Wednesday, December 4, 2019
Expedia CEO, CFO Resign After Clash Over Strategy With Board
IITs eye Asean footprint to boost global ranking
Made in India, Made for the World
Internet Society says private equity firm Ethos Capital will pay $1.135B for the .org top level domain registry (Kieren McCarthy/The Register)
Internet Society says private equity firm Ethos Capital will pay $1.135B for the .org top level domain registry — Anger rises over ten-figure sale of registry — Analysis The price tag for one of the internet's largest and most important domain-name registries has finally been revealed: $1.135bn.
Net giants can store your non-crucial data abroad
An Alphabet of worries
As Alphabet Chief, Pichai joins global CEO A-List
Government localises ‘critical’ & ‘sensitive’ personal data
Instagram Now Asks for Your Birthday When Creating a New Account
Sources: FTC investigators, who have been looking into Amazon's e-commerce business, have begun asking software companies about Amazon's practices around AWS (Bloomberg)
Sources: FTC investigators, who have been looking into Amazon's e-commerce business, have begun asking software companies about Amazon's practices around AWS — - FTC said to broaden Amazon inquiry beyond online retail — Amazon's cloud business leads market over No. 2 Microsoft
Apple Music dives deeper into concert streaming with Billie Eilish
As music streaming apps struggle to differentiate, Apple is making concert video a more central part of its strategy with tonight’s big Billie Eilish show at its HQ’s Steve Jobs Theater. The Apple Music Awards concert will be streaming live and then on-demand to Apple Music’s 60 million subscribers. Apple would like to do more of these streamed concerts in the near future.
You can stream Apple’s Billie Eilish concert here
Beyond the concert streaming, Apple is looking to strengthen its perception as an ally to art and artists. Given Apple Music is just a tiny fraction of the iPhone maker’s massive revenues, it can look overly corporate and capitalistic compared to music-only competitors like Spotify that some see as more aligned with the success of musicians.
To grow its subscriber count amongst serious listeners and earn points with creators, Apple Music can’t look like it’s just designed to sell more Apple hardware. So tonight Apple is hoping to show its respect for artists, handing out its first Apple Music Awards. Billie Eilish has won artist of the year and Songwriter Of The Year (with her brother Finneas), while Lizzo is taking home Breakthrough Artist Of The Year. Additionally, based on Apple Music streaming counts, Eilish’s ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” has won Album Of The Year, and Lil Was X’s ‘Old Town Road’ is the Song Of The Year.
The award statues themselves are specially-crafted Apple artifacts, featuring overwrought design like you see in those WWDC videos of robots making gadgets. They start with a single 12-inch disc of nanometer-level flat silicon wafer — the same kind used to power Apple’s iPhones. Copper layers are patterned with ultraviolet lithography to etch connections between the billions of transistors on the wafer. It’s then sliced into hundreds of individual chips and lined up during the months-long process to create a reflective trophy suspended between glass and anodized aluminum. In what’s sure to become a kooky collector’s item, each award is packaged with its own special Apple spirit level and mounting screws for classy installation.
The hope seems to be that both the winners and their fellow artists will come away with the perception that Apple truly cares about music. That, plus Apple Music’s scale, could help convince them to share more links to their songs on the streaming service and feature their profile there ahead of their presences on competing listening apps.
On the concert front, Apple started holding its yearly Apple Music Festival, formerly the iTunes Festival, back in 2007. But after a blow-out 10th year where Apple streamed shows from Britney Spears, Elton John, and Chance the Rapper, it discontinued the event in 2017. Apple Music launched a dedicated Music Videos tab last year, but has done less recently with concert streaming other than a few events with Tyler, The Creator and Shawn Mendes. These concert videos can be tough to find inside Apple Music.
Yet this represents a massive opportunity for Apple. Across music streaming services, catalogs are becoming more uniform, everyone is copying each other’s personalized playlists and discovery mechanisms, and many are embracing radio and podcasts. Meanwhile, paying for exclusive music or whole artists has fallen out of fashion compared to a few years ago. Fragmenting the music catalog is hostile towards listeners, can be harmful for artists who lose out on mass distribution, and it can engender backlash from artists fans’ who don’t want to pay for multiple redundant streaming services.
Streaming concert videos, which typically aren’t available beyond shaky camera phone footage, feel additive to the music ecosystem. If platforms are willing to pay to shoot and produce the videos, they can be powerful differentiators. And if the recorded shows look unique from the typical tours, as with the tree-covered stage for tonight’s Billie Eilish show at Apple headquarters, they keep fans glued to their screens. Video viewing can lead users to develop more affinity for whichever company is broadcasting the shows compared to multi-tasking while they merely listen to a generic app.
Apple is already ahead of competitors like Spotify that do very little on the concert video front. Streaming more shows like tonight’s could help it better rival YouTube Music, which integrates traditional music streaming with a broad array of rarities, music videos, and streamed concerts like Coachella. Apple is also fortunate to have a global retail and office footprint that could help it throw and record more shows with fewer logistical headaches.
To date, Apple Music has leaned on its pre-installations on the company’s phones, tablets, and computers plus its free trial system to drive growth. But if it can spot holes in the industry’s content offering, leverage its deep pockets to invest in premium video, and prove to artists that it cares, Apple Music could build a brand separate from and with more street cred than Apple itself.
Snapdragon 865 detailed: AI, camera and gaming in focus this year
After teasing some of the features on Tuesday, Qualcomm dropped more details about the Snapdragon 865 and Snapdragon 765 SoCs on Day 2 of the company’s tech summit. Based on the details Qualcomm shared, it feels like the Snapdragon 865 is more of an incremental upgrade as far as the CPU and GPUs are concerned. However, as Qualcomm drilled it down the audience, the real innovation this year was achieved in AI compute, image processing and gaming.
The Snapdragon 865 is manufactured on TSMC’s 7nm N7P process, the same process that is used to make Apple’s A13 Bionic chipsets.
Let’s get down to the details of the Snapdragon 865 -
CPU
Starting with the CPU sub-system, the Snapdragon 865 uses new Kryo 585 cores based on the Cortex-A77 and Cortex-A55 cores. The sub-system architecture is the same as last time, and so are the peak frequencies for each cluster. There’s one prime core, three mid-cores and four efficiency cores. The peak frequency of the prime core remains at 2.84GHz while the mid-cores run up to 2.4GHz and the efficiency cores run at 1.8GHz. Despite that, Qualcomm is claiming a 25 percent performance boost and a 25 percent higher power efficiency. More interestingly, the CPU has twice as much L3 cache. 4 MB worth, which Qualcomm felt is needed so that high-intensity 5G use-cases doesn’t choke the pipeline. There’s now support for LPDDR5 memory but Qualcomm is also retaining support for the previous generation memory.
GPU
The Adreno 650 GPU now supports 144Hz displays and is 25 percent faster in rendering graphics. Qualcomm also claimed a 35 percent boost in power efficiency. More importantly, the GPU is now more tightly integrated in the AI Engine, sharing AI tasks with the DSP and the CPU. A big change this time is the fact that Qualcomm will push out updates to GPU drivers via the Google Play Store. The GPU now supports 10-bit HDR and 90 FPS gaming. There’s also across-the-board improvement in how the GPU can render shadows, lights, depth of field, motion and reflection in games. These are all part of Qualcomm’s Elite Gaming features that made a push for desktop-like experience in gaming this year. More on that later.
Connectivity
Moving on to connectivity, this was the biggest surprise of the event. For the longest time, analysts and media predicted Qualcomm will integrate the 5G modem with the SoC. That didn’t happen this year with the premium-tier Snapdragon 865. Qualcomm did do that with the Snapdragon 765 and the 765G, but on the Snapdragon 865, it’s still the modular approach from last year. There’s a new 5G modem though, called the Snapdragon X55. The X55 5G modem also has backward support for 4G, 3G and 2G and supports Dynamic Spectrum Sharing which Qualcomm claimed will be a stepping stone for a lot of telecom operators towards real 5G.
As to why Qualcomm did not integrate the modem with the SoC, we’re not really sure. Qualcomm said it will help OEMs reduce their development cycle, which because of 5G is expected to be a lot longer. It’s not really a technical incapability on the part of Qualcomm but more of a pragmatic decision to help OEMs take devices to market quicker in the face of complex 5G technologies. As a result, the X55 5G modem comes with its own RF-system.
ISP
Next, the Snapdragon 865 integrates the new Spectra 480 ISP. This is also one place which saw big gains, essentially making us a lot more excited about the smartphone cameras that are coming in 2020. For one, the ISP supports 200MP camera sensors which Qualcomm said is in the works and will be out next year. Then, the ISP supports 8K video recording at 30 FPS, unlimited 960 FPS slo-mo recording and simultaneous 4K HDR capture and 64MP snapshot. These are impressive feats that is primarily achieved by a big architectural change. For one, the new ISP can process 4 pixels per clock from 1 pixel per clock. This allows the ISP to crunch 2 gigapixels data per second. A big announcement this year was the support for Dolby Vision video capture, something we expect flagship smartphones of 2020 to tout as a marquee feature. When launched, these smartphones will be the first of their kind to capture live Dolby Vision HDR videos as all previous Dolby Vision content has been achieved in post-production. There’s also a dedicated core for noise reduction for better low-light photos and videos.
AI Engine
Most of these camera features we mentioned above is achieved in tandem with the 5th-gen AI Engine. Unlike its competitors, Qualcomm doesn’t restrict AI computing to dedicated cores. Instead, it distributes the workload across the CPU, GPU and the DSP. This time though, the benefits of the AI Engine is felt across the board, from the camera to the modem. As for numbers, the AI Engine is 2X more powerful with the capability to deliver 15 trillion operations per second (TOPS) as compared to 7 TOPS in the Snapdragon 855 last year. The increased speed now helps in on-device AI crunching which will find application in things like live transcription and translation. We saw a live demo of this at the keynote. The AI Engine will also allow in-call translation, with the voice signatures included. For instance, an English speaker will be able to hold a conversation with a Chinese speaker over a phone call, with his accent and intonations. There’s a new software stack to enable new AI use-cases. We saw demos from some of Qualcomm’s partners like Snap Inc, loom.ai, and the likes where live filters were applied instantly with zero lag.
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Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 865 is 25% faster, comes with mandatory 5G
Enlarge / The Snapdragon 865.
Today, Qualcomm detailed its new flagship SoC for 2020: the Snapdragon 865. This is going to be the chip that ships in every single high-end Android phone that comes out in 2020, and there's a lot to go over.
First up: we're getting the usual modest speed increases that Qualcomm delivers every year. Qualcomm says the CPU and GPU are 25 percent faster compared to this year's Snapdragon 855. Like last year, this is an eight core, 7nm chip, but as AnandTech reports, now it's being manufactured on TSMC-improved 7nm "N7P" node, the same manufacturing process used by Apple's A13 SoC.
This year, the bigger CPU cores have been upgraded from Qualcomm's Kryo 485 cores in the 855. They have also been based on ARM's Cortex A76 design, to the new "Kryo 585 CPU," which uses ARM Cortex A77 cores. The frequencies are unchanged from last year: the single "Prime" A77 core is at 2.84GHz, and three other A77 cores are at 2.42 GHz. Four Cortex A55s make up the smaller cores for background processing and other lower-power tasks, and are clocked at 1.8GHz.
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More Google employees accuse the company of retaliation in NLRB complaint filed Tuesday in Chicago, alleging Google fired one or more employees for organizing (Bloomberg)
More Google employees accuse the company of retaliation in NLRB complaint filed Tuesday in Chicago, alleging Google fired one or more employees for organizing — A complaint filed Tuesday accused Google of terminating staff in retaliation for activism about working conditions …
AWS Outposts begins to take shape to bring the cloud into the data center
When AWS announced Outposts, a private cloud hardware stack they install in your data center, last year, there were a lot of unanswered questions. This week at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced general availability as the vision for this approach began to come clearer.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy, speaking at a press conference earlier today said that there are certain workloads like running a factory that need compute resources to be close because of low latency requirements. That’s where Outposts could play well, and where similar existing solutions in his opinion fell short because there wasn’t a smooth connection between the on-prem hardware and the cloud.
“We tried to rethink this with a different approach,” he said. “We thought about it more as trying to distribute AWS on premises. With Outposts, you have racks of AWS servers that have compute, storage, database and analytics and machine learning on them. You get to decide what composition you want and we deliver that to you,” he said.
The hardware is equipped with a slew of services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon ECS, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Amazon EMR. Conspicuously missing is S3 storage, but Amazon promises that will be coming in 2020 with other services on deck as well.
Make no mistake, the world’s premiere cloud infrastructure vendor will be installing a rack of hardware inside your data center. AWS has formed a team inside the company to handle installation, monitoring and management of the equipment.
The easy way to think about this would be that it’s a way for companies, who might be afraid to go all-in on the cloud to start experimenting with a cloud-like environment, which you can manage from an AWS console or VMware (beginning next year). Yet an Amazon spokesperson indicated that many companies like Morningstar and Phillips Healthcare, both of which are already AWS public cloud customers, are choosing Outposts because itgives these customers is ultra low latency, almost like a hyper local availability zone.
These customers need to keep compute resources as close as possible to run a particular set of jobs. While a Local availability zone like the one announced for Los Angeles yesterday could also suffice for this, Outposts could help when there isn’t Local option.
Customers can sign up for Outposts in a similar fashion to any EC2 instance, but instead of spinning it up in the cloud, an order goes to the Outposts team, and it gets racked, stacked and installed on prem.
From then on, Amazon still handles the management just as it does with a public cloud instance. For now installation and going management is being handled by an internal Amazon team, but over time they plan to work with systems integrators to help handle some of that workload.
Anthropic updates Claude to add custom writing styles tailored to users, aiming to personalize its replies, following similar ChatGPT and Gemini features (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge : Anthropic updates Claude to add custom writing styles tailored to users, aiming to personalize its replies,...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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