Germany is planning to bolster its semiconductor industry after the government thwarted the takeover of a local supplier, raising questions about the country’s technology strategy. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s administration is working on programs to invest in the chip sector, which the government considers central to Germany’s energy shift, according to Read more…
How to analyse data without revealing their secrets? Data are valuable. But not all of them are as valuable as they could be. Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice Read more…
BlackBerry is adding another sad chapter to the downfall of its smartphone business. Today the company announced a sale of its prized patent portfolio for $600 million. The buyer is “Catapult IP Innovations Inc.,” a new company BlackBerry describes as “a special purpose vehicle formed to acquire the BlackBerry patent Read more…
The New York Times says it has purchased the viral word-guessing game Wordle for “an undisclosed price in the low seven figures.” The newspaper says it’ll remain “free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay.” Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Read more…
Eighty-four percent of app developers support an antitrust bill aimed at curtailing the market power of Apple’s and Google’s app stores, according to a poll (PDF) from the Coalition for App Fairness released Monday. The industry group for app developers is pushing Congress to pass the Open App Markets Act, Read more…
Twitter has on various occasions been accused of political bias, with politicians or commentators alleging Twitter’s algorithm amplifies their opponents’ voices, or silences their own. In this climate, Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicized the findings Read more…
Three research scientists at DeepMind Technologies teamed up with former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to “explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level,” according to their new article in Communications of the ACM. Their paper argues that using neural networks and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms can Read more…