Free Republic

The weekend is about to look a little less like the weekend for the bosses at one of the world’s largest technology and manufacturing companies. Samsung will soon require its executives to work six days a week, according to an April 18 report from the Korea Economic Daily. The Korea-based conglomerate, which makes Galaxy smartphones, flatscreen televisions, appliances and a wide range of other devices, is a stalwart of the tech industry. It generates tens of billions of dollars of revenue every quarter. But after a weak financial year, the executives leading that effort will have to put in one...

Google spent $26 billion to hide this phone setting from youGoogle goes to great lengths to be your default search engine and keep you from switching. Here’s why you should make your own choice. There’s a setting on your phone and web browser that Google is desperate to keep you from discovering. How desperate? In 2021 alone, Google paid Apple, Samsung and others $26.3 billion to keep it buried. That’s more money each year than McDonald’s makes selling burgers. This setting affects who gets to track your location and watch what you look up online. It affects the usefulness...

U.S. glassmaker to boost South Korean production for foldable phones SEOUL -- U.S. specialty glass producer Corning will invest $1.5 billion in South Korea to increase supply capacity for products including ultrathin, bendable glass used in Samsung Electronics' foldable smartphones. Corning CEO Wendell Weeks announced the investment at a ceremony on Friday celebrating the 50th anniversary of the company's entry into South Korea. Corning's South Korean production hub is in Asan, adjacent to a major Samsung display division facility. Corning started its South Korea business in 1973 by building a joint venture factory with Samsung to produce glass for television...

Samsung could report its worst profit in 14 years this week, as prices for memory chips, its biggest business, continue to fall, while demand stays weak. The South Korean technology giant guided earlier this month that it would post operating profit of 600 billion Korean won ($449 million) for the first quarter. If Samsung reports this number, it would be the company’s lowest profit since the first quarter of 2009. Samsung releases preliminary earnings guidance, but does not give detailed figures. It reports its full first quarter earnings on Thursday. Samsung is the world’s largest maker of memory chips, which...

<p>WikiLeaks says Samsung smart TVs were hacked to enable spying on consumers.</p><p>In a trove of documents released Tuesday, WikiLeaks included code that it says shows the CIA worked with U.K. intelligence officials to turn microphones in TVs into listening devices.</p>

Samsung and TSMC are facing an investigation by the US International Trade Commission (USITC) over allegations of patent infringement involving chips and mobile devices containing those chips. The USITC said that it will begin an investigation based on a complaint filed by Daedalus Prime LLC of Bronxville, New York, in September. The complaint alleges violations of section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 in the import into the US of semiconductor devices, and mobile devices containing those chips, which allegedly infringe patents claimed by the company. According to the USITC's notice of investigation [PDF], the patent infringement claims cover...

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has cut down its orders to suppliers according to reports in the Taiwanese press. TSMC, which is facing an industry slowdown as its customers struggle with demand slowdown, cut down capital expenditures for 2022 earlier this year, and the firm cited a lack of demand forecasting as the primary reason behind the drawdown. Now, the firm is also rumored to have significantly reduced its 3-nanometer output estimates for this year, in the latest bit of speculation surrounding the advanced chip manufacturing technology scheduled to enter production in the current quarter. Today's report comes courtesy...

China is losing its influence; it’s in decline. At the same time, however, China, ruled by a despotic regime, is responsible for 28.7 percent of global manufacturing output (more than 10 percentage points ahead of its No. 1 rival, the United States). This utter dependence on China for manufacturing must be stopped. As I write this, three countries are working to siphon customers away from China. Will their efforts prove to be successful?I speak from experience when I say the following: communist China is not a fun place to live in. Moreover, with its frequent power cuts and the Chinese...

Government agencies and private security companies in the U.S. have found a cost-effective way to engage in warrantless surveillance of individuals, groups and places: a pay-for-access web tool called Fog Reveal. The tool enables law enforcement officers to see “patterns of life” – where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit. The tool’s maker, Fog Data Science, claims to have billions of data points from over 250 million U.S. mobile devices. Fog Reveal came to light when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for online civil liberties, was investigating...

This is a public service announcement! Check your drawers for any Samsung (or different brand) phones that aren't in use, as they are a potential fire hazard! In case you follow the smartphone industry, particularly on YouTube and Twitter, you'd know that there have been recent reports of Samsung phones that are … "blowing up", or at least about to. Despite trying, in the end Samsung wasn't able to handle the Note 7 battery crisis. The company recalled the defective phones and released a fresh batch of Note 7s (after having changed its battery supplier). The issues persisted, and the...

Samsung statement: “ We can confirm that none of our employees at Samsung Ukraine has been hurt. Some of the office windows were damaged due to the impact from the blast that occurred 150 meters away. We remain committed to ensuring the safety of our employees and will continue to closely monitor the situation.” It is being reported that a Russian missile has landed right next to a large civilian building where Samsung’s R&D office is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. It is said that it is one of the company’s biggest R&D offices in Europe and the company’s regional headquarter....

Walmart has a new sales pitch for consumers contending with soaring prices: Buy used goods https://t.co/ed9uCwfeqF— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) July 29, 2022

In what could be the biggest economic investment in Central Texas history, technology giant Samsung is considering building 11 new chipmaking facilities in the Austin area over the next two decades, a stunning move that could lead to nearly $200 billion in new investment and create more than 10,000 jobs, according to documents filed with the state. Fresh off announcing plans to build a $17 billion semiconductor factory in Taylor, Samsung could increase its investment in the region by more than 10 times that amount if the proposed facilities were to be built.

NEW YORK – China’s semiconductor industry has lagged the US in patents and lagged South Korea and Taiwan in fabrication, but it hopes to leapfrog its competition by adopting revolutionary new chip design technologies. Advanced chips used in 5G smartphones and some workstations squeeze billions of transistors onto a fingernail-sized chip by shrinking the dimensions of the transistor itself to 3 to 5 nanometers. Most chips have gate widths of 28 nanometers and higher. Etching tiny circuits on silicon is enormously difficult. Only the Dutch manufacturer ASML makes the lithography machines that use the short wavelengths at the extreme end...

Russian companies have been plunged into a technological crisis by western sanctions that have created severe bottlenecks in the supply of semiconductors, electrical equipment and the hardware needed to power the nation’s data centres. Most of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, including Intel, Samsung, TSMC and Qualcomm, have halted business to Russia entirely after the US, UK and Europe imposed export controls on products using chips made or designed in the US or Europe. This has created a shortfall in the type of larger, low-end chips that go into the production of cars, household appliances and military equipment. Supplies of...

Samsung Electronics is preparing to increase prices for chip contract manufacturing in the second half of this year which comes as no surprise given skyrocketing cost pressures eating away at the company’s margins. Samsung’s contract-based chip prices are set to increase between 15-20% given the level of manufacturing complexity, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter, adding the new pricing model has been discussed and negotiated with clients. Samsung’s decision comes as the cost of energy, raw materials, equipment, freight, and labor are rapidly soaring. The move was “inevitable,” said Masahiro Wakasugi, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. Another component driving...

Received a mandatory update (34) alert on my Samsung Galaxy S10e. You can delay the install, but not avoid it. Now all internet access starts from a Google Chrome page. While you can uninstall Google Chrome, you also lose access to Google maps. And those duckduckgo searches you thought were private....uh, no, they are sitting there listed as "recent searches".

NEW YORK ­– Taiwan’s chip fabricators signed an agreement on December 3 to create their own semiconductor equipment industry, opening an “option to decouple from the West,” in the view of a prominent US research firm. The Taiwanese initiative responds to Washington’s extraterritorial sanctions on buyers of US fabricating equipment, imposed by then-president Donald Trump in May 2020. The US asserts the right to block sales of chips produced with US machines or intellectual property. The US sanctions shut off Chinese tech giant Huawei’s access to high-end chips of 7 nanometers and below, crippling what previously was the world’s top...

Samsung is set to build a new $17 billion computer chip factory in Taylor, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reported. An official announcement could come as early as Tuesday, people familiar with the matter told the Journal, and comes as the Biden administration makes a push for expanding semiconductor production in the U.S. Spokespeople for Samsung and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who is scheduled to make an economic announcement later Tuesday, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Samsung told the Journal that a “final decision has not yet been made regarding the location.” Based...

WSJ reports Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is scheduled to make a major “economic announcement” on Tuesday at 5 pm local time concerning new plans for a massive semiconductor plant in Taylor, Texas. South Korean tech giant, Samsung Electronics Co., is doubling down in Texas with another facility, about 30 miles from its manufacturing hub in Austin. The new Taylor facility will cost a whopping $17 billion and create 1,800 jobs. Chip production wouldn’t start until the second half of 2024. WSJ said officials in Taylor incentivized Samsung by giving them “property-tax breaks of up to 92.5% for the first ten...