The UK government's new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill aims to help consumers and increase competition between big tech firms. The bill is being introduced on Tuesday and bans people receiving money or free goods for writing glowing reviews. Firms will also have to remind people when free subscription trials end. The bill also seeks to end the tech giants' current market dominance. The newly formed Digital Markets Unit will be given certain powers to open up a specific market depending on the situation.
Bihar government has recently tweaked its prison rules, paving the way for the release of former MP Anand Mohan Singh who is currently serving life sentence for the murder of then Gopalganj district magistrate G Krishnaiah on December 5, 1994. The sentence of Anand Mohan Singh was earlier reduced to life-imprisonment. The changes in the prison rules will benefit thousands of prisoners in the state.
A new side-channel attack impacting multiple generations of Intel CPUs has been discovered, allowing data to be leaked through the EFLAGS register. The attack works as a side channel to Meltdown, a critical security flaw discovered in 2018, impacting many x86-based microprocessors. The attack is carried out in two phases, the first being to trigger transient execution and encode secret data through the EFLAGS register, and the second is to measure the execution time of the KCC instruction to decode the data. The researchers note that this timing attack isn’t as reliable as cache-state side-channel methods, and to get better results in recent chips, the attack would have to be repeated thousands of times.
CPU on fire: Shutterstock Arm and Qualcomm are at loggerheads and in court, which could have some interesting implications for the future of CPU design. The phrase “big company” is somewhat relative in the context of consumer technology, but however anyone looks at it, Qualcomm is a pan-galactic gargle blaster of a corporation. It makes a vast number of the Arm-based CPUs for cellphones, which has made it large enough to be represented on NASDAQ and capable of paying US$1.4bn for chip design house Nuvia in early 2021. Underlying all this is one of those creations of business politics that’s absolutely nothing to do with technology and is almost too dull to consider in detail. The RISC-V architecture is something we have encountered before in the context of the Xianshan processor put together by the Chinese Academy of Science back in 2021. The bad blood reportedly arises from Qualcomm’s involvement in objections to Nvidia’s purchase of Arm.
Intel plans to utilize the “Adamantine” cache with its next-gen CPUs and GPUs. The 14th-Gen Meteor Lake processors and the 2nd-Gen Arc Battlemage GPUs were both designed to utilize this additional cache layer. According to Moore’s Law is Dead, the Adamantine Cache will eventually get as large as a Gigabyte, but for now, Intel is testing 128MB to 512MB of it for the 14th Gen Meteor Lake iGPUs. It’s worth remembering that this cache is primarily meant for the iGPU rather than the CPU.
The Bombay High Court recently stated that lawyers and counsel who appear for parties from outside of its territorial jurisdiction will not be given any special consideration and their absence will not be a ground for adjournment. Single-judge Justice Amit Borkar made it clear that adjournments will not be granted on the ground that lawyers are appearing from outside the territorial jurisdiction of the High Court. The money laundering case against Kochhar and others being investigated by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) relates to the siphoning off of six high value loans from ICICI Bank to various companies of Videocon Industries to the tune of ₹300 crore.
The Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud on Friday took exception to a lawyer insisting that the name of an advocate be included in the order sheet of a case as having appeared in the matter. The bench headed by CJI Chandrachud said that courts cannot mark the appearance of an advocate, if he or she has not actually appeared in the case. Even though the lawyer insisted, the CJI refused stating that he remembers who had appeared in the matter and that the court was not there to generate revenue for lawyers.
Google has released a new update for its artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard. The update aims to expand the variety of drafts the chatbot produces, providing users with more options for creative explorations. This update is expected to benefit writers, content creators and others who use Bard to brainstorm and generate new ideas. Google Bard’s latest update is a welcome addition to the AI chatbot’s capabilities, reflecting the company’s commitment to innovation and user satisfaction.
Google has released a new update for its artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard. The update aims to expand the variety of drafts the chatbot produces, providing users with more options for creative explorations. The update introduces a new feature allowing users to view a wider range of distinct draft options. Google Bard's latest update is a welcome addition to the AI chatbot’s capabilities, reflecting the company’s commitment to innovation and user satisfaction.
In one of the most significant battery breakthroughs in recent years, the world’s largest battery manufacturer CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg which it says will go into mass production this year. CATL’s new condensed battery will have almost double the energy intensity of Tesla’s 4680 cells. The announcement this week confirms and even exceeds Elon Musk’s prediction that this level of energy density would be commercially possibly by now. Earlier this month Argonne announced a new battery technology with an energy density of 1200 Wh/kg. What makes CATL’s announcement this week truly groundbreaking is that the condensed battery will go into mass production this year.