An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Ukraine's airspace has been busy this year -- that's the nature of war. But scientists in the country are looking to the skies and seeing something they didn't expect: An inordinate number of UFOs, according to a new preprint paper published (PDF) by Kyiv's Main Astronomical Observatory in coordination with the country's National Academy of Science. The paper does not specifically address the war, but in the United States, the Pentagon has long hinted, speculated, and warned that some UFOs could be advanced technology from foreign militaries, specifically China and Russia (though it hasn't really given any evidence this is actually the case). The Ukraine paper is particularly notable because it not only shows that science has continued to occur during the war, but also explains that there have been a lot of sightings. "We see them everywhere," the research said. "We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear."

The paper is titled Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events come from observations made at NAS' Main Astronomical Observatory in Kyiv and a village south of Kyiv called Vinarivka. According to the paper's authors, the observatories took on the job of hunting for UFO's as an independent project because of the enthusiasm around the subject. It describes a specific type of UFO the researchers call "phantoms" that is an "object [that] is a completely black body that does not emit and absorbs all the radiation falling on it." The researchers also observed that the UFOs it's seeing are so fast that it's hard to take pictures of them. "The eye does not fix phenomena lasting less than one-tenth of a second," the paper said. "It takes four-tenths of a second to recognize an event. Ordinary photo and video recordings will also not capture the [unidentified aerial phenomenon]. To detect UAP, you need to fine-tune the equipment: shutter speed, frame rate, and dynamic range."

So the researchers did just that using two meteor monitoring stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka. "We have developed a special observation technique, taking into account the high speeds of the observed objects," the paper said. "The exposure time was chosen so that the image of the object did not shift significantly during exposure. The frame rate was chosen to take into account the speed of the object and the field of view of the camera. In practice, the exposure time was less than 1 ms, and the frame rate was no less than 50 Hz." The scientists divided the phenomenon they observed into two different categories: cosmics and phantoms. "We note that Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. We call these ships names of birds (swift, falcon, eagle)," the paper said. "Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 percent."

Using the cameras, stationed roughly 75 miles apart, allowed the scientists to make repeated observations of strange objects moving in the sky. The paper didn't speculate on what the objects were, merely noted the observations and mentioned the objects' incredible speeds. "Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to 15 degrees per second," the research said. "Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 -- 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s." The easy explanation would be that these are missiles, or rockets, or something else associated with the war. But the scientists insist that their nature "is not clear."

hackingbear shares a report from Gizmodo: China claims that America's National Security Agency used sophisticated cyber tools to hack into an elite research university on Chinese soil. The attack allegedly targeted the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an (not to be confused with a California school of the same name), which is highly ranked in the global university index for its science and engineering programs. The U.S. Justice Department has referred to the school as a "Chinese military university that is heavily involved in military research and works closely with the People's Liberation Army," painting it as a reasonable target for digital infiltration from an American perspective.

China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) recently published a report attributing the hack to the Tailored Access Operations group (TAO) -- an elite team of NSA hackers which first became publicly known via the Snowden Leaks back in 2013, helps the U.S. government break into networks all over the world for the purposes of intelligence gathering and data collection. [CVERC identified 41 TAO tools involved in the case.] One such tool, dubbed 'Suctionchar,' is said to have helped infiltrate the school's network by stealing account credentials from remote management and file transfer applications to hijack logins on targeted servers. The report also mentions the exploitation of Bvp47, a backdoor in Linux that has been used in previous hacking missions by the Equation Group -- another elite NSA hacking team. According to CVERC, traces of Suctionchar have been found in many other Chinese networks besides Northwestern's, and the agency has accused the NSA of launching more than 10,000 cyberattacks on China over the past several years.

On Sunday, the allegations against the NSA were escalated to a diplomatic complaint. Yang Tao, the director-general of American affairs at China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published a statement affirming the CVERC report and claiming that the NSA had "seriously violated the technical secrets of relevant Chinese institutions and seriously endangered the security of China's critical infrastructure, institutions and personal information, and must be stopped immediately."

Just before shareholders voted to approve a $44 billion deal with Elon Musk to buy the company, Twitter whistleblower Pieter Zatko was in Washington testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about alleged security flaws. NPR highlights the main takeaways from the hearing: Twitter executives put profits ahead of security, leaving the door open to infiltration by foreign agents and hackers, the company's former head of security told Congress on Tuesday. "Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors," Peiter Zatko testified during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. "The company's cybersecurity failures make it vulnerable to exploitation, causing real harm to real people." [...] In Tuesday's hearing, which ran for more than two hours, Zatko painted a portrait of a company plagued by widespread security issues and unable to control the data it collects. Calm and measured, he stuck closely to his expertise, unpacking technical details of Twitter's systems with real-world examples of how information held by the company could be misused. "It's not far-fetched to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the senators in this room," he warned.

Zatko alleged the company is highly vulnerable to abuse by foreign intelligence agents -- but is unable or unwilling to root them out. A week before his firing in January, he testified, the FBI told Twitter's security team that at least one agent from China's Ministry of State Security was on the company's payroll. [...] Zatko also alleged that the Indian government had placed an agent inside Twitter. He testified that Twitter struggled to identify potential infiltration by foreign agents and typically was only able to do so when notified by outside agencies.

Zatko placed the blame for Twitter's vulnerabilities squarely on a leadership team that he described as reactive, incompetent, and motivated by profit over safety. Executives, he alleged, ignored warnings from him and other employees over Twitter's security flaws because they "lacked the competency to understand the scope of the problem." Zatko described a company culture that avoided negativity and alleged executives presented selectively favorable information to the board. He accused leadership of prioritizing business over security, quoting writer Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding something."

When Zatko joined Twitter, he said, he was struck that the company kept having recurring security lapses -- "the same amount, year after year." The root cause, he told senators, is that Twitter doesn't understand how much data it collects, why it collects it, and how it's supposed to be used. That includes users' phone numbers, IP addresses, emails, the devices they use, their locations and other identifying information. What's more, he said, around half the employees at Twitter have access to that data. "It doesn't matter who has keys if you don't have any locks on the doors," he said. "The concern there is anybody with access inside Twitter...could go rooting through and find this information and use it for their own purposes." Zatko said that also raised red flags that Twitter may not be complying with its 2011 agreement with the FTC over misuse of email addresses that it told users it was collecting for security reasons, but then used for marketing. (In May, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for violating that agreement.) "How come we keep making these same mistakes?" Zatko said. "What is it that we are telling the FTC as Twitter that is incorrect?"

The world's chances of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown are diminishing rapidly, as we enter "uncharted territory of destruction" through our failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions and take the actions needed to stave off catastrophe, leading scientists have said. From a report: Despite intensifying warnings in recent years, governments and businesses have not been changing fast enough, according to the United in Science report published on Tuesday. The consequences are already being seen in increasingly extreme weather around the world, and we are in danger of provoking "tipping points" in the climate system that will mean more rapid and in some cases irreversible shifts.

Recent flooding in Pakistan, which the country's climate minister claimed had covered a third of the country in water, is the latest example of extreme weather that is devastating swathes of the globe. The heatwave across Europe including the UK this summer, prolonged drought in China, a megadrought in the US and near-famine conditions in parts of Africa also reflect increasingly prevalent extremes of weather. The secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said: "There is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction. This year's United in Science report shows climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction."

The Biden administration plans next month to broaden curbs on U.S shipments to China of semiconductors used for artificial intelligence and chipmaking tools, Reuters reported Monday, citing several people familiar with the matter. From the report: The Commerce Department intends to publish new regulations based on restrictions communicated in letters earlier this year to three U.S. companies -- KLA, Lam Research and Applied Materials, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The plan for new rules has not been previously reported. The letters, which the companies publicly acknowledged, forbade them from exporting chipmaking equipment to Chinese factories that produce advanced semiconductors with sub-14 nanometer processes unless the sellers obtain Commerce Department licenses. The rules would also codify restrictions in Commerce Department letters sent to Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices last month instructing them to halt shipments of several artificial intelligence computing chips to China unless they obtain licenses. Further reading: Banned US AI Chips in High Demand at Chinese State Institutes.

schwit1 writes: Imperial College will shut down two major research centres sponsored by Chinese aerospace and defence companies amid a crackdown on academic collaborations with China, the Guardian has learned.

The Avic Centre for Structural Design and Manufacturing is a long-running partnership with China's leading civilian and military aviation supplier, which has provided more than $6m to research cutting-edge aerospace materials. The second centre is run jointly with Biam, a subsidiary of another state-owned aerospace and defence company, which has contributed $4.5m for projects on high-performance batteries, jet engine components and impact-resistant aircraft windshields. The centres' stated goals are to advance civilian aerospace technologies, but critics have repeatedly warned that the research could also advance China's military ambitions.

Now Imperial has confirmed the two centres will be shut by the end of the year after the rejection of two licence applications to the government's Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU), which oversees the sharing of sensitive research with international partners. The closures follow a warning in July by the heads of MI5 and the FBI of the espionage threat posed by China to UK universities, and highlight the government's hardening attitude on the issue.

"You can say with a high degree of confidence that this decision has been taken because the government is of the view that continuing licensing would enable the military development in China, which is viewed as a threat to security," said Sam Armstrong, director of communications at the Henry Jackson Society thinktank. "The government has made it clear to universities that there is an overall shift in the weather such that these collaborations are no longer possible."

China is claiming it discovered a new lunar mineral in moon samples it retrieved in 2020. From the South China Morning Post: The mineral, called Changesite-(Y), was found in rock and dust samples retrieved from the moon by China's Chang'e-5 mission, the nation's first mission to return a lunar sample, which launched in 2020.

A research team from the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology, a subsidiary of the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), isolated a single crystalline particle of the material from more than 140,000 lunar particles using hi-tech processes, including X-ray diffraction, according to Wang Xuejun, a party official with the CNNC. The particle was about 10 microns in diameter, or about one-tenth of a human hair, Wang told a press conference on Friday....

Meanwhile, Wang added that the research team had for the first time measured the concentration of a future fusion energy source, in the lunar sample. "It provides fundamental scientific data for future assessment of helium-3 in lunar samples and their exploration," Wang said.
If confirmed, it would provide "more basic scientific data for the evaluation and development of lunar resources," according to an executive with the China Atomic Energy Authority, while also deepening mankind's knowledge of the solar system. (It would be the sixth new mineral discovered on the moon.)

Speaking at a press conference, he told the audience that China "has also become the third country to retrieve lunar samples and discover new lunar minerals after the U.S. and Russia." The article points out that China hopes to land another sample-collecting probe to the moon "around 2024," and that a senior lunar program designer said China "could" land astronauts on the moon by 2030.

China remains the world's largest lithium processor, reports Reuters. But Tesla "is considering setting up a lithium refinery on the gulf coast of Texas, as it looks to secure supply of the key component used in batteries amid surging demand for electric vehicles." The potential battery-grade lithium hydroxide refining facility, which Tesla touted as the first of its kind in North America, will process "raw ore material into a usable state for battery production", the company said in an application filed with the Texas Comptroller's Office.

A decision to invest in Texas will also be based on the ability to obtain relief on local property taxes, Tesla said.

Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has previously said that Tesla may have to enter the mining and refining industry directly at scale as lithium prices surge. Musk has also been vocal about the need for more players in the lithium refining industry.... Securing a steady supply of battery components is seen critical for Tesla as it faces fierce competition in the fast-growing market for electric cars. If approved, construction could begin in the fourth quarter of 2022 and would reach commercial production by the end of 2024, Tesla said in the application dated Aug. 22....

If Tesla's plan goes ahead, the carmaker could become the first in the sector to invest directly in lithium refining as automakers scramble to stitch up deals with miners and refiners.
In addition, the article points out, Tesla "also said it would use less hazardous reagents and create usable byproducts, compared with the conventional process."

Nvidia announced yesterday that its upcoming H100 "Hopper" Tensor Core GPU set new performance records during its debut in the industry-standard MLPerf benchmarks, delivering results up to 4.5 times faster than the A100, which is currently Nvidia's fastest production AI chip. Ars Technica reports: The MPerf benchmarks (technically called "MLPerfTM Inference 2.1") measure "inference" workloads, which demonstrate how well a chip can apply a previously trained machine learning model to new data. A group of industry firms known as the MLCommons developed the MLPerf benchmarks in 2018 to deliver a standardized metric for conveying machine learning performance to potential customers. In particular, the H100 did well in the BERT-Large benchmark, which measures natural language-processing performance using the BERT model developed by Google. Nvidia credits this particular result to the Hopper architecture's Transformer Engine, which specifically accelerates training transformer models. This means that the H100 could accelerate future natural language models similar to OpenAI's GPT-3, which can compose written works in many different styles and hold conversational chats. The chip, which is still in development, is forecasted to replace the A100 as the company's flagship data center GPU. The U.S. government imposed restrictions last week on exports of the chips to China, leading many to fear that Nvidia might not be able to deliver the H100 by the end of the year. However, Nvidia clarified that the U.S. government will allow it to continue development of the chip in China, "so the project appears back on track for now," reports Ars.

The state of Virginia has over a third of America's hyperscale datacenter capacity, and this amounts to more than the entire capacity of China or the whole of Europe, highlighting just how much infrastructure is concentrated along the so-called Datacenter Alley. The Register reports: These figures come from Synergy Research Group, which said that the US accounts for 53 percent of global hyperscale datacenter capacity, as measured by critical IT load, at the end of the second quarter of 2022. The remainder is relatively evenly split between China, Europe, and the rest of the world. While few would be surprised at the US accounting for the lion's share of datacenter capacity, the fact that so much is concentrated in one state could raise a few eyebrows, especially when it is centered on a small number of counties in Northern Virginia -- typically Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax -- which make up Datacenter Alley.

"Hyperscale operators take a lot of factors into account when deciding where to locate their datacenter infrastructure," said Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale. "This includes availability of suitable real estate, cost and availability of power supply options, proximity to customers, the risk of natural disasters, local incentives and approvals processes, the ease of doing business and internal business dynamics, and this has inevitably led to some hyperscale hot spots." Amazon in particular locates a large amount of its datacenter infrastructure in Northern Virginia, with Microsoft, Facebook, Google, ByteDance, and others also having a major presence, according to Synergy. The big three cloud providers -- Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- have the broadest hyperscale bit barn footprint, with each of these having over 130 datacenters of the 800 or so around the globe. When measured in datacenter capacity, the leading companies are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent, according to Synergy.

Leading foundry operators stand to benefit from a 25 percent investment tax credit (ITC) on domestic fab projects, according to a document published by the US Department of Commerce this week. The Register reports: The document [PDF] sheds new light on the department's plans for divvying up the more than $50 billion CHIPS Act fund approved this year by Congress to fund domestic chip production. The tax credits accompany $39 billion in grants, cooperative agreements, loans, and loan guarantees are available to companies working to advance US semiconductor and supply chain security interests.

The Commerce Department appears to have mixed sentiments about the state of the US in the global semiconductor sphere. The document argues the US remains the world leader in chip design and native design and automation tools but also notes the US is responsible for only 10 percent of global chip capacity and just 3 percent of global packaging, assembling, and testing services, pointing to areas where America has fallen behind when it comes to domestic production. The department adds that recent advancements made by the People's Republic of China to accelerate their own domestic chip manufacturing capacity has only served to exacerbate the risk to US supply chains.

With that said, the Commerce Department isn't being picky about which companies are eligible for funding. Any company, foreign or domestic, that takes steps to advance the commerce departments goals, with the exception of "entities of concern." Those goals in include accelerating leading-edge and legacy chip production in the US, research and development into next-generation semiconductor applications, and efforts to develop an adequate workforce to fuel this expansion. While foreign manufacturers aren't excluded from receiving funding, the Commerce Department emphasizes that those funds must go towards domestic infrastructure and can't be used abroad.

Beijing this week accused the United States of launching "tens of thousands" of cyberattacks on China and pilfering troves of sensitive data, including from a public research university. From a report: Washington has accused Beijing of cyberattacks against US businesses and government agencies, one of the issues over which ties between the two powers have nosedived in recent years. China has consistently denied the claims and in turn lashed out against alleged US cyber espionage, but has rarely made public disclosures of specific attacks. But a report released Monday by its National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) accused the US National Security Agency (NSA) of carrying out "tens of thousands of malicious attacks on network targets in China in recent years." It specifically accused the NSA's Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) of infiltrating the Northwestern Polytechnical University in the city of Xi'an.

This fall, Apple will make some of its flagship iPhones outside China for the first time, a small but significant change for a company that has built one of the most sophisticated supply chains in the world with the help of the Chinese authorities. But the development of the iPhone 14, which is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday, shows how complicated it will be for Apple to truly untangle itself from China. From a report: More than ever, Apple's Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries.

The critical work provided by China reflects the country's advancements over the past decade and a new level of involvement for Chinese engineers in the development of iPhones. After the country lured companies to its factories with legions of low-priced workers and unrivaled production capacity, its engineers and suppliers have moved up the supply chain to claim a bigger slice of the money that U.S. companies spend to create high-tech gadgets. The increased responsibilities that China has assumed for the iPhone could challenge Apple's efforts to decrease its dependency on the country, a goal that has taken on increased urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and simmering concerns in Washington about China's ascent as a technology competitor.

High-profile universities and state-run research institutes in China have been relying on a U.S. computing chip to power their artificial intelligence (AI) technology but whose export to the country Washington has now restricted, a Reuters review showed. From the report: U.S. chip designer Nvidia last week said U.S. government officials have ordered it to stop exporting its A100 and H100 chips to China. Local peer Advanced Micro Devices also said new licence requirements now prevent export to China of its advanced AI chip MI250. The development signalled a major escalation of a U.S. campaign to stymie China's technological capability as tension bubbles over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured.

China views Taiwan as a rogue province and has not ruled out force to bring the democratically governed island under its control. Responding to the restrictions, China branded them a futile attempt to impose a technology blockade on a rival. A Reuters review of more than a dozen publicly available government tenders over the past two years indicated that among some of China's most strategically important research institutes, there is high demand - and need - for Nvidia's signature A100 chips. Tsinghua University, China's highest-ranked higher education institution globally, spent over $400,000 last October on two Nvidia AI supercomputers, each powered by four A100 chips, one of the tenders showed. In the same month, the Institute of Computing Technology, part of top research group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), spent around $250,000 on A100 chips. The school of artificial intelligence at a CAS university in July this year also spent about $200,000 on high-tech equipment including a server partly powered by A100 chips. In November, the cybersecurity college of Guangdong-based Jinan University spent over $93,000 on an Nvidia AI supercomputer, while its school of intelligent systems science and engineering spent almost $100,000 on eight A100 chips just last month. Less well-known institutes and universities supported by municipal and provincial governments, such as in Shandong, Henan and Chongqing, also bought A100 chips, the tenders showed.

China became the first country to approve a needle-free, inhaled version of a Covid-19 vaccine made by Tianjin-based CanSino Biologics, pushing the company's shares up as much as 14.5% Monday morning in Hong Kong. From a report: China's National Medical Products Administration approved CanSino's Ad5-nCoV for emergency use as a booster vaccine, the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sunday. The vaccine is a new version of CanSino's one-shot Covid drug, the first in the world to undergo human testing in March 2020 and which has been used in China, Mexico, Pakistan, Malaysia and Hungary after being rolled out in February 2021. The inhaled version can stimulate cellular immunity and induce mucosal immunity to boost protection without intramuscular injection, CanSino said. Companies are looking into developing inhaled versions of vaccines to stimulate antibodies in nasal and airway tissues to defend against coronavirus. They are needle-free and can be self-administered, broadening their appeal to vaccine-hesitant people and potentially easing pressure on health-care resources.

The Ocean Cleanup project has an announcement....

75% to 86% of plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch "originates from fishing activities at sea." Plastic emissions from rivers remain the main source of plastic pollution from a global ocean perspective. Plastic lost at sea has a higher chance of accumulating offshore than plastic emitted from rivers, leading to high concentrations of fishing-related debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch [or GPGP]. New findings confirm the oceanic garbage patches cannot be cleaned solely through river interception and highlight the potentially vital role of fishing and aquaculture in ridding the world's oceans of plastic....

Our previous research has shown that almost half of the plastic mass in the GPGP is comprised of fishing nets and ropes (fibrous plastics used, for example, to make our The Ocean Cleanup sunglasses), with the remainder largely composed of hard plastic objects and small fragments. While the provenance of fishing nets is obvious, the origins of the other plastics in the GPGP have — until now — remained unclear.... In 2019, System 001/B, an early iteration of our cleanup technology, retrieved over 6,000 hard plastic debris items (larger than 5 cm) from the GPGP, providing our scientists with a unique opportunity to study larger objects not studied by previous research efforts. Each item was sorted into predefined item categories and inspected individually for evidence of country of origin (evidence may include language or text on the object, company name, brand, logo, or other identifying text such as an address or telephone number, etc.) and date of production. This comprehensive analysis revealed that roughly a third of the items were unidentifiable fragments. The other two-thirds was dominated by objects typically used in fishing, such as floats, buoys, crates, buckets, baskets, containers, drums, jerry cans, fish boxes, and eel traps.

Nearly half (49%) of plastic objects which could be dated were produced in the 20th century, with the oldest identified item being a buoy dating from 1966. This distribution is in line with our previous research showing significant occurrence of decades-old objects in the GPGP and re-emphasizes that the plastic in these garbage patches persists and can cause harm for lengthy periods, continually degrading into microplastics and becoming increasingly difficult to remove. In short, these results underline the urgent need to clean the GPGP; no matter what actions are taken to prevent riverine plastic emissions, the GPGP will persist and its content will continue to beach on remote islands, such as the Hawaiian Archipelago, and fragment into microplastics that will eventually sink to the seabed.
Surprisingly, countries near the edge of the northern Pacific (like the Philippines) weren't major contributors to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and instead their research blamed Japan (34%), China (32%), the Korean peninsula (10%), and the USA (7%). While they're not major sources of plastic from rivers, "they do carry out the majority of industrialized fishing activities in the GPGP region....

"[T]rawlers, fixed gear, and drifting longlines accounted for more than 95% of identified fishing activities that may account for emissions of floating plastic debris into the GPGP. "

Lenovo is finally selling AR glasses for consumers with the recently-announced Lenovo Glasses T1, which Ars Technica's Scharon Harding got to demo. Here's an excerpt from her report: With their Micro OLED displays and required tether to Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS devices, they bring some notable features to a space that has piqued industry-wide interest but is still likely far from becoming ubiquitous. The early version of the T1 I tried had limited features; I was mostly only able to view a homepage with basic menu options and a desktop with icons for apps, like web browsing. Although the glasses weren't ready for me to watch a movie or hop around apps, I was impressed at how clear text and menu items were. This was in a sunny room with exceedingly tall windows. Even when facing sunlight, the few colors on display seemed vibrant and the text legible.

Lenovo specs the displays with 10,000:1 contrast and 1920x1080 pixels per eye. The glasses are also TUV-certified for low blue light and flicker reduction, according to Lenovo. Much more time is needed to explore and challenge the Micro OLED displays before I pass final judgment. But the combination of smaller pixels and, from what I saw thus far, strong colors, should accommodate screens so close to the eyes. More broadly speaking, brightness can be a concern with OLED technologies, but the small demo I saw fared well in a sun-flushed room.

I used the Glasses T1 while it was connected to an Android smartphone via its USB-C cable, but it's also supposed to work with PCs, macOS devices, and, via an adapter sold separately, iPhones. [...] With no processor or battery, it's easier for the glasses to stay trim. There are also no sensors or cameras like the Lenovo ThinkReality A3, announced last year, has. Other T1 features include a pair of speakers (one near each temple) and the ability to add prescription lenses. [...] The Glasses T1 are expected to be available in select markets in 2023 after debuting in China (as the Lenovo Yoga Glasses) this year. Lenovo didn't set a price, but I was told it's hoping to keep the glasses under $500.

Big U.S. tech companies have flocked to the World Artificial Intelligence Conference that opened Thursday in Shanghai, drawing a stark contrast with Washington's ongoing efforts to distance itself economically from China. From a report: The opening ceremony included a virtual address by Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who said the company will supply the most complete and comprehensive technology and solutions in China and the world. Apple, Advanced Micro Devices, Facebook parent Meta and GE HealthCare also have executives or booths at the event, according to Chinese media. Europe's semiconductor industry is represented as well, with executives from Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors, a major supplier of automotive chips, and Germany's Infineon Technologies discussing development plans.

The strong American showing is good news for China, which needs advanced chip technology to power its AI development and is keen to win over companies that can provide it. The business opportunities afforded by the massive Chinese market remain essential to many American companies. China is a leading information technology production hub, as well as the world's top auto production center -- an increasingly important field for chipmakers as the number of semiconductors used in vehicles continues to rise. Qualcomm generated roughly two-thirds of its sales last year in China, a major production base for many of the smartphone manufacturers that are among its main customers. The country accounts for just under 30% of sales at AMD and Intel, 20% at Micron Technology and over 30% at NXP.

"Major VPN services have shut down service in India, as there is no way to comply with a new law without breaching their own privacy protection standards," reports 9to5Mac. "The law also applies to iCloud Private Relay, but Apple has not yet commented on its own plans." The Wall Street Journal reports: Major global providers of virtual private networks, which let internet users shield their identities online, are shutting down their servers in India to protest new government rules they say threaten their customers' privacy [...] Such rules are "typically introduced by authoritarian governments in order to gain more control over their citizens," said a spokeswoman for Nord Security, provider of NordVPN, which has stopped operating its servers in India. "If democracies follow the same path, it has the potential to affect people's privacy as well as their freedom of speech," she said [...]

Other VPN services that have stopped operating servers in India in recent months are some of the world's best known. They include U.S.-based Private Internet Access and IPVanish, Canada-based TunnelBear, British Virgin Islands-based ExpressVPN, and Lithuania-based Surfshark. ExpressVPN said it "refuses to participate in the Indian government's attempts to limit internet freedom." The government's move "severely undermines the online privacy of Indian residents," Private Internet Access said. "Customers in India will be able to connect to VPN servers in other countries," adds 9to5Mac. "This is the same approach taken in Russia and China, where operating servers within those countries would require VPN companies to comply with similar legislation."

"Cloud storage services are also subjected to the new rules, though there would be little practical impact on Apple here. iCloud does not use end-to-end encryption, meaning that Apple holds a copy of your decryption key, and can therefore already comply with government demands for information."

Nvidia said on Thursday that the U.S. government has allowed exports and in-country transfers needed to complete the development of its flagship artificial intelligence chip. From a report: The disclosure comes a day after Washington told the company to stop exporting its two top computing chips for AI work to China, a move Nvidia said could interfere with the development of the H100 chip it announced this year. The ban signaled a major escalation of the U.S. crackdown on China's technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured. The ban, which affects Nvidia's A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, sent the company's shares down 4% before the bell. In its statement on Thursday, Nvidia said U.S. officials have authorized it to perform exports needed to provide support for U.S. customers of A100 through March 1, 2023.