Good Morning! Today we’ll delve into China's ambitious move to bolster its semiconductor sector with a whopping $40 billion fund, aiming to achieve self-sufficiency amidst international sanctions. On the tech front, Codezero unveils the public beta of its innovative collaborative coding platform, designed to revolutionize the development process for teams globally. Lastly, a year post the significant security breach, LastPass remains under scrutiny, failing to address critical security concerns and leaving users in the lurch. Also read to the end for a fun fact about programming history :).

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

China's $40 Billion Investment Fund to Boost Semiconductor Industry

China is set to launch a new state-backed investment fund aiming to raise about $40 billion for its semiconductor sector, as the country seeks to catch up with the US and other rivals in the chip industry. The fund, which is likely to be the largest of three launched by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (also known as the Big Fund), was approved by Chinese authorities in recent months. The Chinese finance ministry plans to contribute 60 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) to the fund, with other contributors yet to be disclosed.

The new fund comes as the US and its allies, including Japan and the Netherlands, have imposed sanctions and export restrictions on China's access to advanced chipmaking equipment. These measures have prompted Chinese President Xi Jinping to push for self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacturing.

The Big Fund has previously provided financing to China's two largest chipmakers, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) and Hua Hong Semiconductor. The latest fund will focus on investments in chip manufacturing equipment to boost domestic production.

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Codezero Launches Public Beta of Collaborative Coding Platform

Codezero, a collaborative coding company, has announced the public beta of version 2.0 of its platform. The platform enables developers to spin up a new Kubernetes cluster and debug and test it in a collaborative environment, creating new levels of visibility and interaction among development teams.

Reed Clayton, co-founder and CEO of Codezero, said, "Simply put, we make it possible for large teams to get ‘back into garage start-up mode’ where they write, test and deploy quickly – together". The platform aims to fix the broken development process for developer teams worldwide.

The public beta was announced at the Civo Navigate Europe conference in London, where attendees can demo the platform during a hands-on workshop. Developed by Microsoft alum Narayan Sainaney, Codezero allows users to spin up a Kubernetes cluster in under ninety seconds and debug and test within simulated collaborative environments, a method they call "Omni-Dev". The 2.0 version of the tool is designed to power the development of higher-quality code with fewer bugs and breaches.

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A Year After the Breach: LastPass Struggles to Improve

A year after the disastrous breach that exposed sensitive customer data, LastPass has not made significant improvements to address the issues raised by security researchers. The password manager has failed to provide customers with useful instructions on mitigating the breach and has not admitted the full scope of the breach.

In August 2022, LastPass suffered a security breach where a threat actor accessed and copied a cloud-based backup of customer vault data, including encrypted passwords, usernames, and form-filled data. Although the company claimed that the master passwords were not compromised due to their zero-knowledge architecture, the breach raised concerns about the security of the service.

Despite the breach, LastPass has not addressed long-standing issues that security researchers have been warning about for years. For instance, the company still does not encrypt website addresses and metadata, which has been criticized by security researchers multiple times. Additionally, owners of older LastPass accounts still need to manually fix outdated security settings.

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Computer Scientists Find a Key Research Algorithm's Limits

Gradient descent, a widely used algorithm in modern applied research, has been found to have limitations when it comes to providing precise solutions for certain problems. This discovery was made by computer scientists who combined the study of gradient descent with computational complexity theory.

Gradient descent is a technique used to optimize mathematical functions by finding their largest or smallest values. It has applications in various fields, such as determining the most profitable way to manufacture a product or the best way to assign shifts to workers. However, researchers have found that gradient descent struggles with some common problems, and there was no comprehensive understanding of why this occurs.

Costis Daskalakis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained that much of the work in gradient descent did not involve complexity theory, which studies the resources, often computation time, required to solve or verify the solutions to different computing problems. By combining these two areas of study, researchers were able to identify the limitations of gradient descent in providing precise solutions for certain problems where precision is important.

The question of precision is central to computational complexity, as it involves evaluating resource requirements. There is a fundamental link between precision and speed in many complex questions. For an algorithm to be considered efficient, it must be possible to increase the precision of a solution without paying a correspondingly high price in the amount of time it takes to find that solution.

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Youtube Spotlight

This Phone Was Designed By The FBI To Catch Criminals - Anom Phone Hands On

The Anom Phone, designed by the FBI, was marketed to criminals as a secure and encrypted device. Unbeknownst to the users, the phone’s operating system, Arcane OS, was developed by the FBI as part of an undercover operation. The phone is based on the Google Pixel 4a, and while little is known about its OS, a hands-on review provides insights into its functionality and features. The phone served as a honeypot, allowing authorities to access, read, and decrypt millions of messages sent over the Anom messaging application. The operation resulted in numerous arrests and seizures, making it one of the largest stings in Australian history.

Fun Fact

The software code written for the Apollo 11 mission that took the first humans to the Moon in 1969 was far simpler than the software in today's smartphones. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had approximately 145,000 lines of code. In contrast, modern smartphones operate using millions of lines of code. The progress in software complexity and capabilities since the Apollo era is astounding. The demands of modern consumers and the multifunctionality of modern devices have driven a need for more intricate software. However, the simplicity of the Apollo code also underscores the brilliance and dedication of the engineers who made the moon landing possible with the limited technology they had.

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