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“The tablet is like a temptress,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst who led the survey. “It’s constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube now.’ Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.” Indeed, the basic menu for the Kindle Fire offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books (once Amazon’s stock in trade) just another menu option

Forrester said that it was more likely that tablets would eventually edge out black-and-white e-readers. “The historical precedent suggests that’s the case,” he said, citing the Palm Pilot, digital point-and-shoot cameras and portable GPS systems for the car as items that have been gradually displaced by multifunction devices. “There’s less and less reason to have these as stand-alone devices.

For Erin Faulk, a 29-year-old legal assistant and voracious reader in Los Angeles, the era of e-readers has had one major effect: she has accumulated many more books that she categorizes as “DNFs” — Did Not Finish. But she is also buying more books, she said, and she thinks that all the interruptions have, in a way, made her a more discerning reader.

Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business.

How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android?

Google is sanguine about Android’s prospects and said the company’s original vision for Android was never solely about huge profits. “The bet that Larry, Sergey and Eric made at the time was that smartphones are going to be a thing, there’s going to be Internet on it, so let’s make sure there’s a great smartphone platform out there that people can use to, among other things, access Google services

The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means that much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices

at the same time, given the increasing threats to Google’s advertising business, we might also wonder how long that largess can continue.

A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly.

even if hot Silicon Valley start-ups still create apps for iOS first, app makers in other parts of the world see Android as a surer path to the masses. “The reality is that folks like you should play a role in educating the Silicon Valley,” she said.

Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China.

Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps.

The situation is especially painful for Google in China, the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market, where Google’s apps are blocked. Even in the rest of Asia, where many low-cost phone manufacturers do include Google’s apps on their phones, there’s growing interest in finding some alternative to Google’s version of Android. About 30 percent of Android smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2014 were actually modified, or forked, versions of the OS that may not be very hospitable to Google’s services, according to the firm ABI Research

Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors — and has signed a “strategic partnership” with Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft — to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android.

“We share services revenue with the phone makers — and today they get very little of that from Google,” said Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s chief executive. “There are very few companies in the world today that really like Google. Nobody wants Google to run the table with this game. So it’s a good time to be a neutral third party. We’re Switzerland, and we want to share that revenue with our ecosystem partners in a meaningful way.”

in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google — losing the high-end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Xiaomi and Cyanogen.

Credential stuffing is “at the root of probably 90 percent of the things we see happening,” said Emmanuel Schalit, chief executive of Dashlane, a password manager that allows people to store unique, random passwords in one place. Only about 1 percent of Internet users, he said, use some kind of password manager.

The company was forced to respond. “Nest was not breached,” it said in a January statement. “These recent reports are based on customers using compromised passwords,” it said, urging its customers to use two-factor authentication. Nest started forcing some users to change their passwords.

According to at least one expert, though, Nest users are still exposed. Hank Fordham, a security researcher, sat in his Calgary, Alberta, home recently and opened up a credential-stuffing software program known as Snipr. Instantly, Fordham said, he found thousands of Nest accounts that he could access. Had he wanted to, he would have been able to view cameras and change thermostat settings with relative ease.

Snipr, which costs $20 to download, is easier to use. Snipr provides the code required to check whether hundreds of the most popular platforms, such as “League of Legends” and Netflix, are accessible with a bunch of usernames and passwords — and those have become abundantly available all over the Internet

The reason Nest has not employed all of Google’s know-how on security goes back to Nest’s roots, according to Nest and people with knowledge of its history. Founded in 2010 by longtime Apple executive Tony Fadell, Nest promised at the time that it would not collect data on users for marketing purposes

1. Gen Z doesn’t distinguish between online and IRL

for my generation, interacting digitally is still ‘in real life.’”

Ms. Sharp says that psychologically, she’s half present in real life and half present on Instagram, Twitter and other social channels where she connects directly with her friends and fans. “I count my followers as being a really impactful force in my life

2. Privacy online? LOL

For the most part, members of Gen Z expect that everything they ever type into a keyboard or capture with a camera is forever and could easily end up all over the internet. Many feel that, at any point in their lives, they could be judged by their most impulsive posts, so they can never let down their guard.

Real-life conversations and phone calls have become the only way to convey thoughts in a way that’s truly privat

3. Facebook is out, Instagram is in

“Facebook for my generation solely exists so that other generations can see that I’m still alive,”

For them, Instagram is the new Facebook—the first place they share by default. On Instagram, everyone’s a content creator, says Ms. Havighorst, which means almost everything they put up is a deliberate act of personal branding

4. Social media is how they stay informed

In a focus group that included 20 members of her generation from across the U.S., she found their news consumption was almost entirely driven by social media. They weren’t seeking out the news, only happening on it, and they read a lot of headlines.

The same culture of influencers that guides their consumer tastes shapes what information they consume and how they stay informed. In politics, for example, those who get this succeed disproportionately with this generation, whether it’s Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

5. Video is important, but it isn’t everything

This generation is definitely more visually oriented, says Drake Rehfeld, a 21-year-old former Snapchat engineer who founded a startup that serves influencers. It’s a natural consequence of their having more access to devices that can display, record and edit images and video than any generation before, he adds.

that doesn’t mean they don’t also like to read. According to Pew, Gen Z is likely to become the best-educated generation ever.

Some members of Gen Z are left feeling the media is obsessed with the negative impacts of tech and doesn’t talk enough about how it empowers their generation.

Whether it’s helping them stay connected with friends when their helicopter parents won’t let them out of the house, says Ms. Havighorst, or find people who share similar interests, says Ms. Sharp, the mobile internet is a powerful force for making this generation aware of the breadth of experiences of their peers.

7. But they’re still susceptible to tech addiction and burnout Still, members of this generation are acutely aware that this level of engagement isn’t always sustainable. Some take breaks from social media, others wonder how it’s changing their brains. They also report having trouble knowing where the line between healthy and unhealthy use should be.

her subjects reported occasional compulsive use of their mobile devices, no matter their age. They were most likely to get sucked into social media and casual games, even though they found them the least satisfying.

“I definitely think we all know that we’re addicted to our phones and social media,” says Ms. Baker. “But I also think we’ve just come to terms with it, and we think, that’s just what it is to be a person now.”

And they contend that an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500, with even that number in doubt. Longtime emergency managers at FEMA are working with military officials to sort through the competing offers and federal procurement rules while under pressure to give President Trump something to announce

But in an interview Thursday night with Sean Hannity, the president played down the need for ventilators.“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he said, a reference to New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo has appealed for federal help in obtaining them. “You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

“Ventec and G.M. have been working at breakneck speed to leverage our collective expertise in ventilation and manufacturing to meet the needs of the country as quickly as possible and arm medical professionals with the number of ventilators needed to save lives,” said Chris O. Brooks, Ventec’s chief strategy officer.The only thing missing was clarity from the government about how many ventilators they needed — and who would be paid to build them.

The shortage of ventilators has emerged as one of the major criticisms of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. The need to quickly equip hospitals across the country with tens of thousands more of the devices to treat those most seriously ill with the virus was not anticipated despite the Trump administration’s own projection in a simulation last year that millions of people could be hospitalized. And even now, the effort to produce them has been confused and disorganized.

Last week, General Motors, Ventec Life Systems and a coalition of business executives called StopTheSpread.org issued a statement saying that Ventec would “leverage G.M.’s logistics, purchasing and manufacturing expertise to build more of their critically important ventilators,” including some portable units.By Sunday, Mr. Trump appeared to suggest on Twitter that a deal had been completed to mass-produce the ventilators, even though it was unclear who would pay to equip the General Motors plant or how long that process would take.

The initial projection, one senior administration official said, was that after three weeks of preparation it could produce an initial run of 20,000 ventilators, or about two-thirds of what Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York recently said his state alone needed to cover the influx of coronavirus patients expected in two weeks, if not sooner.That number then shrank to 7,500 ventilators in the initial run, or maybe 5,000, an apparent recognition that auto transmissions and ventilators had very little in common. Those numbers are in flux and so are the Trump administration’s because the White House cannot decide how many ventilators it wants.

Targets have changed by the hour, officials said, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, which approves the use of medical devices, and the White House try to figure out how many ventilators to request and how much they should cost.

The $1.5 billion price tag comes to around $18,000 a ventilator. And the overall cost, by comparison, is roughly equal to buying 18 F-35s, the Pentagon’s most advanced fighter jet.

then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators.

That failure delayed the development of an affordable ventilator by at least half a decade, depriving hospitals, states and the federal government of the ability to stock up

The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis

“We definitely saw the problem,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017. “We innovated to try and get a solution.

The project — code-named Aura — came in the wake of a parade of near-miss pandemics: SARS, MERS, bird flu and swine flu.

Federal officials decided to re-evaluate their strategy for the next public health emergency. They considered vaccines, antiviral drugs, protective gear and ventilators, the last line of defense for patients suffering respiratory failure

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services established a new division, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, with a mandate to prepare medical responses to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks, as well as infectious diseases.

In its first year in operation, the research agency considered how to expand the number of ventilators. It estimated that an additional 70,000 machines would be required in a moderate influenza pandemic.

In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.

The goal was for the machines to be approved by regulators for mass development by 2010 or 2011,

The ventilators were to cost less than $3,000 each. The lower the price, the more machines the government would be able to buy.

Ventilators at the time typically went for about $10,000 each, and getting the price down to $3,000 would be tough. But Newport’s executives bet they would be able to make up for any losses by selling the ventilators around the world.

In 2011, Newport shipped three working prototypes from the company’s California plant to Washington for federal officials to review.

In April 2012, a senior Health and Human Services official testified before Congress that the program was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013.” After that, the machines would go into production.

In May 2012, Covidien, a large medical device manufacturer, agreed to buy Newport for just over $100 million.

Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.

Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.

Some Newport executives who worked on the project were reassigned to other roles. Others decided to leave the company.

The research agency convened a panel of experts in November 2007 to devise a set of requirements for a new generation of mobile, easy-to-use ventilators.

The stockpile is “still awaiting delivery of the Trilogy Evo,” a Health and Human Services spokeswoman said. “We do not currently have any in inventory, though we are expecting them soon.”

The Chicago DSA branch is overwhelmingly white,” he concedes. “But if you look at the leadership, it’s overwhelmingly people of color. And if you look towards the work we’re doing it’s very intentionally geared towards issues that directly impact people of color and where the solution or the movement is led by people of color.”

“They asked me: ‘How could you work with DSA?’ And I said, ‘I’m tired of people who advocate for me and my voice is not at the table.’ We don’t need any more spokespeople. We need people to walk with us.”

“I think Trump is going to be a one-term president,” she says. “I don’t think he’s going to win at all. Unless, the Democratic party fucks up and gets this nomination wrong. Which they could.”

Despite expressing his support for the anti-lockdown movement, Trump said on Wednesday that he “strongly” disagrees with Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen bowling alleys, hair salons and other businesses this weekend. Many of the state’s business owners have also concluded it is “way too early” to return to normal.

A tale of two states.

Kentucky

The pandemic has made it almost impossible to register new voters using traditional methods in states across the US. That could have a huge impact on November’s election, writes Sam Levine.

Mainland China reported 55,000 cases of coronavirus in the country’s first wave of infections. But a study by researchers in Hong Kong suggests that number would have been more like 232,000, had the later adopted definition of a Covid-19 case been applied from the outset.

…Mexico, at least 21 doctors and nurses have suffered violent attacks, in public, after being wrongly accused of spreading the disease.

This California town is testing everyone

doctor from Bolinas, California, says her small town north of San Francisco is hoping to become a “model” for the rest of the country, after resolving to test every single member of its community for Covid-19. The town raised $300,000 through GoFundMe to buy testing equipment for its population of 1,600, to help researchers understand how the virus s

cats

Two cats in New York state have tested positive for the virus, apparently after catching it from humans – the first confirmed cases of US pets catching Covid-19.

Catastrophic’ flooding is coming soon. That’s according to new research, which has found that the number of people affected by floods will double to around 147 million annually by the end of the 2020s.

When asked if the the state legislature’s session – suspended since 12 March – would also resume, the governor told WGAU’s Tim Bryant lawmakers were “waiting to come back until it’s a safe environment to do so, and have the proper protocols where, you know, we can make sure that that’s not a dangerous situation for anyone that would need to be at the Capitol”.

Critics say he is making decisions with politics uppermost in his mind, stirring a rightwing base in the hope of retaining power – much like Donald Trump.

The opposing sides taken by the owners of Manuel’s – and many others like them in Georgia – and the state’s Republican leaders, backed by a few rightwing protest groups, are a microcosm of the controversy starting to play out across the US as some states push to reopen their economies in the face of dire warnings by many healthcare professionals.

Many of the governor’s critics say his decision to allow certain businesses to reopen will affect minority communities disproportionately, giving the dispute a racial tinge in a region already rife with such issues.

“This virus has disproportionately impacted the lives of black and brown people. We cannot and will not stand silently by and watch the premature opening of businesses that are mostly in the African American communities,” the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus (GLBC) said in a group statement.

“Our first concern is ensuring the safety of our employees and patrons. While we obviously want to reopen, and we have an incentive to do so as business owners, we do not want to contribute to the spread of the virus,” he said in a statement to the Guardian.

“We’re asking people to continue to not travel or run errands unless they need to. Certainly they can go to these establishments that I just talked about and other ones that are necessary,” he added about soon-to-be open nail salons and bowling alleys.

One of the first breakthroughs in keyboard technology was the invention of the teletype machine. Also referred to as the teleprinter, the technology has been around since the mid-1800s and was improved by inventors such as Royal Earl House, David Edward Hughes, Emile Baudot, Donald Murray, Charles L. Krum, Edward Kleinschmidt, and Frederick G. Creed.

In the 1930s, new keyboard models were introduced that combined the input and printing technology of typewriters with the communications technology of the telegraph. Punch-card systems were also combined with typewriters to create what were known as keypunches. These systems became the basis of early adding machines (early calculators), which were hugely commercially successful. By 1931, IBM had registered more than $1 million in adding machine sales.

The most compelling explanation is that Sholes developed the layout to overcome the physical limitations of mechanical technology at the time. Early typists pressed a key which would, in turn, push a metal hammer that rose up in an arc, striking an inked ribbon to make a mark on a paper before returning to its original position. Separating common pairs of letters minimized the jamming of the mechanism.

The system encouraged the development of a new user interface called the video display terminal (VDT), which incorporated the technology of the cathode ray tube used in televisions into the design of the electric typewriter. This allowed computer users to see what text characters they were typing on their display screens for the first time, which made text assets easier to create, edit, and delete.

The first of handheld devices was the HP95LX, released in 1991 by Hewlett-Packard. It had a hinged clamshell format that was small enough to fit in the hand. Although not yet classified as such, the HP95LX was the first of the Personal Data Assistants (PDA). It had a small QWERTY keyboard for text entry, although touch typing was practically impossible due to its small size.

As PDAs began to add web and email access, word processing, spreadsheets, personal schedules, and other desktop applications, pen input was introduced. The first pen input devices were made in the early 1990s, but the technology to recognize handwriting was not robust enough to be effective.

One fairly popular method was the "soft keyboard." A soft keyboard is one that has a visual display with built-in touchscreen technology. Text entry is performed by tapping on keys with a stylus or finger. The soft keyboard disappears when not in use.

Americans choosing Trump would send the signal that they don’t care about the climate, Light said.

“In the case of a second Trump term, we’ve got to totally double down on the efforts to communicate how serious the non-federal actors are in the United States,” Light said. “And what you really want to try to make sure is that those people in other countries who are not in favor of strengthening their countries’ own climate target are not able to point to the United States and say nothing’s going on there.”

The concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases is at a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. The planet is already 1C hotter than it was before industrialization.

As the technology for retrieving oil and gas has advanced, with hydraulic fracturing, the cost of production has plummeted. The US is now a net exporter of oil products.

Much of the expansion expected would be for feedstocks to make chemicals and plastics, explained Courtney Bernhardt, the group’s research director.

“The US is already struggling to meet climate commitments and transition to a low-carbon future,” Bernhardt said. “This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas and petrochemical industries.”

In the race against Trump, all the major Democratic candidates have similarly pledged to seek at least net-zero emissions by 2050.

The League of Conservation Voters’ called the House committee effort encouraging and said the announcement “is further proof that elections have consequences”. But other groups were critical, saying the plan would not transition away from fossil fuels fast enough.

They ran in different social circles. Where Trump would go to a dinner party hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, Bloomberg would go to editor Tina Brown’s house.

“I’m sure Bloomberg has no gold toilets at his house,” said Rebecca Katz, a New York-based Democratic strategist. “It’s a different kind of money with less to prove.”

Bloomberg has seen his national poll numbers rise within the Democratic primary as he’s poured money into advertising for his campaign.

Trump has criticized Bloomberg as well. In early December, Trump mockingly tweeted that “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization” to investigate “President Trump, only”.

Trump around that time tweeted: “Little Michael Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!”

“I’m for guns, he’s against guns,” Trump said. Though Trump, in the past, had praised Bloomberg’s positions on guns.

One way or another, everyone pays for health care. It accounts for about 18 percent of G.D.P. — nearly $11,000 per person. Individuals directly pay about a quarter, the federal and state governments pay nearly half, and most of the rest is paid by employers.

Many Americans think their health insurance is a gift from their employers — a “benefit” bestowed on lucky workers by benevolent corporations. It would be more accurate to think of employer-provided health insurance as a tax.

Rising health care costs account for much of the half-century decline in the earnings of men without a college degree, and contribute to the decline in the number of less-skilled jobs.

Employer-based health insurance is a wrecking ball, destroying the labor market for less-educated workers and contributing to the rise in “deaths of despair.”

We face a looming trillion-dollar federal deficit caused almost entirely by the rising costs of Medicaid and Medicare, even without the recent coronavirus relief bill.

Rising costs are an untenable burden on our government, too. States’ payments for Medicaid have risen from 20.5 percent of their spending in 2008 to 28.9 percent in 2019. To meet those rising costs, states have cut their financing for roads, bridges and state universities. Without those crucial investments, the path to success for many Americans is cut off

Every year, the United States spends $1 trillion more than is needed for high quality care.

executives at hospitals, medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies, and some physicians, are very well paid.

American doctors control access to their profession through a system that limits medical school admissions and the entry of doctors trained abroad — an imbalance that was clear even before the pandemic

Hospitals, many of them classified as nonprofits, have consolidated, with monopolies over health care in many cities, and they have used that monopoly power to raise prices

These are all strategies that lawmakers and regulators could put a stop to, if they choose.

The health care industry has armored itself, employing five lobbyists for each elected member of Congress. But public anger has been building — over drug prices, co-payments, surprise medical bills — and now, over the fragility of our health care system, which has been laid bare by the pandemic

A single-payer system is just one possibility. There are many systems in wealthy countries to choose from, with and without insurance companies, with and without government-run hospitals. But all have two key characteristics: universal coverage — ideally from birth — and cost control.

In the United States, public funding is likely to play a significant role in any treatments or vaccines that are eventually developed for Covid-19. Americans should demand that they be available at a reasonable price to everyone — not in the sole interest of drug companies.

We are believers in free-market capitalism, but health care is not something it can deliver in a socially tolerable way.

They choose not to. And so we Americans have too few doctors, too few beds and too few ventilators — but lots of income for providers

America is a rich country that can afford a world-class health care system. We should be spending a lot of money on care and on new drugs. But we need to spend to save lives and reduce sickness, not on expensive, income-generating procedures that do little to improve health. Or worst of all, on enriching pharma companies that feed the opioid epidemic.

Medical device manufacturers have also consolidated, in some cases using a “catch and kill” strategy to swallow up nimbler start-ups and keep the prices of their products high.

Ambulance services and emergency departments that don’t accept insurance have become favorites of private equity investors because of their high profits

Britain, for example, has the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which vets drugs, devices and procedures for their benefit relative to cost

At the very least, America must stop financing health care through employer-based insurance, which encourages some people to work but it eliminates jobs for less-skilled workers

Our system takes from the poor and working class to generate wealth for the already wealthy.

passed a coronavirus bill including $3.1 billion to develop and produce drugs and vaccines.

The industry might emerge as a superhero of the war against Covid-19, like the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain during World War II.

illions have lost their paychecks and their insurance

it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.

some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable

Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet

so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions

TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.

As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror

Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.

As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

This is May 2024: Humanity is in the early stages of a standoff with generative AI, which offers methods through which visual art, writing, music, and computer code can be created by a machine in seconds with the simplest of prompts

Most of us are still in the sizing-up phase for generative AI, staring warily at a technology that’s been hyped as world-changing and job-disrupting (even, some proponents argue, potentially civilization-ending), and been foisted on the public in a very short period of time. It’s a weird, exhausting, exciting, even tense moment. Enter: THE CRUSHER.

There is about a zero percent chance that the company did not understand the optics of releasing this ad at this moment. Apple is among the most sophisticated and moneyed corporations in all the world.

this time, it’s hard to like what the company is showing us. People are angry. One commenter on X called the ad “heartbreaking.

Although watching things explode might be fun, it’s less fun when a multitrillion-dollar tech corporation is the one destroying tools, instruments, and other objects of human expression and creativity.

Apple is a great technology company, but it is a legendary marketer. Its ads, its slickly produced keynotes, and even its retail stores succeed because they offer a vision of the company’s products as tools that give us, the consumers, power.

The third-order annoyance is in the genre. Apple has essentially aped a popular format of “crushing” videos on TikTok, wherein hydraulic presses are employed to obliterate everyday objects for the pleasure of idle scrollers.

It’s unclear whether some of the ad might have been created with CGI, but Apple could easily round up tens of thousands of dollars of expensive equipment and destroy it all on a whim. However small, the ad is a symbol of the company’s dominance.

The iPad was one of Steve Jobs’s final products, one he believed could become as popular and perhaps as transformative as cars. That vision hasn’t panned out. The iPad hasn’t killed books, televisions, or even the iPhone

The iPad is, potentially, a creative tool. It’s also an expensive luxury device whose cheaper iterations, at least, are vessels for letting your kid watch Cocomelon so they don’t melt down in public, reading self-help books on a plane, or opting for more pixels and better resolution whilst consuming content on the toilet.

Odds are, people aren’t really furious at Apple on behalf of the trumpeters—they’re mad because the ad says something about the balance of power

it is easy to be aghast at the idea that AI will wipe out human creativity with cheap synthetic waste.

The fundamental flaw of Apple’s commercial is that it is a display of force that reminds us about this sleight of hand. We are not the powerful entity in this relationship. The creative potential we feel when we pick up one of their shiny devices is actually on loan. At the end of the day, it belongs to Apple, the destroyer.

This finding is the latest example of how tough it is to vet products we buy online. Buggy software in off-brand smart devices is a recurring problem

digital marketplaces such as Amazon have done little to rein in offending manufacturers. Combine that with sponsored search results and opaque labeling — Amazon repeatedly called the Eken doorbells an “Amazon’s Choice: Overall Pick” — and shoppers have little recourse to figure out which devices are safe.

Smaller brands churn out smart lightbulbs and speakers to compete with bigger companies, often cutting corners on security. Big brands, meanwhile, do a better job with security but create new privacy concerns — do we really want Amazon peeking into every corner of our homes? Efforts to label consumer tech with simple security facts have languished.

Meanwhile, large online marketplaces put unvetted gadgets in front of millions of shoppers. In January alone, Amazon sold 4,200 Eken doorbells under 11 product listings, according to Consumer Reports. Whether you’re shopping for smart home tech or a simple tank top, having to navigate a sea of unfamiliar brands and dubious product reviews is now common

The bomb that hit Manhattan's Chelsea district on Saturday evening injured 29, and an unexploded device was found nearby.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has urged jittery Americans to be "vigilant but not afraid".

"It is crucial that we continue to build up trust between law enforcement and Muslim American communities," she said.

"Anyone who sees this individual or knows anything about him or his whereabouts needs to call it in right away," New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said on CNN.

Mr Cuomo said on Monday that there might be a foreign connection to the Manhattan attack. Officials had said over the weekend there were no confirmed links to international terrorist groups.

The bag had been picked out of the bin by two men on Sunday evening. They thought it could contain something of value but saw wires and notified the police.

"That was not a controlled explosion,

Indeed, just a year later, a Virginia judge ruled that police could force a person to unlock his own iPhone with his fingerprint. And this February, a federal judge in Los Angeles signed a search warrant that compelled a 29-year-old woman to do the same.

“Unlocking devices through biometric systems generally won’t raise Fifth Amendment issues.”

“When you put your fingerprint on the phone, you’re actually communicating something,” Gidari said. “You’re saying, ‘Hi, it’s me. Please open up.’”

With that nuanced a system, it’s unclear how police could force a user to retrieve information from a phone, even with a legal court order in hand.

It’s possible that a more advanced system, however, would be able to pick up even a slight tremor of fear and lock up.

a strong, memorized password remains the only foolproof way to get away with invoking the Fifth and keep your phone locked.

“access is not a panacea,” said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. “Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring.”

children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999.

Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999.

“Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.”