On the ice, a machine-learning system often triumphed over high-level South Korean players
Artificial intelligence still needs to bridge the “sim-to-real” gap. Deep-learning techniques that are all the rage in AI log superlative performances in mastering cerebral games, including chess and Go, both of which can be played on a computer. But translating simulations to the physical world remains a bigger challenge.
A robot named Curly that uses “deep reinforcement learning”—making improvements as it corrects its own errors—came out on top in three of four games against top-ranked human opponents from South Korean teams that included a women’s team and a reserve squad for the national wheelchair team. (No brooms were used).
One crucial finding was that the AI system demonstrated its ability to adapt to changing ice conditions. “These results indicate that the gap between physics-based simulators and the real world can be narrowed,” the joint South Korean-German research team wrote in Science Robotics on September 23.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Curling, in its human version, is all about cooperation. How will broom holders cooperate with a robotic launcher as it seems it doesn't need help anymore ? It this still curling after all ?
Voici la vidéo du débat sur "Les nouvelles technologies : vers une évolution culturelle et cognitive" auquel je représentais Leonard à la Sorbonne dans le cadre de la Cité de la Réussite aux côtés d'Anne Lalou (Web School Factory) et Sophie Stanton (IBM), modérés par Annabelle Laurent d'Uzbek & Rica
Privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo is working on an "everyday" desktop browser, according to CEO Gabriel Weinberg. In a blog post, Weinberg said the company is building a desktop app "from the ground up" using OS-provided rendering engines rather than Chromium, the browser codebase underpinning Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other browsers.
This will allow DuckDuckGo to "strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that's accumulated over the years in major browsers," Weinberg said.
The CEO noted that the browser will have default “robust privacy protection," meaning users won't have to turn it on in security settings.
Like its mobile version, the desktop browser will also contain a Fire button to erase stored data, tabs, and browsing history.
Early tests have shown the browser is “significantly faster” than Google Chrome, he claimed. It's now in closed beta testing on macOS, with no announced release date yet.
Also in the blog post, Weinberg went through the company's achievements in 2021. One of those was reaching 150 million downloads of its privacy apps for iOS and Android and Chromium extensions.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Looks like Chromium is no longer "la coqueluche"...
Le paradoxe d’internet est qu’il repose sur du code, et que ce code est largement accessible à tous : le futur d’internet serait-il sa disparition ?
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Le futur d’internet sera ce que nous en ferons. Nous en ferons ce que nous en avons compris. Et nous le comprendrons uniquement si nous avons été enseignés dans les trois matières non négociables si l’on veut éduquer des ingénieurs et citoyens libres : les mathématiques, la philosophie et l’histoire. Alors seulement le futur d’internet sera celui d’un bien commun.
Microsoft acquired the AI speech technology company Nuance for $19.7B, its second-largest purchase after it bought LinkedIn for $26B in 2016. Microsoft reportedly wants to use Nuance's tech — which includes the transcription tool Dragon — in its health-care cloud products.
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The all-cash deal is expected to boost Microsoft's voice recognition and medical computing capabilities and offerings.
Dragon uses deep learning to transcribe a person's speech and improve its accuracy by adapting to their voice. It can transcribe doctor's visits, customer service calls, and voicemails.
Nuance has been licensing the technology to companies for years. The tech formed part of the basis for Apple's Siri, which could pose as a conflict of interest between the companies if it is still involved in Siri's operation.
In 2019, Microsoft and Nuance announced a partnership to incorporate AI assistants into doctors' visits. They later integrated Nuance's tech into Microsoft’s Teams.
The tech giant plans to implement Nuance into its cloud-based health-tech products launched in 2020, such as patient monitoring systems, electronic healthcare records, and care coordination.
The acquisition could also allow Microsoft to integrate advanced voice recognition into services including Teams and Bing and generate transcripts, according to Bloomberg analysts.
Microsoft will purchase Nuance for $56 per share, a 23% premium over its closing price Friday.
A user in a low-level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free.
The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses.
Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by matching known Facebook users' phone numbers with the IDs listed in the data set. We also verified records by testing email addresses from the data set in Facebook's password-reset feature, which can be used to partially reveal a user's phone number.
A Facebook spokesperson told Insider that the data had been scraped because of a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019.
While it's a couple of years old, the leaked data could prove valuable to cybercriminals who use people's personal information to impersonate them or scam them into handing over login credentials, according to Alon Gal, the chief technology officer of the cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, who discovered the trough of leaked data on Saturday.
"A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook's users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts," Gal told Insider.
Gal discovered the leaked data in January when a user in the same hacking forum advertised an automated bot that could provide phone numbers for hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a price. Motherboard reported on that bot's existence at the time and verified that the data was legitimate.
Now the data set has been posted on the hacking forum for free, making it available to anyone with rudimentary data skills.
Insider attempted to reach the leaker through the messaging app Telegram but did not get a response.
This is not the first time that lots of Facebook users' phone numbers have been found exposed online. The vulnerability uncovered in 2019 allowed millions of phone numbers to be scraped from Facebook's servers in violation of its terms of service. Facebook said that vulnerability was patched in August 2019.
Facebook vowed to crack down on mass data-scraping after Cambridge Analytica scraped the data of over 80 million users in violation of Facebook's terms of service to target voters with political ads in the 2016 election.
Gal said that from a security standpoint there wasn't much Facebook could do to help users affected by the breach since their data is already out in the open, but he added that Facebook could notify users so they could remain vigilant about phishing schemes or fraud using their data.
"Individuals signing up to a reputable company like Facebook are trusting them with their data, and Facebook [is] supposed to treat the data with utmost respect," Gal said. "Users having their personal information leaked is a huge breach of trust and should be handled accordingly."
What began as an effort to produce an open-source ISA for low-end microcontrollers and other simple kinds of chips is becoming a genuine ecosystem. RISC-V CPUs still can’t challenge the likes of a Cortex-A76 or x86 CPU, but they’re creeping up the performance charts. Two recent developments could give the project a further boost: First, MIPS (formerly Wave Computing) has announced it will begin developing its own RISC-V CPUs. Second, China’s new Loongson CPU, based on the MIPS64 architecture, may be looking for a new ISA.
Wave Computing was an AI company developing around a MIPS architecture that eventually bought MIPS Technologies itself before collapsing into bankruptcy. In the aftermath, Wave announced it would rebrand as MIPS. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, MIPS Technologies (not just MIPS) was a RISC CPU developer who found success in the 1980s before being acquired by SGI in the early 1990s. SGI eventually decided to go with the then-upcoming Itanium in lieu of continuing to develop its own in-house CPUs, so MIPS was reborn as a tech licensing company.
MIPS enjoyed a bit of a run very early in the history of Android, but ARM’s growing hegemony drove it from the marketplace. Since then, we haven’t heard much about the ISA. It’s a little odd for Wave Computing to rebrand as MIPS, then declare it was building a new RISC-V CPU, but that’s what the company has done.
“Going forward, the restructured business will be known as MIPS, reflecting the company’s strategic focus on the groundbreaking RISC-based processor architectures which were originally developed by MIPS,” a company statement read. “MIPS is developing a new industry-leading standards-based 8th generation architecture, which will be based on the open-source RISC-V processor standard.”
As for the Loongson, we’ve talked about this CPU family before. Loongson is one of China’s homegrown CPU efforts and is built around MIPS64. The current iteration of the core is known as the Loongson 3B4000 and is reportedly clocked between 1.8GHz – 2GHz. It offers four cores and is built on a 28nm process. It’s said to offer a 128KB L1 split into 64KB L1i and 64KB L1d, and 256KB of L2 cache per core. There’s an 8MB L3 presumably shared between all cores.
The next iteration of the Loongson 5000 series, set to launch this year, will be the last variant of the CPU family to support the MIPS64 architecture. The Loongson 3A5000 is a quad-core chip for client PCs and the Loongson 3C5000 features up to 16 cores and is intended for servers. Both are expected to be fabbed at TSMC on a 12nm process node. THG reports that the chips are based on an internal architecture that’s fully MIPS64 compatible, with larger caches and a new memory controller.
Loongson’s executives have stated they are “looking forward to join the open-source instruction consortium,” which is being interpreted to mean that China intends to shift to RISC-V in the future.
The timing of these announcements probably isn’t coincidental. CIP United, a Chinese company, controls all MIPS licensing rights in China, Hong Kong, and Macau. It takes a few years to design a new CPU, which is why the Loongson project isn’t moving to RISC-V right away. If the Loongson 5000 family launches in 2021, we could reasonably expect to see the RISC-V-based follow-up in 2023 – 2024.
We’re still a few years away from RISC-V CPUs that can stand up to ARM or x86 cores, performance-wise, but there’s been a lot of interesting activity in this space the past few years. China is said to be ramping its efforts to create a semiconductor ecosystem that doesn’t depend on the United States. The country may feel that the open-source nature of the RISC-V ISA offers it the best chance to develop a CPU core that can’t be interdicted.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Intéressant développement en Chine pour l'architecture Risc-V, sur laquelle se penche notamment Loogson, certes inconnu en Europe, mais qui est au cœur des derniers supercalculateurs de l'Empire du Milieu.
Même si les performances ne sont pas encore au niveau d'ARM ou d'Intel, elles progressent très rapidement notamment en raison de la communauté Open Source qui développe cette architecture autour d'un jeu d'instructions libre.
Il est plausible que la Chine intensifie ses efforts dans ce domaine en vue de créer un écosystème de microprocesseurs totalement indépendant des Etats-Unis et non plus seulement d'Intel. Un cœur de processeur utilisant un pareil jeu d'instructions ne pourrait en effet être facilement interdit d'import/export.
La souveraineté numérique n'est pas uniquement une question de discours ou d'argent : l'agilité et la compétence y ont toute leur place.
Promotion of a “Apple Car” cooperation agreement this month Prospects of building exclusive production facilities through investment Kia's Georgia plant targets production in 2024 100,000 units per year… Up to 400,000 units “Hyundai Glovis will take on a significant role” Hyundai Motor Group's “Apple Car (tentative name)” cooperation theory is heating up the industry with the start of the new year. Amidst various rumors and news coming out steadily, a puzzle about the cooperation of Apple Cars was put together, centering on the group's major affiliate, Kia.
As previously known, Kia takes over the Apple Car project and production takes place at the Kia Georgia plant in the United States. Both Kia and Apple are refraining from expressing their official positions, but it was confirmed that they have entered the contract process. Apple car development cooperation, which was full of rumors and speculation, is making progress.
Overall, Kia and Apple plan to sign a formal contract worth 4 trillion won for Apple car production this month. Practical coordination for a formal contract has been underway since last month, and a specific contract schedule has been set. Initially, the contract date was set at the beginning of February, but it was delayed once and the schedule was changed to February 17. However, it is reported that the contract schedule on February 17 may change depending on the internal circumstances of each company. In particular, on the day of the contract, Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Eui-sun Eui-seon said that the plan was scheduled to attend the contract ceremony. Recently, the news that Chairman Chung met a senior Apple official on a business trip to Singapore last month. The facts have not been confirmed.
The contract is expected to contain specific details related to the production of Apple cars. Apple is planning to invest 4 trillion won in Kia. With the aim of launching in 2024, the number of Apple cars produced by Kia is initially around 100,000 units per year, and can be expanded to a maximum of 400,000 units.
The 4 trillion won that Apple invests in Kia is expected to be used for building exclusive facilities for Apple car production and vehicle development. This large-scale initial investment is also a way Apple often uses in the process of driving major product production. When promoting the production of existing flagship products such as iPhone and iPad, Apple has invested trillions in LG Display (LGD) and supplied OLED panels produced in dedicated facilities. Likewise, Kia, which has attracted investment from Apple, is expected to build a dedicated line for Apple's electric vehicle production.
With Kia leading vehicle production in the Apple Car Project, attention is also being drawn to the role of Hyundai Glovis. An industry official said, "Glovis, which has several subsidiaries in the US, will play a significant role in the Apple Car business." Glovis operates 4 subsidiaries and 4 offices in the United States, including Glovis America and Georgia subsidiaries, Alabama subsidiaries, and GET subsidiary of local land transportation. In addition to logistics, which is its flagship business, the possibility of promoting electric vehicle-related businesses is predicting. According to the industry, from Apple's point of view, Hyundai Motor Group is the best partner for entering the electric vehicle market. It is analyzed that it is because it has its own electric vehicle platform (E-GMP), has a production facility in the United States, and has both the ability and requirements to actually produce new cars in accordance with the planned period (2024). The vision of the future proposed by Hyundai Motor Group, such as electric cars, hydrogen cars, and flying cars, may have been an attractive factor for Apple seeking innovation.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Apple a fait l'impasse sur l'ensemble des constructeurs automobiles européens, et il serait intéressant de comprendre pour quelles raisons.
Pendant ce temps, Kia mérite de plus en plus son slogan "The Power to Surprise" !
Ce 14 janvier, Alon Gal, chercheur en sécurité informatique, a découvert qu'un bot Telegram commercialise une base de données contenant les numéros de téléphone de 533 millions d'internautes inscrits sur Facebook, rapportent nos confrères de Motherboard. Il n'est pas rare que des informations de cet acabit se retrouvent sur des forums ou sur des marchés noirs du dark web. Par contre, il est plus rare que ces données soient monnayées via une application de messagerie comme Telegram.
Moyennant rémunération, le bot permet aux internautes de retrouver le numéro de téléphone lié à un compte Facebook, ou inversement. Il s'agit d'un processus entièrement automatisé. Pour obtenir un seul numéro de téléphone, il faut débourser la somme de 20 dollars, vendu sous la forme d'un crédit. Evidemment, le bot offre une remise aux internautes qui souhaitent acheter une importante quantité de données. Ainsi, l'achat de 10 000 crédits est proposé à 5000 dollars.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Article a lire in extenso sur PhoneAndroid pour bien comprendre la différence entre le nouveau (le mode de commercialisation) et l'ancien (les données siphonnées l'ont été il y a 2 ans).
This site compares secure messaging apps from a security & privacy point of view. These include Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Skype, Signal, Google Allo, Threema, Riot, Wire, Telegram, and Wickr. The best secure messaging app?
In the midst of #WhatsAppGate, @Telegram announced 25 million new registrations in the past 72 hours, and more than half a billion active users.
Beyond simplistic comparisons buzzing through the #Kommentariat, the offer is much more abundant. Besides, Skype or Viber were not born out of the last rain.
While solutions seems to focus on #privacy enforcement, the question of interoperability is another possible avenue : after all, a large number of these apps are based on the open source #XMPP protocol from Jabber (and therefore Orange). Why not enforce some level of interconnection ?
Simplicity is the other issue, and there WhatsApp has a huge advantage, given how easy it is to set up a group, whether for a family, project, or circumstantial powwow, and share photos and comments.
But simplicity also means not having to remember the application I was using in my last conversation with you !
En plein #WhatsAppGate, Telegram annonce 25 millions de nouveaux inscrits en 72h et franchit la barre du demi-milliard d'utilisateurs actifs.
Au delà des comparaisons simplistes qui ont fait le buzz dans le Kommentariat, laissant accroire qu'il n'y aurait que l'alternative iMessage, Telegram ou Signal, l'offre est nettement plus abondante. D'ailleurs Skype ou Viber ne sont pas nés de la dernière pluie.
D'autres acteurs ne figurent pas encore dans ce tableau, comme #FireChat (qui fonctionne de proche en proche en mode décentralisé), le français Skred de Pierre Bellanger, Olvid, ou encore la messagerie sécurisée #Tchap développée sur base Riot par les pouvoirs publics.
Au delà du #RGPD se pose la vraie question de l'interopérabilité : après tout, une grande partie de ces apps sont parties du protocole open source #XMPPissu de Jabber (et donc d'Orange).
La simplicité est l'autre enjeu, et WhatsApp garde ici un avantage énorme tant il est facile de monter un groupe qu'il soit familial, projet, ou circonstanciel et d'y partager photos et propos.
Mais la simplicité c'est aussi ne pas avoir à se souvenir de l'application sur laquelle avait lieu ma dernière conversation avec vous !
Insurance company MassMutual just invested $100 mn in bitcoin to get: - exposure to a new asset class - investment portfolio diversification - a (limited) hedge against sovereign debt hiccups - the benefit of a digital gold store of value - some hope to get decent investment yield in the current zero-interest trap - a protection against decreasing fiat currencies (under current quantitative easings) - a better understanding of this new asset that institutional investors want to invest in This is coming after listed companies like Microstrategy or Square already made the move to protect their company reserves. Other financial companies will soon follow suit. those lagging behind will have to invest after the next price peak.
Bitcoin devient à la fois un outil de couverture de risque financier (le quantitative easing pourrait impacter les monnaies fiat) et une classe d'actifs permettant de diversifier les portefeuilles.
Tout ceci alimente certes la hausse spectaculaire de la plus ancienne des cryptomonnaies, mais la nouveauté vient de la nature des investisseurs.
After five years of offering unlimited free photo backups at “high quality,” Google Photos will start charging for storage once more than 15 gigs on the account have been used. The change will happen on June 1st, 2021, and it comes with other Google Drive policy changes like counting Google Workspace documents and spreadsheets against the same cap. Google is also introducing a new policy of deleting data from inactive accounts that haven’t been logged in to for at least two years.
All photos and documents uploaded before June 1st will not count against that 15GB cap, so you have plenty of time to decide whether to continue using Google Photos or switching to another cloud storage provider for your photos. Only photos uploaded after June 1st will begin counting against the cap.
Google already counts “original quality” photo uploads against a storage cap in Google Photos. However, taking away unlimited backup for “high quality” photos and video (which are automatically compressed for more efficient storage) also takes away one of the service’s biggest selling points. It was the photo service where you just didn’t have to worry about how much storage you had.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Chaque semaine, 28 milliards de photos et vidéos sont ajoutées à Google Photos. Soit l'équivalent de 4 selfies par habitant de notre planète.
Voici ce que révèle la notification envoyée par Google à l'ensemble des utilisateurs de son service d'hébergement Google Drive.
On y relève également toutes les possibilités proposées à l'utilisateur pour récupérer de la place, comme la détection des photos floues, ou encore des photos de slides. L'idée, élégante de prime abord, repose sur des capacités de traitement et d'analyse d'images tout à fait intéressantes. Pourquoi ne pas imaginer de reconstituer des éléments de Google Slides par exemple ?
Un dernier élément — de portée symbolique — est la dénomination de "politique" qui dit quelque chose en creux de la représentation de puissance de Google & co.
4 selfies per human per week #4selfies : today more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded...
Apple emprunte à son tour la "Verticale du Fou" et abandonne Intel. 3 fois plus performant par Watt dissipé, le processeur "maison" #M1 — annoncé le 10 Novembre dernier — semble confirmer à quel point l'architecture #ARM a réussi à rattraper puis à dépasser l'architecture #X86 du géant de Santa Clara.
Les 16 milliards de transistors du M1 sont en effet gravés en 5 nanomètres, là où Intel ne parvient toujours pas à maîtriser ni 10 ni 7 nanos.
Un excellent article de Tom's #Hardware montre l'étendue de la menace qui pèse désormais sur Intel ; ce n'est pas tant la part de marché du Mac (à peine 9%) que celle de ses développeurs (30%) qui vont de plus en plus exclusivement basculer dans l'architecture ARM.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
L'intégration verticale est la tendance "Tech" du moment...
HELSINKI (Reuters) - Struggling to get a phone signal at home on planet Earth? Perhaps you’ll have better luck on the moon.
Nokia has been selected by NASA to build the first cellular network on the moon, the Finnish company said on Monday, as the U.S. space agency plans for a future where humans return there and establish lunar settlements.
NASA aims to return humans to the moon by 2024 and dig in for a long-term presence there under its Artemis programme.
Nokia said the first wireless broadband communications system in space would be built on the lunar surface in late 2022, before humans make it back there.
It will partner with a Texas-based private space craft design company, Intuitive Machines, to deliver the equipment to the moon on their lunar lander. The network will configure itself and establish a 4G/LTE communications system on the moon, Nokia said, though the aim would be to eventually switch to 5G
The network will give astronauts voice and video communications capabilities, and allow telemetry and biometric data exchange, as well as the deployment and remote control of lunar rovers and other robotic devices, according to the company.
The network will be designed to withstand the extreme conditions of the launch and lunar landing, and to operate in space. It will have to be sent to the moon in an extremely compact form to meet the stringent size, weight and power constraints of space payloads.
Nokia said the network would be using 4G/LTE, in use worldwide for the last decade, instead of the latest 5G technology, because the former was a more known quantity with proven reliability. The company would also “pursue space applications of LTE’s successor technology, 5G”.
A student YouTuber by the name of Lucas VRTech has designed and 3D printed a pair of low-cost finger tracking gloves for use in virtual reality. Named LucidVR, the open-source gloves are currently on iteration three, and grant users the ability to precisely track their fingers without the use of dedicated VR controllers. Lucas is […]
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Oblong's implementation of the Minority Report Gloves was certainly more expensive — https://vimeo.com/76468455
LG Electronics appears to have decided to pull out of its money-losing smartphone business and entered into a transition process to relocate its mobile communications employees to other business units. After suffering operating losses since 2015, LG attempted recently to sell its mobile communications unit, which oversees the smartphone business. The company has reportedly been in negotiations with various interested buyers, including Vietnam's Vingroup, but failed to reach an agreement with any of them. LG Electronics has considered selling parts of its operations or pulling out of the smartphone business altogether. But it decided recently to pull out of the smartphone business altogether. "LG has considered various options such as a sale, split sales or pulling out of the smartphone business, but decided recently to pull out of the business," according to industry sources, Thursday, adding that the company will make an official announcement at its board meeting on April 5. When asked to address such prospects, an LG Electronics official said, "There's nothing to comment on." "All we can say is that every possibility is open. Although we cannot confirm that right now, we will announce the specific direction of our mobile communications business," the official said. The possibility of LG pulling out of the smartphone business surfaced in January when LG Electronics CEO Kwon Bong-seok acknowledged that the company was reviewing the direction of its mobile communications business with all possibilities open. Industry watchers expected an official comment from the company at its shareholders' meeting on March 24, but its Chief Financial Officer Bae Doo-yong only reiterated the company's aforementioned position that "all possibilities remain open." While the company has struggled with the smartphone business, LG's stock value has been reevaluated with soaring demand for its cutting-edge home appliances and TVs, as consumers have spent an increasing amount of time at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, LG has been expanding its presence gradually in emerging sectors such as electric vehicles (EVs) and vehicle components. Last December, the company announced the establishment of a joint venture with automotive parts maker Magna International to manufacture electric motors, inverters and onboard chargers used in EVs. Magna had been involved in Apple's EV-manufacturing business under Project Titan. The announcement drove LG Electronics shares to their 30 percent daily limit on the day the news broke as investors hoped the joint venture could potentially join Apple's EV business. The iPhone maker announced recently that it plans to roll out its first EVs in 2024 or later. Although LG has not made any comments regarding the joint venture's participation in the manufacture of Apple's EVs, Magna International CEO Swamy Kotagiri said at a recent automotive association event that the company is ready to produce vehicles for Apple or any other carmaker. The CEO added that Magna is willing to expand its manufacturing plant if necessary to manufacture Apple-designed cars.
LG Electronic’s smartphone division has had six years of losses totalling US$4.5 billion The company’s smartphone division is expected to be wound down by July 31, 2021
But later, its flagship models suffered from both software and hardware mishaps which combined with slower software updates saw the brand steadily slip in favour. Analysts have also criticised the company for lack of expertise in marketing compared to Chinese brands
Currently its global share is only about 2 per cent. It shipped 23 million phones last year which compares with 256 million for Samsung, according to research provider Counterpoint.
In addition to North America, it does have a sizeable presence in Latin America, where it ranks as the No 5 brand.
“In South America, Samsung and Chinese companies such as Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi are expected to benefit in the low to mid-end segment,” said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities.
While other well-known mobile brands such as Nokia, HTC and BlackBerry have also fallen from lofty heights, they have yet to disappear completely.
LG’s smartphone division – the smallest of its five divisions, accounting for about 7 per cent of revenue – is expected to be wound down by July 31.
In South Korea, the division’s employees will be moved to other LG Electronics businesses and affiliates while elsewhere decisions on employment will be made at the local level.
LG will provide service support and software updates for customers of existing mobile products for a period of time which will vary by region, it added.
Talks to sell part of the business to Vietnam’s Vingroup fell through due to differences about terms, sources with knowledge of the matter have said.
Chinese businesses have collectively acquired ~$32B worth of chip manufacturing equipment over the last year, reports Bloomberg; an analysis of trade data shows firms increased spending by ~20 percent when compared with 2019; China also imported $380B worth of chips in 2020, equal to ~18 percent of the country’s total product imports for the year.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Europe is right in the middle of a widening Silicon Rift.
A user of a low-level cybercriminal forum is selling access to a database of phone numbers belonging to Facebook users, and conveniently letting customers look up those numbers by using an automated Telegram bot.
Although the data is several years old, it still presents a cybersecurity and privacy risk to those whose phone numbers may be exposed—one person advertising the service says it contains data on 500 million users. Facebook told Motherboard the data relates to a vulnerability the company fixed in August 2019.
"It is very worrying to see a database of that size being sold in cybercrime communities, it harms our privacy severely and will certainly be used for smishing and other fraudulent activities by bad actors," Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, and who first alerted Motherboard about the bot, said.
Upon launch, the Telegram bot says "The bot helps to find out the cellular phone numbers of Facebook users," according to Motherboard's tests. The bot lets users enter either a phone number to receive the corresponding user's Facebook ID, or visa versa. The initial results from the bot are redacted, but users can buy credits to reveal the full phone number. One credit is $20, with prices stretching up to $5,000 for 10,000 credits. The bot claims to contain information on Facebook users from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and 15 other countries.
This site compares secure messaging apps from a security & privacy point of view. These include Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Skype, Signal, Google Allo, Threema, Riot, Wire, Telegram, and Wickr. The best secure messaging app?
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
In the midst of #WhatsAppGate, @Telegram announced 25 million new registrations in the past 72 hours, and more than half a billion active users.
Beyond simplistic comparisons buzzing through the #Kommentariat, the offer is much more abundant. Besides, Skype or Viber were not born out of the last rain.
While solutions seems to focus on #privacy enforcement, the question of interoperability is another possible avenue : after all, a large number of these apps are based on the open source #XMPP protocol from Jabber (and therefore Orange). Why not enforce some level of interconnection ?
Simplicity is the other issue, and there WhatsApp has a huge advantage, given how easy it is to set up a group, whether for a family, project, or circumstantial powwow, and share photos and comments.
But simplicity also means not having to remember the application I was using in my last conversation with you !
En plein #WhatsAppGate, Telegram annonce 25 millions de nouveaux inscrits en 72h et franchit la barre du demi-milliard d'utilisateurs actifs.
Au delà des comparaisons simplistes qui ont fait le buzz dans le Kommentariat, laissant accroire qu'il n'y aurait que l'alternative iMessage, Telegram ou Signal, l'offre est nettement plus abondante. D'ailleurs Skype ou Viber ne sont pas nés de la dernière pluie.
D'autres acteurs ne figurent pas encore dans ce tableau, comme #FireChat (qui fonctionne de proche en proche en mode décentralisé), le français Skred de Pierre Bellanger, Olvid, ou encore la messagerie sécurisée #Tchap développée sur base Riot par les pouvoirs publics.
Au delà du #RGPD se pose la vraie question de l'interopérabilité : après tout, une grande partie de ces apps sont parties du protocole open source #XMPPissu de Jabber (et donc d'Orange).
La simplicité est l'autre enjeu, et WhatsApp garde ici un avantage énorme tant il est facile de monter un groupe qu'il soit familial, projet, ou circonstanciel et d'y partager photos et propos.
Mais la simplicité c'est aussi ne pas avoir à se souvenir de l'application sur laquelle avait lieu ma dernière conversation avec vous !
The US ban on Chinese tech giant Huawei and its 5G technology has sparked a heated debate on the future of information flows and their control.
Until now, however, that debate has largely overlooked how Huawei arrived at its position of tech prowess.
The Five Eyes intelligence group (United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) insist that Huawei 5G technology represents a huge intelligence risk.
Huawei flatly denies the accusation. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars in 5G revenue are at stake. Shutting down Huawei also has an extra benefit for the US — it temporarily halts Chinese progress in this extremely lucrative sector.
But how did Huawei get so far ahead in the first place? Well, according to a piece in Wired and carried by androidcentral, it all comes down to a theory crafted in 1948 and recently revived by a Turkish professor.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Fascinating story about signal theory, IP acquisition, and how Qualcomm and the US missed an opportunity that now vastly benefits Huawei as a 5G Equipment leader.
The German telecoms group and its partner, British startup Stratospheric Platforms, said that a remotely piloted aircraft flying at 14,000 metres (45,000 feet) had successfully connected with its terrestrial 4G network from an on-board antenna.
The airborne base station, which can cover an area up to 140 km (87 miles) across, handled voice and video calls, data downloads and web browsing from a smartphone user on the ground during trial flights this month.
“We won’t stop until everyone is connected,” Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hoettges told a video presentation on the project, which has been in development for the past five years.
“A stratospheric network can help reach areas that have been difficult to supply up to now.”
Hosting base stations in the stratosphere promises the fast reaction times that next-generation 5G networks will need to support innovations such as self-driving cars.
But, while aerial antennas offer a speed and cost advantage over satellites, keeping them aloft poses a design challenge.
Alphabet's GOOGL.O rival Loon venture uses high-altitude balloons to run wireless networks and Facebook FB.O grounded an experimental solar-powered internet drone two years ago after concluding it was not feasible.
Deutsche Telekom’s test flights were staged over the state of Bavaria in southern Gemrany using an adapted H3Grob 520 propeller plane because Stratospheric Platforms is still developing its own pilotless aircraft.
The UK startup says its lightweight “platform” will have a wingspan of 60 metres - as big as a Boeing 747 - but weigh only 3.5 tonnes and be able to stay aloft for nine days.
It will use an emission-free hydrogen fuel-cell system, which can generate far more power than solar cells. The on-board antenna, weighing 140 kg, will be capable of doing the job of 200 terrestrial towers.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
La promesse d'une station de base (antenne) embarquée "remplaçant" 200 tours de télécommunications est séduisante. Deutsche Telekom aurait-il trouvé une solution là ou Google et Facebook ont échoué ?
On the ice, a machine-learning system often triumphed over high-level South Korean players
Artificial intelligence still needs to bridge the “sim-to-real” gap. Deep-learning techniques that are all the rage in AI log superlative performances in mastering cerebral games, including chess and Go, both of which can be played on a computer. But translating simulations to the physical world remains a bigger challenge.
A robot named Curly that uses “deep reinforcement learning”—making improvements as it corrects its own errors—came out on top in three of four games against top-ranked human opponents from South Korean teams that included a women’s team and a reserve squad for the national wheelchair team. (No brooms were used).
One crucial finding was that the AI system demonstrated its ability to adapt to changing ice conditions. “These results indicate that the gap between physics-based simulators and the real world can be narrowed,” the joint South Korean-German research team wrote in Science Robotics on September 23.
Philippe J DEWOST's insight:
Curling, in its human version, is all about cooperation. How will broom holders cooperate with a robotic launcher as it seems it doesn't need help anymore ? It this still curling after all ?
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Curling, in its human version, is all about cooperation. How will broom holders cooperate with a robotic launcher as it seems it doesn't need help anymore ? It this still curling after all ?