Chinese based Trina Solar has announced that it has once again broken its own efficiency record for mono-crystalline silicon solar panels, hitting 22.61 per cent for the first time. This is a near .5 per cent improvement over a similar development it made in 2015 and a more than 1.2 per …
Read More »Black Mirror meets real life, China pushing for universal credit score
If you thought the first episode of season three of Black Mirror, Nosedive, was far fetched, think again. In China, there are already trials underway of a “social credit,” system, which takes everything from minor infractions, to how much respect a person gives their parents and from 1st January, will …
Read More »Chinese state curfew forces fans to miss LoL qualifier
The regional qualifiers for China's top League of Legends team came to a surprising end over the weekend, with the last game in the tournament between Snake eSports and Team World Elite, having no audience to play in front of. Thanks to the local region's curfew, the entire crowd was sent …
Read More »Alibaba’s internet connected car paves way for autonomy
Chinese online retail giant, Alibaba, has announced a new vehicle created as part of a joint partnership between itself and SAIC Motor Corp, china's largest car manufacturer. Made using the YunOS operating system, the new Roewe RX5 can connect to the internet through your smartphone, with the firms behind it claiming it's …
Read More »China keeps pressure on U.S. counterparts with successful rocket launch
With plans still on track to land a rover on the far side of the moon in 2018, Chinese scientists continue to impress with their rocketry advances. Over the weekend it successfully launched its latest rocket design, from a new launch centre with new fuel combinations. Although ventures into space …
Read More »Riot Games owner Tencent could be buying the UFC
Riot Games owner Tencent may be looking to make one more acquisition after its monstrous buyout of Clash of Clans maker Supercell, as rumours circulating around the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) have it that Tencent may be one of the interested parties. The suggestion is that a collection of firms, …
Read More »China takes top supercomputing spot with 93 petaflop beast
China continues to be the owner of the world's most powerful supercomputer, easily surpassing the U.S. in what feels like a 21st century version of the Cold War space race. The newly ranked #1 Sunway TaihuLight was built and designed in China, using Chinese micro-processors and is capable of a whopping …
Read More »Facebook trumps Apple by winning China court case
Apple ran into some difficulty with the courts in China recently, when it was ruled that its iPhone brand wasn't “widely known,” enough for it to hold copyright on it. In comparison though, Facebook has fared far better, achieving ownership of its own name against a local Chinese firm, which …
Read More »Chinese court: iPhone brand isn’t ‘familiar or widely known’
In a legal ruling that seems bizarre considering how dominant Apple has been in court rooms over the past half decade, a Chinese judge has ruled that the iPhone brand isn't well known enough to stop someone else using it. The Xintong Tiandi company is now legally allowed to continue selling …
Read More »Apple’s iBooks and iTunes Movies stores shut down in China
Apple has found itself unable to sell both ebooks and films over in China, after a government regulator took issue with the iBooks and iTunes movie stores. Right now, it is being reported that China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television is behind the block on two …
Read More »Tencent founder makes $2 billion charity stock pledge
The CEO and co-founder of Tencent, parent company of game developers like Riot, has announced that he will donate 100 million of the company's shares to charity. The move is being hailed as one of the biggest philanthropic gestures in China's history and is estimated to be worth around $2 billion (£1.39 billion). …
Read More »1984 eat your heart out: China has gamified government loyalty
Ah China, such a wonderfully helpful tool in discussing impeaches of privacy and personal liberty. It's like the ball pit at the bottom of the slippery slope. The government there has created a tool that uses data collected from retailers, social networks and messaging applications, to rate a web user's …
Read More »AMD launches low-cost FX-6330 Black Edition CPU
It's been a long time since AMD offered a credibly performing alternative to Intel's high-end CPUs, but it's always had a good range of cost-effective options at the lower end and it's looking to continue that with its latest release. Although it hasn't arrived with much fanfare, AMD has now …
Read More »U.S. and China to run hacking ‘tabletop exercises’ to aid defence
Although the United States and China have been covertly trying to hack each other's digital systems for a long time at this point, it looks like the two cyber-super-powers are now going to be working together; a little. Following weeks of joint meetings, the countries are going to conduct what …
Read More »China to go after global chip market with £30 billion investment
Although China is perhaps most well known for producing low cost goods and emulating designs, it's also shown that with enough investment it can create some impressive products in its own right. Looking to bring that attitude to the processor game, state-owned Tsinghua Holdings is set to invest upwards of 300 …
Read More »Bitcoin pyramid scheme fuels 24 hour boom and bust
Since its peak a couple of years ago, the price of Bitcoin has jumped around within a relatively confined range of values, often settling between two and three hundred dollars. However in the past 48 hours, it's value has exploded, doubling almost overnight before starting to crash down again. This stupendous …
Read More »Genetically engineered ‘double muscle’ dogs born in China
Of all of the ways humans have attempted to alter the muscle mass of themselves and animals over the past hundred or so years, from exercise, to steroids to growth hormones, nothing has quite had the same effect as myostatin inhibitors. Removing that particular protein from an animal increases their …
Read More »Security firm claims China still hacking U.S. after Obama deal
Although the visit was a little tense at times, President Obama's meeting with the Chinese president Xi Jingping in September did achieve one thing: an agreement that neither the United States or China would use their digital assets to hack one another to steal corporate secrets and prop up domestic …
Read More »Pepsi is making a line of smartphones
There are tons of companies out there that have attempted to jump in to the smartphone market, we've had Amazon try it, we've had Facebook try it and now Pepsi is making its own line of Android smartphones. Yes its own line… as in more than one. The Pepsi-made smartphone …
Read More »SanDisk and Toshiba could be bought by government owned Tsinghua Unigroup
It looks like SanDisk and Toshiba could both be targets of a take over by the Chinese state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup, according to industry sources. SanDisk and Toshiba currently jointly create NAND flash technology, though each company currently sits on shaky ground as far as financials are concerned. In addition to …
Read More »China to start charging companies for pollution from 2017
China has revealed new plans designed to push back against pollution, by setting limits on the greenhouse gas emissions of companies and then charging them for going over that limit. The hope is that by discouraging companies from excessively polluting the environment, overall carbon emission levels will halve by 2030. …
Read More »China responds to U.S. intelligence call for more digital security
The topic of China and its continued tug of war with the United States on the digital battleground is a hot one at the moment. With Chinese president Xi Jinping set to meet with President Obama to discuss hacking and digital defences, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper has …
Read More »U.S. considering sanctioning Russia and China over hacking
The United States is said to be considering applying sanctions to both Russia and Chinese individuals and companies for conducting aggressive hacking attempts against U.S. targets, according to several unnamed U.S. officials. While no decision has been made one way or another just yet, they claim that the Obama administration …
Read More »U.S. secretary of state believes China, Russia read his emails
It turns out that we aren't the only ones assuming that every government out there is looking at our private communications; even high-ranking United States politicians don't feel safe from hackers and foreign actors. In a TV interview, current U.S. secretary of state and one-time presidential candidate, John Kerry, admitted …
Read More »Fake iPhone factory in China shut down
A factory in China responsible for producing over 40,000 fake iPhone handsets worth over £12 million in total has been shut down according to Beijing police, who shut down the operation this week. The raid resulted in the arrest of nine people, including a married couple who may have been …
Read More »China announces an end to console sale ban in country
Considering the buzz that's generated in Western countries when a new games console is launched, it seems strange to imagine a country as vast as China not joining in on that hype, but since the turn of the century, China has banned the sale and production of video game consoles …
Read More »US personnel data breach was far worse than we thought
When the White House's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was cracked wide open by some unknown actors earlier this year, it was thought that as many as 4.2 million people had had their records copied away. That included their medical histories, employment details and potentially confessions made to help them …
Read More »FBI wants encryption backdoor to combat ISIS
Another day, another leading public figure who's calling for the breaking of encryption so that it can effectively track terrorist organisations. This time it's the head of the FBI, James Comey, who said that his policing agency needed a “backdoor” to encryption standards so that the FBI could track the …
Read More »China’s new digital security laws could increase censorship
A new draft law being considered by Chinese parliament could increase the censorship of its internet even more, making information harder for average citizens – without the knowledge of proxies – to access. It's raising concerns among international businesses operating in the region too, as they would need to comply …
Read More »White House Personnel Management hack exposes sordid secrets
Earlier this month, we learned that hackers – possibly from China – had infiltrated the White House Office of Personnel Management and had copied documents on millions of government employees. While there were concerns that financial and employment data, possibly even security clearance information had been compromised, it's also shed …
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