Daily Tech News 31 August 2021

• ARM China has hoisted the black flag and started slitting throats. (ExtremeTech)
  
  SoftBank - owners of ARM - thought it was a good idea to form a joint venture with China where they only held 49% of the company. The CEO of the joint venture was fired last year for running a business on the side, and went rogue, claiming he owns the company, and started firing any staff who wouldn't follow his instructions.
  
  The Chinese authorities are perfectly happy with this situation because it lets them walk away with a lot of ARM intellectual property. Only older designs - up to the A77 - but not garbage.
  
  Of course this means that no-one with any sense will enter a joint venture with China again, but it was a pretty dumb move to start with.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile China is working to scrub what's left of its internet of inconvenient truths. (Bloomberg)
  
  It appears they've recently started heading back from fascism to communism, which means the oppression will remain the same but the economy will disintegrate.
  
  
  

• Movie companies want VPNs to lose the P. (TorrentFreak)
  
  In essence - given the way a VPN works - they want to ban arithmetic. That's what it all comes down to - all the laws on end-to-end encryption and backdoors for law enforcement and VPN logging are attempts to ban arithmetic.
  
  
  
• The best consumer hard drives. (AnandTech)
  
  While I'd love to go SSD-only, it still costs at least three times as much per gigabyte, and doesn't really make sense if you just want a big storage array where you dump copies of everything in existence.
  
  Since there are now only three makers of hard drives - Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba - the roundup is relatively straightforward, and they helpfully highlight the best bargains in green.
  
  
  
• Which reminds me: I recently said there are no good small Android tablets.
  
  I was incorrect. There's the Lenovo Tab M8 FHD. (Lenovo)
  
  It's the smaller cousin to the 10" model I got recently. Same 8-core CPU, but with just 3GB RAM and 32GB of built-in storage. But it does have a 1920x1200 screen, which is what I see as the minimum for good typography at that screen size (which matters if you read a lot), and it would be a hell of a lot faster than my ancient Nexus 7.
  
  And for $120 you can't go too far wrong. Except that it's completely unavailable in Australia. Even eBay turned up empty. I could order it from AliExpress and keep my fingers crossed for six weeks.
  
  Lenovo also seems to have released four new 11" tablets - the P11, P11 Plus, P11 Pro, and Yoga Tab 11. Those are rather more expensive (and a lot bigger and heavier) but the P11 Pro has a 2560x1600 OLED display, which would be great for watching TV and movies.
  
  
  
• A bug in the latest version of the Google Search App prevents some models of Android phones from making or receiving phone calls. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I understand that there are people who still do that.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:54 AM

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