Tech Advisor April 2022

Nvidia’s proposed purchase of Arm for an estimated $40 billion in cash and stock was expected to have a difficult time winning the approval of regulators. It could not, and the two companies have called off the agreement. Nvidia and Softbank, which owns Arm, said that the proposed deal had been terminated. Softbank will keep a $1.25bn prepayment, but will instead divest of Arm via a public offering rather than an outright sale. That IPO will take place sometime before Softbank’s fiscal year ends on 31 March 2023. “The parties agreed to terminate the Agreement because of significant regulatory challenges preventing the consummation of the transaction, despite good faith efforts by the parties,” the two companies said in a statement. The proposed agreement became much more challenging when the Federal…

Nvidia’s proposed purchase of Arm for an estimated $40 billion in cash and stock was expected to have a difficult time winning the approval of regulators. It could not, and the two companies have called off the agreement. Nvidia and Softbank, which owns Arm, said that the proposed deal had been terminated. Softbank will keep a $1.25bn prepayment, but will instead divest of Arm via a public offering rather than an outright sale. That IPO will take place sometime before Softbank’s fiscal year ends on 31 March 2023. “The parties agreed to terminate the Agreement because of significant regulatory challenges preventing the consummation of the transaction, despite good faith efforts by the parties,” the two companies said in a statement. The proposed agreement became much more challenging when the Federal Trade Commission…

While the chip shortage continues, graphics cards and CPUs are hard to find and wickedly expensive on the secondary market. Newfangled DDR5 RAM is hard to find, and even motherboards are getting pricey. But the one component that’s remained refreshingly cheap is storage: You can find multi-terabyte drives at their lowest prices ever, even for the best SSDs. Or at least, you could. A factory accident has tainted millions of new flash storage components, affecting billions of gigabytes of storage headed to the market. Two flash fabrication factories in Japan, used by Western Digital and Kioxia, have experienced ‘contamination of certain material used in [the] manufacturing process’. While details are scarce on precisely what happened, it’s reportedly taken out ‘at least 6.5 exabytes’ of flash capacity – roughly 6.5 million…

Historically, malicious Office macros have been the equivalent of email’s phishing attempts, launching malware at the click of a user’s mouse. Microsoft announced last month that it’s finally clamping down on this security vulnerability, blocking Visual Basic (VBA) macros by default. To date, Microsoft has warned users about the dangers of untrusted macros, but allowed users to download and run them by manually approving them. Now, untrusted macros will be blocked by default within Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word for any file downloaded from the Internet. The change will roll out to Microsoft’s Current Channel of these Microsoft 365 apps beginning in April, and applied later to the other update channels, too. “At a future date to be determined, we also plan to make this change to Office LTSC,…

While the chip shortage continues, graphics cards and CPUs are hard to find and wickedly expensive on the secondary market. Newfangled DDR5 RAM is hard to find, and even motherboards are getting pricey. But the one component that’s remained refreshingly cheap is storage: You can find multi-terabyte drives at their lowest prices ever, even for the best SSDs. Or at least, you could. A factory accident has tainted millions of new flash storage components, affecting billions of gigabytes of storage headed to the market. Two flash fabrication factories in Japan, used by Western Digital and Kioxia, have experienced ‘contamination of certain material used in [the] manufacturing process’. While details are scarce on precisely what happened, it’s reportedly taken out ‘at least 6.5 exabytes’ of flash capacity – roughly 6.5 million terabytes, or…

Historically, malicious Office macros have been the equivalent of email’s phishing attempts, launching malware at the click of a user’s mouse. Microsoft announced last month that it’s finally clamping down on this security vulnerability, blocking Visual Basic (VBA) macros by default. To date, Microsoft has warned users about the dangers of untrusted macros, but allowed users to download and run them by manually approving them. Now, untrusted macros will be blocked by default within Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word for any file downloaded from the Internet. The change will roll out to Microsoft’s Current Channel of these Microsoft 365 apps beginning in April, and applied later to the other update channels, too. “At a future date to be determined, we also plan to make this change to Office LTSC, Office…