Commentary: Samsung’s next big foldable phone needs a bigger cover screen and more software capabilities that make use of its foldable form.
SCI-TECH
Breville Joule Turbo review: sous vide with speed
Sous vide cooking can produce perfect meats every time, but it takes a long time to do so. Breville’s new Joule Turbo can pull the same tricks in as little as half the time.
India’s Byju’s to cut up to 1,000 more jobs
Byju’s is cutting 500 to 1,000 more jobs at the firm, this time eliminating several non-sales roles as well, as the Indian edtech giant pushes to improve its finances, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, which has cut over 3,000 jobs in the past one year, declined to comment.
The new wave of layoff is aimed at improving the finances, the person familiar with the matter said, requesting anonymity discussing nonpublic matters.
India’s Byju’s to cut up to 1,000 more jobs by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
Let’s demystify the life-changing physics of electricity
To the uninitiated, electricity might seem like a sort of hidden magic. It plays by laws of physics we can’t necessarily perceive with our eyes.
But most of our lives run on electricity. Anyone who has ever lived through a power outage knows how inconvenient it is. On a broader level, it’s hard to understate just how vital the flow of electricity is to powering the functions of modern society.
“If I lose electricity, I lose telecommunications. I lose the financial sector. I lose water treatment. I can’t milk the cows. I can’t refrigerate food,” says Mark Petri, an electrical grid researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
[Related: How to save electricity this summer]
Which makes it all the more important to know how electricity works, where it comes from, and how it gets to our homes.
How does electricity work?
The universe as we know it is governed by four fundamental forces: the strong nuclear force (which holds subatomic particles together inside atoms), the weak nuclear force (which guides some types of radioactivity), gravity, and electromagnetism (which governs the intrinsically linked concepts of electricity and magnetism).
One of electromagnetism’s key tenets is that the subatomic particles that make up the cosmos can have either a positive or negative charge. To use them as a form of energy, we have to make them flow as electric current. The electricity we have on Earth is mostly from the movement of negatively charged electrons.
But it takes more than a charge to keep electrons flowing. The particles don’t travel far before they run into an obstacle, such as a neighboring atom. That means electricity needs a material whose atoms have loose electrons, which can be knocked away to conduct keep the current going. This type of material is known as a conductor. Most metals have conductive qualities, such as the copper that forms a lot of electrical wires.
Other materials, called insulators, have far more tightly bound electrons that aren’t easily pushed around. The plastic that coats most wires is an insulator, which is why you don’t get a nasty shock when you touch a cord or plug.
Some scientists and engineers think of electricity as a bit like water streaming through a pipe. The volume of water passing through a pipe section at a given time compares to the number of electrons flowing through a particular strand of wire, which scientists measure in amps. The water pressure that helps to push the fluid through is like the electrical voltage. When you multiply amps by volts, you compute the power or the amount of energy passing through the wire every second, which electricians measure in watts. The wattage of your microwave, then, is approximately the amount of electrical energy it uses per second.
How electrons carry voltage through wires
Based on the law of electromagnetism, if a wire is caught in a magnetic field and that magnetic field shifts, it induces an electric current in the wire. This is why most of the world’s electricity is born from generators, which are typically rotating magnetic apparatuses. As a generator spins, it sends electricity shooting through a wire coiled around it.
[Related: The best electric generators for your home]
Powering a whole city calls for a colossal generator, potentially the size of a building. But it takes energy to make energy from that generator. In most fossil fuel and nuclear plants, the fuel source boils water into steam, which causes turbines to spin their respective generators. Hydro and wind generators take advantage of nature’s own motion, redirecting water or gusts of wind to do the spinning. Solar panels, meanwhile, work differently because they don’t need moving magnets at all. When light strikes a solar cell, it excites the electrons within the atoms of the material, causing them to flow out in a current.
It’s easier to transfer energy with lots of volts and fewer amps. As such, long-distance power lines use thousands of volts to carry electricity away from power plants. That’s far too high for most buildings, so power grids rely on substations to lower the voltage for regular outlets and home electronics. North American buildings typically set their voltage to 120 volts; most of the rest of the world uses between 220 and 240 volts.
Current also doesn’t flow one way—instead, it constantly switches direction back and forth, which engineers call alternating current. This enables it to travel stretches of up to several thousands of miles. North American wires flip from one current direction to the other 60 times every second. In other parts of the globe, particularly in Europe and Africa, they alternate back and forth 50 times every second.
That brings the current to your building’s breaker box. But how does that power actually get to your electronic devices?
[Related: Why you need an uninterruptible power supply]
To keep a continuous flow of electricity, a system needs a complete circuit. Buildings everywhere are wired with incomplete circuits. A two-hole socket contains one “live” wire and one “neutral” wire. When you plug in a lamp, kitchen appliance, or phone charger, you’re completing that circuit, allowing electricity to flow from the live wire, through the device, and back through the neutral wire to deliver energy.
Put another way, if you stick a finger into a live socket, you’re temporarily completing the circuit with your body (somewhat painfully).
The future of electricity
Not long ago, electricity was still a luxury. In the late 1990s, nearly one-third of the world’s population lived in homes without electrical access. We’ve since cut that proportion by more than half—but nearly a billion people, mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, still don’t have a current.
Historically, almost all electricity started at large power plants and ended at homes and businesses. But the transition to renewable energy is altering that process. On average, solar and wind farms are smaller than hulking coal plants and dams. On rainy and calm days, giant batteries can back them up with stored power.
“What we have been seeing, and what we can expect to see in the future, is a major evolution of the grid,” says Petri.
[Related: Why hasn’t Henry Ford’s power grid become a reality?]
The infrastructure we build around electricity makes a difference, both for the health of the planet and people. In 2020, only 39 percent of the world’s electricity came from clean sources like nuclear and hydro, compared to CO2-emitting fossil fuels.
Fortunately, there is plenty of reason for optimism. By some accounts, solar power is now the cheapest energy source in human history, with wind power not far behind. Moreover, a growing number of utility users are installing rooftop solar panels, solar generators, heat pumps, and the like. “People’s homes are not just taking power from the grid,” says Petri. “They’re putting power back on the grid. It’s a much more complex system.”
The laws of electricity don’t change depending on where we choose to draw our current from. But the consequences of our decisions on how to use that power do matter.
The post Let’s demystify the life-changing physics of electricity appeared first on Popular Science.
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An eating disorder chatbot that gave harmful advice was taken offline. Now it’s coming back.
This article originally published on KFF Health News.
For more than 20 years, the National Eating Disorders Association has operated a phone line and online platform for people seeking help for anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders. Last year, nearly 70,000 individuals used the help line.
NEDA shuttered that service in May, saying that, in its place, a chatbot called Tessa, designed by eating disorder experts with funding from NEDA, would be deployed.
When NPR aired a report about this last month, Tessa was up and running online. Since then, both the chatbot’s page and a NEDA article about Tessa have been taken down. When asked why, NEDA said the bot is being “updated,” and the latest “version of the current program [will be] available soon.”
Then NEDA announced on May 30 that it was indefinitely disabling Tessa. Patients, families, doctors, and other experts on eating disorders were stunned. The episode has set off a fresh wave of debate as companies turn to artificial intelligence as a possible solution for a mental health crisis and treatment shortage.
Paid staffers and volunteers for the NEDA help line said that replacing the service with a chatbot could further isolate the thousands of people who use it when they feel they have nowhere else to turn.
“These young kids … don’t feel comfortable coming to their friends or their family or anybody about this,” said Katy Meta, a 20-year-old college student who has volunteered for the help line. “A lot of these individuals come on multiple times because they have no other outlet to talk with anybody. … That’s all they have, is the chat line.”
The decision is part of a larger trend: Many mental health organizations and companies are struggling to provide services and care in response to a sharp escalation in demand, and some are turning to chatbots and AI, even though clinicians are still trying to figure out how to effectively deploy them, and for what conditions.
The help line’s five staffers formally notified their employer they had formed a union in March. Just a few days later, on a March 31 call, NEDA informed them that they would be laid off in June. NPR and KFF Health News obtained audio of the call. “We will, subject to the terms of our legal responsibilities, [be] beginning to wind down the help line as currently operating,” NEDA board chair Geoff Craddock told them, “with a transition to Tessa, the AI-assisted technology, expected around June 1.”
NEDA’s leadership denies the decision had anything to do with the unionization but told NPR and KFF Health News it became necessary because of the covid-19 pandemic, when eating disorders surged and the number of calls, texts, and messages to the help line more than doubled.
The increase in crisis-level calls also raises NEDA’s legal liability, managers explained in an email sent March 31 to current and former volunteers, informing them that the help line was ending and that NEDA would “begin to pivot to the expanded use of AI-assisted technology.”
“What has really changed in the landscape are the federal and state requirements for mandated reporting for mental and physical health issues (self-harm, suicidality, child abuse),” according to the email, which NPR and KFF Health News obtained. “NEDA is now considered a mandated reporter and that hits our risk profile — changing our training and daily work processes and driving up our insurance premiums. We are not a crisis line; we are a referral center and information provider.”
Pandemic created a ‘perfect storm’ for eating disorders
When it was time for a volunteer shift on the help line, Meta usually logged in from her dorm room at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
Meta recalled a recent conversation on the help line’s messaging platform with a girl who said she was 11. The girl said she had just confessed to her parents that she was struggling with an eating disorder, but the conversation had gone badly.
“The parents said that they ‘didn’t believe in eating disorders’ and [told their daughter], ‘You just need to eat more. You need to stop doing this,’” Meta recalled. “This individual was also suicidal and exhibited traits of self-harm as well. … It was just really heartbreaking to see.”
Eating disorders are common, serious, and sometimes fatal illnesses. An estimated 9 percent of Americans experience an eating disorder during their lifetimes. Eating disorders also have some of the highest mortality rates among mental illnesses, with an estimated death toll of more than 10,000 Americans each year.
But after covid hit, closing schools and forcing people into prolonged isolation, crisis calls and messages like the one Meta describes became far more frequent on the help line.
In the U.S., the rate of pediatric hospitalizations and ER visits surged. On the NEDA help line, client volume increased by more than 100 percent compared with pre-pandemic levels.
“Eating disorders thrive in isolation, so covid and shelter-in-place was a tough time for a lot of folks struggling,” explained Abbie Harper, who has worked as a help line associate.
Until a few weeks ago, the help line was run by just five to six paid staffers and two supervisors, and it depended on a rotating roster of 90-165 volunteers at any given time, according to NEDA.
Yet even after lockdowns ended, NEDA’s help line volume remained elevated above pre-pandemic levels, and the cases continued to be clinically severe. Staffers felt overwhelmed, undersupported, and increasingly burned out, and turnover increased, according to multiple interviews.
The help line staff formally notified NEDA that their unionization vote had been certified on March 27. Four days later, they learned their positions were being eliminated.
“Our volunteers are volunteers,” said Lauren Smolar, NEDA’s vice president of mission and education. “They’re not professionals. They don’t have crisis training. And we really can’t accept that kind of responsibility.” Instead, she said, people seeking crisis help should be reaching out to resources like 988, a 24/7 suicide and crisis hotline that connects people with trained counselors.
The surge in volume also meant the help line was unable to respond immediately to 46 percent of initial contacts, and it could take six to 11 days to respond to messages.
“And that’s frankly unacceptable in 2023, for people to have to wait a week or more to receive the information that they need, the specialized treatment options that they need,” Smolar said.
After learning in the March 31 email that the helpline would be phased out, volunteer Faith Fischetti, 22, tried out the chatbot on her own, asking it some of the more frequent questions she gets from users. But her interactions with Tessa were not reassuring: “[The bot] gave links and resources that were completely unrelated” to her questions, she said.
Fischetti’s biggest worry is that someone coming to the NEDA site for help will leave because they “feel that they’re not understood, and feel that no one is there for them. And that’s the most terrifying thing to me.”
A chatbot can miss red flags
Tessa the chatbot was created to help a specific cohort: people with eating disorders who never receive treatment.
Only 20 percent of people with eating disorders get formal help, according to Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft, a psychologist and associate professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Her team created Tessa after receiving funding from NEDA in 2018, with the goal of looking for ways technology could help fill the treatment gap.
NEDA said Tessa was supposed to be a “rule-based” chatbot, meaning one that is programmed with a limited set of possible responses. It is not ChatGPT and cannot generate unique answers in response to specific queries. “So she can’t go off the rails, so to speak,” Fitzsimmons-Craft said.
The plan was for Tessa to guide users through an interactive, weeks-long course about body positivity, based on cognitive behavioral therapy tools. Additional content about bingeing, weight concerns, and regular eating was under development but not yet available to users.
There’s evidence the AI approach can help. Fitzsimmons-Craft’s team did a small study that found college students who interacted with Tessa had significantly greater reductions in “weight/shape concerns” than a control group at three- and six-month follow-ups.
But even the best-intentioned technology can carry risks. Fitzsimmons-Craft’s team published a different study looking at ways the chatbot “unexpectedly reinforced harmful behaviors at times.” For example, the chatbot would give users a prompt: “Please take a moment to write about when you felt best about your body?”
Responses included: “When I was underweight and could see my bones.” “I feel best about my body when I ignore it and don’t think about it at all.”
The chatbot seemed to ignore the troubling aspects of such responses — and even to affirm negative thinking — when it would reply: “It is awesome that you can recognize a moment when you felt confident in your skin, let’s keep working on making you feel this good more often.”
Researchers were able to troubleshoot some of those issues. But the chatbot still missed red flags, the study found, such as when it asked: “What is a small healthy eating habit goal you would like to set up before you start your next conversation?”
One user replied, “Don’t eat.”
“Take a moment to pat yourself on the back for doing this hard work, <>!” the chatbot responded.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology assistant professor Marzyeh Ghassemi has seen issues like this crop up in her own research developing machine learning to improve health.
Large language models and chatbots will inevitably make mistakes, but “sometimes they tend to be wrong more often for certain groups, like women and minorities,” she said.
If people receive bad advice or instructions from a bot, “people sometimes have a difficulty not listening to it,” Ghassemi added. “I think it sets you up for this really negative outcome … especially for a mental health crisis situation, where people may be at a point where they’re not thinking with absolute clarity. It’s very important that the information that you give them is correct and is helpful to them.”
And if the value of the live help line was the ability to connect with a real person who deeply understands eating disorders, Ghassemi said, a chatbot can’t do that.
“If people are experiencing a majority of the positive impact of these interactions because the person on the other side understands fundamentally the experience they’re going through, and what a struggle it’s been, I struggle to understand how a chatbot could be part of that.”
Tessa goes ‘off the rails’
When Sharon Maxwell heard NEDA was promoting Tessa as “a meaningful prevention resource” for those struggling with eating disorders, she wanted to try it out.
Maxwell, based in San Diego, had struggled for years with an eating disorder that began in childhood. She now works as a consultant in the eating disorder field. “Hi, Tessa,” she typed into the online text box. “How do you support folks with eating disorders?”
Tessa rattled off a list of ideas, including resources for “healthy eating habits.” Alarm bells immediately went off in Maxwell’s head. She asked Tessa for details. Before long, the chatbot was giving her tips on losing weight — ones that sounded an awful lot like what she’d been told when she was put on Weight Watchers at age 10.
“The recommendations that Tessa gave me were that I could lose 1 to 2 pounds per week, that I should eat no more than 2,000 calories in a day, that I should have a calorie deficit of 500-1,000 calories per day,” Maxwell said. “All of which might sound benign to the general listener. However, to an individual with an eating disorder, the focus of weight loss really fuels the eating disorder.”
NEDA blamed the chatbot’s issues on Cass, the mental health chatbot company that operated Tessa as a free service. Cass had changed Tessa without NEDA’s awareness or approval, said NEDA CEO Liz Thompson, enabling the chatbot to generate new answers beyond what Tessa’s creators had intended.
Cass’ founder and CEO, Michiel Rauws, said the changes to Tessa were made last year as part of a “systems upgrade,” including an “enhanced question-and-answer feature.” That feature uses generative artificial intelligence — meaning it gives the chatbot the ability to use new data and create new responses.
That change was part of NEDA’s contract, Rauws said.
But Thompson disagrees. She told NPR and KFF Health News that “NEDA was never advised of these changes and did not and would not have approved them.”
“The content some testers received relative to diet culture and weight management, [which] can be harmful to those with eating disorders, is against NEDA policy, and would never have been scripted into the chatbot by eating disorders experts,” she said.
Complaints about Tessa started last year
NEDA was aware of issues with the chatbot months before Maxwell’s interactions with Tessa in late May.
In October 2022, NEDA passed along screenshots from Monika Ostroff, executive director of the Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association in Massachusetts. They showed Tessa telling Ostroff to avoid “unhealthy” foods and eat only “healthy” snacks, like fruit.
“It’s really important that you find what healthy snacks you like the most, so if it’s not a fruit, try something else!” Tessa told Ostroff. “So the next time you’re hungry between meals, try to go for that instead of an unhealthy snack like a bag of chips. Think you can do that?”
Ostroff said this was a clear example of the chatbot encouraging “diet culture” mentality. “That meant that they [NEDA] either wrote these scripts themselves, they got the chatbot and didn’t bother to make sure it was safe and didn’t test it, or released it and didn’t test it,” she said.
The healthy-snack language was quickly removed after Ostroff reported it. But Rauws said that language was part of Tessa’s “pre-scripted language, and not related to generative AI.”
Fitzsimmons-Craft said her team didn’t write it, that it “was not something our team designed Tessa to offer and that it was not part of the rule-based program we originally designed.”
Then, earlier this year, “a similar event happened as another example,” Rauws said.
“This time it was around our enhanced question-and-answer feature, which leverages a generative model. When we got notified by NEDA that an answer text it provided fell outside their guidelines,” it was addressed right away, he said.
Rauws said he can’t provide more details about what this event entailed.
“This is another earlier instance, and not the same instance as over the Memorial Day weekend,” he said via email, referring to Maxwell’s interactions with Tessa. “According to our privacy policy, this is related to user data tied to a question posed by a person, so we would have to get approval from that individual first.”
When asked about this event, Thompson said she doesn’t know what instance Rauws is referring to.
Both NEDA and Cass have issued apologies.
Ostroff said that regardless of what went wrong, the impact on someone with an eating disorder is the same. “It doesn’t matter if it’s rule-based or generative, it’s all fat-phobic,” she said. “We have huge populations of people who are harmed by this kind of language every day.”
She also worries about what this might mean for the tens of thousands of people turning to NEDA’s help line each year.
Thompson said NEDA still offers numerous resources for people seeking help, including a screening tool and resource map, and is developing new online and in-person programs.
“We recognize and regret that certain decisions taken by NEDA have disappointed members of the eating disorders community,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “Like all other organizations focused on eating disorders, NEDA’s resources are limited and this requires us to make difficult choices. … We always wish we could do more and we remain dedicated to doing better.”
This article is from a partnership that includes Michigan Radio, NPR, and KFF Health News.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
The post An eating disorder chatbot that gave harmful advice was taken offline. Now it’s coming back. appeared first on Popular Science.
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How Generative AI Helps Bring Big Design Ideas to Life – CNET
Commentary: Generative AI can help democratize 3D design, but it won’t replace skilled artistry anytime soon.
Best OTA DVR for Cord Cutting – CNET
Free TV just got better. Here are our top picks for devices that pause, record and stream free over-the-air television with an antenna.
PayGo solar startup Yellow raises $14 million to scale in africa
Yellow, an asset financier for solar energy and digital devices in Africa has raised $14 million series B funding in a round led by Convergence Partners with participation from the Energy Entrepreneurs Growth Fund, managed by Triple Jump, in addition to follow-on investment from Platform Investment Partners.
Yellow was founded and launched in Malawi in 2018 by Mike Heyink and Maya Stewart, to initially bring solar energy to the country, which is among those with the lowest access to electricity in the world. It has since grown its footprint across Africa and increased its product offering to include electronics like smartphones.
Following the new funding, Yellow plans to deepen its reach in its current markets Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Madagascar, launch digital and financial products in near-term, and prepare for future debt funding rounds to ramp up its growth. The new round brings total equity funding raised by Yellow to $45 million.
“The newly injected capital is being used to leverage more debt finance to reach more customers with financed smartphones and solar systems. While the business will broaden its product offering to include other mobile financial services, growth will be fueled primarily by deepening our expertise in our existing product categories,” said Yellow founder and CEO, Heyink.
Yellow claims to be profitable having recorded a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 265% over the last four-year period. The startup says its network of 1100 agents, who source and make applications for the asset finance on behalf of customers through its proprietary Ofeefee app, have enabled it to penetrate and reach over 400,000 customers in its five markets.
The startup’s small home solar system, comprising a 6W-10W panel, 20-50Wh battery, 4 lights, cellphone charger and radio, remains its most popular product. It also sells solar systems with bigger capacities, and smartphones.
For the small and large solar home systems, users pay a deposit of $10, and $68 respectively, and remit the balance through monthly payments spread over six and 24 months.
“It’s incredibly exciting to see the early stages of sustained growth in Africa. The team at Yellow is thrilled to be on the multi-decade journey with the African consumer, to a better life. We have a front-row seat to witness millions of people prospering as a result of joining the digital global economy for the first time,” said Heyink.
Yellow is among the asset financiers that have attracted VC funding this year indicating a sustained appetite for deals in startups making solar energy accessible, following last year’s trend that saw cleantech emerge as the second most-funded sector after fintech. Cleantechs attracted $863M in equity or 18% of the total funding raised by African startups, according to 2022 Partech Africa report.
Overall, in the last 10 years startups in Africa’s off-grid solar sector have attracted over $2.3 billion in funding, according to the biennial Gogla-World Bank report released in October last year.
Commenting on the Yellow investment, Convergence Partner CEO, Brandon Doyle, said, “we are excited to be backing the Yellow team. We have been tracking the off-grid solar power asset finance space for many years but have failed to find a business model and team that we felt we could back until now.”
“Yellow’s offering also sits well with our promise to our investors of strong investment returns married with solid social development impact; in this case by tackling the triple challenge of financial inclusion, green energy distribution, and broadband penetration, and doing so profitably while servicing the unbanked communities of the lowest income countries of Africa,” said Doyle.
Asset financiers like Yellow, Sun King and M-Kopa operate pay-go models that offer asset-based financing (pay-to-own) for solar kits and lanterns, products that are hugely popular in Sub-Saharan Africa, where millions of people are off-grid, as national power grids remain underdeveloped. It is estimated that sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 75% of the world’s population without access to electricity.
These companies, some of which offer financing for other assets, have also been quick to add new revenue streams, and to tap debt-financing to further tap and increase their clientele base.
PayGo solar startup Yellow raises $14 million to scale in africa by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch
Fisker to enter China’s hotly contested EV market with local production plans
Fisker, the electric carmaker founded by the Danish auto designer Henrik Fisker, is gearing up to enter the Chinese market where competition is increasingly cut-throat, following in the footsteps of another brave American player Lucid.
Fisker plans to open a delivery center in China this year and commence deliveries of the Fisker Ocean SUV, its first all-electric model, in Q1 2024, according to a recent company announcement. It also aims to start manufacturing in China as early as next year with the potential to add 75,000 Ocean SUVs to its production capacity.
Having a China facility should help Fisker address some of the “strong demand” it received from Europe and the U.S., which prompted it to bump its production target to 42,400 by the end of 2023.
The California-based EV startup has already done some prep work to build government relationships, which, as we have seen in the case of Tesla’s deal with the Shanghai government, is a crucial step for doing business in China.
Fisker’s leadership team recently visited China and met with officials and business leaders in Shanghai to discuss collaborations and opportunities in the region, according to its announcement. The talks focused on supply chains, logistics, warehousing, and future production development.
Fisker fits into the luxury segment of the EV world, putting it in competition with China’s homegrown premium EV brand Nio. In a market that is experiencing a price war sparked by Tesla’s aggressive price cuts, even Nio, which previously committed to not joining the price war, announced last week a cut of $4,000 across all its products.
Nio is nowhere near the dominant positions of BYD and Tesla. In April, the Chinese EV and battery behemoth BYD accounted for nearly a quarter of the all-electric auto market, while Tesla came in second with 12%, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association.
Nio finished the first four months of 2023 with sales just south of 40,000 units and a 3.4% share of the all-electric segment, according to the association’s data.
Fisker is envisioning a brighter future for its China expansion, counting on both the immense market size and the country’s appetite for international luxury cars. The company seems to be gambling on the notion that the affluent class, who have been avidly purchasing Audi, Benz, and BMW vehicles, will be searching for ABB (amicably dubbed so in China for their popularity) equivalents in the age of electrification.
“Firstly, China represents a third of global vehicles sales, which is roughly 26 million cars in 2022, of which electric vehicles represent 6-7 million, around a 25% share,” said Fisker’s China board member Daniel Foa.
“In 2023 year-to-date, that has grown to around 27%. Secondly, the premium and affordable luxury segment is growing faster than general segments. Fisker fits right in that segment with its unique history, features, and design,” he continued.
“China has always had a high acceptance of high-quality traditional international automotive brands,” he added. “There has been a rapid shift to electrification both from government policies and consumer behavior. Fisker is one of only two EV-only international companies which are viable alternatives to traditional brands.”
Mr. Fisker is no stranger to the Chinese capital market. In 2014, Wanxiang Group, China’s largest auto parts company (which also has a sprawling investment empire in web3), acquired the assets of Fisker Automotive, the original auto company that Mr. Fisker founded and went bankrupt.
Fisker to enter China’s hotly contested EV market with local production plans by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Hackers threaten to leak 80GB of confidential data stolen from Reddit
Hackers are threatening to release confidential data stolen from Reddit unless the company pays a ransom demand – and reverses its controversial API price hikes.
In a post on its dark web leak site, the BlackCat ransomware gang, also known as ALPHV, claims to have stolen 80 gigabytes of compressed data from Reddit during a February breach of the company’s systems.
Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions but confirmed that BlackCat’s claims relate to a cyber incident confirmed by Reddit on February 9. At the time, Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe, or KeyserSosa, said that hackers had accessed employee information and internal documents during a “highly-targeted” phishing attack. Slowe added that the company had “no evidence” that personal user data, such as passwords and accounts, had been stolen.
Reddit didn’t share any further details about the attack or who was behind it. However, BlackCat over the weekend claimed responsibility for the February intrusion and threatened to leak “confidential” data stolen during the breach. It’s unclear exactly what types of data the hackers have stolen, and BlackCat hasn’t shared any evidence of data theft.
BlackCat was also linked to a March attack on Western Digital that saw hackers steal 10 terabytes of data from the company, including reams of customer information. That same month, the gang also threatened to leak data allegedly stolen from Amazon-owned video surveillance company Ring.
In a post published on Saturday, titled “The Reddit Files”, BlackCat says it contacted Reddit twice – once on April 13 and again on June 16 – but did not receive a response. “I told them in my first email that I would wait for their IPO to come along. But this seems like the perfect opportunity! We are very confident that Reddit will not pay any money for their data,” BlackCat wrote. “We expect to leak the data.”
The hackers say they are demanding $4.5 million in exchange for deleting the stolen data and for Reddit to withdraw its API pricing changes.
Reddit’s new API pricing plans have been the subject of much controversy in recent weeks: popular third-party Reddit app Apollo has announced it’s closing down as a result of the new pricing, and thousands of subreddits last week went dark in protest of the new API policy – some, including r/music and r/videos, indefinitely.
When asked by TechCrunch, Reddit declined to say whether it plans to respond to BlackCat’s demands.
Reddit experienced a more serious data breach in 2018 that saw attackers access a complete copy of Reddit data from 2007. This included usernames, hashed passwords, emails, public posts and private messages.
Hackers threaten to leak 80GB of confidential data stolen from Reddit by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch