Castle gets rid of Huawei phones after Zeman, 25Mb data transfer in space, Britain bans default passwords

Every Friday, reporter Jan Sedlák prepares a selection of interesting news from the IT world. What happened this week?

The office of the President of the Republic got rid of the Huawei phones that employees received during the era of Miloš Zeman. The castle gradually replaced less than two hundred devices. The reason is cyber security and the NÚKIB warning (this mainly applies to networks and others). The castle had signed a contract with Huawei, it received mobile phones in exchange for providing space for conferences of the Chinese company and the like. The president’s office is also strengthening cyber security, for example hiring a manager in this area.

NASA managed to transmit data over a distance of 226 million kilometers at a speed of 25 Mbps. Communication took place from Earth with the Psyche probe, which is traveling to the planet of the same name. Originally, the plan was to make at least a megabit per second over this distance. Communication took place via laser transmission.

An amendment to the UK’s Product Safety Act mandated that network-connected devices must not have default passwords. It must be random, or generated at startup. At the same time, passwords must not be related to public information, i.e. MAC addresses and the like.

Ukrainian citizen Yaroslav Vasinksyi, nicknamed Rabotnik, was sentenced to 14 years in prison in the US for the REvil ransomware. It attacked thousands of victims and caused $700 million worth of damage. Rabotnik was arrested in 2022 in Poland on the border with Ukraine and was extradited to the States.

Microsoft, in cooperation with IBM, released the source codes for MS-DOS 4.0. They are available on GitHub, as well as PDF documentation. License is MIT.

The largest Russian operator MTS offers foreign shareholders to buy back their shares. But with a discount of 69 percent. However, unlike some other investors in Russian business, they have a chance to get at least something. MTS is to set aside 7.97 billion rubles, about two billion crowns, for buybacks. MTS was also behind the electronics manufacturer Nvision operating in Votice.

Chinese technology companies are supposed to serve as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. This was reported by the Australian think tank ASPI in its study. The Chinese Communists are allegedly using globally popular apps, games and services to gather data and then influence public opinion abroad.

China’s ByteDance has no intention of selling TikTok. The US has passed a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or it will be banned in the States. It is a question of how ByteDance would proceed as a result and whether it would prefer to shut down the service in the American market and focus even more on Europe and other continents. The firm also said it would challenge the law in court. The firm also states that ByteDance only owns 20 percent of TikTok and that foreign investors, including US funds such as the Carlyle Group, own the rest. And 20 percent should be held by employees worldwide.

Huawei secretly sponsored key research at leading American universities, including Harvard. Bloomberg reports that the Chinese colossus also did so through sanctions, through the Washington Foundation.

https://twitter.com/pstAsiatech/status/1785276008792256773 Sanctions are supposed to ensure their supply, and close cooperation, building a supply chain, and so on, has started.

China has reportedly already met most of the goals of the Made in China 2025 program, which is supposed to significantly advance the country in key technologies and manufacturing. The program started in 2015 and is 86 percent complete.

China already has 369 unicorns, i.e. companies with a value of one billion dollars or more. The average value is $3.8 billion. The most valued are businesses around AI with an average of 6.76 billion.

Richard Yu (Yu Chengdong), the long-time head of Huawei’s Mobile and Other End Devices Division (CBG), is leaving his post. He will move to the board of directors and at the same time head the division focused on the development of electric cars. Yu led the mobile section for 12 years. He helped it grow to the position of world number one (together with Samsung) and subsequently managed its rescue after the introduction of American sanctions. Today, thanks to the production of the 7nm chip, it returns to the leading positions in China.

Huawei’s net profit in the first quarter of the current fiscal year grew by 564 percent to 19.65 billion yuan, about 64 billion crowns. Revenue jumped 37 percent to 178.5 billion yuan. These are numbers presented by Huawei, the company is not listed on the stock exchange. Huawei is helping to get into the electric car business, enter the energy sector, and also make a domestic comeback in phones.

AMD’s first quarter results are full of contradictions. The data center division grew by 80 percent, so Epyc continues to do well in servers (at the expense of Intel) and AI accelerators Instinct (Nvidia’s competitor). The MI300 alone made a billion dollars. But the gaming section fell by 48 percent. There is not much interest in Radeons, after all, the company doesn’t even produce that many of them. The embedded section has also dropped.

Microsoft had its best third quarter ever. Revenue jumped 17 percent year over year to $61.9 billion and operating profit added 23 percent to $27.6 billion. Everything is growing, except for the cloud, Windows OEM, Bing and the gaming division (up 62 percent, thanks to Activision Blizzard).

Amazon Web Services revenues should reach one hundred billion dollars this year. In the last quarter, they added 17 percent and reached 25 billion dollars. AWS generates 65.7 percent of Amazon’s total profit, with sales accounting for only 17 percent.

Samsung’s operating profit jumped 930 percent in the last quarter. It is driven by artificial intelligence, memory chips for AI accelerators and SSDs are in demand.

Investment firm Thoma Bravo buys British cybersecurity firm Darktrace for $5.23 billion. This is a 44 percent bonus over the original price on the stock exchange. Thoma Bravo is one of the traditional investors in IT, it has positions in Sophos, SolarWinds or Proofpoint and in the past it had, for example, McAfee.

Google dropped RISC-V support from the Android kernel. It’s unclear exactly what this means for the future of RISC-V support, but Google has said it’s still counting on it.

Ivan Bartoš’s team launched a Czech website dedicated to the AI ​​Act. It is intended to serve as a signpost for orientation of what this European regulation of artificial intelligence brings.

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