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Zoom Suspends Activist for Tiananmen Square Event
Zoom suspends U.S.-based activist's account after Tiananmen Square commemoration event
Zoom shut down the account of an activist who was holding an event on the video conferencing platform to commemorate China's Tiananmen Square crackdown.
The move has prompted accusations that Zoom, a U.S. company, has bowed to pressure from Beijing.
U.S.-based rights group Humanitarian China held an event on Zoom on May 31 to commemorate those who lost their lives in the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989. The topic is taboo in China and references to it online are heavily censored.
The account that hosted the event was shut down on June 7, according to Zhou Fengsuo, who founded Humanitarian China and took part in the 1989 protests as a student. The account has since been reinstated.
Also at The Guardian.
Kim Yo-jong, the Leader We've Been Waiting for
North Korean leader's sister emerges as policymaker in spat with South Korea
The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is taking a leading role in a new, more hard-line pressure campaign against South Korea, highlighting what analysts say is a substantive policy role that goes beyond being her brother’s assistant.
[...] this year, Kim has taken on a more public policy role, cementing her status as an influential political player in her own right.
“Prior to this, Kim Yo Jong was portrayed in state media as Kim Jong Un’s sister, his protocol officer, or one of his accompanying officials,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a former North Korea open source intelligence analyst in the U.S. government. “Now, North Koreans know for sure there is more to her than that.”
Kim has worked behind the scenes in North Korea’s propaganda agencies, a role that led the United States to add her to a list of sanctioned senior officials in 2017 because of human rights abuses and censorship.
In March, state media carried the first ever statement by Kim, in which she criticised South Korean authorities. That was followed by several more, including a response to comments by Trump, and last week, a warning that the North would cut communications with South Korea.
Lee said Kim’s statements have a unique style, showcasing her wit and underscoring her powerful position.
“In addition to the harsh words and sarcasm, they can be bitingly witty in ways that the other statements are not,” Lee said. “She seems to have more leeway in crafting her statements, which of course is not surprising.”
Defund the Police
Democratic leaders clash with Black Lives Matter activists over 'defund the police'
As Trump seizes on the slogan to paint his opponents as radicals who envision a world of lawlessness and anarchy, Biden and most other Democrats are resisting the left's calls and floating more modest measures to curtail bad police behavior.
“No, I don't support defunding the police," Biden told CBS Evening News on Monday. "I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community."
Johnetta Elzie, a civil rights activist and organizer, said Biden's calls for "reform" sound stale, mealy-mouthed and out of touch as "black people are still dying behind these antiquated ideas and policies."
"It's not enough. Joe Biden knows it's not enough. Joe Biden's team knows it's not enough. It's not at all answering the calls of the moment," Elzie said. "People have been saying to anyone who's f---ing up in this moment: Read the room. People are calling for defunding the police.
"People in power — politicians and policymakers — are still talking about reform. We're beyond that. We're over that," she said. "If they wanted reform, they would have done it six years ago when we actually had the chance to. But that's not what happened."
The clash pits an ideological movement aiming to transform the national debate against a Democratic electoral apparatus whose overriding goal is to defeat Trump. While activists say they believe the need for radical change is worth taking political risks, party leaders say they worry about alienating moderate white voters who sympathize with the protesters' cause but still support police.
[...] Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, was loudly booed and forced to retreat from a gathering of demonstrators Saturday after he responded to a question about whether he would commit to defunding the police by saying, "I do not support the full abolition of the police."
When pressed to explain what the slogan means in policy terms, activists say "defund the police" is not actually a call for a country with no cops.
"It does not mean a world where we do not have safety and justice. It does not mean a world where we do not have order," Robinson said. "But what it does mean is that right now we seem to try to solve all of our society's problems by increasing the role and responsibility of law enforcement, and it has not worked."
Elzie said "defund the police" means "reducing police budgets, to me, down to the bare minimum."
[...] "It's not the job of activists to present poll-tested ideas," said Sean McElwee, a left-wing organizer and data scientist who popularized #AbolishICE. "It's the job of activists to demand we imagine a world built on fundamentally different assumptions. We've already seen a number of concrete and actionable policies that can fundamentally change the way we understand policing in this country."
More Than 4 GB VRAM Becoming Standard
AMD Hints at More Than 4 GB Graphics Memory As Standard on Next-Gen Radeon RX Graphics Card
In a recent blog post, AMD might have hinted at the end of the 4 GB entry-level graphics cards era as we get closer to the launch of the first RDNA 2 powered Radeon RX graphics cards. The blog post that is cleverly titled 'Game Beyond 4GB' compares AMD's most entry-level Navi based Radeon RX graphics card, the 5500 XT, in both 4 GB and 8 GB flavors and shows how the increased VRAM size not only delivers better performance but has become crucial from a support point of view in next-generation AAA titles.
Currently, AMD's entry-level Radeon RX graphics card lineup consists of the Radeon RX 5500 XT which has two variants, one with 4 GB GDDR6 memory and a second variant with 8 GB GDDR6 memory. In addition to its Navi based cards, AMD's older Polaris based options continue to sell large volumes and have several options to select from with the majority being 8 GB variants that we saw become a standard in the last generation of Polaris offerings.
AMD in its own testing reports up to 24% performance improvement in AAA titles using an 8 GB Radeon RX 5500 XT versus a 4 GB variant. Modern titles such as Borderlands 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Forza Horizon 4, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Doom Eternal, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus were tested, all of which showed marked improvement over the 4 GB option.
Also at Guru3D.
Frankly speaking, neither is 8.
laughs (cries?) in heavily modified 8K textures Skyrim Mods
PineTab Linux Tablet + Optional RTL-SDR Expansion Module
PineTab Linux Tablet will have an Optional RTL-SDR Expansion Module
What's interesting about the PineTab is that they are advertising that they are working on expansion options, with one expansion module being an RTL-SDR. It seems that the expansion module will allow cards to be inserted internally, keeping everything tidy on the outside. Apart from the RTL-SDR, they will also offer LoRa, LTE (with GPS) and sata SSD add on cards.
May Update: PineTab Pre-Orders, PinePhone Qi Charging & More!
AMD Ryzen 3900X/3800X/3600X Refresh
It looks like AMD will launch some Zen 2 refresh CPUs to stave off Intel's Whatever Lake before the Zen 3 launch:
If correct, these should replace the 3900X, 3800X, and 3600X, boosting clocks a bit. Pricing would be the same as the original lineup ($500, $400, $250 respectively), while the older chips will get price cuts.
Separately, Tom's Hardware reported replacements for 3800X and 3700X:
AMD Reportedly Planning Two New Ryzen 3000-Series CPUs
The Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 7 3700X are the two potential Zen 2 candidates that could undergo the refresh treatment. If there is a tiny bit of credence in the rumors, AMD will market the rewarmed parts as the Ryzen 7 3850X and Ryzen 7 3750X with the latter having already surfaced in AMD's Product Master guide since last year. In other words, the Ryzen 7 3850X and Ryzen 7 3750X would just be higher-binned variants of their vanilla counterparts.
Hot Chips 2020 in August
Online-only conference, August 16th to August 18th.
IBM, USCB, and Google's quantum computing presentations should be interesting in light of: Some Serious Drama Went Down on Google’s Quantum Computing Team and IBM and Google disagree on quantum computing achievement
Other interesting presentations:
Marvell ThunderX3 ARM server CPU
2nd generation of the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine
Alibaba RISC-V
ARM Cortex-M55
DeepMind and Google's 2nd and 3rd generation tensor processing units (TPUs)
Manticore: A 4096-core RISC-V Chiplet Architecture for Ultra-efficient Floating-point Computing
Baidu Kunlun AI processor
Alibaba Hanguang 800 NPU
Grubman Shire Meiselas HACK: Trump Emails?
The unidentified cybergang who dumped Lady Gaga's data after the hack of a prominent entertainment law firm have dumped what they say is data about the president.
The cybergang dropped links to "the first part of data, with the most harmless information," on the dark web site. A sampling of the files reviewed by Business Insider were were legal emails, documents, and contracts mentioning the president, from an "Apprentice" costar's emails seeking to land a new show during his campaign, to the contracts negotiating legal use of his videotaped interviews.
The ransomware gang has stolen data from businesses and leaked it on a dark web site in the past, and a ransomware expert who has followed past data dumps said it's difficult to know what they data they have stolen – but said the crime adds to a wave of highly public ransomware extortion attacks.
Criminal group that hacked law firm threatens to release Trump documents
Hackers Release Dozens of Law Firm’s Emails Citing Trump, but There’s No ‘Dirty Laundry’
The criminals’ claims to have revealing info on Trump in connection with their hack of Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks were puzzling, given that the law firm has never represented Donald Trump or the Trump Organization.
The hackers claimed the emails they released Saturday contain “the most harmless information” about Trump — apparently trying to imply they are holding back more compelling material. But considering that what they published contained nothing remotely interesting, it seems likely that the cybercriminals are vastly exaggerating the value of the data they’ve stolen.
Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks refused to pay the cyberthieves’ initial $21 million ransom, after which the hackers doubled their demand to $42 million. Now that it’s clear the law firm, which has brought in the FBI to conduct a criminal investigation, will not even negotiate with the criminal ring, the hackers are claiming they will auction off the client data they stole on the dark web.
The attack on the Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks network, which appears to have occurred on or around May 7, allegedly resulted in the theft of documents on multiple music and entertainment figures. The hackers have claimed those include Lady Gaga, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Bruce Springsteen, Mary J. Blige, Ella Mai, Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey, Cam Newton, Bette Midler, Jessica Simpson, Priyanka Chopra, Idina Menzel and Run DMC.
What is the name of the group?
TSMC "5nm" Products Leak, Includes Intel
Products manufactured on the upcoming TSMC 5nm have already been confirmed in a leak from ChinaTimes and while it had products that we were already expecting: AMD Zen 4 CPUs, AMD Radeon RDNA 3 GPUs and NVIDIA Hopper GPU, it also had an unexpected entry: Intel's Xe graphics. There have been a lot of rumblings on the rumor mill of Intel moving to 5nm and this is another feather in that hat. While the bit about AMD CPUs and GPUs and NVIDIA Hopper is confirmed, I would take the portion about Intel Xe with a grain of salt because as per my information - nothing is set in stone right now.
[...] 2021~2022 Mass Production:
AMD: Zen4-architecture CPUs and RDNA3-architecture GPUs
Broadcom: High-speed network processor
Qualcomm: Snapdragon 875 and X60 and other 5G modem
Nvidia: Hopper-architecture GPUs
Mediatek: Dimensity 2000 series 5G chips
Intel: Xe-architecture GPUs or FPGA
Apple: A15 application processor
Huawei HiSilicon: Kirin 1100, AI and Server processors
Zen 4 may launch in late 2021, but could easily slip into 2022.
Intel was said to be producing a high-end GPU on TSMC "7nm", so this would be a follow-up. It could also be an indication that their own "7nm" process (comparable to TSMC "5nm") is failing, or they are hedging their bets and can make any product they want on that node.
Dimensity 1000 looked good on paper, so the follow-up should be interesting.
Separate Snapdragon 875 info:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 flagship 5nm chipset’s details leaked
WTF is "Bluetooth Milan"?
World Too Bleak for Black Mirror Season 6
Black Mirror creator not working on season 6 because we already feel depressed
Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker believes humanity could use a bleakness break.
Brooker revealed to the U.K.'s Radio Times that he's not currently working on writing season 6 of Netflix's Emmy-winning series because we've already found ourselves plunged into a nightmarish dystopia like those explored in his shows.
‘Black Mirror’ Creator Says the World Is Too Bleak Right Now for Season 6 to Happen
