China

Artificial intelligence is a hot industry with governments and private companies alike scrambling to stay ahead. Earlier today, China announced a plan to make itself one of the global leaders in AI technologies, something that would see the nation's core artificial intelligence industries exceeding the $22 billion valuation mark by the year 2020 and, assuming everything goes as planned, exceeding $59 billion by the year 2025.

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This afternoon a set of photos of the iPhone 8 - or what appears to be the iPhone 8 - leaked in China. These images show a relatively official-looking piece of hardware - albeit a less-than-ideal version of what we expected. In this version of the iPhone 8, we see the Touch ID hole - the fingerprint reader - set on the back of the phone. Just the place we'd crossed our fingers it'd never end up.

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A Huawei-made KFC-branded smartphone is coming to China, and the entire smartphone industry should be ashamed. This should, by all means, be the end of consumers assuming that smartphones are something for which they should pay a premium. A smartphone is no longer a precious sort of item that has inherent value beyond its assembled components - and it's KFC's fault.

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Vast solar plants are becoming increasingly common around the world, but most of them aren't anything you'd go out of your way to see. The big exception is a new solar plant in China that was built in the shape of a giant cartoon panda. Anyone flying above the region in Datong, China, will be greeted with the sight of a happy panda smiling up at the sky; soon enough a second solar plant in the shape of another panda will be joining it.

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Tesla is interested in opening a factory in China to begin building its all-electric vehicles in the country, the company revealed this week. But before fans of American manufacturing start getting worried, know that this isn't about Tesla looking for a cheaper workforce or anything like that. Instead the car maker is looking to improve its appeal among buyers by making the vehicles more affordable for the local market.

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When it comes to data security, the worry seems to usually revolve around hackers making off with your personal data. Today, however, we're learning once again that it may not only be hackers that we need to worry about, but rather the people who are tasked with maintaining the services our phones use and fixing our devices. Police in China have arrested 22 people suspected of illegally obtaining and selling data from Apple users. The difference here? Most of the people arrested are said to be Apple employees.

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If Overwatch players are familiar with anything, it's the game's loot boxes — rewards for rank-ups and various numbers of match wins — and their tendency to almost never give the most desired cosmetic items. Players have often complained about the poor drop rates for Epic and Legendary items, which include things like costumes, voice lines, and emotes. Now, thanks to new regulations in China, Blizzard has disclosed the exact odds of players receiving different types of loot box items.

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This week the folks at OnePlus have confirmed that the OnePlus 5 will be released this summer and that it will, indeed, be called the OnePlus 5. A post to Twitter this morning by the official OnePlus Twitter account added some credence to previous rumors of the name for the phone with two words: "True Story". In doing so, they've not only suggested that the phone was named after a basketball player, but that some other rumors are true.

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Bluboo, a company based in Hong Kong, has taken the wraps off a new Android smartphone that features dual rear cameras, a fingerprint sensor, and a price tag that tops out at $80. That likely makes this the cheapest smartphone available at the moment with such features, giving budget shoppers an opportunity to get in on the dual-camera game. Depending on how many units are ordered, the Bluboo D1's price goes as low as $9.99 each.

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A Chinese cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the country's Tiangong-2 space lab on Saturday, marking a significant achievement for the nation's space agency. The Tianzhou-1 cargo ship was launched on April 20th from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Southern China, and is the first such supply delivery mission to the space station. Once the spacecraft arrived, it connected to the station via automated docking process.

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Xiaomi has officially launched the Mi 6, a sleek Android smartphone with a bunch of high-end features, including USB-C, a ceramic back (with the Exclusive Edition), 3D curved glass, optical image stabilization, dual rear cameras, and more. This follows several leaks surrounding the handset, which Xiaomi says achieved a 184,292 AnTuTu benchmark score. Storage capacity goes up to a huge 128GB.

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Apple has finally caught a break in its rather tumultuous relationship with the Chinese market. The Cupertino-based company has long been trying to woo one of the world's largest smartphone markets with mixed results. While iPhones are indeed popular in China, Apple has been experiencing rather strong opposition not just from rivals but also from government agencies and patent holding entities. At least Apple has gotten a slight reprieve now that the Beijing Intellectual Property Court has overturned a previous ruling that found Apple guilty of copying a design patent for the iPhone 6.

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