Huawei's New SoC Features Processor Cores Designed In-House (arstechnica.com) 88
While Huawei is still licensing Arm's basic designs, its own HiSilicon chip design business has improved on them to build its own processor cores on the Mate's Kirin 9000S SoC. This will give it the flexibility needed to produce high-end smartphones despite the constraints of US export controls, said analysts and industry insiders. The Kirin 9000S also features a graphics processing unit and neural processing unit developed by HiSilicon. Its predecessor, the Kirin 9000 SoC, had relied completely on Arm for its CPUs and GPU...
Huawei was able to produce its own phone processors by adapting CPU core designs that were originally used in its data center servers, according to people with direct knowledge of its development. The strategy resembles Apple's moves to turn its iPhone processors into chips capable of powering its Mac computers — but in reverse. "No one ever did this before," said analyst Brady Wang of Counterpoint Research of Huawei's server-to-phone innovation...
Various testing teams, including Geekerwan's, have found that Huawei's semiconductor capabilities are one to two years behind those of chips made by the US's Qualcomm, the leading mobile chipmaker. Huawei's chips also consume more power than its competitors', according to measurements, and can cause the phone to heat up.
Reuters reports that "The United States has no evidence that Huawei can produce smartphones with advanced chips in large volumes, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Tuesday."
But meanwhile, a Huawei Technologies unit "is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras, in a fresh sign the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of U.S. export controls, two sources briefed on the unit's efforts said." The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company's HiSilicon chip design unit started this year, according to one of the sources, and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said at least some of the customers were Chinese...
"These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors," said the source familiar with the surveillance camera industry's supply chain, adding that HiSilicon's return would shake up the market... Before the U.S. export controls, it was the dominant chip supplier to the surveillance camera sector, with brokerage Southwest Securities estimating its global share in 2018 at 60%. By 2021, HiSilicon's global market share plummeted to just 3.9%, according to data from consulting firm Frost & Sullivan...
TechInsights analyst Dan Hutcheson said their analysis of the Mate 60 Pro and other components such as its radio frequency power chip also suggested that Huawei had access to sophisticated electronic design automation (EDA) tools that "they are not supposed to have".
"We don't know if they got them illicitly, or more probably the Chinese developed their own EDA tools," he said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
WSJ Criticizes 'the Billionaire Keeping TikTok On Phones In the US' (msn.com) 72
The newspaper argues that TikTok's "friends" in the U.S. government — backed by billionaire financier Jeff Yass — "helped stall attempts to outlaw America's most-downloaded app." Yass's investment company, Susquehanna International Group, bet big on TikTok in 2012, buying a stake in parent company ByteDance now measured at about 15%. That translates into a personal stake for Yass of 7% in ByteDance. It is worth roughly $21 billion based on the company's recent valuation, or much of his $28 billion net worth as gauged by Bloomberg.
Yass is also one of the top donors to the Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that rallied Republican opposition to a TikTok ban. Yass has donated $61 million to the Club for Growth's political-spending arm since 2010, or about 24% of its total, according to federal records. Club for Growth made public its opposition to banning TikTok in March, in an opinion article by its president, at a time when sentiment against the platform among segments of both parties was running high on Capitol Hill... With many Democrats already skeptical of a ban, the whittling away of Republican support killed momentum for several bills, including the bipartisan Restrict Act backed by the Biden administration...
TikTok's own lobbying efforts in Washington have included hundreds of meetings and other contacts, according to a person familiar with the matter. One of its main arguments to Republicans has been that a majority of ByteDance's shareholders are Americans, and some are well-connected conservatives, this person said. The lobbying appears to have helped push House Republican lawmakers to back away from the idea of a ban on TikTok and focus instead on legislation that would put new legal protections in place for users' personal data...
The Biden administration hasn't indicated any change in its effort to ban the app or force its sale. It could still try to use executive powers to ban it, or force a sale to remove Chinese control. But without legislation, analysts say those orders could be overturned in court.
'Laugh then Think': Strange Research Honored at 33rd Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony (improbable.com) 15
You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.
COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.
NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.
PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
China's Quest for Human Genetic Data Spurs Fears of a DNA Arms Race (adn.com) 32
Although some of them were temporary, "scores" of the portable labs "were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. But it adds that now those same labs "are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China's intentions." Some analysts perceive China's largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world. That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said. Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers...
BGI Group, the Shenzhen-based company that makes Fire-Eye labs, said it has no access to genetic information collected by the lab it helped create in Serbia. But U.S. officials note that BGI was picked by Beijing to build and operate the China National GeneBank, a vast and growing government-owned repository that now includes genetic data drawn from millions of people around the world. The Pentagon last year officially listed BGI as one of several "Chinese military companies" operating in the United States, and a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment linked the company to the Beijing-directed global effort to obtain even more human DNA, including from the United States. The U.S. government also has blacklisted Chinese subsidiaries of BGI for allegedly helping analyze genetic material gathered inside China to assist government crackdowns on the country's ethnic and religious minorities...
Beijing's drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons.
U.S. intelligence officials believe China's global effort is mostly about beating the West economically, not militarily. There is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for reasons other than scientific research. China has announced plans to become the world's leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called "the new gold" — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures...
U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that they have limited insight into how BGI handles DNA information acquired overseas, including whether genetic data from the Fire-Eye labs ultimately end up in the computers of China's military or intelligence services... Chinese law makes clear that any information collected using BGI's machines can be accessed by the Chinese government. A national intelligence law enacted in 2017 stipulates that Chinese firms and citizens are legally bound to share proprietary information acquired in foreign countries whenever requested.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article
China's AI 'War of a Hundred Models' Heads For a Shakeout (reuters.com) 17
Additionally, companies have also announced dozens of "industry-specific LLMs" that link to their core model. However, investors and analysts say that most were yet to find viable business models, were too similar to each other and were now grappling with surging costs. Tensions between Beijing and Washington have also weighed on the sector, as U.S. dollar funds invest less in early-stage projects and difficulties obtaining AI chips made by the likes of Nvidia start to bite. "Only those with the strongest capabilities will survive," said Esme Pau, head of China internet and digital asset research at Macquarie Group, who expects consolidation and a price war as players compete for users.
China Just Stopped Exporting Two Minerals the World's Chipmakers Need (cnn.com) 289
China's exports of two rare minerals essential for manufacturing semiconductors fell to zero in August, a month after Beijing imposed curbs on sales overseas, citing national security. China produces about 80% of the world's gallium and about 60% of germanium, according to the Critical Raw Materials Alliance, but it didn't sell any of the elements on international markets last month, Chinese customs data released on Wednesday showed. In July, the country exported 5.15 metric tons of forged gallium products and 8.1 metric tons of forged germanium products.
When asked about the lack of exports last month, He Yadong, a spokesperson from China's commerce ministry told a press briefing Thursday that the department had received applications from companies to export the two materials. Some applications had been approved, he said, without elaborating. The curbs are indicative of China's apparent willingness to retaliate against US export controls, despite concerns about economic growth, as a tech war simmers.
Nobody ever said weaning ourselves off the CCP would be easy, Schwit1 adds.
US and China Launch Economic and Financial Working Groups With Aim of Easing Tensions (apnews.com) 11
The announcement follows a string of high-ranking administration officials' visits to China this year, which sets the stage for a possible meeting between President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in November at an Asia-Pacific economic conference in San Francisco. China is one of the United States' biggest trading partners, and economic competition between the two nations has increased in recent years. The two finance ministers have agreed to meet at a "regular cadence," the Treasury Department said in a news release.
Nearly 500 Smartphone Brands Have Left the Market Since 2017 (techspot.com) 42
Counterpoint Research highlights several reasons behind the shrinking number of brands over the last seven years. The pandemic and component shortages that began in 2020 had a massive impact, while the global economic slowdown following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has caused many smaller smartphone companies to shutter. The local brands have also been dealing with other factors killing off their businesses. More people are holding onto their devices for longer before upgrading, cheaper phones are improving in quality all the time, there's a maturing user base, we've seen technology transitions such as that from 4G to 5G, and a handful of big brands are holding on to more of the market.
China Accuses US of Hacking Huawei Servers as Far Back as 2009 (time.com) 29
The ministry's accusations emerged as the two countries battle for technological supremacy. Huawei in particular has spurred alarm in Washington since the telecom leader unveiled a smartphone powered by an advanced chip it designed, which was made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. That's in spite of years-long U.S. sanctions intended to cut Huawei off from the American technology it needs to design sophisticated chips and phones. The U.S. has been "over-stretching" the concept of national security with its clampdown on Chinese enterprises, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. "What we want to tell the US is that suppression and containing of China will not stop China's development. It will only make us more resolved in our development," Mao said.
Toyota Reveals Its Plan To Catch Up On EV Battery Technology (arstechnica.com) 93
A performance-focused liquid electrolyte lithium-ion battery is slated to be the first to appear in 2026. Toyota says it's targeting a 20-minute fast-charging time and wants these cells to be 20 percent cheaper than the cells used in the bZ4x. The company plans to use this in a BEV that can travel almost 500 miles (800 km) on a single charge. For lower-cost vehicles, Toyota is looking at lithium iron phosphate cells, a chemistry that's already extremely popular in China and is being used by Tesla. Toyota plans to construct these as bipolar batteries, where the active materials for the anode and cathode are on either side of a common electrode carrier rather than having separate electrodes for each. (Toyota already uses this approach for the nickel metal hydride batteries it uses in many of its hybrid models.) LFP cells are targeting a 40 percent cost reduction compared to the bZ4x battery and 20 percent more range. LFP cells don't charge as fast, but Toyota wants a 10-80 percent DC fast-charging time of 30 minutes. If it pans out, the company expects these cells in 2026 or 2027.
There's also a high-performance lithium-ion chemistry in development, though it may not be ready until 2028. Toyota wants to combine its bipolar electrode structure with a high percentage of nickel in the cathode to create a pack with extremely long range -- up to 621 miles (1,000 km). But it's also targeting a 10 percent cost reduction compared to the performance-focused pack mentioned earlier. The fourth battery technology is one that Toyota has talked about a lot in the past -- solid state. Both electrodes and electrolytes in a solid state battery are solid, which means the battery can be smaller and lighter than a cell with liquid electrodes. The technology is tantalizing, but it's troubled by the formation of dendrites -- spikes of lithium crystals that can grow and puncture the cathode. Toyota says it has made a breakthrough in durability for lithium-ion solid state cells -- it's being coy as to exactly what -- that has allowed it to switch to putting these batteries into mass production, with commercial use scheduled for 2027 or 2028. Interestingly, Toyota was originally planning to use solid state cells in its hybrids only, but it appears to have revised that idea and will put them in BEVs, with a target range of more than 600 miles and a fast-charging time of just 10 minutes.
No Evidence That China Can Make Advanced Chips 'at Scale,' US Says (bloomberg.com) 112
Maduro Says Venezuela Will Send Astronauts To Moon In Chinese Spaceship (washingtonpost.com) 151
"Very soon, Venezuelan youth will come to prepare as astronauts, here in Chinese schools," Maduro said, as part of a "new era" of collaboration between China and Venezuela. After years of drifting away from Beijing, Maduro is strengthening ties with China as he seeks help reviving Venezuela's crumbling economy and oil industry. Venezuela is also in talks with the United States exploring the possibility of lifting some U.S. sanctions on Venezuela's oil sector in exchange for Maduro's promise to hold free and fair presidential elections next year. "Venezuela became the first outside nation to join the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project, which was jointly announced by China and Russia in 2021," notes Space.com.
It may be some time before any Venezuelans visit the moon, however. The report notes that Venezuela owes over $15 billion to China at the moment, which will likely impact how much the country would be able to contribute to the China-led ILRS. Venezuela also faces severe economic, political and social crises that have fueled an exodus that has surpassed 7 million.
Was China's 'Spy Balloon' Just Blown Off Course? (cbsnews.com) 112
But now an anonymous reader shares this report from CBS News: Seven months later, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells "CBS News Sunday Morning" the balloon wasn't spying. "The intelligence community, their assessment — and it's a high-confidence assessment — [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon," he said.
So, why was it over the United States? There are various theories, with at least one leading theory that it was blown off-track. The balloon had been headed toward Hawaii, but the winds at 60,000 feet apparently took over. "Those winds are very high," Milley said. "The particular motor on that aircraft can't go against those winds at that altitude..."
After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon's sensors had never been activated while over the Continental United States. But by then, the damage to U.S.-China relations had been done.
On the CBS News show Sunday Morning, the host had this exchange with America's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
CBS: "Bottom line, it was a spy balloon, but it wasn't spying?"
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China."
China's Spy Balloon Program Appears to Have Been Suspended, US Officials Say (cnn.com) 81
The US assessed at the time that the spy balloon was part of an extensive surveillance program run by the Chinese military, CNN has previously reported. The balloon fleet had conducted at least two dozen missions over at least five continents in recent years, according to US officials. The suspension of the program is likely China's way of trying to stabilize its relations with the United States in the run-up to a potential meeting between President Biden and Xi in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, said Christopher Johnson, a former senior China analyst at the CIA and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Although China is unlikely to publicly acknowledge that the balloon was part of an espionage program or announce it will no longer conduct such surveillance on the United States, Johnson said, quietly suspending the program is "a positive step" and likely Beijing's way of showing the US it is trying to address some of the friction points in the relationship...
The FBI concluded its analysis of the balloon's remnants earlier this year, and the Pentagon announced in June that the US government assessed that the balloon did not collect intelligence while flying over the country...In the wake of the incident, the US widened the aperture of its radar systems so that they could better detect objects traveling above a certain altitude and at certain speeds. The aim was to fix a "domain awareness gap" that had allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental United States undetected under the Trump administration, Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said at the time. The more sensitive radar systems led the US military to spot more unidentified objects in US airspace, however, leading to three additional shootdowns of unidentified high-altitude objects in the weeks following the Chinese balloon incident.
Researchers Including Microsoft Spot Chinese Disinformation Campaign Using AI-Generated Photos (businesstimes.com.sg) 40
But a new piece co-authored by the newspaper's national security correspondent and its misinformation investigative reporter notes a new effort identified by researchers from Microsoft, the RAND Corporation, the University of Maryland, the intelligence company Recorded Future, and news-rating service NewsGuard. And that newly-discovered effort "suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States."
It began when, sensing an opportunity,"China's increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced" after high winds in Hawaii downed three power lines that sparked wildfires in Hawaii on August 8th... The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret "weather weapon" being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign... Recorded Future first reported that the Chinese government mounted a covert campaign to blame a "weather weapon" for the fires, identifying numerous posts in mid-August falsely claiming that MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, had revealed "the amazing truth behind the wildfire." Posts with the exact language appeared on social media sites across the internet, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium and Pixiv, a Japanese site used by artists. Other inauthentic accounts spread similar content, often accompanied with mislabeled videos, including one from a popular TikTok account, The Paranormal Chic, that showed a transformer explosion in Chile...
The Chinese campaign operated across many of the major social media platforms — and in many languages, suggesting it was aimed at reaching a global audience. Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center identified inauthentic posts in 31 languages, including French, German and Italian, but also in less prominent ones like Igbo, Odia and Guarani. The artificially generated images of the Hawaii wildfires identified by Microsoft's researchers appeared on multiple platforms, including a Reddit post in Dutch. "These specific A.I.-generated images appear to be exclusively used" by Chinese accounts used in this campaign, Microsoft said in a report. "They do not appear to be present elsewhere online."
The researchers "suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election," according to the article. It adds that president Biden "has cut off China's access to the most advanced chips and the equipment made to produce them."
The article adds that the impact of China's misinformation campaign "is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories."
TSMC Arizona Chip Plant Will Be a 'Paperweight', Says Analyst 126
Given that TSMC has been struggling even to build a chip fab for older tech, there seems no prospect that it would ever attempt to set up chip packaging facilities in the U.S. "Building this type of facility is a huge expenditure of [capital], time, and effort, and it does not seem likely that TSMC will want to do this anytime soon in the desert in Arizona, particularly given all the problems the firm has encountered with construction, costs and personnel so far," said Paul Triolo, senior vice president for China at consultancy DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
Africa's Internet Registry Placed Under Receivership (mybroadband.co.za) 5
China's Apple iPhone Ban Appears To Be Retaliation, US Says (bloomberg.com) 53
But the situation grew more muddled Wednesday, when Beijing pushed back on reports about iPhone restrictions while also raising concerns about security problems with the device. "China has not issued laws and regulations to ban the purchase of Apple or foreign brands' phones," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. It marked the government's first comments on the issue, but didn't seem to refer directly to workplace bans of the device.