The ongoing US-China trade-war is going to jack up prices of PC hardware and other electronics products made in China (PRC). This will also affect prices of products made by American companies that are manufactured in China. A new tranche of goods and services prescribes a 25 percent import tariff on "electronic integrated circuits: processors and controllers," "electronic integrated circuits: memories," "electronic integrated circuits: amplifiers," "electronic integrated circuits: other," which about covers all PC hardware. This tariff takes effect on August 23, 2018.

A component costing $100 at a US port, could be inflated to $125 before Federal and State taxes are applied, not to mention costs of the rest of the supply-chain, leading up to your retailer and their margins. Not all PC hardware is made in China. Goods imported from Taiwan (ROC), South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia (the other known countries where PC hardware is manufactured), remains unchanged. China remains America's biggest source of electronics imports.Many Thanks to Flyordie for the tip.

A Supreme Court decision last Thursday may be just what the doctor ordered for states' ability to collect taxes on online sales from a much wider variety of businesses. The decision, passed with 5-4 votes from the Justices involved, overrules previous understandings regarding the physical presence rule: essentially, that a business was only forced to collect sales tax and send it to the State it's operating if it had some sort of physical presence (be it warehouses or some such) in that particular state. If not, taxes were still due - but shoppers had to take the initiative of delivering their taxable amount to the state. That, naturally, very rarely happened, which led to reported billion dollar losses in tax revenue for a variety of US states.

Now, states have essentially been given the green light to pass laws requiring out-of-state sellers to collect the state's sales tax from customers and send it to the state. More than a dozen states have already adopted such laws even ahead of the court's decision, confident in the decision's direction, said state tax policy expert Joseph Crosby.

The White House today is hosting executives from 38 companies for a grueling, embattled day of trying to move through the as of yet murky waters of AI development. The meeting, which includes representatives from Microsoft, Intel, Google, Amazon, Pfizer, and Ford, among others, aims to gather thoughts and ideas on how to supercharge AI development in a sustainable, safe, and cost-effective way.

Fields such as agriculture, healthcare and transportation are being spearheaded as areas of interest (military applications, obviously, are being discussed elsewhere). The Washington Post quotes Michael Kratsios, deputy chief technology officer at the White House, as saying in a recent interview that "Whether you're a farmer in Iowa, an energy producer in Texas, a drug manufacturer in Boston, you are going to be using these techniques to drive your business going forward."

In the age of cyber-security vulnerabilities being named by their discoverers, much like incoming tropical storms, the latest, which exploits speculative execution of modern processors, is named "BranchScope," discovered by academics from four US universities, Dmitry Evtyushkin, Ryan Riley, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, and Dmitry Ponomarev. The vulnerability has been successfully tested on Intel "Sandy Bridge," "Haswell," and "Skylake" micro-architectures, and remains to be tested on AMD processors. It bears similarities to "Spectre" variant 2, in that it is an exploit of the branch prediction features of modern CPUs.

BranchScope differs from Spectre variant 2, in that while the latter exploits the branch target buffer, BranchScope goes after the directional branch predictor, a component that decides which speculative operations to execute. By misdirecting it, attackers can make the CPU read and spit out data from the memory previously inaccessible. The worst part? You don't need administrative privileges to run the exploit, it can be run from the user-space. Unlike CTS-Labs, the people behind the BranchScope discovery appear to have alerted hardware manufacturers significantly in advance, before publishing their paper (all of it, including technicals). They will present their work at the 23rd ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2018), later today.

The United States Government is closely examining national security implications of a potential Broadcom-Qualcomm merger. Broadcom is a Singapore-based company, while Qualcomm is American. An empowered national security panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which has the legal power to stop mergers between American and foreign companies, and acquisitions of American companies by foreign entities; is said to be examining specifics of Qualcomm's high-technology and intellectual property falling into the hands of Broadcom, as the two companies close in on a crucial Qualcomm board meet scheduled for March, in which Broadcom has exercised its shareholding to plant 6 favorable board members among the 11-member Qualcomm board, which all but guarantees a vote in favor of the merger - a classic hostile takeover.

"Not so fast," believes Senator John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the US Senate, who urged Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to have the CFIUS examine the Broadcom-Qualcomm deal. In its unprecedented pre-deal discussions within the otherwise opaque committee, a consensus emerged that Broadcom's decision to relocate its headquarters to the US was insufficient to circumvent a CFIUS review. "I urge CFIUS to promptly review Broadcom's proposed acquisition of control of Qualcomm's board, and to act prior to the March 6 Qualcomm meeting to address any national security concerns that may be identified," Senator Cornyn wrote to Secretary Mnuchin. It looks like Broadcom's decision to tamper with Qualcomm's board is set to spectacularly backfire.

One of the hottest pieces of tech in the last few years, Oculus' Rift and Touch VR add-on, have entered a sale of sorts, which bring the pricing on these pieces of kit down to more humane, tenable values. If you are living over in the Great Britain side of the pond, you can grab your Rift+ Oculus Touch VR kit for a reasonable (for the tech) £399, for a limited time only. Scan.uk has you covered. On the other side of the pond (that means you, US), you can grab the same kit for an even more reasonable $399 (Newegg pricing at time of writing.)

These deals are being touted as limited to supply, and of a short duration. So if you think the hardware is at a point you're comfortable with, and that the platform and software ecosystem have matured enough for you to take the plunge, now might be the best time in a while to do so.

Taiwan-based Foxconn, one of Apple's main suppliers, is looking to expand its operations in the US to the tune of $10 billion. The company is still deciding which state will get the greatest solo investment, in the form of a $7 billion display factory (worth mentioning here is that Foxconn's display manufacturing has seen a recent buff by the acquisition of Sharp.) Reportedly, investments are being considered in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and/or Texas. There was no given timeframe for the construction's start or finish, but a final decision should be made public in July. Foxconn's CEO Terry Gou also vowed to press on with a bid for Toshiba Corp.'s semiconductor business, although the Japanese company has already selected a preferred buyer in the form of a Japanese and US joint venture. Such a deal could cost $27 billion and introduce Foxconn (and, likely but indirectly, China) into the memory chip business.