“RISC-V is open source, so it’s much more resistant to government bans,” reports Tom’s Hardware:

The Alibaba Group Holding, China’s largest e-commerce company, unveiled its first self-designed chip, Xuantie 910, based on the open source RISC-V instruction set architecture. As reported by Nikkei Asian Review, the chip will target edge computing and autonomous driving, while the RISC-V’s open source license may help Alibaba side-step the U.S. trade war altogether.

Alibaba doesn’t intend to manufacture the chips itself. Instead, it could outsource production to other Chinese semiconductor companies, such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. According to Nikkei, the Chinese government has been encouraging wealthy Chinese companies from various industries to enter the semiconductor industry in recent years. The government’s efforts accelerated when the trade war with the U.S. started last year. It reportedly forced foreign companies to transfer their technology and IP to Chinese companies if they wanted any chance at the local Chinese market.

“Most Chinese companies are still wary about whether Arm’s architecture and Intel’s architecture and technical support would remain accessible amid tech tension and further geopolitical uncertainties,” Sean Yang, an analyst at research company CINNO in Shanghai, said, according to Nikkei. “It would be very helpful for China to increase long-term semiconductor sufficiency if big companies such as Alibaba jump in to build a chip (design) platform which smaller Chinese developers can just use without worrying about being cut off from supplies.”

The article also notes that using RISC-V will give Alibaba “the ability to completely customize and extend the ISA of the processors built on top of it without having to get permission from any company first.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Open Source RISC-V License Helps Alibaba Sidestep US Trade War

“A consumer privacy group has filed a challenge to Facebook’s $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, saying it is not ‘adequate, reasonable or appropriate’ and lets the social media giant off the hook for years of violations,” reports the AP.

The Verge argues that the current consensus is “the FTC gave the company a slap on the wrist, and Facebook’s latest earnings report showed the social network earning three times as much in revenue as the FTC fine in just three months.”

Now, EPIC wants to potentially force the agency to alter the terms of the deal to better address complaints filed by individuals and consumer groups. EPIC takes issue not just with the relatively low size of the fine, which, while the biggest ever for a tech company, is barely a drop in the bucket for the $571 billion company. The group is also upset with how Facebook effectively avoided culpability for its actions, as part of the settlement allowed the company to avoid admitting any guilt over massive privacy and data security scandals, like Cambridge Analytica, that landed it in hot water with the agency.

EPIC also wants a court to decide whether the FTC should have granted Facebook blanket immunity from past legal challenges and if the scope of the settlement can be broadened to include issues like Facebook’s widespread use of facial recognition on users without their consent and violations of children’s privacy.
EPIC complains that the deal would extinguish more than 26,000 consumer complaints against Facebook that are currently pending at the FTC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Privacy Group Challenges FTC’s Small Facebook Settlement, Also Wants an Admission of Guilt

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:

On the three-year anniversary of the No More Ransom project, Europol announced today that users who downloaded and decrypted files using free tools made available through the No More Ransom portal have prevented ransomware gangs from making profits estimated at at least $108 million… However, an Emsisoft spokesperson told ZDNet that the $108 million estimate that Europol shared today is “actually a huge underestimate. They’re based on the number of successful decryptions confirmed by telemetry — in other words, when the tools phone home to confirm they’ve done their job,” Emsisoft told ZDNet… Just the free decryption tools for the GandCrab ransomware alone offered on the No More Ransom website have prevented ransom payments of nearly $50 million alone, Europol said.

The project, which launched in July 2016, now hosts 82 tools that can be used to decrypt 109 different types of ransomware. Most of these have been created and shared by antivirus makers like Emsisoft, Avast, and Bitdefender, and others; national police agencies; CERTs; or online communities like Bleeping Computer. By far the most proficient member has been antivirus maker Emsisoft, which released 32 decryption tools for 32 different ransomware strains… All in all, Europol said that more than three million users visited the site and more than 200,000 users downloaded tools from the No More Ransom portal since its launch.

One Emisoft researcher said they were “pretty proud” of their decryptor for MegaLocker, “as not only did it help thousands of victims, but it really riled up the malware author.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘No More Ransom’ Decryption Tools Prevent 8M In Ransomware Payments

dryriver writes:
People who are only mildly tech- or engineering-literate tend to think that innovation is really difficult and expensive, takes years to achieve/discover, and that when something “amazing” is actually discovered, the innovative tech is integrated into products like smartphones or PCs “as soon as is technically possible”.

More tech and engineering literate people I talk to frequently tell me the exact opposite of this, namely that companies often discover an innovative method or technique in their R&D labs, are capable of packaging said method or technique into a product as soon as the next fiscal year, but choose instead to sit on the innovation for several years, bringing it to market only when competitors force them to, or sales of existing-paradigm products start to become lacklustre…at the exact point in time where the sales and profit numbers from selling the innovation are maximized.

One tech market, two very different opinions on how it actually works. So here’s the question. Do we typically get innovation in products “shortly after the necessary techniques are discovered and mastered”, or do we rather get cool innovation handed to us “in a planned fashion” — at a deliberately delayed future date when the manufacturer thinks it will achieve the greatest finanical return from selling the innovation to the end user?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Ask Slashdot: Is the Pace of Tech Innovation Spontaneous Or Planned?