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Nvidia is in advanced talks to acquire Arm, the chip designer that SoftBank Group bought for $32 billion four years ago, according to people familiar with the matter. The two parties aim to reach a deal in the next few weeks, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Nvidia is the only suitor in concrete discussions with SoftBank, according to the people. A deal for Arm could be the largest ever in the semiconductor industry, which has been consolidating in recent years as companies seek to diversify and add scale. Cambridge, England-based Arm's technology underpins chips in products including Apple devices and connected appliances.

This is great news for consumers but bad news for Intel, which reorganized its engineering department this week shortly after admitting that we won't be seeing its 7nm desktop CPUs until late 2022 or perhaps even 2023. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds—there's a discrepancy between the way the two companies measure process size, and transistor density for Intel's 7nm process should be roughly equivalent to AMD fab partner TSMC's 5nm process. Unfortunately, the delay means TSMC should be debuting its 3nm parts around the same time that Intel now expects to be launch its own 7nm. AMD's own good news continued with the earnings themselves, with revenue up 26 percent and net income up $122 million—a whopping 449 percent—year on year. Su attributed the increase primarily to Epyc and Ryzen CPUs, with special focus on Ryzen 4000 mobile—the company's average sale price actually dropped year-on-year due to the increased revenue from the individually less-expensive...

Google will keep "nearly all" of its workforce—around 200,000 employees and contractors—working from home for another year, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly made the decision last week. The long timeline gives more certainty for Googlers who are making school and housing decisions for the coming academic year. Previously Google workers were due back in the office in January.

Hackers are actively exploiting two unrelated high-severity vulnerabilities that allow unauthenticated access or even a complete takeover of networks run by Fortune 500 companies and government organizations. The most serious exploits are targeting a critical vulnerability in F5’s Big-IP advanced delivery controller, a device that’s typically placed between a perimeter firewall and a Web application to handle load balancing and other tasks. The vulnerability, which F5 patched three weeks ago, allows unauthenticated attackers to remotely run commands or code of their choice. Attackers can then use their control of the device to hijack the internal network it’s connected to. Prescient The presence of a remote code execution flaw in a device located in such a sensitive part of a network gave the vulnerability a maximum severity rating of 10. Immediately after F5 released a patch on June 30, security practitioners predicted that the flaw—which is tracked as CVE-2020-5902—would be exploited...

Welcome to Edition 3.09 of the Rocket Report! This week two missions, built by the UAE and China, launched successfully toward Mars. Last but not least for this year's Martian launch window comes NASA with Mars Perseverance, which remains on track for a July 30 launch on an Atlas V rocket. Good luck to NASA and United Launch Alliance! As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A representative from the Department of Justice suggested in 2018 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation should have a look into NPR's use of a secure, encrypted tipline, newly publicized emails reveal. Reporter Jason Leopold obtained an email exchange from DOJ officials from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and shared them on Twitter. The email thread begins with an April 2018 message from Neil McCabe, who was at the time a reporter at One America News Network (OANN), a far-right cable news channel best known for boosting and spreading conspiracy theories. McCabe was writing to Lauren Ehrsam Gorey, who was then a spokesperson in the DoJ's Office of Public Affairs (i.e., the department's communications and public relations division). "Can you find out if DOJ is cool with NPR running a Tor-enabled tip email?" McCabe wrote, adding a link to NPR's instructions for sending in confidential tips. National Public Radio is an independent, nonprofit radio ...

Hey, you! Do you want to control the future of basically every mobile device on Earth, and even some laptops and desktops? Have I got a deal for you! ARM Limited is for sale, the company in charge of the ubiquitous ARM CPU architecture that powers the majority of devices that run on a battery. It will only cost a few tens of billions of dollars. Bloomberg has two reports on the matter, one stating that Nvidia is interested in buying ARM and another saying that Apple isn't. ARM is currently owned by SoftBank group, a giant Japanese holding company previously featured on Ars for buying Boston Dynamics, buying Sprint, and buying stakes in Uber and GM's Cruise. SoftBank bought ARM for $32 billion in 2016, and since then, ARM has only gotten more powerful. ARM doesn't manufacture chips; instead, it sells IP based on the ARM CPU architecture in the form of its in-house Cortex CPU designs or licenses to design whatever you want using ARM's instruction set.

Mozilla, the open source company best known for the Firefox Web browser, made its VPN service generally available in the United States this month. The cross-platform VPN is based on Wireguard and delivered in partnership with well-known and especially techie-friendly VPN provider Mullvad. Mullvad itself was, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available VPN provider to offer Wireguard support back in 2017. The Mozilla VPN service costs $4.95 per month and offers server endpoints in 30-plus countries. It currently has VPN clients available for Windows 10, Android, and iOS—but users of other operating systems, such as MacOS and Linux, are going to have to wait. Mozilla says that support for MacOS and Linux is coming soon—but unfortunately, even if you're an advanced user who understands Wireguard configs, you can't just roll your own connection now. The service authenticates via Firefox cloud account. When you sign up for a Mozilla VPN subscription, you'll be ask...

On Wednesday afternoon, Tesla announced that it ended the second quarter of 2020 with a GAAP profit of $104 million. That is now the fourth profitable quarter in a row for the US automaker, which may help the company move to the S&P 500 index. It took home $143 million in 19Q3, $105 million in 19Q4, and $16 million in 20Q1. However, the past 12 months' profits still don't offset the company's $408 million loss in 19Q2. Tesla ends 20Q2 with a positive free cash flow of $418 million and $8.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Tesla says in its presentation to investors that lower operating costs and greater income from regulatory credits, plus recognizing $48 million in payments for its "Full Self Driving" feature, were big helps to the balance sheet. These contrast the costs it bore for having to shut down the factory due to a raging pandemic, as well as having to pay CEO Elon Musk $101 million for one of his compensation milestones.

Hackers accessed direct messages for 36 high-profile account holders in last week’s epic compromise of Twitter, with one of the affected users being an elected official from the Netherlands, the social media company said late Wednesday. The company also said the intruders were able to view email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information for all 130 hijacked accounts. The revelation that some of the world's most influential people likely had their personal messages read by unknown hackers will put more pressure on Twitter to better protect its users. US Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat representing Oregon, said in a statement last week that he has pushed CEO Jack Dorsey to protect direct messages with end-to-end encryption, which would prevent Twitter and anyone else other than the sender and recipient from being able to read them. “Twitter DMs are still not encrypted, leaving them vulnerable to employees who abuse their internal access to the company's systems, and ...

T witter has permanently suspended nearly 7000 accounts of far right-wing conspiracy theory movement QAnon from its platform. The company has taken stringent actions against the conspiracy theory group which will affect 1,50,000 QAnon related accounts, The Verge noted. QAnon refers to a far right-wing conspiracy theory group that propagates the idea that US President Donald Trump is fighting a group of elites in the US government who run a child trafficking ring, Forbes noted. The movement has gained recognition in the recent months from Eric Trump, support from three Republican congressional candidates, as well as retweets from the President itself. The conspiracy theories from the QAnon fringe group have been gaining traction on social media platforms ahead of the 2020 elections in the US. "We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attem...

This morning, AMD announced the next big thing for its Ryzen desktop CPU line—the Ryzen 4000 series, slated to arrive in Q3 2020. Those of you who have been waiting breathlessly for Zen 3 architecture will need to keep waiting—Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs are still built on 7nm, Zen 2 architecture. There also don't appear to be any performance recordbreakers in Ryzen 4000's desktop lineup: the highest-end SKU announced is the 65W 8 core / 16 thread Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G. Instead, AMD is taking solid aim at rival Intel's chokehold on the office PC market. Every single one of the 18 new processor SKUs announced features integrated Radeon graphics—and nine of the 18 are "GE" suffix CPUs, meaning only 35W TDP. Both of these features are highly desirable in either home-office or business environments—Radeon integrated graphics are good enough for anything short of high-end content creation or gaming, and lower TDP means lower power bills and lower cooling bills as well in hotte...

SPECS AT A GLANCE: KANO PC OS           :- Windows 10 Home CPU :- Intel Celeron N4000 RAM :- 4GiB DDR3L (not upgradeable) GPU :- Integrated Intel UHD600 HDD :- Foresee 64GB eMMC (not upgradeable) DISPLAY :- 11.6" touchscreen at 1366x768 PORTS :- 1 USB-C (charging)           2 USB3 type A           1 microSD card slot           1 3.5mm headphone jack           1 HDMI COOLING               :-     Passive heat sink CHARGING          :-     USB-C (charger included) CONNECTIVITY  :-      Dual-band Wi-Fi 5 + Bluetooth 5.0 (Intel Wireless-AC 9650) PRICE AS TESTED :- $300 Last week, we covered the launch of Kano's new Windows-powered build-it-yourself PC. The Kano PC is an extremely chunky ...