This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze In January, Beijing-based software engineer Feng Qingyang started tinkering with OpenClaw, a new AI tool that can take over a device and autonomously complete tasks.…
How low will stocks go? That is the question on everyone’s mind as the recent highs for the S&P 500 (SPY) seem like a distant memory as stocks have been…
Online mortgage lender Better.com is making its public debut Thursday on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker symbols “BETR” and “BETRW.” After merging with SPAC Aurora Acquisition Corp., the combined entity is called Better Home & Finance Holding Company. The deal unlocks about $565 million of fresh capital for Better.com, including a $528 million […]
QIA, Qatar’s sovereign fund, will invest $1 billion in Reliance Retail for a 1% stake in India’s largest retail chain, the two firms said Wednesday. The investment values Reliance Retail, part of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, at $100 billion. Reliance Retail — which operates 18.500 stores and digital commerce platforms, selling everything from electronics to […]
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The idea of downloading a third-party keyboard to your phone may seem unnecessary to most people, but in China it’s the norm. Chinese is the only modern language that’s logographic, meaning…
In Miami, extreme heat is a deadly concern. Rising temperatures now kill more people than hurricanes or floods, and do more harm to the region’s economy than rising sea levels. That’s why, in 2021, Florida’s Miami-Dade County hired a chief heat officer, Jane Gilbert—the first position of its kind in the world. Heat has been…
From “The Troubled Hunt for the Ultimate Cell” (1998), by Antonio Regalado: “If awards were given for the most intriguing, controversial, underfunded and hush-hush of scientific pursuits, the search for the human embryonic stem (ES) cell would likely sweep the categories. It’s a hunt for the tabula rasa of human cells—a cell that has the…
Somewhere above you right now, a plane is broadcasting its coordinates on 1090 megahertz. A satellite high above Earth is transmitting weather maps on 1694.1 MHz. On top of all that, every single phone and Wi-Fi router near you blasts internet traffic through the air over radio waves. A carefully regulated radio spectrum is what…
The world of online misdeeds is an eerie biome, crawling with Bored Apes, Fancy Bears, Shiba Inu coins, self-replicating viruses, and whales. But the behavior driving fraud, hacks, and scams on the internet has always been familiar and very human. New technologies change little about the fact that illegal operations exist because some people are…
Cybercriminals are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR, the venerable shareware archiving tool for Windows, to target traders and steal funds. Cybersecurity company Group-IB discovered the vulnerability, which affects the processing of the ZIP file format by WinRAR, in June. The zero-day flaw — meaning the vendor had no time, or zero days, to fix […]