.

In a world where major countries are competing with each other to take the lead in AI development, this finding suggests a trick they could use to expand their research capacity: invest in graduate-level institutions and attract overseas students to come. 

This is particularly important in the US-China context, where the souring of the relationship between the two countries has affected the academic field. According to news reports, quite a few Chinese graduate students have been interrogated at the US border or even denied entry in recent years, as a Trump-era policy persisted. Along with the border restrictions imposed during the pandemic years, this hostility could have prevented more Chinese AI experts from coming to the US to learn and work. 

3. The US still overwhelmingly attracts the most AI talent, but China is catching up.

In both 2019 and 2022, the United States topped the rankings in terms of where elite AI researchers work. But it’s also clear that the distance between the US and other countries, particularly China, has shortened. In 2019, almost three-fifths of top AI researchers worked in the US; only two-fifths worked here in 2022. 

“The thing about elite talent is that they generally want to work at the most cutting-edge and dynamic places. They want to do incredible work and be rewarded for it,” says AJ Cortese, a senior research associate at MacroPolo and another of the main authors. “So far, the United States still leads the way in having that AI ecosystem—from leading institutions to companies—that appeals to top talent.”

In 2022, 28% of the top AI researchers were working in China. This significant portion speaks to the growth of the domestic AI sector in China and the job opportunities it has created. Compared with 2019, three more Chinese universities and one company (Huawei) made it into the top tier of institutions that produce AI research. 

It’s true that most Chinese AI companies are still considered to lag behind their US peers—for example, China usually trails the US by a few months in releasing comparable generative AI models. However, it seems like they have started catching up.

4. Top-tier AI researchers now are more willing to work in their home countries.

This is perhaps the biggest and also most surprising change in the data, in my opinion. Like their Chinese peers, more Indian AI researchers ended up staying in their home country for work.

In fact, this seems to be a broader pattern across the board: it used to be that more than half of AI researchers worked in a country different from their home. Now, the balance has tipped in favor of working in their own countries. 

This is good news for countries trying to catch up with the US research lead in AI. “It goes without saying most countries would prefer ‘brain gain’ over ‘brain drain’—especially when it comes to a highly complex and technical discipline like AI,” Cortese says. 

It’s not easy to create an environment and culture that not only retains its own talents but manages to pull scholars from other countries, but lots of countries are now working on it. I can only begin to imagine what the report might look like in a few years.  

Did anything else stand out to you in the report? Let me know your thoughts by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. The Dutch prime minister will visit China this week to discuss with Chinese president Xi Jinping whether the Dutch chipmaking equipment company ASML can keep servicing Chinese clients. (Reuters $)

• Here’s an inside look into ASML’s factory and how it managed to dominate advanced chipmaking. (MIT Technology Review)

2. Hong Kong passed a tough national security law that makes it more dangerous to protest Beijing’s rule. (BBC)

3. A new bill in France suggests imposing hefty fines on Shein and similar ultrafast-fashion companies for their negative environmental impact—as much as $11 per item that they sell in France. (Nikkei Asia)

4. Huawei filed a patent to make more advanced chips with a low-tech workaround. (Bloomberg $)

• Meanwhile, a US official accused the Chinese chip foundry SMIC of breaking US law by making a chip for Huawei. (South China Morning Post $)

5. Instead of the usual six and a half days a week, Tesla has instructed its Shanghai factory to reduce production to five days a week. The slowdown of EV sales in China could be the reason. (Bloomberg $)

6. TikTok is still having plenty of troubles. A new political TV ad (paid for by a mysterious new nonprofit), playing in three US swing states, attacks Zhang Fuping, a ByteDance vice president that very few people have heard of. (Punchbowl News)

• As TikTok still hasn’t reached a licensing deal with Universal Music Group, users have had to get creative to find alternative soundtracks for their videos. (Billboard)

7. China launched a communications satellite that will help relay signals for missions to explore the dark side of the moon. (Reuters $)

Lost in translation

The most-hyped generative AI app in China these days is Kimi, according to the Chinese publication Sina Tech. Released by Moonshot AI, a Chinese “unicorn” startup, Kimi made headlines last week when it announced it had started supporting inputting text using over 2 million Chinese characters. (For comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo currently supports inputting 100,000 Chinese characters, while Claude3-200K supports about 160,000 characters.)

While some of the app’s virality can be credited to a marketing push that intensified recently. Chinese users are now busy feeding popular and classic books to the model and testing how well it can understand the context. Feeling threatened, other Chinese AI apps owned by tech giants like Baidu and Alibaba have followed suit, announcing that they will soon support 5 million or even 10 million Chinese characters. But processing large amounts of text, while impressive, is very costly in the generative AI age—and some observers worry this isn’t the commercial direction that companies ought to head in.

One more thing

Fluffy pajamas, sweatpants, outdated attire: young Chinese people are dressing themselves in “gross outfits” to work—an intentional provocation to their bosses and an expression of silent resistance to the trend that glorifies career hustle. “I just don’t think it’s worth spending money to dress up for work, since I’m just sitting there,” one of them told the New York Times.

Update: The story has been updated to clarify the affiliation of the report authors.

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.

Over the last year, a few Chinese influencers have made millions of dollars peddling short video lessons on AI, profiting off people’s fears about the as-yet-unclear impact of the new technology on their livelihoods. 

But the platforms they thrived on have started to turn against them. Just a few weeks ago, WeChat and Douyin began suspending, removing, or restricting their accounts. While influencers on these platforms have been turning people’s anxiety into traffic and profits for a long time, the latest actions show how Chinese social platforms are trying to contain the damage before it goes too far. 

The backlash started last month, as students angrily complained on social media about the superficiality of the courses, saying that they fell far short of the educational promises made about them. 

“I paid 198 RMB ($27.50), and the first three courses were void of actual content. It’s all about urging people to keep paying 1980 RMB for the next course,” Bessie, a Chinese user of the social media site Xiaohongshu, posted about her experience. The courses were created by Li Yizhou, a serial entrepreneur turned startup mentor who, despite having no background in AI, pivoted to posting about explaining AI and drumming up anxiety after the release of ChatGPT in November 2022.

Li sold his entry-level course package for $27.50, and an advanced one for 10 times that price. The cheaper offering contained 40 lesson videos, most of which were around 10 minutes long. Li’s course consisted of tutorials of specific generative AI tools, talks with Chinese AI company executives, and introductions to unrelated topics like how to manage your time more effectively. 

His lessons were a huge commercial success. According to the social media data analysis site Feigua, they were sold over 250,000 times last year, which could have brought in over $6 million in revenue. 

Li is not the only influencer who, despite having no background in AI, saw a business opportunity to calm people’s AI anxieties with quick fixes. There’s also “Teacher He,” an influencer with over 7 million followers who until recently mostly talked about marketing and personal finance, and Zhang Shitong, also followed by millions, whose usual videos mix basic economics with sensational conspiracies like 9/11 denialism. These creators also offered beginner AI lessons at a similar price to Li’s.

In addition to quality complaints, buyers reported that it was hard to get a refund when they changed their mind. Bessie tells MIT Technology Review that she got a refund since she applied early, but others who applied for a refund more than a week after the purchase were denied. A Beijing-based AI community website has also accused Li of appropriating their free user-contributed templates and selling them for profit as part of his course offering. 

By late February, the platforms that hosted these video lessons began to heed the complaints. All of the classes by Li and other AI gurus have been removed from Chinese social media and e-commerce websites. Li hasn’t posted on any of his social media channels since he was suspended in late February. Other creators like “Teacher He” and Zhang Shitong have also been silent.

Li and “Teacher He” didn’t respond to a media inquiry sent by MIT Technology Review. But a customer representative working for Zhang Shitong said the team processes all refund requests in 12 hours and that it was the team’s own decision to not post anything for the past three weeks.

On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, Li’s account, which used to have over 3 million followers, is now hidden from search results. WeChat Channels, another popular short-video platform, blocked Li and other similar creators from getting new followers in the last week of February. Other smaller platforms have also taken action. Zhishi Xingqiu, a Patreon-like platform that was used by many influencers to sell access to AI-focused communities, has now blocked the search for keywords like “AI,” “Li Yizhou,” or “Sora.”

But none of the platforms have specified which rules the gurus violated. While they may have overpromised with their marketing, it’s hard to say whether their activities really qualified as “scams.” Douyin and WeChat declined to comment on their decisions.

However, there are signs that the restrictions could be reversed. While Chinese social media platforms often permanently delete the accounts of users they believe are flouting rules, these AI course creators have kept their accounts on all platforms. On WeChat, after around two weeks of being blocked from receiving new followers, the creators quietly regained that ability in mid-March. On Douyin, Li’s account was hidden from in-app search results, but his past videos can still be found by going directly to his profile page. 

So far, the Chinese government has not directly addressed the phenomenon or given its official stance. The government has been reining in the livestreaming industry heavily in recent years to censor how influencers act and post, and Chinese platforms set their own rules accordingly, sometimes ahead of government orders, to show they are doing their parts in content regulation.

Even as the creators and their lessons were removed online, there are still lots of Chinese people keen to access these lessons. On social media, some people are now reselling pirated videos of Li’s courses through file sharing, likely without Li’s permission. Now, instead of $27.50, people can spend a few bucks to access the whole course package.

Do you think these AI gurus have crossed a line? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. The US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass a bill that would force ByteDance to either sell TikTok or see it banned in the US. Now it’s heading to the Senate, where there’s less urgency to pass it. (Associated Press)

2. While the TSMC chip plant in Arizona is delayed, the company’s other new plant in Japan is set to start mass production on schedule in the fourth quarter of 2024. (Wall Street Journal $)

3. Tesla is talking to countries like Thailand to prepare for a potential production expansion in Southeast Asia. But it will have to compete with Chinese EV companies like BYD, which currently accounts for over a quarter of the EVs sold in the region. (Reuters $)

4. An obscure Chinese e-commerce platform called Pandabuy is recruiting influencers to peddle counterfeit products on TikTok and Facebook. (Wired $)

5. The US and Chinese governments quietly renewed their bilateral deal on science and technology research for another six months. (Wall Street Journal $)

6. Chinese students and academics say they are increasingly being targeted at US airports when they enter the country. (Washington Post $)

7. As the Chinese population ages quickly, a tutoring industry for the elderly is thriving. (Reuters $)

Lost in translation

As the Chinese automobile industry moves fast toward battery-operated cars and electric motors, internal combustion engine technology is increasingly seen as a thing of the past. The Chinese publication Economic Observer talked to students who chose to study combustion engines out of their love for cars. They found it’s a decision some now regret, as they’re finding it hard to land a job after graduation. 

Engineering universities are recruiting experts who can teach students about car batteries, but the pace is not fast enough to catch up with the speed of the Chinese market. From January to July 2023, there was a 6% increase in job postings in the automotive industry in China, but a 18% increase in job postings in the EV industry. As a result, large numbers of combustion engineering students say they are being rejected by the auto industry. They either have to compete for the limited positions still available, or find jobs outside the car industry.

One more thing

Youdao, a Chinese online dictionary app, recently started letting users upload their own pronunciations of English words to appear alongside the standard pronunciations in American or British accents. It soon became a vehicle for fun, with people competing to insert jokes, cultural memes, viral TikTok soundbites, and dramatic acting as pronunciations. In a particularly amusing example, someone pronounces “constipation” as if they are actually experiencing it.

In 2023, the CL0P ransomware gang broke the scalability barrier and shook the security world with a series of short, automated campaigns, hitting hundreds of unsuspecting targets simultaneously with attacks based on zero-day exploits. The gang’s novel approach challenged a bottleneck that makes it hard to scale ransomware attacks, and other gangs may try to replicate its approach in 2024.

Big game ransomware attacks are devastating but relatively rare compared to other forms of cyberattack. There were about 4,500 known ransomware attacks in 2023, although the true figure is probably twice that. These attacks extorted more than $1 billion in ransoms in 2023, according to blockchain data platform Chainalysis.

The potential riches are enormous and there’s no other form of cybercrime that’s so lucrative, so why aren’t we seeing more attacks? It doesn’t seem to be a lack of targets, in fact the evidence suggests that the gangs are picky about who they attack. The most likely reason is that each attack takes a lot of work. Broadly speaking, an attack requires a team of people that: Breaks in to an internet-connected computer, researches the target to see if they’re worth the effort of an attack, explores their network, elevates their privileges until they’re an all-conquering administrator, steals and stores terabytes of data, attacks security software and backups, positions ransomware, runs it, and then conducts negotiations.

Doing all of this efficiently requires people, tools, infrastructure, expertise, and experience, and that seems to make it a difficult business model to scale up. The number of known ransomware attacks a year is increasing steadily, by tens of percentage points rather than exploding by thousands. This suggests that most of the people who are drawn to this life of crime are probably already doing it, and there isn’t a vast pool of untapped criminal talent waiting in the wings.

Before 2023, cybercrime’s best answer to this scalability problem was Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), which splits the work between vendors that provide the malware and infrastructure, and affiliates that carry out the attacks.

CL0P found another way. It weaponised zero-day vulnerabilities in file transfer software, notably GoAnywhere MFT and MOVEit Transfer, and created automated attacks that plundered data from them. Hundreds of unsuspecting victims were attacked in a pair of short, sharp campaigns lasting a few days, leaving Cl0P as the third most active gang of the year, beating ransomware groups that were active in every month of 2023.

It remains to be seen if other gangs can or will follow CL0P’s lead. The repeated use of zero-days signaled a new level of sophistication for a ransomware gang and it may take a while for its rivals to catch up. However, the likes of LockBit—the most prolific group of them all—don’t want for resources so this is probably a matter of time and will, rather than a fundamental barrier.

There is also a question mark about how successful the attacks were. While automation allowed CL0P to increase its reach, it’s reported that a much lower percentage of victims paid a ransom than normal. However, ransomware incident response firm Coveware believes the group managed to compensate by demanding higher ransoms, earning the gang as much as $100 million.

Because of CL0P’s actions, the shape of ransomware in 2024 is in flux and organisations need to be ready. To learn more about how big game ransomware is evolving, the threat of zero-day ransomware, and how to protect against them, read our 2024 State of Malware report.