Month: June 2021

Enlarge / This pair of FT232RL USB to serial UARTs looks quite similar—but the one on the right is a counterfeit based on a mask-programmable microcontroller and only works with older drivers. (credit: Zeptobars)

Beginning with the first Wuhan quarantine in January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world from both sides of the law of supply and demand. Independent Distributors of Electronics Association (IDEA) founder Steve Calabria believes this two-fisted squeeze will spawn a surge in counterfeit electronics, with consequences for longevity and reliability of equipment built with substandard components.

Supply, demand, and counterfeit

Pandemic lockdowns in industrial cities have pinched supply of both finished goods and raw materials, while demand for electronic products has skyrocketed due to both the need for remote work/school gear and simple boredom from people unable to travel, dine out, and party in the ways they're accustomed to.

The immediate impact of this shortage is obvious and already well-reported—for example, it's so difficult to buy a graphics card right now that manufacturer MSI is bringing back the 2014-era Nvidia GT 730. The GT 730 is, frankly, garbage—it offers a bit more than half the performance of Intel's UHD integrated graphics and less than a fifth the performance of 2015's GTX 950. But it works—and for the moment, that's the most important thing to be said about it.

Enlarge / A participant gets his second dose of the Novavax vaccine during the clinical trial. (credit: Karen Ducey / Getty Images)

Today, a company called Novavax announced that it had completed a large efficacy trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, and the news was good. The vaccine is highly effective, it blocked severe disease entirely, and it appeared to work against some of the more recently evolved virus variants. The company says it can produce 150 million doses per month by the end of the year, and the vaccine is stable when stored in a normal freezer, so it could play a big part in the effort to administer vaccines outside of industrialized nations.

Different tech

So far, US citizens have had the choice of RNA-based vaccines, like the offerings from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, or a vaccine based on a harmless virus engineered to carry the coronavirus spike protein, as used in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. (The AstraZeneca and Sputnik vaccines are similar to J&J's.) Outside the US, many countries have used vaccines based on an inactivated coronavirus, although these have turned out not to be very effective.

The Novavax vaccine uses an entirely different technology. Vaccine production starts by identifying a key gene from the pathogen of interest—the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, in this case—and inserting it into a virus that infects insect cells. Insect cells can easily be grown in culture, and they process any proteins they make in the same way that human cells do. (This processing can involve chemically linking sugars or cleaving off superfluous parts of the protein.) The activity ensures that the purified protein will be chemically identical to the spike protein found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself.

Enlarge / The dome of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Phil Roeder)

Legislators in the US House of Representatives introduced five new bills Friday afternoon that promise the biggest overhaul of antitrust law since the trust-busting era of the early 1900s. 

The bills take aim at the many platforms that Big Tech companies have rolled out over the last decade or so, including Apple’s iOS, Google’s search and ad platforms, Amazon’s marketplace, and Facebook’s social media and messaging networks. The proposed legislation would usher in sweeping changes both in the way monopoly regulations are enforced and in how companies run their platforms. They would require divestments in some cases while mandating interoperability and portability in others. 

“Right now, unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who introduced one of the bills. “They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices on consumers, and put folks out of work. Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us.”