World's top chipmaking equipment maker claims Chinese rival may infringe IP

Lithography titan ASML names DongFang JingYuan Electron as a worry

The world's top manufacturer of lithography equipment, Dutch company Advanced Semiconductor Materials International (ASML), has warned that it believes a Chinese company may be selling chipmaking equipment that infringes its intellectual property rights.

News of the possible Chinese imitation emerged in ASML's 2021 annual report [PDF] in a section on intellectual property protection:

Indonesia's new mega-telco to build 18,000km submarine cable to the US

Coming out party for Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison

Indonesian telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and independent cable builder and operator Inligo Networks have signed a memorandum of understanding to construct an 18,000km submarine cable linking Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, Japan, and the US.

The Networks Asia Connect Cable System (ACC-1) will offer 240Tbit/sec of capacity. Its planned route will touch five Indonesian cities including the tech manufacturing centre in Batam, Singapore, the northern Australian city of Darwin, the fledgling nation of Timor Leste, Tokyo, and eventually terminate in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, with a stopover on the US-controlled island of Guam.

The announcement is something of a coming out party for Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison – an entity formed last year after protracted negotiations between Indonesia's Ooredoo and CK Hutchison.

Apple tweaks AirTag trackers to make them less useful for stalkers, thieves

The slogan 'Privacy is built in' was more an aspiration until now

Apple on Thursday said it is modifying its AirTag tracking devices to prevent them from being used for the wrong sort of tracking.

AirTags ‒ Bluetooth-enabled discs that report their location – were announced last April to help people find lost keys, baggage, and other possessions capable of containing, or being tethered to, the $29 tracking tokens. If you put one in your wallet, and it goes missing, you can attempt to locate it via Apple's iCloud. The tag automatically talks to nearby devices wirelessly to report its whereabouts, allowing its location to be determined. Thus, your wallet can, hopefully, be recovered from wherever the tag reports it is.

"Your AirTag sends out a secure Bluetooth signal that can be detected by nearby devices in the Find My network," Apple explains on its website. "These devices send the location of your AirTag to iCloud — then you can go to the Find My app and see it on a map. The whole process is anonymous and encrypted to protect your privacy."

This malware gang plants incriminating evidence on PCs, gets victims arrested

A whole different kettle of phish

For the past decade, unidentified miscreants have been planting incriminating evidence on the devices of human-rights advocates, lawyers, and academics in India seemingly to get them arrested.

That's according to SentinelOne, which has named the crew ModifiedElephant and described the group's techniques and targets since 2012 in a report published on Wednesday.

"The objective of ModifiedElephant is long-term surveillance that at times concludes with the delivery of 'evidence' – files that incriminate the target in specific crimes – prior to conveniently coordinated arrests," said Tom Hegel, threat researcher at SentinelOne, in a blog post.

AMD confirms Xilinx merger approved by regulators

While Nvidia loses an Arm, this acquisition has legs

AMD on Tuesday said it has passed all the regulatory hurdles to complete its $35bn acquisition of Xilinx, which will close on Monday.

The acquisition of Xilinx will bulk up AMD's product offerings with FPGAs (that's field programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips used for all sorts of applications, from accelerating machine-learning software to prototyping chips and providing glue logic to handling network traffic at the edge.

The acquisition was announced in October 2020, but the closing was delayed as AMD waited for China to approve the deal, which happened late last month.

Cringe: Salesforce latest megacorp to jump on non-fungible tokens bandwagon

How to get nothing for something

SaaS CRM provider Salesforce has proposed to launch a platform for trading non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

For those who prefer living under rocks to the hellish infotainment torrent of the 21st century, NFTs are non-interchangeable digital units stored on an immutable blockchain ledger. Why do we care? Money.

Reportedly, digital artist Pak's The Merge was bought for $91.8m in December, with 28,983 collectors snapping up 312,686 total units of mass, otherwise known as a non-fungible token, the largest NFT sale at the time.

Users sound off as new 100TB-to-share Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

But should free tier users in universities not invest in their own IT infrastructure?

Educational users of Google Workspace will soon be facing a new storage policy that limits the free tier to 100TB shared between all users at a site, and some are expressing their dissatisfaction with the change.

Google Workspace for Education, formerly G Suite for Education, is Google's offering for schools and universities. As part of the rebrand last year, the free tier was renamed Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, alongside paid-for Standard and Education Plus editions.

Dynatrace goes multi-cloud with serverless monitoring

Easier observability for when you have eggs in many baskets

Application monitoring outfit Dynatrace has extended its platform's support for serverless architectures to cover all the major cloud platforms, providing observability for developers working with multi-cloud application deployments.

Dynatrace said it has extended existing support for monitoring apps on AWS Lambda to Microsoft's Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions, plus managed Kubernetes environments, messaging queues, and cloud databases.

Serverless applications may consist of hundreds of loosely coupled services spread across multiple environments, which can make it hard to ensure observability, Dynatrace said. Extending its support across all the clouds should make it easier for developers to analyse and troubleshoot such multi-cloud applications, allowing for greater scalability.

Atos realises future does not belong to data centre services

€1.9bn goodwill writedown, another profit warning, going to focus on cloud, digital and security from now on

The bad news keeps rolling for Atos after its third financial warning in eight months, this time accompanied by confirmation the French integrator will start to lessen its focus on "classic infrastructure services" and unified comms in favour of the cloud.

The group has revised estimates for sales to shrink 2.6 per cent in calendar 2021 to €10.8bn ($12.3bn) and operating margin to be closer to 3.5 per cent than 4 per cent due to higher than expected costs from a BPO agreement with a UK financial service client, believed to be Aegon.

Talking to analysts this morning, CEO Rodolphe Belmer – who only took office early January and days later issued a profit warning – said Atos is booking goodwill impairment charges of €1.9bn, related to prior acquisitions and assets including data centres and IT kit rentals.

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR because it sends data to US

Unnamed website manager given 1 month to strip GA from his site

French data protection authority CNIL has declared that Google Analytics breaches Euro privacy law the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because it transfers European netizens' data to America.

In a statement this morning CNIL said it "considers these transfers to be illegal," blowing a large hole in French usage of one of the world's most ubiquitous traffic-counting suites.

Precise details of exactly what laws Google Analytics breaches were not explained in the statement. We have asked CNIL for more detail and will update this article if it responds.

Use Zoom on a Mac? You might want to check your microphone settings

Big Zoomer is listening to us, complain users

Apple Mac users running the Zoom meetings app are reporting that it's keeping their computer's microphone on when they aren't using it.

The issue appears to affect the native app running on the current macOS release, Monterey, in which Apple has implemented a visual cue to alert users that an application or device is accessing their microphone or camera — via an orange or green dot in the Menu Bar, respectively.

Users began complaining about the issue after Monterrey was released late last year, and on December 27, Zoom Inc put out an update that was meant to address the bug, stating that version 5.9.1 (3506) "resolved an issue regarding the microphone light indicator being triggered when not in a meeting."