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• California files appeal in latest bid to intervene in Activision Blizzard's $18m discrimination lawsuit settlement

  Super Cali goes ballistic, this deal is atrocious
  Katyanna Quach Tue 11 Jan 2022 // 01:39 UTC 1

  The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) is appealing a judge's ruling that prevented it from intervening in Activision Blizzard’s $18m settlement to end a sex discrimination lawsuit last year.

  Activision continues to be under intense scrutiny after California’s DFEH claimed the gaming giant fostered a “frat boy” work culture. In a lawsuit filed in July 2021, the department claimed this toxic workplace led to sex-based discrimination, including harassment against female employees.

  The case runs parallel to other probing and litigation. The US National Labor Relations Board is investigating a complaint made by the Communications Workers of America Union, which accused the games maker of intimidating staff and illegally hampering their attempts to form a union. The Securities Exchange Commission is also investigating whether the company failed to report claims of sexual discrimination and harassment to investors before they were aired publicly, causing share prices to drop.

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• Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike resigns, leaves WhatsApp co-founder to run things until a successor is named

  Departure comes as app courts controversy by integrating private cryptocurrency scheme
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Tue 11 Jan 2022 // 01:02 UTC

  Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of the Signal secure messaging app, on Monday announced his resignation as CEO of the company.

  Marlinspike said he had always intended to grow Signal to the point that it could go on without his direct involvement but that wasn't possible as recently as four years ago when he was writing most of the code, managing employees, and personally handling support. Fast forward to today and Marlinspike said he rarely writes code and feels comfortable leaving matters in the hands of his leadership team.

  Signal is one of only two mobile messaging apps deemed secure enough to be recommended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where "secure" means encrypted end-to-end with some degree of credibility. The other, Signal's much larger rival, is Meta's (Facebook's) WhatsApp.

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• Who's Intel Inside and Outside today: PC chip boss installed after EVP heads for exit – plus next CFO named

  25-year veteran Michelle Johnston Holthaus appointed alongside beancounter from Micron
  Agam Shah Tue 11 Jan 2022 // 00:06 UTC

  Intel today announced a new showrunner for its PC processor business and named its next chief financial officer, who is arriving from Micron.

  Gregory Bryant, who as an executive vice-president ran Intel's Client Computing Group, is leaving at the end of this month to pursue "a new opportunity," the chip giant said.

  Bryant, who just oversaw Chipzilla's CES launches, will be replaced by Michelle Johnston Holthaus. Her title will be executive vice president and general manager of the client division, which focuses on components for personal computers and other consumer electronics.

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• JavaScript dev deliberately screws up own popular npm packages to make a point of some sort

  Faker.js and colors.js sabotaged by maker
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 21:38 UTC 11

  Updated Two popular open-source packages were recently sabotaged with mischievous commits, creating confusion among those using the software and exacerbating concerns about the fragility of the open-source software supply chain.

  The npm packages, faker.js and colors.js, were not hijacked by outsiders, as has been known to happen; rather their creator added code to the software libraries that made them malfunction.

  Three days ago, developer Marak Squires added a "new American flag module" to colors.js, a module to simplify printing colored text in the developer console. The new code printed the word "LIBERTY" multiple times and an ASCII-flag to the developer console and went into an endless loop.

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• Nvidia promises British authorities it won’t strong Arm rivals after proposed merger

  We're just two chip businesses, standing in front of the regulators, asking them to love us
  Dan Robinson Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 20:30 UTC 4

  The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published Nvidia and Arm's responses to its renewed probing of the proposed takeover of Arm by Nvidia.

  Unsurprisingly, Nvidia rejects that it would block access to Arm's intellectual property from competitors, and the pair claim that the alternative scenario of Arm spun-off from present owner Softbank would be unable to make sufficient R&D investments to ensure its future viability.

  Last year, the UK government tasked the CMA with looking deeper into the proposed $40bn acquisition after the watchdog raised in a report misgivings from customers and other industry players. These groups feared move could harm competition. In particular, rivals were worried that Nvidia might lock them out of licensing Arm's designs for its widely used processors.

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• Avira also mines imaginary internet money on customers' PCs

  Who should your PC work for: you, or your antivirus vendor?
  Liam Proven in Prague Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 18:36 UTC 17

  Germany-based security biz Avira's antivirus has enabled a new feature: "Avira Crypto". It's opt-in, but if you click "yes", the AV will use your computer to mine Ethereum.

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• 50 US airports to be surrounded by 5G C-band-free zones

  AT&T and Verizon come to agreement with FAA on tech rollout
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 17:51 UTC 14

  Live close to an airport in US and have a 5G handset? The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has released a promised list of major American airports to be surrounded by buffer zones that won't have 5G-C band service.

  The tech is slated to go live on January 19th.

  The selected 50 airports – which include JFK, LAX and SFO – were chosen based on traffic volume, number of low-visibility days and geographic location, said the FAA in a canned statement.

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• Supply and demand means TSMC set to beat revenue expectations for Q4 2021

  What happens when you're top of the pile and everyone wants chips
  Dan Robinson Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 17:06 UTC 3

  TSMC looks set to beat its own revenue guidance for calendar Q4 of 2021 if the latest monthly figures are anything to go by, rounding off a year of strong growth for the semiconductor industry as a whole.

  The Taiwanese chipmaker is currently in a quiet period, during which it refrains from making contact with the investment community, however it is scheduled to reveal all in its earnings conference on 13 January.

  In its current guidance for investors, TSMC estimates that Q4 '21 net revenue would fall somewhere in the region of US$15.4bn to 15.7bn. However, a glance at the monthly figures published for the last three months of 2021 show the chip giant brought in a grand total of NT$438bn, which indicate it has surpassed those expectations with a figure somewhere in the region of US$15.8bn.

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• French tech giant Atos issues second profit warning in 7 months

  Week 2 for new CEO, forced to report sliding sales, delayed projects to investors
  Paul Kunert Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 16:16 UTC 2

  Atos has issued a profit warning following a "major" contract revision with a UK financial services customer, as well as wider project slippages and lower reselling revenue.

  The French firm told investors this morning it is unlikely to meet commercial forecasts for calendar 2021, outlined in July. Turnover of 5 per cent has morphed into a decline of 2.4 per cent to €10.8bn; operating margin is said to be nearer to 4 per cent of revenue than 6 per cent, and free cash flow is estimated to have changed to -€420m.

  The latest set of numbers is not yet finalised or audited, and lands just days after Rodolphe Belmer took over as CEO at Atos last week when the financial data was being "collected and consolidated," as the exec was quick to point out.

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• Spruce up your CV or just bin it? Survey finds recruiters are considering alternatives

  Shock: Nobody likes whiteboard interviews either
  Richard Speed Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 15:29 UTC 37

  A survey of nearly 14,000 coders and recruiters has shown that 70 per cent of devs prefer remote work while some headhunters are considering dropping the curriculum vitae (CV) from the hiring process.

  Although more than half of the recruiters that responded reported a budget increase (and 35 per cent were planning to hire more than 50 developers), actually finding qualified candidates is a struggle. Filling vacancies for full-stack and back-end engineers are predicted to be particularly problematic.

  Rather than going by the CV's take on work experience and educational accomplishment, live interviews and assessment tests are being proposed as ways of spotting the most skilled candidates for the job. That said, while 30 per cent of respondents said they would be willing to remove CVs from the process and 27 per cent thought "maybe", a chunky 34 per cent gave a very definite "No," showing that there is life in the old dog yet.

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• Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes

  The solution? Click the annoying error messages away and keep printing
  Richard Currie Mon 10 Jan 2022 // 14:32 UTC 50

  The ongoing semiconductor shortage has reached the point that it's affecting one of the most-hated aspects of printing – copy-protection chips on ink cartridges.

  That's right, the function that enables printers to scream about foreign bodies if you dare to use a third-party cartridge or potentially prevent the printer from working at all.

  Japanese electronics outfit Canon has had to admit, by way of its German tentacle, that it's having such a hard time getting hold of components that it's been forced to ship toner cartridges without the chip fitted.

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