Huawei mixes it up with Micron and its new NVM tech

Embedded World Chipmaker Micron is offering a microSD Card for embedded applications with an impressive 1.5TB capacity, enough to hold four months of continuously recorded security camera footage, according to the company.

Announced at the Embedded World 2022 conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Micron's new i400 [PDF] is claimed to be the highest-capacity microSD card yet and was designed with a focus on industrial-grade video security applications.

The device is sampling with potential customers now.

The United States last week quietly eased its ban on investors holding stock in, or otherwise profiting from, Chinese companies that are felt to have ties to China's military.

The ban was first imposed by president Donald Trump with a 2020 executive order that forbade US-based individuals or entities owning shares in private Chinese companies identified as offering support to China's military, intelligence, and security agencies, by auditing their "development and modernization."

President Biden later issued a similar order of his own.

Huawei has entered the datacenter construction business with an offering that it claims can be built in half the time required by competing methods, then run more efficiently.

The prosaically named “Next-Generation Datacenter Facility”, as depicted in a video posted to Chinese social media, employs suspiciously-shipping-container-sized modules stacked into a larger building.

In the video, a pre-school girl and her father use Lego to assemble a cube-shaped building. The scene cuts to film of a very similar building under construction in the real world, before the director makes sure the metaphor can’t be missed by morphing the Lego and actual buildings, as depicted below.

Huawei's long established trading relationship with Leica to integrate the German camera maker's technology into its phones is over, the companies have confirmed.

From February 2016, all Huawei flagships were slated [PDF] to have Leica-developed lenses and branding.

The Reg was generally quite impressed by the combined products over the years.

The Canadian government has joined many of its allies and banned the use of Huawei and ZTE tech in its 5G networks, as part of a new telecommunications security framework.

“The Government is committed to maximizing the social and economic benefits of 5G and access to telecommunications services writ large, but not at the expense of security,” stated the Government of Canada.

Companies using equipment or managed services from the two Chinese companies have been until 28 June 2024 to stop operating or remove the equipment.

Memory and storage maker Micron Technology has revealed a new business model intended to address the volatility in the memory market that has resulted in sharp swings in pricing over the past several years.

Revealed at Micron's Investor Day 2022 event, the new forward pricing agreements enable a Micron customer to sign a multi-year deal that guarantees them a supply of memory at a predictable price that follows the cost reduction that the chipmaker sees during the lifecycle of a particular product.

Micron's chief business officer Sumit Sadana told Investor Day attendees that the chipmaker has already signed up an unnamed volume customer to one of the new agreements, which the company is currently trying out to see whether it delivers on the expected benefits.

Desktop Tourism Rightly or wrongly, Huawei has acquired a reputation for being a risky proposition, security-wise. It almost beggars belief, then, that the Chinese goliath's flagship Matebook X Pro laptop contains a literal hidden webcam secreted under a fake function key on the top row of its keyboard.

Touch the key and it clicks lightly, then springs up to reveal the camera.

It's a terrible place for the camera because when the laptop is flat on a desk and close enough to type on, the view it affords would probably please an ear, nose, and throat surgeon conducting a remote examination. Needless to say, that angle is not going to show your best side during a Zoom or Teams session. And you can't change the angle without moving the entire laptop into odd positions or placing it too far away to type.

China's Central Cyberspace Administration has revealed a plan for further and faster adoption of IPv6 across the nation and outlined plans to drive new developments for the protocol.

The Middle Kingdom's updated IPv6 ambitions were detailed yesterday in an announcement of the "2022 Work Arrangement for Further Promoting the Large-scale Deployment and Application of IPv6", which set the following goals for local IPv6 adoption by the end of 2022:

Flush from the sale of various business units, Huawei has distributed a whopping $9.65 billion dividend to current and retired staff under its Employee Shareholders Scheme (ESS).

A filing with the Shanghai Clearing House confirms the payment, and according to Huawei's recent 2021 Annual Report published last week, some 131,507 "beneficiaries" are enrolled in ESS, including founder Ren Zhengfei.

Huawei is owned by Huawei Investment & Holding Co Ltd, which is itself owned by two lots of shareholders, including Ren (0.84 percent of the company) and the Union of Huawei Investment & Holding Company (comprised of employees that hold 99.16 percent of the share capital).

Updated Chinese telecom giant Huawei has issued a mandatory month-long furlough to some of its Russia-based staff and suspended new orders, according to Russian media.

"There are no orders, so why should people go to the office – in a month the vacation will either be extended, or employees will be returned from it," an anonymous source told Forbes Russia.

The business mag also reported that Chinese nationals working for Huawei Russia are still going to the office.