Flexible office-space firm WeWork has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, listing over $18.6 billion of debts in a remarkable collapse for the once high-flying startup co-founded by Adam Neumann and bankrolled by SoftBank, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. From a report: The New York-based firm, which raised over $22 billion and was valued at $47 billion at its peak, has listed assets of over $15 billion in the petition it filed in a New Jersey federal court.

WeWork chief executive David Tolley said about 90% of the company's lenders have agreed to convert their $3 billion of debt into equity. WeWork's bankruptcy filing is limited to locations in the U.S. and Canada, it said. WeWork India has emerged as one of the strongest units in the WeWork franchise, and is largely insulated from the bankruptcy as majority of it is owned by Embassy Group. The India unit makes money and doesn't need external capital to operate, the India head said in a statement today.

After years of inflation, Americans are used to sticker shock. But nothing compares to the surging price of streaming video. From a report: Last week, Apple TV+ became the latest streaming service to raise its price -- up from $6.99 to $9.99 per month -- following the example of Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Netflix, which all hiked their prices in October. Half of the major streaming platforms in the U.S. now charge a monthly fee that's double the price they charged when they initially came to market. And many of these streaming services haven't even been around for 10 years.

Consumers have grumbled, but have so far been willing to keep paying up. It's hard to say where their breaking point will be, but given that analysts believe the platforms are likely to continue raising prices even further, we'll probably find out soon enough. Part of what's driving the price hikes is how saturated the streaming market has become. For a company like Netflix, which has 77 million paid subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, finding new paying subscribers to keep revenue growing is not easy. Netflix has started clamping down on password sharing to boost its paid subscriber rolls, but that only goes so far. Raising prices for existing subscribers is an effective way to pump up the top line and keep investors happy.

Long-time Slashdot reader thepacketmaster writes: Documented in a recent article in the journal Nature, researchers have found an abundance of both helium-4 and helium-3 trapped in the volcanic rocks on Canada's Baffin Island.

As the Earth formed, it is thought that helium-4 and helium-3 flowing on the solar wind became trapped in the minerals of the cooling planet. With heavier elements and minerals sinking to the bottom, this trapped helium was transported to the core, where it would have remained locked in its original forms.

Earth isn't massive enough to hold on to helium in any significant quantities, though. Any that did not get trapped, or that was subsequently released when the minerals melted in the mantle or due to massive impacts, would have eventually seeped up to the surface and floated off into space. So, helium is relatively rare on Earth, and helium-3 is even more so.

Citing an "unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security," Canada banned Chinese messaging application WeChat and Russian antivirus program Kaspersky on government-issued mobile devices. Reuters reports: The ban was announced after an assessment by Canada's chief information officer that Tencent-owned WeChat and applications made by Moscow-based Kaspersky "present an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security," the Treasury Board of Canada, which oversees public administration, said in a statement. Kaspersky said it was surprised and disappointed, and that the decision was made without warning or an opportunity for the firm to address the government's concerns. "As there has been no evidence or due process to otherwise justify these actions, they are highly unsupported and a response to the geopolitical climate rather than a comprehensive evaluation of the integrity of Kaspersky's products and services," the company said in a statement.

The Treasury Board said it has no evidence that government information has been compromised, but the collection methods of the applications provide considerable access to a device's contents, and risks of using them were "clear." "The decision to remove and block the WeChat and the Kaspersky applications was made to ensure that government of Canada networks and data remain secure and protected and are in line with the approach of our international partners," the statement said. The applications will be removed from government-issued mobile devices on Monday, and users will be blocked from downloading them in the future.

The seven industrial countries known as the "G7" — America, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Britain — will agree on a code of conduct Monday for companies developing advanced AI systems, reports Reuters.

The news comes "as governments seek to mitigate the risks and potential misuse of the technology," Reuters reports — citing a G7 document. The 11-point code "aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI worldwide and will provide voluntary guidance for actions by organizations developing the most advanced AI systems, including the most advanced foundation models and generative AI systems", the G7 document said. It "is meant to help seize the benefits and address the risks and challenges brought by these technologies".

The code urges companies to take appropriate measures to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks across the AI lifecycle, as well as tackle incidents and patterns of misuse after AI products have been placed on the market. Companies should post public reports on the capabilities, limitations and the use and misuse of AI systems, and also invest in robust security controls.

The previously announced joint collaboration between Honda Motor and General Motors to develop a platform for affordable electric vehicles (EVs) has been cancelled, the firms said today. Initially publicized in April 2022, the collaboration aimed to produce lower-cost EVs for the North American, South American, and Chinese markets, with the first models expected to roll out in 2027. However, the companies disclosed that they have mutually agreed to disband the project. ArsTechnica: "After extensive studies and analysis, we have come to a mutual decision to discontinue the program. Each company remains committed to affordability in the EV market," Honda and GM said in a joint statement. "After studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment we are ending development of an affordable EV," said Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe in an interview with Bloomberg. "GM and Honda will search for a solution separately. This project itself has been canceled," Mibe said.

The now-canceled platform was supposed to use GM's Ultium batteries. GM debuted Ultium in 2020 as its third-generation lithium-ion cell, developed together with LG Chem. At the time, GM CEO Mary Barra said that Ultium cells would drop below the $100/kWh barrier "early in the platform's life." In 2022, the first Ultium-based EVs went into production -- the GMC Hummer EV, the Cadillac Lyriq, and the BrightDrop Zevo 600. Ultium cells were supposedly ready for mass production, but GM and LG Chem are struggling to make that a reality. In July, GM had to idle BrightDrop's production line in Canada due to a shortage of battery cells, and Kelly Blue Book's sales data for the first three quarters of 2023 show that just 6,920 Ultium-based EVs (which include the Chevrolet Blazer and Silverado EV, as well as the Hummer, Lyriq, and BrightDrop van) were delivered to customers.

"The Worker as Futurist project assists rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short speculative fiction," explains its web site. "In a world where massive corporations not only exploit people but monopolize the power of future-making, how can workers and other people fight and write back?"

I couldn't find any short stories displayed on their site, but there are plans to publish a book next year collecting the workers' writing about "the world after Amazon" in print, online and in audiobook format. And there's also a podcast about "the world Amazon is building and the workers and writers struggling for different futures."

From their web site: A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 workers gather online to discuss how SF shed light on their working conditions and futures. In 2023, 13 workers started to meet regularly to build their writing skills and learn about the future Amazon is compelling its workers to create... The Worker as Futurist project aims, in a small way, to place the power of the imagination back in the hands of workers. This effort is in solidarity with trade union mobilizations and workers self-organization at Amazon. It is also in solidarity with efforts by civil society to reign in Amazon's power.
Four people involved with the project shared more details in the socialist magazine Jacobin : At stake is a kind of corporate storytelling, which goes beyond crass propaganda but works to harness the imagination. Like so many corporations, Amazon presents itself as surfing the wave of the future, responding to the relentless and positive force of the capitalist market with innovation and optimism. Such stories neatly exonerate the company and its beneficiaries from the consequences of their choices for workers and their world...

WWS doesn't focus on science fiction. But it does show the radical power of the imagination that comes when workers don't just read inspiring words, but come together to write and thereby take the power of world-building and future-making back into their hands. This isn't finding individual commercial or literary success, but dignity, imagination, and common struggle... Our "Worker as Futurist" project returns the power of the speculative to workers, in the name of discovering something new about capitalism and the struggle for something different. We have tasked these workers with writing their own futures, in the face of imaginaries cultivated by Amazon that see the techno-overlords bestride the world and the stars.

Thanks to funding from Canada's arms-length, government-funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions. In each of these online forums, we were joined by experts on speculative fiction, on Amazon, and on workers' struggles. At the end of this series of sessions, the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about "The World After Amazon...."

We must envision the futures we want in order to mobilize and fight for them together, rather than cede that future to those who would turn the stars into their own private sandbox. It is in the process of writing and sharing writing we can come to an awareness of something our working bodies know but that we cannot otherwise articulate or express. The rank-and-file worker — the target of daily exploitation, forced to build their boss's utopia — may have encrypted within them the key to destroying his world and building a new one.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Canada will legalize medically assisted dying for people who are addicted to drugs next spring, in a move some drug users and activists are calling "eugenics." The country's medical assistance in dying (MAID) law, which first came into effect in 2016, will be expanded next March to give access to people whose sole medical condition is mental illness, which can include substance use disorders. Before the changes take place, however, a special parliamentary committee on MAID will regroup to scrutinize the rollout of the new regulations, according to the Toronto Star.

Currently, people are eligible for MAID if they have a "grievous and irremediable medical condition", such as a serious illness or disability, that has put them in an advanced state of irreversible decline and caused enduring physical or psychological suffering -- excluding mental illness. Anyone who receives MAID must also go through two assessments from independent health care providers, among meeting other criteria. [...] As Canada prepares to legalize MAID for people with mental disorders, each province will have to develop its own protocol for how to assess people. Dr. Simon Colgan, lead physician for the Community Allied Mobile Palliative Partnership which provides palliative care to homeless people, said MAID requests "must be understood within the context of a person's lived experience and this takes time and relationship." He said any MAID protocols for people with substance use disorders should be made with the input of people with lived experiences. "I don't think it's fair, and the government doesn't think it's fair, to exclude people from eligibility because their medical disorder or their suffering is related to a mental illness," said Dr. David Martell, physician lead for Addictions Medicine at Nova Scotia Health. "As a subset of that, it's not fair to exclude people from eligibility purely because their mental disorder might either partly or in full be a substance use disorder. It has to do with treating people equally."

On the flip side, some drug users and harm reduction advocates say they're upset drug users are being given access to MAID, as they feel other public health measures are lacking. "I just think that MAID when it has entered the area around mental health and substance use is really rooted in eugenics. And there are people who are really struggling around substance use and people do not actually get the kind of support and help they need," said Zoe Dodd, a Toronto-based harm reduction advocate.

Karen Ward, a drug user activist in Vancouver, said she considers the expansion of MAID to include people with substance use disorders a "statement in federal law that some people aren't really human." "The government has made death accessible while a better life remains impossible," she said. "Homes for all, guaranteed dignified incomes, access to healthcare, education and employment: these aren't radical demands."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Today, Tesla released (PDF) its Q3 2023 financial results and as expected, there was an update about Cybertruck in there. In the quarterly presentation, Tesla mentioned that "pilot production" of the Cybertruck has begun: "At Gigafactory Texas, we began pilot production of the Cybertruck, which remains on track for initial deliveries this year." While that doesn't include any new information, in the photo section of the presentation, Tesla added a comment confirming that "deliveries will begin in November 2023."

The previous official comment from CEO Elon Musk was that Tesla was aiming for the end of Q3, which ended last month. Interestingly, Tesla also updated its "installed annual vehicle capacity" and added capacity for the Cybertruck for the first time. Surprisingly, Tesla already claims a capacity of "over 125,000 Cybertrucks" at Gigafactory Texas. In a company post on X, Tesla specifies that its first Cybertruck deliveries are scheduled for November 30th at Giga Texas.

These are the highlights of Tesla's Q3 shareholder update, as mentioned in the company's X post: "Cybertruck production remains on track for later this year, with first deliveries scheduled for November 30th at Giga Texas.

Production of our higher density 4680 cell is progressing as planned & we continue building capacity for cathode production & lithium refining in the US.

In Europe, Model Y remains the best-selling vehicle of any kind (based on latest available data as of August) Thank you to our European owners!

We have more than doubled the size of our AI training compute, accommodating for both our growing data set & Optimus, which is currently being trained for simple tasks through AI rather than hardcoded software, while its hardware continues to improve.

All Hertz rentals in the US & Canada now allow Tesla app access, enabling renters to use keyless lock/unlock via phone key, remotely precondition the cabin & more.

In addition, we redesigned the in-app service experience for owners, making scheduling & tracking service appointments & loaner access much simpler."

Energy deployments increased 90% YoY to 4GWh -- our highest quarterly deployment ever!

The Five Eyes countries' intelligence chiefs came together on Tuesday to accuse China of intellectual property theft and using artificial intelligence for hacking and spying against the nations, in a rare joint statement by the allies. From a report: The officials from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - known as the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network - made the comments following meetings with private companies in the U.S. innovation hub Silicon Valley. U.S. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the "unprecedented" joint call was meant to confront the "unprecedented threat" China poses to innovation across the world.

From quantum technology and robotics to biotechnology and artificial intelligence, China was stealing secrets in various sectors, the officials said. "China has long targeted businesses with a web of techniques all at once: cyber intrusions, human intelligence operations, seemingly innocuous corporate investments and transactions," Wray said. "Every strand of that web had become more brazen, and more dangerous." In response, Chinese government spokesman Liu Pengyu said the country was committed to intellectual property protection.

Amir Golestan, the 40-year-old CEO of the Charleston, S.C. based technology company Micfo, has been sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud. From a report: Golestan's sentencing comes nearly two years after he pleaded guilty to using an elaborate network of phony companies to secure more than 735,000 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit which oversees IP addresses assigned to entities in the U.S., Canada, and parts of the Caribbean.

In 2018, ARIN sued Golestan and Micfo, alleging they had obtained hundreds of thousands of IP addresses under false pretenses. ARIN and Micfo settled that dispute in arbitration, with Micfo returning most of the addresses that it hadn't already sold. ARIN's civil case caught the attention of federal prosecutors in South Carolina, who in May 2019 filed criminal wire fraud charges against Golestan, alleging he'd orchestrated a network of shell companies and fake identities to prevent ARIN from knowing the addresses were all going to the same buyer.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): CBC and Radio-Canada have announced they'll no longer carry the National Research Council (NRC) time signal. Monday marked the last time it was broadcast, ending the longest running segment on CBC Radio. In a statement, spokesperson Emma Iannetta described the signal as a "wonderful partnership," but confirmed it's being dropped. Given the range of CBC platforms from traditional over-the-air radio, to satellite and the internet, the long dash undergoes a range of delays by the time it's heard, leading to accuracy concerns from the NRC, she wrote. Iannetta added that nowadays most people use their phones to get the time, though many CBC listeners have a "fondness" for the signal.

For many, the relationship with the time signal goes far beyond fondness. It's allowed sailors to set their instruments for navigation, kept railway companies running on time and helped Canadians stay punctual. In a 2019 interview with Day 6 on the occasion of the signal's 80th birthday, Laurence Wall, one of its current voices, reflected on its origin and importance. His memories include taxi drivers recognizing his voice from daily announcements and hearing from a young man living in Hong Kong who would stay up past midnight just to hear the time signal because it reminded him of home. Beyond emotional connections, the signal has a practical history too. Wall said when it started out, timekeeping was relatively primitive, with watches and clocks that needed to be regularly set in order to stay accurate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Major corporations like Apple and Disney will be forced to disclose their carbon emissions under a new Californian law approved on Monday. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill -- passed by the state legislature -- requiring companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to report greenhouse gas emissions. Similar efforts are moving slowly at the federal level. Mr Newsom praised the law's aims, but questioned how it will be carried out.

"This important policy, once again, demonstrates California's continued leadership with bold responses to the climate crisis," Mr Newsom wrote in a signing statement. "However, the implementation deadlines in this bill are likely infeasible." He added that he is "concerned about the overall financial impact of this bill on businesses." The California Air Resources Board must put a system in place for reporting emissions by January 1, 2025, a little more than a year from now, under the law.

Hyundai and Kia said on Thursday that they will adopt Tesla's electric vehicle charging technology in the United States. Reuters reports: Joining their global peers, including Ford Motor, General Motors and Nissan in adopting Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS), Hyundai's and Kia's moves take the Elon Musk-led company's superchargers closer to becoming the industry standard at the expense of the rival Combined Charging System (CCS). Hyundai and Kia's new EVs will come with a NACS port, starting in the fourth quarter of 2024 in the United States, the companies said.

However, in Canada, Hyundai EVs equipped with the NACS port would be available in the first half of 2025, while Kia's EVs with the technology by the end of 2024. The move gives Hyundai and Kia EVs with NACS ports access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the companies said. The South Korean automakers also said that they would offer adapters to owners of existing and future Hyundai and Kia EVs with the current CCS giving them access to Tesla's Supercharging Network in the first quarter of 2025.

Netflix plans to raise the price of its ad-free service a few months after the continuing Hollywood actors strike ends, the latest in a series of recent price increases by the country's largest streaming platforms. From a report: The streaming service is discussing raising prices in several markets globally, but will likely begin with the U.S. and Canada, according to people familiar with the matter. It couldn't be learned how much Netflix will raise prices by or when exactly the new prices will take effect.

Over the past year or so, the cost of major ad-free streaming services has gone up by about 25%, as entertainment companies look to bring their streaming platforms to profitability and lead price-conscious customers to switch to their cheaper and more-lucrative ad-supported plans. Streamers are also starting to look at how they can create new pricing tiers around exclusive programming, such as live sports, without running the risk of driving people away from their core offerings.

Slashdot reader jjslash writes: The average cost of a gigabyte of mobile data in the U.S. is $6, while the most expensive data plan in the country offers a gig for $83.33. That makes the U.S. one of the most expensive countries in the world for mobile data, even though some plans can still get you a gig for as low as $0.75.

The situation in Canada isn't much better, with an average price of $5.37 per GB, but it's much cheaper to surf mobile internet in the U.K., thanks to an average price of $0.62 for a gig.

Starting on November 1st, Disney Plus will begin restricting password sharing in Canada. The Verge reports: Disney has not provided many details on how it plans to enforce this policy -- its email merely states that "we're implementing restrictions on your ability to share your account or login credentials outside of your household." The announcement reads more like a strong finger wag than anything else. "You may not share your subscription outside of your household," reads the company's updated Help Center.

A new "account sharing" section in the Canadian subscriber agreement also notes that the company may "analyze the use of your account" and that failing to comply with the agreement could lead to account limits or termination. After Netflix started cracking down on password sharing in the U.S., it resulted in the "four single largest days of U.S. user sign-ups since January 2019," according to Variety. The streaming giant later went on to add 2.6 million U.S. subscribers in July.

The new iPhone 15 Pro may be too hot for some to handle. Literally. WSJ: Apple's priciest new iPhones are heating up in some scenarios, reaching high temperatures that make them difficult to touch at certain times, according to reviews, tests by The Wall Street Journal and social-media posts from buyers in China, the U.S. and Canada. Some iPhone 14 Pro owners have noticed similar hot temperatures over the past year. The high temperatures in Apple's newest 15 Pro models -- typically when charging and using intensive apps -- are prompting concerns that the company might need to address overheating in software updates that could impact performance. Premium iPhones have long been a critical cash cow for Apple as smartphone demand has slumped globally.

The company is hoping the iPhone 15, especially its Pro models, will return its business to growth. Thomas Galvin, a 23-year-old from Cleveland, says his iPhone 15 Pro Max has been "super hot" and that he is considering returning it. Apple customer support told him the heat was a result of setting up the new phone, but even a few days later, it is still "way worse than the iPhone 13 Pro Max," he said. Other users on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Reddit have had similar complaints about the heat, with some mentioning that the phone had become so warm it is difficult to hold. The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern noted in her review last week that the iPhone 15 Pro Max hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit while charging. In further testing, the phone reached temperatures up to 112 degrees when simultaneously charging and doing processor-intensive tasks, such as gaming.

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK," explains the ceremony web page, promising that "a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners." As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, "All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

In 2020 Serbian scientists were gifted China's "Fire-Eye" labs, remembers the Washington Post. The sophisticated portable labs "excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors."

Although some of them were temporary, "scores" of the portable labs "were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. But it adds that now those same labs "are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China's intentions." Some analysts perceive China's largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world. That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said. Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers...

BGI Group, the Shenzhen-based company that makes Fire-Eye labs, said it has no access to genetic information collected by the lab it helped create in Serbia. But U.S. officials note that BGI was picked by Beijing to build and operate the China National GeneBank, a vast and growing government-owned repository that now includes genetic data drawn from millions of people around the world. The Pentagon last year officially listed BGI as one of several "Chinese military companies" operating in the United States, and a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment linked the company to the Beijing-directed global effort to obtain even more human DNA, including from the United States. The U.S. government also has blacklisted Chinese subsidiaries of BGI for allegedly helping analyze genetic material gathered inside China to assist government crackdowns on the country's ethnic and religious minorities...

Beijing's drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials believe China's global effort is mostly about beating the West economically, not militarily. There is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for reasons other than scientific research. China has announced plans to become the world's leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called "the new gold" — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures...

U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that they have limited insight into how BGI handles DNA information acquired overseas, including whether genetic data from the Fire-Eye labs ultimately end up in the computers of China's military or intelligence services... Chinese law makes clear that any information collected using BGI's machines can be accessed by the Chinese government. A national intelligence law enacted in 2017 stipulates that Chinese firms and citizens are legally bound to share proprietary information acquired in foreign countries whenever requested.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article