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X2 Elite is Qualcomm’s latest attempt to bring Apple’s M-series magic to the PC

3 months ago
Plus the Snapdragon 8 Elite turns 5

Qualcomm revealed the second act in its bid to overtake Intel and AMD as the leading laptop CPU maker this week with the paper launch of its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme processors. The company seeks to bring the kind of battery life and performance Apple has gotten out of its Arm-based M-series silicon to the Windows market.…

Tobias Mann

Amazon Blamed AI For Layoffs, Then Hired Cheap H1-B Workers, Senators Allege

3 months ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Senators are demanding answers from Big Tech companies accused of "filing thousands of H-1B skilled labor visa petitions after conducting mass layoffs of American employees." In letters sent to Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft -- among some of the largest sponsors of H-1B visas -- Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) requested "information and data from each company regarding their recruitment and hiring practices, as well as any variation in salary and benefits between H-1B visa holders and American employees." The letters came shortly after Grassley sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem requesting that DHS stop "issuing work authorizations to student visa holders." According to Grassley, "foreign student work authorizations put America at risk of technological and corporate espionage," in addition to allegedly "contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans." [...] In the letters to tech firms, senators emphasized that the unemployment rate in America's tech sector is "well above" the overall jobless rate. Amazon perhaps faces the most scrutiny. US Citizenship and Immigration Services data showed that Amazon sponsored the most H-1B visas in 2024 at 14,000, compared to other criticized firms like Microsoft and Meta, which each sponsored 5,000, The Wall Street Journal reported. Senators alleged that Amazon blamed layoffs of "tens of thousands" on the "adoption of generative AI tools," then hired more than 10,000 foreign H-1B employees in 2025.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon will refund $1.5B to 35M customers allegedly duped into paying for Prime

3 months ago
Former FTC chair Khan not happy her legal wrath ended in settlement worth just 14% of Amazon's quarterly net

Amazon has settled the Federal Trade Commission's case against it for making it too hard to quit Prime, and while it naturally didn't admit to any wrongdoing, it's still going to pay out one of the largest settlements in FTC history to make the matter go away. …

Brandon Vigliarolo

Microsoft Disables Some Cloud Services Used by Israel's Defense Ministry

3 months ago
Microsoft has disabled the Israeli Defense Ministry's access to certain services and subscriptions, after finding evidence that the ministry used the tech company's cloud services to surveil Gaza citizens. WSJ adds: The software company made the move after an internal investigation indicated Israel's Defense Ministry used Microsoft's Azure cloud services for surveillance, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company probe is ongoing. "As employees, we all have a shared interest in privacy protection, given the business value it creates by ensuring our customers can rely on our services with rock solid trust," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Thursday on Microsoft's company website. Smith said Microsoft's investigation was guided by the company's "longstanding protection of privacy as a fundamental right." Microsoft opened the probe after the Guardian, the British news organization, reported in August that Israel used Azure to store data on Gaza civilians and surveil them. The issue has been the source of protests at the company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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