Latest posts

  • Inside China’s robotics revolution

    How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? I visited 11 companies in five Chinese cities to find out Chen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but…

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  • Fake rooms, props and a script to lure victims: inside an abandoned Cambodia scam centre

    Sprawling compound, including mock-up banks and police offices, uncovered by Thai military during border clashes It is as if you have walked into a branch of one of Vietnam’s banks. A row of customer service desks, divided by plastic screens, with landline phones, promotional leaflets and staff business cards. A seated waiting area and a…

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  • X suspends 800m accounts in one year amid ‘massive’ scale of manipulation attempts

    Social media company tells MPs of continual fight against state-backed efforts, with Russia being most prolific Elon Musk’s X said it had suspended 800m accounts over a 12-month period as it fights the “massive” scale of attempts to manipulate the platform. The social media company told MPs it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack…

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  • Indonesia to ban social media for children under 16

    Platforms include YouTube, TikTok and Instagram as communication minister says ‘our children face real threats’ Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, its communication and digital affairs minister said on Friday. Meutya Hafid said in a statement to media said that she signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age…

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  • China’s dancing robots: how worried should we be?

    Eye-catching martial arts performance at China gala had viewers and experts wondering what else humanoids can do Dancing humanoid robots took centre stage on Monday during the annual China Media Group’s Spring Festival Gala, China’s most-watched official television broadcast. They lunged and backflipped (landing on their knees), they spun around and jumped. Not one fell…

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  • Indonesia blocks Musk’s Grok chatbot due to risk of pornographic content

    Move comes after governments and regulators from Europe to Asia have condemned the AI tool and some have opened inquiries into sexualised content Indonesia temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot on Saturday due to the risk of AI-generated pornographic content, becoming the first country to deny access to the AI tool. The move comes after…

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  • UK Foreign Office victim of cyber-attack in October, says Chris Bryant

    Minister says ‘any individual’ at low risk from hack, while Sun reports Chinese cyber gang responsible for breach The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was hacked in October, the minister Chris Bryant has said. Bryant, a trade minister in Keir Starmer’s government, told Sky News there was a low risk to “any individual” from…

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  • TikTok signs Trump-backed deal to avoid US ban

    Joint venture will take over part of app’s US operations, including data protection, algorithm security and content moderation Business live – latest updates US politics live – latest updates TikTok has reached a deal to form a joint venture that will allow it to continue operating in the US, five years after Donald Trump threatened…

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  • Foreign interference or opportunistic grifting: why are so many pro-Trump X accounts based in Asia?

    A new feature on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter allows users to see the location of other accounts. It has resulted in a firestorm of recriminations When X rolled out a new feature revealing the locations of popular accounts, the company was acting to boost transparency and clamp down on disinformation. The…

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  • AI firm claims it stopped Chinese state-sponsored cyber-attack campaign

    Anthropic says financial firms and government agencies were attacked ‘largely without human intervention’ A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed “cyber espionage” campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight. The US-based Anthropic said its coding tool, Claude Code, was “manipulated” by a…

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