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TECH/SCIENCE

US Congress passes bill to boost chipmakers, compete with China

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The U.S. House of Representatives passed sweeping legislation on Thursday to subsidize the domestic semiconductor industry as it competes with Chinese and other foreign manufacturers, a victory for President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats hoping to keep their slim majority in Congress in November midterm elections.

The final vote was 243 to 187, with one Democrat – Representative Sara Jacobs – voting present. Twenty-four Republicans joined 218 Democrats in backing the measure. Passage sends the bill to the White House, where Biden is expected to sign it into law as soon as early next week.

The Senate passed the “Chips and Science” act with bipartisan support on Wednesday, after more than a year of effort. A rare major foray into U.S. industrial policy, the bill provides about $52 billion in government subsidies for U.S. production of semiconductors used in everything from automobiles and high-tech weaponry to electronic devices and video games. It also includes an investment tax credit for chip plants estimated to be worth $24 billion.

The legislation would also authorize $200 billion over 10 years to boost U.S. scientific research to better compete with China. Congress would still need to pass separate appropriations legislation to fund those investments.

The bill passed hours after Biden had a telephone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which Xi warned Biden against “playing with fire” over Taiwan. Aides had said the leaders of the world’s two largest economies also would discuss supply chain and other economic issues.

China had lobbied against the semiconductor bill. The Chinese Embassy in Washington said China “firmly opposed” it, calling it reminiscent of a “Cold War mentality” and “counter to the common aspiration of people” in both countries.

HEFTY SUBSIDIES FOR PRIVATE BUSINESS

Many U.S. lawmakers had said they normally would not support hefty subsidies for private businesses but noted that China and the European Union have been awarding billions in incentives to their chip companies. They also cited national security risks and huge global supply chain problems that have hampered global manufacturing.

Representative Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was one “yes” vote from his party. “We need to manufacture (chips) in this country, and not let it go offshore,” he told reporters before the vote.

“… This is vitally important to our national security,” McCaul said.

At the White House, Biden interrupted a meeting on the economy with corporate executives when told the House had passed the chips bill. “The House has passed it,” Biden said, looking delighted, to applause in the room.

House members cheered after the bill passed. The measure had been in the works for more than a year. The Senate passed a bill in June 2021 with strong bipartisan support, only to have it stall for months in the House as Republicans and Democrats disputed whether it should include provisions addressing issues such as climate change and China’s human rights record.

The chips bill passed the House by a narrower-than-expected margin after some Republicans pulled support at the last minute.

Republican party leaders told members to vote against the bill after the announcement on Wednesday of an agreement between Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin that could pave the way for Senate passage of separate legislation to increase corporate taxes, reduce the national debt, invest in energy technologies and lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Democrats hope such legislative achievements will help them in the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Republicans hope to regain control of the Senate, and some polls have them favored to win a majority in the House of Representatives.

Originally Appeared Here

Filed Under: BUSINESS, TECH/SCIENCE

Chip and carmaker CEOs meet ahead of Biden signing

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The heads of chipmakers GlobalFoundries and Applied Materials and carmakers Ford Motor and General Motors Co were to meet at a closed-door summit with U.S. government officials on Monday to discuss administration plans to invest in semiconductors.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden will sign legislation to subsidize the U.S. semiconductor industry and boost efforts to make the United States more competitive with China. The bill provides $52 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing and research. It also includes an investment tax credit for chip plants estimated to be worth $24 billion.

GlobalFoundries CEO Thomas Caulfield said in a statement the chips legislation “protects U.S. economic, supply chain and national security by accelerating semiconductor manufacturing on American soil.”

The legislation aims to alleviate a persistent shortage that has affected supplies of goods from cars and weapons to washing machines and video games. Thousands of cars and trucks remain parked in southeast Michigan awaiting chips as the shortage continues to impact automakers.

The companies said the summit would bring them together with government officials to “discuss how these public investments can accelerate semiconductor and emerging technology manufacturing, support the electrification of automobiles with a ready supply of chips, including feature-rich chips, and strengthen the United States’ economy, supply chains, and national security.”

White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition William LaPlante and National Security Council official Tarun Chhabra were among officials due to attend.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement “a reliable domestic supply of chips, including legacy semiconductors needed in the automotive and defense industries, will keep American manufacturing lines humming.”

Originally Appeared Here

Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

Twitter whistleblower to testify at US Congress on September 13

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Twitter whisleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko is set to testify at US Congess on September 13 about allegation he leveled against the Parag Agrawal-led micro-blogging platform over misleading regulators about security practices and actual number of bot accounts.

Twitter’s former security chief Zatko will testify Twitter before the Senate about his allegations of security failures at the social network, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the hearing is scheduled for September 13 and Zatko will appear “pursuant to a subpoena”.

“Zatko’s allegations of widespread security failures and foreign state actor interference at Twitter raise serious concerns. If these claims are accurate, they may show dangerous data privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world,” said Senators Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) from the Senate Judiciary Committee in a statement.

Zatko has met privately with Judiciary Committee staff, and has had three meetings on Capitol Hill, according to the report.

Twitter declined to comment on the hearing.

The company held a town hall on Wednesday in which senior company executives deliberated upon the whistleblower complaint.

Twitter is now facing privacy probes in the European Union (EU) after the whistleblower complaint.

Zatko’s complaints had references to European regulators, alleging that Twitter misled or intended to mislead regional oversight bodies over its compliance with local laws.

According to TechCrunch, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) and France’s CNIL are following up on the whistleblower complaint.

Meanwhile, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also asked Twitter to explain its user metrics after Tesla CEO Elon Musk complained.

“We note your estimate that the average number of false or spam accounts during fiscal 2021 continues to represent fewer than 5 per cent of mDAU,” the commission wrote to Twitter.

“To the extent material, please disclose the methodology used in calculating these figures and the underlying judgements and assumptions used by management,” the SEC added.

Originally Appeared Here

Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

You can now chat with Google’s most advanced AI chatbot but at your own risk

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Google has opened its experimental artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for the public and you can now register to chat with the AI-driven bot trained on the company’s controversial language model.

Google has already warned that early previews of its LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) model “may display inaccurate or inappropriate content”.

‘AI Test Kitchen’ by Google is an app where people can learn about, experience, and give feedback on Google’s emerging AI technology.

“Our goal is to learn, improve and innovate responsibly on AI together. We’ll be opening up to small groups of people gradually,” said the company.

According to Alphabet and Google CEO Sunday Pichai, ‘AI Test Kitchen’ is “meant to give you a sense of what it might be like to have LaMDA in your hands”.

The ability of these language models to generate infinite possibilities shows potential, “but it also means they don’t always get things quite right”.

“And while we’ve made substantial improvements in safety and accuracy in the latest version of LaMDA, we’re still at the beginning of a journey,” said Google.

“We’ve added multiple layers of protection to the AI Test Kitchen. This work has minimised the risk, but not eliminated it,” it added.

Both Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) have unveiled their AI conversational chatbots, asking the public to give feedback.

The initial reports are scary as the Meta chatbot named BlenderBot 3 thought Mark Zuckerberg is “creepy and manipulative” and Donald Trump will always be the US president.

Meta said last week that all conversational AI chatbots are known to sometimes mimic and generate unsafe, biased or offensive remarks.

“BlenderBot can still make rude or offensive comments, which is why we are collecting feedback that will help make future chatbots better,” the company mentioned in a blogpost.

Last month, Google fired an engineer over breaching its confidentiality agreement after he made a claim that the tech giant’s conversation AI is “sentient” because it has feelings, emotions and subjective experiences.

Lemoine also interviewed LaMDA, which came with surprising and shocking answers.

Originally Appeared Here

Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

US bill to allow parents to sue social media over child addiction fails

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California lawmakers have rejected a much-anticipated bill allowing parents to sue social media platforms over their addictive features for kids has failed in the legislature.

The Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act (AB 2408) failed to pass out of committee for a full state Senate vote, reports Miami Herald.

The bill would have let local prosecutors sue social media platforms for up to $250,000 per violation for knowingly using tools that can make children addicted to their products.

“As we’ve said from the start, protecting children online is a priority but must be done responsibly and effectively,” Dylan Hoffman, executive director for California and the Southwest of TechNet was quoted as saying.

“We’re glad to see that this bill won’t move forward in its current form. If it had, companies would’ve been punished for simply having a platform that kids can access,” Hoffman said in the report that came out on Friday.

Supporters said that such rules are necessary to protect children from companies who turn a blind eye to the harm caused to their mental health by social media addiction.

The Bill applied to social networks that generate less than $100 million annually or are primarily intended for video games.

“I am extremely disappointed. The bill’s death means a handful of social media companies will be able to continue their experiment on millions of California kids, causing generational harm,” said bill author Jordan Cunningham.

The demise of the bill comes at a time when US President Joe Biden has called for new child safety protections online.

Critics of the bill argued that it would have pushed services toward privacy-threatening age verification.

“It hurts the kids by depriving them of valuable social outlets and educational resources,” according to Internet policy expert Eric Goldman.

Originally Appeared Here

Filed Under: BUSINESS, TECH/SCIENCE

Over 32K tech workers fired in US, more than 11K in India this year

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FILE – This May 18, 2021, photo shows a person typing on a laptop on a train in New Jersey. Democratic lawmakers are widening their scrutiny into the role of tech companies in collecting personal data of people who may be seeking an abortion, as lawmakers, regulators and the Biden administration grapple with the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling ending the constitutional protections for abortion. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)

Photo : AP

More than 32,000 tech workers have been laid off in the US till July this year, including at Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Meta (formerly Facebook) and the worst has not been over yet for the tech sector that has seen massive stock sell-off.

According to the data compiled by Crunchbase, more than 32,000 workers in the US tech sector have been laid off in mass job cuts, as of late July.

“We’ve included both startups and publicly traded companies that are based in the US. We’ve also included companies based elsewhere that have a sizable team in the United States, such as Klarna,” the analysis said.

The layoff includes ride-sharing platform Uber, Netflix and several cryptocurrency exchanges and lending platforms.

Robinhood, Glossier and Better are just a few of the tech companies that have trimmed their headcount this year.

Since April 1 this year, more than 43,000 workers from 342 tech companies/startups have been laid off across the world and over 13 per cent are from India, according to latest data compiled by layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks layoffs in startups.

In India, more than 25,000 startup workers have lost jobs since the pandemic began — and more than 11,500 have been fired this year.

The layoffs in India are dominated by edtech platforms like Unacademy (1,150 employees), BYJU’S (550 at Toppr and Whitehat Jr) and Vedantu (624), along with ride-hailing platform Ola (nearly 500), healthcare startup MFine (600) and pre-owned cars platform Cars24 (600), among others.

The other Indian startups and unicorns that have laid off employees are Meesho, MPL, Trell and Blinkit (now owned by Zomato), among others.

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Originally Appeared Here

Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

US opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

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US auto safety regulators said Monday they had opened a formal safety probe into Tesla Inc’s driver assistance system Autopilot after a series of crashes involving emergency vehicles.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that since January 2018 it had identified 11 crashes in which Tesla models “have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles involved with those scenes.”

After investigating, NHTSA could opt to take no action, or it could demand a recall, which might effectively impose limits on how, when and where Autopilot operates. Any restrictions could narrow the competitive gap between Tesla’s system and similar advanced driver assistance systems offered by established automakers.

The auto safety agency said it had reports of 17 injuries and one death in those crashes.

Tesla shares were down 3.6% on the investigation.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Chief Executive Elon Musk has repeatedly defended Autopilot and in April tweeted that “Tesla with Autopilot engaged now approaching 10 times lower chance of accident than average vehicle.”

NHTSA said the 11 crashes included four this year, most recently one last month in San Diego, and it had opened a preliminary evaluation of Autopilot in 2014-2021 Tesla Models Y, X, S, and 3.

“The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes,” NHTSA said in a document opening the investigation.

The probe covers an estimated 765,000 Tesla vehicles in the United States, NHTSA said in opening the investigation.

AFTER DARK

NHTSA has in recent years sent numerous special crash investigation teams to review a series of Tesla crashes.

It said most of the 11 crashes took place after dark and the crash scenes encountered included measures like emergency vehicle lights, flares or road cones.

NHTSA said its investigation “will assess the technologies and methods used to monitor, assist, and enforce the driver’s engagement with the dynamic driving task during Autopilot operation.”

Before NHTSA could demand a recall, it must first decide to upgrade a preliminary investigation into an engineering analysis. The two-step investigative process often takes a year or more.

Autopilot, which handles some driving tasks and allows drivers to keep their hands off the wheel for extended periods, was operating in at least three Tesla vehicles involved in fatal U.S. crashes since 2016, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has said.

The NTSB has criticized Tesla’s lack of system safeguards for Autopilot and NHTSA’s failure to ensure the safety of Autopilot.

In February 2020, Tesla’s director of autonomous driving technology, Andrej Karpathy, identified a challenge for its Autopilot system: how to recognize when a parked police car’s emergency flashing lights are turned on.

“This is an example of a new task we would like to know about,” Karpathy said at a conference.

In one of the cases, a doctor was watching a movie on a phone when his vehicle rammed into a state trooper in North Carolina.

KEY CONCERNS

Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said the parked emergency crashes “really seems to illustrate in vivid and even tragic fashion some of the key concerns with Tesla’s system.” He said it induces driver complacency and is not working in some non-typical circumstances.

NHTSA, he suggested, “has been far too deferential and timid, particularly with respect to Tesla.”

One of the 11 crashes NHTSA cited was a January 2018 crash into a parked fire truck in California. NTSB said the system’s design “permitted the driver to disengage from the driving task,” in the Culver City, California, crash.

NHTSA said Monday it had sent teams to review 31 Tesla crashes involving 10 deaths since 2016 where it suspected advanced driver assistance systems were in use. It ruled out the systems in three of the crashes.

In a statement, NHTSA reminded drivers “no commercially available motor vehicles today are capable of driving themselves … Certain advanced driving assistance features can promote safety by helping drivers avoid crashes and mitigate the severity of crashes that occur, but as with all technologies and equipment on motor vehicles, drivers must use them correctly and responsibly.”

Tesla and CEO Musk have sparred with U.S. agencies over the years on various safety issues.

In February, Tesla agreed to recall 134,951 Model S and Model X vehicles with touchscreen displays that could fail and raise the risk of a crash after U.S. auto safety regulators sought the recall.

NHTSA made a rare formal recall request to Tesla in January and said other automakers issued numerous recalls for similar safety issues stemming from the touchscreen failure.

Musk said last month on Twitter the automaker will hold “Tesla AI Day” on Thursday to “go over progress with Tesla AI software & hardware, both training & inference. Purpose is recruiting.”

In January 2017, NHTSA closed a preliminary evaluation into Autopilot covering 43,000 vehicles without taking any action after a nearly seven-month investigation.

NHTSA said at the time it “did not identify any defects in the design or performance” of Autopilot, “nor any incidents in which the systems did not perform as designed.”

NHTSA has not had a Senate-confirmed administrator since January 2017 and nearly seven months into office President Joe Biden has not nominated anyone for the post.

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Originally Appeared Here

Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

Uber partners with GetUpside to offer promotions to drivers, delivery people

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Uber Technologies Inc said on Tuesday it had partnered with retail technology startup GetUpside that would allow its drivers and delivery people in the United States get cashbacks and discounts at fuel stations and convenience stores.

The move comes when the U.S. ride-hailing industry is battling a shortage of drivers as demand strongly bounces back from pandemic lows.

Uber said earlier this month that riders returned to its platform in greater numbers in July and it expects the trend to continue in the coming months, coupled with strong food delivery orders.

Smaller rival Lyft Inc has also flagged the need for further investments in driver incentives.

Uber drivers will receive free access to the promotions via the GetUpside app under the partnership that began earlier this month, the company said.

Washington, D.C.-based GetUpside offers users customized promotions through its app.

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Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

T-Mobile says it found unauthorized access to data

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T-Mobile US Inc acknowledged a data breach but said it was yet to find if any customer information has been compromised, a day after an online forum alleged that personal data of more than 100 million of its users was leaked.

The telecom operator said in a blogpost that it was confident the entry point used to access the data had been closed. It did not confirm the number of affected records.

“We are conducting an extensive analysis alongside digital forensic experts to understand the validity of these claims, and we are coordinating with law enforcement,” the company said.

U.S.-based digital media outlet Vice first reported the claims of a data breach on Sunday.

According to the report in Vice’s Motherboard, the forum’s post does not mention T-Mobile, but the hacker told Vice they have obtained data of over 100 million people and that the data came from T-Mobile servers.

Shares of T-Mobile were down 2.8% in afternoon trading.

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Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

Intel 12th-generation processor details leaked, reveals key specs and more

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Intel is working hard to get back at AMD by improving upon its processor’s performance. A new report has surfaced online suggesting that Intel’s 12th-generation Alder Lake flagship CPU will outperform AMD’s Ryzen 5000 chip by a big margin.

An alleged benchmark of the 12th-generation Intel Core i9 1200K processor has surfaced online on Chinese website Zhihu suggests serious performance improvements over its predecessor. Also, Intel is planning on improving core counts to compete with AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors and also boost the performance. The Intel Core i9 1200K is expected to feature a total of 16 cores.

The website also reveals the specifications of a few 12th-generation processors that includes Intel Core i9-12900K, Core i7-1200K and Core i5 12600K. It also claims that the company will be using hybrid cores with the upcoming processors.

The hybrid cores are basically a mix of low performance and power-efficient cores with high performance cores.

Right now, there’s no official confirmation from Intel about the upcoming 12th-generation processors or whether there will be any improvement on the graphics front.

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Filed Under: TECH/SCIENCE

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