Better Batteries Could Soon Come to a Phone Near You
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As companies create AI-powered solutions, how can they ensure they're effective and trustworthy? Join IBM at the break to hear how companies can build trust in their AI with Hrithika Gunnar, IBM's General Manager for Data and AI.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, June 26th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Hate it when your cell phone dies before the day is done? Join the club. A battery that lasts 50% longer is finally in production. But what are the hurdles to getting it into our devices? Then, hackers are all over the web. Now they're turning the helpful army of tech support agents against us. We'll tell you what you need to know.

But first, every day I towed around a fairly heavy little bag of battery chargers and their corresponding cables. Just because you never know when you might need some extra juice if work runs late or you decide to grab dinner out before heading home. And in this day and age, the last thing any of us wants is to be running around without access to our cell phones.

But there soon might be a day that heavy little bag is no longer needed because the elusive technology of solid-state batteries might soon make their way into our consumer electronics. Christopher Mims, a WSJ Tech columnist and co-host of the Bold Names podcast, has been digging into this topic. Christopher, why are solid-state batteries such a difficult innovation to tackle?

Solid-state batteries, they are the holy grail of batteries. They're, in theory, the fastest charging, the most energy-dense we can possibly make. The problem is that as the lithium ions moving around in a solid-state battery do their thing, they actually make the battery expand and contract. It breathes. And the battery will just crack itself apart. Or it has to be in this...

crazy metal enclosure to keep it from expanding and contracting too much.

And you don't have that problem in regular batteries like in your phone because it's a liquid in there. So the lithium ions kind of have this gel that they can swim around in. So you have been to the factory floor of a company called Ion. What is it doing that could be a potential game changer in this solid state battery space? Ion came up with a new kind of solid state battery. They borrowed technology from fuel cells, like hydrogen fuel cells.

And they said, what if instead of the usual kind of crystal, chunky granola matrix that's inside a solid state battery, we put this elegant ceramic, like the ceramic in your coffee mug, and it's full of tiny holes where the lithium ions can hang out as they're moving back and forth between the two poles of a battery.

And what do you know? This battery does not expand or contract the way that a normal solid state battery does. It's very stable and it can be manufactured in factories that already make

regular lithium-ion batteries. So very importantly, it doesn't require any kind of new gigafactories to be built. So ION told you that it has shipped test batches of this battery to, quote, every consumer electronics company you can think of. And it's also sent some to the Department of Defense. So how have these batteries actually held up and performed when put through their paces in a real-life setting? The Department of Defense found

that across many charge and discharge cycles, these batteries held up. And that's a big deal because typically with batteries, if they can hold more charge, they just don't last as long or they have some other weird special requirement. They can only operate at certain temperatures. But the DOD said, we got these batteries. They worked as promised. And then when I asked them about it,

They said, and we're not going to tell you anything else. But the stated purpose is to make it so that soldiers don't have to carry as much weight into battle. So for consumer electronics, what does this mean? In what ways could it revolutionize the way that we use everyday technology? And how soon could that happen? If Ion's promises bear out, and keep in mind that it's rare that we get a fundamentally new battery technology,

So no one should be surprised if they completely flame out. But if what they claim proves true in the real world, you could have your smartphone last 50% longer, or you could have things like smart glasses, which last all day long. And realistically, given that Ion is already producing batteries and they're being tested within 18 months to two years, you can see the first

consumer product with one of their batteries in it. That was Christopher Mims, WSJ tech columnist and co-host of the Bold Names podcast. Coming up, we rely on tech support operators around the globe to help us with all kinds of device related issues. But our reporter warns some might be working against us. We'll have that story after the break.

Enterprise AI is an unstructured data problem at scale. How does generative AI address it? Rithika Gunnar, General Manager for Data and AI at IBM, explains. Think of this as emails, PDF, PowerPoint decks that sit in an organization. Generative AI has allowed us to unlock data.

the opportunity to be able to take the 90% of data that is buried in unstructured formats, which really unlocks a new level of driving data and insights of that data into your workflows, into your applications, which is essential for organizations as we go forward.

As technology gets smarter, so do hackers looking to exploit it. Recently, bad actors have targeted low-level workers whose staff call centers to pressure them to hand over sensitive information the criminals need to commit crimes. WSJ reporter Robert McMillan covers computer security, hackers, and privacy, and he's written about how hackers are weaponizing tech support.

Bob, how does this kind of hack work exactly? Well, there are two problems with call centers, and they've been going on for a long time. The first problem is what's known as social engineering, which is when people call up call centers and they basically talk the employees into doing things they shouldn't do. Now, the corporate security problem here is this.

You get locked out of your computer network, you call tech support, and they get you back in. What hackers are doing is they're calling up

tech support at call centers, and they're pretending to be employees of companies they don't actually work for. So they'll call up and say, I'm the CEO of this company. I need to get on the corporate network to finish an important business deal, and you need to help me right now. They are then using that access to install ransomware and extorting companies, and it's become a really big problem. The other thing they're doing is they're just...

paying off employees. They're just bribing people in these call centers. In the story I wrote, the employees of call centers that were working for Coinbase were being bribed, and those people were providing the sensitive information, the account numbers, the social security numbers, the phone numbers that could then be used for fraud.

And that's what's so interesting is that it doesn't just end at hackers stealing this information from companies. In your story, you talk about in this Coinbase example, they go to the customers, the real people that the information belongs to, and then they scan the individuals out of millions of dollars. That's right. Somebody calls you and the phone number looks like it's from Coinbase and they have information that only Coinbase would have on you because they've literally bribed employees to get this information.

And then that person tells you there's a security concern around your account and your crypto may be in danger. And they convince you that you need to take some steps right now. That Coinbase security is calling you and they've identified a potential hack of your account. You need to do this stuff right away to prevent yourself from losing all of your money. People freak out and they have lost very large amounts of money with these social engineering attacks.

Tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen this way. In your piece, you spoke with Coinbase's chief security officer. What did he have to say about how the company is dealing with stuff like this? They've already taken a bunch of steps to minimize the risk. So the call center computers, for example, it's pretty difficult to get a ton of information off of them if you're a hacker. But what they've done is they're actually moving some of their operations back into the U.S.,

They have locked down the computers at the call centers. And they've also just stopped working with some of these call centers. Now, if you're a customer on the other end of one of these calls to try to get information from you and then money from you, is there a rule of thumb to know how to protect yourself from something like this? If you're ever doing anything related to cryptocurrency in a panic situation,

you need to stop and really think very hard about what you're doing and why you're doing it so if you find yourself at a atm that's selling you cryptocurrency

Stop and reconsider why you're doing that. You may be the victim of a scam. If you find yourself creating a digital wallet online with a sense of panic, stop and ask yourself, is the person that I'm talking to really who they claim to be? This is a huge problem on the internet right now. It's very easy to fake a trusted identity. We don't know who we're talking to on the phone. We don't know who we're talking to when we send email messages or chats online.

So anytime you find yourself kind of in a panic about losing money, just stop, do a Google search for the entity you're supposed to be talking to. Maybe it's Coinbase, maybe it's your banking institution, and then call the number you know is the right number for them. And then try and talk through your problem. If they've called you, that's a red flag. That

That was computer security reporter Robert McMillan there. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

How can companies build AI they can trust? Here again is Hrithika Gunnar, General Manager for Data and AI at IBM. A lot of organizations have thousands of flowers of generative AI projects blooming. Understanding what is being used and how is the first step. Then it is about really understanding what kind of policy enforcement do you want to have on the right guardrails on privacy enforcement.

The third piece is continually modifying and updating so that you have robust guardrails for safety and security. So as organizations have not only a process, but the technology to be able to handle AI governance, we end up seeing a flywheel effect of

more AI that is actually built and infused into applications, which then yields a better, more engaging, innovative set of capabilities within these companies. Visit IBM.com to learn how to define your AI data strategy. Custom content from WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal advertising department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.