The world’s largest electric vehicle maker is having a bumpy ride (and no, it’s not Tesla).
You might not have heard of BYD. But the Chinese firm is the world’s largest electric vehicle maker—boasting sales growth of roughly 45 percent per annum over the last two years, capable of producing as many as 900 of its cars per day, and, along with Tesla, dramatically driving down the cost of batteries. But like Elon Musk’s venture, BYD is also facing a reality of declining subsidies. We investigate how the Chinese automaker plans to surmount the problem.
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The French election hack has been tied to a Russian state-linked cyber group.
Yesterday, France elected Emmanuel Macron as president. But that’s despite an unwelcome last-minute leak of his campaign’s documents on Friday. The Guardian reports that cyber security firms believe the attack was carried out by a hacking group sometimes known as Fancy Bear—a collective linked with Russian intelligence services and believed to be behind last year’s U.S. election hacks. Now, the U.K. will brace for trouble ahead of its own elections next month.
One day, someone could pluck passwords right out of your brain.
That may sound like sci-fi doom-mongering, but as more firms jump on the neurone-tapping bandwagon it could become a problem. Our own Tom Simonite reports that some researchers have shown that machine learning algorithms can spot links between brain signals and a person’s typing, making it far easier to guess their password. The logical extension: that our minds could be hacked if the security of brain-computer interfaces isn’t properly locked down.
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