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Adds new heads to boardroom too but still not word on destination of flotation

Chip designer Arm has made a flurry of boardroom appointments ahead of its IPO later this year, including hiring a new Chief Financial Officer with experience taking companies public.…

But you'll need to buy lots of new hardware to get the benefit

Analysis As it rolled out the laundry list of new features in Windows 11, version 22H2 this week, Microsoft also unveiled the configuration baseline that systems will have to meet to take advantage of the latest security capabilities.…

Understands income streams, seasonality of sales, how hard drivers work, and safety records

Southeast Asia's Uber-clone turned superapp, Grab, collects so much data about its customers and drivers that it can rate their suitability for a loan – and is already a significant lender to its drivers.…

Netflix is forming an in-house game studio in Helsinki, Finland to create "world-class" original games without ads or in-app purchases. Engadget reports: While it's too soon for details of the games themselves, Zynga and EA alumnus Marko Lastikka will serve as director. Helsinki is a good fit as the home to some of the "best game talent" on the planet, according to Netflix. This includes The Walking Dead mobile developer Next Games (which Netflix bought in March). Netflix has purchased multiple developers, including Boss Fight and Oxenfree creator Night School Studio, but hasn't built a developer from scratch until now. You won't see the first fruits of this internal studio for "years," Netflix says. Still, this and recent acquisitions show how the company's gaming strategy is evolving. Where Netflix initially depended on outsiders' games, including slightly tweaked versions of existing titles, it's increasingly focused on truly unique projects you won't find elsewhere. In theory, more people will subscribe to Netflix with the game library in mind.

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Too many small fish in the pond mean the bigger ones are about to enjoy a feeding frenzy

Resesarch on UK gigabit broadband investment toasts alternative network providers' efforts to build infrastructure, but warns that the number of them has now become unsustainable and a period of consolidation looms.…

NASA's DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world's first test of a planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth. From a report: Humanity's first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations center outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after DART was launched. The livestream showed images taken by DART's camera as the cube-shaped "impactor" vehicle, no bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, streaked into the asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth. The $330 million mission, some seven years in development, was devised to determine if a spacecraft is capable of changing the trajectory of an asteroid through sheer kinetic force, nudging it off course just enough to keep Earth out of harm's way. Whether the experiment succeeded beyond accomplishing its intended impact will not be known until further ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid next month. But NASA officials hailed the immediate outcome of Monday's test, saying the spacecraft achieved its purpose.

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Headcount in subcontinent quadruples in 3 years thanks to CFO's 'measured approach' to recruitment

Salesforce is set to hire 2,500 staff in India – bringing the number in the subcontinent to 10,000 – weeks after it slowed hiring in the US.…

The other open-source productivity suite gets a version bump

The latest point-release of Onlyoffice, a free Microsoft Office-compatible suite, is here with multiple small improvements and better support for Asian and African writing systems.…

Noam Izenberg, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University's applied physics laboratory, is making a case for sending a crewed mission to examine Venus en route to Mars. "Venus gets a bad rap because it's got such a difficult surface environment," said Izenberg in a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris last week. "The current Nasa paradigm is moon-to-Mars. We're trying to make the case for Venus as an additional target on that pathway." The Guardian reports: There are notable downsides. Walking on the surface would be an unsurvivable experience, so astronauts would have to gaze down at the planet from the safety of their spacecraft in a flyby mission. In its favor, however, Venus is significantly closer, making a return mission doable in a year, compared with a potentially three-year roundtrip to Mars. A flyby would be scientifically valuable and could provide crucial experience of a lengthy deep-space mission as a precursor to visiting Mars, according to a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris last week. Izenberg said there were practical arguments for incorporating a Venus flyby into the crewed Mars landing that Nasa hopes to achieve by the late 2030s. Although the planet is in the "wrong" direction, performing a slingshot around Venus -- known as a gravity assist - could reduce the travel time and the fuel required to get to the red planet. That would make a crewed flyby trip to Venus a natural stepping stone towards Nasa's ultimate goal. "You'd be learning about how people work in deep space, without committing yourself to a full Mars mission," he said. "And it's not just going out into the middle of nowhere -- it would have a bit of cachet as you'd be visiting another planet for the first time." "We need to understand how we can get out of the cradle and move into the universe," he added. There is also renewed scientific interest in Venus. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets raises the question of how many might be habitable, and scientists want to understand how and why Venus, a planet so similar to our own in size, mass and distance from the sun, ended up with infernal surface conditions. Izenberg said a Venus flyby "doesn't yet have traction" in the broader space travel community, although there are advocates within Nasa, including its chief economist, Alexander Macdonald, who led the IAC session. Of course, there are those who push back against such an idea. "It's really not a nice place to go. It's a hellish environment and the thermal challenges for a human mission would be quite considerable," said Prof Andrew Coates, a space scientist at UCL's Mullard space science laboratory. He said Venus was rightly a focus of scientific exploration, but that "a human flyby really wouldn't add very much."

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Report finds increase in anonymous vuln reports

The number of vulnerability reports provided by Chinese information security researchers has fallen sharply, according to research by think tank The Atlantic Council, which also found a strangely commensurate increase in bug reports from unknown sources.…

Argue tough economy means everyone needs to pay for the internet's growth – especially those who use it most

The European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO) has again called for big technology companies – and especially video streamers – to pay for their share of internet infrastructure.…

Including assistance for the kind of companies the US is keen to contain

Microsoft has celebrated the 30th anniversary of its operations in China with promises to hire more locals and encourage exports.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hill: Passenger rail service Amtrak is aiming to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 to reduce its impact on the environment. Amtrak on Thursday announced efforts to hit that mark will involve reducing the use of diesel fuel and phasing in renewable fuels in its network over the next decades. The rail service said it plans to reach 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 by investing in new fuel-cell, hydrogen and battery technologies. Funds from President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law will be used to help Amtrak develop a more sustainable fleet, expand service and revamp part of the rail's aging infrastructure. The legislation includes $66 billion in rail funding, the largest federal investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. Amtrak executives said setting clear goals to reduce emissions is particularly important for attracting "a new generation of travelers who are conscious of their environmental impact." Amtrak last year announced a $7.3 billion investment to procure 83 new trains that will operate mostly along the Northeast Corridor, which include some of the first hybrid-electric powered trains. The trains will start replacing older trains, some of which are nearly 50 years old, in 2024. The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., making up 27 percent of total emissions in 2020. Rail makes up just 2 percent of transportation emissions, while cars and trucks make up more than 80 percent.

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Video A spacecraft smashed head-on into a 170-metre-wide asteroid named Dimorphos on Monday in a first-of-its-kind experiment demonstrating how we could one day potentially divert a hazardous object on a collision course with Earth.…

U.S. lawmakers and TikTok are hammering out a plan, under which the short-form video app would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its parent firm, China's ByteDance to sell it, the New York Times reported on Monday. Reuters reports: TikTok and the Biden administration have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns but are still deciding on a potential agreement, the Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on the report but said the app was confident about being able to "fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns." TikTok's parent company ByteDance was ordered to divest the company more than two years ago over fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to China's communist government.

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'Cruise AV automated driving system is still under development' is putting it politely after vehicles block roads

Analysis Two San Francisco transit agencies have asked the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to check the safety of General Motors' Cruise self-driving cars.…

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems. Phoronix reports: Last week was a patch posted for the ACPI processor idle code to avoid an old chipset workaround on modern AMD Zen systems. Since ACPI support was added to the Linux kernel in 2002, there has been a "dummy wait op" to deal with some chipsets where STPCLK# doesn't get asserted in time. The dummy I/O read delays further instruction processing until the CPU is fully stopped. This was a problem with at least some AMD Athlon era systems with a VIA chipset... But not a problem with newer chipsets of roughly the past two decades. With this workaround still being applied to even modern AMD systems, K Prateek Nayak discovered: "Sampling certain workloads with IBS on AMD Zen3 system shows that a significant amount of time is spent in the dummy op, which incorrectly gets accounted as C-State residency. A large C-State residency value can prime the cpuidle governor to recommend a deeper C-State during the subsequent idle instances, starting a vicious cycle, leading to performance degradation on workloads that rapidly switch between busy and idle phases. One such workload is tbench where a massive performance degradation can be observed during certain runs." At least for Tbench, this long-time, unconditional workaround in the Linux kernel has been hurting AMD Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC performance in select workloads. This workaround hasn't affected modern Intel systems since those newer Intel platforms use the alternative MWAIT-based intel_idle driver code path instead. The AMD patch evolved into this patch by Intel Linux engineer Dave Hansen. That patch to limit the "dummy wait" workaround to old systems is already queued into TIP's x86/urgent branch. With it going the route of "x86/urgent" and for fixing a overzealous workaround that isn't needed on modern hardware, it's likely this patch will be submitted this week still for the Linux 6.0 kernel rather than needing to wait until the next (v6.1) merge window.

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Will those be before or after the nuke strikes Putin keeps banging on about?

Russia plans to conduct "massive cyberattacks" on Ukraine and its allies' critical infrastructure and energy sector, according to Kyiv.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Ever since American manufacturing entered a long stretch of automation and outsourcing in the late 1970s, every recession has led to the loss of factory jobs that never returned. But the recovery from the pandemic recession has been different: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed -- and then some. The resurgence has not been driven by companies bringing back factory jobs that had moved overseas, nor by the brawny industrial sectors and regions often evoked by President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump and other champions of manufacturing. Instead, the engines in this recovery include pharmaceutical plants, craft breweries and ice-cream makers. The newly created jobs are more likely to be located in the Mountain West and the Southeast than in the classic industrial strongholds of the Great Lakes. American manufacturers cut roughly 1.36 million jobs from February to April of 2020, as Covid-19 shut down much of the economy. As of August this year, manufacturers had added back about 1.43 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 workers above pre pandemic levels. Data suggest that the rebound is largely a product of the unique circumstances of the pandemic recession and recovery. Covid-19 crimped global supply chains, making domestic manufacturing more attractive to some companies. Federal stimulus spending helped to power a shift in Americans' buying habits away from services like travel and restaurants and toward goods like cars and sofas, helping domestic factory production -- and with it, job growth -- to bounce back much faster than it did in the previous two recessions. In recessions over the last half century, factories have typically laid off a greater share of workers than other employers in the economy, and they have been slower to add jobs back in recoveries. Often, companies have used those economic inflection points to accelerate their pace of outsourcing jobs to foreign countries, where wages are significantly lower, and to invest in technology that replaces human workers. [...] This time was different. Factory layoffs roughly matched those in the services sector in the depth of the pandemic recession. Economists attribute that break in the trend to many U.S. manufacturers being deemed "essential" during pandemic lockdowns, and the ensuing surge in demand for their products by Americans. Manufacturing jobs quickly rebounded in the spring of 2020, then began to climb at a much faster pace than has been typical for factory job creation in recent decades. Since June 2020, under both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, factories have added more than 30,000 jobs a month. "Sectors that hemorrhaged employment in recent recessions have fared much better in this recovery," reports the NYT. They include furniture makers, textile mills, paper products companies and computer equipment makers. "Mr. Biden has pushed a variety of legislative initiatives to boost domestic manufacturing, including direct spending on infrastructure, tax credits and other subsidies for companies like battery makers and semiconductor factories, and new federal procurement requirements that benefit manufacturers located in the United States," adds the report -- all of which could help encourage factory job growth in the coming months and years. Furthermore, the rising tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology could encourage more companies to leave China for the United States, particularly cutting-edge industries like clean energy and advanced computing.

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Apple said Monday it is assembling its flagship iPhone 14 in India as the U.S. technology giant looks to shift some production away from China. CNBC reports: "The new iPhone 14 lineup introduces groundbreaking new technologies and important safety capabilities. We're excited to be manufacturing iPhone 14 in India," the company said in a statement. Apple's main iPhone assembler, Foxconn, is manufacturing the devices at its Sriperumbudur factory on the outskirts of Chennai. The Cupertino, California, giant has been manufacturing iPhones in India since 2017 but these were usually older models. This time with the iPhone 14, Apple is producing its latest model in India for the first time, close to the device's launch. Apple introduced the iPhone 14 earlier this month. Apple will sell India-produced phones locally but also export them to other markets globally. Customers in India will begin receiving the locally manufactured devices in the next few days. Earlier this month, JPMorgan analysts said that Apple will move 5% of its global production for the iPhone 14 to India by late 2022. The company could also make 25% of all iPhones by 2025 in India.

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