An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:

In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden’s administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China — a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders…

RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence… The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V…

Executives from China’s Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation’s progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet’s Google saying it will make Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips…

Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a “tremendous tragedy.” “It would be like banning us from working on the internet,” Kang said. “It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created.”

One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was “abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.

“U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws.”

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Source: Slashdot – Some US Lawmakers Want to Restrict American Companies From Working on RISC-V Chip Technology

In downtown San Francisco two vehicles were stopped at a red light on Monday night, reports the Washington Post — a regular car and a Cruise robotaxi.
Both vehicles advanced when the light turned green, according to witness accounts and video recorded by the Cruise vehicle’s internal cameras and reviewed by The Post. As the cars moved forward, the pedestrian entered the traffic lanes in front of them, according to the video, and was struck by the regular car. The video shows the victim rolling onto that vehicle’s windshield and then being flung into the path of the driverless car, which stopped once it collided with the woman. According to Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow, the autonomous vehicle “braked aggressively to minimize the impact” but was unable to stop before rolling over the woman and coming to a halt. Photos published by the San Francisco Chronicle show the woman’s leg sticking out from underneath the car’s left rear wheel.

“According to Cruise, police had directed the company to keep the vehicle stationary, apparently with the pedestrian stuck beneath it,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Also from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Austin Tutone, a bicycle delivery person, saw the woman trapped underneath the Cruise car and tried to reassure her as they waited for first-responders. “I told her, ‘The ambulance is coming’ and that she’d be okay. She was just screaming.” He shared a photo of the aftermath with The Chronicle that appears to show the car tire on the woman’s leg. San Francisco firefighters arrived and used the jaws of life to lift the car off the woman. She was transported to San Francisco General Hospital with “multiple traumatic injuries,” said SFFD Capt. Justin Schorr. The victim was in critical condition as of late Tuesday afternoon, according to the hospital.

It appears that once the Cruise car sensed something underneath its rear axle, it came to a halt and turned on its hazard lights, Schorr said. Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”

More from the San Francisco Chronicle:
“When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, “you run the risk of causing more injury.” Once the person is freed, the car must stay in place as police gather evidence including “the location of the vehicle and/or vehicles before, during and after the collision,” said Officer Eve Laokwansathitaya, another spokesperson.
The human driver who struck the pedestrian immediately fled the scene, and has not yet been identified.

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Source: Slashdot – Freak Accident in San Francisco Traps Pedestrian Under Robotaxi

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Tens of thousands of Android devices have been shipped to end-users with backdoored firmware, according to a warning from cybersecurity vendor Human Security. As part of the global cybercriminal operation called BadBox (PDF), Human Security found a threat actor relied on supply chain compromise to infect the firmware of more than 70,000 Android smartphones, CTV boxes, and tablet devices with the Triada malware. The infected devices come from at least one Chinese manufacturer but, before they are delivered to resellers, physical retail stores, and e-commerce warehouses, a backdoor was injected into their firmware. “Products known to contain the backdoor have been found on public school networks throughout the United States,” Human says.

Discovered in 2016, Triada is a modular trojan residing in a device’s RAM, relying on the Zygote process to hook all applications on Android, actively using root privileges to substitute system files. Over time, the malware went through various iterations and was found pre-installed on low-cost Android devices on at least two occasions. As part of the BadBox operation that Human Security discovered, the infected low-cost Android devices allow threat actors to carry out various ad-fraud schemes, including one named PeachPit, which at its peak relied on 121,000 Android and 159,000 iOS devices infected with malware, and on 39 Android, iOS, and CTV-centric apps designed to connect to a fake supply-side platform (SSP).

One of the modules delivered to the infected devices from the command-and-control (C&C) server allows the creation of WebViews that are fully hidden from the user, but which “are used to request, render, and click on ads, spoofing the ad requests to look like they’re coming from certain apps, referred by certain websites, and rendered” on specific devices. BadBox, Human Security notes, also includes a residential proxy module that allows the threat actors to sell access to the victim’s network. Furthermore, they can create WhatsApp messaging accounts and Gmail accounts they can then use for other malicious activities. “Finally, because of the backdoor’s connection to C2 servers on BadBox-infected smartphones, tablets, and CTV boxes, new apps or code can be remotely installed by the threat actors without the device owner’s permission. The threat actors behind BadBox could develop entirely new schemes and deploy them on BadBox-infected devices without any interaction from the devices’ owners,” Human notes.

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Source: Slashdot – Android Devices With Backdoored Firmware Found In US Schools