sordid

The hotel was spacious. It was upscale. It had a karaoke bar. The perfect venue, the CEO of the Chinese hacking company thought, to hold a Lunar New Year banquet currying favor with government officials. There was just one drawback, his top deputy said.“Who goes there?” the deputy wrote. “The girls are so ugly.”So goes the sordid wheeling and dealing that takes place behind the scenes in China’s hacking industry, as revealed in a highly unusual leak last month of internal documents from a private contractor linked to…

Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld (formerly Marieke Lucas Rijneveld) won the International Booker prize with his debut, The Discomfort of Evening, narrated by a farmer’s daughter coaxed into sex games with her siblings after their brother dies in a freak accident. There are scenes involving pilfered vials of bull sperm and an insemination gun; the protagonist, aged 12 by the end of the book, fantasises about the tongue of a local vet who tells her how pretty she is. For overseas readers, it evoked “Ian Macabre”-era McEwan, but…

In the quest to deliver true 5G technology, wireless carriers have naturally been trying every angle they can to promote their own 5G services as superior to the competition. This has resulted in a confusing assortment of letters and symbols often appearing after the letters “5G” on your smartphone to suggest that you’re getting service that is somehow better than the norm. While this may be true in some cases, there’s at least one exception where it means the exact opposite: AT&T’s “5GE” or “5G Evolution” isn’t…