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The Chinese government wants to build its own digital currency, but it is unlikely to experience the investment frenzy that launched Bitcoin into the mainstream. The central bank official in charge of the project said the new currency, developed under a project known as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment, would not be open to speculation like other cryptocurrencies, disappointing would-be speculators. Mu Changchun, head of the People’s Bank of China’s digital currency research institute, on Saturday said it would be “a digital form of the yuan,” China’s official currency. There would be no speculation on its value and it would not need the backing of a basket of currencies, according t

Engineer Kuang Kaiming was assigned to a team developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology for a Shanghai start-up. The company went with two leading open-source software libraries, Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s Pytorch. The decision to adopt US core technology over Chinese alternatives was telling of China’s weakness in basic AI infrastructure.  Despite the country’s success in producing commercially successful AI companies, the open-source coding repositories used to build the technology tend to be American.  Kuang’s company, whose AI product detects abnormalities in X-rays, is by no means alone.  Nearly all small- to medium-sized Chinese AI companies rely on the US-originated o

Twitter and Facebook have cracked down on what they call Beijing-linked accounts seeking to undermine continuing protests in Hong Kong demanding accountability and democracy. The social media sites, which are blocked in mainland China, have deleted hundreds of accounts associated with this activity, the companies said in separate statements on Tuesday. Facebook said it had removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong.” On the same day, Twitter said it took down 936 accounts originating from within China due to a number of violations of its policies, including fake

The chief executive of Google, which is said to be developing a censored search engine for China, didn’t bother to show up for a grilling by lawmakers in Washington. But his Silicon Valley colleagues, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, did turn up on Wednesday to testify. They were there to answer to the Senate Intelligence Committee about their responses to foreign efforts to meddle in US politics – and ended up defending their partnerships with Chinese companies. Sandberg, in particular, was in the hot seat. Facebook has active partnerships with four Chinese phone makers, giving these makers special access to user data. One of these companies is Huawei, a telecoms gro

Slowly, if not so surely, Facebook is finding a toehold in China. The company’s social network is largely blocked in China, but it was spotted Tuesday on China’s business registry to have formed a subsidiary in Hangzhou, the capital city of the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang. By Wednesday morning, the records had been removed. It’s unclear why the filing disappeared. In response to Inkstone’s inquiries, Facebook said that it was “interested in setting up an innovation hub” in the province to support Chinese developers and start-ups. If the subsidiary is successfully set up, it will represent Facebook’s latest move into a market with more than twice as many internet users as the entire

Facebook has active partnerships with four Chinese phone makers that give them special access to social media users’ data, the company said on Wednesday. The announcement has drawn further scrutiny to the social media company because the phone makers include Huawei, a telecoms conglomerate with ties to China’s government that US intelligence agencies consider to pose national security risks. Facebook disclosed the Chinese partnerships after a New York Times report on Sunday raised concerns that Facebook had compromised users’ privacy by allowing around 60 partners to access extensive user information. Special access The access to user data, which is available to partners including the likes