Microsoft is working on in-house processor designs for use in server computers that run the company's cloud services, adding to an industrywide effort to reduce reliance on Intel's chip technology, Bloomberg News reports. From the report: The world's largest software maker is using Arm designs to produce a processor that will be used in its data centers, according to people familiar with the plans. It's also exploring using another chip that would power some of its Surface line of personal computers. The people asked not to be identified discussing private initiatives.

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U.S. prosecutors on Friday charged a China-based executive at Zoom Video Communications with disrupting video meetings commemorating the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown at the request of the Chinese government. From a report: Xinjiang Jin, 39, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of conspiring since January 2019 to use his company's systems to censor speech, the U.S. Department of Justice said. Zoom was not named in court papers, but its identity was confirmed by a person close to the matter. Papers filed in federal court in Brooklyn said Jin's employer is based in San Jose, California, where Zoom is headquartered. Prosecutors said Jin, a software engineer and his employer's main liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence, helped terminate at least four video meetings in May and June, including some involving dissidents who survived the June 4, 1989, student protests. Jin allegedly fabricated violations of Zoom's terms of service to justify his actions to his superiors.

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An award-winning Taiwanese horror game was removed from storefronts by the beleaguered developer CD Projekt Red amid a backlash from Chinese gamers, hours after it was put on sale. From a report: Devotion, a PC game that chronicles the life of a Taiwanese family in a religious cult in the 1980s, was released to critical acclaim in February 2019. But shortly after release, Chinese players found a poster hanging in the apartment that serves as the games' setting that said "Xi Jinping Winnie-the-Pooh moron." Almost 10,000 negative reviews soon flooded the game's review page. The developer, Red Candle Games, posted an apology saying it was "purely an accident" that the poster was left in the game. Within a week, however, the game was pulled from sale on the digital storefront Steam. It has not been available in English since, despite winning multiple game of the year awards at the end of 2019, and an ongoing campaign for it to return to sale. On Wednesday, Red Candle Games announced that was changing. The game would be published on Friday by GOG, the digital storefront run by the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, it said in a tweet at 10am. A fresh wave of opprobrium from Chinese internet users followed the announcement and less than six hours later, CDPR reversed its decision. "Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG," the company tweeted. "After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store." It gave no further explanation and did not respond to a request for comment. Like many PC gaming firms, GOG operates in a grey area in China.

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OneWeb is back. The company on Friday made its fourth launch of a batch of satellites to build up its constellation in low-Earth orbit that eventually will provide broadband internet access around the globe. From a report: The latest group of 36 satellites headed to orbit atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Vostochny Cosmodrome, ending a long delay since the last OneWeb launch, on Feb. 6. The nine months since then have seen the company file for bankruptcy at the start of the coronavirus pandemic only to re-emerge under new ownership led by the British government and India's Bharti Global. OneWeb is now flying over 100 satellites of a planned 648-bird constellation.

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There's a narrative that the tech industry's future lies in Texas and Florida. That tech workers and executives -- sick of California's oppressive policies and sky-high real estate costs -- are moving en masse to Miami and Austin this year. That these cities are building dominant talent foundations that will persist for years due to the pandemic. That narrative is wrong. From a report: The story crumbles when placed next to new LinkedIn data showing where tech workers are actually moving in 2020. The key beneficiaries of this year's tech migration are less buzzy cities like Madison, Wisconsin; Richmond, Virginia; and Sacramento, California. These places don't get much play in the news, but they're attracting tech talent at significantly higher rates than they were last year. Austin, conversely, is gaining tech workers more slowly. The new LinkedIn data, which Big Technology is first publishing here, examines several hundred thousand tech workers in the U.S. It breaks down the ratio at which they're moving into a city vs. moving out, something LinkedIn calls the inflow/outflow ratio. The data ranges from April to October, comparing 2020 with 2019. It encompasses the core months people left their cities due to the pandemic. The country's biggest tech migration increase took place in Madison. The city was gaining 1.02 tech workers for each one that left last year, and it's now gaining 1.77, a 74% jump. Sacramento and Richmond, meanwhile, were losing tech workers before the pandemic and have turned it around. Sacramento was adding a fraction of a tech worker -- 0.87 -- for each one that left last year, and now it's adding 1.02. Richmond was adding 0.95 last year, and it's adding 1.06 this year. Other Midwest cities, including Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cleveland, Ohio, have significantly reduced the rate at which tech workers were leaving their cities.

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Rebellion is in the air at Polish video game publisher CD Projekt after the company's highly anticipated, and thrice-delayed, latest title was released to scathing reviews about glitches. Bloomberg News reports: Frustrated and angry staff fired questions at the board during an internal video meeting Thursday that opened with management apologizing for Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch, according to two people who were present. It was a fitting atmosphere for a company whose slogan, plastered on posters all around its Warsaw office, is "We are rebels." Developers asked blunt questions about the company's reputation, the game's unrealistic deadlines and the relentless overtime in the months and years leading up to the game's Dec. 10 release. The meeting took place before Sony's shocking announcement that it was pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and will offer full refunds to any customer who requests one. During the staff meeting, CD Projekt's directors said they had come to an arrangement with Sony but didn't offer specifics. In a Twitter post on Friday, the company said that "following our discussion with PlayStation, a decision was made to temporarily suspend digital distribution" of the game.

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Terence Eden: I am concerned that -- despite the hard work of the AC -- Google has limited interest in that goal. When I joined, I wondered whether I could make a difference. I hope that I have been a critical friend. The AC has encouraged AMP to think more about user needs -- rather than Google's needs. And changes to the search carousel were also a concern of the committee which have been partly addressed. Google's thesis is that the mobile-web is dying and people prefer to use apps -- therefore making the web faster and more app-like will retain users. Google doesn't publish data about this, so I can't directly criticise their motives. But I do not think AMP, in its current implementation, helps make the web better. I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web. I am glad that I tried to make it better, but I'm sad to have failed.

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The little-known Texas software company that's been attacked by suspected Russian hackers has a sprawling reach among U.K. government agencies, potentially putting clients from the National Health Service to police forces at risk. From a report: SolarWinds, which fell victim to hackers who put a "backdoor" in the software giving them access to users' computer networks, has been deployed by the U.K.'s Ministry of Justice and the intelligence and security organization GCHQ. Procurement records also show that police forces from Scotland to Cornwall have also used the software. The Home Office, which oversees policing, posted a job opening for a software engineer for the "implementation of a fully resilient platform and architecture SolarWinds Orion monitoring system based upon the upgrade of the existing installation" in 2018. "We are continuing to investigate this incident and have produced guidance for SolarWinds' Orion suite customers," said a spokesperson for the U.K. National Cybersecurity Centre. Representatives for the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice referred requests for comment to the NCSC. "We have issued a high severity alert to the NHS which explains the action to take to mitigate this threat," a spokesperson for NHS said in a statement. "We have been working closely with the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate this issue robustly. So far, we have no indication of any malicious activity, but our investigation is ongoing."

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The United States confirmed on Friday it will add dozens of Chinese companies, including the country's top chipmaker, SMIC, and Chinese drone giant DJI to a trade blacklist. From a report: The move, which was first reported by Reuters, is seen as the latest in President Donald Trump's efforts to cement his tough-on-China legacy. It comes just weeks before Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office on Jan. 20. The U.S. Commerce Department confirmed the decision early Friday, saying the action "stems from China's military-civil fusion (MCF) doctrine and evidence of activities between SMIC and entities of concern in the Chinese military industrial complex." Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement that the department would "not allow advanced U.S. technology to help build the military of an increasingly belligerent adversary." Ross said the government would presumptively deny licenses to prevent SMIC from accessing technology to produce semiconductors at advanced technology levels -- 10 nanometers or below.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Ads are the worst, yet we see them everywhere. They fund the content we consume, for free, on a daily basis. It's one thing to receive ads on a website you are going to for free, but it's quite another when an OEM goes out of its way to force an app onto your phone in order to serve you more ads. Sadly, that is exactly what Samsung just did with its new Samsung Visit In update through the Galaxy Store. On December 15, Samsung in the United States updated a system app called "IPS Geofencing" with the new Samsung Visit In app. This offers and coupons app has been rolling out in other countries and regions over the past year, but just hit the United States. IPS Geofencing was previously unused, or at least it was not user-accessible, and its function was unknown. As part of Visit In, it will be used to track your location, see when you're in a store that sells Samsung products or services, then serve you related ads. While you do need to opt-in for this service, the update allowing the functionality was installed automatically in the background of devices via the Galaxy Store. Further reading: Ads Are Taking Over Samsung's Galaxy Smartphones.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Of the 18,000 organizations that downloaded a backdoored version of software from SolarWinds, the tiniest of slivers -- possibly as small as 0.2 percent -- received a follow-on hack that used the backdoor to install a second-stage payload. The largest populations receiving stage two were, in order, tech companies, government agencies, and think tanks/NGOs. The vast majority -- 80 percent -- of these 40 chosen ones were located in the US. These figures were provided in an update from Microsoft President Brad Smith. Smith also shared some insightful and sobering commentary on the significance of this almost unprecedented attack. His numbers are incomplete, since Microsoft sees only what its Windows Defender app detects. Still, Microsoft sees a lot, so any difference with actual numbers is likely a rounding error. Smith said: It's critical that we step back and assess the significance of these attacks in their full context. This is not "espionage as usual," even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world. In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world's critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation's intelligence agency. While the most recent attack appears to reflect a particular focus on the United States and many other democracies, it also provides a powerful reminder that people in virtually every country are at risk and need protection irrespective of the governments they live under.

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SpamSlapper shares a report from The Australian Broadcasting Corporation: A company commercializing a CSIRO-developed, seaweed feed product, which slashes the amount of greenhouse gases cattle burp and fart into the atmosphere, has won a $1 million international prize for its work reshaping the food system. CSIRO-affiliated company Future Feed said it would use its Food Planet Prize winnings to create an international commercial fund to help First Nations communities generate income from cultivating and selling the seaweed. Methane emissions from livestock make up around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and one cow produces on average as much gas emission as one car. "As a greenhouse gas, methane is about 28 times more potent in terms of global warming potential than carbon dioxide and lasts much longer in the atmosphere," the CSIRO said on its website. Future Feed director and CSIRO scientist Michael Battaglia said that when added to cattle feed, the product, which contains Australian "super seaweed" Asparagopsis, virtually eliminated methane from the animals' bodily emissions. "We know that just a handful [of the product] per animal per day, or 0.2 percent of their diet can virtually eliminate 99.9 percent of methane," Dr Battaglia said.

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