Month: February 2024

Enlarge / The latest Huawei-designed Kirin processor was a 7-nanometer chip made for it by SMIC that appeared in the Mate 60 Pro smartphone in August. (credit: James Park/Bloomberg)

China’s national chip champions expect to make next-generation smartphone processors as early as this year, despite US efforts to restrict their development of advanced technologies.

The country’s biggest chipmaker, SMIC, has put together new semiconductor production lines in Shanghai, according to two people familiar with the move, to mass-produce the chips designed by technology giant Huawei.

That plan supports Beijing’s goals of chip self-sufficiency, with President Joe Biden’s administration tightening export restrictions for advanced chipmaking equipment in October, citing national security concerns. The US has also been working with the Netherlands and Japan to block China’s access to the latest chip tools, such as machines from the Dutch maker ASML.

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“You may be shocked to find,” the people-search websites pitch, that you or the other person you’re searching for “has a criminal record.” Other sites offer “millions of records that expose” a person for who they “really are.”

These kinds of “people search” sites are myriad. They copy from one another, and removing your information from them, while technically possible in fine-print fashion, could take days or weeks. Mozilla, the Firefox maker expanding into a suite of privacy-minded tools, has an alternative to clicking and hoping.

Mozilla Monitor Plus, just launched today, pledges to automatically monitor such "people search" sites, along with known data breaches, for your information and then take care of the removal process. The "Plus" version costs $14 if you go month by month, or $108 for a year's subscription (about $9 per month). You can still get a free scan on Monitor to see the data breaches and data brokers where Mozilla finds your information (used with Mozilla's fairly human-readable privacy policy).

Enlarge / Behold: Io (credit: Björn Jónsson)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's February 6, and today's image reveals the Jovian moon Io in a revelatory new light.

Over the weekend the operators of NASA's Juno spacecraft released a new batch of images showcasing a February 3 flyby of Io, the volcanically active moon orbiting Jupiter. Io, if you didn't know, is the most volcanically active world known to humans.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

It was just a stray remark at the end of a guitar lesson last fall.

My teacher is a veteran musician whose band has had both major label and indie record deals, and he loves the analog, the human, the vintage, the imperfect. So it didn't surprise me to learn that he still likes to mix tracks with an old analog board or that he has a long-time "mastering guy" who finalizes the band's albums.

What did surprise me was the comment that he had for some time been testing LANDR, the online music service that offers AI-powered mastering. Pay a monthly fee, upload a well-mixed track, and in a minute, the system spits back a song that hits modern loudness standards and is punched up with additional clarity, EQ, stereo width, and dynamics processing.