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Serious floods have hit the Chinese province of Sichuan, which has a sizeable cryptocurrency mining infrastructure. As many machines have been lost, the operations will need to buy new graphics cards. That’s good news for vendors who will see increased demands, but potentially unwelcome news for customers. Thanks to the rise of cryptocurrency, the GPU market has become increasingly complicated. We have written before how GPU prices decreased as the Ethereum bubble burst....

VentureBeat reports numerous chip companies who supply CPUs to Huawei are pushing the U.S. government to relax their band on sales of the company’s products. Qualcomm and Intel, the largest chipmakers on mobile and PC respectively are including in the group. Sources says company representatives from Intel and others held a meeting in May with the Commerce Department to discuss Huawei’s ban. Other sources say Qualcomm has been conducting its own lobbying campaign alongside the others....

Despite the fix of critical flaws that enabled these attacks, it’s clear they won’t stop any time soon. The finger is pointed increasingly at Russia, but while NATO considers an offensive approach, the world’s biggest tech companies promise otherwise. In an agreement named the Cybersecurity tech accord, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Cisco, and others espouse the need for a defensive approach. They agree to do this not just individually, but collectively, in collaboration with each other....

An EU member state can order removal if the content is found to be illegal, extending it to a worldwide takedown if there’s a relevant treaty or international law in place. The CJEU ruling follows a case surrounding Austrian Green Party politician Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, who complained to Facebook Ireland over a post that defamed her. The fact Facebook will have to actively seek out and remove similar content is a major change here....

Floyd was murdered by police last week, sparking nationwide protests across the United States. Many of the protests have turned violent, with riots reported in several locations. Trump deployed the National Guard in Minneapolis, the center of the troubles. In a tweet and Facebook post, he said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. This was a direct copy of Miami police chief Walter Headley in the 1960s during his campaign of harsh policing of African American areas....

Called “human review”, Facebook has already told advertisers that new requirements are needed. The company warns agencies that their ads may now be delayed as they are reviewed before being posted. Facebook’s current automated advertising method has been criticised. The company has been accused of allowing the spread of fake news. Divisive and hateful content is often passed by the automation. For example, ads promoting a specific divisive message would now be blocked through human review....

A spokesperson for the ICO spoke to Reuters about the referral, mentioning several concerns about Facebook’s business model, the privacy of its users, and the ability for its adverts to influence politics. “We have referred our ongoing concerns about Facebook’s targeting functions and techniques that are used to monitor individuals’ browsing habits, interactions and behavior across the internet and different devices … to the Irish Data Protection Commission,” said the spokesperson....

The problem began earlier in the week when the browser suddenly disabled all extensions and prevented users from installing new ones. Mozilla has since revealed that its engineers forgot to renew an intermediate signing certificate. As Firefox doesn’t allow unsigned extensions, they were disabled for everyone. Firefox’s developers responded extremely quickly, pushing fixes through Nightly rings and releasing the hotfix to all via an optional ‘Studies’ channel. The general fix does not use the studies system and should have fewer issues....

Firefox’s Bugzilla reports the integration will be a part of Firefox 64 as a replacement for the pop-up banner. The benefits of allowing Windows 10 Action Center support in Chrome and Firefox are several. As mentioned, users are moving away from desktop apps and increasingly towards web apps. Being able to receive notifications from those apps is important. Furthermore, there’s no getting away from the fact that Microsoft’s own (Windows 10 native) Edge browser is way behind its rivals in terms of market share....

The code-hosting platform has announced it has hired Shanku Niyogi to head up its product development team. Niyogi is a big get for GitHub as he comes from Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP), where he was director of product management. Despite his more recent ties to Google, Shanku Niyogi is best know for his near two-decade relationship with Microsoft. Indeed, he has only been with Google Cloud since December 2017. At Microsoft, Niyogi was an engineering general manager for the Visual Studio team....

Chrome Site Isolation Feature Google described Site Isolation as an “additional security boundary between websites,” and as a way to prevent malicious sites from messing with the code of legitimate sites. The site isolation function is designed to protecting PCs from the known Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities but will lead to an increase in the RAM used by Google Chrome. 1 Chrome Site Isolation Feature2 Consume more memory2.1 How to enable Site isolation on Chrome...

Launched as a program for Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), Android Enterprise Recommended helps users find leading EMM providers for deploying Android. “Since we’ve collaborated closely with EMM partners over the years, we understand what it takes to demonstrate excellence in this area. With this program, we’re recognizing partners who provide the most comprehensive technical solutions and have knowledgeable teams focused on modern Android security and management.” Google named Microsoft as one of its key partners....

As you might expect, Google is constantly looking for ways to boost the abilities of Maps and frequently expands the feature set. At its Google I/O developer conference (which is currently happening), the company explains how it uses AI to boost the capabilities of Maps. Immersive Mode is the latest AI-powered development, an attempt to give users even more navigation options in Street View and traditional maps. Google says the new feature provides a more in-depth view of the world, an immersive view that puts users at the heart of a landmark, street, or other areas of interest....

So far this year, Project Zero’s web fuzzer has found 31 bugs in browsers, and 17 of them were in Safari. Edge, on the other hand, came in at 6, Internet Explorer 4, and Chrome just 2. The tool used by Google’s Ivan Fratric is called Domato, and searches for bugs in the Document Object Model of browser’s rendering engine. Attackers occasionally target exploits in DOM engines, a notable example being Tor....

Interestingly, it seems to be certain phrases that are causing the bug. For example, some of the terms include the words “what” and “message” are resulting in the app crashing. If you’re unfamiliar with Google’s Search app on mobile, it is simply known and “Google”: “The Google app keeps you in the know about things that matter to you. Find quick answers, explore your interests, and stay up to date with Discover....

According to Google, user feedback shows people are annoyed by seeing unoriginal and promotional content, especially if the content is irrelevant to their searches. As well as adding filters to remove such content, Google Search will also provide improved product reviews. Google says the search engine will focus more on “content made by, and for, people.” “This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search, and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content....

The feature was unveiled at an AI event in San Francisco, although Google says it is currently in prototype. While Google has not confirmed, it seems the tool only works with live audio on Google Translate. In other words, you won’t be able to transcribe recorded audio or video files. Still, Google points out users can simply play the recorded content through a smartphone mic to activate real-time transcription. Interestingly, the feature can monitor whole sentences and point out incorrect punctuation and even fix accents....

Specifically, Google Drive, Gmail, and Hangouts Chat will be unified in the app. Furthermore, Google Calendar will also be included, although the app will open separately. It seems the company is targeting this tool as a rival to the likes of Teams and Slack and will make the app available as part of G Suite. G Suite is Google’s Office competitor that bundles productivity applications into a single offering. Cloud unit CEO Thomas Kurian told a salesperson earlier this month that the new messaging app will come to organizations soon....

Designer Jonathan Da Costa has developers a new mixed reality concept for HoloLens. He says he created an “inspirational” in collaboration with Microsoft and Qwant. The latter partner provides a private search engine. In the concept video (below), you can see how a HoloLens user will be able to online shop while interacting with a magazine. For example, while browsing through a fashion magazine while using HoloLens, a user can open holographic cards that link to a website....

1 How to Check if Your PC has TPM with the TPM Management Tool2 How to Check if Your PC has TPM Chip with Device Manager3 How to Check if Your PC has TPM Using Command Prompt4 How to Tell If Your PC Has TPM in BIOS/UEFI What is TPM? TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module, which may not mean much to you alone. Essentially, TPM is a security module typically soldered onto the motherboard in the form of a chip....