Items tagged with China
Odds are you haven't heard of Zhaoxin; the company is a joint venture between Via Technologies (a name you may know) and the Chinese government. Zhaoxin has unveiled its coming x86-compatible CPU called the KaiXian KX-6000 that promises to be at least 50% better performing than the KX-5000 CPU the company offered before. Zhaoxin wants to use the KX-6000 to take some of the market share Intel and AMD currently own in the x86 CPU market. The KX-6000 is an eight-core x86-64 SoC with 8MB of L2 cache, a DirectX 11.1 compatible integrated GPU, dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller, and the usual mix...
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China is a huge market for gaming, and likewise, Twitch is the largest streaming platform in the world. Unfortunately for Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, it will have to forge ahead without a presence in China, at least for now. China decided to block Twitch not longer after the streaming service experienced a surge in downloads in the area. Twitch is gone from Apple's App Store in China after recently rising to near the top of the chart, landing at No. 3 among free app downloads. The rise in downloads is attributable to the Asian Games, and state broadcaster CCTV deciding to now to air the esports...
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In May, it was reported that Google workers were quitting over Google's involvement with a Pentagon project called Project Maven. Eventually, a petition made the rounds with Google workers demanding that the search giant sever ties with the military project. A new report is making the rounds that claims Googlers are quitting in protest to the relaunch of Google search in the Chinese market. Jack Poulson, identified as a senior Google research scientist in the research and machine intelligence department, quit in protest of Google's plans to launch a censored version of its search engine...
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AMD's desktop class Ryzen 2000 series and upcoming Ryzen Threadripper WX series processors aren't the only Zen-flavored chips on the company's docket. The company announced today that it has a new semi-custom SoC that's available to customers that will allow them to design powerful gaming systems targeted for their respective markets. More specifically, these SoCs will initially go into gaming PCs and dedicated gaming consoles that will be released by Chinese firm Zhongshan Subor. The specs are relatively beefy, as it combines the brawn of Ryzen with the graphics prowess of...
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Apple customers living in China have a new set of privacy concerns to deal with, if they use the iPhone maker's iCloud service. While previously all their iCloud data was stored on servers located in the United States, Apple has agreed to transfer iCloud storage duties in China to a division of China Telecom, a state-owned telecommunications service. That outfit is called Tianyi, as first revealed in a WeChat post from China Telecom and later confirmed by Apple to TechCrunch. The concern for Apple users in China is that the state-owned agency now has access to a wealth of sensitive information,...
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China has no love for Taiwan, and the former's censorship has led to strange issues for some iPhone users. If users have their region set to China and someone sends them the Taiwan flag emoji, a bug in iOS could cause the app to crash. That bug has the potential to allow a remote user to launch a denial of service attack on the message receiver by continually sending them the Taiwan flag emoji. The bug was discovered by security researcher Patrick Wardle. Wardle says that the bug was first brought to his attention when a friend told him that iOS apps crashed when she typed the word "Taiwan" or...
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Could Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications company, be a threat to American national security? The United States Congress recently urged Google to reconsider their partnership with Huawei. The lawmakers believe that Huawei is capable of phone-tapping and cyber-espionage. Senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton and Representatives Michael Conaway, Liz Cheney, and Dutch Ruppersberger wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. They recommended that Google discontinue their relationship with Huawei, “...particularly since your company recently refused to renew a key research partnership, Project...
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Hackers employed by the Chinese government have purportedly stolen 614GB of sensitive data from a United States Navy contractor. The data potentially includes plans for a supersonic anti-ship missile and other information related to naval warfare. According to a report by The Washington Post, the breaches occurred in January and February of 2018. The Chinese hackers compromised a contractor who had been hired by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. The Rhode Island-based military organization focuses on researching and developing submarines and naval weapons. Navy officials have not publicly identified...
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It looks as though ZTE will live to see another day. After facing a near-certain death earlier this year when Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross imposed crippling sanctions on the company for violating an agreement with the U.S. government, a deal brokered in part by President Donald Trump has saved the Chinese company. As part of the new agreement, which was signed off [again] by Secretary Ross, ZTE has been given 30 days to replace its entire board of directors and senior leadership. It also has to pay a $1 billion fine and hold another $400 million in escrow. These hefty monetary...
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The intricacies of Facebook's full data collection and sharing policies are not really known outside of the social network, but it is safe to assume that your information changes hands. Facebook does not hide this tidbit, even if the full scope is not known. What is known, however, is that Facebook has data sharing deals with four Chinese companies, perhaps more, including Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL. These are not small firms by any means. Huawei is the world's third biggest smartphone player, while Lenovo often jostles with Hewlett-Packard for the top spot in computer shipments and market share....
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It appears that the United States is backtracking on its decision to pummel Chinese electronics company ZTE into submission. In a tweet over the weekend, President Donald Trump revealed that he is working with Chinese President Xi Jinping to give ZTE some assistance in regaining the ability to purchase components from U.S. manufacturers. In his tweet, Trump specifically calls attention to the fact that many jobs in China will be lost and that the company should have the ability to restart its operations as soon as possible. On the first front, ZTE employees around 70,000 people, mostly in...
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Many smartphone makers have seen China as their key market for growth over the last few years. Chinese consumers have been gobbling up smartphones despite the booming black market in the country for devices like iPhones. That black market is so robust that smugglers had taken to flying iPhones in by drone. Canalys has some numbers that look at the Chinese smartphone market and they aren't good. Smartphone shipments in China had their worst ever decline in Q1 2018, with shipments down 21% annually to 91 million units. Shipments haven't been that low since Q4 2013. The numbers also show that eight...
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The hits keep coming for Chinese telecom giant ZTE. Last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that ZTE would be banned from buying components from U.S. companies for a period of 7 years due to its blatant disregard for a plea agreement to atone for previous transgressions. Now, a major Chinese regulator is coming down hard on ZTE, and is blaming the company for making the country look bad. China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which regulates domestic enterprises, said that ZTE's actions were simply "stupid and passive". SASAC went...
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Chinese hardware OEM ZTE has just been hit hard by the U.S. Department of Commerce after the company pled guilty to illegally providing telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea and lying about its actions. ZTE agreed to pay nearly $1.2 billion in civic and criminal penalties for shipping the goods, making false statements, and obstructing justice. While the financial penalties were no doubt significant, the Department of Commerce has an even stiffer penalty for the company that was announced today (terms of which ZTE agreed to comply with as part of the original plea agreement). American...
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