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More than two decades of efforts by Microsoft to put down roots in China may soon bring a partial pay-off, if it succeeds in steering through the purchase of TikTok’s US business.

But as relations between the US and China continue to deteriorate, the software company’s long-term bet on the Chinese market is also facing its most uncertain period yet.

Microsoft’s involvement in the Chinese tech world, dating from its creation of a research centre in Beijing in the late 1990s, has left it with important personal connections. Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, worked at Microsoft, though only for a few months before he left to join a start-up.

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  Honk if you love the environment.

When Untitled Goose Game finally sees a physical release later this year (after a highly successful digital launch last year), it will also see the debut of a new line of "eco-packaging" that publisher iam8bit says it "hope[s] leads an entire industry into the future."

Iam8bit's so-called "Lovely Edition" release of the game will be the first PS4 title to eschew the standard plastic Blu-ray DVD case in favor of a cardboard box made with "100% post-consumer, recycled material with heavy duty 20-pt stock and no harmful inks." The packaging also makes use of a biodegradable plastic shrinkwrap called biolefin, which breaks down into biomass after just one to three years, instead of the usual 300 to 600, according to its manufacturer.

The eco-friendly decisions extend to what comes inside the game box, as well. A booklet and foldout poster included in the package get their paper from sources certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, ensuring the wood "comes from only the most well-managed and environmentally responsible forests," as iam8bit puts it. And the included "No Goose" sticker is made from sugar cane waste, which the company assures us is fully biodegradable but not as delicious as it sounds.

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  We've known for a while now that machine learning was important to the palm rejection technology on the iPad when using a Pencil. [credit: Apple ]

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) now permeate nearly every feature on the iPhone, but Apple hasn't been touting these technologies like some of its competitors have. I wanted to understand more about Apple's approach , so I spent an hour talking with two Apple executives about the company's strategy—and the privacy implications of all the new features based on AI and ML.

Historically, Apple has not had a public reputation for leading in this area. That's partially because people associate AI with digital assistants, and reviewers frequently call Siri less useful than Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. And with ML, many tech enthusiasts say that more data means better models—but Apple is not known for data collection in the same way as, say, Google.

Despite this, Apple has included dedicated hardware for machine learning tasks in most of the devices it ships. Machine intelligence-driven functionality increasingly dominates the keynotes where Apple executives take the stage to introduce new features for iPhones, iPads, or the Apple Watch. The introduction of Macs with Apple silicon later this year will bring many of the same machine intelligence developments to the company's laptops and desktops, too.