Gates donates another $20 billion, Google Cloud switches to ARM, Twitter employees are warned by CEO because of Musk, more big news today is here

Daily News from Aofei Temple
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Hello everyone, today is Thursday. Did you see the super moon last night?

What are the big things happening in the technology circle today?

Let’s take a look with Daily News.

Today's Big News

Twitter CEO warns employees not to be distracted by lawsuit

According to Sina Technology, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal warned employees on Tuesday local time that the company's lawsuit against Musk could distract a lot of attention and keep employees focused.

In an email to employees, he wrote:

The coming weeks will be filled with news and noise about this case, including speculation from the media and analysts. Some of it will help explain this complex process, but much of it will be a distraction.

Twitter formally sued Musk on July 12, demanding that he fulfill the acquisition agreement signed in late April.

Previously, on July 8, Musk terminated the transaction on the grounds that Twitter did not provide him with relevant information about spam accounts, violating the terms of the contract.

However, Twitter did not buy this argument and applied for enforcement in the U.S. court in Delaware.

Xiaodu smart screen is caught in "privacy scandal"

According to Investor Network, recently, Baidu's well-known product Xiaodu Smart Screen was exposed to have violated consumers' privacy rights.

On July 1, Ms. Yang from Benxi, Liaoning Province, found that the Xiaodu smart speaker in the homestay room had captured video of her walking around the room in caregiving mode, and the video also contained several private videos of the guests' stay.

The landlord was also unaware of this, and Ms. Yang decided to call the police after further communication.

On July 5, the official Weibo account of "Xiaodu Xiaodu" released a statement on the incident, making an official response and supporting the woman in question in defending her rights.

It is said that the Xiaodu Smart Screen will not automatically turn on the camera and "care assistant" functions by default, and only the device administrator has permission.

It also emphasized that if the Xiaodu product is in standby or not awakened, Xiaodu will never automatically collect and identify audio and video information of the user and the surrounding area.

△ Caption: From the Weibo of "Xiaodu Xiaodu"

It is worth mentioning that Xiaodu products are widely used in hotels. According to the data released by Xiaodu at the end of June, the number of hotel rooms equipped with Xiaodu Assistant's smart services has reached 400,000, and the business scale ranks first in the industry.

Nature cover explores dog's ancestry

The cover of the latest issue of Nature features a large international joint research team from the Francis Crick Institute in the UK, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the University of Oxford and other institutions exploring the wild ancestors of dogs.

The origins of domestic dogs can be traced back to gray wolves, but exactly when, where, and how they were domesticated remains a matter of debate.

The research team found that there is not one, but two ancestors of dogs. Gray wolves were domesticated independently in Asia and Europe, but only the former gave rise to the ancestors of modern dogs.

The results showed that dogs are most genetically similar to the ancient Siberian gray wolf, but they are not direct ancestors.

"This basically suggests that dogs were probably domesticated somewhere in Asia," said Anders Bergström, lead author of the study from the Francis Crick Institute.

But a small number of dogs in Africa and the Middle East, as well as in Europe, were found to have additional genetic contributions from western gray wolf populations, Bergström said:

The largest number of second ancestral sources was found in a 7,000-year-old ancient dog from Israel.

There are still many issues to be resolved:

We still cannot tell whether there were two independent domestication events followed by a merger of the two populations, or whether there was only one domestication process followed by admixture with wild gray wolves. Therefore, the geographic origin of our canine companions still needs to be determined.

Gates to donate another $20 billion this month

On July 13th local time, Bill Gates announced on his personal blog that he would donate $20 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this month.

Bill Gates plans to donate all his wealth to the foundation:

I will fall off the list of the world's richest people and eventually quit. It's not a sacrifice for me to give this money.

In addition, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also announced plans to increase annual grant spending to $9 billion by 2026, a 50% increase from before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bill Gates' donation exceeds the $15 billion pledge he and Melinda French Gates made last summer, and together with the donation from Buffett, the two donations will bring the total funds of the Gates Foundation to about $70 billion.

The new donation will enable the Gates Foundation to increase investment in existing areas of focus, including global health and development, gender equality and education programs with a focus on low- and middle-income countries, as well as work in the areas of education and economic mobility in the United States, the foundation said.

Google Cloud announces adoption of ARM chips: putting pressure on Intel and AMD

According to Sina Technology, Alphabet's Google Cloud division announced on Wednesday local time that they will begin to use chips based on ARM technology, becoming another large technology company to join this transformation wave, putting more pressure on Intel and AMD.

Google said its new service will be based on Altra chips from Ampere Computing, which also sells chips to companies including Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp.

ARM is a chip design company headquartered in Cambridge, UK. The company announced that it would go public after its failed acquisition by Nvidia.

In 2018, ARM began to provide chip technology for data centers that have long been dominated by Intel and AMD. Since then, ARM technology has appeared in large data centers around the world (Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu, etc.) .

With Google joining the ARM camp, almost all major cloud service providers have now begun to provide ARM-based cloud computing services.