The U.S. and China Are in a Race to Develop Energy’s Holy Grail

[00:00:00] If only life had a remote control, you could pause or rewind. Well, life doesn't always give you time to change the outcome, but prediabetes does. Take the one-minute risk test today at doihaveprediabetes.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and its prediabetes awareness partners.

[00:00:18] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, July 8th. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Companies' productivity tracking tools are getting more sophisticated in detecting when remote workers are using devices like mouse and keyboard jigglers.

[00:00:35] We'll tell you how bosses are using their own tools and software to spot fake busywork. And then, China wants to dominate commercial fusion, which could deliver almost limitless energy. Our reporter Jennifer Hiller will join us to talk about how China is outspending the

[00:00:52] U.S. in the race to achieve a clean energy dream. But first, the rise of remote work and, in turn, employee monitoring software sparked a boom in hacks designed to help staffers fake computer activity so workers could step away to do something else.

[00:01:14] Now some companies are cracking down on these techniques, deploying tools they can better spot the phony busywork. Here to tell us more is Sanvi Bangalore, who reported on this for The Wall Street Journal. So, Sanvi, for people who aren't familiar with these tools to fake work activity like

[00:01:30] mouse or keyboard jigglers, can you give us an idea of how they work? Yeah, so there are a wide range of devices and life hacks that people use to blow off work or give the impression that they're actively on their computers. And so we lead the story with

[00:01:44] mouse jigglers, which are essentially small rotating platforms that you can place your computer mouse on and they can be plugged into your computer or an outlet. And so the rotation of the jiggler moves the mouse cursor, which can simulate a person physically using the mouse.

[00:02:01] What about devices to keep computers awake? There are just so many hacks that people use. Like, for example, people have like an automatic PowerPoint running just so that their computer doesn't shut down. There's also like some old school hacks like placing a textbook on a keyboard

[00:02:18] just to keep the computer on. I've even heard of people like tying a computer mouse physically to like a ceiling fan. So there are all kinds of weird things people do to keep their computers on. Well, how did the employee monitoring software detect this?

[00:02:34] We spoke with two companies, Terramind and Hubstaff, and they use machine learning algorithms to flag repetitive cursor movements so they can actually sense when computer activity is not genuine. And a Terramind official told me that they collect data on how people normally use their

[00:02:50] computer, even down to how long someone holds down their mouse pad when they click on something. So they can tell when there's a mouse jiggler doing the movement instead of a person, or even if an imposter outside the company starts poking around on sensitive files.

[00:03:05] How many workers are using jigglers or other hacks, according to one of the companies that monitors this? Terramind has 7,500 customers across various industries, so all the way from software development companies to small dentist offices, various sizes and industries.

[00:03:22] Terramind did a study where they examined an anonymized sample of a million workers at 5,000 corporate clients late last year, and they found that 7% of employees appeared to be faking work activity on their machines. And they have since rerun the test, this time finding just over 8%

[00:03:38] of employees appear to be faking work. But the chief growth officer of Terramind actually says that the true number is almost certainly higher because there were no false positive results when they investigated the findings. How many companies are using detection tools for their workers?

[00:03:54] Based on a survey that we saw from Gartner Group, we saw that the share of companies using some kind of electronic worker surveillance system has surged during the pandemic, reaching to nearly half of companies in 2023, according to a survey of nearly 300 medium to large employers in the study.

[00:04:13] That was WSJ's Sanvi Bangalore. Coming up, scientists say China is outpacing the U.S. on nuclear fusion. We'll tell you how and why it matters after the break. If only life had a remote control you could pause or rewind.

[00:04:36] Well, life doesn't always give you time to change the outcome, but prediabetes does. Take the one-minute risk test today at doihebprediabetes.org, brought to you by the Ad Council and its prediabetes awareness partners. The U.S. and China are in a race to develop energy's

[00:04:56] elusive holy grail, fusion. Fusion has long been a clean energy dream. Harnessing the process that powers the sun would deliver almost limitless energy. The technology faces daunting science and engineering hurdles, but both countries are looking to overcome those to dominate

[00:05:15] in the commercial fusion space. Here to tell us more about the race is our reporter Jennifer Hiller, who covers renewable energy. So, Jennifer, nuclear fusion occurs when two light atomic nuclei merge to form a single heavier one that releases a huge amount of energy. No carbon emissions and

[00:05:34] limited radioactivity. What methods are scientists around the world trying to develop to sustain reactions and turn that energy into net power? Well, there's a lot of different fusion designs that people are pursuing around the world. In general, the designs either use powerful magnets

[00:05:53] to try to hold the plasma in place or they use lasers to heat and control the fuel. And the issue is sustaining that fusion reaction. And then the next step would be the engineering of how you

[00:06:09] turn the heat produced into electricity. What resources is China putting towards developing commercial fusion? So, China has a rather large fusion research program going on. They have loads of PhDs going through their universities in fusion science and engineering programs.

[00:06:30] They've got private companies investing in much the same way that the U.S. and other countries have private companies investing. And they have the equivalent of our national labs that are doing

[00:06:43] work in fusion. So, they have been spending about what appears to be around 1.5 billion a year on fusion, which is almost twice as much as the U.S. is spending. Can you tell us a little more about

[00:06:55] the speed of China's fusion development? The speed is one of the most surprising and shocking things to scientists around the world that are not working in China but have maybe visited at

[00:07:06] different times and have been able to watch their progress over the years. China, when it decides to build something, goes all in even on fusion facilities that are public or private. They have people working around the clock. So, they are building and delivering projects really quickly

[00:07:25] and are just moving at a much faster pace than Western countries in terms of trying to get new equipment, new labs built, and all of these sort of materials testing facilities and things that

[00:07:38] everybody around the world knows that they need to build. And China is actually building a lot of things simultaneously. So, how is the U.S. approaching fusion? The U.S. has actually a lot of different fusion approaches. The National Lab in California, Lawrence Livermore, had a huge

[00:07:57] fusion breakthrough a couple of years ago. That facility uses powerful lasers. We have a lot of different programs at universities or within private companies that are doing fusion research. A lot of magnetic confinement work is going on. That's an area where a lot of people expect that

[00:08:19] to be the kind of fusion that works first in a commercial sense. And so, a lot of the U.S. effort has been around that as well. It's not like a completely centralized thing in the U.S. The U.S.

[00:08:32] is basically making a lot of different bets on fusion and wants to give a lot of different kinds of technologies and approaches a chance because nobody knows exactly what is going to work in this

[00:08:45] space. How do these efforts compare to past efforts to commercialize new technology? One of the things that people will sometimes compare this to are the chips industry and the kind of spending that needed to happen to be able to make chips technology better for computing. Some people say

[00:09:06] that we need to approach fusion in a similar manner as we did like nuclear submarines several decades ago and go all in. Most of what you hear from scientists in the U.S. is just that

[00:09:21] we need to be consistent in the approach and in funding. What would it mean for the West if China developed commercial fusion first? Everybody obviously wants to make fusion work first and

[00:09:37] make commercial fusion work first. The issue for scientists in the U.S. and other countries is not just that the idea of getting there first because all countries want to do that including China.

[00:09:51] The idea is also who can commercialize it and who can control the supply chain. China is really good at being a fast follower and there's been sort of a history of technologies that the U.S. was ahead on

[00:10:06] and kind of abandoned. Then China invested very heavily in things like solar and wind and batteries. Now China really controls that global renewable supply chain. People are worried essentially that it almost doesn't matter who gets to fusion first. What matters is that long

[00:10:28] game of can you access the sort of like supplies and materials that you would need over time. And China has a lot of investment in the nuclear space broadly. They're building a lot of conventional

[00:10:40] nuclear plants as well and so they have a big supply chain that's very similar to what the fusion supply chain would be. Part of it is just a point of pride to both countries want to get there first.

[00:10:53] That was our reporter Jennifer Hiller. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Catherine Millsop. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.