Posts by blatcho:

A look at Samsung’s mounting semiconductor problems: reportedly losing Qualcomm and Nvidia’s business to TSMC, Galaxy S22 lagging iPhone 13’s chips, and more (Financial Times)

Financial Times: A look at Samsung’s mounting semiconductor problems: reportedly losing Qualcomm and Nvidia’s business to TSMC, Galaxy S22 lagging iPhone 13’s chips, and more  —  Move follows warnings from investors, analysts and employees that chipmaker is losing its technological edge

Inside China’s $16B virtual influencer industry, as motion capture actors complain of hard working conditions powering their avatars four to five hours per day (Rest of World)

Rest of World: Inside China’s $16B virtual influencer industry, as motion capture actors complain of hard working conditions powering their avatars four to five hours per day  —  Hidden behind the perfect faces of China’s $16 billion virtual celebrity industry is an angry, overworked labor force.

A cyberattack on Illuminate Education, exposing the personal data of 1M+ students, highlights the dangers of stockpiling school children’s sensitive information (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

Natasha Singer / New York Times: A cyberattack on Illuminate Education, exposing the personal data of 1M+ students, highlights the dangers of stockpiling school children’s sensitive information  —  At a moment when education technology firms are stockpiling sensitive information on millions of school children, safeguards for student data have broken down.

How Tor is fighting Russia’s efforts since December 2021 to block the anonymous browser, such as by using Telegram to share details of volunteer-run Tor bridges (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Matt Burgess / Wired: How Tor is fighting Russia’s efforts since December 2021 to block the anonymous browser, such as by using Telegram to share details of volunteer-run Tor bridges  —  Russia has been trying to block the anonymous browser since December—with mixed results.  —  For years, the anonymity service Tor …

A look at the supply chain resilience myth, as efforts to replicate the chipmaking process inside single countries or regions reveal and exacerbate bottlenecks (Nikkei Asia)

Nikkei Asia: A look at the supply chain resilience myth, as efforts to replicate the chipmaking process inside single countries or regions reveal and exacerbate bottlenecks  —  TAIPEI — In the sweltering Asia summertime of mid-June, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. urgently dispatched a team …

Chasing TikTok’s success and leaving behind the protection of hard-to-replicate, large social graphs could end the lengthy dominance of platforms like Facebook (Cal Newport/New Yorker)

Cal Newport / New Yorker: Chasing TikTok’s success and leaving behind the protection of hard-to-replicate, large social graphs could end the lengthy dominance of platforms like Facebook  —  Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms.

For Danna Freedman, an impasse is an invitation

Asked once about the most difficult part of her research, Danna Freedman could not stop referring to obstacles as opportunities, and to challenges as excitement. “Every time we hit a barrier it enables us to discover new science,” she told an interviewer at Northwestern University in 2017, describing difficulties encountered in her research as among […]

The US and Japan plan to open an R&D center for 2nm chips in 2022 and start mass production in 2025, to establish secure supply chains amid tensions over Taiwan (Rieko Miki/Nikkei Asia)

Rieko Miki / Nikkei Asia: The US and Japan plan to open an R&D center for 2nm chips in 2022 and start mass production in 2025, to establish secure supply chains amid tensions over Taiwan  —  Economic and diplomatic chiefs to discuss supply chains at 2+2 meeting Friday  —  Taiwan hosts the lion’s share …

A look at the rise and fall of Bird, now a penny stock with a public market cap under $140M, as valuations in the scooter rental sector collapse (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)

Joanna Glasner / Crunchbase News: A look at the rise and fall of Bird, now a penny stock with a public market cap under $140M, as valuations in the scooter rental sector collapse  —  Almost exactly five years ago, the scooters came.  That’s when Bird, the first unicorn in this once sizzling startup sector, launched […]

Dell XPS 13 Plus review: thin with a great OLED screen and a powerful P-series chip but expensive, gets very hot, mediocre battery life, and very few ports (Monica Chin/The Verge)

Monica Chin / The Verge: Dell XPS 13 Plus review: thin with a great OLED screen and a powerful P-series chip but expensive, gets very hot, mediocre battery life, and very few ports  —  The XPS 13 has a new design and a whole bunch of new problems  —  Dell collectively shocked everyone who follows […]

How Modi’s government is increasingly skirting India’s own internet rules to crack down on free speech and dissent on social media, under a “fake news” pretext (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Mark Bergen / Bloomberg: How Modi’s government is increasingly skirting India’s own internet rules to crack down on free speech and dissent on social media, under a “fake news” pretext  —  Sandeep Ravindranath, an Indian filmmaker, posted his latest work to YouTube in May. The video …

Some streamers on Twitch, a more intimate platform than others, endure threats and stalkers and say Twitch gives limited support when dangerous situations arise (New York Times)

New York Times: Some streamers on Twitch, a more intimate platform than others, endure threats and stalkers and say Twitch gives limited support when dangerous situations arise  —  Stars on Twitch, the video game streaming platform, invite viewers into their homes virtually.  What happens when one shows up in person?

Samsung announces a feature that keeps users’ data secure during a phone repair, starting with the Galaxy S21 series in South Korea (Sagar Naresh/SamMobile)

Sagar Naresh / SamMobile: Samsung announces a feature that keeps users’ data secure during a phone repair, starting with the Galaxy S21 series in South Korea  —  You’ll obviously have some anxiety about the security of your data if you leave your smartphone at a repair center for a couple of days.

Global smartphone shipments fell 7% YoY to 291M units in Q2 2022; Samsung had a 21.5% market share, followed by Apple’s 16.3%, its best Q2 in the past 10 years (Strategy Analytics)

Strategy Analytics: Global smartphone shipments fell 7% YoY to 291M units in Q2 2022; Samsung had a 21.5% market share, followed by Apple’s 16.3%, its best Q2 in the past 10 years  —  BOSTON—(BUSINESS WIRE)— According to new research from Strategy Analytics, global smartphone shipments fell -7% YoY to 291 million units in Q2 2022.

Lina Khan’s attempt to block Meta’s Within acquisition upends decades of antitrust standards and could shift how DC regulates competition in nascent industries (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

Cecilia Kang / New York Times: Lina Khan’s attempt to block Meta’s Within acquisition upends decades of antitrust standards and could shift how DC regulates competition in nascent industries  —  Lina Khan may set off a shift in how Washington regulates competition by filing cases in tech areas before they mature.

Sources: a Chinese government PR division asked to open a stealth account on TikTok, targeting Western audiences; TikTok declined the “sensitive” request (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)

Olivia Solon / Bloomberg: Sources: a Chinese government PR division asked to open a stealth account on TikTok, targeting Western audiences; TikTok declined the “sensitive” request  —  A Chinese government entity responsible for public relations attempted to open a stealth account on TikTok targeting Western audiences …

Sources: EU is considering creating a new directorate headed by two top antitrust officials, amid concerns EU competition watchdog may struggle to enforce DMA (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: Sources: EU is considering creating a new directorate headed by two top antitrust officials, amid concerns EU competition watchdog may struggle to enforce DMA  —  The European Commission is considering creating a new directorate that may be headed by two top antitrust officials to enforce tough …

Space and Time, a decentralized blockchain data platform, raised a $10M seed led by Framework Ventures, and says it is building a new cryptographic protocol (Kharishar Kahfi/The Block)

Kharishar Kahfi / The Block: Space and Time, a decentralized blockchain data platform, raised a $10M seed led by Framework Ventures, and says it is building a new cryptographic protocol  —  Framework Ventures is leading the seed funding round.  —  The $10 million in funds will be used to add engineers to work on the […]

An in-depth look at the issues facing Afterpay, Klarna, Affirm, and other BNPL players, such as economic uncertainty, competition, regulators, and customer debt (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: An in-depth look at the issues facing Afterpay, Klarna, Affirm, and other BNPL players, such as economic uncertainty, competition, regulators, and customer debt  —  For three days each week during the month of April in 2014, a seasoned product manager named Lulu Young, an engineering manager …

Intel is winding down its Optane memory business, incurring a $559M inventory impairment; it’s Intel’s sixth non-core business sold under CEO Pat Gelsinger (Paul Alcorn/Tom’s Hardware)

Paul Alcorn / Tom’s Hardware: Intel is winding down its Optane memory business, incurring a $559M inventory impairment; it’s Intel’s sixth non-core business sold under CEO Pat Gelsinger  —  3D XPoint at the last crossroad.  —  Intel’s Q2 2022 earnings report today was uncharacteristically disappointing …

MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body

Ultrasound imaging is a safe and noninvasive window into the body’s workings, providing clinicians with live images of a patient’s internal organs. To capture these images, trained technicians manipulate ultrasound wands and probes to direct sound waves into the body. These waves reflect back out to produce high-resolution images of a patient’s heart, lungs, and […]

New hardware offers faster computation for artificial intelligence, with much less energy

As scientists push the boundaries of machine learning, the amount of time, energy, and money required to train increasingly complex neural network models is skyrocketing. A new area of artificial intelligence called analog deep learning promises faster computation with a fraction of the energy usage. Programmable resistors are the key building blocks in analog deep […]