Month: March 2021

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A Texas jury has ordered Intel to pay $2.18 billion in damages for infringing two patents. The lawsuit was filed by VLSI Technology LLC, a 4-year-old firm that Intel says has no products and no sources of revenue besides patent litigation.

The patents at issue in the case previously belonged to NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch company that spun off from Philips in 2006. NXP acquired the patents when it bought Freescale Semiconductor (itself a spinoff of Motorola) in 2015. Intel's lawyer told jurors that NXP would get a portion of the proceeds from the lawsuit.

The two patents focus on methods for minimizing the power consumption of computing chips. One way to do this is by varying the system voltage: setting a higher voltage when high performance is needed, then lowering the voltage to conserve power afterward. One patent claims the concept of storing information about a memory chip's minimum voltage in nonvolatile memory so the system can ensure that the memory circuit has a high enough voltage.

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SpaceX and Dish Network are fighting at the Federal Communications Commission over Dish's attempt to block a key designation that SpaceX's Starlink division needs in order to get FCC broadband funding.

A SpaceX filing submitted yesterday said that Dish's "baseless attempt" to block funding "would serve only to delay what matters most—connecting unserved Americans." While Dish says it has valid concerns about interference in the 12 GHz band, SpaceX described Dish's complaint to the FCC as a "facially spurious filing" that "is only the latest example of Dish's abuse of Commission resources in its misguided effort to expropriate the 12 GHz band."

The dispute is related to several FCC proceedings including one on a Starlink petition seeking designation as an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) under the Communications Act. SpaceX needs this legal designation in some of the states where it won federal funding to deploy broadband in unserved areas. Dish asked the FCC to deny SpaceX the needed status in the 12 GHz band.

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Microsoft is urging customers to install emergency patches as soon as possible to protect against highly skilled hackers who are actively exploiting four zero-day vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.

The software maker said hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government have been using the previously unknown exploits to hack on-premises Exchange Server software that is fully patched. So far, Hafnium, as Microsoft is calling the hackers, is the only group it has seen exploiting the vulnerabilities, but the company said that could change.

“Even though we’ve worked quickly to deploy an update for the Hafnium exploits, we know that many nation-state actors and criminal groups will move quickly to take advantage of any unpatched systems,” Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Customer Security & Trust Tom Burt wrote in a post published Tuesday afternoon. “Promptly applying today’s patches is the best protection against this attack.”

Enlarge / Amazon's orange-yellow logo wall. (credit: David Ryder/Getty Images)

A senior manager at Amazon Web Services has filed suit against the company alleging race and gender discrimination, saying that she was underpaid, denied promotions, and sexually assaulted at the firm.

Charlotte Newman, who is Black, began working at AWS in 2017 in a public policy role. Prior to joining Amazon, she served as a congressional advisor, including a senior role advising US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ). From the start, she alleges, she was "de-leveled"—hired at a position below the one for which she applied and for which she was qualified—and undercompensated as a result.

Underpaying Black employees through de-leveling is routine at Amazon, the suit (PDF) alleges. "When a company's top leaders traffic in stereotypes of Black employees and fail to condemn intimidation tactics, managers farther down the chain will take note of that modus operandi and behave accordingly," the filing reads.

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  A Samsung Micro LED TV in suitably swanky digs. [credit: Samsung ]

It's that time of year when many TV manufacturers begin announcing prices for and shipping their annual product refreshes. We took a look at Sony's OLED lineup yesterday, and today we're turning our attention to Samsung, which just announced imminent availability (most models will start shipping this month) for its high-end Micro LED and Mini LED TV lineup.

We'll get to Micro LED in a minute, but let's start with the mainstream high end, which comprises the Mini LED TVs. Samsung is giving these a proprietary "Neo QLED" label.

The top-end QN900A is the most tricked-out 8K option, with 65-inch ($5,000), 75-inch ($7,000), and 85-inch options ($9,000). One step down while keeping the 8K banner flying is the QN800A, offered in the same sizes but at $3,500, $4,700, and $6,500, respectively.

In 1697, a man named Jacques Sennacque wrote a letter to his cousin, a French merchant named Pierre Le Pers, requesting a certified death certificate for another man named Daniel Le Pers (presumably also a relation). Sennacque sealed the letter with an intricate folding method known as "letterlocking," a type of physical cryptography, to safeguard the contents from prying eyes. That letter was never delivered or opened. More than 300 years later, researchers have virtually "unlocked" the letter to reveal its contents for the first time, right down to the watermark in the shape of a bird. They described their results in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Co-author Jana Dambrogio, a conservator at MIT Libraries, coined the term "letterlocking" after discovering such letters while a fellow at the Vatican Secret Archives in 2000. The Vatican letters dated back to the 15th and 16th centuries, and they featured strange slits and corners that had been sliced off. Dambrogio realized that the letters had originally been folded in an ingenious manner, essentially "locked" by inserting a slice of the paper into a slit, then sealing it with wax. It would not have been possible to open the letter without ripping that slice of paper—evidence that the letter had been tampered with.

Dambrogio has been studying the practice of letterlocking ever since, often creating her own models to showcase different techniques. The practice dates back to the 13th century—at least in Western history—and there are many different folding and locking techniques that emerged over the centuries. Queen Elizabeth I, Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, and Marie Antoinette are among the famous personages known to have employed letterlocking for their correspondence.

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Today's Dealmaster includes a good discount on Bose's Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, the white version of which is down to $299 at various retailers. That's $80 off Bose's MSRP, about $65 off the street price we typically see online, and tied for the best price we've tracked.

While we generally recommend Sony's WH-1000XM4 as the top choice among wireless noise-canceling headphones, this Bose pair is a strong alternative. Its battery life isn't as good, but its metal headband gives the design a more premium feel, and it offers a more neutral sound profile than the XM4's more bass-heavy default signature.

And though its active noise cancellation isn't quite as effective as the XM4's at maximum, it's not terribly far off. Perhaps more importantly, Bose's companion app lets you customize the strength of the noise-canceling effect on a 10-point scale, so you can lessen the intensity if you're somewhere that's only mildly noisy. If you need that extra flexibility—or if ultrastrong active noise cancellation tends to bring you discomfort—the Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 are a worthwhile option in the premium bracket.