Luxury carmaker Porsche expects the transition to electric vehicles to take longer than it thought, it said on Monday, having previously said its aim was for 80% of sales to be all-electric by 2030. From a report: It has now watered down that goal by tying it explicitly to customer demand and developments in the electromobility sector, saying in a statement only that it could now deliver on the 80% target if those factors warrant it. "The transition to electric cars is taking longer than we thought five years ago," Porsche said in a statement. "Our product strategy is set up such that we could deliver over 80% of our vehicles as all electric in 2030 - dependent on customer demand and the development of electromobility."

OpenResearch, a lab funded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has released initial findings from a comprehensive study on unconditional cash transfers. The experiment, conducted from 2020 to 2023, provided $1,000 monthly to 1,000 low-income Americans across Illinois and Texas. Results showed recipients primarily used the funds for basic needs and increased spending on healthcare and leisure activities.

While the cash boost led to some positive outcomes, including increased business startups among Black recipients and women, it did not significantly improve long-term financial health or physical well-being. The study also noted a reduction in work hours among participants, with earnings dropping by at least 12 cents for every dollar received.

8.5 million Windows devices were ultimately affected by the Crowdstrike outage, according to figures from Microsoft cited by CNN.

And now an anonymous Slashdot reader shares CNN's report on the ramifications: What one cybersecurity expert said appears to be the "largest IT outage in history" led to the cancellation of more than 5,000 commercial airline flights worldwide and disrupted businesses from retail sales to package deliveries to procedures at hospitals, costing revenue and staff time and productivity... While CrowdStrike has apologized, it has not mentioned whether or not it intends to provide compensation to affected customers. And when asked by CNN about whether it plans to provide compensation, its response did not address that question. Experts say they expect that there will be demands for remuneration and very possibly lawsuits.

"If you're a lawyer for CrowdStrike, you're probably not going to enjoy the rest of your summer," said Dan Ives, a tech analyst for Wedbush Securities....

But there could be legal protections for CrowdStrike in its customer contracts to shield it from liability, according to one expert. "I would guess that the contracts protect them," said James Lewis, researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies...

It's also not clear how many customers CrowdStrike might lose because of Friday. Wedbush Securities' Ives estimates less than 5% of its customers might go elsewhere. "They're such an entrenched player, to move away from CrowdStrike would be a gamble," he said. It will be difficult, and not without additional costs, for many customers to switch from CrowdStrike to a competitor. But the real hit to CrowdStrike could be reputational damage that will make it difficult to win new customers... [E]ven if customers are understanding, it's likely that CrowdStrike's rivals will be seeking to use Friday's events to try to lure them away.
One final note from CNN. Patrick Anderson, CEO of a Michigan research firm called the Anderson Economic Group, "added that the costs could be particularly significant for airlines, due to lost revenue from canceled flights and excess labor and fuel costs for the planes that did fly but faced significant delays."

See also: Third Day of 1,000+ Cancelled Flights, Just in the US, After Crowdstrike Outage .

2017 Slashdot headline: "People Keep Finding Hidden Cameras in Their Airbnbs."

Nearly seven years later, CNN launched their own investigation of "Airbnb's hidden camera problem". CNN: "Across North America, police have seized thousands of images from hidden cameras at Airbnb rentals, including people's most intimate moments... It's more than just a few reported cases. And Airbnb knows it's a problem. In this deposition reviewed by CNN, an Airbnb rep said 35,000 customer support tickets about security cameras or recording devices had been documented over a decade. [The deposition estimates "about" 35,000 tickets "within the scope of the security camera and recording devices policy."]

Airbnb told CNN a single complaint can involve multiple tickets.
CNN actually obtained the audio recording of an Airbnb host in Maine admitting to police that he'd photographed a couple having sex using a camera hidden in a clock — and also photographed other couples. And one Airbnb guest told CNN he'd only learned he'd been recorded "because police called him, months later, after another guest found the camera" — with police discovering cameras in every single room in the house, concealed inside smoke detectors. "Part of the challenge is that the technology has gotten so advanced, with these cameras so small that you can't even see them," CNN says.

But even though recording someone without consent is illegal in every state, CNN also found that in this case and others, Airbnb "does not contact law enforcement once hidden cameras are discovered — even if children are involved." Their reporter argues that Airbnb "not only fails to protect its guests — it works to keep complaints out of the courts and away from the public."

They spoke to two Florida attorneys who said trying to sue Airbnb if something goes wrong is extremely difficult — since its Terms of Service require users to assume every risk themselves. "The person going to rent the property agrees that if something happens while they're staying at this accommodation, they're actually prohibited from suing Airbnb," says one of the attorneys. "They must go a different route, which is a binding arbitration." (When CNN asked if this was about controlling publicity, the two lawyers answered "absolutely" and "100%".) And when claims are settled, CNN adds, "Airbnb has required guests to sign confidentiality agreements — which CNN obtained — that keep some details of legal cases private."

Responding to the story, Airbnb seemed to acknowledge guests have been secretly recorded by hosts, by calling such occurrences "exceptionally rare... When we do receive an allegation, we take appropriate, swift action, which can include removing hosts and listings that violate the policy.

"Airbnb's trust and safety policies lead the vacation rental industry..."

"If there is no alternative, then the whole thing can collapse around you," says Ron Delnevo. He's the chair of The Payment Choice Alliance, "which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society."

He's part of those arguing "the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society," writes the Observer: Authorities in China and the US have fined businesses for not accepting cash. Delnevo said the U.K. should have a law requiring all businesses to take cash. Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. "I don't want my data sold on, and I don't want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life," he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some, he added.
The article includes some interesting statistics from a U.K. bank trade association. "The number of people who never use cash, or use it less than once a month, reached 23.1 million in 2021, but declined to 21.6m last year." The GMB [general trade] Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that "cash is a vital part of how our communities operate". "When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics."

SolarWinds still faces some legal action over its infamous 2020 breach, reports NextGov.com. But a U.S. federal judge has dismissed most of the claims from America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which "alleged the company defrauded investors because it deliberately hid knowledge of cyber vulnerabilities in its systems ahead of a major security breach discovered in 2020."

Slashdot reader krakman shares this report from the Washington Post: "The SEC's rationale, under which the statute must be construed to broadly cover all systems public companies use to safeguard their valuable assets, would have sweeping ramifications," [judge] Engelmayer wrote in a 107-page decision. "It could empower the agency to regulate background checks used in hiring nighttime security guards, the selection of padlocks for storage sheds, safety measures at water parks on whose reliability the asset of customer goodwill depended, and the lengths and configurations of passwords required to access company computers," he wrote. The federal judge also dismissed SEC claims that SolarWinds' disclosures after it learned its customers had been affected improperly covered up the gravity of the breach...

In an era when deeply damaging hacking campaigns have become commonplace, the suit alarmed business leaders, some security executives and even former government officials, as expressed in friend-of-the-court briefs asking that it be thrown out. They argued that adding liability for misstatements would discourage hacking victims from sharing what they know with customers, investors and safety authorities. Austin-based SolarWinds said it was pleased that the judge "largely granted our motion to dismiss the SEC's claims," adding in a statement that it was "grateful for the support we have received thus far across the industry, from our customers, from cybersecurity professionals, and from veteran government officials who echoed our concerns."
The article notes that as far back as 2018, "an engineer warned in an internal presentation that a hacker could use the company's virtual private network from an unauthorized device and upload malicious code. Brown did not pass that information along to top executives, the judge wrote, and hackers later used that exact technique." Engelmayer did not dismiss the case entirely, allowing the SEC to try to show that SolarWinds and top security executive Timothy Brown committed securities fraud by not warning in a public "security statement" before the hack that it knew it was highly vulnerable to attacks.

The SEC "plausibly alleges that SolarWinds and Brown made sustained public misrepresentations, indeed many amounting to flat falsehoods, in the Security Statement about the adequacy of its access controls," Engelmayer wrote. "Given the centrality of cybersecurity to SolarWinds' business model as a company pitching sophisticated software products to customers for whom computer security was paramount, these misrepresentations were undeniably material."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Netflix will start phasing out its Basic plan, its cheapest advertising-free plan, which costs $11.99 per month in the United States, the company said on Thursday. The company had previously stopped accepting new sign-ups for the Basic plan, instead pushing customers to Netflix's ad-supported plan, which costs $6.99 per month. However, existing users were allowed to keep the basic plan. In January, the company said it would retire its cheapest ad-free tier in Canada and the UK. On Thursday, the company said the US and France are next.

Basic users in the US who want an ad-free viewing experience on Netflix will now have two choices: Netflix's Standard plan, which costs $15.49 per month, and its Premium plan, which costs $22.99 per month...

The company reported a record-high 277.65 million subscribers on its streaming platform Thursday, far outpacing streaming competitors like Disney+, Peacock and Max... Overall, Netflix added 8.05 million new subscribers in its second quarter. Netflix's surge in new subscribers has been fueled in part by the company's effort to push users who share passwords to create their own accounts.
The article adds that Netflix's stock has climbed more than 35% in 2024.

Slashdot reader Thelasko shared Friday's article from Digital Trends: Nearly every flight in the U.S. is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system update error that's affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks — but not Southwest Airlines flights. Southwest is still flying high, unaffected by the outage that's plaguing the world today, and that's apparently because it's using Windows 3.1.

Yes, Windows 3.1 — an operating system that is 32 years old. Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven't had any issues with the CrowdStrike outage. In responses to CNN, Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant all said they were having issues, but Southwest told the outlet that its operations are going off without a hitch. Some are attributing that to Windows 3.1. Major portions of Southwest's systems are reportedly built on Windows 95 and Windows 3.1...
UPDATE: Reached for comment, Southwest "would not confirm" that's it's using Windows 3.1, reports SFGate. But they did get this quote from an airline analyst:

âoeWe believe that Southwestâ(TM)s older technology kept it somewhat immune from the issues affecting other airlines today."

Shares of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings dropped 15% on Friday after the company's software update resulted in what may turn out to be the largest IT outage ever. CrowdStrike stock "is on pace for its steepest daily loss since November 2022 and its $290 low share price is the lowest intraday mark since April 25," reports Forbes. "CrowdStrike is on track for the third-worst day in its five-year history as a publicly traded company." From the report: Microsoft, which was swept up in the outage as the downed systems are those running CrowdStrike's cybersecurity applications and Microsoft's Windows software, also slumped, with its shares down about 1% to the $3.2 trillion behemoth's lowest share price since June 11. CrowdStrike competitor Palo Alto Networks enjoyed a 4% rally Friday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite stock index gained about 0.2%, held up by the likes of Microsoft rival Apple's 1% stock gain and a 1% rise for shares of Alphabet, which is reportedly in talks to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23 billion.

The CrowdStrike selloff is "an overreaction to a temporary setback," Rosenblatt analyst Catharine Trebnick wrote in a note to clients Friday. It's a "compelling buying opportunity" as it "creates a window for investors to buy into a high-quality, growth-oriented cybersecurity company at a discounted valuation," Trebnick continued. To her point, CrowdStrike stock's relative valuation, according to its price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), which compares its market value to its projected profits over the next four quarters, fell Friday to its lowest number since April. Still, CrowdStrike's P/E of about 70 is very high for a company of its size, meaning investors will need to express significant confidence in the business' ability to grow earnings, a challenge if Friday's incident were to impact CrowdStrike's client base.

An anonymous reader shares a report, which expands on the ongoing global outage: The incident will exacerbate concerns about concentration risk in the cyber security industry. Just 15 companies worldwide account for 62 per cent of the market in cyber security products and services, according to SecurityScorecard. In modern endpoint security, the business of securing PCs, laptops and other devices, the problem is worse: three companies, with Microsoft and CrowdStrike by far the largest, controlled half the market last year, according to IDC.

While the US Cyber Safety Review Board dissects large cyber attacks for lessons learned, there is no obvious body charged with analysing these technical failures to improve the resilience of global tech infrastructure, said Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre. The current global outage should spur clients -- and perhaps even governments and regulators -- to think more about how to build diversification and redundancy into their systems. Further reading: Without Backup Plans, Global IT Outages Will Happen Again.

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares an op-ed from Reason, written by Sen. Rand Paul: In America, we do not punish businesses for their success. We certainly do not punish businesses because their competitors are struggling to keep pace. Sadly, that is exactly what the Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to do in its recent lawsuit against Apple. In March, the DOJ, joined by 15 states and the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit aimed at penalizing Apple for successfully competing in the market for smartphones. However, like much of the Biden administration's approach to antitrust enforcement, the DOJ's lawsuit is focused on punishing Apple for its success rather than addressing any real harm to consumers. Instead of fostering innovation and competition, this approach threatens to stifle the very progress that benefits Americans.

In its lawsuit, the DOJ makes the unsubstantiated claim that Apple has "willfully monopolized" the smartphone market through "exclusionary" and "anticompetitive" conduct. In particular, it accuses Apple of exercising unwarranted control over the creation, distribution, and functioning of apps within the iPhone operating system. What the complaint ignores, however, is that this control is not simply a lawful business practice by a privately held company; it is an indispensable part of Apple's business model. Far from being an "anticompetitive" practice that harms consumers, Apple's careful approach to app integration is a pro-competitive way in which it meets its users' demands.

Privacy, security, and seamless integration have been the core of Apple's operational strategy for years. Back in 2010, Steve Jobs explained that "when selling to people who want their devices to just work, we think integrated wins every time." That "open systems don't always work," and Apple was "committed to the integrated approach." What makes Apple products so unique is their ease of use and consistency over time. While no product will ever be perfect, Apple's goal is to deliver a seamless, integrated experience that users can rely on time after time without giving it a second thought. How does Apple do this? By carefully exercising the very control that the DOJ is trying to punish. As economist Alex Tabarrok explains in Marginal Revolution: "Apple's promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple's brand promise. Gatekeeping is what the consumer's are buying." [...] "Digital markets do not need more government regulation; they need more companies willing to innovate and compete," concludes Sen. Paul. "The DOJ should not waste taxpayer-provided resources targeting a company that has earned its success through excellence in the marketplace. An Apple a day may keep the doctor away, but it seems that all of the pro-competitive justifications in the world cannot keep a politically motivated antitrust enforcer at bay."

Nvidia is ready to fully transition to open-source Linux GPU kernel drivers, starting with the R555 series and planning a complete shift with the R560 series. The open-source kernel modules will only be available for select newer GPUs, while older architectures like Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta must continue using proprietary drivers. TechSpot reports: According to Nvidia, the open-source GPU kernel modules have helped deliver "equivalent or better" application performance compared to its proprietary kernels. The company has also added new features like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, confidential computing, and the coherent memory architectures of the Grace platform to its open-source kernels. [...] For compatible GPUs, the default version of the driver installed by all methods is switching from proprietary to open-source. However, users will have the ability to manually select the closed-source modules if they are still available for their platform.

Unfortunately, the open-source kernel modules are not available for GPUs from the older Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, meaning people still running a GTX 980 or GTX 1080 will have to continue using Nvidia's proprietary drivers. For mixed deployments with older and newer GPUs in the same system, Nvidia recommends continuing to use the proprietary driver for full compatibility. "Nvidia has moved most of its proprietary functions into a proprietary, closed-source firmware blob," adds Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "The parts of Nvidia's GPUs that interact with the broader Linux system are open, but the user-space drivers and firmware are none of your or the OSS community's business."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Postal Service was sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap, TechCrunch has found. On Wednesday, the USPS said it addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming that it was "unaware" of it. TechCrunch found USPS was sharing customers' information by way of hidden data-collecting code (also known as tracking pixels) used across its website. Tech and advertising companies create this kind of code to collect information about the user -- such as which pages they visit -- every time a webpage containing the code loads in the customer's browser.

In the case of USPS, some of that collected data included the postal addresses of logged-in USPS Informed Delivery customers, who use the service to see photos of their incoming mail before it arrives. It's not clear how many individuals had their information collected or for how long. Informed Delivery had more than 62 million users (PDF) as of March 2024. [...] The code also collected other data, such as information about the user's computer type and browser, which appeared as partly pseudonymized -- essentially scrambled in a way that makes it more difficult for humans to know where data came from, or who it relates to, by using randomized identifiers in place of real customer names. But researchers have long warned that pseudonymous data can still be used to re-identify seemingly anonymous individuals.

TechCrunch also found that tracking numbers entered into the USPS website were also shared with advertisers and tech companies, including Bing, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snap. Some in-transit tracking data was also shared, such as the real-world location of the mail in the postal system, even if the customer was not logged in to USPS' website. USPS spokesperson Jim McKean said in a statement: "The Postal Service leverages an analytics platform for our own internal purposes, so that we understand the usage of our products and services and which we use on an aggregated basis to market our products. The Postal Service does not sell or provide any personal information that is collected from this analytics platform to any third party, and we were unaware of any configuration of the platform that collected personal information from the URL and that shared it without our knowledge with social media."

"We have taken immediate action to remediate this issue," the spokesperson added, without saying what action was taken.

The energy giant Shell has quietly backed away from a pledge to rapidly increase its use of "advanced recycling," a practice oil and petrochemical producers have promoted as a solution to the plastics pollution crisis. From a report: "Advanced" or "chemical" recycling involves breaking down plastic polymers into tiny molecules that can be made into synthetic fuels or new plastics. The most common form, pyrolysis, does so using heat. Shell has invested in pyrolysis since 2019, touting it as a way to slash waste. That year, the company used oil made via pyrolysis in one of its Louisiana chemical plants for the first time. And it began publicizing a new goal for the technology: "Our ambition is to use 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year in our global chemicals plants by 2025."

But recently, the company rolled back that promise with little fanfare: "[I]n 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible," it said in its 2023 sustainability report, published in March. Reached for comment, a Shell spokesperson, Curtis Smith, said: "Our ambition, regardless of regulation, is to increase circularity and move away from a linear economy to one where products and materials are reused, repurposed and recycled."

Nvidia and French startup Mistral AI jointly announced today the release of a new language model designed to bring powerful AI capabilities directly to business desktops. From a report: The model, named Mistral-NeMo, boasts 12 billion parameters and an expansive 128,000 token context window, positioning it as a formidable tool for businesses seeking to implement AI solutions without the need for extensive cloud resources. Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at Nvidia, emphasized the model's accessibility and efficiency in a recent interview with VentureBeat. "We're launching a model that we jointly trained with Mistral. It's a 12 billion parameter model, and we're launching it under Apache 2.0," he said. "We're really excited about the accuracy of this model across a lot of tasks."

The collaboration between Nvidia, a titan in GPU manufacturing and AI hardware, and Mistral AI, a rising star in the European AI scene, represents a significant shift in the AI industry's approach to enterprise solutions. By focusing on a more compact yet powerful model, the partnership aims to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities. Catanzaro elaborated on the advantages of smaller models. "The smaller models are just dramatically more accessible," he said. "They're easier to run, the business model can be different, because people can run them on their own systems at home. In fact, this model can run on RTX GPUs that many people have already."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nearly a quarter of Japanese companies have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) in their businesses, while more than 40% have no plan to make use of the cutting-edge technology, a Reuters survey showed on Thursday. The survey, conducted for Reuters by Nikkei Research, pitched a range of questions to 506 companies over July 3-12 with roughly 250 firms responding, on condition of anonymity. About 24% of respondents said they have already introduced AI in their businesses and 35% are planning to do so, while the remaining 41% have no such plans, illustrating varying degrees of embracing the technological innovation in corporate Japan.

Asked for objectives when adopting AI in a question allowing multiple answers, 60% of respondents said they were trying to cope with a shortage of workers, while 53% aimed to cut labour costs and 36% cited acceleration in research and development. As for hurdles to introduction, a manager at a transportation company cited "anxiety among employees over possible headcount reduction." Other obstacles include a lack of technological expertise, substantial capital expenditure and concern about reliability, the survey showed.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the so-called "godmother of AI," is working on a startup focused on developing technology capable of human-like visual data processing and advanced reasoning. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the startup is called World Labs and is already worth $1 billion. Quartz reports: "Curiosity urges us to create machines to see just as intelligently as we can, if not better," Li said during a Ted talk in April. "And if we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do." Andreessen Horowitz and the AI fund Radical Ventures are funders of World Labs.

Li is renowned for her contributions to AI. She invented ImageNet, a dataset used for advancing computer vision that many see as a catalyst for the AI boom. She consults with policymakers as they work to set up guardrails for the technology, and was named one of 12 national AI research resource task force members by the U.S. White House in 2021.

Valve had its employee and payroll data leaked through a poorly redacted document in an antitrust lawsuit in May, offering a rare glimpse into the company's small but impactful workforce over the years. As first noticed by SteamDB's Pavel Djundik, Valve's significant influence in PC gaming transactions has been maintained by just a few hundred employees. Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: It's striking to consider just how small Valve is compared to other major players in the game industry. In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve's annual revenue at $6.5 billion, roughly on the same scale as EA's $7.5 billion in 2024 revenue. But Steam achieved those numbers with around 350 employees, compared to well over 13,000 people employed by EA. The disparity highlights just how much money Valve brings in with a relatively small workforce. And a lot of that is thanks to the chunk of revenue Valve takes from every sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming marketplace has seen a massive increase in the number of annual game releases since 2012 or so, thanks to initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.

Yet, surprisingly, the size of the "Steam" department inside Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 employees in 2015 down to just 79 in 2021. From the outside, having just 79 employees keeping track of more than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio. Some readers may also be surprised that Valve's "Games" department has represented a majority of the company's headcount since 2003. That has remained true (though to a lesser extent) even in more recent years, as Valve's output of new games has become much more occasional. It seems likely a large number of those Games department employees are devoted to ultra-popular Valve games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which enjoy tens of millions of players and need significant support work.

The leaked data also shows the slow rise of Valve's small Hardware department, which started with just three employees in 2011 as the company began work on its doomed Steam Machines initiative. Transitioning into the Valve Index era in the late 2010s, the hardware department still represented just a few dozen people and a paltry 3 to 4 percent of the company's annual payroll. By the time we hit 2021 and the run-up to the Steam Deck, the Hardware division still makes up just 12 percent of Valve's small total headcount. Looking back, it's impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned a whole micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope the Hardware team got a little more employee support in the wake of the Steam Deck's market success.

Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: US government is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act cash to help fund its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri. The Commerce Department said GlobalWafers' Texas plant is a significant milestone for the US as it's the country's first facility for manufacturing 300mm wafers, the kind that are used for modern processes. The Missouri site will produce a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) variant of 300mm wafers, which are more geared towards defense and aerospace applications where chips need to be less prone to failure. Plans to build the Texas wafer plant were first revealed just over two years ago by the Taiwanese chip biz. It was an alternative use of a few billion dollars that were originally earmarked for acquiring German wafer maker Siltronic, an acquisition which didn't go as hoped due to resistance from German regulators.

The Missouri plant meanwhile was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip fab spun off from AMD that now focuses on older nodes rather than the cutting edge. This fab seems to be the smaller of the two, considering that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and that seems to also cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer plant. In total, GlobalWafers' Texas and Missouri factories will cost around four billion dollars, which means the maximum award funded by the CHIPS Act would cover up to ten percent of the budget. The Commerce Department claims that facilities will create 1,700 jobs in construction and 880 in manufacturing.

The U.S. Commerce Department plans to issue proposed rules on connected vehicles next month and expects to impose limits on some software made in China and other countries deemed adversaries, a senior official said Tuesday. From a report: "We're looking at a few components and some software - not the whole car - but it would be some of the key driver components of the vehicle that manage the software and manage the data around that car that would have to be made in an allied country," said export controls chief Alan Estevez at a forum in Colorado.

In May, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said her department planned to issue proposed rules on Chinese-connected vehicles this autumn and had said the Biden administration could take "extreme action" and ban Chinese-connected vehicles or impose restrictions on them after the Biden administration in February launched a probe into whether Chinese vehicle imports posed national security risks.