Clive Darra

In a Security and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said it is looking to raise $24.3 billion dollars in its upcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange. Alibaba aims to sell off 368 million shares of its company at $66 per share, according to its SEC filing.

If Alibaba is able to raise $24.3 billion in its IPO, it would make it one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. Similarly large IPOs in the US have included Visa racking up $17.9 billion in 2008 and a previously de-listed General Motors coming back in 2010 to raise $15.8 billion.

A Reuters source said that Alibaba aims to kick off its IPO next week, although the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the company will likely offer a “friends and family” deal first, selling off pieces of the company to insiders before making the shares more widely available. This practice was common during the first tech boom in the late '90s and early '00s, but it has become less popular in recent years.

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The Kurds in Syria there have not received any air support in their battle against IS but men and women are fighting the militants.

Drone footage reveals the extent of damage to Gaza City caused by the recent conflict with Israeli that lasted 50 days, until a ceasefire was brokered.

Nvidia has sued Samsung and Qualcomm in a pair of legal actions claiming that the processors used in a range of Samsung products—including the Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3, and Galaxy S4 smartphones, and Galaxy Tab S and Galaxy Note Pro tablets—violate seven different GPU patents.

Nvidia has sued Samsung and Qualcomm in the Delaware federal court and is seeking unspecified damages. Simultaneously, the company is asking the International Trade Commission to impose an import ban on Samsung products made in South Korea, Vietnam, and China.

The GPU firm's complaint claims that the Qualcomm Adreno GPUs, found in its range of Snapdragon systems-on-chip, ARM Mali GPUs, and Imagination PowerVR GPUs, both found in Samsung's own Exynos SoCs, all violate Nvidia patents on graphics technology. The patents cover various core GPU technologies, such as multithreaded processing of graphical data, graphics pipelines that include shaders and rasterizers, and programmable GPUs.

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Network neutrality protest at Google headquarters. Steve Rhodes

Common Cause and more than 50 other advocacy groups this week called on Google to end its affiliation with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that has pushed state laws limiting the rights of cities and towns to create community-owned broadband networks. ALEC also opposes network neutrality rules that Google used to be a staunch supporter of and last month urged the FCC to quickly approve Comcast’s purchase of Time Warner Cable without imposing any regulatory conditions on the merger.

In a letter to Google’s top executives, Common Cause et al wrote that “Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of Americans have signed petitions asking Google to end its ALEC membership because of their concerns about the harmful role ALEC has played in our democratic process… The public knows that the ALEC operation—which brings state legislators and corporate lobbyists behind closed doors to discuss proposed legislation and share lavish dinners—threatens our democracy. The public is asking Google to stop participating in this scheme.”

Common Cause also complained about ALEC’s nonprofit status to the IRS in 2012, saying the group “massively underreports” lobbying it does on behalf of corporate members.

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Fossils unearthed in Argentina represent the most complete giant sauropod dinosaur ever discovered.

As the Nato summit continues to discuss the threat of the militant group Islamic State (IS) the world is waiting to see the formation of a new Iraqi government.

We are currently on the verge of PCIe transition. Nearly every SSD controller vendor has shown or at least talked about their upcoming PCIe designs, and the first ones should enter the market in early 2015. In the meantime, there are a couple of existing PCIe drives for the early adopters, namely Samsung XP941 and Plextor M6e, and a variety of RAID-based PCIe SSDs like the OCZ RevoDrive 350. We already reviewed the 512GB Samsung XP941 in May and found it to be the fastest client SSD on the market, but today we are back with the 128GB and 256GB models along with OCZ's RevoDrive 350.

The BBC's Andrew North tours the site in central Islamabad that has been occupied by supporters of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan and cleric Tahirul Qadri

Nato agrees to create a "spearhead" rapid reaction force with several thousand troops ready to deploy at very short notice.

The Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, says he has ordered the military to declare a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine.

Zach Copley

On Thursday two prominent Bitcoin supporters, Robert Faiella and Charles Shrem, pleaded guilty to federal charges in a Federal District Court in Manhattan. Faiella, 54, was also known as BTCKing and admitted to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business on Silk Road. Shrem, 24, was formerly the CEO of BitInstant and is one of the founding members of the Bitcoin Foundation. He pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business.

A district court press release says that both men were accused on the basis that they, “knowingly transmitted money intended to facilitate criminal activity—specifically, drug trafficking on 'Silk Road,' a black-market website designed to enable its users to buy and sell illegal drugs anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement.” Federal investigators shut down the Silk Road last October and arrested the alleged founder, Ross Ulbricht, who went by the name “Dread Pirate Roberts.”

Shrem and Faiella were both arrested in January. Prosecutors said the two sold over $1 million in Bitcoins to users of the Silk Road. According to court documents, Faiella sold bitcoins to Silk Road users directly and relied on Schrem's company to set up anonymous exchange accounts for his customers.

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A class-action lawsuit against hiring practices at Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel was set to settle shortly before trial for $324 million. The companies are accused of violating antitrust laws by creating "no poach" deals in which they wouldn't cold call each other's employees for recruitment purposes.

Last month, US District Judge Lucy Koh threw out the settlement, agreeing with objectors from the class that $324 million wasn't enough. The companies should have paid out "at least $380 million" to match the rate paid by other companies that had already settled, including Lucasfilm, Intuit, and Pixar.

But the four remaining defendants don't want to pay more, and they're going to fight for the $324 million deal they struck with lawyers representing the plaintiffs.

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Facebook has installed a "privacy checkup" pop-up on its Web interface intended to help prevent users from sharing information that they don't intend to, according to a press release issued on Thursday. The feature walks users through a set of steps to let them see which groups of friends see which pieces of profile information, as well as information from third-party apps.

The feature first asks users to adjust their default privacy setting on posts and then to look through their Facebook-connected apps to adjust the privacy settings in each one or to revoke access. The last step pulls up the privacy settings of each profile element into one box with the same drop-down menu for tweaks.

Facebook's previous best effort at privacy transparency was its View As tool, which allows users to see their profile as another particular user might see it. While this helped with profile design, it didn't address app information or posting privacy status. Facebook will be prompting users in waves over the coming weeks to use the checkup, but completing it won't be required.

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Iain Watson

A Congressional proposal to let cable and satellite customers choose which broadcast TV channels they pay for has led to a battle between small cable companies and broadcasters. While cable companies usually are opponents of mandates to sell channels individually instead of in bundles, in this case they are fighting for à la carte and against the broadcasters. The “Local Choice” proposal by US Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) affects local broadcast stations such as affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox.

A group called TVfreedom.org that represents local broadcasters and other organizations today criticized the American Cable Association (ACA) for supporting Local Choice. “We believe ‘Local Choice’ represents a frontal assault on free and local TV broadcasting,” TVfreedom Public Affairs Director Robert Kenny wrote. “It would tilt television’s balance of power in favor of pay-TV providers at the expense of broadcasters invested in localism. It would cost consumers more on their monthly bills, and do nothing to address shoddy pay-TV service or the deceptive billing practices of cable and satellite TV providers.”

TVfreedom is composed of “local broadcasters, community advocates, network television affiliate associations, multicast networks, manufacturers and other independent broadcaster-related organizations” and says its mission is to make sure “cable and satellite TV providers [are] held accountable for stifling innovation and repeatedly using their own customers as bargaining chips while increasing their record profits.” The group chided the ACA for supporting à la carte pricing this year despite arguing in a previous case that “current technology costs make à la carte a financial impossibility for ACA member systems, the business model is entirely unproven, and no lawful basis exists for imposing regulated a la carte.”

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Version:next-20140905 (linux-next) Released:2014-09-05

You probably can't make out any pixels on that indistinct blue background thanks to the monitor's staggering 5K resolution. Dell

A recent Dell press event saw the computer manufacturer debut a number of new laptop and desktop models, but tucked into its product list came one particular stunner: a 27-inch monitor sporting a 5120×2880 resolution. The Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K Monitor, set to launch by the end of Q4 2014 for $2,499, will scream past the consumer-grade competition with a whopping 14.7 million pixels in all. That's over 70 percent bigger than the standard 4K spec of 3840×2160.

Maximum PC managed to make eyes with the monitor—and, perhaps more importantly, its backside, where their reporter found dual DisplayPort 1.2 ports required to handle 5K resolution; that dual-port solution suggests that Dell may be combining two 2560×2880 displays to make this monitor work. (Users who prefer the stone-age days of 4K can use a miniDisplayPort for that resolution as well.) Dell has also left out some details, such as the monitor's refresh rate.

At 218 PPI, the UltraSharp's pixel density just about matches that of a MacBook Pro with Retina display, and it will additionally sport six USB ports, a media card reader, and a pair of Harmon/Kardon speakers. We expect this monitor to serve as a workstation and photo-editing option for professionals who already split between multiple monitors as opposed to a jumping-off point for 5K gaming—most high-end rigs can barely render games in 4K resolution as it stands.

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Erik Lucero

Google was one of the early backers of a new approach to quantum computing adopted by a company called D-Wave. The company offers boxes that perform a process called quantum annealing instead of the more typical approach, which involves encoding information in a quantum state of a collection of entangled qubits. Although whatever D-Wave is doing is clearly quantum, it's still not clear that it offers a speedup compared to classical computers.

So rather than keeping all its eggs in D-Wave's basket, Google's "Quantum A.I. Lab" announced that it is starting a collaboration with an academic quantum computing researcher, John Martinis of the University of California-Santa Barbara. Martinis' group focuses on creating fault-tolerant qubits using a solid-state superconducting structure called a Josephson junction. By linking several of these junctions and spreading a single quantum state across them, it's possible to reach fidelities of over 99 percent when it comes to storing the quantum state.

Quantum states tend to be fragile and decay when they interact with their environment, so a lot of labs are working on making qubits that are more robust or have error correcting ability. Josephson junctions are one possible approach to this, but they have the advantage of being on familiar turf for computing companies, since they can be made by standard fabrication techniques (although they still need to be chilled to near absolute zero).

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An earlier version of Team Durafet's sensor. Yui Takeshita

A year ago, we reported on the launch of a new XPRIZE competition—not to launch a rocket, but to build a better device to measure ocean pH. The aim was to produce something that could be added to automated platforms like ARGO floats to greatly expand pH data collection, which presently has to rely mostly on expensive research vessel cruises.

Teams are competing for a pair of $1 million prizes put up by Wendy Schmidt—who, together with her husband Eric Schmidt, just donated $500,000 to help keep the famous atmospheric CO2 monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography running.

The first of three stages in the competition will begin next week. The 18 teams who were selected for the competition will place their devices into carefully controlled tanks of water at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Over three months, the devices will be judged on the accuracy, precision, and stability of their pH measurements.

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Artist's impression of a young, growing elliptical galaxy's rapid star formation. NASA, Z. Levay, G. Bacon (STScI)

Eleven billion years ago, when the Universe was half the Earth's present age, massive galaxies had already begun to form, planting the seeds for the present-day Universe. According to current models, the dense cores of massive elliptical galaxies formed first, within which there were regions of intense star formation. By looking at distant objects, we should be able to see evidence of this process. Until now, however, we had not seen anything that looked definitively like the formation of a galaxy core. But a newly discovered object, GOODS-N-774 (nicknamed “Sparky”), may be the first glimpse of exactly that.

The researchers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope, obtained as part of the CANDELS survey, as well as the Herschel Space Observatory and the W.M. Keck Observatory, to study Sparky, which has about 150 billion (1.5 x 10^11) times the mass of the Sun (solar masses), of which 100 billion is in the form of stars.

GOODS-N-774, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The bright orange object near the center is Sparky. NASA, ESA, and E. Nelson (Yale University, USA)

Scientists still aren’t sure why galaxies like Sparky haven’t been observed before. While there’s a good chance that they are very rare, the authors of the study suggest that many similar star-forming cores may be obscured by gas and dust. If that’s the case, visible-light and near-infrared telescopes could be missing them.

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