Had a long day and still want to stream something? These tips from sleep experts will help you stay awake till the credits roll.

Novelist Ning Ken’s history of Beijing’s Zhongguancun district shows how two generations of professors and tech entrepreneurs helped make the country more open.

The country’s surge in cases is a human tragedy but isn’t showing signs of changing the Covid picture in the West—where the virus is already running free.

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: SteamDB: Valve’s Steam platform crossed 10M concurrent in-game players for the first time on January 7 and recently exceeded 33M concurrent online users  —  Valve’s game distribution platform Steam had a record-breaking weekend, exceeding 10 million concurrent in-game players for the first time …

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: London-based insurance broker Superscript, which offers a “self-serve” platform for SMEs, sole traders, and others, raised a £45M Series B led by BHL UK  —  Superscript, an insurance broker and tech platform targeting SMEs and “high-growth” tech firms, has raised £45 million …

Financial Times: Sources: UK PM Rishi Sunak met Arm CEO Rene Haas and Masayoshi Son to revive efforts to secure a London listing for Cambridge-based Arm’s IPO alongside New York  —  Officials and London Stock Exchange face uphill battle to secure UK role for chip designer’s IPO

Wi-Fi devices acknowledge each other, even when not connected to the same network, and hackers can exploit this to drain their batteries

A bit of turbulence in the job market can affect people in different ways. Consider the Egyptian scholar Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364-1442). In the early 1400s, after about a quarter-century of frustration in seeking short-lived administrative jobs and wealthy patrons in Cairo, al-Maqrizi became fed up for good. He retreated to his […]

Need to grab a clip from Twitter or remix that YouTube meme compilation? These tools can help.

The neural representations of a perceived image and the memory of it are almost the same. New research shows how and why they are different.

Microsoft’s subscription service includes captivating titles like Potion Craft, Metal: Hellsinger, and Pentiment.

Naomi Nix / Washington Post: Meta says it is weeks away from announcing its decision on reinstating Trump, who continues to harass 2020 election workers by name, as recently as last week  —  The platform cut Trump’s indefinite suspension to two years at the urging of its Oversight Board.  But that doesn’t mean he’s coming […]

Karen Hao / Wall Street Journal: The Cyberspace Administration of China will start regulating “deep synthesis” tech like AI-powered image, audio and text-generation software starting next week  —  Beijing is among the first governments to regulate hyper-realistic, AI-generated media

Alex Kantrowitz / Big Technology: The economic downturn is hurting the creator economy, one of the most-hyped sectors of the past decade, in particular since its middle class hasn’t yet emerged  —  We’re seeing the truth about one of the most-hyped sectors of the past decade.  —  After years of hype, the Creator Economy is […]

Depending on who you are, this can be much more complicated than “whenever I feel like it.”

WIRED photographer Roger Kisby captures the glory, madness, and optimism of the consumer tech extravaganza.

Beyond just getting us from A to B, 2023’s vehicles want their drivers to be happier, healthier, and safer.

Oliver Whang / New York Times: A look at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, which is exploring questions around artificial consciousness and the possibility of self-aware robots  —  The pursuit of artificial awareness may be humankind’s next moonshot.  But it comes with a slurry of difficult questions.

Allison Johnson / The Verge: After years of hype, 5G took a back seat at CES 2023, as the industry focuses on laying the groundwork for self-driving cars, AR, and expanding IoT in cities  —  When it wasn’t being overshadowed by covid resurgences, CES, for the past few years, has partially functioned as a big […]

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: Seattle Public Schools sue TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, and their parent companies for allegedly causing a youth mental health crisis  —  A new lawsuit filed by Seattle Public Schools against TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, and their parent companies alleges …

When deep learning models are deployed in the real world, perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images, they are often able to outperform humans. But what exactly are these deep learning models learning? Does a model trained to spot skin cancer in clinical images, for example, actually […]

Aside from color-morphing concepts and Tron-inspired bikes, this year’s show was about how car and tech companies will work closer together in the future.

Plus: Russian spies uncovered in Europe, face recognition leads to another wrongful arrest, a new porn ID law, and more.

Plus: Apple reportedly cancels the next iPhone SE, Google gets HD maps into cars, and all the CES news you could ever want.

Callum Cyrus / Tech.eu: Marseille-based Volta Medical, whose AI assistant helps surgeons in cardiac ablation procedures, raised a €36M Series B, bringing its total funding to over €70M  —  Marseille-based Volta Medical is preparing for additional clinical trials, after successfully winning CE and FDA-approval …

Bloomberg: Some companies are taking a liberal interpretation of California’s pay transparency law with wide pay ranges; one Netflix job posting has a $90K-$900K pay range  —  A Tesla Inc. software engineer could earn anywhere from $83,200 to $417,600.  Netflix Inc. has one job posting advertising …

Kylie Robison / Fortune: Sources: some former US Twitter employees finally received their severance agreements, offering only one month of base pay as severance and no prorated bonuses  —  Following further delays this week, some former Twitter employees finally received their official severance agreements on Saturday …

The technology could draw more players into the pricey hobby by allowing people to design their own pieces and even develop their own games.

From gaming headsets to electric in-line skates, here’s everything announced at the tech trade show that you can actually order today.

Andy Greenberg / Wired: Mandiant: Russian cyberespionage group Turla piggybacked on other hackers’ decade-old malware that spread via USB drives to stealthily access victim networks  —  The infamous, FSB-connected Turla group took over other hackers’ servers, exploiting their USB drive malware for targeted espionage.

Darío Gil / Fortune: IBM SVP and Director of Research says the company will no longer pursue numeric patent leadership and will instead focus on open innovation and collaboration  —  For 29 years straight, IBM has led the United States in minting patents, at its peak filing over 10,000 US patent applications …

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: IBM’s US patent count fell 44% YoY in 2022 to 4,743, behind Samsung’s 8,513, losing its top spot after decades as the company refocuses on its core businesses  —  International Business Machines Corp. dropped from the top spot for US patents in 2022, the first time in decades Big Blue …

Staff laid off by Elon Musk were assured they would be compensated following mass cuts. As the deadline passes, the silence has been deafening.

Try as they might, crypto companies pressured by the trading platform’s collapse are failing to bail themselves out.

The exposure of hundreds of millions of email addresses puts pseudonymous users of the social network at risk.

Wired: Some Twitter staff in the US and other countries laid off by Elon Musk in November say they have not received information about the severance they were promised  —  Staff laid off by Elon Musk were assured they would be compensated following mass cuts.  As the deadline passes, the silence has been deafening.

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg: Irish DPC’s €390M Meta fine, issued at the behest of the European Data Protection Board, fits with the EU’s plan to crack down on Big Tech in the next two years  —  Meta Platforms Inc. is used to batting away the occasional fine from European regulators as a cost of doing […]

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: Amazon S3 will now automatically encrypt all new objects added on buckets on the server side using AES-256; AWS has had server-side encryption for over a decade  —  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will now automatically encrypt all new objects added on buckets on the server side, using AES-256 by default.

The stock of language data that artificial intelligences like ChatGPT train on could run out by 2026, because AIs consume it faster than we produce it

There is a limit to how big existing wind turbine designs can get, which limits the power they can produce, but a new approach inspired by palm trees could help them scale up

The ancient Romans were masters of engineering, constructing vast networks of roads, aqueducts, ports, and massive buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Many of these structures were built with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and was dedicated in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some ancient […]

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In 2022, U.S. workers voted to form more unions than they have in nearly 20 years.

How to recognize the influence you already have — and wield it more effectively.

ClientEarth helps shape new laws and enforce old ones to protect the planet and its most vulnerable inhabitants.

The January 6 Committee’s 841-page report will go down as one of the most important documents in US history. These key details stand out.

Companies trialing the metaverse space say it’s kind of fun, but only in small doses.

Varsha Bansal / Rest of World: A profile of Shaik Salauddin, an Uber driver turned union leader, who has become a quasi-celebrity in India after fighting for gig worker rights in the country  —  Shaik Salauddin: the Indian driver-turned-union leader who is brushing shoulders with top politicians and giving ride-hailing firms a run for their […]

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: Stellantis announces Mobilisights, a business unit focused on selling software using connected vehicle data to enterprises, utilities, and other organizations  —  Stellantis is launching a new business unit dedicated to turning all that vehicle data into marketable products — and revenue.

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Snap plans to shut down its Camera app for Mac and PC on January 25, 2023; launched in October 2018, the app let users apply face filters while on video calls  —  On January 25th, Snap will be shutting down its camera app for Mac and PCs.  If that name […]