Even if you’re one of the many fans who used to religiously watch The Walking Dead and fell off somewhere along the way, there’s one project coming you are still curious about. It’s, of course, the Rick and Michonne spinoff show called The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.
Source: Gizmodo – Rick and Michonne’s Walking Dead Show Has a Brand New Teaser Trailer
A new survey suggests that American teens—a generation that doesn’t know what life was like without streaming—now favor watching videos on YouTube rather than the previously all-powerful Netflix.
Source: Gizmodo – Teens’ Friendship Ended With Netflix, Now YouTube Is Their Best Friend
Speaking to partners last week as part of their annual Open Innovation Platform forum in Europe, a big portion of TSMC’s roadshow was dedicated to the next generation of the company’s foundry technology. TSMC’s 2 nm-class N2, N2P, and N2X process technologies are set to introduce multiple innovations, including nanosheet gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, backside power delivery, and super-high-performance metal-insulator-metal (SHPMIM) capacitor over the next few years. But in order to take advantage of these innovations, TSMC warns, chip designers will need to use all-new electronic design automation (EDA), simulation, and verification tools as well as IP. And while making such a big shift is never an easy task, TSMC is bringing some good news to chip designers early-on: even with N2 still a couple of years out, many of the major EDA tools, verification tools, foundation IP, and even analog IP for N2 are already available for use.
“For N2 we could be working with them two years in advance already because nanosheet is different,” said Dan Kochpatcharin, Head of Design Infrastructure Management at TSMC, at the OIP 2023 conference in Amsterdam. “[EDA] tools have to be ready, so what the OIP did is to work with them early. We have a huge engineering team to work with the EDA partners, IP partners, [and other] partners.”
| Advertised PPA Improvements of New Process Technologies Data announced during conference calls, events, press briefings and press releases |
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| TSMC | |||||
| N5 vs N7 |
N3 vs N5 |
N3E vs N5 |
N2 vs N3E |
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| Power | -30% | -25-30% | -34% | -25-30% | |
| Performance | +15% | +10-15% | +18% | +10-15% | |
| Chip Density* | ? | ? | ~1.3X | >1.15X | |
| Volume Manufacturing |
Q2 2022 | H2 2022 | Q2/Q3 2023 | H2 2025 | |
*Chip density published by TSMC reflects ‘mixed’ chip density consisting of 50% logic, 30% SRAM, and 20% analog.
Preparations for the start of N2 chip production, scheduled for sometime in the second half of 2025, began long ago. Nanosheet GAA transistors behave differently than familiar FinFETs, so EDA and other tool and IP makers had to build their products from scratch. This is where TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) demonstrated its prowess and enabled TSMC’s partners to start working on their products well in advance.
By now, major EDA tools from Cadence and Synopsys as well as many tools from Ansys and Siemens EDA have been certified by TSMC, so chip developers can already use them to design chips. Also, EDA software programs from Cadence and Synopsys are ready for analog design migration. Furthermore, Cadence’s EDA tools already support N2P’s backside power delivery network.
With pre-built IP designs, things are taking a bit longer. TSMC’s foundation libraries and IP, including standard cells, GPIO/ESD, PLL, SRAM, and ROM are ready both for mobile and high-performance computing applications. Meanwhile, some PLLs exist in pre-silicon development kits, whereas others are silicon proven. Finally, blocks such as non-volatile memory, interface IP, and even chiplet IP are not yet available – bottlenecking some chip designs – but these blocks in active development or planned for development by companies like Alphawave, Cadence, Credo, eMemory, GUC, and Synopsys, according to a TSMC slide. Ultimately, the ecosystem of tools and libraries for designing 2 nm chips is coming together, but it’s not all there quite yet.
“[Developing IP featuring nanosheet transistors] is not harder, but it does take more cycle time, cycle time is a bit longer,” said Kochpatcharin. “Some of these IP vendors also need to be trained [because] it is just different. To go from planar [transistor] to FinFET, is not harder, you just need to know how to do the FinFET. [It is] same thing, you just need to know how to do [this]. So, it does take some to be trained, but [when you are trained], it is easy. So that is why we started early.”
Although many of the major building blocks for chips are N2-ready, a lot of work still has to be done by many companies before TSMC’s 2 nm-class process technologies go into mass production. Large companies, which tend to design (or co-design) IP and development tools themselves are already working on their 2 nm chips, and should be ready with their products by the time mass production starts in 2H 2025. Other players can also fire up their design engines because 2 nm preps are well underway at TSMC and its partners.
Source: AnandTech – TSMC: Ecosystem for 2nm Chip Development Is Nearing Completion
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned six flavored Vuse Alto e-cigarette products on Thursday amid a nationwide crackdown on vape and e-cigarette sales in the U.S. The FDA cited concerns that Vuse Alto applied targeted marketing to children as it became the top-selling vape product, surpassing Juul.
Source: Gizmodo – FDA Cracks Down On Vape Sales by Banning Six Vuse Alto E-Cigarettes
They’ve raced for the moon, they’ve raced for Mars, and now the astronauts of For All Mankind are racing after an asteroid. The first trailer for season four of Apple TV+’s incredible alternate reality show is here, and it’s a perfect illustration of what sets the series apart from everything else.
Source: Gizmodo – For All Mankind’s Season 4 Trailer Introduces a New Space Race
The European Union (EU) has opened an investigation into X (formerly Twitter) for lackluster moderation of illegal content and disinformation in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. The move, via Financial Times, comes two days after EU Commissioner Thierry Breton sent an “urgent” letter to X owner Elon Musk asking the billionaire about the company’s handling of misinformation. The formal probe is the first under the newly minted Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires platforms operating in Europe to police harmful content — and can levy fines significant enough to give it teeth.
EU officials sent a series of questions to X that the company has until October 18 to answer. The commission says it will determine its next steps “based on the assessment of X replies.” The DSA, which passed into law in 2022, requires social companies to proactively moderate and remove illegal content. Failing to do so could lead to periodic fines or penalties that, in X’s case, could total up to “five percent of the company’s daily global turnover,” according to FT.
Researchers and fact-checkers have cautioned about widely distributed misinformation on X following the Hamas attacks on Israel. Tuesday’s letter warned Musk about harmful content on X, signaling that Breton was prepared to use the DSA’s full muscle to enforce compliance. “Following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, we have indications that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU,” Breton wrote. “Let me remind you that the Digital Services Act sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation.”
Musk’s response appeared to contain at least a whiff of snark. “Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports,” the X owner and Tesla CEO wrote. “Please list the violations you allude to on X, so that that [sic] the public can see them. Merci beaucoup.” Breton retorted, “You are well aware of your users’ — and authorities’ — reports on fake content and glorification of violence. Up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk.”
Yaccarino’s response claimed the company redistributed its resources and shuffled internal teams to address moderation issues surrounding the Middle East conflict. She said X has removed or labeled “tens of thousands of pieces of content” since the attacks commenced.
The CEO added that X deleted hundreds of Hamas-aligned accounts from the platform while stating that the company works with counter-terrorism organizations. Yaccarino said X’s Community Notes, a crowdsourced moderation feature, is now supported on Android and the web (with iOS “coming soon”). She also claimed the company has “significantly scaled” a feature that sends notifications to people who liked, replied to or reposted something that later received a Community Note fact-check.
The EU’s newly opened probe also questions how X is prepared to react during a crisis and what procedures it has to handle associated misinformation. The company allegedly has until the end of October to respond to that line of questioning.
Breton isn’t focusing exclusively on X. The commissioner also sent letters to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok owner ByteDance this week, reminding them of their obligations to the DSA in the wake of the Middle East bloodshed.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-eu-is-probing-xs-response-to-israel-hamas-misinformation-204101029.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – The EU is probing X’s response to Israel-Hamas misinformation
Schools for children of military members achieve results rarely seen in public education. From a report: Amy Dilmar, a middle-school principal in Georgia, is well aware of the many crises threatening American education. The lost learning that piled up during the coronavirus pandemic. The gaping inequalities by race and family income that have only gotten worse. A widening achievement gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students. But she sees little of that at her school in Fort Moore, Ga. The students who solve algebra equations and hone essays at Faith Middle School attend one of the highest-performing school systems in the country. It is run not by a local school board or charter network, but by the Defense Department. With about 66,000 students — more than the public school enrollment in Boston or Seattle — the Pentagon’s schools for children of military members and civilian employees quietly achieve results most educators can only dream of.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam that is considered the gold standard for comparing states and large districts, the Defense Department’s schools outscored every jurisdiction in math and reading last year and managed to avoid widespread pandemic losses. Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students. Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school — suggesting lower family incomes, on average — performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates. The schools reopened relatively quickly during the pandemic, but last year’s results were no fluke. While the achievement of U.S. students overall has stagnated over the last decade, the military’s schools have made gains on the national test since 2013. And even as the country’s lowest-performing students — in the bottom 25th percentile — have slipped further behind, the Defense Department’s lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Who Runs the Best US Schools? It May Be the Defense Department
Enlarge (credit: BackyardProduction | iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus)
This month, more than three dozen victims allegedly terrorized by stalkers using Apple AirTags have joined a class-action lawsuit filed in a California court last December against Apple. They alleged in an amended complaint that, partly due to Apple’s negligence, AirTags have become “one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers” because they can be easily, cheaply, and covertly used to determine “real-time location information to track victims.”
Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an “explosion of reporting” showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area—Tulsa, Oklahoma—alone, the complaint said.
This seeming escalation is concerning, plaintiffs say, because Apple allegedly has not done enough to mitigate harms, and AirTags stalking can lead to financial ruin, as victims bear significant costs like hiring mechanics to strip their cars to locate AirTags or repeatedly relocating their homes. AirTags stalking can also end in violence, including murder, plaintiffs alleged, and the problem is likely bigger than anyone knows, because stalking is historically underreported.
Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Apple AirTags stalking led to ruin and murders, lawsuit says
Threads may not be the place to go for news, but it now has an edit button. And unlike a certain other social media platform, it didn’t take 16 years to get it.
Source: Gizmodo – Threads Edit Button Is Here, No Payment to Zuck Required
French technology company Shadow has confirmed a data breach involving customers’ personal information. TechCrunch: The Paris-headquartered startup, which offers gaming through its cloud-based PC service, said in an email to customers this week that hackers had accessed their personal information after a successful social engineering attack targeted the company. “At the end of September, we were the victim of a social engineering attack targeting one of our employees,” Shadow CEO Eric Sele said in the email, seen by TechCrunch. “This highly sophisticated attack began on the Discord platform with the downloading of malware under cover of a game on the Steam platform, proposed by an acquaintance of our employee, himself a victim of the same attack.”
Shadow said that though its security team took unspecified “immediate action,” the hackers were able to connect to the management interface of one of the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to obtain customers’ private data. That data includes full names, email addresses, dates of birth, billing addresses and credit card expiry dates. Shadow says no passwords or sensitive banking data were compromised.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Cloud Gaming Firm Shadow Says Hackers Stole Customers’ Personal Data
Lower Decks does a lot with its love of story threads and nods to past Star Trek, but when it comes to carving out its own true additions to the trope canon those results are often a little mixed—and, weirdly enough, have so far largely focused on one very specific trope, in the form of Trek’s litany of asshole AI…
Source: Gizmodo – Lower Decks’ AI Antics Offer a Mathematically Imperfect Redemption
Alphabet’s Google is setting itself up to be a one-stop shop for all sorts of climate- and sustainability-related decisions. The company announced a series of updates this week that aim to help users make more informed choices, whether they’re about buying an electric vehicle or preparing for extreme weather.
Source: Gizmodo – Google’s New Weather and Climate Tools, Ranked
There’s been a lot of talk recently about NFTs, mainly that the vast majority of them are now damn near worthless.
Source: Gizmodo – These Brands Are Still Going Down With NFT’s Sinking Ship
Netflix is planning to open new immersive locations created around its original TV shows where fans can shop, eat, and play some games. The two new locations will be Netflix’s first permanent fan experience locations its Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos announced on Thursday during the Bloomberg Screentime…
Source: Gizmodo – ‘Netflix House,’ the Streamer’s First Permanent Fan Experience Locations, to Open in 2025
ChatGPT creator OpenAI quietly revised all of the “Core values” listed on its website in recent weeks, putting a greater emphasis on the development of AGI — artificial general intelligence. From a report: CEO Sam Altman has described AGI as “the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.” OpenAI’s careers page previously listed six core values for its employees, according to a September 25 screenshot from the Internet Archive. They were Audacious, Thoughtful, Unpretentious, Impact-driven, Collaborative, and Growth-oriented. The same page now lists five values, with “AGI focus” being the first. “Anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope,” the website reads. The others are Intense and scrappy, Scale, Make something people love, and Team spirit.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – OpenAI Has Quietly Changed Its ‘Core Values’
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing and blog post that the Internal Revenue Service says the company owes the US Treasury $28.9 billion in back taxes, plus penalties and interest, reports the Associated Press. The claim comes as a result of a lengthy IRS audit that examined how Microsoft distributed its profits across different countries from 2004 to 2013. Microsoft disagrees with the IRS’s claim and intends to appeal the decision.
According to the AP, the ongoing IRS probe began in 2007 and is described as “one of the largest in the Service’s history” in court documents released last year. Recently, Microsoft received notification that the audit phase has concluded, triggering the next steps for settling the dispute. At the core of the IRS investigation is the practice known as “transfer pricing,” which some critics argue allows companies to report lower profits in countries with higher taxes and vice versa, minimizing their overall tax obligations.
Microsoft maintains that it has complied with IRS rules all along and will proceed to appeal the agency’s decision—a process expected to last for years. Here’s how the company described the episode in Section 8.01 of its SEC filing:
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Microsoft disputes B tax bill after “one of the largest” audits in IRS history
You never want to see Michael Myers anywhere near your home, but he may soon be coming to TV near you. Miramax just scored the TV rights to the very popular Halloween franchise with an eye on developing not just a TV show but a full universe that expands into film as well.
Source: Gizmodo – Halloween TV Rights Go to Miramax With Eye on a Cinematic Universe
A federal judge responsible for deciding the fate of Montana’s unprecedented TikTok ban poked holes in the state’s argument during a hearing Thursday and questioned why the government should prevent users and creators from willfully handing over data to the app. Donald Molloy, the judge overseeing the hearing, said…
Source: Gizmodo – Montana Struggles to Convince Judge to Back Its Historic TikTok Ban
EA is making a turn-based strategy game based on… soccer? That’s the bizarre premise behind the upcoming EA Sports FC Tactical, a mobile title heading to iOS and Android in early 2024. The company says the most peculiar installment in its decades-old franchise (formerly FIFA) results in “authentic football action like never before.”
As its description suggests, matches will be simulated, so you won’t directly control players’ actions like in traditional sports games. Instead, it focuses on in-game strategies like player stamina and power-play management. Playable modes include online-friendly matches and “intense online competitions” like Rank matches, Leagues, and Guilds. It sounds like a sports game for those who want 100 percent strategy and little or no player-controlled action.
Promotional screenshots show a one-on-one battle with assigned numerical skills for each player. They’re broken down into categories like dribbling, one-two, passing and shooting. The pictured player appears to have “skill move” power-up cards like combative chase shot, wild tap dribble and floating instep shot. It sounds like EA took core gameplay elements familiar from titles like Teamfight Tactics (and many others) and slapped a soccer skin onto it to attract fans of both genres.
The game will have over 5,000 licensed players from “more than 10 top leagues,” including the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, and Serie A. You can train players to upgrade their moves, unlock new traits as you progress and customize cosmetics like stadium designs, uniforms and balls.
“EA Sports FC Tactical embraces strategic gameplay to create an all-new football experience that immerses players in the World’s Game like never before,” said EA Sports senior vice president Nick Wlodyka. The game is available for pre-registration on the App Store and Google Play ahead of an expected January 18, 2024 launch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/eas-surreal-mobile-mashup-blends-soccer-with-turn-by-turn-strategy-185803016.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – EA’s surreal mobile mashup blends soccer with turn-by-turn strategy
Microsoft could use board games to revisit dormant franchises owned by Xbox Game Studios, with Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game potentially being the first of many. From a report: Zoo Tycoon was developed by Elite: Dangerous studio Frontier Developments and published by Microsoft Studios (the previous name for Xbox Game Studios), on November 22, 2013 for Xbox One and Xbox 360. Speaking to Xbox Wire, Xbox Game Studios executive producer Robert Jerauld said this board game adaptation is a “prime illustration” of how Microsoft could expand its franchises that don’t have video games in active development. “It’s crucial to recognize that even if certain franchises aren’t currently undergoing active development, they can still be actively appreciated by their fans,” Jerauld said.
“Zoo Tycoon serves as a prime illustration of this. It presents a valuable chance for Microsoft to extend gratitude to the dedicated and ardent Zoo Tycoon fans who have worked tirelessly to sustain the game’s enchantment. We acknowledge your dedication and deeply appreciate you.” While Jerauld didn’t say if he had any other dormant franchises in mind, Xbox certainly has a wealth to choose from. These could include Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Pinata, Blinx: The Time Sweeper, Project Gotham Racing, MechAssault and plenty more. There are some bigger names that haven’t seen a release in a long time, of course, but many of these currently have sequels in development at Xbox.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Xbox Game Studios Could Use Board Games To Revisit Dormant Franchises
