Sony announced last month that it plans to pass control of its home entertainment division -- including the two-decade-old Bravia television brand -- to Chinese electronics group TCL through a joint venture in which TCL would hold a 51% stake. The Japanese company was long ago overtaken in sales by South Korea's Samsung and LG and now holds just 2% of the global television market. Sony stopped making its own LCD screens in 2011.

Chinese companies supplied 71% of television panels made in Asia last year, according to TCL, and less than 10% are now produced in Japan and Korea. TCL is close to overtaking Samsung as the world's largest television maker. Sony retains valuable intellectual property in image rendering, and the Bravia brand still carries consumer recognition, but its OLED screens are already supplied by Samsung and LG. The company has been shifting toward premium cameras, professional audio, and its entertainment businesses in film, music, and games -- areas where intellectual property is less exposed to Chinese manufacturing scale.

sinij writes:

Automakers have increasingly implemented door handles that retract into the bodywork for aerodynamic reasons, but they are now off limits in China.

My issue is with electronic-only door latch mechanism. It should be possible to open the door from both inside and outside the car in case of complete power loss.

The owners of Leica Camera AG -- Austrian billionaire Andreas Kaufmann and private equity giant Blackstone -- are considering a sale of a controlling stake in the German camera maker in a deal that could value the company at about $1.2 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

HSG, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, and Altor Equity Partners are among a handful of bidders. The Kaufmann family could re-invest following a transaction. Leica traces its roots roughly 150 years to Ernst Leitz's microscope company and was publicly traded on the Frankfurt stock exchange until the Kaufmann family took it private in 2012.

China's decades-old network of elite high-school "genius classes" -- ultra-competitive talent streams that pull an estimated 100,000 gifted teenagers out of regular schooling every year and run them through college-level science curricula -- has produced the core technical talent now building the country's leading AI and technology companies, the Financial Times reported Saturday.

Graduates of these programs include the founder of ByteDance, the leaders of e-commerce giants Taobao and PDD, the billionaire behind super-app Meituan, the brothers who started Nvidia rival Cambricon, and the core engineers behind large language models at DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen. DeepSeek's research team of more than 100 was almost entirely composed of genius-class alumni when the startup released its R1 reasoning model last year at a fraction of the cost of its international rivals.

The system traces to the mid-1980s, when China first sent students to the International Mathematical Olympiad and a handful of top high schools began creating dedicated competition-track classes. China now graduates around five million STEM majors annually -- compared to roughly half a million in the United States -- and in 2025, 22 of the 23 students it sent to the International Science Olympiads returned with gold medals. The computer science track has overtaken maths and physics as the most popular competition subject, a shift that accelerated after Beijing designated AI development a "key national growth strategy" in 2017.

The BBC reports: China has executed 11 members of a notorious mafia family that ran scam centres in Myanmar along its north-eastern border, state media report.

The Ming family members were sentenced in September for various crimes including homicide, illegal detention, fraud and operating gambling dens by a court in China's Zhejiang province. The Mings were one of many clans that ran the town of Laukkaing, transforming an impoverished backwater town into a flashy hub of casinos and red-light districts. Their scam empire came crashing down in 2023, when they were detained and handed over to China by ethnic militias that had taken control of Laukkaing during an escalation in their conflict with Myanmar's army. With these executions Beijing is sending a message of deterrence to would-be scammers.

But the business has now moved to Myanmar's border with Thailand, and to Cambodia and Laos, where China has much less influence.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia, according to estimates by the UN. Among them are thousands of Chinese people, and their victims who they swindle billions of dollars from are mainly Chinese too. Frustrated by the Myanmar military's refusal to stop the scam business, from which it was almost certainly profiting, Beijing tacitly backed an offensive by an ethnic insurgent alliance in Shan State in late 2023. The alliance captured significant territory from the military and overran Laukkaing, a key border town.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A former Google engineer has been found guilty on multiple federal charges for stealing the tech giant's trade secrets on artificial intelligence to benefit Chinese companies he secretly worked for, federal prosecutors said. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, a jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, following an 11-day trial. The 38-year-old, also known as Leon Ding, was hired by Google in 2019 and was a resident of Newark.

According to evidence presented at trial, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential information containing Google AI trade secrets between May 2022 and April 2023. He uploaded the information to his personal Google Cloud account. Around the same time, Ding secretly affiliated himself with two Chinese-based technology companies. Around June 2022, prosecutors said Ding was in discussions to be the chief technology officer for an early-stage tech company. Several months later, he was in the process of founding his own AI and machine learning company in China, acting as the company's CEO. Prosecutors said Ding told investors that he could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google's technology.

In late 2023, prosecutors said Ding downloaded the trade secrets to his own personal computer before resigning from Google. According to the superseding indictment, Google uncovered the uploads after finding out that Ding presented himself as CEO of one of the companies during an Beijing investor conference. Around the same time, Ding told his manager he was leaving the company and booked a one-way flight to Beijing. "Silicon Valley is at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation, pioneering transformative work that drives economic growth and strengthens our national security. The jury delivered a clear message today that the theft of this valuable technology will not go unpunished," U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Reuters: Fully electric car sales in December overtook petrol for the first time in the European Union, even as policymakers proposed to loosen emissions regulations, data showed on Tuesday. U.S. battery-electric brand Tesla continued to lose market share to competitors including China's BYD and Europe's best-selling group Volkswagen, data from the European auto lobby ACEA showed.

Car sales throughout Europe sustained a sixth straight month of year-on-year growth, with overall registrations, a proxy for sales, hitting their highest volumes in five years in Europe in 2025, though they remained well below pre-pandemic levels. [...] December registrations of battery electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid electric cars were up 51%, 36.7% and 5.8%, respectively, to account collectively for 67% of the bloc's registrations, up from 57.8% in December 2024.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday set their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight -- the closest the timepiece has ever been to the theoretical point of annihilation since scientists created it during the Cold War in 1947.

The clock now stands four seconds nearer than last year's setting, and this marks the third time in four years that the Bulletin has moved it closer to midnight. The Chicago-based nonprofit pointed to aggressive behavior by nuclear powers Russia, China and the United States, fraying nuclear arms control frameworks, ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, unregulated AI integration into military systems, and climate change.

"In terms of nuclear risks, nothing in 2025 trended in the right direction," said Alexandra Bell, the Bulletin's president and CEO. The last remaining nuclear arms pact between the US and Russia, the New START treaty, expires on February 5.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: China hacked the mobile phones of senior officials in Downing Street for several years, The Telegraph can disclose. The spying operation is understood to have compromised senior members of the government, exposing their private communications to Beijing. State-sponsored hackers are known to have targeted the phones of some of the closest aides to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak between 2021 and 2024. It is unclear whether the hack included the mobile phones of the prime ministers themselves, but one source with knowledge of the breach said it went "right into the heart of Downing Street."

Intelligence sources in the US indicated that the Chinese espionage operation, known as Salt Typhoon, was ongoing, raising the possibility that Sir Keir Starmer and his senior staff may also have been exposed. MI5 issued an "espionage alert" to Parliament in November about the threat of spying from the Chinese state. [...] The attack raises the possibility that Chinese spies could have read text messages or listened to calls involving senior members of the Government. Even if they were unable to eavesdrop on calls, hackers may have gained access to metadata, revealing who officials were in contact with and how frequently, as well as geolocation data showing their approximate whereabouts.

Slashdot reader Mr. Dollar Ton summarizes this article from Bloomberg: According to a new report from think tank "Ember", the availability of cheap green tech can have developing countries profit from earlier investment and skip steps in the transition from fossil to alternatives.

India is put forward as an example. While China's rapid electrification has been hailed as a miracle, by some measures, India is moving ahead faster than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development. It's an indication that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies.

That's mainly because India has access to solar panels and electric cars at a much lower price than China did about a decade ago. Chinese investments lowered the costs of what experts call "modular technologies" — the production of each solar panel, battery cell and electric car enables engineers to learn how to make it more efficiently.
The think tank's team even argues "that countries such as India, which don't have significant domestic fossil-fuel reserves, will become 'electrostates' that meet most of their energy needs through electricity generated from clean sources," according to the article: No country is an electrostate yet, [says Ember strategist Kingsmill Bond], but countries are increasingly turning to green electricity to power their economies. Nations that are less developed than India will see even more advantages as the cost of electricity technologies, from solar panels and electric vehicles to battery components and minerals, continue to fall.

Neither India nor China is going electric purely to cut emissions or meet climate targets, says Bond. They're doing so because it makes economic sense, particularly for India, which imports more than 40% of its primary energy in the form of coal, oil and gas, according to the International Energy Agency. "To grow and have energy independence, India needs to reduce the terrible burden of fossil-fuel imports worth $150 billion each year," said Bond. "India needs to find other solutions...."

[I]f countries like India find ways to grow electrotech manufacturing without absolute dependence on Chinese equipment, electrification could speed up further. With the U.S. and Europe continuing to add exclusions for Chinese-linked electrotech, countries like India will have an incentive to invest in their own manufacturing capacity. "We are probably at a moment of peak Chinese dominance in the electrotech system, as the rest of the world starts to wake up and realize that this is the energy future," he said.

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 efforts to rationalize pricing in the country's car market, and earlier this month a government ministry urged battery makers to curtail expansion and cutthroat competition.

The European Union imposed steep tariffs on Chinese EV imports in 2024 and is now considering replacing them with minimum import price agreements. Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney last week decided to allow 49,000 Chinese EVs annually at a 6.1% tariff rate, removing a 100% surtax. Germany announced this week that its $3.5 billion EV subsidy program will be open to all manufacturers including Chinese brands. Germany's environment minister Carsten Schneider dismissed concerns during a January 19 press conference: "I cannot see any evidence of this postulated major influx of Chinese car manufacturers in Germany, either in the figures or on the roads."

BYD registered an eightfold increase in sales in Germany last year and pulled ahead of Tesla, though Volkswagen still registered around 2,300 vehicles for every one BYD sold.

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 especially important with the bloc's alternative to Russian LNG -- Washington -- becoming increasingly unreliable and willing to weaponize economic tools. The US Commerce Secretary threw shade at the bloc's renewable push during Davos, warning that China uses net zero goals to make allies "subservient" by controlling battery and critical mineral supply chains.

Still, renewables now provide nearly half of EU power, with wind and solar outpacing all fossil sources in more than half of member countries. "The stakes of transitioning to clean energy are clearer than ever," the Ember report's author said.

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 linked to Apple. The specific company targeted, the scope of the breach, and its operational impact were unclear until now. The attack was first revealed on RansomHub's dark web leak site on December 15, 2025, where the group claimed it had encrypted internal Luxshare systems and exfiltrated large volumes of confidential data belonging to the company and its customers.

The attackers warned that the information would be publicly released unless Luxshare contacted them to negotiate, and accused the company of attempting to conceal the incident. According to the attackers' claims, the exfiltrated material includes vital files such as detailed 3D CAD product models and high-precision geometric files, 2D manufacturing drawings, mechanical component designs, circuit board layouts, and internal engineering PDFs. The group added that the large archives include Apple product data as well as information belonging to Nvidia, LG, Tesla, Geely, and other major clients.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under "defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users," the company said in a statement Thursday. American TikTok users can continue using the same app. [...] Adam Presser, who previously worked as TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, will lead the new venture as its CEO. He will work alongside a seven-member, majority-American board of directors that includes TikTok's CEO Shou Chew.

[...] In addition to an emphasis on data protection, with U.S. user data being stored locally in a system run by Oracle, the joint venture will also focus on TikTok's algorithm. The content recommendation formula, which feeds users specific videos tailored to their preferences and interests, will be retrained, tested and updated on U.S. user data, the company said in its announcement. The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties -- specifically the algorithm -- with ByteDance. Under the terms of this deal, ByteDance would license the algorithm to the U.S. entity for retraining.

The law prohibits "any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm" between ByteDance and a new potential American ownership group, so it is unclear how ByteDance's continued involvement in this arrangement will play out. Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX are the three managing investors, who each hold a 15% share. Other investors include the investment firm of Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies. ByteDance retains 19.9% of the joint venture.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it's time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be "bamboo-ready" as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.

Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda international airport in Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world's first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo.

At the Green School in Bali, a bamboo-made arc serves as the gymnasium and a striking example of how the material is reshaping sustainable architecture. The use of composite bamboo shear walls have proved to be resilient against earthquakes and extreme weather in countries such as Colombia and the Philippines, where sustainable, disaster-resilient housing has been built with locally sourced materials.

Claims that Chinese technology for AI lags the US are a "fairy tale," Arthur Mensch, the chief executive officer of Mistral, said. From a report: "China is not behind the West," Mensch said in an interview on Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday. The capabilities of China's open-source technology is "probably stressing the CEOs in the US."

The remarks from the boss of one of Europe's leading AI companies diverge from other tech leaders at Davos, who reassured lawmakers and business chiefs that China is behind the cutting edge by months or years.

How would Sony ceding control of its TV hardware business change the industry? The Verge has an optimistic take: [...] As of today, Sony already relies on different manufacturing partners to create its TV lineup. While display panel manufacturers never reveal who they sell panels to, Sony is likely already using panels for its LCD TVs from TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT), in addition to OLED panels from LG Display and Samsung Display. With this deal, a relationship between Sony and TCL CSOT LCD panels is guaranteed (although I doubt this would affect CSOT selling panels to other manufacturers). And with TCL CSOT building a new OLED facility, there's a potential future in which Sony OLEDs will also get panels from TCL. Although I should point out that we're not sure yet if the new facility will have the ability to make TV-sized OLED panels, at least to start.

[...] There's some concern from fans that this could lead to a Sharp, Toshiba, or Pioneer situation where the names are licensed and the TVs produced are a shell of what the brands used to represent. I don't see this happening with Sony. While the electronics side of the business hasn't been as strong as in the past, Sony -- and Bravia -- is still a storied brand. It would take a lot for Sony to completely step aside and allow another company to slap its name on an inferior product. And based on TCL's growth and technological improvements over the past few years, and the shrinking gap between premium and midrange TVs, I don't expect Sony TVs will suffer from a partnership with TCL.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Just 32 companies accounted for over half of global fossil carbon emissions in 2024, according to a report published Wednesday by the U.K.-based think tank InfluenceMap. That is down from 36 companies responsible for half the global CO2 emissions in 2023, and 38 companies five years ago. The analysis is the latest update to the Carbon Majors database, which tracks the world's largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers and uses production data to calculate the carbon emissions from each entity's production. The database, first developed by researcher Richard Heede and now hosted by InfluenceMap, quantifies current and historical emissions attributable to nearly 180 companies and provides annual updates. It is the only database of its kind tracking corporate-generated carbon emissions dating back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, research that's being used in efforts to hold major polluters accountable for climate harms.

Despite dire warnings from scientists about the consequences of accelerating climate change, fossil fuel production is continuing apace. Last year, fossil fuel CO2 emissions reached a record high, topping 38 billion metric tons. In 2024 these emissions were 37.4 billion metric tons -- up 0.8 percent from 2023 -- and traceable to 166 oil, gas, coal and cement producers, according to the report. Much of the global carbon emissions in 2024 came from state-owned entities, which represented 16 of the top 20 emitters. The five largest emitters overall -- Saudi Arabia's Aramco, Coal India, China's CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Co. and Russia's Gazprom -- were all state-controlled, and accounted for 18 percent of the total fossil CO2 emissions in 2024.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP -- the top five emitting investor-owned companies -- together were responsible for 5.5 percent of the total emissions in that year. Historically, ExxonMobil and Chevron rank in the top five for fossil carbon emissions generated from 1854 through 2024, accounting for 2.79 percent and 3.08 percent of overall carbon pollution, respectively. According to the analysis, the 178 entities in the database have generated 70 percent of fossil CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and just 22 entities are responsible for one-third of these emissions. "Each year, global emissions become increasingly concentrated among a shrinking group of high-emitting producers, while overall production continues to grow. Simultaneously, these heavy emitters continue to use lobbying to obstruct a transition that the scientific community has known for decades is essential," said Emmett Connaire, senior analyst at InfluenceMap. The findings of the new analysis, he added, "underscore the growing importance of this kind of rigorous evidence in efforts to determine accountability for climate-related losses."

Just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half the global carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024, down from 36 a year earlier, a report has revealed. The Guardian: Saudi Aramco was the biggest state-controlled polluter and ExxonMobil was the largest investor-owned polluter. Critics accused the leading fossil fuel companies of "sabotaging climate action" and "being on the wrong side of history" but said the emissions data was increasingly being used to hold the companies accountable.

State-owned fossil fuel producers made up 17 of the top 20 emitters in the Carbon Majors report, which the authors said underscored the political barriers to tackling global heating. All 17 are controlled by countries that opposed a proposed fossil fuel phaseout at the Cop30 UN climate summit in December, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and India. More than 80 other nations had backed the phaseout plan.

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who served three years in prison after creating the world's first gene-edited babies in 2018, is now preparing for another attempt at germline editing -- this time to prevent Alzheimer's disease. In an interview, He said he has established an independent lab in south Beijing and raised $7 million from private donors to fund research into introducing a protective genetic mutation found in Icelandic populations.

The three girls born from his original experiment are now in primary school and healthy, according to He. Since germline editing remains banned in China, He said he plans to conduct future human trials in South Africa and has already spoken with contacts there. He estimates he needs two more years to complete mouse and monkey studies before seeking regulatory approval abroad. He said his lab is developing techniques to make 12 simultaneous genetic edits in a single embryo, targeting genes associated with cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV, and other conditions. He is currently working on human cell lines and has not yet begun embryo experiments.