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As the world grapples with an ongoing chip shortage, a quiet giant among chipmakers has committed to investing $100 billion over three years to ramp up production. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company may not be a household name, but with a market value of over $550 billion, it’s one of the world’s 10 most valuable companies. Now, it’s leveraging its considerable resources to bring the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing back to U.S. soil. CNBC got an exclusive tour of the $12 billion fabrication plant, or fab, outside Phoenix, Arizona, where TSMC will start making 5-nanometer chips in 2024. The company...

...The cars — equipped with technology and a human driver in case of emergencies — appear completely baffled as they take in the street and make a multi-point turn to get out of the dead end, CBS San Francisco reported. Not long after one car is gone, another one shows up and does the same thing. And it never really stops, according to the street's residents.... ...The company was originally Google's self-driving car project before becoming a separate subsidiary of the tech giant's parent, Alphabet. It launched a ride-hailing program with its self-driving vehicles in San Francisco for "Trusted Testers"...

The Pentagon's first ever chief software officer resigned last month in protest at the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military, claiming the failure to respond to China winning the Artificial Intelligence battle is putting the U.S. at risk. Nicolas Chaillan, 37, told the Financial Times after resigning: 'We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years.' 'Right now, it's already a done deal – it is already over in my opinion,' he added. 'Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal.' Chaillan worked for three years on a Pentagon project...

(CNN Business)Just days after several of its major services went down for about six hours, Facebook is suffering another outage. "We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," the company said on its verified Twitter account on Friday. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience." Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo sharing service, also announced on Twitter that some of its users were facing issues. The disruption initially appeared to be smaller than what those platforms and others faced earlier in the week...

Wait… did ⁦@JoeBiden⁩ just call Lori Lightfoot “Mr. Mayor?” What am I missing? pic.twitter.com/J3o3Ohb7Oz — Kate Hyde (@KateHydeNY) October 7, 2021 Does Biden know something we don’t about Lori Lightfoot?

Users of popular forum website Reddit are fuming once more as the social media platform experiences its second global outage in as many days. Connectivity issues on the site have been detected across the globe, including in the UK, US, Canada and Australia. The disruption was confirmed by Down Detector, a website that tracks the status of social media platforms. Data from the site shows that the amount of reports of Reddit being down skyrocketed by 11 times just before 3am today.... .

Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers struggled to access their accounts this morning following technical issues across all three banks. Complaints on social media show people were unable to use both mobile banking and apps.... ...Outage tracker DownDetector showed the issues started around 6am with 2,000 people complaining of technical difficulties with Lloyds Bank....

Facebook staff said they experienced "what felt like a snow day" when the site's global outage left them paralysed on Monday. ...A Facebook employee reportedly said workers were not able to enter buildings to examine the scale of the outage on Monday.... ....Meanwhile other members of staff at Facebook said it felt like they were having a 'snow day' as the firm's internal tools and communications also went down yesterday. This meant no one was able to do any work, tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted... The issues were caused by a faulty configuration change, according to Facebook. Explaining the outage,...

Facebook executives are preparing for a whistleblower to accuse the network of contributing to the Capitol riot by turning online safeguards off too soon after the presidential election. The whistleblower, whose identity has not been publicly revealed, is expected to make the fresh allegations and reveal her identity in a bombshell interview on CBS's 60 Minutes Sunday. Facebook went into damage control Friday ahead of the interview sending a 1,500-word email to its employees attempting to prepare them for the allegations about to surface. The email, from the company's Vice President of Policy and Global Affairs Nick Clegg and obtained...

The tech executive referenced in the criminal case against leading cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann was identified Thursday as an industry pioneer who’s founded the world’s first commercial internet hosting company, is an expert in detecting malware and holds 10 patents. Rodney Joffe is the person referred to as “Tech Executive-1” in Sussman’s indictment for allegedly lying to the FBI by withholding his connections to Hillary Clinton’s losing 2016 election campaign against former President Donald Trump, according to CNN... ..Joffe also founded and was chief technology officer of Genuity, which was the first company to offer commercial hosting services that allow...

Johnny Lin, a former Apple engineer and co-founder of the software company Lockdown Privacy says Apple's "Ask App Not To Track" button is a "dud" that gives users "a false sense of privacy," according to a Washington Post report. Even if users request apps not to collect their activity across other companies' apps and websites, popular iPhone apps like Subway Surfers still collect personal data, a new study by Lockdown Privacy determined. "We found that App Tracking Transparency made no difference...

Aggressive ravens have forced a drone delivery service to pause flights altogether after bizarre footage emerged of the birds attacking them in the skies above Australia's capital. The service Wing, run in collaboration with Google, offers Canberra residents the option to buy essential items like coffee, food, medicine and hardware supplies through a drone which drops off each package to their homes. But lately in the northern suburb of Harrison those eagerly awaiting their morning lattes have instead been greeted by vicious ravens...

Minutes before former President Donald Trump left office, a shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank took control over a large chunk of internet space owned by the Pentagon. Now the Department of Defense has reclaimed the 175 million IP addresses - about six percent the size of the entire current internet - from Global Resource Systems LLC, which is headquartered in Plantation, Florida, the Washington Post reported Friday. 'It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,' said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company....

Google has temporarily locked some Afghan government email accounts in an apparent attempt to head off the Taliban’s hunt for the identities of former officials who worked with the recently collapsed US-backed administration. “In consultation with experts, we are continuously assessing the situation in Afghanistan. We are taking temporary actions to secure relevant accounts, as information continues to come in,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement obtained by The Post.... ...Days after the Taliban entered Kabul on Aug. 15, Google-owned YouTube said it would “terminate” any account it believes to be operated by the extremist group. By contrast, Twitter...

Ragnarok, a hacking gang that’s locked victims out of their computers and extorted them since 2019, suddenly appears to have called it quits. The group shared a free tool Thursday that will help previous victims unlock their files and gain access to their computers again, according to security researchers. It’s not clear why Ragnarok is abandoning its pilfering ways. But the apparent decision to self-destruct is a move that other ransomware gangs have been adopting as well. Ragnarok is the fifth ransomware operator that’s appeared to backtrack on its previous grift following increased international attention to ransomware hacking. Ziggy ransomware...

A California judge on Wednesday cleared the way for conservative talk radio host Larry Elder to join the field of candidates for an upcoming recall election aimed at removing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom from office. Elder scored a swift court victory in Sacramento, where he challenged a decision by state election officials to block him from the September recall ballot. In a tweet, Elder wrote, “Victory! My next one will be on Sept. 14 at the ballot box.” Superior Court Judge Laurie M. Earl disagreed with a state decision that Elder failed to meet requirements to qualify to run in...

Over the past few months I have been writing analysis on a planned crisis war game organized by the World Economic Forum called "Cyber Polygon." The event will be held this week on July 9th, and it's allegedly designed to simulate a massive cyberattack that somehow disrupts the global supply chain, or at the very least disrupts the supply chain of multiple large economies. Why am I so interested in this war game? Well, many of my readers will recall that the last major simulation the WEF and the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation held was Event 201, a global...

New Delhi -- The Government on Wednesday asserted that microblogging platform Twitter has lost its legal protection in India because it deliberately chose non-compliance despite multiple opportunities to it. Losing legal protection means Twitter’s top executives, including the nation’s managing director, face police questioning and criminal liability under the Indian Penal Code over “unlawful and inflammatory” content posted by users on Twitter. Accusing Twitter of deliberately refusing to comply with Indian laws, in identical posts on Twitter as well as its Indian rival Koo, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Twitter was given “multiple opportunities to comply” but it...

In Virginia, Loudoun County Public Schools officials were warned Friday to revoke their suspension of a teacher for declining to use students’ preferred pronouns or face further legal action. Tanner Cross, who taught at Leesburg Elementary School, was suspended after speaking publicly May 26 during a school board meeting in opposition to the system’s proposed policy that teachers must use the pronouns preferred by students rather than the pronouns consistent with their biological sex. Cross was informed May 28 that he was being suspended “pending an investigation of allegation that [he] engaged in conduct that had a disruptive impact on...

“I am a proven winner and the only outsider who can put an end to Gavin Newsom’s disastrous time as governor,” Jenner said in a statement. The Olympic gold medalist and transgender rights activist is a longtime Republican and joins a crowded field of conservatives hoping to unseat Newsom, who has been the state’s Democratic governor for the past two years. The petition signatures calling for a recall election are still being verified by California election officials, but if it passes, an election would be held “no earlier than Nov. 2 and as late as Nov. 30,” according to a...