For all the wishful thinking about manufacturing more laptops and iPhones in the U.S., there is one sector of tech manufacturing where America remains a leader: computer chips. From a report: Some $44 billion worth of semiconductors are exported from the U.S. each year, making them America's fourth leading manufacturing export after cars, airplanes and refined oil. There are roughly 80 wafer fabrication plants (aka fabs) in the U.S., spread across 19 states. [...] An even greater share of the world's computer chips are designed domestically and made overseas by companies including Qualcomm, Apple, Broadcom and Nvidia. A bunch of the high-tech gear needed to produce chips is also designed and/or made in the U.S.

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Victor Orban's government accused of 'violently pushing people back' or making life 'miserable' in transit zones.

Andrew Orlowski of The Register recounts all the gadgets supercharged with AI that he came across at IFA tradeshow last week -- and wonders what value AI brought to the table. He writes: I didn't see a blockchain toothbrush at IFA in Berlin last week, but I'm sure there was one lurking about somewhere. With 30 vast halls to cover, I didn't look too hard for it. But I did see many things almost as tragic that no one could miss -- AI being squeezed into almost every conceivable bit of consumer electronics. But none were convincing. If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, it's ramming AI into gadgets to show of a company's machine learning prowess. For the consumer it adds unreliability, cost and complexity, and the annoyance of being prompted. [...] Back to LG, which takes 2018's prize for sticking AI into a superfluous gadget. The centrepiece of its AI efforts this year is a robot, ClOi. Put Google Assistant or Alexa on wheels, and you have ClOi. I asked the booth person what exactly ClOi could do to be told "it can take notes for your shopping list." Why wasn't this miracle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution let loose on the LG floor? I wondered -- a question answered by this account of ClOi's debut at CES in January. Clearly things haven't improved much -- this robot buddy was kept indoors.

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More than 2,900 children were recently separated from their parents prompting international outrage.

From Michael Flynn to 'shithole countries', Donald Trump's presidency has been marred by insider press leaks.

Opposition leader Hassan Mushaima reportedly ill and stripped of books by Bahraini authorities, son says.

Open .git directories are a bigger cybersecurity problem than many might imagine, at least according to a Czech security researcher who discovered almost 400,000 web pages with an open .git directory possibly exposing a wide variety of data. From a report: Vladimir Smitka began his .git directory odyssey in July when he began looking at Czech websites to find how many were improperly configured and allow access to their .git folders within the file versions repository. Open .git directories are a particularly dangerous issue, he said, because they can contain a great deal of sensitive information. "Information about the website's structure, and sometimes you can get very sensitive data such as database passwords, API keys, development IDE settings, and so on. However, this data shouldn't be stored in the repository, but in previous scans of various security issues, I have found many developers that do not follow these best practices," Smitka wrote. Smitka queried 230 million websites to discover the 390,000 allowing access to their .git directories. The vast majority of the websites with open directories had a .com TLD with .net, .de, .org and uk comprising most of the others.

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Israeli Supreme Court judges have ordered the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar school, along with the adjacent Bedouin village.

MAXOMENOS writes: EVE Online developer CCP Games has been acquired by Pearl Abyss, the South Korean studio behind the action-oriented MMORPG Black Desert Online. According to VentureBeat, the deal was worth $425 million and will close in early October. It's a surprise announcement for CCP, which has long operated as an independent developer. Eve Online isn't the biggest MMORPG on the market, but it has maintained a steady and loyal userbase through continuous updates and a well-timed switch to a hybrid premium and free-to-play model. The 15-year-old game is unique, too, with its large-scale battles and notoriously complex economic and political systems.

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UK envoy to UN says British government has 'clear evidence' of Russian state involvement in failed assassination.

Since the release of Chrome 69 earlier this week, countless of users have gone on social media and Google Product Forums to complain about "blurry" or "fuzzy" text inside Chrome. ZDNet: The blurred font issue isn't only limited to text rendered inside a web page, users said, but also for the text suggestions displayed inside the address bar search drop-down, and Chrome's Developer Tools panel. [...] According to reports, the issue only manifests for Chrome 69 users on Windows. Those who rolled back to Chrome 68 stopped having problems. Users said that changing Chrome, operating system, or screen DPI settings didn't help. "Our team is investigating reports of this behavior. You can find more information in this public bug report," a Google spokesperson said last night after first user complaints started surfacing online. Some users have also expressed concerns over Chrome not showing "trivial subdomains" including www and secure lock sign in the address bar.

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Rebuilding Syria will top the agenda when leaders from Iran, Russia and Turkey meet in 24 hours.

In the next five years, military spending by the six GCC countries is likely to reach $117bn.

The Tor Browser has rolled out a new interface with the release of v8. From a report: The Tor Browser has always been based on the Firefox codebase, but it lagged behind a few releases. Mozilla rolled out a major overhaul of the Firefox codebase in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57, the first release in the Firefox Quantum series. Firefox Quantum came with a new page rendering engine, a new add-ons API, and a new user interface called the Photon UI. Because these were major, code-breaking changes, it took the smaller Tor team some time to integrate all of them into the Tor Browser codebase and make sure everything worked as intended. The new Tor Browser 8, released yesterday, is now in sync with the most recent version of Firefox, the Quantum release, and also supports all of its features. This means the Tor Browser now uses the same modern Photon UI that current Firefox versions use, it supports the same speed-optimized page rendering engine and has also dropped support for the old XUL-based add-ons system for the new WebExtensions API system used by Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and the rest of the Chromium browsers.

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There should be an inverse a real estate market where buyers could list their requirements. Sellers could peruse, the way buyers scan Zillow now. Who knows if I'm looking in the right geography? There could be lots of places that match my desires.