First four paragraphs (cause paywall won't let most people see this).

Chip giant Qualcomm made a takeover approach to rival Intel in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be one of the largest and most consequential deals in recent years.

A deal for Intel, which has a market value of roughly $90 billion, would come as the chip maker has been suffering through one of the most significant crises in its five-decade history.

A deal is far from certain, the people cautioned. Even if Intel is receptive, a deal of that size is all but certain to attract antitrust scrutiny, though it is also possible it could be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the U.S.’s competitive edge in chips. To get the deal done, Qualcomm could intend to sell assets or parts of Intel to other buyers.

Intel—once the world’s most valuable chip company—had seen its shares drop roughly 60% so far this year before The Wall Street Journal reported on the approach. As recently as 2020, the company had a market value above $290 billion. The stock closed up over 3% Friday after the Journal’s report.

Anas Altikriti was in London, and busy, on the day in July 2020 when his phone was hacked. He frequently works as a hostage negotiator and, at the time, he was negotiating a deal to free a hostage being held on the Libya–Chad border. Altikriti also had a meeting with former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But his schedule did not include having his phone infiltrated by Pegasus, the phone hacking software made by Israel’s NSO Group.

For many years, he had been vocally critical of the UAE, where he previously lived. The UAE designated his organization, the Cordoba Foundation — which works to promote dialogue and rapprochement between Islam and the West — as a terrorist group in 2014. In response, the organization issued a statement calling the country a “despotic regime seeking to silence any form of dissent.” He made similar declarations about the UAE over the following years.

Four years later, Altikriti, an Iraqi-born British citizen and vocal critic of the United Arab Emirates, is filing a report to the Metropolitan Police in London accusing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group of complicity in the targeted hacking of his phone. On Wednesday, he filed the complaint about NSO and its associates alongside three fellow U.K.-based human rights defenders whose phones were also hacked.

Assembled with the help of advocates from GLAN on behalf of the victims, the extensively footnoted filing sent to the Metropolitan Police, which was obtained by The Intercept, puts the ball in the police’s court. The police now have discretion over whether to open an investigation and subsequently bring charges.

In response to this post: https://lemmy.zip/post/22916249

Disclaimer: I understand this community is more geared towards technology news and not someone's scribblings, but I'd like to bring in a different view on the same topic.

I came up with the idea to make this post while discussing something on Lemmy, and I realized that not even that long ago, something like Mastodon was so incredibly niche, even as a developer who likes niche stuff I viewed it as something more like IRC - good for people who want the "old days" back, but no longer fit for the general public.

Over the past year or more, ever since the Reddit API block fiasco began (I was an avid Boost for Reddit user) up until now, the way that I consume social media has changed drastically, huge thanks to the invention of ActivityPub and the Fediverse. I finally understood the importance of actual free speech, not unmoderated, but ungoverned¹ discussions, where even the most outlandish ideas are allowed in niche spaces, but where cheap clickbait and ragebait quickly gets cleaned up by motivated and dedicated members of communities.

As I was reading a comment on some post, the comment had a 😡 emoji in the middle of it. I took a moment to smile and appreciate just how ubiquitous UTF-8 has become, to the point that even your smart pregnancy test would probably be able to display them, in one way or another. Ain't that something?

Not even speaking about the horrible things that happen in the real world, there are also atrocious acts committed even in the tech world, where good ideas like blockchain and cryptocurrency get blown out of proportion, hyped to no end, and implemented atrociously by greedy capitalists looking for a quick buck in any way possible that makes my blood boil. However, as I'm seeing, Facebook, Google and others (at least in the EU) are slowly, but surely being forced to, uhm, not steal and lie and scam people out of their data and privacy? The solution is not perfect, but it is good, and it is pointing us in the right direction.

In conclusion, I don't think the future of digital technology and how we use it is going to be how sci-fi movies imagined, with brain-computer interfaces being a commonplace thing or whatever, at least not in the next 50-100 years in my opinion. I think that shitty NFT art scams are not going to be the next web, Web 3.0 - this is.

For a better future for all, one day at a time! Written with Boost for Lemmy 😉 @rmayayo

¹ Please correct me if I misspoke here, I hope I got my point across.

Three Mile Island was the worst nuclear accident in US history. Was mainly caused by poor design of human feedback systems which caused operational confusion and lead to a catastrophic failure.

From the stupidest-thing-I-can-think-of desk…

Source.

Firebrick systems powered by renewable energy could be used for up to 90% of industrial process heat applications, the Stanford study says. Meeting that demand in the U.S. would require firebrick system capacity of 2.6 TWh, with a peak discharge rate of 170 GW.

The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility. 

Wordfreq is a program that tracked the ever-changing ways people used more than 40 different languages by analyzing millions of sources across Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, websites, Twitter, and Reddit. The system could be used to analyze changing language habits as slang and popular culture changed and language evolved, and was a resource for academics who study such things. In a note on the project’s GitHub, creator Robyn Speer wrote that the project “will not be updated anymore.”

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/42738519