Arm cancells Qualcomm's licence to develop & sell chips using ARM architecture

According to Bloomberg, Arm has issued Qualcomm a "60-day notice of the cancellation of their so-called architectural license agreement". If this licence is cancelled, it means Qualcomm can no longer sell Arm based chips. The dispute has been on going since 2022 and is centered around Nuvia - a startup with its own Arm licence that Qualcomm acquired and has since used to develop the cores in the Snapdragon X "desktop" SoCs and just this week, will be using in their mobile Snapdragon SoCs. Arm reckons the licence needs to be renegotiated now that Qualcomm owns Nuvia and that all designs made post-Qualcomm acquisition using that licence need to be scrapped. Qualcomm obviously doesn't want to do that, so in come the lawyers. Serve The Home has a good explainer as to why Arm is beefing with one of it's biggest customers and what each side is risking.

LocateX is a surveillance platform that uses internet ads to track people in the real world

404 Media and Krebs on Security are both running stories about LocateX, a platform that "allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Google Android and Apple mobile devices". LocateX essentially buys up al the advertising data it can, sucks it up into one platform and sells it to law enforcement so they can track people without a warrant. 404 Media saw how LocateX can be used to track a phone of someone visiting an abortion clinic, a big deal in the US where even accessing this type of health care across state lines is a criminal offense. There's another example of it being used to track jurors, which could be used to potentially intimidate them. It's wild that all this tracking is a result of advertising, not even anything useful.

DTA reports lacklustre results of Copilot use in Australian public service

The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) published a report "providing a detailed view of how some 5765 Copilot licences were used in the first six months of 2024". The participants in the trial "consistently reported quality and efficiency improvements in 3 key activities: summarisation of content, creating first drafts and information searches", but Copilot was still underwhelming for most as many believed it would help them "spend less time in emails" and "attend fewer meetings", but that was not the case. There were also concerns that "transcribing every meeting with AI could make detailed minutes of meetings fair game for freedom of information requests, which, in turn, may mean participants are less likely to engage in those forums". Full report available here.

Spinorama is a good website for objective speaker data

Been thinking about upgrading my home cinema recently and as part of that planning, I've been using a website called Spinorama heavily to help me decide which speakers would be a worthy upgrade from the 20+ year old Krix units I'm currently using. Spinorama collates output from Klippel Near Field Scanners, a device that can measure speaker frequency response as if it was in an anechoic chamber, without the vast expense of an anechoic chamber. With this data we get objective measurements of a speaker's quality instead of the usual audiophile wankery or a manufacturer's marketing numbers. It obviously doesn't take into account how the speaker will sound in your room or your personal preferences in a speaker, but it's an excellent starting point to separate the wheat from the chaff.