A Restaurant in China Where Wood Behaves Like a Forest

A Restaurant in China Where Wood Behaves Like a Forest

The first thing you notice about the Lakeside Restaurant at Silk Road Friendship Park in Dingzhou, China, is that the building doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t shout or compete. It simply arrives at the water’s edge like it’s always been there, wooden columns branching upward like trees that never needed permission to grow. Completed in…

Read More
Chinese brain interface startup Gestala raises M just two months after launch

Chinese brain interface startup Gestala raises $21M just two months after launch

Elon Musk’s Neuralink and OpenAI-backed Merge Labs are pushing forward with brain–computer interface (BCI) technology in the U.S. Meanwhile, Chinese serial entrepreneur Phoenix Peng is building rival efforts through two startups: NeuroXess, which develops implantable BCI systems, and a second company, Gestala, developing non-invasive ultrasound-based BCIs. Gestala has raised $21.6 million (CN¥150 million) just two…

Read More
An iPhone-hacking toolkit used by Russian spies likely came from U.S military contractor

An iPhone-hacking toolkit used by Russian spies likely came from U.S military contractor

A mass hacking campaign targeting iPhone users in Ukraine and China used tools that were likely designed by U.S. military contractor L3Harris, TechCrunch has learned. The tools, which were intended for Western spies, wound up in the hands of various hacking groups, including Russian government spooks and Chinese cybercriminals. Last week, Google revealed that over…

Read More
VPN flaws allowed Chinese hackers to compromise dozens of Ivanti customers, says report

VPN flaws allowed Chinese hackers to compromise dozens of Ivanti customers, says report

In February 2021, software giant Ivanti discovered that Chinese hackers had breached the network of Pulse Secure, one of its subsidiaries that provided VPN appliances to dozens of companies and government agencies around the world, according to new reporting by Bloomberg. The hackers exploited a secret backdoor they had planted in Pulse Secure’s VPN software,…

Read More
China’s brain-computer interface industry is racing ahead

China’s brain-computer interface industry is racing ahead

While Elon Musk’s Neuralink likes to say it’s “pioneering” brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), China’s BCI industry is already quietly moving from research to scale. A new wave of startups is racing to commercialize both implantable and noninvasive BCIs, backed by stronger policy support, expanding clinical trials, and growing investor interest. So says Phoenix Peng, who has…

Read More