SoftBank-backed Nuro raised $500 million in its latest round of funding. Woven Capital, a venture fund owned by Toyota Motor Corp, is the other investor in the company. The self-driving tech company had raised about $940 million from Softbank, the Japanese conglomerate, and Greylock Capital Management, an investment firm based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Last November, Nuro raised $500 million from a group of investors that included T. Rowe Price Associates, Fidelity Management and Research Co. and Baillie Gifford.

Neither Chipotle nor Nuro disclosed the terms of the deal.

“Early investments in digital innovation have provided a competitive advantage operationally with digital kitchens and the brand’s Chipotlanes,” the company said in a statement. “Now the organization is exploring disruptive opportunities outside of traditional third-party partnerships.”

Nuro already has agreements with Kroger, Walmart, and CVS wherein it delivers prescriptions and groceries in the Houston area.

Nuro uses Prius cars that are redesigned with its self-driving technology. It now has got permits to makes self-driving deliveries in the state of California.

Nuro’s $940 million money injection from SoftBank in 2019 raised its valuation to almost $5 billion.

For the fast-casual food chain, the investment in Nuro builds on its already strong digital operations that have been a standout in the industry during the COVID-19 pandemic and has helped Chipotle ride out the worst of the impact.

Brain Niccol, the CEO of Chipotle, took over the company in 2018, and this is the first “significant” investment that the food chain restaurant has made in a third-party technology business under his leadership, the company statement said.

“Nuro could change the traditional delivery model, and we believe consumers are going to continue to seek options and additional access points for how and where they enjoy their food,” said Curt Garner, Chief Technology Officer at Chipotle.

Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson said that financial and strategic support from major companies like Chipotle will help Nuro Euro advance their technology and business both in terms of more customers and revenue.

Chipotle has been able to meet the Pandemic-led online food delivery demand by upping its digital presence. The restaurant said on Thursday that its digital business increased 174% year over year in 2020, almost half of which came from delivery.

Hence, the company said that their synergy with Nuro was organic.

Chipotle has been innovating with its menu and marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition and give the ever-discerning, forever online customer some value additions.

Chipotle’s digital orders made up 46.2% of its sales in 2020. The company posted $2.8 billion in digital sales last year.

The post Chipotle invests in self-driving auto company Nuro appeared first on Technowize.

“It is the first attack to exploit contention on the cross-core interconnect of Intel CPUs,” doctoral student Riccardo Paccagnella, part of the research team, told The Register. “The attack does not rely on sharing memory, cache sets, core-private resources or any specific uncore structures. As a consequence, it is hard to mitigate with existing side-channel defenses.”

The researcher team includes Licheng Luo, and assistant professor Christopher Fletcherrs besides Paccagnella. They will present their findings later in the year at the USENIX Security 2021 conference.

Intel Core i7 6700K CPU perspective view

Side-channel attacks are carried out by tapping into the vulnerabilities of modern chip microarchitecture when computers share resources or are interconnected for work. Unlike previous side-channel attacks, this attack does not rely on sharing memory, cache sets, etc. Instead, it relies on a component called CPU ring interconnect contention. This component facilitates communication across various CPU units – including cores, the last-level cache, system agent, and graphics unit – on modern Intel processors, such as the Skylake and Coffee Lake CPUs.

The attacks were tested on Intel Coffee Lake and Skylake CPUs, and it isn’t clear whether the attack vector will work on newer Intel Xeon’s.

To study the working of the attack, researchers were able to reverse engineer the various protocols that handle the communication on the ring interconnect. They then proceeded to decipher the conditions needed for the two processors to be attacked through the ring connection.

“Specifically, [the attack] abuses mitigations to preemptive scheduling cache attacks to cause the victim’s loads to miss in the cache, monitors ring contention while the victim is computing, and employs a standard machine learning classifier to de-noise traces and leak bits,” according to the researchers.

“The attacker needs to be able to already run unprivileged code on the machine under attack,” Paccagnella told a tech website Threatpost. “This may be possible by either fooling the user into downloading some code (e.g. a malicious app/malware) and run it, stealing the credentials of an unprivileged user of the same machine (and then, e.g., SSH-ing into it), or exploiting remote code execution vulnerabilities.”

In a paper – “Lord of the Ring(s): Side-Channel Attacks on the CPU On-Chip Ring Interconnect Are Practical” – Paccagnella, Luo, and Fletcher elaborate on the workings of Intel’s ring interconnect that passes information between CPU cores.

Intel does not seem to be overly worried about its processor’s vulnerability. They even supported the researchers in their endeavor. In fact, it has clubbed their new attack vector alongside existing side-channel attacks. “We appreciate the ongoing work and coordination with the research community,” said Intel. “After reviewing the paper, we believe developers and system administrators can employ a number of security best practices that help protect against various types of side-channel attacks, including those found in this paper.”

“They treat this class of attacks differently than the class of ‘speculative execution / transient execution attacks’ (like Spectre, Meltdown, etc.). That is, they do not consider traditional side-channel attacks as a significant value for an attacker, and they already published their suggested guidance on how to mitigate them in software,” revealed Paccagnella.

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Facebook’s Australian and New Zealand managing director, Will Easton, said the tech giant has decided not to post links to Australian publishers and no Australian user would be able to share or see content from any news outlets—Australian or international.

In a Facebook post, Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, said the social media company’s actions were “as arrogant as they were disappointing.

“The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” Facebook said in a blog post published on Thursday morning. “It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia.

“With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.”

The ban has led to a severe backlash as it also restricts access to critical information on government health and emergency service sites. The Facebook pages of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, Queensland Department of Health and Hobart Women’s Shelter were among dozens hit by the ban. Preventing access to vital information during the Covid-19 pandemic smacks of bullying, say health experts. “The timing could not be worse,” said Julie Leask, professor at the school of nursing at the University of Sydney.

“Three days before our Covid-19 vaccine rollout, Australians using Facebook as their primary source of news can no longer get access to credible information about vaccination from news organizations and some government and public health organization pages.”

Canberra is set to pass a landmark media law that would make Google and Facebook pay news publishers for displaying their content. The move is backed by the nation’s media companies. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission held an 18-month inquiry which found that the social media platforms were taking unfair advantage of the media companies’ hard-earned business by offering their articles on their sites. This threatened the viability of the news businesses.

The ACCC has proposed a bargaining code to ensure that news media businesses are fairly remunerated for the content they generate.

In a Facebook post, Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, said the social media company’s actions were “as arrogant as they were disappointing. These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behavior of BigTech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them.”

Josh Frydenberg said Facebook gave no warning of its intentions to ban all news posts. “But what today’s events do confirm for all Australians is the immense market power of these media digital giants,” he said. Frydenberg earlier held talks with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook chief executive, on Thursday and on the weekend.

On the other hand, Google has signed a slew of deals with Australian media houses, including Ruper Murdoch’s New Corp, in a bid to appease the government’s demand for payment.

Sally McManus, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said the platform had mistakenly blocked her organisation. “Australian workers cannot now find out about their rights at work via Facebook. This is disgraceful & needs to be reversed immediately,” she wrote on Twitter.

Facebook has assured that it had no intentions to ban government pages on the social media site, and it would reverse any pages that were closed inadvertently. “As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted,” said the company.

The difference in approach between Google and Facebook to the code imposition is very stark. Facebook is already under pressure worldwide for its inability to filter harmful content on its website. Additionally, it is facing regulation scrutiny for the content and monopolistic tendencies of big tech companies.

“We will be making the point that the position that Facebook has taken means that the information that people see on Facebook does not come from organizations with a fact-checking capability with paid journalists, with editorial policies and so on,” said Paul Fletcher, Australia’s communications minister.

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This fully waterproof design with well-equipped on-ear controls and a transparent listening mode is specially designed for you to hear your surroundings while exercising. The earphones are priced at $350. Let us look at the fantastic features to see if these E8 Sports earphones are worth the high price.

Beoplay E8 Sport: Design

These Beoplay E8 Sport earphones are designed from anodized aluminum trim on the case. The earpieces are made from a ridged and rubberized material that looks great and provides a comfortable grip for sweaty fingers. This makes them waterproof and sport-focused true wireless earphones more stylish and sleek at the same time.

These earphones are available in the colors black and light blue models. Bang & Olufsen have teamed with race car driver Fernando Alonso and the Rapha cycling company to co- brands some limited and exclusive special editions of the earphones.

Beoplay E8 Sport: Features

This classy earphone also comes with multiple ear tip fit options. These include three pairs of ear fin sleeves for added stability and four silicon pairs available in different sizes. A pair of extra Comfy foam tips is also attached, creating an excellent in-canal seal and enhancing the bass response.

The controls are super comfortable and quite responsive at the same time. When you single tap on the right ear, the music plays or pauses. A double-tap towards the right skips the tracks, a single tap towards the left ear turns the transparent listening mode on or off, and a double-tap on the left ear navigates to the previous track. A long press on the right ear increases the volume, and a long press on the left ear lowers the volume.

The Beoplay E8 Sports water resistance comes with a fully waterproof rating on IP57. The 5 in the rating here refers to its protection against dust, meaning it is not fully protected against dust. The 7 in the rating means that the earphones can withstand submergence in water up to a meter for 30 minutes.

The Bang & Olufsen app is available for both Android and iOS. It comes with a virtual guide on how-to-use-your-earphones so that the user can make the operational adjustments themselves once they are ready.

One can adjust the sound signature either with the listening presets or by creating customized EQ presets. You get a circular graph in EQ bands’ lead, which comes with words such as Bright, Energetic, Warm, and Fixed. The first two are on the higher-frequency end of the things, and the latter two on the bass realm. A brighter and warmer sound signature can be created by only moving your fingertip closer to the other bands.

The earphones support AAC, AptX, and SBC codes and are also compatible with Bluetooth 5.1. It delivers a frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, with an impedance of 16 Ohms and 0.57mm drives. The battery life is estimated to be roughly 7 hours on ears and 21 hours or so in the charging case. The charging case is compatible with wireless Qi charging pads. The overall sound signature of these earphones is clean, balanced, rich, and bright. The model provides a strong audio performance. As such, if you are looking for a pair of luxurious and exercise-friendly earphones, the Band & Olufsen Beoplay E8 Sports is the perfect fit for you.

Beoplay E8 Sport Pros

• Solid battery life
• Transparent listening mode
• Rich bass and clear and detailed highs
• Beautiful and stylish
• Fully waterproof and high dust-resistant
• Useful app

Beoplay E8 Sport Cons

• Expensive

The post Bang & Olufsen Beoplay E8 Sport Review appeared first on Technowize.

A deal for Arm Limited is perhaps the largest-ever deal in the semiconductor industry, which has been consolidating over the years as companies are looking forward to diversifying and add to the scale. However, any deal with Nvidia would likely mean regulatory scrutiny and a wave of opposition from other users.

NVIDIA buys ARM

Cambridge, England-based Arm’s technology creates chips that are crucial to most modern electronic products. These also include the ones that dominate the smartphone market- an area where Nvidia failed to earn a strong foothold. Customers like Apple Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corporation may demand assurances about the new owner would continue offering equal access to Arm’s instruction set. It is because of concerns like these that SoftBank, a neutral company, had to buy Arm when it was up for sale. However, no decisions have yet been made, and the negotiations may either drag longer or fall apart as per sources.

SoftBank may also look for interest from other potential suitors if it can’t reach an agreement with the tech company Nvidia. Representatives for Nvidia, SoftBank and Arm, declined to comment on this.  “With Nvidia’s low-cost model enabling the corporation to focus entirely on R&D, engineering and programming, the fit with Arm will be a perfect one,” said Neil Campling, an analyst at Mirabaud Securities.

NVIDIA buys ARM for $32 billion

Nvidia Corporation is the largest maker of graphics processors and is entering into a new foray by spreading the use of gaming components into new areas like AI processing in data centres and self-driving cars. It is mixing its capabilities with CPUs that are designed by Arm and may enable it to take on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in a substantial way.

Rosenblatt Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann estimates Nvidia Corporation would have to pay around $55 billion for Arm. “You need control of both the CPU and GPU roadmaps and also data centres,” he stated, referring to the CPUs and GPUs. “Strategically, Nvidia Corporation needs a scalable CPU which can be integrated into its GPU roadmap, like AMD and Intel.”

Billionaire Masayoshi Son has been selling a few SoftBank’s trophy assets as the company is looking forward to paying off its debts at the Japanese conglomerate. SoftBank has so far offloaded half its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and also a section of holdings in T-Mobile US Inc. It has also explored options to exit a part or all its stake in Arm through a sale or public stock listing. The chip-design company may soon go public if SoftBank decides to take that step, according to sources.

Arm Limited has become a more valuable tech company as it pushes its architecture into smart cars, data centres as well as networking gear. The company can be of a worth $44 billion value if it pursues an initial public offering in 2021. That would be a valuation that may rise to $68 billion by the year 2025.

Nvidia Corporation is based in Santa Clara in California and is the largest graphics chipmaker in the world. The stock has increased more than twenty-fold in the last five years, thus enhancing the company to make more deals. Nvidia’s market value has also increased to more than $260 billion during that time, thereby surpassing Intel.

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