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Apple is hiring engineers for a new office in Southern California to develop wireless chips that could eventually replace components supplied by Broadcom and Skyworks Solutions.

The company is seeking a few dozen people to develop wireless chips in Irvine, where Broadcom, Skyworks and other companies have offices. Recent job listings show that Apple wants employees with experience in modem chips and other wireless semiconductors.

It’s part of a broader strategy of expanding satellite offices, letting the tech giant target engineering hotbeds and attract employees who might not want to work at its home base in Silicon Valley. The approach also has helped Apple further its goal of making more of its own components.

Shares of wireless-chip makers slid Thursday after Bloomberg reported on the effort. Skyworks fell as much as 11%, marking its biggest intraday plunge since March 2020. Broadcom and Qualcomm Inc. declined more than 4% each.

Apple’s interest in hiring talent related to a particular technology is usually bad news for the existing providers. The company has increasingly touted the importance of its in-house chip designs in making its products stand out. Intel Corp., the industry’s biggest company, has joined growing a list of chipmakers that have lost their grip on Apple products.

In 2018, Apple started recruiting engineers in San Diego, home of Qualcomm. Two years later, Apple chip chief Johny Srouji told employees that the company is developing its own cellular modem to eventually replace Qualcomm’s offerings.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the Irvine push. Representatives for Broadcom and Skyworks didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Irvine expansion is in its early stages, and Apple plans to increase its presence gradually. The company also is still working out its companywide return-to-office plans. Just Wednesday, Apple scrapped its Feb. 1 deadline for corporate employees to go back to in-person work.

But staffing up in Irvine is the latest sign Apple is bringing more technology in-house. Engineers will work on wireless radios, radio-frequency integrated circuits and a wireless system-on-a-chip, or SoC. They’ll also develop semiconductors for connecting to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Those are all components currently provided to Apple by Broadcom, Skyworks and Qualcomm.

The effort builds on Apple’s earlier work in wireless chips. The AirPods and Apple Watch already include custom parts that let them pair with devices, and Apple’s latest iPhones include U1 ultra-wideband chips for more accurately pinpointing their location and connecting with the AirTag accessory and other products.

“Apple’s growing wireless silicon development team is developing the next generation of wireless silicon!” one job listing says. Another says employees will “be at the center of a wireless SoC design group with a critical impact on getting Apple’s state-of-the-art wireless connectivity solutions into hundreds of millions of products.”

Apple, and particularly the iPhone, is a key source of revenue for chipmakers. In early 2020, Apple and Broadcom reached a $15 billion supply agreement for wireless components that ends in 2023. Apple accounts for about 20% of Broadcom’s sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Skyworks is even more dependent on Apple, which makes up nearly 60% of its revenue, the data shows.

Irvine — located in Orange County, south of Los Angeles — is also home to wireless chip design offices for NXP Semiconductors NV, another company Apple could hire engineers from. Apple currently relies on NXP’s near-field-communication chips for mobile payments.

The office also is near the University of California at Irvine, which is known for its engineering programs.

Apple will emerge from the pandemic in a less centralized form. While Cupertino remains the heart of the company, it has turned San Diego into a bigger hub. Apple has added headcount and expanded hiring there beyond chips to smart home technology, displays and software.

It’s also expanding in Los Angeles, hiring employees to work on Apple TV+ and other digital services. And it has an office in Newport Beach, near Irvine, for development of augmented reality content from its NextVR acquisition.

Apple has a history of setting up offices near existing suppliers — in some cases, as the first step toward eventually replacing them.

That includes its chip offices in Portland, Oregon, near Intel buildings, as well as its operations in Austin, Texas, and Orlando, Florida, where Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has campuses. And it’s expanded in Haifa and Herzliya, Israel, where Intel has engineers, and in Munich, Germany, home to Infineon Technologies’s headquarters.

Srouji has also pushed Apple to open new offices in Massachusetts, where Skyworks has offices, and Japan, where chipmakers like Toshiba Corp. have design centers. In 2018, Apple invested in Dialog Semiconductor, which specializes in power management chips, and acquired hundreds of employees and offices in the U.K. and Italy.

Last year, the company started transitioning away from Intel chips for its Macs, while also designing its own in-house camera and display technologies. Apple bought Intel’s modem unit for $1 billion as well, setting the stage to replace the component from Qualcomm.

Apple’s chip development strategy has allowed the company to build devices with unique features, helping its market value soar to nearly $3 trillion, and its chip unit is now considered one of its most prized assets. But the strategy hasn’t been without its snags.

Apple had a public dispute with U.K. graphics chip designer Imagination Technologies Group in 2017 after transitioning to its own custom graphics processors. Apple’s move left Imagination nearly bankrupt. In 2020, the two companies reached a licensing agreement.

Published : December 17, 2021

By : Bloomberg

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Facebook is notifying nearly 50,000 users in more than 100 countries that they may have been targets of hacking attempts by surveillance companies working for government agencies or private clients, the company said Thursday.

The notification is the result of a months-long investigation by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, into what Meta officials called “cyber-mercenaries” who engage in “surveillance-for-hire.” As a result, Facebook said it was taking enforcement actions against seven surveillance companies based in four countries, removing about 1,500 fake accounts, blocking malicious Web addresses and sending cease-and-desist letters to the companies.

Meta’s investigators concluded that these companies used Meta’s Facebook and Instagram subsidiaries for surveillance activities, mainly to research and groom targets for later infections by spyware. Each step was part of a broader targeting process the researchers called the “surveillance chain.”

The investigation’s final report, titled “Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry,” took aim at long-standing industry claims that the spying software is used only against terrorists and serious criminals such as drug kingpins and pedophiles. Meta’s investigation found that surveillance companies “regularly” target politicians, human rights workers, journalists, dissidents and family members of opposition figures, with few legal controls or other forms of accountability.

These findings echo those of the Pegasus Project, a global investigation of Israel-based surveillance company NSO Group by The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations, led by Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories. But Meta officials said that while they previously have taken enforcement actions against NSO and sued the company in 2019 for allegedly delivering spyware to users through WhatsApp, the problems posed by private surveillance companies are broader.

“The surveillance industry is much bigger than just one company, and it’s much bigger than just malware-for-hire,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, head of security policy for Meta and a co-author of Thursday’s report. “The targeting we see is indiscriminate. They’re targeting journalists. They’re targeting politicians. They’re targeting human rights defenders. They’re also targeting ordinary citizens.”

Among the companies that Meta sanctioned was a little-known surveillance firm, Cytrox, based in North Macedonia. The Meta report, which said it had removed 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts the company used to engage and deceive targets, lists 10 governments that hire Cytrox, including Egypt, Armenia, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Vietnam, the Philippines and Germany.

Overall, Meta’s report listed more than two dozen countries across six continents that used the surveillance services provided by the seven companies in the report; the victims were in more than 100 countries. The report included an example of the nearly 50,000 notifications, which are to start arriving Thursday, reading, “We believe that a sophisticated attacker may be targeting your Facebook account. Be cautious when accepting friend requests and interacting with people you don’t know.”

Pegasus and other forms of spyware allow operators to remotely turn smartphones and other computers into surveillance devices capable of listening to calls and tracking user locations, as well as stealing photos, videos, contact lists and other files. Advanced spyware can be delivered without the users knowing or taking any action, often by text message or a chat app, and then can activate the cameras and microphones built into smartphones.

The claim about Cytrox being used by Egyptian authorities is backed by a separate report, also released Thursday, by Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that specializes in investigating spyware. It found that the iPhone 12 of Egyptian opposition figure Ayman Nour was infected by both NSO’s Pegasus spyware and a similar one by Cytrox, called Predator, on a single day in June.

An initial sign of infection was that the smartphone began “running hot” as it managed the computational demands of two types of spyware at once, the report said. These infections happened even though Nour’s iPhone had the latest version of iOS, the mobile operating system made by Apple.

Nour, speaking by video call from exile in Istanbul, said this intrusion was just the latest after years of efforts by the Egyptian government to undermine him and suppress democratic activity in the country going back to 2005, when he ran unsuccessfully for president against then-strongman Hosni Mubarak.

More recently Nour has had personal photos of himself and private phone conversations made public in what he said were government efforts to embarrass him and undermine his role as a leader in Egypt’s political opposition. Currently the head of the Ghad EL-Tahwra Party, Nour called private surveillance companies “digital monsters” that should face international sanctions.

“This is something that is really dangerous, and it has real impact on politicians,” Nour said through an interpreter. “They are making use of every single word we say on our mobile phones.”

Citizen Lab said the Cytrox hack probably came from the Egyptian government, and the Pegasus one probably from the Saudis or the United Arab Emirates, both of which have been repeatedly identified by researchers as aggressive users of private surveillance services.

Cytrox did not reply to a request for comment on Thursday, nor did the Egyptian Embassy in Washington.

NSO Group issued a statement saying it did not have enough information to comment fully. “The details we do have from reporters are ambiguous both from contractual and technological perspectives and indicate with high probability there is no connection to Pegasus,” the statement said.

Meta’s actions are the latest developments in months of growing scrutiny of the global surveillance industry since the Pegasus Project in July. The NSO Group has repeatedly denied its findings and said it works only with vetted countries and terminates contracts with any that violate company policies limiting the use of its spyware to only terrorists and serious criminals.

Even so, the U.S. government blacklisted NSO in November following an investigation that backed the key claims of the Pegasus Project. Apple sued NSO soon after and issued warnings to users across the world – including 11 employees working for the U.S. government in Uganda – that they had been targeted by Pegasus.

These repercussions have done little to slow the global surveillance industry, said Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab who discovered the attacks on Nour’s phone and on a phone belonging to another Egyptian. This person, who hosts a popular news program in Egypt, has opted to remain anonymous and is not named in the report.

Marczak called the nearly simultaneous hacking of Nour’s iPhone by two types of spyware remarkable evidence of how widespread such techniques have become. Never before had Citizen Lab researchers seen a single target “doubly hacked.”

“It really drives home that the story of spyware is not just the story of NSO,” said Marczak. “This is an industry that is really growing.”

The Meta report cites six other companies. One, BellTrox, is based in India, and one is based in China, but Meta researchers were unable to determine its name, they said. The remaining four are based in Israel: Cognyte, Cobwebs Technologies, Bluehawk CI and Black Cube, the last of which was hired by disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein to collect information on women accusing him of sexual misconduct and journalists covering that story.

Meta said it removed 300 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts linked to Black Cube, which it said specialized in serving people involved in legal battles – a leading purpose for hiring private surveillance, Meta investigators found. That company’s clients included private individuals, businesses and law firms worldwide, Meta’s report said.

In response to the report, Black Cube issued a statement denying Meta’s allegations and saying it complies with the laws wherever it operates. “Black Cube does not undertake any phishing or hacking and does not operate in the cyber world,” the statement said.

Cobwebs Technologies denied that it had violated any laws. “We have not been contacted by Facebook (Meta) and are unaware of any claims it has allegedly made about our services,” the statement said. Cobwebs Technologies “operates only according to the law and adheres to strict standards in respect of privacy protection.”

The list of clients for Cobwebs Technologies included an unnamed customer in the United States, as well as Bangladesh, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Poland.

The other companies named in the report did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts in the surveillance industry say it includes more than 100 companies that span the globe, with many having numerous international hubs of operation – a fact making a crackdown by any one country, or even a group of countries, unlikely to stop abuses.

The Meta report says surveillance companies operate by steps, starting with reconnaissance to identify information about prospective targets, and followed by a period of engagement, sometimes over social media or other communications services. This often involves the use of fake accounts – sometimes supposedly belonging to TV producers, journalists or academic researchers – that gain the trust of targeted individuals.

Finally, during the exploitation phases, the spyware is delivered to a user’s device, infecting it and allowing data collection to begin.

“The scrutiny and the pressure on NSO Group is welcome,” said David Agranovich, director of threat disruption for Meta and a co-author of the threat report. “But it can’t just be one and done. Part of the reason why we’re including all of these cases in our threat report, and while we are leaning so heavily into making people understand that this is an industry that is bigger than just one company . . . is in hopes that it inspires more pressure, more action and broader impact across the entirety of the surveillance-for-hire industry.”

Published : December 17, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on Wednesday (December 15) that its spacecraft, Parker Solar Probe, has touched the Sun for the first time in history.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere – the corona – and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. 

The new milestone marks one major step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science. Just as landing on the Moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the very stuff the Sun is made of will help scientists uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system. 

“Parker Solar Probe “touching the Sun” is a monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Not only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun’s evolution and it’s impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe.”

As it circles closer to the solar surface, Parker is making new discoveries that other spacecraft were too far away to see, including from within the solar wind – the flow of particles from the Sun that can influence us at Earth. In 2019, Parker discovered that magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks, are plentiful close to the Sun. But how and where they form remained a mystery. Halving the distance to the Sun since then, Parker Solar Probe has now passed close enough to identify one place where they originate: the solar surface.

The first passage through the corona – and the promise of more flybys to come – will continue to provide data on phenomena that are impossible to study from afar.

“Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere – the corona – that we never could before,” said Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “We see evidence of being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images. We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”

Closer than ever before 

Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to explore the mysteries of the Sun by travelling closer to it than any spacecraft before. Three years after launch and decades after the first conception, Parker has finally arrived.

Unlike Earth, the Sun doesn’t have a solid surface. But it does have a superheated atmosphere, made of solar material bound to the Sun by gravity and magnetic forces. As rising heat and pressure push that material away from the Sun, it reaches a point where gravity and magnetic fields are too weak to contain it.

That point, known as the Alfvén critical surface, marks the end of the solar atmosphere and beginning of the solar wind. Solar material with the energy to make it across that boundary becomes the solar wind, which drags the magnetic field of the Sun with it as it races across the solar system, to Earth and beyond. Importantly, beyond the Alfvén critical surface, the solar wind moves so fast that waves within the wind cannot ever travel fast enough to make it back to the Sun – severing their connection. 

Until now, researchers were unsure exactly where the Alfvén critical surface lay. Based on remote images of the corona, estimates had put it somewhere between 10 to 20 solar radii from the surface of the Sun – 4.3 to 8.6 million miles. Parker’s spiral trajectory brings it slowly closer to the Sun and during the last few passes, the spacecraft was consistently below 20 solar radii (91 per cent of Earth’s distance from the Sun), putting it in the position to cross the boundary – if the estimates were correct.

On April 28, 2021, during its eighth flyby of the Sun, Parker Solar Probe encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions at 18.8 solar radii (around 8.1 million miles) above the solar surface that told scientists it had crossed the Alfvén critical surface for the first time and finally entered the solar atmosphere.

“We were fully expecting that, sooner or later, we would encounter the corona for at least a short duration of time,” said Justin Kasper, lead author on a new paper about the milestone published in Physical Review Letters, and deputy chief technology officer at BWX Technologies, Inc. and University of Michigan professor. “But it is very exciting that we’ve already reached it.”  

Into the eye of the storm 

During the flyby, Parker Solar Probe passed into and out of the corona several times. This is proved what some had predicted – that the Alfvén critical surface isn’t shaped like a smooth ball. Rather, it has spikes and valleys that wrinkle the surface. Discovering where these protrusions line up with solar activity coming from the surface can help scientists learn how events on the Sun affect the atmosphere and solar wind.

At one point, as Parker Solar Probe dipped to just beneath 15 solar radii (around 6.5 million miles) from the Sun’s surface, it transited a feature in the corona called a pseudostreamer. Pseudostreamers are massive structures that rise above the Sun’s surface and can be seen from Earth during solar eclipses.

Passing through the pseudostreamer was like flying into the eye of a storm. Inside the pseudostreamer, the conditions quieted, particles slowed, and number of switchbacks dropped – a dramatic change from the busy barrage of particles the spacecraft usually encounters in the solar wind. 

For the first time, the spacecraft found itself in a region where the magnetic fields were strong enough to dominate the movement of particles there. These conditions were the definitive proof the spacecraft had passed the Alfvén critical surface and entered the solar atmosphere where magnetic fields shape the movement of everything in the region.

The first passage through the corona, which lasted only a few hours, is one of many planned for the mission. Parker will continue to spiral closer to the Sun, eventually reaching as close as 8.86 solar radii (3.83 million miles) from the surface. Upcoming flybys, the next of which is happening in January 2022, will likely bring Parker Solar Probe through the corona again.

“I’m excited to see what Parker finds as it repeatedly passes through the corona in the years to come,” said Nicola Fox, division director for the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. “The opportunity for new discoveries is boundless.”

The size of the corona is also driven by solar activity. As the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle – the solar cycle – ramps up, the outer edge of the corona will expand, giving Parker Solar Probe a greater chance of being inside the corona for longer time.

“It is a really important region to get into because we think all sorts of physics potentially turn on,” Kasper said. “And now we’re getting into that region and hopefully going to start seeing some of these physics and behaviours.”  

Narrowing down switchback origins

Even before the first trips through the corona, some surprising physics was already surfacing. On recent solar encounters, Parker Solar Probe collected data pinpointing the origin of zig-zag-shaped structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks. The data showed one spot that switchbacks originate is at the visible surface of the Sun – the photosphere. 

By the time it reaches Earth, 93 million miles away, the solar wind is an unrelenting headwind of particles and magnetic fields. But as it escapes the Sun, the solar wind is structured and patchy. In the mid-1990s, the NASA-European Space Agency mission Ulysses flew over the Sun’s poles and discovered a handful of bizarre S-shaped kinks in the solar wind’s magnetic field lines, which detoured charged particles on a zig-zag path as they escaped the Sun. For decades, scientists thought these occasional switchbacks were oddities confined to the Sun’s polar regions.  

In 2019, at 34 solar radii from the Sun, Parker discovered that switchbacks were not rare, but common in the solar wind. This renewed interest in the features and raised new questions: Where were they coming from? Were they forged at the surface of the Sun, or shaped by some process kinking magnetic fields in the solar atmosphere?

The new findings, in press at the Astrophysical Journal, finally confirm one origin point is near the solar surface. 

The clues came as Parker orbited closer to the Sun on its sixth flyby, less than 25 solar radii out. Data showed switchbacks occur in patches and have a higher percentage of helium – known to come from the photosphere – than other elements. The switchbacks’ origins were further narrowed when the scientists found the patches aligned with magnetic funnels that emerge from the photosphere between convection cell structures called supergranules.

In addition to being the birthplace of switchbacks, the scientists think the magnetic funnels might be where one component of the solar wind originates. The solar wind comes in two different varieties – fast and slow – and the funnels could be where some particles in the fast solar wind come from. 

“The structure of the regions with switchbacks matches up with a small magnetic funnel structure at the base of the corona,” said Stuart Bale, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the new switchbacks paper. “This is what we expect from some theories, and this pinpoints a source for the solar wind itself.”

Understanding where and how the components of the fast solar wind emerge, and if they’re linked to switchbacks, could help scientists answer a longstanding solar mystery: how the corona is heated to millions of degrees, far hotter than the solar surface below.

While the new findings locate where switchbacks are made, the scientists can’t yet confirm how they’re formed. One theory suggests they might be created by waves of plasma that roll through the region like ocean surf. Another contends they’re made by an explosive process known as magnetic reconnection, which is thought to occur at the boundaries where the magnetic funnels come together.

“My instinct is, as we go deeper into the mission and lower and closer to the Sun, we’re going to learn more about how magnetic funnels are connected to the switchbacks,” Bale said. “And hopefully resolve the question of what process makes them.”

Now that researchers know what to look for, Parker’s closer passes may reveal even more clues about switchbacks and other solar phenomena. The data to come will allow scientists a glimpse into a region that’s critical for superheating the corona and pushing the solar wind to supersonic speeds. Such measurements from the corona will be critical for understanding and forecasting extreme space weather events that can disrupt telecommunications and damage satellites around Earth.

“It’s really exciting to see our advanced technologies succeed in taking Parker Solar Probe closer to the Sun than we’ve ever been, and to be able to return such amazing science,” said Joseph Smith, Parker program executive at NASA Headquarters. “We look forward to seeing what else the mission discovers as it ventures even closer in the coming years.”

Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA’s Living with a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living with a Star program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the Parker Solar Probe mission for NASA and designed, built, and operates the spacecraft.

Source: NASA

Published : December 16, 2021

By : THE NATION