An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Video game and hardware studio Valve has been secretly building a Switch-like portable PC designed to run a large number of games on the Steam PC platform via Linux -- and it could launch, supply chain willing, by year's end. Multiple sources familiar with the matter have confirmed that the hardware has been in development for some time, and this week, Valve itself pointed to the device by slipping new hardware-related code into the latest version of Steam, the company's popular PC gaming storefront and ecosystem.

On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal." The name is a derivative of a previously discovered code term, "Neptune," which began appearing in September of last year and came with a "Neptune Optimized Games" string. At the time, curious code crawlers thought this discovery referred to some type of controller. Technically, that's true. The "SteamPal," whose name we're putting in scare quotes because we do not have confirmation of the device's final name, is an all-in-one PC with gamepad controls and a touchscreen. In other words, it looks and functions like a Nintendo Switch (albeit without removable "Joy-Con" controller functionality).

The SteamPal will [feature] a system on a chip likely coming from either Intel or AMD, not Nvidia. (The aforementioned Switch-like PC manufacturers have leaned on both AMD and Intel for their products.) It's unclear whether Valve will release multiple SKUs to offer customers a choice of power level, battery life, and other specs, as other Switch-like PCs have offered over the past year. At least one SteamPal prototype version is quite wide compared to the Nintendo Switch. This extra width accommodates a slew of control options. No, Valve is likely not slapping an entire QWERTY keyboard onto its system, but the company has packed in a standard array of gamepad buttons and triggers, along with a pair of joysticks and at least one thumb-sized touchpad (in addition to the device's touch-sensitive screen). The SteamPal's touchpad is likely smaller than the pair of touchpads that came standard on every Steam Controller. The SteamPal's Switch-like properties will include the option to "dock" to larger monitors via its USB Type-C port, but I don't have firm details on exactly how that connection will work or whether Valve has any plans for an eventual SteamPal dock.

The ability to boot from an external drive on an Apple Silicon Mac may not be an option for much longer, with the creation and use of the drives apparently being phased out by Apple, according to developers of backup tools. Apple Insider reports: Mike Bombich, the founder of Bombich Software behind Carbon Copy Cloner, wrote in a May 19 blog post that the company will continue to make bootable backups for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and will "continue to support that functionality as long as macOS supports it." However, with changes in the way a Mac functions with the introduction of Apple Silicon, the ability to use external booting could be limited, in part due to Apple's design decisions.

The first problem is with macOS Big Sur, as Apple made it so macOS resides on a "cryptographically sealed Signed System Volume," which could only be copied by Apple Software Restore. While CCC has experience with ASR, the tool was deemed to be imperfect, with it failing "with no explanation" and operating in a "very one-dimensional" way. The second snag was Apple Fabric, a storage system that uses per-file encryption keys. However, ASR didn't work for months until the release of macOS 11.3 restored it, but even then kernel panics ensued when cloning back to the original internal storage.

In December, Bombich spoke to Apple about ASR's reliability and was informed that Apple was working to resolve the problem. During the call, Apple's engineers also said that copying macOS system files was "not something that would be supportable in the future." "Many of us in the Mac community could see that this was the direction Apple was moving, and now we finally have confirmation," writes Bombich. "Especially since the introduction of APFS, Apple has been moving towards a lockdown of macOS system files, sacrificing some convenience for increased security." [...] While CCC won't drop the ability to copy the System folder, the tool is "going to continue to offer it with a best effort' approach." Meanwhile, for non-bootable data restoration, CCC's backups do still work with the macOS Migration Assistant, available when booting up a new Mac for the first time.

In late 2019, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8c and 7c, a pair of affordable chips for always-on Windows 10 PCs and Chromebooks. Today, the company is updating the latter of those two SoCs to improve performance. Engadget: The Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 features a Kyro CPU that can achieve clock speeds of up to 2.55GHz. The company claims it delivers 10 percent faster performance than "most competing platforms." Qualcomm likely has processors from Intel's Gemini Lake family in mind here. The company also claims the 7c Gen 2 can deliver up to two times the battery life of its competitors. Outside of the faster CPU, the 7c Gen 2 is more or less the same chip Qualcomm announced in 2019. It features an Adreno 618 GPU and Snapdragon X15 LTE modem. The latter allows the 7c Gen 2 to hit theoretical download speeds of 800 Mbps. As with its predecessor, the chip is designed for education and price-conscious customers. According to Qualcomm, we can expect the first Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 laptops to arrive this summer, with the first models coming from Lenovo.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: DarkSide, the hacker group behind the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, received a total of $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments before shutting down last week, according to new research. Colonial Pipeline was hit with a devastating cyberattack earlier this month that forced the company to shut down approximately 5,500 miles of pipeline in the United States, crippling gas delivery systems in Southeastern states. The FBI blamed the attack on DarkSide, a cybercriminal gang believed to be based in Eastern Europe, and Colonial reportedly paid a $5 million ransom to the group.

On Friday, London-based blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said it had identified the bitcoin wallet used by DarkSide to collect ransom payments from its victims. The same day, security researchers Intel 471 said DarkSide had closed down after losing access to its servers and as its cryptocurrency wallets were emptied. DarkSide also blamed "pressure from the U.S.," according to a note obtained by Intel 471. In a blog post Tuesday, Elliptic said DarkSide and its affiliates bagged at least $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments over the past nine months from 47 victims. The average payment from organizations was likely $1.9 million, Elliptic said. "To our knowledge, this analysis includes all payments made to DarkSide, however further transactions may yet be uncovered, and the figures here should be considered a lower bound," said Tom Robinson Elliptic's co-founder and chief scientist.

According to Elliptic, $15.5 million of the $90 million total haul went to DarkSide's developer while $74.7 million went to its affiliates. The majority of the funds are being sent to crypto exchanges, where they can be converted into fiat money, Elliptic added.

Apple is preparing to release several new Mac laptops and desktops with faster processors, new designs and improved connectivity to external devices, accelerating the company's effort to replace Intel chips and leapfrog rival PC makers. From a report: The overhaul encompasses a broad range of Macs, including Apple's higher-end laptop, the MacBook Pro; the laptop aimed at the mass market, the MacBook Air; and its desktop computers, the Mac Pro, iMac and Mac mini, according to people familiar with the matter. Redesigned MacBook Pros are expected to debut as soon as early this summer, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter, followed by a revamped MacBook Air, a new low-end MacBook Pro and an all-new Mac Pro workstation.

The company is also working on a higher-end Mac mini desktop and larger iMac. The machines will feature processors designed in-house that will greatly outpace the performance and capabilities of the current M1 chips, the people said. Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch (code name J314) and 16-inch screen (J316) sizes. They'll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like.

Framework is one of an increasing number of companies working to address planned obsolescence by creating products that are incredibly customizable and easy to repair. Today, the company's Framework Laptop is up for preorder, starting at $999 and shipping at the end of July. TechCrunch reports: There are three basic configurations -- Base, Performance and Professional, ranging from $999 to $1,999, upgrading from an Intel Core i5, 8GB of Ram and 256GB of storage to a Core i7 and 32GB/1TB. Windows also gets upgraded from Home to Pro at the top level. At $749, the company offers a barebones shell, where users can plug in their own internals.

Other upgrades include: "On top of that, the Framework Laptop is deeply customizable in unique ways. Our Expansion Card system lets you choose the ports you want and which side you want them on, selecting from four at a time of USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, MicroSD, ultra-fast 250GB and 1TB storage, and more. Magnetic-attach bezels are color-customizable to match your style, and the keyboard language can be swapped too."

Researchers at Intel Labs have applied machine learning techniques to GTA 5 to make it look incredibly realistic. Gizmodo reports: [I]nstead of training a neural network on famous masterpieces, the researchers at Intel Labs relied on the Cityscapes Dataset, a collection of images of a German city's urban center captured by a car's built-in camera, for training. When a different artistic style is applied to footage using machine learning techniques, the results are often temporally unstable, which means that frame by frame there are weird artifacts jumping around, appearing and reappearing, that diminish how real the results look. With this new approach, the rendered effects exhibit none of those telltale artifacts, because in addition to processing the footage rendered by Grand Theft Auto V's game engine, the neural network also uses other rendered data the game's engine has access to, like the depth of objects in a scene, and information about how the lighting is being processed and rendered.

That's a gross simplification -- you can read a more in-depth explanation of the research here -- but the results are remarkably photorealistic. The surface of the road is smoothed out, highlights on vehicles look more pronounced, and the surrounding hills in several clips look more lush and alive with vegetation. What's even more impressive is that the researchers think, with the right hardware and further optimization, the gameplay footage could be enhanced by their convolutional network at "interactive rates" -- another way to say in real-time -- when baked into a video game's rendering engine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A dozen Wi-Fi design and implementation flaws make it possible for miscreants to steal transmitted data and bypass firewalls to attack devices on home networks, according to security researcher Mathy Vanhoef. On Tuesday, Vanhoef, a postdoctoral researcher in computer security at New York University Abu Dhabi, released a paper titled, "Fragment and Forge: Breaking Wi-Fi Through Frame Aggregation and Fragmentation" [PDF]. Scheduled to be presented later this year at the Usenix Security conference, the paper describes a set of wireless networking vulnerabilities, including three Wi-Fi design flaws and nine implementation flaws. Vanhoef, who in 2017 along with co-author Frank Piessens identified key reinstallation attacks (KRACKs) on the WPA2 protocol (used to secure Wi-Fi communication), has dubbed his latest research project FragAttacks, which stands for fragmentation and aggregation attacks.

The dozen vulnerabilities affect all Wi-Fi security protocols since the wireless networking technology debuted in 1997, from WEP up through WPA3. [...] In total, 75 devices -- network card and operating system combinations (Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, and iOS) -- were tested and all were affected by one or more of the attacks. NetBSD and OpenBSD were not affected because they don't support the reception of A-MSDUs (aggregate MAC service data units). [...]

Patches for many affected devices and software have already been deployed, thanks to a nine-month-long coordinated responsible disclosure overseen by the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (ICASI). Linux patches have been applied and the kernel mailing list note mentions that Intel has addressed the flaws in a recent firmware update without mentioning it. Microsoft released its patches on March 9, 2021 when disclosure was delayed tho Redmond had already committed to publication. Vanhoef advises checking with the vendor(s) of Wi-Fi devices about whether the FragAttacks have been addressed. "[F]or some devices the impact is minor, while for others it's disastrous," he said.

Some of the world's biggest chip buyers, including Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google, are joining top chip-makers such as Intel to create a new lobbying group to press for government chip manufacturing subsidies. From a report: The newly formed Semiconductors in America Coalition, which also includes Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services, said Tuesday it has asked U.S. lawmakers to provide funding for the CHIPS for America Act, for which President Joe Biden has asked Congress to provide $50 billion. "Robust funding of the CHIPS Act would help America build the additional capacity necessary to have more resilient supply chains to ensure critical technologies will be there when we need them," the group said in a letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in both houses of the U.S. Congress.

A global chip shortage has hit automakers hard, with Ford Motor saying it could halve second-quarter production. Automotive industry groups have pressed the Biden administration to secure chip supply for car factories. But Reuters last week reported administration officials were reluctant to use a national security law to redirect computer chips to automakers because doing so could hurt other industries. The new coalition includes some of those other chip-consuming industries, with members such as AT&T, Cisco Systems, General Electric, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Verizon Communications. It cautioned against government actions to favor a single industry such as automakers.

MojoKid writes: In January, Intel officially announced its Tiger Lake-H mobile platform, but today disclosed full details on the new, higher-end variant of Tiger Lake manufactured using 10nm SuperFIN technology, that brings with it a few significant platform enhancements beyond just its clock speed and core count boost. Intel is refreshing the lineup with higher-power and higher-performance Tiger Lake-H45 processors, with up to 8 physical cores (16 threads). In addition, the CPUs feature 20 reconfigurable PCI Express 4.0 lanes attached directly to the processor, which enable PCIe 4.0 NVMe RAID -- a first for any mobile platform. The platform features all of the latest IO and connectivity technologies, like Killer Wi-Fi 6 / 6E, Thunderbolt 4, and support for Resizable BAR. There are an array of consumer and commercial Tiger Lake-H based 11th Gen Intel Core H-series processors coming down the pipeline. The top-end consumer SKU is the Core i9-11980HK, which is an 8-core / 16-thread processor, with a base clock of 2.6GHz and maximum turbo clock of 5GHz on one or two cores. What also makes this particular processor interesting is that it is fully unlocked and overclockable via Intel's XTU utility. Intel has shipped millions of units volume to laptop OEMs already and expects to have laptops in market from all of the majors this month.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The first few months of 2021 have been absolutely massive for AMD and Intel. According to the latest report from Mercury Research, the first three months of 2021 saw the largest yearly increase in shipments of CPUs in a quarter of a century, and second only to the final moments of 2020 in terms of raw volume. You'd be perhaps surprised to learn that Intel has gained a touch in overall x86 market share in Q1 2021, whereas AMD reportedly lost out. There's only a percentage point in it: a 1% gain for Intel and a 1% loss for AMD, though. Far from major gains in either direction.

Mercury Research puts that down to an increase in budget chip shipments for Chipzilla, which tallies with other figures out of the tech giant as of late. But where Intel has gained in mobile processor market share, it loses out marginally in desktop. That's where AMD's Ryzen processors are seemingly crushing it, and despite some difficulty sourcing the top-tier chips, such as the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, AMD is still managing to make gains within the market predisposed to Intel processors for so long. [...] But perhaps the biggest win in AMD's eyes is the 1.8% increase in server market share quarter to quarter, and 3.8 percent year on year. That means its Epyc processors are selling supremely well against Intel's Xeon chips, and the market that AMD will be most determined to get more of a footing in.

The New York Times reports on surprising silver linings of the global chip shortage: Even as a chip shortage is causing trouble for all sorts of industries, the semiconductor field is entering a surprising new era of creativity, from industry giants to innovative start-ups seeing a spike in funding from venture capitalists that traditionally avoided chip makers. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung Electronics, for example, have managed the increasingly difficult feat of packing more transistors on each slice of silicon. IBM on Thursday announced another leap in miniaturization, a sign of continued U.S. prowess in the technology race. Perhaps most striking, what was a trickle of new chip companies is now approaching a flood.

Equity investors for years viewed semiconductor companies as too costly to set up, but in 2020 plowed more than $12 billion into 407 chip-related companies, according to CB Insights. Though a tiny fraction of all venture capital investments, that was more than double what the industry received in 2019 and eight times the total for 2016. Synopsys, the biggest supplier of software that engineers use to design chip, is tracking more than 200 start-ups designing chips for artificial intelligence, the ultrahot technology powering everything from smart speakers to self-driving cars. Cerebras, a start-up that sells massive artificial-intelligence processors that span an entire silicon wafer, for example, has attracted more than $475 million. Groq, a start-up whose chief executive previously helped design an artificial-intelligence chip for Google, has raised $367 million.

"It's a bloody miracle," said Jim Keller, a veteran chip designer whose resume includes stints at Apple, Tesla and Intel and who now works at the A.I. chip start-up Tenstorrent. "Ten years ago you couldn't do a hardware start-up...."

More companies are concluding that software running on standard Intel-style microprocessors is not the best solution for all problems. For that reason, companies like Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have long designed specialty chips for products such as networking gear. Giants like Apple, Amazon and Google more recently have gotten into the act. Google's YouTube unit recently disclosed its first internally developed chip to speed video encoding.

And Volkswagen even said last week that it would develop its own processor to manage autonomous driving.

There was a big announcement this week from Mozilla. They've joined Fastly, Intel, and Microsoft "in announcing the incorporation and expansion of the Bytecode Alliance, a cross-industry partnership to advance a vision for fast, secure, and simplified software development based on WebAssembly." Building software today means grappling with a set of vexing trade-offs. If you want to build something big, it's not realistic to build each component from scratch. But relying on a complex supply chain of components from other parties allows a defect anywhere in that chain to compromise the security and stability of the entire program.

Tools like containers can provide some degree of isolation, but they add substantial overhead and are impractical to use at per-supplier granularity. And all of these dynamics entrench the advantages of big companies with the resources to carefully manage and audit their supply chains.

Mozilla helped create WebAssembly to allow the Web to grow beyond JavaScript and run more kinds of software at faster speeds. But as it matured, it became clear that WebAssembly's technical properties — particularly memory isolation — also had the potential to transform software development beyond the browser by resolving the tension described above. Several other organizations shared this view, and we came together to launch the Bytecode Alliance as an informal industry partnership in late 2019. As part of this launch, we articulated our shared vision and called for others to join us in bringing it to life... [W]e asked prospective members to be patient and, in parallel with ongoing technical efforts, worked to incorporate the Alliance as a formal 501(c)(6) organization. That process is now complete, and we're thrilled to welcome Arm, DFINITY Foundation, Embark Studios, Google, Shopify, and University of California at San Diego as official members of the Bytecode Alliance.

We have a real opportunity to change how software is built, and in doing so, enable small teams to build big things that are both secure and fast.

Achieving the elusive trifecta — easy composition, defect isolation, and high performance — requires both the right technology and a coordinated effort across the ecosystem to deploy it in the right way. Mozilla believes that WebAssembly has the right technical ingredients to build a better, more secure Internet, and that the Bytecode Alliance has the vision and momentum to make it happen.

CES 2022 is going back to Las Vegas following this year's all-digital event, the Consumer Technology Association said Thursday, as coronavirus restrictions ease in the US. The event will take place Jan. 5-8, with media days taking place Jan. 3-4. From a report: Around 1,000 companies -- including Amazon, AMD, AT&T, Daimler AG, Dell, Google, Hyundai, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, LG, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung and Sony -- are on board for the event, according to the CTA, with more being added. You'll also be able to attend digitally. Plans for the event will evolve depending on coronavirus safety measures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CTA noted.

The next generation of Mac processors designed by Apple entered mass production this month, Nikkei Asia reported Tuesday, citing sources, bringing the U.S. tech giant one step closer to its goal of replacing Intel-designed central processing units with its own. From the report: Shipments of the new chipset -- tentatively known as the M2, after Apple's current M1 processor -- could begin as early as July for use in MacBooks that are scheduled to go on sale in the second half of this year, the people said. The new chipset is produced by key Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest contract chipmaker, using the latest semiconductor production technology, known as 5-nanometer plus, or N5P. Producing such advanced chipsets takes at least three months. The start of mass production came as Apple introduced new iMac and iPad Pro models using the M1. The company said the M1 offers CPU performance up to 85% faster than an iMac using an Intel chipset, and graphics performance that is twice as fast.

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo has announced plans to acquire cybersecurity company Proofpoint in a deal worth $12.3 billion. VentureBeat reports: Founded in 2002 by former Netscape CTO Eric Hahn, Proofpoint was originally known for an email security product that helped businesses identify spam, viruses, and other electric correspondence that might contravene company policies. In the subsequent years, the Sunnyvale, California-based company has expanded its scope to include an array of cloud-based security products designed to protect enterprises from targeted threats. Proofpoint went public back in 2012, with its shares initially trading at around $13 -- these have grown steadily over the past decade, hitting an all-time high of $140 earlier this year and giving it a market capitalization of more than $7 billion.

Thoma Bravo has a track record of taking publicly traded cybersecurity companies private, having done just that with network security company Barracuda in a 2017 deal worth $1.6 billion and with Sophos last year for $3.9 billion. The Proofpoint deal, which is expected to close in Q3 2021, sees Thoma Bravo paying a 34% premium on Proofpoint's closing price at the last full trading day (April 23), with shareholders set to receive $176 for each share they own. It's worth noting that the $12.3 billion price tag positions this as the biggest cybersecurity acquisition of all time, putting it ahead of the $7.68 billion Intel shelled out for McAfee 11 years ago. And by VentureBeat's calculations, the Proofpoint acquisition represents one of the biggest overall technology acquisitions ever, putting it in the top 20, alongside megadeals that include Dell's $67 billion EMC purchase, IBM's $34 billion Red Hat deal, and Salesforce's impending $27.7 billion Slack acquisition.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from South China Morning Post: In a rare public appearance since retiring nearly three years ago, Morris Chang, the 89-year-old founder of the world's largest contract chip maker, said China is not yet a competitor in chipmaking and that Taiwan should defend its leadership in semiconductor manufacturing. "Mainland China has given out subsidies to the tune of tens of billions of US dollars over the past 20 years but it is still five years behind TSMC," Chang said. "Its logic chip design capability is still one to two years behind the US and Taiwan. The mainland is still not yet a competitor."

In his speech, Chang also took a swipe at US chip giant Intel, describing its recent decision to enter the contract chip making market as "very ironic" because it turned down an opportunity to invest in TSMC more than three decades ago. Contract chip makers like TSMC typically take orders from so-called fabless chip makers like Qualcomm, which design their products but outsource the manufacturing. Chang said he was rejected by Intel when he approached it for funding in 1985. "In the past, Intel was the alpha sneering at us and thought that we would never get big," he said. "They never thought the business of [outsourced] wafer fabrication would become so important today."

Chang said the US is also at a disadvantage compared with Taiwan because it lacks engineers dedicated to the semiconductor manufacturing sector, adding that the "US level of dedication to manufacturing was absolutely no match for that of Taiwan." "What I need right now are capable and dedicated engineers, technicians and operators. And they have to be willing to throw themselves into manufacturing," he said. "In the US, doing manufacturing isn't popular. It hasn't been popular for decades."

The operators of the Darkside ransomware are expanding their extortion tactics with a new technique aimed at companies that are listed on NASDAQ or other stock exchanges. From a report: In a message posted on their dark web portal, the Darkside crew said it is willing to notify crooked market traders in advance so they can short a company's stock price before they list its name on their website as a victim. The Darkside crew believes that the negative impact of having a traded company's name listed on its website would be enough to cause its stock price to fall and for a crooked trader to make a profit.

"While other ransomware families previously discussed how to leverage the effect of a publicly disclosed cyber attack on the stock market, they have never made it their official attack vector," Dmitry Smilyanets, threat intel analyst at Recorded Future, told The Record today. "DarkSide becomes the first ransomware variant to make it formal." However, the announcement also serves as an indirect method to threaten hacked companies that not paying the ransom demand could result in negative press large enough to impact their market listings and enough to push some victims into paying the asked ransom.

Despite only being released in November, sales of the M1-powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini now represent the majority of Mac sales, outperforming Mac computers powered by Intel processors, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. MacRumors reports: Cook made the remarks during Apple's "Spring Loaded" event yesterday, where it introduced a completely redesigned 24-inch iMac powered by the M1 Apple silicon chip. Cook says that the M1 and Apple silicon "isn't just an upgrade, but a breakthrough," while touting Mac's industry-leading customer satisfaction. According to Cook, the four M1-powered Macs now outperform the five remaining Intel-powered computers in its lineup in terms of sales. During the keynote, Cook's comment went largely unnoticed but is likely to be a key point the CEO makes during Apple's upcoming earnings call, which is being held on April 28.

Now that Apple's lost item finder AirTag has officially been introduced, competitor Tile is going on record ahead of its testimony in front of Congress tomorrow about how it perceives Apple's latest product. In a statement, Tile CEO CJ Prober said today: "Our mission is to solve the everyday pain point of finding lost and misplaced things and we are flattered to see Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world, enter and validate the category Tile pioneered. The reason so many people turn to Tile to locate their lost or misplaced items is because of the differentiated value we offer our consumers. In addition to providing an industry leading set of features via our app that works with iOS and Android devices, our service is seamlessly integrated with all major voice assistants, including Alexa and Google. And with form factors for every use case and many different styles at affordable prices, there is a Tile for everyone.

Tile has also successfully partnered with top brands like HP, Intel, Skullcandy and fitbit to enable our finding technology in mass market consumer categories like laptops, earbuds and wearables. With over 30 partners, we look forward to extending the benefits of Tile to millions of customers and enabling an experience that helps you keep track of all your important belongings. We welcome competition, as long as it is fair competition. Unfortunately, given Apple's well-documented history of using its platform advantage to unfairly limit competition for its products, we're skeptical. And given our prior history with Apple, we think it is entirely appropriate for Congress to take a closer look at Apple's business practices specific to its entry into this category. We welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues further in front of Congress tomorrow.