Tech Industry

Intel’s planned acquisition of Tower Semiconductor has failed, after the US chipmaker was unable to get the necessary regulatory approval.

The abandonment of the $5.4B deal is a setback to Intel’s hopes of competing with Apple chipmaker TSMC …

A United Nations report has argued that we should ban smartphones in schools, noting that one in four countries around the world already does so.

UN education and science agency Unesco says that there three strong reasons to implement the policy …

The White House has announced a plan intended to improve the security of smart home tech. The government will test everything from smart speakers to Wi-Fi routers, awarding a US Cyber Trust Mark logo to products which pass the tests.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will set the standards to be met, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will manage the program …

A Supreme Court affirmative action ruling that bans race-conscious admissions into higher education will end up hurting US companies, and the economy as a whole – according to Apple and many other US brands.

An amicus brief arguing in favor of continued affirmative action by colleges was filed by Apple, Adobe, Airbnb, Cisco, Dell, Google, Ikea, Intel, Lyft, PayPal, Salesforce, Uber, and many other major corporations …

The Federal Trade Commission in the United States has proposed a handful of changes that it says will make it easier for consumers to cancel recurring subscriptions and memberships. The FTC believes that its “Click to Cancel” provisions “would go a long way to rescuing consumers from seemingly never-ending struggles to cancel unwanted subscription payment plans.”

A web developer has created a Siri GPT-3 mashup that is intended to demonstrate the potential for a truly smart voice assistant.

The AI system was able to make sense of conversational speech – including some in which the required action was implied rather than directly stated …

CNN has pointed to upcoming tech earnings reports from Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter – and suggested that they aren’t going to be pretty.

The site argues that this may be the quarter in which tech giants reveal that their seeming immunity to the broader economic climate is at an end …

Maruta Manufacturing – which makes components for a wide range of companies, including Apple – says it expects the current smartphone slump to continue into 2023.

It predicts that consumers will hold onto their existing phones for even longer periods than they do now, though suggests that high-end phones may be the exception …

Long-range wireless power has been a long-term dream, where a single charger in a single location in our home, can beam power to all of our portable devices. That simply isn’t possible given existing technologies, but smart lock company Alfred has now turned one small part of the dream into reality.

However, rather than use RF energy – which has been the main approach to date – the company has instead turned to infrared …

While we knew that around $50B was being made available to promote US chip fabrication, it’s only today that we’re learning the actual CHIPS Act details. The bill itself did not specify how the money would be split.

Specifically, we now know that a little over half the total will be made available to help produce advanced chips in the US, while the rest of the money is being divided between two further initiatives …

A Californian bill colloquially known as the Kids’ Code has been unanimously passed by the State Senate, following earlier approval by the State Assembly. It now requires the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom to take effect.

The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act addresses a key loophole in the equivalent federal law, the much weaker Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 …

There have been conflicting reports in the chip industry on when we might expect an end to the global chip shortage, but Apple chipmaker TSMC says that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

The growing number of low-end chips used in everything from smartphones and cars means that production can be held up by a lack of mundane chips costing as little as 50 cents …