
Is China quietly winning the AI race?
The BBC’s Lily Jamali looks into why big US firms and start-ups alike are turning to Chinese tech.
SATURDAY, 24 JANUARY 2026, 20:45

The BBC’s Lily Jamali looks into why big US firms and start-ups alike are turning to Chinese tech.

On this episode of Uncanny Valley, our hosts unpack the news from Davos, where Trump and major AI companies shared the stage at the World Economic Forum.

The ruling in federal court in Minnesota lands as Immigration and Customs Enforcement faces scrutiny over an internal memo claiming judge-signed warrants aren’t needed to enter homes without consent.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device...

According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto’s electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit...
Global hiring remains 20% below pre-pandemic levels and job switching has hit a 10-year low, according to a LinkedIn report, and new university graduates are bearing the brunt of a labor market that increasingly favors experienced candidates over fresh talent. In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers found that graduate hiring fell 8% in the last academic year and employers now receive 140...

Bitter cold, power outages, and impassible roads are a terrible cocktail. Here’s how to prep and bunker in for an extreme winter storm.
An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. That’s nearly three times the maximum for...
After years of Western governments raising alarms about Chinese automotive overcapacity and erecting tariff barriers, an unexpected pivot is now underway as major economies cautiously open their markets to Chinese electric vehicles, Bloomberg writes. Beijing itself has started acknowledging the problem at home. Chinese regulators last week warned of “severe penalties” for automakers defying...

These excellent earbuds were already a good deal before the discount.

iQmetrix, the only global provider of Interconnected Commerce solutions for telecom retail, today announced its return to Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona with the first-ever Telecom Retail Summit.
Wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels last year as a source of electricity in the EU for the first time, a new report found. Semafor adds: The milestone was hit largely thanks to a rise in solar power, which generated a record 13% of electricity in the EU, according to Ember. Together, wind and solar hit 30% of EU electricity generation, edging out fossil fuels at 29%. The shift is...

Authorities ousted state mobile operator MTN Irancell’s chief executive officer without informing MTN Group.
A Toronto man posed as a pilot for years in order to fool airlines into giving him hundreds of free flights, prosecutors have alleged, in a case that has prompted comparisons to the Hollywood thriller Catch Me If You Can. From a report: Authorities in Hawaii announced this week that Dallas Pokornik, 33, had been charged with wire fraud after he allegedly fooled three major US carriers into...
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China’s Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen. It was reported in December that one of Apple’s assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line information and manufacturing data...

US Customs and Border Protection is paying General Dynamics to create prototype “quantum sensors,” to be used with an AI database to detect fentanyl and other narcotics.
Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT’s “data consent” option in August to test whether the AI tool’s functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently deleted and his project folders emptied without...

For much of crypto’s history, success was measured by one thing: price. Buy early, hold through volatility, and wait for the next cycle to do the work. That approach built fortunes, but in 2026, it is no longer enough for a growing number of investors. The crypto market has matured. Sharp rallies still happen, but […]

TikTok’s new age-detection tech seems like a better solution than automatically banning youth accounts. But experts say it still requires social platforms to surveil users more closely.
Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company’s own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have taken it, and dozens now work at...