No, it is not.
We haven't even touched a single percentage of the crust, and to actually "shrink" that crust you'd also have to reduce the volume of everything below the crust, mantle, core, etc.

That's a rather stupid idea the politicians are pushing.

If the tracking isn't in the chip itself, it can be removed by ditching the packaging.

If it is in the chip, that makes things even more screwy. First it will need a completely new design of the chip, you can't just slap something like that into pre-existing microcircuitry and expect things to remain the same. It introduces changes to power, EM sources, and heat.
Then there's the issues if it's a passive item like the RF tags a lot of stores use, that only respond when hit with the right field, like the one produced by those panels at the entry/exit. You'd need the transmitter/receiver to be close enough to the tags to both cause them to respond, and to pick up their transmission, something that isn't exactly hard to block or avoid.
On the other hand, it could be an active transmitter, a larger component to add, that will need some kind of antenna, a power source whenever it's supposed to be transmitting, and the fact that it will cause even more chaos to an integrated circuit if just slapped on, which will require even more research and development so it doesn't impair the functionality of the chip it's been foisted into than the more passive ones would need. Even then, it could be put in a shielded box and no longer be capable of being picked up remotely. If it's antenna is external at all, that can be broken so it's output signal is even weaker.
Of course you could always make a more powerful transmitter for it, but then you are inflating the size of unit again, as well as how much it can interfere with the function of the chip in the first place, and it can still have it's signal shielded, it just takes more shielding.
Perhaps make it so it only transmits when the chip is actually in use, that way it doesn't need a integrated power supply, but all the other issues remain.
And for that matter, China won't give a rodents donkey if you can detect they have the chips in their country, but they'll still shield the ones in sensitive locations they don't want you to know about. It's not that hard to put up a faraday cage around a room, a 40' trailer, or even an entire building if have government backing.

It all boils down to this. If the tracker is external to the chip, it will be removed. If it's internal to the chip, it's a completely unfeasible proposition in the first place that even if implemented would have little effect that can't already be easily negated if desired.

I hope this is real, and it has no gotchas, like stupid expensive or really limited number of cycles, etc.

Sadly anything extraordinary reported by China needs at lest 2 kilos of salt due to the numerous false reports of breakthroughs that have occurred over the past couple of decades, especially this last one. Well, at least they don't claim to have found magical unicorn caves like north korea has.

I've got a good chunk of "face blindness", I forget the current medical/scientific name for it.
It would be really great to have a heads up display pop up the name of whomever I'm looking at, and whatever reminder note I chose.
You have no idea how often I'm talking to someone that obviously knows me, but I have no idea who they are. It really sucks!

The nickname of "face blindness" is a bit misleading. You can see faces without a problem, but you tend to have no idea who they are, the two things just don't link very well in your mind. You ever heard someone say that they never forget a face? Well this is the exact opposite of that.
I bet police sketch artists hate us. Just imagine:
          "Please describe his eyes" ... "There were two of them on his face, and I think they were dark".
          "What shape were they, what color, also describe the eyelashes" ... "Um... eyeball shaped? I'm pretty sure they were dark. There might or might not have been eyelashes, I can't remember. Do you have a picture of him?"
        "No we don't have a picture, that's why you're telling me what he looked like!", sigh, "How about his chin, what shape was his chin?" ... "If it's not a something bizarre I might remember, it must have been pretty normal."
        Police sketch artist pulls out a large charcoal pencil and lunges at face blind witness like Norman Bates even as his hair starts falling out from stress.

I was worried it would be awful, especially with some of their casting, but I really hoped they'd rise above their unsuitability when lifted by good writing and make a fun movie. Now it sounds like what I was worried about has happened.
Though I have to say that Jack Black as Claptrap I can't see going wrong.

Sadly, I still want to see it, but I may just wait a month or two until it's on a streaming service for free.

That would fail the obviousness test for patents as it is obvious to anyone in the field, and heck, a good portion of us that aren't.
The only reason why everyone other than ford hasn't tried to patent it, other than the usual reasons, is that we aren't total dicks that want to turn the entire automotive using populace of the world into out enemy.

Sorry, but I fully believe that NS (Natural Stupidity) can and will conquer such attempts at using AI (Artificial Intelligence)

On top of that, the less intelligent ones will refuse to use the AI support, or will not follow it's instructions correctly and blame the AI.

Long time doing tech support, so it's not just being pessimistic about humanity but my own experience with the ones calling tech support for help.
(Yes, that's not evidence, it's just anecdotal, but it absolutely is my opinion.)

We're talking about Apple, "rational thought" really isn't part of their plans.

As we know, "Newspaper" companies are falling like dominos this century, mostly due to lack of income for various reasons.
This totally feels like a move straight out of the playbooks of the many patent trolls out there.
Does anyone think this is their new "business model"?

Never had to deal with a blue screen of death back at the software company I worked for.
I'd changed it to a sort of mauve color, so it was an MSOD, and an MS OD is so much a better acronym ;p

No idea what their chances of winning are, but you can bet this will spawn at least one class action suit.

Further in the article they finally mention that the device has a cooling phase in addition to the heating phase.
Run it once, it heats up, run it again, it cools down.

In short it's replacing the coolant in a regular AC unit so you don't have to pump around the compressed hot liquid/gas, let it decompress which will cool it, then recompress it, all the while cycling it back and forth so it absorbs heat from inside, and releases heat outside.

Now they can have those ceramic thingies switching phases to absorb heat from inside, and then dump it outside.
Seems likely there will still be a liquid or gas used in the transfers to keep things going the right direction for whatever phase a ceramic piece is in, but far less complications than a regular AC has to go through. And yes, if it can improve efficiency, and even expand the operable temperature range, all while keeping costs, both initial and maintenance down, it would be a great improvement.

Of course until they can provide the numbers (and an independent 3rd party can verify them), it's all just marketing whizz.

Get the regulation back so the #$^@#$%&s can't "discriminate against data".

And contrary to what the article said, the internet did break numerous times because of that deregulation, it just wasn't anything that brought down the entire internet in the same day, but rather functionality breaks for LOTS of stuff... Anybody else remember Comcast intentionally F'ing over Netflix data so your streams were lousy until they agreed to pay Comcast a lot of money? Well I certainly do, and that wasn't the even close to the only shakedown from both ends.

Net Neutrality was the default for the internet until greed seeped in from the corporate giants, let's get Net Neutrality back!

I wouldn't even have facebook or twitter accounts if it weren't for the fact that many companies REQUIRE you to have one or the other for various reasons!
Still, facebook and twitter are NOT worth paying for in my opinion. As to ads, that's another reason to avoid them if my ad blockers can't deal with them.
I don't watch youtube on the phone anymore because I haven't found an ad blocker that will strip the ads on youtube. Tried tons of free ones that say they can do it, but none has worked properly yet. As to the paid for versions, there's no way I'm paying for one until after I have it verified that does what I want, is reasonably priced by my evaluation, and doesn't have those F'd up subscriptions. (Have you ever tried to cancel some of those? It's easier to reach orbit that dealing with some of those!)

I guess the synopsis is: Paying subscriptions for social media not acceptable.

It's behind a paywall so you have to pay to get the better version.
It has DRM so that you can't share it with anyone else.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive in the slightest.

However, neither one is all that favored in the mod communities, so the cracking of it isn't a surprise.