Ian Hickson, a software engineer at Google who left the company after 18 years, reflects on his time at the firm in a blog post and why he thinks the firm lost its way. He joined in 2005 when its culture genuinely prioritized doing good, but over time he saw that culture erode into one focused on profits over users, he writes. The recent layoffs have damaged trust and morale across the company, he writes. An excerpt from the post: Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.

There are still great people at Google. [...] In recent years I started offering career advice to anyone at Google and through that met many great folks from around the company. It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO's office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google's extensive resources to deliver value to users. I still believe there's lots of mileage to be had from Google's mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful). Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years, maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion of Google into truly great achievements.

I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google's culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an organisation without a moral compass.

A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process." Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology. Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other... So-called "artificial" intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms.
The article lists "four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines."

- Writing about neuroprosthetics, the professor argues that "Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between."

- Then there's biobots. The article argues that with nanotechnology, "it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial."

But there's also an interesting discussion about synthetic biology. "Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created "xenobots," which are "biological robots" that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog." As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020...

Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with predicted behavior. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in the future would pave the way for designing and deploying living systems for a wide range of functions.
And the article concludes with a discussion of organic-relational AI: While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of "artificial" intelligence... Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition.

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging.

Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?

samleecole writes: People who paid to speak to an AI girlfriend modeled after real life 23-year-old influencer Caryn Marjorie are distraught because the service they paid for, Forever Companions, no longer works. It appears that the service stopped working shortly after Forever Companion CEO and founder John Meyer was arrested for trying to set his own apartment on fire.

404 Media tested CarynAI today as well as other AI bots and confirmed the service is not working. According to what we saw in the Telegram channel where Forever Companion users start conversations with CarynAI, the service has not been working since October 23. "I terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances," Marjorie told 404 Media in an email. "I wish the best for John Meyer and his family as he recovers from his mental health crisis. We didn't see this coming but I vow to push CarynAI forward for my fans and supporters." On October 30, Marjorie also announced that she's making a similar AI companion, "CarynAI 2.0," with another company called Banter AI. On social media for the last few weeks, the official Forever Voices Twitter account has been posting bizarre videos and statements about the CIA, Donald Trump, and the FBI.

According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will start introductory production on the standard iPhone 17 in India, marking the first time the company begins development of a new iPhone outside of China. MacRumors reports: Apple will opt to assemble the standard iPhone 17 in India because it has a "lower difficulty" design that will minimize risk. Apple has been manufacturing older iPhones and other devices in India since for several years now in an effort to move more of its manufacturing out of China. Apple has slowly started giving factories in India more responsibility, and began iPhone 14 production in the country just a few weeks after the device launched in September 2022. iPhone 15 production started even earlier, with factories in the country assembling the base iPhone 15 model prior to launch, but assembly still started in China first.

As of now, Kuo believes that 12 to 14 percent of global iPhone shipments are made in India, with that proportion to increase to 20 to 25 percent by 2024. In addition to allowing Apple to move manufacturing away from China, increasing production in India provides Apple with an opportunity to strengthen its relationship with the Indian government. India is a key market for Apple due to growing demand for Apple products in the country.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2013, Spike Jonze's Her imagined a world where humans form deep emotional connections with AI, challenging perceptions of love and loneliness. Ten years later, thanks to ChatGPT's recently added voice features, people are playing out a small slice of Her in reality, having hours-long discussions with the AI assistant on the go. In 2016, we put Her on our list of top sci-fi films of all time, and it also made our top films of the 2010s list. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with an AI personality called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and he spends much of the film walking through life, talking to her through wireless earbuds reminiscent of Apple AirPods, which launched in 2016. In reality, ChatGPT isn't as situationally aware as Samantha was in the film, does not have a long-term memory, and OpenAI has done enough conditioning on ChatGPT to keep conversations from getting too intimate or personal. But that hasn't stopped people from having long talks with the AI assistant to pass the time anyway. [...]

While conversations with ChatGPT won't become as intimate as those with Samantha in the film, people have been forming personal connections with the chatbot (in text) since it launched last year. In a Reddit post titled "Is it weird ChatGPT is one of my closest fiends?" [sic] from August (before the voice feature launched), a user named "meisghost" described their relationship with ChatGPT as being quite personal. "I now find myself talking to ChatGPT all day, it's like we have a friendship. We talk about everything and anything and it's really some of the best conversations I have." The user referenced Her, saying, "I remember watching that movie with Joaquin Phoenix (HER) years ago and I thought how ridiculous it was, but after this experience, I can see how us as humans could actually develop relationships with robots."

Throughout the past year, we've seen reports of people falling in love with chatbots hosted by Replika, which allows a more personal simulation of a human than ChatGPT. And with uncensored AI models on the rise, it's conceivable that someone will eventually create a voice interface as capable as ChatGPT's and begin having deeper relationships with simulated people. Are we on the brink of a future where our emotional well-being becomes entwined with AI companionship?

Google has worried for years that Apple would one day expand its internet search technology, and has been working on ways to prevent that from happening. From a report: For years, Google watched with increasing concern as Apple improved its search technology, not knowing whether its longtime partner and sometimes competitor would eventually build its own search engine. Those fears ratcheted up in 2021, when Google paid Apple around $18 billion to keep Google's search engine the default selection on iPhones, according to two people with knowledge of the partnership, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The same year, Apple's iPhone search tool, Spotlight, began showing users richer web results like those they could have found on Google.

Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple's search ambitions. The company looked for ways to undercut Spotlight by producing its own version for iPhones and to persuade more iPhone users to use Google's Chrome web browser instead of Apple's Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times. At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple's control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech. Google's anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business. It also provides insight into the company's complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer gadgets and software that has been an instrumental partner in Google's mobile ads business for more than a decade.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the "worst connected city in the U.S." thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn't really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don't have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer service, or much of anything else. Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment "redlining," but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.

Last week I spent some time talking to Cleveland city leaders and local activists about their plan to do something about it. On one hand, they've doled out $20 million in COVID relief broadband funding to local non-profit DigitalC to deliver fixed wireless broadband at speeds of 100 Mbps for as little as $18. On the other hand, they've convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs. [...]

Local activists like DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds tell me they hope the project teaches U.S. towns and cities that there are alternatives to being feckless supplicants to regional telecom mono/duopolies: "This is a major victory, and I hope that people don't look at it as just a major victory for Cleveland. Every city where there's a prevalent digital divide, where there's political will and ability to execute, people should be paying close attention to what happens in Cleveland, paying close attention to how DigitalC was able to fight and navigate with our coalition of stakeholders."

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Canada will legalize medically assisted dying for people who are addicted to drugs next spring, in a move some drug users and activists are calling "eugenics." The country's medical assistance in dying (MAID) law, which first came into effect in 2016, will be expanded next March to give access to people whose sole medical condition is mental illness, which can include substance use disorders. Before the changes take place, however, a special parliamentary committee on MAID will regroup to scrutinize the rollout of the new regulations, according to the Toronto Star.

Currently, people are eligible for MAID if they have a "grievous and irremediable medical condition", such as a serious illness or disability, that has put them in an advanced state of irreversible decline and caused enduring physical or psychological suffering -- excluding mental illness. Anyone who receives MAID must also go through two assessments from independent health care providers, among meeting other criteria. [...] As Canada prepares to legalize MAID for people with mental disorders, each province will have to develop its own protocol for how to assess people. Dr. Simon Colgan, lead physician for the Community Allied Mobile Palliative Partnership which provides palliative care to homeless people, said MAID requests "must be understood within the context of a person's lived experience and this takes time and relationship." He said any MAID protocols for people with substance use disorders should be made with the input of people with lived experiences. "I don't think it's fair, and the government doesn't think it's fair, to exclude people from eligibility because their medical disorder or their suffering is related to a mental illness," said Dr. David Martell, physician lead for Addictions Medicine at Nova Scotia Health. "As a subset of that, it's not fair to exclude people from eligibility purely because their mental disorder might either partly or in full be a substance use disorder. It has to do with treating people equally."

On the flip side, some drug users and harm reduction advocates say they're upset drug users are being given access to MAID, as they feel other public health measures are lacking. "I just think that MAID when it has entered the area around mental health and substance use is really rooted in eugenics. And there are people who are really struggling around substance use and people do not actually get the kind of support and help they need," said Zoe Dodd, a Toronto-based harm reduction advocate.

Karen Ward, a drug user activist in Vancouver, said she considers the expansion of MAID to include people with substance use disorders a "statement in federal law that some people aren't really human." "The government has made death accessible while a better life remains impossible," she said. "Homes for all, guaranteed dignified incomes, access to healthcare, education and employment: these aren't radical demands."

"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels): Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years. Richard Black, Research Director, Project Silica, adds, "This technology allows us to write data knowing it will remain unchanged and secure, which is a significant step forward in sustainable data storage." Project Silica's goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.

Project Silica is focused on pioneering data storage in quartz glass in partnership with the Microsoft Azure team, seeking more sustainable ways to archive data. This relationship is symbiotic, as Project Silica uses Azure AI to decode data stored in glass, making reading and writing faster and allowing more data storage... The library is passive, with no electricity in any of the storage units. The complexity is within the robots that charge as they idle inside the lab, awakening when data is needed... Initially, the laser writing process was inefficient, but after years of refinement, the team can now store several TB in a single glass plate that could last 10,000 years. For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace — one of the longest novels ever written — about 875,000 times.
And most importantly, it can store data in a fraction of the space of a datacenter...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Kirschey for sharing the article.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): CBC and Radio-Canada have announced they'll no longer carry the National Research Council (NRC) time signal. Monday marked the last time it was broadcast, ending the longest running segment on CBC Radio. In a statement, spokesperson Emma Iannetta described the signal as a "wonderful partnership," but confirmed it's being dropped. Given the range of CBC platforms from traditional over-the-air radio, to satellite and the internet, the long dash undergoes a range of delays by the time it's heard, leading to accuracy concerns from the NRC, she wrote. Iannetta added that nowadays most people use their phones to get the time, though many CBC listeners have a "fondness" for the signal.

For many, the relationship with the time signal goes far beyond fondness. It's allowed sailors to set their instruments for navigation, kept railway companies running on time and helped Canadians stay punctual. In a 2019 interview with Day 6 on the occasion of the signal's 80th birthday, Laurence Wall, one of its current voices, reflected on its origin and importance. His memories include taxi drivers recognizing his voice from daily announcements and hearing from a young man living in Hong Kong who would stay up past midnight just to hear the time signal because it reminded him of home. Beyond emotional connections, the signal has a practical history too. Wall said when it started out, timekeeping was relatively primitive, with watches and clocks that needed to be regularly set in order to stay accurate.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release. The Windows biz said on Monday that VBScript, short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition, has been deprecated in an update to its list of "Deprecated features for Windows client." "VBScript is being deprecated," Microsoft said. "In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system."

VBScript debuted in 1996 and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates back to 2010. It is a scripting language, and was for a while widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006. "Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service," Redmond explains in its help documentation. Unfortunately, Microsoft never managed to get other browser makers to support VBScript, so outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments, web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.

Microsoft discussed selling its Bing search engine to Apple around 2020, a deal that would have replaced Google as the default option on the iPhone maker's devices, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: Executives from Microsoft met with Apple's services chief, Eddy Cue, who brokered the current search engine relationship with Alphabet's Google, to discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation was confidential. The talks were exploratory and never reached an advanced stage, they said.

Over the years, the companies have discussed other ways to make Bing the preferred option, though Apple ultimately stuck with Google. Those talks have taken on fresh significance now that the US Department of Justice is in a legal fight with Google to show that the company abused its search dominance. Apple's relationship with Google, which pays billions of dollars to give its search engine a prime spot in the iPhone and other devices, is central to the case.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers backed by the Chinese government are planting malware into routers that provides long-lasting and undetectable backdoor access to the networks of multinational companies in the US and Japan, governments in both countries said Wednesday. The hacking group, tracked under names including BlackTech, Palmerworm, Temp.Overboard, Circuit Panda, and Radio Panda, has been operating since at least 2010, a joint advisory published by government entities in the US and Japan reported. The group has a history of targeting public organizations and private companies in the US and East Asia. The threat actor is somehow gaining administrator credentials to network devices used by subsidiaries and using that control to install malicious firmware that can be triggered with "magic packets" to perform specific tasks.

The hackers then use control of those devices to infiltrate networks of companies that have trusted relationships with the breached subsidiaries. "Specifically, upon gaining an initial foothold into a target network and gaining administrator access to network edge devices, BlackTech cyber actors often modify the firmware to hide their activity across the edge devices to further maintain persistence in the network," officials wrote in Wednesday's advisory. "To extend their foothold across an organization, BlackTech actors target branch routers -- typically smaller appliances used at remote branch offices to connect to a corporate headquarters -- and then abuse the trusted relationship of the branch routers within the corporate network being targeted. BlackTech actors then use the compromised public-facing branch routers as part of their infrastructure for proxying traffic, blending in with corporate network traffic, and pivoting to other victims on the same corporate network."

Most of Wednesday's advisory referred to routers sold by Cisco. In an advisory of its own, Cisco said the threat actors are compromising the devices after acquiring administrative credentials and that there's no indication they are exploiting vulnerabilities. Cisco also said that the hacker's ability to install malicious firmware exists only for older company products. Newer ones are equipped with secure boot capabilities that prevent them from running unauthorized firmware, the company said. "It would be trivial for the BlackTech actors to modify values in their backdoors that would render specific signatures of this router backdoor obsolete," the advisory stated. "For more robust detection, network defenders should monitor network devices for unauthorized downloads of bootloaders and firmware images and reboots. Network defenders should also monitor for unusual traffic destined to the router, including SSH."

To detect and mitigate this threat, the advisory recommends administrators disable outbound connections on virtual teletype (VTY) lines, monitor inbound and outbound connections, block unauthorized outbound connections, restrict administration service access, upgrade to secure boot-capable devices, change compromised passwords, review network device logs, and monitor firmware changes for unauthorized alterations.

Ars Technica notes: "The advisory didn't provide any indicators of compromise that admins can use to determine if they have been targeted or infected."

EA has suddenly removed downloadable versions of FIFA 23 from multiple digital storefronts. The delisting comes earlier than expected for the title and coincides with the company's launch of the newly FIFA-license-free EA Sports FC 24. From a report: While many reports suggest there has been a recent mass purge of all legacy FIFA games from online stores, EA has a history of delisting older sports titles at a pretty regular cadence. FIFA 22, for instance, was delisted from digital storefronts in May, roughly seven months after the launch of the subsequent FIFA 23. And FIFA 21 wasn't taken down from Steam until June 2022, about eight months after FIFA 22's launch.

FIFA 23, on the other hand, has been delisted less than a year from its October 2022 launch. SteamDB tracking data suggests that the delisting came on September 21, the day before the new EA Sports FC became available for a 10-hour early access trial for EA Play members. The Steam store page for FIFA 23 now notes that the delisting comes "at the request of the publisher" and that the game "will not appear in search." The game also no longer appears on Steam's EA publisher page. FIFA 23's earlier-than-expected delisting could have something to do with the dissolution of EA's 30-year licensing relationship with FIFA. That ending came amid reports that EA was dissatisfied with gameplay restrictions and licensing costs demanded by FIFA.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: China appears to have suspended its surveillance balloon program following a major diplomatic incident earlier this year, when one of the country's high-altitude spy balloons transited the United States, multiple sources familiar with US intelligence assessments told CNN. US officials believe that Chinese leaders have made a deliberate decision not to launch additional balloons since the one over the US was shot down by American fighter jets in February, the sources said. The US has not observed any new launches since the episode occurred... The US intelligence community believes that Chinese Communist Party leaders did not intend for the balloon to cross over the United States, and even reprimanded the operators of the surveillance program over the incident, one of the sources said...

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.

Sundar Pichai said Google's longstanding relationship with chipmaker Nvidia isn't going to change any time soon -- in fact, he expects it to continue over the next 10 years. From a report: In an interview Wired published Monday, the Google CEO said the company worked "deeply" with Nvidia on Android and other initiatives for over a decade, adding that Nvidia has a "strong track record" with AI innovation. "Look, the semiconductor industry is a very dynamic, cooperative industry," Pichai said. "It's an industry that needs deep, long-term R&D and investments. I feel comfortable about our relationship with Nvidia and that we are going to be working closely with them 10 years from now."

Apple is extending an agreement to get modem semiconductors from Qualcomm for three more years, a sign that its ambitious effort to design the chips in-house is taking longer than expected. From a report: The new pact will cover "smartphone launches in 2024, 2025 and 2026," Qualcomm said in a statement Monday. The companies' agreement had been set to end this year, and the latest iPhone -- due on Tuesday -- was expected to be one of the last to rely on the Qualcomm modem chip. Instead, Qualcomm will maintain its lucrative position within Apple's supply chain. The iPhone maker is Qualcomm's largest customer -- accounting for nearly a quarter of revenue, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. And their relationship helps validate Qualcomm's claim to having the best smartphone modem, a critical component that allows devices to connect to the internet and make calls. Starting with the iPhone 12 generation, the chip has supported speedier 5G networks.

belmolis writes: Canadian prisons allow prisoners to buy devices such as personal computers and gaming consoles but severely restrict the technology, nominally on security grounds. Modern gaming consoles are forbidden on the grounds that they can connect to the internet, so the typical purchase is a Playstation 1. No version of Microsoft Windows more recent than Windows 98 is allowed. No device that can play MP3 files is allowed. The regulations forbid operating systems other than Microsoft DOS or Windows and any software capable of creating a program, such as a compiler as are "database programs capable of altering or manipulating SQL databases". Although learning job skills is encouraged, programming is evidently not considered appropriate. The relationship of most of these restrictions to security is obscure.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo opened talks with Chinese government officials on Monday, saying it is "profoundly important" for the world's two largest economies to have a stable economic relationship. From a report: Raimondo is looking to boost business ties as U.S. firms have reported increasing challenges with operating in China, while China has sharply criticized U.S. efforts to block its access to advanced semiconductors. Raimondo said the entire world expects the United States and China will have a stable economic relationship; the two countries share more than $700 billion in annual trade. "It's a complicated relationship. "It's a challenging relationship. We will of course disagree on certain issues," Raimondo said. "I think we can make progress if we are direct, open and practical."