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'Keep Android Open' movement fights back against Google sideloading restrictions

4 hours 18 minutes ago
Petition seeks to rally community opposition and alert regulators

Starting next year, Google plans to require all apps installed on certified Android devices, including sideloading, to come from developers it has verified. Many Android developers see the move as a power grab and have started a movement to "Keep Android Open."…

Thomas Claburn

US Startup Substrate Announces Chipmaking Tool That It Says Will Rival ASML

4 hours 50 minutes ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Substrate, a small U.S. startup, said on Tuesday that it had developed a chipmaking tool capable of competing with the most advanced lithography equipment made by Dutch firm ASML. Substrate's tool is the first step in the startup's ambitious plan to build a U.S.-based contract chip-manufacturing business that would compete with Taiwan's TSMC in making the most advanced AI chips, its CEO James Proud told Reuters in an interview. Proud wants to slash the cost of chipmaking by producing the tools needed much more cheaply than rivals. [...] An engineering feat that has eluded even large companies, lithography needs extreme precision. ASML is the only company in the world that has been able to make at scale the complex tools that use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) to produce patterns on silicon wafer at a high rate of throughput. Substrate said that it has developed a version of lithography that uses X-ray light and is capable of printing features at resolutions that are comparable to the most advanced chipmaking tools made by ASML that cost more than $400 million apiece. The company said it has conducted demonstrations at U.S. National Laboratories and at its facilities in San Francisco. The company provided high resolution images that demonstrate the Substrate tool's capabilities. "This is an opportunity for the U.S. to recapture this market with a homegrown company," Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Stephen Streiffer, an expert on high-energy x-ray beams, said in an interview. "It's a nationally important effort and they know what they're doing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

Major telecom supplier compromised by unnamed nation-state attackers

5 hours 19 minutes ago
Snoops remained undetected for nearly 10 months

Nation-state snoops broke into Ribbon Communications – an outfit that provides software and networking gear to Verizon, CenturyLink, and the US Defense Department – last December, remained hidden for about nine months, and stole files belonging to three customers, according to the US telecommunications firm.…

Jessica Lyons

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start - here’s how to get it

5 hours 28 minutes ago
The new Start has a more convenient layout that saves you a click

Four years after the debut of Windows 11, Microsoft has finally fixed one of the biggest problems with its Start menu: The need to click the “All” button to view a complete list of all of your apps. A new Start menu, which gives you three different ways to view all installed programs without that extra click, is slowly rolling out to users.…

Avram Piltch