neutrino38 writes: "France is the country of the Enlightenment, it is the country of innovation [...] We are going to debunk all false ideas. Yes, France is going to take the 5G turning point because it is the turning point of innovation," Macron insisted in front of a hundred French Tech entrepreneurs gathered at the Elysee. "I hear a lot of voices saying that the complexity of contemporary problems should be addressed by returning to the oil lamp! I don't think that the Amish model can solve the challenges of contemporary ecology," the head of state said.

Meanwhile, AT&T's 5G network was found to be slower than 4G, and in China some 5G towers are switched off during the night because of power consumption. Welcome to the future.

According to Apple Insider, Apple is researching an Apple Watch band that could contain controllable protrusions to present tactile information on the surface. From the report: Apple has famously always researched providing accessibility features in its devices, whether or not it's profitable. However, so far there has been a limit to what the Apple Watch can do -- and its bands could have no accessibility features at all. "Tactile output for wearable device," is a newly granted US patent which aims to change that. Alongside the various things Siri can say aloud since the Apple Watch Series 3, there could now be Apple-designed bands that display Braille information.

While Apple wants its patent to cover any kind of electronic device possible, most of its descriptions and all of its drawings refer to the Apple Watch and to what Apple refers to as actuators. These are components that respond to a processor and cause other elements to move or rearrange. "[For example, a] wearable item comprises a flexible strap and actuators within the flexible strap," says the patent. "The actuators are configured to dynamically form protrusions along the flexible strap. The protrusions present tactilely-perceptible information." These protrusions are similar to the raised dots in Braille, but Apple says they needn't be confined to that one system. Rather than following the established patterns of whole words in Braille, the same protrusions could be configured to "also or instead be dynamically and/or selectively actuated to form [the] shapes of alphanumeric characters."

The European Union's top court has handed down its first decision on the bloc's net neutrality rules -- interpreting the law as precluding the use of commercial 'zero rating' by Internet services providers. TechCrunch reports: 'Zero rating' refers to the practice of ISPs offering certain apps/services 'tariff free' by excluding their data consumption. It's controversial because it can have the effect of penalizing and/or blocking the use of non-zero-rated apps/services, which may be inaccessible while the zero rated apps/services are not -- which in turn undermines the principal of net neutrality with its promise of fair competition via an equal and level playing field for all things digital. The pan-EU net neutrality regulation came into force in 2016 amid much controversy over concerns it would undermine rather than bolster a level playing field online. So the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU)'s first ruling interpreting the regulation is an important moment for regional digital rights watchers.

A Budapest court hearing two actions against Telenor, related to two of its 'zero rating' packages, made a reference to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling on how to interpret and apply Article 3(1) and (2) of the regulation -- which safeguards a number of rights for end users of Internet access services and prohibits service providers from putting in place agreements or commercial practices limiting the exercise of those rights -- and Article 3(3), which lays down a general obligation of "equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic." The court found that 'zero rating' agreements that combine a 'zero tariff' with measures blocking or slowing down traffic linked to the use of 'non-zero tariff' services and applications are indeed liable to limit the exercise of end users' rights within the meaning of the regulation and on a significant part of the market. It also found that no assessment of the effect of measures blocking or slowing down traffic on the exercise of end users' rights is required by the regulation, while measures applied for commercial (rather than technical) reasons must be regarded as automatically incompatible. The full CJEU judgement is available here.

Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to the Linux kernel with its aim being "to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor." The Register reports: The patches are designated "RFC" (Request for comments) and are a minimal implementation presented for discussion. The key change is that with the patched kernel, Linux will run as the Hyper-V root partition. In the Hyper-V architecture, the root partition has direct access to hardware and creates child partitions for the VMs it hosts. "Just think of it like Xen's Dom0," said Microsoft principal software engineer Wei Liu. Hyper-V's architecture is more similar to Xen than it is to KVM or to VMware's ESXi, and Liu acknowledged that "we drew inspiration from the Xen code in Linux," specifically for code handing interrupts. Until now, the Hyper-V root partition had to run Windows.

Microsoft has also ported Intel's open-source Cloud Hypervisor, a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) written in Rust that normally runs on KVM, the hypervisor that is built into the Linux kernel. Cloud Hypervisor itself is currently in "very early pre-alpha stage." Even when Linux is the root partition, it will still run on top of Microsoft's hypervisor, a thin layer running with ring -1 privileges. It will no longer be necessary to run Windows on that hypervisor, though, enabling Microsoft to call the new arrangement "a complete virtualization stack with Linux."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday that roughly 46,000 veterans had their personal information, including Social Security numbers, exposed in a data breach in which "unauthorized users" gained access to an online application used for making health care payments. A preliminary review of the incident indicated that the hackers accessed the application "to change financial information and divert payments from VA by using social engineering techniques and exploiting authentication protocols," according to the department's announcement.

"The Financial Services Center (FSC) determined one of its online applications was accessed by unauthorized users to divert payments to community health care providers for the- medical treatment of Veterans. The FSC took the application offline and reported the breach to VA's Privacy Office," the statement said. "To prevent any future improper access to and modification of information, system access will not be reenabled until a comprehensive security review is completed by the VA Office of Information Technology," it added. The department is taking steps to alert veterans whose information was compromised. "To protect these Veterans, the FSC is alerting the affected individuals, including the next-of-kin of those who are deceased, of the potential risk to their personal information. The department is also offering access to credit monitoring services, at no cost, to those whose social security numbers may have been compromised," Monday's statement said.

"Veterans whose information was involved are advised to follow the instructions in the letter to protect their data. There is no action needed from Veterans if they did not receive an alert by mail, as their personal information was not involved in the incident," it adds.

Sandvine, the technology company backed by private equity firm Francisco Partners, canceled a deal with Belarus, saying the government used its technology to violate human rights. From a report: The company's technology, which is used to filter and manage internet networks, was used by a state-run internet agency in Belarus to block thousands of websites in the country amid nationwide protests over a disputed election, Bloomberg reported on Aug. 28. Sandvine said in a statement on Tuesday that a preliminary investigation determined that "custom code" was inserted into its products "to thwart the free flow of information during the Belarus election." The Tuesday announcement comes days after Sandvine was criticized by many including politicians .

Apple today introduced a redesigned iPad Air that looks more like an iPad Pro, as well as an updated 8th-generation, entry-level iPad. MacRumors reports on the new iPad Air: Apple today introduced a redesigned iPad Air with slimmer bezels, paving the way for an all-screen design similar to recent iPad Pro models. In addition, the new iPad Air is the first Apple device with Touch ID built into the power button. The new iPad Air is powered by the new 5nm-based, six-core A14 Bionic chip for up to 40 percent faster performance and up to 30 percent faster graphics than the previous-generation iPad Air.

The device features a fully laminated 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display with True Tone, P3 wide color support, and an anti-reflective coating. Following in the footsteps of the iPad Pro, the new iPad Air features a USB-C port instead of a Lightning connector. The device also features the same 12-megapixel rear camera used in the iPad Pro for higher-resolution photos and 4K video recording. The new iPad Air will be available starting in October on Apple.com and the Apple Store app in 30 countries and regions. Wi-Fi models will start at $599, while cellular models will start at $729, with 64GB and 256GB storage capacities available. There will be five colors to choose from, including silver, space gray, rose gold, green, and sky blue. 9to5Mac reports on the 8th-generation iPad: Apple today announced the 8th-generation iPad, featuring an A12 chip compared to the previous-generation's A10 processor. The design of the new entry-level iPad is largely the same as its predecessor. The jump from A10 to A12 means Apple's cheapest iPad will feature the Neural Engine for the first time. Apple says the A12 chip offers more than twice the performance of the top selling Windows laptop, 6x faster than the top-selling Android tablet and 6x faster than the best-selling Chromebook. The 8th-generation iPad keeps the same price as the 7th-gen: that's $329 for general sale and $299 for education.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google Fiber will soon offer 2Gbps service for $100 a month, a package that includes a Wi-Fi 6 router and mesh extender, the Alphabet-owned ISP announced yesterday. Google fiber-to-the-home service never rolled out as far as many people hoped, but the ISP is still making improvements in cities where it does provide broadband. The new offering is double the download speed of Google Fiber's standard 1Gbps service and costs $30 more. While the new offer is 2Gbps on the download side, it will be 1Gbps for uploads.

In addition to fiber-to-the-home, Google Fiber offers wireless home Internet access in some cities through its Webpass service. Even the Webpass wireless service will get the 2Gbps plan, the announcement said. Webpass' standard speeds today range from 100Mbps to 1Gbps. The 2Gbps service will initially be available to some customers through Google Fiber's Trusted Tester program next month, with plans to roll out across "most" Google Fiber and Webpass markets in 2021. The announcement didn't provide any details on the Wi-Fi 6 router and mesh extender that will be included in the $100 price. Google Fiber provides 1Gbps customers a gateway and router in a single device it calls a "Network Box." "Why 2 Gig? This year has made this need for more speed and bandwidth especially acute, as many of us are now living our entire lives -- from work to school to play -- within our homes, creating unprecedented demand for Internet capacity," the Google Fiber announcement said.

Google says the 2 Gig speeds "will roll out to all of our Nashville and Huntsville customers later this year, with plans to launch the service across most of our Google Fiber and Google Fiber Webpass cities in early 2021." You can sign up here for an opportunity to be among the first to test the new speeds in your city.

Corporate workplaces around the world are empty due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Google on Tuesday unveiled new devices for when people eventually return to office conference rooms. From a report: The system of gadgets, called Google Meet Series One, includes a camera, soundbar with eight mics and touchscreen remote. Google partnered with the Chinese manufacturer Lenovo for the hardware. The setup relies on Google Meet, the search giant's Zoom rival, which has surged in popularity as people began to hunker down in their homes earlier this year to fend off the spread of Covid-19. Google boasts that its artificial intelligence software can automatically pan and around the room and focus in on people who are speaking. The company also says its audio tools can use noise cancellation to block out the sounds of typing and people shuffling around and instead amplify peoples voices. Google is charging $2,700 for small room setups, $3,000 for medium-sized rooms and $4,000 for large rooms.

The FBI has sent a private security alert to the US financial sector last week warning organizations about the increasing number of credential stuffing attacks that have targeted their networks and have led to breaches and considerable financial losses. From a report: Credential stuffing is a relatively new term in the cyber-security industry. [...] According to an FBI security advisory obtained by ZDNet today, credential stuffing attacks have increased in recent years and have now become a major problem for financial organizations. "Since 2017, the FBI has received numerous reports on credential stuffing attacks against US financial institutions, collectively detailing nearly 50,000 account compromises," the FBI said. "The victims included banks, financial services providers, insurance companies, and investment firms."

IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits -- and somewhere between 10 and 50 logical qubits -- by the end of 2023. From a report: Currently, the company's quantum processors top out at 65 qubits. It plans to launch a 127-qubit processor next year and a 433-qubit machine in 2022. To get to this point, IBM is also building a completely new dilution refrigerator to house these larger chips, as well as the technology to connect multiple of these units to build a system akin to today's multi-core architectures in classical chips. IBM's Dario Gil tells me that the company made a deliberate choice in announcing this road map and he likened it to the birth of the semiconductor industry.

"If you look at the difference of what it takes to build an industry as opposed to doing a project or doing scientific experiments and moving a field forward, we have had a philosophy that what we needed to do is to build a team that did three things well, in terms of cultures that have to come together. And that was a culture of science, a culture of the road map, and a culture of agile," Gil said. He argues that to reach the ultimate goal of the quantum industry, that is, to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, the company could've taken two different paths. The first would be more like the Apollo program, where everybody comes together, works on a problem for a decade and then all the different pieces come together for this one breakthrough moment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Automaker Daimler AG and subsidiary Mercedes-Benz USA have agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve allegations they cheated on emissions tests, officials said Monday. The U.S. Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency and the California attorney general's office said Daimler violated environmental laws by using so-called "defeat device software" to circumvent emissions testing. In doing so, the companies sold roughly 250,000 cars and vans between 2009 and 2016 with diesel engines that didn't meet state and federal standards. The settlement, which includes civil penalties and still awaits court approval in Washington, will require Daimler to fix the already sold vehicles.

Daimler AG must repair at least 85% of the affected cars within two years and at least 85% of the affected vans within three years, justice department officials said. The company must also offer extended warranties to drivers on certain vehicle parts and conduct emissions tests on the repaired vehicles each year for the next five years. A separate class action civil settlement will bring a one-off charge of about $700 million, Daimler AG said. In a statement, the company also said settling the emissions allegations means Daimler does not admit any liability nor will the company have to buy back any of the vehicles in question. As part of Daimler AG's settlement, officials in California will receive $17.5 million for future environmental enforcement.

On Tuesday, Apple will hold its annual September event called "Time Flies." Unlike in previous years, the company is not expected to announce new iPhones as they have reportedly been delayed "a few weeks" due to the pandemic. Macworld reports on what we can expect to see announced instead: Apple's invitation was light on details, as always, but it's hard to look at its "Time Flies" tagline and think that this won't mean showing off new models of the Apple Watch. Presumably that means a Series 6, but rumors have also circulated around an additional lower cost model to replace the aging Series 3. [...] While the iPad Pro received a minor update this past spring, the midrange iPad Air has remained unchanged since March 2019. Eighteen months is about the refresh cycle for iPads these days, so a revamped Air seems like a pretty good bet for this week's event. [...] There also remains the question of the iPad mini, last updated at the same time as the Air. It could very well see a similar update to stay in step with the Air, but given that Apple has often let the smaller tablet lie unchanged for years at a time -- which it seems to do with many products with the "mini" moniker -- it's hardly a sure thing.

With new hardware naturally comes new software. The release of a new Apple Watch will certainly require watchOS 7, which in turn will need iOS 14. Likewise, new iPads are unlikely to ship without iPadOS 14. That gibes with a recent Bloomberg report that iOS 14 would be released in mid-September, following the usual schedule for Apple's mobile operating system updates. And given our brave new world where Apple events are not subject to the typical restrictions of time and scheduling, that might be all we have to look forward to this time around. That said, there are plenty of other things that Apple could talk about at this event, assuming they're ready to go -- everything from over-the-head AirPods to Apple silicon-powered Macs.

Ethnic violence set off by the assassination of a popular singer has been supercharged by hate speech and incitements shared widely on the platform. From a report: Throughout his life, Ethiopian singer Hachalu Hundessa sang about love, unity, and raising the marginalized voices of his Oromo ethnic group. He had always tried to keep his work and politics separate, saying, "Art should not be subject to political pressure." But it became increasingly difficult for him to keep these two worlds apart, thanks to a politically-motivated disinformation campaign orchestrated on Facebook through a network of newly created pages and designed to demonize Hundessa. The incendiary campaign claimed Hundessa abandoned his Oromo roots in siding with Prime Minister Ahmed Abiy. Abiy, Ethiopia's first Oromo leader, has been heavily criticized by hard-line Oromo nationalists who believe he has abandoned his heritage by appeasing other ethnic groups. The impact was devastating.

Hundessa was assassinated on June 29 while driving through the capital Addis Ababa. The man police charged with Hundessa's killing told prosecutors that he was working as an assassin for the Oromo Liberation Front, an armed nationalist group linked to numerous violent attacks -- and who told the shooter that Oromia would benefit from the death of one of its most famous singers. Hundessa's death at age 34 set off a wave of violence in the capital and his home region of Oromia. Hundreds of people were killed, with minorities like Christian Amharas, Christian Oromos, and Gurage people suffering the biggest losses. This bloodshed was supercharged by the almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people's anger. Mobs destroyed and burned property. They lynched, beheaded, and dismembered their victims. The calls for violence against a variety of ethnic and religious groups happened despite the government shutting down the internet within hours of Hundessa's murder. Soon, the same people who'd been calling for genocide and attacks against specific religous or ethnic groups were openly posting photographs of burned-out cars, buildings, schools and houses, the Network Against Hate Speech, a volunteer group tracking hate speech in Ethiopia, told VICE News.

These attacks reflect the volatile nature of ethnic politics in Ethiopia. Abiy's rise to power in 2018 led to a brief period of hope that Ethiopia could be unified under the first Oromo to lead the country. But that quickly evaporated, and the country has since been wracked by violence, coinciding with a rapid increase in access to the internet, where Facebook dominates. And rather than helping to unify the country, Facebook has simply amplified existing tensions on a massive scale.

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News. From the report: The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Bolivia, and Ecuador she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them. "In the three years I've spent at Facebook, I've found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions," wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her Linkedin profile said she "worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team" and dealt with "bots influencing elections and the like."

"I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I've lost count," she wrote. The memo is a damning account of Facebook's failures. It's the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

In the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China, America has "dropped the ball" in funding for basic research, according to former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. From a report: And that's one of the key reasons why China has been able to catch up. Dr Schmidt, who is currently the Chair of the US Department of Defense's innovation board, said he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now. But that the gap is narrowing fast. "There's a real focus in China around invention and new AI techniques," he told the BBC's Talking Business Asia programme. "In the race for publishing papers China has now caught up." [...] Dr Schmidt blames the narrowing of the innovation gap between the US and China on the lack of funding in the US. "For my whole life, the US has been the unquestioned leader of R&D," the former Google boss said. "Funding was the equivalent of 2% or so of GDP of the country. Recently R&D has fallen to a lower percentage number than was there before Sputnik."

According to Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a US lobby group for technology, the US government now invests less in R&D compared to the size of the economy than it has in more than 60 years. This has resulted in "stagnant productivity growth, lagging competitiveness and reduced innovation". Dr Schmidt also said the US's tech supremacy has been built on the back of the international talent that's been allowed to work and study in the US - and warns the US risks falling further behind if this kind of talent isn't allowed into the country. "This high skills immigration is crucial to American competitiveness, global competitiveness, building these new companies and so forth," he said. "America does not have enough people with those skills."

NPR reporter Shannon Bond reports of a little-known -- and now nearly entirely forgotten -- company called Simulmatics, which had technology that used vast amounts of data to profile voters and ultimately help John F. Kennedy win the 1960 election. From the report: The [...] company was called Simulmatics, the subject of Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's timely new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. Before Cambridge Analytica, before Facebook, before the Internet, there was Simulmatics' "People Machine," in Lepore's telling: "A computer program designed to predict and manipulate human behavior, all sorts of human behavior, from buying a dishwasher to countering an insurgency to casting a vote."

Lepore unearths Simulmatics' story and makes the argument that, amid a broader proliferation of behavioral science research across academia and government in the 1960s, the company paved the way for our 21st-century obsession with data and prediction. Simulmatics, she argues, is "a missing link in the history of technology," the antecedent to Facebook, Google and Amazon and to algorithms that attempt to forecast who will commit crimes or get good grades. "It lurks behind the screen of every device," she writes.

If Then presents Simulmatics as both ahead of its time and, more often than not, overpromising and under-delivering. The company was the brainchild of Ed Greenfield, an advertising executive straight out of Mad Men, who believed computers could help Democrats recapture the White House. He wanted to create a model of the voting population that could tell you how voters would respond to whatever a candidate did or said. The name Simulmatics was a contraction of "simulation" and "automation." As Greenfield explained it to investors, Lepore writes: "The Company proposes to engage principally in estimating probable human behavior by the use of computer technology." The People Machine was originally built to analyze huge amounts of data ahead of the 1960 election, in what Lepore describes as, at the time, "the largest political science research project in American history."

In late 2016, Nikola Motor Company founder Trevor Milton unveiled a prototype of the Nikola One truck, claiming it "fully functions and works, which is really incredible." A couple years later, in January 2018, the company showed the Nikola One truck moving rapidly along a two-lane desert highway. But last week, the short-selling investment firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report, accusing Nikola Motors of massive fraud, having no proprietary technology and vastly overstating the capabilities of their prototypes to investors.

Incredibly, "Hindenburg reported that the truck in the 'Nikola One in motion' video wasn't moving under its own power," reports Ars Technica. "Rather, Nikola had towed the truck to the top of a shallow hill and let it roll down. The company allegedly tilted the camera to make it look like the truck was traveling under its own power on a level roadway." From the report: On Monday morning, Nikola sent out a lengthy press release titled "Nikola Sets the Record Straight on False and Misleading Short Seller Report." While the statement nitpicks a number of claims in the Hindenburg report, it tacitly concedes Hindenburg's main claim about the Nikola One. Nikola now admits that the Nikola One prototype wasn't functional in December 2016 and still wasn't functional when the company released the "in motion" video 13 months later. Nikola claims that the gearbox, batteries, inverters, power steering, and some other components of the truck were functional at the time of the December 2016 show. But Nikola doesn't claim that the truck had a working hydrogen fuel cell or motors to drive the wheels -- the two key components Hindenburg stated were missing from the truck in December 2016.

And Nikola now admits that it never got the truck to fully function. "As Nikola pivoted to the next generation of trucks, it ultimately decided not to invest additional resources into completing the process to make the Nikola One drive on its own propulsion," Nikola wrote in its Monday statement. Instead, Nikola pivoted to working on its next vehicle, the Nikola Two. So what about that video of the Nikola One driving across the desert? "Nikola never stated its truck was driving under its own propulsion in the video," Nikola wrote. "Nikola described this third-party video on the Company's social media as 'In Motion.' It was never described as 'under its own propulsion' or 'powertrain driven.' Nikola investors who invested during this period, in which the Company was privately held, knew the technical capability of the Nikola One at the time of their investment."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Arm Holdings, the U.K. semiconductor company, made history for the second time today, becoming the country's biggest tech exit when Nvidia announced over the weekend that it would buy it from SoftBank for $40 billion in an all-stock deal. (Arm's first appearance in the record books? When SoftBank announced in 2016 that it would acquire the company for $32 billion.) But before you can say advanced reduced instruction set computing machine, the deal has hit a minor hitch. One of Arm's co-founders has started a campaign to get the U.K. to interfere in the deal, or else call it off and opt for a public listing backed by the government.

Hermann Hauser, who started the company in 1990 along with a host of others as a spin-out of Acorn Computers, has penned an open letter to the U.K.'s Prime Minister Boris Johnson in which he says that he is "extremely concerned" about the deal and how it will impact jobs in the country, Arm's business model and the future of the country's economic sovereignty independent of the U.S. and U.S. interests. Hauser has also created a site to gather public support -- savearm.co.uk -- and to that end has also started to collect signatures from business figures and others. He's calling on the government to intervene, or to at least create legally binding provisions, tied to passing the deal to guarantee jobs, create a way to enforce Nvidia not getting preferential treatment over other licensees and secure an exemption from CFIUS regulation "so that U.K. companies are guaranteed unfettered access to our own microprocessor technology." "This puts Britain in the invidious position that the decision about who ARM is allowed to sell to will be made in the White House and not in Downing Street," he writes. "Sovereignty used to be mainly a geographic issue, but now economic sovereignty is equally important. Surrendering UK's most powerful trade weapon to the US is making Britain a US vassal state."

Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang said: "This will drive innovation for customers of both companies," adding that Nvidia "will maintain Arm's open licensing model and customer neutrality... We love Arm's business model. In fact, we intend to expand Arm's licensing portfolio with access to Nvidia's technology. Both our ecosystems will be enriched by this combination." Hauser responded by saying: "Do not believe any statements which are not legally binding."

Google is planning to launch its Pixel 5 smartphone, a new Chromecast, and a new smart speaker later this month. From a report: Google has started inviting members of the media to a special event on September 30th, promising new hardware. "We invite you to learn all about our new Chromecast, our latest smart speaker, and our new Pixel phones," reads the invite. Google already confirmed its plans to launch a Pixel 5 later this year, complete with 5G connectivity. The Pixel maker revealed its launch plans alongside the introduction of the Pixel 4A last month, promising 5G versions of the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4A in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Australia.