Key members of China's most influential scientific body have outlined the country's plan to circumvent US chip sanctions for the first time, codifying Beijing's view of how it could win a crucial technological conflict with Washington. From a report: Two of the country's senior academics wrote that Beijing should amass a portfolio of patents that govern the next generation of chipmaking, from novel materials to new techniques. That should propel its semiconductor ambitions while giving China the clout to push back against US sanctions designed to hamstring its semiconductor sector, Luo Junwei and Li Shushen wrote in the bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The article, published to a social media account affiliated with the academy, offers a rare glimpse into how Beijing thinks about and might react to the Biden administration's escalating hostilities over semiconductors. The academy advises China's top decision makers and the article echoes remarks by President Xi Jinping calling for victory in developing core technologies. It comes as the country's new technology overseer outlined his vision for moving past American sanctions, stressing the need to modernize and rectify weak links in its supply chain. China has a plan to develop next-generation chip materials that it put in place in 2020 as a reaction to Trump-era restrictions. Yet that national strategy has yet to yield a technological edge on the world's leading chipmakers. Washington has implemented a series of measures limiting exports of technology such as chipmaking gear and artificial intelligence processors to China, part of a broader set of technology sanctions.

Scientists from China's Hebei University of Science and Technology have developed an ice-melting additive for asphalt that could remain active for years. New Atlas reports: [The researchers started] out by developing a chloride-free acetate-based salt. Such salts are considerably less environmentally harmful than chlorides, they're less corrosive to steel and other materials, plus they work at lower temperatures. The researchers proceeded to mix the salt with a surfactant, silicon dioxide, sodium bicarbonate and blast furnace slag (which has also been used in salt-proof concrete), resulting in a fine powder. Particles of that powder were then coated with a polymer solution, producing microcapsules. Finally, the scientists replaced some of the mineral filler in a conventional asphalt mixture with those capsules.

When the special asphalt was tested on the off-ramp of a highway, it was found not only to continuously melt the snow that fell upon it, but also to lower the freezing point of water from 0C (32F) down to -21C (-6F). What's more, based on lab tests, the researchers estimate that a 5-cm (2-in)-thick slab of the pavement would continue to release its salt capsules for seven to eight years, keeping the road clear that whole time. The study was recently published in the journal ACS Omega.

China's Lenovo reported a 24% revenue decline for the third quarter, its largest revenue fall in 14 years as global demand for electronics slumped, and said it would look to cut spending and make workforce adjustments. Reuters reports: The world's largest maker of personal computers (PCs) said on Friday that total revenue during the October-December quarter was $15.3 billion, down 24% from the same quarter a year earlier. The results trailed an average Refinitiv estimate of $16.39 billion drawn from seven analysts. The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 provided a huge boost in electronic sales for Lenovo and its peers worldwide as many people opted to work remotely and replaced or upgraded their equipment. However, demand has begun to fall and Lenovo's revenue started contracting in the July-September quarter last year.

Lenovo Chief Executive Officer Yang Yuanqing told an analyst call after its earnings that the entire PC and mobile market experienced a "severe downturn" in the last quarter, and the company was looking to reduce expenses and improve efficiency. Lenovo is aiming to reduce its run rate operational expenses by approximately $150 million to achieve a medium-term goal of doubling net margin, its chief financial officer, Wong Wai Ming, added. "This includes overall reduction in operational spending as well as workforce adjustments where necessary and appropriate." he said.

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund became the largest outside shareholder of Nintendo on Friday, in the latest move by the Gulf state to lower its reliance on oil. From a report: The sovereign wealth fund now owns 8.3% of the Kyoto-based games company, according to a filing, building up a position that stood just above 6% at the start of the year. That puts PIF ahead of Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund and behind only Nintendo's own holding, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia is making a concerted push to break into the games and esports industry. Most notably, it set up Savvy Games Group under the PIF umbrella with a $38 billion budget and longtime industry veterans in charge. Savvy this week revealed its first foray into China's games sector with a $260 million investment in a Tencent-backed competitive gaming organizer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: ASML, one of the world's most critical semiconductor firms, said Wednesday that it recently discovered that a former employee in China had misappropriated data related to its proprietary technology. The Dutch firm said that it does not believe the alleged misappropriation is material to its business. "We have experienced unauthorized misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China," ASML said in its annual report. "However, as a result of the security incident, certain export control regulations may have been violated. ASML has therefore reported the incident to relevant authorities." The data that was misappropriated involved documents. ASML did not expand on the details.

The security incident comes at a sensitive time for ASML and the government of the Netherlands which has been caught in the middle of a battle for tech supremacy between the U.S. and China. Semiconductors are very much part of that rivalry. ASML holds a unique position in the chip supply chain. The company makes a tool called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that is required to make the most advanced semiconductors, such as those manufactured by TSMC. ASML is the only company in the world that produces this piece of kit. The U.S. is worried that if ASML ships the machines to China, chipmakers in the country could begin to manufacture the most advanced semiconductors in the world, which have extensive military and advanced artificial intelligence applications. "With ASML's unique position and the growing geopolitical tensions in the semiconductor industry, we see increasing security risk trends, ranging from ransomware and phishing attacks to attempts to acquire intellectual property or disrupt business continuity," a spokesperson for the company said.

ChatGPT is big in China, even though it's not officially available there. From a report: China's obsession with ChatGPT runs deeper than curiosity. Search giant Baidu is preparing to launch its own competitor, Ernie Bot, in March. It'll embed the tool initially into its search services and smart speakers. Amid the fervor, Alibaba, NetEase and Tencent each promised similar initiatives in the span of a few days, stirring Chinese tech stocks from a years-long slump. The government in Beijing, where Baidu is based, has vowed to give more support to such efforts.

This is the first time in probably more than a decade that Chinese internet firms are all racing to adopt, localize and perhaps advance a Silicon Valley invention on the level of Google, Facebook or YouTube. Microsoft's Bing and Alphabet's Google -- which showed its own artificial-intelligence search assistant called Bard -- appear to have an early lead. But both products exhibit many flaws. Rolling the services out too soon could create problems for Bing and Google. Doing so in China could be disastrous. Appeasing the country's complex censorship machine is difficult enough for search and social media companies. Trying to keep a malleable AI bot in check is a new kind of challenge.

Bruce66423 shares a report from Nature: The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned. Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn't going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. "Their hands are really tied." [...]

"There is no phase two," Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but "that plan has changed." "The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins," she said. Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus's initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated. "The ending of the investigation is not a surprise," adds Bruce66423. "But why 'quietly'?"

A 50% rejection rate for iPhone casings produced by an Indian company is a stark illustration of the difficulties Apple faces in reducing its dependence on China. 9to5Mac reports: Apple's target for casings that fail to pass quality control is 0%, with Chinese suppliers reportedly getting extremely close to this. The attitude of Indian suppliers is also said to compare poorly with the can-do approach of Chinese companies, with one former Apple engineer saying that there is no sense of urgency in its Indian supply chain...

The Financial Times reports that poor yields is a key challenge faced by Apple in attempting to replicate its Chinese supply chain in India: "At an iPhone casings factory in Hosur run by Indian conglomerate Tata, one of Apple's suppliers, just about one out of every two components coming off the production line is in good enough shape to eventually be sent to Foxconn, Apple's assembly partner for building iPhones, according to a person familiar with the matter. This 50 per cent 'yield' fares badly compared with Apple's goal for zero defects. Two people that have worked in Apple's offshore operations said the factory is on a plan towards improving proficiency but the road ahead is long."

Tech entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa said that it will likely take three years or so for Indian suppliers to be capable of the kind of volume production needed to make a noticeable dent in Chinese production. [...] He also suggested that Apple, too, will need to adapt -- especially when it comes to dealing with the bureaucratic government: "He suggested its engineers learn the art of jugaad -- a way of 'making do' or transcending obstacles. 'Because everything in India is an obstacle,' he said."

As Meta gears up for its "year of efficiency," the company announced today it's exiting the livestream shopping business on Instagram, following a similar shutdown on Facebook. From a report: Starting on March 16, 2023, Instagram users will no longer be able to tag products while livestreaming -- a capability that has been broadly available to U.S. businesses and creators since 2020. The changes highlight the difficulties the U.S. market has had in making livestream shopping successful. The activity is already hugely popular activity in Asian markets, including China where apps like WeChat, Taobao Live and Douyin (China's TikTok) have proven live shopping to be a popular and profitable endeavor. As the pandemic raged across the globe, many U.S. businesses looked to adopt live shopping as well, to help boost their own online retail revenues. Before too long, pundits were calling live shopping the "future of e-commerce," citing the early traction businesses like TalkShopLive, NTWRK, Brandlive, and others in the space had gained, alongside adoption from big tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and YouTube.

China's capital Beijing will support leading enterprises in building large artificial intelligence (AI) models that can challenge ChatGPT, the city's economy and information technology bureau said on Monday. From a report: The city will support key firms to invest in building an open source framework and accelerate the supply of basic data, it said in a statement. The bureau also said that 1,048 core AI companies, or 29% of the country's total, were located in Beijing as of October last year, and that it would look into ways to cultivate talent and conduct research in areas such as ethical governance.

China's biggest tech companies are rushing to develop their own versions of ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that has set the U.S. tech world buzzing, despite questions over the capabilities and commercial prospects of the technology. Nikkei Asia Review reports: Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, Baidu, NetEase and JD.com all unveiled plans this week to test and launch their own ChatGPT-like services in the near future, eager to show the results of their AI research efforts are just as ready for prime time as those of their U.S. counterparts. [...] Shares of Baidu surged to an 11-month high after the search giant on Monday revealed its plan to launch the ChatGPT-style "Ernie Bot," which is built on tech the company said has been in development since 2019. The company aims to complete internal testing in March before making the chatbot available to the public. Following Baidu's announcement, Alibaba said it is internally testing a ChatGPT-style tool, without revealing more details. The e-commerce conglomerate's shares closed up 3.96% in Hong Kong on Thursday. Tencent confirmed its plans in ChatGPT-style and AI-generated content on Thursday, saying relevant research is underway "in an orderly manner."

Online retailer JD.com said it plans to integrate some of the technologies that underpin applications like ChatGPT, such as natural language processing, in its own services. Gaming giant NetEase said it is researching the incorporation of AI-generated content into its education unit. Chinese media reported on Thursday that ByteDance's AI lab has launched certain research initiatives on technologies to support its virtual reality arm Pico. However, a person familiar with the matter at ByteDance told Nikkei that the report was false. "Making use of AI-generated content is a natural thing," an unnamed executive from one of the leading listed Chinese tech companies told Nikkei. "Whenever there is a so-called next big thing, multiple companies will announce that they are in this area, but some companies may be just hyping with the catchword without any concrete product."

"Another challenge is China's heavy censorship of cyberspace, which will make AI-generated content difficult, too."

According to CNBC, the United States is placing sanctions on six Chinese tech companies for supporting spy balloon programs that have spanned more than 40 countries. The development comes less than a week after the U.S. military used fighter jets to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon along the South Carolina coast. From the report: "The Commerce Department will not hesitate to use the Entity List and our other regulatory and enforcement tools to protect U.S. national security and sovereignty," said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves. "The Entity List is a powerful tool for identifying and cutting off actors that seek to use their access to global markets to do harm and threaten American national security. We will not hesitate to use the Entity List and our other regulatory and enforcement tools to protect U.S. national security." Earlier today, a U.S. military F-22 shot down a second "high altitude object" in American airspace over Alaska.

"We're calling this an object because that's the best description we have right now," said White House spokesman John Kirby. He also said U.S. officials did not yet know which nation or group was responsible for it.

China has cut its participation in an internet cable project to link Asia with Europe, as tensions grow between Washington and Beijing over control of the physical infrastructure that transmits the world's online traffic. From a report: Two of China's biggest telecoms groups, China Telecom and China Mobile, withdrew their combined investment of roughly 20 per cent from the subsea cable project last year after a US company was selected to build the line over Hengtong Marine, the country's biggest provider in the sector, according to three people briefed on the decision.

Their exit from the Sea-Me-We 6 pipeline -- which is estimated to cost around $500mn to lay 19,200km of cables connecting south-east Asia to western Europe -- highlights the growing battle between China and the US over who builds and owns the infrastructure underpinning the global internet. The departure of China Mobile and China Telecom is an indication of intensifying tensions between Washington and Beijing, according to industry figures with knowledge of the project. Another member of the consortium described their involvement as "important but not critical."

The alleged Chinese spy balloon that flew over the US was capable of collecting communications signals and was part of a broader People's Liberation Army intelligence-gathering effort that spanned more than 40 countries, a State Department official said Thursday. From a report: High-resolution imagery provided by U-2 spy planes that flew past the balloon revealed an array of surveillance equipment that was inconsistent with Beijing's claim that it was a weather device blown off course, the official said in a statement provided on condition of anonymity. The statement, released before State and Defense Department officials appeared before Congress in open hearings and closed briefings on Thursday, marks the fullest accounting yet for the Biden administration's insistence over the course of a week-long drama that the balloon was meant to spy on the US. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in an interview with CBS News that the Pentagon acted to limit what the balloon could learn about US nuclear capabilities.

Growing concerns about China's military and economic ambitions have lawmakers and the White House weighing yet another effort to restrict Beijing's access to advanced technologies that could be used in war. From a report: This time, the U.S. government appears poised to extend its restrictions to a new area: American dollars that are used to finance the development of such technologies within Chinese borders. For months, the Biden administration has been preparing curbs on the investments that U.S. firms can make in China, particularly in areas like advanced computing.

Those measures are now largely complete and could be issued within two months. The Treasury Department has been reaching out to other governments, including the European Union, to try to ensure that they do not rush in to provide similar financing to China after the United States cuts it off, according to people familiar with the discussions. The voyage of a spy balloon across the United States has set off newfound fears about the national security threats posed by the Chinese government. This week, lawmakers on both sides warned the White House that if the administration did not move ahead with investment restrictions, Congress would propose its own.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Australian government will examine surveillance technology used in offices of the defense department, Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Thursday, amid reports that Chinese-made cameras installed there posed a security risk. "This is an issue and ... we're doing an assessment of all the technology for surveillance within the defense (department) and where those particular cameras are found, they are going to be removed," Marles told ABC Radio in an interview. Opposition lawmaker James Paterson said his own audit had revealed almost 1,000 units of equipment by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Dahua Technology Co -- two partly state-owned Chinese firms -- were installed across more than 250 Australian government offices.

Paterson, the shadow minister for cyber security and countering foreign interference, urged the government to urgently come up with a plan to remove all such cameras. Marles said the issue was significant though adding: "I don't think we should overstate it." Hikvision said it was "categorically false" to represent the company as a threat to Australia's national security as it could not access the video data of end users, manage end-user databases or sell cloud storage in Australia. "Our cameras are compliant with all applicable Australian laws and regulations and are subject to strict security requirements," a spokesperson said in an emailed response.

India's push to ban over 90 lending apps has sent shockwaves to the fintech industry as many scramble to understand why they have been impacted. The Ministry of Electronics and IT's move is reportedly aimed at protecting the nation's integrity and curb China's influence in the South Asian market, the state-owned broadcaster Prasar Bharti said on Sunday. In meetings with fintech associations on Tuesday, officials from the IT Ministry and influential think tank Niti Aayog offered broader explanations about the decision. From a report: The IT Ministry is concerned about the past and current presence of Chinese investors on the cap tables of some lending apps in India, the officials said, according to a source familiar with the matter. Another concern is the rising reports of cybercrimes that are linked to China. The officials said the Ministry of Home Affairs has received reports of criminal activities involving Chinese firms that are tapping APIs to access Indian lending apps and obtaining and storing data of Indian consumers outside of the country, the source said.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Don't buy an Android phone in China, boffins have warned, as they come crammed with preinstalled apps transmitting privacy-sensitive data to third-party domains without consent or notice. The research, conducted by Haoyu Liu (University of Edinburgh), Douglas Leith (Trinity College Dublin), and Paul Patras (University of Edinburgh), suggests that private information leakage poses a serious tracking risk to mobile phone customers in China, even when they travel abroad in countries with stronger privacy laws.

In a paper titled "Android OS Privacy Under the Loupe: A Tale from the East," the trio of university boffins analyzed the Android system apps installed on the mobile handsets of three popular smartphone vendors in China: OnePlus, Xiaomi and Oppo Realme. The researchers looked specifically at the information transmitted by the operating system and system apps, in order to exclude user-installed software. They assume users have opted out of analytics and personalization, do not use any cloud storage or optional third-party services, and have not created an account on any platform run by the developer of the Android distribution. A sensible policy, but it doesn't seem to help much. Within this limited scope, the researchers found that Android handsets from the three named vendors "send a worrying amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) not only to the device vendor but also to service providers like Baidu and to Chinese mobile network operators."

China's Baidu said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of a ChatGPT-style project called "Ernie Bot" in March, joining a global race as interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) gathers steam. Reuters reports: Ernie, meaning "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration," is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said. It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation, it added. Search engine giant Baidu's Hong Kong-listed shares jumped as much as 13.4% on the news.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week that Baidu was planning to launch such a service in March. The person said Baidu aims to make the service available as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine by incorporating chatbot-generated results when users make search requests. In a blog post on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard.

Polluting single-use plastic production rose globally by 6 million tons per year from 2019 to 2021 despite tougher worldwide regulations, with producers making "little progress" to tackle the problem and boost recycling, new research showed on Monday. Reuters reports: Single-use plastics have emerged as one of the world's most pressing environmental threats, with vast amounts of waste buried in landfills or dumped untreated in rivers and oceans. The manufacturing process is also a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas. But while growth has slowed recently, the production of single-use plastic from "virgin" fossil fuel sources is still nowhere near its peak, and the use of recycled feedstocks remains "at best a marginal activity," Australia's Minderoo Foundation said in its Plastic Waste Makers Index. "Make no mistake, the plastic waste crisis is going to get significantly worse before we see an absolute year-on-year decline in virgin single-use plastic consumption," it said.

Exxon Mobil was at the top of the list of global petrochemical companies producing virgin polymers used in single-use plastics, followed by China's Sinopec. Sinopec also leads the way when it comes to building new production facilities over the 2019-2027 period, the report said, with more than 5 million tons of annual capacity planned. Exxon Mobil was second with around 4 million tons. [...] Around 137 million tons of single-use plastics were produced from fossil fuels in 2021, and it is expected to rise by another 17 million tons by 2027, the researchers said.